JetBrains Assumes You Only Spend 45% of Time in Your IDE

JetBrains assumes developers spend only 45% of their working hours inside the IDE. The other 55% goes to meetings, planning, admin, and documentation. That single number is the most important assumption in their newly published ROI calculator methodology, because it means every claimed productivity boost is cut by more than half before it hits the bottom line.

Why self-reported time savings are the core data

JetBrains ran two dedicated productivity surveys: 194 respondents for managed-language tools (IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, PyCharm Pro, etc.) and 846 for system-language tools (CLion, GoLand, RustRover). Each developer reported average hours saved per week after switching from another editor or IDE. The raw boost is simply hours saved divided by total weekly working hours. Then they averaged across respondents and segmented by product group and region.

That self-reported number gets applied conservatively. Instead of saying "a developer is always x% faster," JetBrains multiplies the boost by 0.45 - the portion of time actually spent in the IDE. If a developer reports a 20% time savings, the effective gain in the calculator is 9% of total working time. No magical 2x claims.

AI stacking uses a multiplicative formula

When you add JetBrains AI subscriptions (their Junie assistant), the calculator applies a separate AI productivity boost to 55% of all tasks - the part of the day where developers are not in the IDE. On overlapping IDE-relevant tasks, gains combine as IDE boost + AI boost - (IDE boost x AI boost). An additional 10% AI-only boost covers tasks like documentation and analysis. The AI data comes from a 241-respondent Junie Developer Experience survey.

This stacking avoids double-counting but acknowledges that AI helps beyond typical IDE boundaries. The formula is a practical compromise, not a rigorous scholarly model.

Salary benchmarks and the final ROI number

Salary defaults come from JetBrains' annual State of Developer Ecosystem Survey (over 20,000 respondents in 2025), aggregated to country-level medians. You can override with your own total project cost. The final ROI is ((productivity savings - investment cost) / investment cost) x 100. Investment cost is pre-tax annual license prices. All estimates are explicitly labeled as illustrative and not guarantees.

What this does: it turns fuzzy "tools make us faster" feelings into a concrete, defensible number - with all the caveats spelled out. The next time a procurement team asks for ROI on IntelliJ IDEA subscriptions, you can point them to the calculator and its methodology page rather than waving your hands.

Source: How We Measure the ROI of JetBrains IDEs
Domain: blog.jetbrains.com