Revenue per employee is a widely used productivity metric across industries. For talent-based businesses, particularly technology services companies, RPE plays a central role in evaluating performance. We still are not seeing relevant differences in RPE from last year to this year based on productivity advances related to GenAI.
We wrote about revenue per employee (RPE) and revenue per head (RPH) last year: https://alten.capital/blog/revenue-per-employee-in-digital-engineering-and-it-consulting. Technology services firms often vary significantly in structure and focus. Given their reliance on human capital, revenue levels are closely tied to the number of employees. A higher RPE may indicate that clients are paying a premium for the services provided, reflecting differentiated value relative to peers.
Geography also influences RPE. Billing rates differ across regions, shaped by delivery models, cultural alignment, and time zone considerations. For U.S.-based clients, these are often ranked as follows:
Highest - North America: domestic delivery, strong cultural alignment, and timezone coverageIn the table above, we compare revenue per employee across several publicly traded digital engineering and IT consulting companies. For firms that disclose this information, we distinguish between billable and non-billable employees. These RPE figures should be viewed as approximations, since revenue is reported over a period of time while headcount is measured at a specific point in time. Using average headcount can improve accuracy, particularly for companies experiencing rapid growth.
Endava has the highest RPE with an estimated $87,000 revenue per employee per year, while CI&T has the lowest RPE at an estimated $59,000 per year. Headcount footprint has a significant impact on these metrics. Another interesting metric is the ratio of billable versus non-billable headcount at these companies. On average, these companies have 91% billable employees and 9% non-billable headcount.
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