The Language That Won’t Die

In an industry obsessed with the next big thing, few technologies have the endurance of COBOL. Born in 1959, COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) predates the internet, personal computers, and even the moon landing. And yet, it continues to power much of the world’s critical infrastructure. From banking networks and insurance claims to healthcare billing and government benefits, COBOL is not a relic—it’s a backbone. Quietly, it processes the world’s most sensitive and high-volume workloads every single day. The question isn’t why COBOL is still here. It’s why it continues to thrive—and what that means for your IT roadmap.

The Numbers Behind COBOL’s Endurance

The scale of COBOL in today’s economy is hard to ignore:

• 220+ billion lines of active COBOL code worldwide.

• 70–80% of business transactions touch COBOL at some point.

• 30+ billion COBOL transactions are processed every single day.

This isn’t forgotten legacy code sitting on a shelf—it’s mission-critical infrastructure. The systems that move money, settle insurance claims, process hospital records, and run manufacturing lines are still overwhelmingly written in COBOL. Why? Because replacing them isn’t simply “upgrading code.” It’s rewriting decades of embedded business rules, passing regulatory audits, retraining staff, and absorbing enormous operational risk. In a world chasing agility, COBOL survives because it delivers something rarer: predictability at scale.

Why Enterprises Still Rely on COBOL

1. Stability Over Novelty
   COBOL systems have decades of uptime behind them. They run 24/7 with minimal failure—vital in industries where outages mean lost revenue, fines, or risks to public safety.

2. Deep Integration
   Banking settlements, claims adjudication, and logistics tracking all depend on COBOL’s tight coupling with mainframes, schedulers, and databases. Pull one piece out, and the entire workflow can collapse.

3. The Cost Equation
   A full rewrite can run into the tens of millions. Add downtime, retraining, and compliance hurdles, and the ROI is rarely favorable.

4. Regulatory Entrenchment
   COBOL systems are certified and audit-proven. Replacing them often means reopening compliance processes—a nightmare for industries like finance and healthcare.

5. Institutional Knowledge in Code
   COBOL systems encode decades of business rules, often undocumented. Replacing them means relearning your business logic from scratch—a task more cultural than technical.

Simply put: COBOL isn’t hanging on despite its age. It’s thriving because, for certain workloads, it remains the lowest-risk option available.

Where COBOL Still Reigns Supreme

• Banking & Financial Services
  Powers core banking, ATM networks, fraud detection, and payment rails. North American banks alone spend $11.8B annually modernizing COBOL systems.

• Healthcare & Insurance
  Manages eligibility checks, billing, and public health programs. California’s Medi-Cal committed $220M to modernize its COBOL-based eligibility engine.

• Manufacturing
  Runs legacy MRP systems and even production-line controllers. Modernizing a single plant line can cost $850K–$4.2M, so gradual upgrades are the norm.

• Government
  Tax processing, unemployment benefits, and defense logistics all lean on COBOL. The U.S. GAO flagged 10 federal systems still running COBOL, costing $337M annually in upkeep.

These industries aren’t behind—they’re risk-aware. For them, COBOL is not a weakness. It’s a strategic safeguard.

The Real Risk: People, Not Code

COBOL itself works just fine. The real problem is the human layer.

• The Retirement Cliff – Nearly 70% of COBOL programmers are due to retire by 2025.

• Knowledge Loss – Decades of undocumented business rules risk disappearing with them.

• Talent Gap – Universities don’t teach COBOL, and younger developers avoid it, citing outdated tools and limited career prospects.

This creates “human technical debt.” Even bulletproof systems become fragile if no one can maintain them. That fragility is already surfacing: during the COVID-19 crisis, some U.S. states publicly begged for COBOL programmers to keep unemployment systems afloat.

What This Means for Your IT Strategy

COBOL isn’t going anywhere soon—but your strategy around it must evolve. CIOs and CTOs face a clear challenge: how to modernize without destabilizing mission-critical systems.

Here’s the path forward:

1. Stabilize the Present

• Audit COBOL systems

• Automate documentation

• Build failover protocols

• Create knowledge-transfer programs before retirements hit

2. Build a Skills Bridge

• Pair senior COBOL experts with younger developers

• Incentivize COBOL upskilling internally

• Use AI-powered assistants to accelerate onboarding and reduce dependency on shrinking expertise

3. Wrap, Don’t Replace

• Use APIs and middleware to expose COBOL functions to modern systems

• Integrate with mobile apps, cloud analytics, and AI without touching the core logic

4. Refactor Strategically

• Selectively modernize high-change areas like reporting or customer interfaces

• Extract business rules into decision engines for reuse in modern applications

5. Leverage AI and Emulation

• Use AI-driven code converters to assist migration (with strict validation)

• Run COBOL in containers or emulators for cloud flexibility and reduced mainframe dependency