Every year the same lists appear. Every year PHP is missing. Every year we invoice more than the year before.
I have a ritual every January. I open Medium, search “top programming languages,” and count how many articles mention PHP.
This year I found 14 lists. PHP appeared in three of them. Two of those put it at the bottom with a paragraph that basically said “still alive, somehow.” The third mentioned it only to say WordPress uses it.
Meanwhile, I closed Q4 2025 with the highest revenue my company has ever recorded. Every project was built with PHP. Every single one. Laravel, specifically. The language that apparently nobody should be learning in 2026 paid for my daughter’s school fees, my team’s salaries and three new client contracts signed in December alone.
Something does not add up.
The Lists Are Not Wrong. They Are Irrelevant.
I am not here to argue that PHP should be number one on any list. It should not be. Python genuinely dominates AI and data science. TypeScript genuinely dominates frontend. Rust genuinely fills a niche that PHP was never designed for.
The lists are measuring the right things. They track GitHub stars, Stack Overflow surveys, job posting volume on global platforms and tutorial search trends.
But here is what they do not measure: how many small and mid-size businesses are running production applications right now, today, on PHP. How many government systems in Southeast Asia are built on Laravel. How many agencies are billing clients monthly for PHP maintenance contracts.
These lists measure what developers want to learn. They do not measure what businesses are actually paying for.
The Numbers Nobody Writes About
Let me share some numbers from my own business. I run a small software company in Malaysia. We have a team of eight developers. We serve government agencies, logistics companies and financial services firms.
In 2025:
We delivered 3 projects. All Laravel. Total contract value exceeded 6 digit. Average project timeline was 4 months from kickoff to production. Zero projects required a rewrite or major architectural change post-launch.
Our client retention rate was 82%. Not because we lock them in. Because the applications work and they keep coming back for the next phase.
Now compare this to the narrative on Medium. If you only read tech Twitter and programming articles, you would think PHP developers are going extinct. You would think nobody is hiring for this stack. You would think the entire language is held together by WordPress and legacy code.
That is not what I see. What I see is a language with a massive installed base, a mature ecosystem and a framework in Laravel that ships features faster than most teams can adopt them.
Why Clients Choose PHP (Even When They Do Not Know It)
Most of my clients do not care what language their system is built in. They care about three things: can you deliver on time, can you stay within budget and can we find someone else to maintain this if you get hit by a bus.
PHP answers all three.
Delivery speed. Laravel’s ecosystem is absurdly productive. Authentication, queues, notifications, file storage, API resources, scheduled tasks. All built in. All documented. All tested. I do not need to evaluate 15 npm packages to send an email. I run php artisan make:notification and I am done in ten minutes.
Cost predictability. PHP developers are available. Not just in Silicon Valley. In Kuala Lumpur, in Jakarta, in Manila, in Ho Chi Minh City. The hiring pool is deep. Salaries are reasonable. Training a junior takes months, not years. When I quote a client for a 6-month project, I can price it accurately because I know exactly how long Laravel takes to build common features. There are no surprises.
Maintenance reality. When my client’s internal team needs to take over a Laravel application, they can find developers. They can find documentation. They can find answers on Laracasts, on Stack Overflow, on the official docs that are genuinely excellent. Try handing a Rust application to a government IT department in Putrajaya. See how that goes.
The “PHP Is Dead” Crowd Has Been Wrong for 15 Years
I have been writing PHP professionally since 2014. In that time, I have heard “PHP is dead” at least once a year, every year, without exception.
During that same period:
PHP went from 5.6 to 8.4. Each version was meaningfully better. Laravel went from version 4 to version 12. It now competes with any framework in any language for developer experience. Composer became one of the best package managers in any ecosystem. PHP’s performance improved so dramatically that most benchmarks now show it competing with Node.js for web workloads.
The language evolved. The people writing the obituaries did not notice because they stopped using it in 2012.
PHP 8.4 introduced property hooks, asymmetric visibility and the ability to chain methods on new without wrapping it in parentheses. These are serious language features. Not gimmicks. Not catch-up features. Actual improvements that make code cleaner and more maintainable.
Laravel 12 shipped with first-party support for React and Vue starter kits, improved the testing experience and continued to expand its cloud deployment tooling. The ecosystem is not stagnating. It is accelerating.
What the Lists Get Wrong About “Relevance”
The “top languages” lists define relevance by novelty and growth rate. By that measure, PHP is not relevant. It is not growing fast because it is already everywhere. It is not novel because it has been around for 30 years.
But relevance should be measured by impact. And by impact, PHP is arguably the most relevant server-side language on the planet.
According to W3Techs, PHP powers roughly 77% of all websites with a known server-side language as of early 2026. You can dispute the methodology. You can argue that most of those are WordPress sites. But even if you cut that number in half, it is still an enormous share of the web.
Every time someone interacts with a WordPress site, a Laravel application, a Drupal system, a Magento store or a MediaWiki page, they are using PHP. The language is so embedded in the infrastructure of the internet that most people do not even realize it.
That is not a sign of irrelevance. That is a sign of infrastructure. Nobody writes articles about how TCP/IP is trending. It just works. PHP, for a huge portion of the web, just works.
I Am Not Telling You to Learn PHP
If you are a new developer in 2026 and you want to maximize your job options globally, learn Python or TypeScript. The lists are correct about that. The volume of job postings, the breadth of use cases and the community resources for those languages are enormous.
But if you are already building with PHP. If you are running a business on Laravel. If you are serving clients who need reliable, maintainable and cost-effective web applications. Stop apologizing for your stack.
You do not need to justify PHP to anyone. You do not need to feel embarrassed when someone at a tech meetup asks what you use and you say “Laravel.” You do not need to chase the next framework because a Medium article told you your tools are outdated.
The market is telling you something different from what the articles are telling you. The market is paying you. The articles are not.
The Real Risk Is Not PHP. It Is Chasing Trends.
I have watched companies in my market rewrite working PHP applications in Go because a CTO read an article about performance. The rewrite took 18 months. The original application was handling 10,000 requests per day. It did not need Go. It needed a Redis cache and a CDN. That would have taken a week.
I have seen agencies pitch clients on microservices architectures using Kubernetes when the client has 200 users. The project went over budget by 300%. The client came to us afterward and we rebuilt it in Laravel in 8 weeks.
The real risk in 2026 is not using an “unpopular” language. The real risk is choosing your tools based on what gets claps on Medium instead of what solves the problem in front of you.
What I Tell My Team
When a developer on my team asks me whether they should learn Rust or Go or switch to a different ecosystem, I tell them the same thing every time.
Learn what interests you. Build side projects in whatever language excites you. Stay curious.
But when you sit down on Monday morning and open a client project, use the tool that ships. Use the tool that your team knows. Use the tool with the best documentation for the problem you are solving.
For us, that is Laravel. Not because it is trendy. Not because it appeared on a list. Because it works. Because it has worked for years. Because it will keep working while the next “revolutionary” framework is still figuring out its routing layer.
PHP is not on anyone’s list for 2026. Good. That means while everyone else is arguing about what to learn next, we are building.
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