Ask whether anyone still hires ColdFusion developers and you'll get two answers depending on who you ask: current CFML developers will say yes, obviously, and everyone else will assume the honest answer is no. The real answer is closer to the first one, but it's worth looking at who's actually posting the openings and who's actually training the next generation, rather than trusting either side's gut feeling.
The job board tells a narrower story than either extreme
A live search of Indeed's ColdFusion developer listings in August 2026 turns up somewhere between fifteen and twenty active postings on the first page alone, spanning entry-level application-developer roles through senior architect positions, several of them fully remote. That's not a large market by any measure, and nobody sourcing this site is going to pretend otherwise. What's more informative than the raw count is who's actually posting.
That composition lines up with what's been true about ColdFusion's installed base for a long time: it's disproportionately government, higher education, and internal line-of-business software, the kind of system that isn't customer-facing enough to justify a rewrite budget but is load-bearing enough that it can't be left unstaffed either. One of the listings is from PaperThin, the company behind the CommonSpot content management system, itself written in ColdFusion and still sold to enterprise and higher-ed customers today; a company hiring ColdFusion developers to maintain a ColdFusion product is about as direct a signal as this market gets that the demand isn't purely legacy-system triage, some of it is ordinary product engineering on software that's still actively sold. CGI Group, another of the listings, is a publicly traded, Canadian-headquartered IT and business-consulting firm with a long history of government-systems integration work across North America and Europe, not a boutique CFML shop; a firm that size posting a ColdFusion req is doing it because a specific client system needs it, not because the company has no other option.
The industries the job board alone doesn't show you
That breakdown fills in a gap the Indeed listings alone don't show. It isn't only government contractors keeping ColdFusion staffed: education and training platforms make up the single largest identifiable vertical, ahead of even cybersecurity, which tracks with how many university systems, learning-management platforms, and continuing-education portals got built on ColdFusion during the years it was a default choice for a database-backed web app. The customer-size distribution tells a related story. The largest company-size bracket running ColdFusion isn't small shops nursing along a forgotten intranet, it's organizations with 10,000 or more employees, 349 of them in that single tier, more than any other size bracket in the dataset. A meaningful share of ColdFusion's remaining footprint sits inside large organizations that made an ongoing, active decision to keep funding it, not ones that simply never got around to replacing it.
The Indeed listings back that same education-and-training skew up in miniature. Enrollment123, a fully remote listing among the current postings, builds enrollment-management software for schools by name, and ClinDCast, another active listing based in Schenectady, New York, works in clinical and healthcare-adjacent data systems, itself a sector where continuing-education and certification tracking overlap heavily with the kind of records-driven, database-backed application CFML was built to produce in the first place. None of that is a coincidence. It's the same pattern the 6sense numbers describe, just visible one job requisition at a time instead of as an aggregate percentage.
Twenty years of ColdBox says the tooling side didn't stop either
The clearest evidence that CFML's open-source tooling kept building, rather than freezing in place once Adobe's own release cadence slowed, is ColdBox, the MVC framework Ortus Solutions has maintained since roughly 2006. It hit its 20th anniversary in 2026, and Ortus used the milestone to describe what the framework has actually become rather than just what it started as.
“What began as an MVC framework has grown into a broader application-development platform.”
Ortus Solutions, marking ColdBox's 20th anniversary
The numbers behind that claim are concrete: the ColdBox module ecosystem has grown past 700 individual modules, and a companion BoxLang skills directory launched with more than 200 entries of its own. ColdBox 8 specifically added native support for BoxLang, the JVM-native language Ortus has been building as a modernization path for CFML codebases, meaning a two-decade-old framework now runs, largely unmodified, on the newest language in its own ecosystem. A framework doesn't reach a 20th anniversary by accident in a market this small; someone has been actively maintaining it, adding to it, and rewriting its own internals to keep pace with where the surrounding language is heading, for the entire two decades.
That last detail is worth sitting with: on the community's own package repository, the free, open-source Lucee engine has more recorded installs than Adobe's own commercial ColdFusion product does. That doesn't mean Lucee has overtaken ColdFusion in actual production traffic, install counts on a package repository measure how often something got pulled down, not how many production servers are still running it years later. What it does mean is that ForgeBox, CommandBox, and the packages built on top of them aren't a one-vendor ecosystem quietly serving Adobe's install base. It's shared infrastructure the CFML community built and now uses regardless of which specific engine, Adobe's, Lucee's, or increasingly BoxLang's, a given shop happens to run underneath it.
Teaching it to people who've never touched a line of CFML
The harder problem for any shrinking-but-not-dead language market isn't the developers who already know it, it's whether anyone new ever gets introduced to it at all. Ortus Solutions partnered with Florida International University's Tech Talent Academy on a two-day program built specifically to close that gap: day one covered resume guidance and career readiness with industry professionals, day two was a hands-on BoxLang workshop culminating in a hackathon, open to students with zero prior BoxLang or CFML experience.
“the future of software development depends on...the people who learn to use them, improve them, challenge assumptions”
Luis Majano, Ortus Solutions founder, on the FIU Tech Talent Academy initiative
That's a genuinely different move from the recruiting problem languages like RPG have publicly wrestled with, where the old playbook of poaching a competitor's existing programmer stops working once the pool of existing programmers shrinks too far. Ortus isn't fishing in that same shrinking pool; the FIU program is explicitly aimed at students who've never touched the ecosystem at all, using BoxLang, not raw CFML tag syntax, as the on-ramp. Betting the training pipeline on the newer, more conventional-looking language rather than on decades-old syntax is a deliberate choice about where the next generation of developers actually gets recruited from, not an accident of which tool happened to be handy. The program's own framing makes the same point from the hiring side: what gets emphasized isn't a checklist of prior CFML experience, it's whether a candidate shows curiosity, communication, initiative, and the willingness to keep learning once the two days are over, qualities a company can screen for in a student who's never opened a code editor before, let alone one who's never seen a cfquery tag.
See ColdFusion vendor details →What the job board and the classroom program have in common
Neither of these is a huge signal on its own. A dozen or two open job requisitions and one university partnership don't add up to a resurgence, and nobody should read them that way. What they do add up to is evidence against the laziest version of the ColdFusion story, the one where the entire remaining workforce is a handful of people who learned the language in 1999 and are counting down to retirement with nobody behind them. There are current, open requisitions, including from companies whose own products still run on ColdFusion, and there is at least one documented, active attempt to recruit and train people who've never touched the language at all, using a newer entry point built specifically to lower that barrier.
That's a narrower, more specific story than either "ColdFusion is dead" or "ColdFusion is thriving," and it's the more useful one if you're actually the person deciding whether to staff, hire for, or invest in a CFML system in 2026. The demand is real but concentrated, largely in government and higher-education-adjacent work and in companies whose own products are built on it. The supply side isn't purely people retiring out of a fixed pool; there's at least one organization actively trying to grow that pool from zero, and doing it through the JVM language built to carry CFML forward rather than through the original tag syntax alone.
It's also worth separating two questions that get conflated too easily: whether ColdFusion is popular, and whether it's staffable. Popularity, measured against every other language a graduate could pick up instead, was never going to be ColdFusion's strong suit again, and nothing here changes that. Staffability is a narrower, more practical question, and the honest answer is that a shop willing to post the job, or to fund a training pipeline the way Ortus and FIU did, can still find people willing to do the work. That's a lower bar than a resurgence, but it's a meaningfully higher one than the version of this story where the language simply can't be staffed anymore at any price.
Where this leaves you
- Roughly fifteen to twenty active ColdFusion developer postings were visible on Indeed in August 2026, a narrow market, but one skewed toward government, government-contracting, and internal line-of-business software rather than evenly spread across industries.
- At least one listing came from a company, PaperThin, whose own commercial product is itself written in ColdFusion, evidence that some of this demand is product engineering, not only legacy maintenance.
- ColdBox, the CFML MVC framework Ortus Solutions has maintained since roughly 2006, passed 700 modules and its 20th anniversary in 2026, and ColdBox 8 already runs natively on BoxLang, the newer JVM language built as CFML's modernization path.
- Ortus's Florida International University partnership is a concrete, documented attempt to recruit developers who've never touched CFML at all, using BoxLang as the entry point rather than legacy tag syntax, a materially different strategy than trying to poach existing CFML programmers from a shrinking pool.
- Taken together, the honest read isn't decline or revival, it's a small, specific, still-active market with real open requisitions on one side and a real, if early, training pipeline on the other.