The commonly quoted 8% to 14% band is real, and this figure sits in the middle of it. What makes the number worth a page is the direction and the company it keeps.
Security's share of IT spend went down while the security market went up. Gartner projects roughly 12.5% growth in worldwide information security spending for 2026. IANS finds buyer budgets growing at 4%. Those two numbers can only both be true if spend is concentrating: fewer buyers absorbing more of the market, or existing buyers reallocating from tools they already own toward platforms.
For a security leader writing a budget, the useful read is that the ratio argument is getting weaker. Benchmarking to a percentage of IT worked while the percentage was rising. It is a losing frame in a year when the median moved down a point.
Common questions
- What percentage of the IT budget should go to security?
- Published benchmarks cluster between 8% and 14%, and the IANS and Artico Search survey of 587 CISOs put the current figure at 10.9% of IT spend, down from 11.9% the prior year. The ratio is a sanity check rather than a target, because it says nothing about whether the spend matches the risks the organization carries.
- Are security budgets still growing?
- Slowly. IANS and Artico Search found average security budget growth of 4% year over year, down from 8% the prior year and the lowest rate in five years, with more than half of responding CISOs reporting flat or shrinking budgets. Healthcare organizations reported the sharpest pressure.
- Does a falling security share of IT budget mean a program was cut?
- No. Share of IT budget is a ratio, and it falls whenever IT spend rises faster than security spend, which is exactly what a large AI infrastructure program does. A security program whose absolute budget grew while its share of IT fell has not been cut, and reading the ratio as a cut misdirects the conversation with finance.
