Emerging Markets Hiring Statistics: 50 Numbers for 2026

Emerging markets are where the next decade of hiring growth will come from.

Over the next ten years, 1.2 billion young people in developing countries will reach working age, while current trends point to only about 420 million new jobs to absorb them.¹ That gap is a problem for local economies and an opportunity for companies that can hire across those borders without running into compliance failures.

The shift is already underway. 73% of business leaders expect most of their new hires to be international by 2026,² and on one global platform 47% of new hires in 2024 were located in emerging economies, three points higher than the year before.¹² Hiring in markets like India and the United Arab Emirates ran 40% and 37% above pre-pandemic levels in 2025, while hiring across advanced economies sat 20% to 35% below the same baseline.⁷

The 50 statistics below map what hiring in emerging markets looks like in 2026, organized the way a cross-border workforce plan actually comes together: the macro case, the cross-border hiring shift, then region by region across Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and Eastern Europe, followed by the real cost of employment, the compliance exposure, and the outlook to 2030.

Why Companies Are Hiring in Emerging Markets

The infrastructure for cross-border hiring has matured into its own fast-growing market. The global Employer of Record (EOR) market, the service model that lets a company legally employ workers in a country where it has no entity, is valued at USD 5.97 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach USD 10.45 billion by 2035, a 6.8% compound annual growth rate.⁸

Asia-Pacific already holds roughly 22% of that market, behind North America at 41% and Europe at 28%, and is the fastest-growing region.⁸

USD 10.45B projected global Employer of Record market size by 2035, up from USD 5.97 billion in 2026 at a 6.8% CAGR.⁸

The on-demand layer is growing even faster. The global freelance-platforms market sits at USD 6.4 billion in 2025 and is forecast to nearly quadruple to USD 24.2 billion by 2033, an 18.6% CAGR, with Asia-Pacific the fastest-growing region.⁹ That is where the flexible cross-border workforce is expanding fastest.

Behind the hiring infrastructure is a real economic base. Southeast Asia's digital economy crossed USD 300 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, up about 15% year over year, with revenue forecast at USD 135 billion, an 11.2-fold increase over a decade.¹⁰

India's digital economy reached 11.74% of national income in 2022 to 2023 and was projected to rise to 13.42% by 2024 to 2025, per a January 2025 government estimate.¹¹

The Cross-Border Hiring Shift

International hiring is moving from exception to default, and the demand is concentrating in a recognizable set of roles.

• 73% of HR and business leaders across ten countries expect more than half of new hires to be international by 2026.²
• 47% of new hires on the Oyster platform were in emerging economies in 2024, up three points year over year.¹²
• Companies grow more confident after their first hire abroad: 37% of first international hires on Oyster are in emerging markets, rising to 48% for subsequent hires.¹²
• Hiring in India ran 40% above pre-pandemic levels in 2025 and the UAE 37% above, while advanced economies sat 20% to 35% below.⁷

The fastest-growing cross-border work is no longer dominated by software. AI trainer roles grew 283% across borders in 2025, the single fastest-growing cross-border role on Deel's platform, followed by legal case managers at 164% and medical administrative assistants at 123%.³ More than 70,000 workers now train AI systems across over 600 organizations.³

283% cross-border growth in AI trainer roles in 2025, the fastest-growing cross-border role of the year.³

That work is landing in emerging markets. After the United States at 58%, the largest shares of AI trainers sit in India at 7.2%, the Philippines at 4.6%, and Kenya at 1.7%, putting three emerging markets in the global top five for the newest knowledge-work profession.³

Pay is following the talent, and so is currency preference. USD appeared in 5 of the 10 most common country-currency payment combinations globally in 2025, and in Argentina 84.6% of workers on Deel chose to be paid in USD rather than their local currency.³ ¹³

For companies hiring in high-inflation economies, the practical question of how to pay international employees now includes which currency keeps talent from walking.

Latin America: The Nearshoring Talent Pool

Latin America has shifted from a pure cost play to a depth-and-time-zone play, and compensation is climbing fast.

• COOs in Latin America saw 99.8% compensation growth in 2025, nearly five times the US rate for the same role.³
• LATAM financial analysts saw 195.5% compensation growth, the largest single-year jump for the role in Deel's global dataset.³
• Generative AI course enrollments in Latin America grew 425% year over year, the highest of any region, and cybersecurity enrollments rose 129%.¹⁴
• 84% of employers in Latin America and the Caribbean plan to upskill their own workforce to meet demand for digital and tech talent.¹⁵

The fast-rising compensation undercuts the assumption that LATAM hiring is simply cheaper hiring. What employers are buying is a professionalizing talent base in compatible time zones, with English depth to match: Argentina ranks 26th of 123 countries on the 2025 EF English Proficiency Index, the highest-ranked Latin American country and one of two in the High proficiency band alongside Honduras.¹⁶

Inflation also reshapes how pay has to be structured. In Argentina, 57% of businesses plan to redesign their salary and compensation strategy to protect workers' purchasing power, against 33% globally.¹⁵ That is the kind of country-specific design decision that cannot be handled from a standard head-office template.

Southeast Asia: APAC's Talent Engine

Southeast Asia pairs a large, growing tech workforce with rising pay pressure and acute skills shortages, which is precisely the combination that pushes companies toward compliant local hiring.

Vietnam anchors the region. By the end of 2024 it had 73,788 digital technology companies, up 10.1% year over year, with nearly 1.26 million workers in its information and communication technology sector.¹⁷

Demand outstrips supply: 80% of companies in Vietnam report difficulty finding qualified candidates, and specialist roles in AI, data, and fintech may see 15% to 25% salary increases in 2026.¹⁸ Vietnam also leads Southeast Asia on budgeted 2026 pay growth at 7.1%.¹⁹

The Philippines is the region's outsourcing backbone. Its IT and business-process management sector reached 1.82 million full-time employees in 2024 on USD 38 billion in export revenue, adding 120,000 direct jobs that year.²⁰ It also carries the region's highest staff turnover at 20.0%, a retention reality that shapes the hiring math.¹⁹

"Slasify helped us scale in Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Their local knowledge and execution saved us time and costs." - Head of Operations, Astro Malaysia Holdings Berhad

Across the six largest Southeast Asian markets, the skills gap is broad: 63% of businesses report a skills-gap, and information technology, engineering, and sales are the hardest roles to fill.¹⁹ Regional employers expect 43% of today's core skills to be disrupted by 2030, above the global average of 39%.²¹

The capital is arriving to match: more than USD 2.3 billion was invested in over 680 AI startups in the region in the twelve months to mid-2025, accounting for more than 30% of private funding value in the first half of 2025.¹⁰

India: The Global Capability Center Hub

India has become the default destination for companies that want to own a global team rather than outsource one. It hosts 2,117 Global Capability Centers, the in-house offshore offices multinationals use to run engineering, finance, and operations, employing roughly 2.36 million professionals as of FY2026, with the count up 32% since FY2021 and total market revenue at USD 98.4 billion.⁴

2.36 million professionals employed across India's 2,117 Global Capability Centers as of FY2026.⁴

More than 1,200 of these centers already have embedded AI and machine-learning capabilities, supported by a talent base of about 250,000 AI professionals.⁴

The wider technology industry is still a net hirer. It was expected to add 126,000 net new employees in FY2025 to reach a 5.8-million-strong workforce on revenue of more than USD 282.6 billion.²²

Hiring at this scale comes with a rising cost curve that employers should factor in. Salaries in India are projected to rise 9.0% in 2026, with Global Capability Centers higher at 9.5%, while attrition has cooled for a second year to 17.1%.²³ India is a rising-cost market, not a static-cost one.

Africa: The Demographic Dividend

Africa is the structural long game. It is the world's youngest continent, with a median age of about 19 years, and home to roughly 532 million young people aged 15 to 35, more than 22% of the global youth cohort.²⁴ ²⁵

Each year over 10 million young people enter the African labor market, yet current growth is estimated to create only about 3 million formal jobs, leaving a large surplus of trainable talent available to employers hiring remotely.²⁵

532 million young Africans aged 15 to 35, more than a fifth of the global youth cohort.²⁵

The developer base is still small in absolute terms but growing faster than any other continent. Africa had 4.7 million developers in 2024, and that population grew 21% a year between 2019 and 2024, the strongest rate of any continent.²⁶ Kenya is already a top-five global supplier of AI-trainer talent.³

Investment is flowing back into the region. African tech startups raised USD 4.1 billion in combined equity and debt in 2025, up 25% year over year and the strongest year since 2022, with Kenya leading the continent at USD 1.04 billion raised.²⁷ It adds up to a young, growing, increasingly funded talent base that local job creation cannot absorb on its own.

Eastern Europe: Europe's Developer Bench

Eastern Europe is the established nearshoring base for European and global employers, and the numbers show real depth.

Two operational signals stand out. Ukraine retains a deep, experienced workforce, but the 58,000 specialists now working abroad are a direct flag for contractor and EOR compliance, since where a person physically works drives their employment and tax status.³⁰

That depth is globally visible: Ukraine and Poland accounted for 2.7% and 2.5% of respondents to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, with Ukraine ranking seventh and Poland eighth worldwide.³²

Poland's rising developer pay, up double digits in a single year, is the reminder that cost-driven hires in CEE should budget for inflationary salary growth rather than assume flat rates.²⁹

The Cost of Hiring in Emerging Markets

The headline salary is rarely the full cost. Each market layers its own statutory employer contributions on top of salary. The US employer FICA match, the federal payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare, is 7.65%, plus a small FUTA (federal unemployment tax) contribution.⁶

Most emerging markets sit well above that, as the rates below show, often by two to three times once every mandatory scheme is counted.

There are two details behind the table that are worth noting. In Brazil, the 8% FGTS deposit (Fundo de Garantia, a severance guarantee fund) recurs every pay cycle and is separate from the INSS social-security rate, and a statutory 13th salary applies on top.³³ ⁶ In India, the employer matches the employee's 12% provident-fund contribution, so statutory PF alone deposits 24% of basic salary.³⁶

Getting these stacks right every month, in local currency, is the core of Global Payroll, and the full picture for the US baseline is in our US Social Security tax guide.

Compliance Risk When Hiring in Emerging Markets

Cross-border hiring carries exposure that does not show up on a salary line, and several rules tightened in 2025 and 2026.

In the European Union, which borders the Eastern European hiring markets, the Platform Work Directive installs a rebuttable legal presumption of employment for gig workers and was adopted on 14 October 2024, giving member states two years to transpose it into national law.

More than 28 million people in the EU work through digital labor platforms, a figure expected to reach 43 million.³⁸ Any contractor-first strategy across Poland or Romania faces higher reclassification risk as that window closes.

Permanent establishment (PE) risk, the point at which a remote worker can make their employer liable for corporate tax in a country, remains a gray zone. Of 63 jurisdictions surveyed in 2026, only 25% have issued specific guidance on PE and cross-border remote work, yet 84% have an agency-PE concept in domestic law, so a remote salesperson who habitually concludes contracts abroad can still create a taxable presence.³⁹ Tax authorities in 30% of those jurisdictions are paying more attention to remote-work arrangements.³⁹

Specific markets are formalizing gig and platform work:

• Mexico reclassifies app-based workers earning at least MXN 8,364 net per month as platform employees under a Federal Labor Law reform effective 22 June 2025, with IMSS social security made mandatory for qualifying digital-platform workers from 1 July 2025 under a pilot program.⁴⁰ ⁴¹
• India announced four consolidated Labour Codes on 21 November 2025 that will authorize the government to require platform aggregators to contribute 1% to 2% of annual turnover, capped at 5% of amounts payable to workers, toward gig-worker social security once the rules are notified.⁴²
• In the United States, an estimated 10% to 30% of employers misclassify at least some workers, a baseline reminder that the odds of a misclassified cross-border arrangement are material.⁴³

Worker classification is where cross-border hiring goes wrong most often, and the path most companies use to stay out of the assessment column is to employ the worker properly through an Employer of Record. Our guide to contractor misclassification and when to switch to an EOR walks through the trigger points.

If you are hiring across these markets and want to pressure-test the cost and compliance picture for the specific countries on your list, book a demo with our team and we will map it with you.

The 2030 Outlook for Emerging-Market Talent

Every major forecast points the same direction: more workers, concentrated in emerging markets, and a widening need to hire across them through compliant structures.

• The global labor market will create 170 million new roles and displace 92 million by 2030, a net increase of 78 million jobs.⁴⁴
• 39% of workers' current skill sets are expected to be transformed or outdated over 2025 to 2030, and 59 of every 100 workers will need training by then.⁴⁵
• Sub-Saharan Africa's working-age population will grow by more than 600 million over the next quarter century, more than three-quarters of the net labor-force increase across all developing economies, though only 24% of new workers today land wage-paying jobs.⁴⁶
• Almost half of Sub-Saharan African employers expect talent availability to improve over 2025 to 2030, against 29% globally, as the region's population rises 79% toward 2.2 billion.⁴⁷

78 million net new jobs forecast globally by 2030, with the working-age surge concentrated in emerging markets.⁴⁴

The training gap is the constraint, and it is sharpest where the workers are. In India, 63 of every 100 workers will need training by 2030, and more than 70 million may not receive it.⁴⁸ In Southeast Asia, 62 of every 100 workers will need training, and 96% of employers see a need to invest in upskilling their existing workforce, above the global average of 85%.²¹

How Slasify Helps You Hire in Emerging Markets

Hiring across these markets means navigating local employment law that cannot be guessed at from a head office, and that is the work we take on. We act as the legal Employer of Record in markets where you have no entity, handling the employment contract, local payroll, statutory contributions, mandatory benefits, and termination compliance, while you manage the work itself.

In practice that means we run local onboarding, register each hire with the right statutory bodies, calculate and remit contributions like Vietnam's social insurance or Brazil's FGTS every pay cycle, and keep each contract current as local rules change.

We support payroll and hiring in over 150 countries across 130-plus currencies, backed by a network of 600+ local compliance partners. We are ISO 27001 certified and currently serve more than 900 companies worldwide.

For companies that already hold entities in some markets and not others, our Global Payroll and Global Contractor services cover the rest of the stack, and our EOR market statistics breakdown sets the wider context.

"We've partnered with Slasify for 3 years to launch healthcare MVPs. Their developers have become key team members, and their flexibility and speed in resolving challenges have been outstanding." - Alda P., VP of Technology, House Rx

The value is that the statutory contribution stacks, currency choices, classification rules, and 2025 to 2026 reforms covered above stop being your problem to track market by market.

What This Means for Your 2026 Emerging-Markets Hiring Plan

The data points in three operational directions for HR, Finance, and Operations leaders building a cross-border plan.

Go where the talent is growing, not just where it is cheap. India's 2.36 million GCC professionals, Vietnam's 1.26 million ICT workers, Poland's 400,000 programmers, and Africa's 4.7 million fast-growing developers are deep, distinct pools, and rising compensation in LATAM and India shows the cost gap is closing in the markets that matter most.

Budget for the full cost of employment. Employer statutory loads of 10% to 22% across Indonesia, the Philippines, Poland, Vietnam, and Brazil, plus 13th-salary and severance-fund obligations, sit well above the US 7.65% baseline. The salary is the start of the cost, not the end of it.

Plan for compliance before you hire, not after. The EU Platform Work Directive, Mexico's platform-worker reforms, India's Labour Codes, and persistent permanent-establishment gray zones all point the same way. Contractor-first hiring is a riskier default than it used to be, and an EOR is the cleanest way to hire across emerging markets without setting up an entity in each one.

Request a demo to map the numbers above against the specific markets in your 2026 hiring plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

What counts as an emerging market for global hiring?

Emerging markets are fast-growing economies outside the traditional North American and Western European hiring centers. For global hiring, the markets that matter most in 2026 are in Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia), Southeast Asia (Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia), India, Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa), and Eastern Europe (Poland, Romania, Ukraine).

Why are companies hiring in emerging markets in 2026?

These markets combine deep, growing talent pools with favorable demographics and lower employment costs than the US or Western Europe. Over the next decade 1.2 billion young people in developing countries reach working age against only about 420 million projected jobs, and demand is concentrating in roles like AI training, engineering, and operations that companies are now sourcing across borders.¹ ³

Which emerging markets have the most tech talent?

India leads with 2.36 million professionals across its Global Capability Centers and a 5.8-million-strong technology workforce.⁴ ²² Vietnam has nearly 1.26 million ICT-sector workers, Poland has up to 400,000 programmers, and Africa has 4.7 million developers growing 21% a year.¹⁷ ²⁸ ²⁶

How much does it cost to employ someone in an emerging market?

Beyond salary, employers pay statutory contributions that vary widely by country: roughly 10% to 12% in Indonesia, around 21.5% in Vietnam, 19% to 22% in Poland, and 20% to 22.5% plus an 8% severance-fund deposit in Brazil.³⁷ ⁵ ³⁴ ³³ Most run well above the 7.65% US FICA employer match, and several markets add a mandatory 13th-month salary.⁶

What are the biggest compliance risks of hiring in emerging markets?

The two largest are worker misclassification and permanent establishment risk. An estimated 10% to 30% of US employers misclassify at least some workers, and only 25% of 63 surveyed jurisdictions have clear guidance on when remote work creates a taxable presence abroad.⁴³ ³⁹ New 2025 and 2026 rules in the EU, Mexico, and India are tightening the treatment of gig and platform workers.

Do I need a local entity to hire employees in emerging markets?

No. An Employer of Record can legally employ workers on your behalf and manage payroll, tax, and statutory compliance in a market where you have no entity, which avoids the cost and delay of setting up a local subsidiary. Companies often start with an EOR and move to their own entity later if hiring volume justifies it.

How does Slasify help companies hire in emerging markets?

We act as your Employer of Record, Global Payroll provider, or Contractor Management partner across more than 150 countries and 130-plus currencies, handling local contracts, statutory contributions, and compliance so you can hire without local entities. Explore our EOR services for a detailed look at how we operate by requesting a demo if you’re ready to map specific markets.

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