Pakistan Decides to Measure Its Digital Economy: Here’s What the First IT Census Will Cover

Pakistan’s first IT census is officially happening, and for a country that has been championing its digital economy for years, the fact that it is only now getting around to counting its IT workers says something important about the data gap the government is finally moving to close.

The Ministry of IT and Telecom has decided to conduct Pakistan’s first-ever IT census in collaboration with the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. The objective is straightforward but long overdue: collect reliable, comprehensive data on Pakistan’s IT workforce, its size, its skills, its geographic distribution, and its composition, for the first time in the country’s history.

All expenses for the project will be borne by the Ministry of IT.

What the Census Will Actually Count

The scope of the IT census is broader than the title might suggest. It is not just counting software engineers at registered technology companies. It is a ground-up mapping of everyone who earns a living through digital skills, including the vast informal workforce that has never appeared in any official dataset.

According to Ministry of IT officials, the census will include the following:

• Freelancers — the backbone of Pakistan’s growing gig economy
• Video editors — a rapidly expanding category as content creation scales
• Call centre employees — a significant but often overlooked segment of IT-adjacent work
• IT workforce broadly — collected from across the country, not just major tech hubs

The most significant aspect of this scope is the explicit inclusion of informal IT labour in national data for the first time. Pakistan’s freelance economy is substantial; the country consistently ranks among the top five globally for freelance workforce size, but because most of it operates outside formal employment structures, it has never been captured in official government statistics.

That invisibility has real consequences. Policy decisions about the IT sector have been made without accurate data on who is actually working in it, how many people are involved, what skills they have, and where they are located.

Why This Data Has Never Existed Before

Pakistan’s IT sector has grown largely organically, driven by private initiative, individual enterprise, and the global demand for affordable digital services rather than government planning or formal industrial policy. That organic growth produced results, nearly $3 billion in IT exports in just eight months of FY26, but it also produced a sector that government data systems were never designed to capture.

The Bureau of Statistics’ standard economic surveys are built around formal employment, registered businesses, salaried employees, and documented transactions. A freelancer earning dollars through Upwork in Faisalabad does not appear in any of those frameworks. A video editor working for international clients on a project basis has no official existence in Pakistan’s employment data. A call centre worker at a small, unregistered operation in Karachi is similarly invisible.

The IT census is designed to change that, creating, for the first time, a data layer that reflects the actual shape of Pakistan’s digital workforce rather than the portion of it that happens to be formally registered.

The Policy Implications

The Ministry of IT officials were explicit about why this data matters: it will directly improve policy-making for the IT industry.

That is not a generic justification. There are specific, concrete ways in which accurate IT workforce data changes what government can do.

Overseas employment access: The census is expected to help improve IT experts’ access to overseas employment opportunities. A verified, data-backed national registry of IT skills creates a credible foundation for bilateral labour agreements, skills certification programmes, and international employer engagement. Pakistan has struggled to formally market its IT talent to overseas employers partly because it cannot demonstrate the scale and composition of that talent with reliable official data.

Training and skills development: Knowing what skills exist and where the gaps are allows the government and educational institutions to design targeted training programmes rather than generic digital skills initiatives that may not match market demand.

Infrastructure planning: Geographic data on where IT workers are concentrated allows more targeted decisions about broadband expansion, co-working infrastructure, and technology park development.

Export facilitation: Accurate sector data strengthens Pakistan’s negotiating position in trade discussions about digital services, an increasingly important category in international trade agreements.

180 to 200 Enumerators: The Operational Scale

The census will deploy between 180 and 200 enumerators nationwide to collect data, a field operation of meaningful scale that reflects the geographic breadth of what is being surveyed.

Unlike a standard economic census that follows formal business registrations, an IT census that includes informal workers requires active field enumeration, going to where people actually work, not just where they are registered. That operational approach is more resource-intensive but is the only way to capture the informal segment that makes this census genuinely useful.

A Foundation for Everything That Follows

Pakistan has been building an IT export story for years, and the numbers have been moving in the right direction. But that story has been told with incomplete information. Policymakers, investors, and international partners have been working with estimates and extrapolations rather than verified data.

The IT census changes that. When completed, it will give Pakistan something it has never had: a credible, official baseline for its digital economy. How many IT workers are there? What skills they have. Where they are. What sectors they serve. How many are formal and how many informal?

That baseline does not just inform today’s policy. It creates the measurement foundation for tracking progress, identifying bottlenecks, and holding the sector’s development to account over time.

For a country that has been telling the world it has a world-class IT workforce, knowing exactly how large and skilled that workforce is, officially and verifiably, is long overdue.