The MSP Technician Shortage, By the Numbers

The technician shortage got measurably worse this year, not better, and MSPs can feel it in hiring time, burnout, and stalled growth plans. Automation is absorbing real pressure, letting many providers scale without adding headcount, but it is not erasing the shortage on its own. The practical fix is less about finding more people and more about deciding which work still needs one.

How bad is the technician shortage right now?

Kaseya's newest survey of 1,061 MSPs worldwide found that difficulty finding and hiring skilled technicians jumped from 9 percent to 16 percent year over year, according to Kaseya's 2026 State of the MSP Report. Staffing now ranks among the top 10 operational issues MSPs face in 2026, cited by 32 percent of respondents, per the same report.

The shortage is not evenly spread across roles. Difficulty hiring skilled cybersecurity professionals specifically rose to 39 percent, up from 29 percent the year before, according to Kaseya's report. Security work requires the deepest and most current expertise on an MSP's team, and that is exactly where the gap is widening fastest.

This is not a story about one bad hiring season. A year-over-year jump of that size, in the same survey, with the same methodology, means the market for qualified technicians got tighter across the board, not just at any single firm that recruited poorly.

The cybersecurity number carries the most operational risk, because security and backup are also where MSPs make their money. Kaseya's same survey found 71 percent of MSPs reporting year-over-year revenue growth in cybersecurity services, the strongest growth of any category it tracked, according to Kaseya's report. Growing a service line faster than you can staff it is its own kind of risk, one that shows up later as missed SLAs rather than an empty req on a job board.

Why is talent replacing tools as the top operational headache?

For years, MSPs blamed their tech stack for operational friction. That is changing. 83 percent of MSPs now say their IT management tools significantly enhance operational efficiency, according to Kaseya's report. Challenges tied to training and upskilling staff more than doubled over the same year, per the same report.

Put those two findings together and the operational story is clear. Tool satisfaction is up. People capacity is down. An MSP that spent the last three years consolidating its tech stack solved yesterday's bottleneck. The bottleneck has moved to whether there is a qualified human available to run that stack well.

That shift changes what a COO should actually be measuring. Tool spend and tool count used to be the operational levers worth tracking quarter over quarter. Now the more useful dashboard tracks technician utilization, time to productivity for a new hire, and how much of the routine workload still depends on a specific person being available.

That table is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to be specific about where the pressure actually sits, which is hiring and retaining expertise, not running the tools you already bought.

Can automation actually close the gap?

Automation is carrying real weight, just not in the way most MSPs assume. In Rewst's 2026 State of MSP Automation Report, a survey of 300 MSP professionals, 44 percent say automation lets them scale without adding headcount, according to Rewst's report. Another 42 percent credit automation specifically with reducing technician burnout, per the same report.

That is a meaningful offset, not a solution. 97 percent of the MSPs Rewst surveyed plan to automate even more processes this year, and 71 percent already call automation essential rather than optional to their strategy, according to Rewst. The MSPs furthest ahead on automation are not hiring less because they need fewer people overall. They are hiring less for the repetitive work and redirecting that budget toward the roles that actually require a person.

There is still plenty of headroom left to capture. 55 percent of MSPs have automated up to only a quarter of their total workload so far, according to Kaseya's report. The staffing relief automation can offer has not peaked yet for most providers, since most of them have barely started.

Does automation make the shortage go away?

No, and the labor math explains why. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 317,700 computer and information technology job openings a year, on average, from 2024 to 2034, according to Coursera's summary of the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. That is a structural shortfall across the entire technology labor market, not something one MSP's automation stack fixes on its own.

Automation buys time and capacity inside a fixed headcount. It does not expand the pool of qualified technicians available to hire from. An MSP that treats automation as the whole staffing strategy will still lose the race for scarce senior talent to the competitor that automated the routine work first and redirected its hiring budget toward retention instead.

Retention matters more than the hiring numbers suggest on their own. Every technician who leaves takes institutional knowledge of specific client environments with them, and the replacement starts from zero on documentation that was never quite finished. A shortage that is hard to hire out of gets worse, not better, when it is also hard to retain out of.

Remote work compounds the problem rather than solving it. A technician in a mid-sized market is no longer competing for a local salary against local competitors. They are one recruiter message away from a fully remote role at a national MSP or an enterprise IT team, which means retention now has to compete on more than a slightly better offer than the shop down the street.

Where should the remaining headcount actually go?

This is where the operational decision gets concrete. Routine, high-volume work, ticket triage, patch verification, and onboarding checklists, is exactly the kind of work Kaseya's and Rewst's data both point to as the easiest to automate without losing service quality. That frees the hires you fought to find and are trying to keep for the judgment calls a script cannot make. Forge University offers AI-mentored IT and security certification training to help them grow into that work.

Some capacity gaps are better solved by partnership than by hiring at all. Co-managed arrangements let a business reach specialized IT expertise without recruiting and retaining it directly, according to N-able. The same logic applies inside an MSP. A white-labeled tool that reliably handles a function in house is capacity you are extending to your own technicians, not a replacement for them.

Before adding a tool or a headcount line to close a specific capacity gap, run the actual numbers against your own ticket volume and staffing costs. The stack-builder can model whether a given gap is cheaper to close with automation, a new hire, or some mix of both, instead of defaulting to whichever option is top of mind that quarter.

The sequencing matters as much as the decision itself. Automate the highest-volume, lowest-judgment work first, since that is where the staffing data says the relief is largest and the risk of a mistake is smallest. Only after that queue is actually shorter should a COO decide whether the next open req is for a junior technician, a senior specialist, or no hire at all.

The operational call for 2026

The technician shortage is not going to resolve itself, and no single tool closes it. What changed this year is that MSPs now have real data on where automation earns its keep, on routine and repeatable work, and where it does not, on judgment, client relationships, and the senior expertise clients are actually paying for. Build a staffing plan around that line, using the full product catalog as the inventory of what can already be automated, rather than around the assumption that more software quietly solves a people problem on its own.

See the full stack to see which parts of your technician workload are the easiest to take off the schedule first.