If you ask any CTO what keeps them awake at night, technical debt is likely near the top of the list. It’s a problem that has existed for as long as software has been built, but in 2025, it has become more visible, more costly, and harder to ignore.
Technical debt is often compared to financial debt. You borrow speed today, cutting corners on design, testing, or documentation in order to release faster. But the interest compounds over time. That extra hour saved at the start may cost days or even weeks later, when features become harder to extend, systems become brittle, and teams spend more time maintaining code than building new products.
And the numbers back this up. McKinsey has estimated that technical debt can amount to as much as 40% of a company’s technology estate. More recent surveys suggest that over half of businesses now spend a quarter or more of their IT budgets managing debt, often at the expense of innovation. In other words, the more debt piles up, the less room there is for growth.
What Technical Debt Looks Like in 2025
The face of technical debt has changed. It’s no longer just about messy code left behind by hurried developers.
Today, one common source is the rise of AI-assisted coding and low-code platforms. While these tools boost productivity, they also produce code that can be inconsistent or lack long-term maintainability. Teams often gain speed but inherit complexity.
Read: What AI Can and Can’t Do for Your Company in 2025
Another driver is the mix of legacy monoliths and new microservices. Many organizations modernize in phases, layering cloud-native architectures on top of older systems. The result? Fragile integrations and hidden dependencies that create ongoing overhead.
Then there’s cloud sprawl. With SaaS platforms and APIs multiplying, it’s easy for organizations to lose governance and visibility. What starts as flexibility can quickly become an unmanageable web of services.
And finally, the reality of talent rotation in hybrid teams. Distributed or fast-scaling teams often experience uneven coding practices, leading to quality gaps. For example, developers spend a significant amount of their time on technical debt, often in the range of 25-50% per year or 20-40% of their development velocity, a substantial portion of which is spent debugging and working around it.
In short, technical debt in 2025 is less about “bad coding” and more about structural complexity in modern software ecosystems.
Why Businesses Tolerate Technical Debt (and When It’s Okay)
If technical debt is so costly, why do companies keep accumulating it? The short answer: because it buys speed.
For startups, debt is a survival tool. Getting an MVP to market quickly matters more than architectural perfection. Investors and customers want traction, not spotless codebases.
Even large enterprises accept some debt when they need to test new markets or experiment with features. Writing throwaway code for a pilot project is often smarter than over-engineering something that may never scale.
The truth is, tech debt can be strategic. When managed deliberately, it enables rapid iteration. The problem begins when teams stop tracking it, or when debt lingers past its useful purpose. That’s when it turns from fuel into friction.
The Real Risks of Ignoring Technical Debt
Unmanaged technical debt is rarely visible to non-technical stakeholders until it suddenly becomes expensive.
One risk is performance and reliability. Systems slow down, downtime increases, and customer frustration grows. What looks like a small bug in code often masks deeper architectural fragility.
Another risk is cost explosion. Every new feature takes longer to implement because the foundation is shaky. What once required days can stretch into weeks. Research has shown that some teams spend up to 42% of their time dealing with tech debt instead of innovating.
There’s also the talent drain factor. Skilled engineers don’t want to spend their careers fixing brittle systems. If your codebase is messy, retention becomes a problem.
And finally, security exposure. Old libraries, patchwork integrations, and neglected systems are perfect entry points for attackers. The more complex and outdated the system, the harder it is to secure.
How to Keep Pace Without Breaking the Product
Managing tech debt doesn’t mean eliminating it entirely. It means building systems to keep it under control.
- Set “debt budget”. Many successful teams allocate 15–20% of each sprint to refactoring, documentation, or improving infrastructure. This prevents debt from snowballing while keeping delivery speed high.
- Prioritize fixes. Not all debt is equal. Leaders should focus on the modules and systems that block scalability or impact performance, rather than trying to clean everything at once.
- Adopt modern architectures. Microservices, modular APIs, and cloud governance frameworks allow teams to contain complexity, making it easier to scale without adding hidden risks.
- Automate processes. Automated QA, security scanning, and CI/CD pipelines reduce the burden on engineers, catching issues before they grow. Netflix’s use of “Chaos Engineering,” for example, shows how proactive stress-testing can keep systems resilient.
- Split resources into “feature delivery” teams and “platform stability” teams. One group pushes innovation forward, while the other ensures the foundation remains strong. This balance keeps speed and reliability aligned.
Read: Quality of Software Development: Defining, Measuring, and Ensuring High Standards with JetQuality Framework
Managing tech debt isn’t just an engineering responsibility. CTOs and product leaders must frame it as a business cost:
Feature delays caused by slow codebases impact revenue.
Poor stability increases churn.
Developer frustration drives attrition and recruitment costs.
Forward-thinking organizations are already making “technical health” part of their KPIs, alongside velocity and revenue growth.
The key is balance: moving fast enough to meet market demand, but building systems that can scale and adapt over the long term. Technical debt, when treated as part of product strategy rather than an afterthought, becomes not a burden, but a tool.
At JetSoftPro, we help businesses build software that moves quickly without breaking under its own weight. From code audits to scalable architectures, we help teams get ahead of the debt curve.
Is your product moving fast but starting to creak under the pressure? Let’s talk.
