By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s freelancers generated a record $1.76 billion in export earnings during the 2026 fiscal year, more than four times the total recorded five years earlier, according to figures released by Khurram Schehzad, adviser to the finance minister, on Sunday.
The full-year total marks a 78% jump from fiscal 2025, when freelance earnings reached $985 million after nearly doubling the year before. June alone brought in $164 million, up 69% from the same month last year, capping a fiscal year in which freelance income roughly tripled over three years — from $505 million in fiscal 2024 to Friday’s tally.
The freelance figures form part of a broader export push in Pakistan’s technology sector, which the government has identified as central to its recovery from a balance-of-payments crisis that drained foreign reserves and pressured the rupee over the past several years. Pakistan’s overall technology exports — a category that includes freelance income alongside software and IT-services firms — hit $4.6 billion for the fiscal year, a 21% increase, according to State Bank of Pakistan data cited separately by Schehzad. Freelance earnings account for roughly 38% of that total, up from about a quarter of IT exports when the sector first crossed the $1 billion threshold earlier in the fiscal year.
The growth has not been linear. Freelance exports were essentially flat between fiscal 2021 and 2022, at $396 million and $397 million respectively, before contracting 8% in fiscal 2023 to $364 million — a stretch that coincided with acute economic turmoil, including a currency collapse and import restrictions that squeezed the broader economy. The rebound began in fiscal 2024, and has accelerated each year since.
Measured on a per-freelancer basis, the shift is more pronounced. Based on an estimated population of 2.5 million to 3 million freelancers, average monthly earnings per worker have risen from roughly $12 in 2021 to more than $53 this year — a 4.4-fold increase.
Pakistan’s freelance workforce ranked 16th out of 193 countries in the 2026 Global Outsourcing Talent Index, a study published in April by Ataraxis Management that evaluates nations across talent availability, labor-cost competitiveness, digital infrastructure, English proficiency and business stability. That placed the country in the top 9% globally and ahead of larger outsourcing markets including China and Vietnam, though still well behind regional leader India, which ranked third overall. On the talent-availability component specifically, Pakistan’s score of 80 out of 100 placed it eighth worldwide — ahead of every European Union member state and every country in the Middle East and Africa included in the index.
The same study identified weak digital infrastructure as the principal constraint on Pakistan’s ranking, scoring the country just 30 out of 100 on that measure. Ataraxis estimated that raising the infrastructure score to 50 could lift Pakistan’s overall position to 11th globally.
Government officials have pointed to several policy measures aimed at sustaining the sector’s momentum, including a three-year extension, through June 2029, of the preferential 0.25% final tax regime on IT export earnings, and a reduction in the advance tax on foreign payments to 0.5% from 5%.
Schehzad said continued progress would depend on further investment in digital skills training, simplified cross-border payment systems, a stable tax framework, and expanded broadband and 5G coverage, alongside the government’s Tech Destination Pakistan initiative aimed at raising the country’s international profile as an outsourcing hub.
Pakistan is pursuing export-led growth as part of broader structural reforms tied to a $7 billion International Monetary Fund loan program, after a crisis that pushed the fiscal deficit to roughly 8% of gross domestic product in 2022.
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