Quantum looks to be the next big breakthrough technology, with budgets surging in anticipation of its transformative impact over the next five years, but new research has found that a critical part of the quantum computing ecosystem is not ready.
After surveying over 300 quantum professionals across academia, industry, and national labs, Riverlane found that while quantum error correction (QEC) is widely recognised as the key to building useful quantum computers, those working in the field are facing a stark capability gap.
QEC techniques protect fragile quantum data from noise and interference by spreading information across multiple qubits, detecting subtle errors, and correcting them without disturbing the original state.
It’s a foundational tool for building reliable, scalable quantum computers, and without it, quantum systems would be too unstable to function.
According to Riverlane’s 2025 QEC Survey, 95% of quantum pros rate QEC as essential to scaling quantum computing, with frontrunners like IBM planning to release an error correction decoder in 2026 in the hope of predicting fault tolerance by 2029, while the UK government is targeting one million error-free quantum operations by 2028.
But as more attention begins to be paid to QEC, with Riverlane finding a staggering 99% of respondents are interested in QEC as a field of study, significant barriers remain.
Limited training and a lack of knowledge, reported by 41% of quantum professionals, is the biggest roadblock, with a further 28% highlighting the absence of best practices and clear guidelines, and the same number (28%) reporting difficulties in securing resources and support.
Further, Riverlane’s research found that the quantum community lacks a ‘playground’ where researchers and organisations can learn how to implement QEC effectively, with many of those surveyed citing a ‘lack of sufficiently large and stable quantum computers to run experiments’.
Despite that, 94% of those polled were eager to learn and adapt to QEC techniques, with work in the field already taking place at the majority of quantum organisations.
Riverlane found that more than half (51%) have allocated moderate or significant resources to QEC, with another 21% allocating at least minimal resources, but without the right expertise, these investments risk falling flat.
The survey shows that just 4% of organisations plan to build their QEC infrastructure internally, while 96% of respondents said they will rely on external support to implement QEC, with most planning to rely on partnerships and collaborations (21%) or a hybrid in-house and partnership approach (43%) to deploy QEC in their quantum computing projects.
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Meanwhile, although 94% of respondents had at least some familiarity with QEC research and 88% knew how to build a quantum circuit, only 62% had built a surface code circuit, essential components that detect and correct errors, maintain quantum information across operations, and enable fault-tolerant computation.
“QEC sits at the heart of scalable quantum computing. But the ecosystem is struggling to keep pace with the challenges QEC introduces to today’s quantum systems,” said the report.
“It is the core challenge of building useful quantum computers. This survey confirms what we hear from our partners and across the broader quantum community. Teams are ready to start running QEC experiments, but too often, they don’t know exactly how or where to start.”
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