FinOps practitioners are finding themselves feeling pressure to embed financial context earlier in the engineering life cycle, rather than after the bill comes in.
This is according to the FinOps Foundation’s 2026 State of FinOps report, which includes responses from over 1,100 practitioners.
They found that teams are wanting FinOps context earlier in the life cycle so that they can make informed decisions prior to deployment, rather than remediating costs after they are charged. As a result, pre-deployment architecture guidance is becoming a top desired capability when looking for FinOps tools.
“FinOps is no longer just explaining past spend. It’s shaping future technology decisions before commitments are made,” the company wrote in the report.
The survey also revealed that FinOps work is moving beyond just optimization and efficiency into areas like governance, forecasting, organizational alignment, and managing expanding technology areas.
One of those expanding areas is managing AI spend, which is something that 98% of respondents are now doing, compared to only 31% two years ago. Additionally, 90% are now managing SaaS (up from 65% in 2025), 64% are managing licensing (49% in 2025), 57% are managing private cloud (39% in 2025), and 48% are managing data center costs (12% in 2025). Twenty-eight percent are also now tracking labor costs.
These trends have prompted the FinOps Foundation to change its mission from “Advancing the People who manage the value of Cloud” to “Advancing the People who manage the Value of Technology.”
FinOps practitioners are also working more closely with IT Financial Management, IT Asset Management, and IT Service Management teams, highlighting a growing FinOps influence across the entire organization. There is also an increasing trend towards FinOps working more closely with platform engineering teams.
A majority of organizations (60%) operate their FinOps teams centrally, with embedded FinOps champions across different teams. Twenty-one percent utilize hub-and-spoke models and fewer than 10% operate decentralized teams. Team sizes overall remain small, with organizations who manage over $100M typically having an average of 8-10 practitioners and 3-10 contractors.
Finally, the report found that the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, or FOCUS, is continuing to gain traction. All major clouds now natively generate FOCUS data, and 68% of large spenders (those managing over $100M) use or are experimenting with FOCUS data and another 18% are planning to.
The top requests for updates to the specification include broader support for AI workloads, data centers, deeper cloud, and PaaS/SaaS.
“FinOps has definitively expanded to a broad array of technology value management, and the FinOps Foundation has followed to reflect the full scope of what practitioners are doing in the industry today, what they influence, and how they use FinOps to drive greater value from technology investments,” said J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation. “As companies pursue transformation via AI, with the resulting increases in AI costs, FinOps practices will be critical to enable c-level decisions about multi-year strategic technology investments across infrastructure types”
