Pakistan’s freelancing sector is on the verge of crossing the $1 billion annual export milestone for the first time, but a detailed analysis published by Nikkei Asia reveals that the same sector faces a trio of structural challenges that could constrain its long-term growth: the disruption of entry-level work categories by artificial intelligence, persistent barriers to cross-border payment access, and the natural mathematical compression of growth rates as the sector scales from a small base.
According to State Bank of Pakistan data cited in the Nikkei Asia report, freelance exports of computer and information services reached $959 million during the first ten months of the current fiscal year ending June 2026, with the January-March quarter alone contributing $299 million, a sixfold increase from the April-June 2023 quarter that marked the beginning of twelve consecutive quarters of growth. Pakistan has the second-highest share of global online gig workers among non-high-income countries at 10.2 percent, behind only India at 35.2 percent, according to a 2023 World Bank report that also found 35 percent of Pakistani freelancers identify as independent contractors, 18 percent as entrepreneurs, and 15 percent as seasonal workers.
Imran Batada, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pakistan Freelancers Association, told Nikkei Asia that more than 2.3 million active freelancers now account for roughly a quarter of Pakistan’s total IT export revenues, with the country’s relatively low-cost labour and depreciated currency making Pakistani freelancers competitive in international markets. However, he also acknowledged the emerging threat from artificial intelligence tools reshaping global demand for the specific categories of work where Pakistani freelancers have historically been strongest, including entry-level content writing, basic design, and data entry, where artificial intelligence is increasingly capable of producing output that competes directly with human freelancers at a fraction of the cost. Mutaher Khan, co-founder of market intelligence provider Data Darbar, added that the slowing year-on-year growth rate, which peaked at 138 percent in the July-September 2024 quarter before moderating to 39 percent in the latest quarter, reflects both the natural mathematical difficulty of maintaining exceptional percentage growth rates from a larger base and genuine market headwinds.
The payment infrastructure gap emerged as the most practically acute concern for working freelancers in the Nikkei Asia report. A freelancer based in Islamabad identified only as Mumtaz described paying considerable shares of income in transfer fees across multiple payment gateways as a direct result of the absence of trusted global platforms like PayPal and Stripe from Pakistan’s supported payout markets. Danish Lakhani, Chief Executive Officer of NayaPay, told Nikkei Asia that the core challenge is not the absence of payment gateways per se but that many global freelancing platforms do not route payments to Pakistan at all, a situation that will only change if those platforms decide to add Pakistan to their supported payout markets. He recommended the State Bank of Pakistan consider allowing local dollar-denominated wallets, which would give freelancers a formal and convenient way to hold foreign earnings within Pakistan without the conversion and transfer cost penalty that currently eats into their income.
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