PHP Foundation Runs on One Full-Time Staff Member, Its Director Says
Elizabeth Barron, Executive Director of the PHP Foundation, told Reuters that the organization is "under-funded" and has one full-time staff member. The foundation also contracts 14 developers, most of them part-time, according to Reuters, which published the interview on 24 October 2026.
The foundation's stated mission is to ensure the long-term prosperity of the PHP language, the server-side programming language used to build many websites. It provides financial support and guidance to developers working on maintenance, security and new features approved through the RFC (request for comments) process, the public proposal-and-review route by which language changes are accepted. To do that work, it contracts a team of part-time and full-time developers.
Staffing has shifted over time. In its Impact and Transparency Report 2025, published 27 May 2026, the foundation listed eight volunteer board members, an Executive Director sponsored by JetBrains, and 11 contracted developers.
Leadership has also changed hands. Roman Pronskiy concluded his tenure as Executive Director in early 2026, after four years in the role. The foundation announced in November 2025 that it was seeking a new Executive Director, and Barron now holds the post. Under the foundation's governance framework, the Executive Director ensures operational execution of strategic goals, manages day-to-day operations, and serves as the bridge between the Board and staff.
On 21 October 2026, the foundation said it had secured funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency to organize a security audit through OSTIF, the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund. Quarkslab carried out the audit. The announcement was tied to a PHP security release that same day, as described in the foundation's blog.
The foundation's ten founding members are Acquia, Automattic, Craft CMS, JetBrains, Laravel, PrestaShop, Private Packagist, Symfony, Tideways and Zend by Perforce. Those companies form the core of its institutional backing.
The broader context here is structural rather than a single funding shortfall. Maintenance, security response and RFC-approved feature work for a widely deployed language rest on a small paid team, a volunteer board and a short list of sponsoring organizations. The governance model places the Executive Director at the center of coordinating that work, so the size of the operational base becomes a practical limit on what the foundation can deliver. Whether funding widens to match that workload is the open question. The sponsor list and the Sovereign Tech Agency grant show that institutional support already exists, and any expansion would build on it.
