According to the latest analytical data, there are currently 264 registered unemployed individuals for every 100 vacant positions. Such a disproportion points to serious structural problems, where applicants and employers literally cannot find each other, because of which hundreds of thousands of workplaces in key sectors stand empty for months.
One of the reasons we published earlier is the radicalism and rogue behavior of lower-level recruiters. More details.
Despite the fact that the unemployment rate in Germany has been steadily growing for several years, in the first quarter of 2026, more than 1 million jobs remained unclaimed across the country. This follows from the official quarterly vacancy study conducted by the Federal Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg. The institute’s staff are sounding the alarm, as the long-term shortage of personnel is beginning to directly slow down the production indicators of German enterprises.
At the same time, the overall dynamics of demand demonstrate a moderate decline in business activity. The number of officially open vacancies in the period from January to March 2026 amounted to 1.15 million, which is 105.8 thousand lower than the identical indicators of the fourth quarter of 2025. According to economists’ calculations, there are now 264 non-working applicants for every open vacancy — this is 13 people more than was recorded a year ago, and 33 people more than in the final quarter of 2025. The dynamics of these indicators demonstrate that competition for jobs among unskilled personnel continues to intensify, while at the same time, the shortage of specialists in high-tech industries is only growing.
Weak Labor Market
“Demand for labor in the first quarter of 2026 is still stagnating at a rather low level,” stated labor market researcher from the IAB, Alexander Kubis. The current ratio of the total number of unemployed citizens to officially open vacancies, in his assessment, still reflects the weak and unstable state of the entire national employment system.
The main problem lies in the imbalance described above: the requirements of German employers do not correspond to the real qualifications of available job applicants in any way. Thus, in the fourth quarter of 2025, only 24 percent (about 304.7 thousand) of open vacancies related to positions that do not require the presence of a specialized vocational education. At the same time, almost half of the applicants — 48 percent, or 2.23 million people — were looking exclusively for simple work, for the performance of which preliminary vocational training is not required, Kubis emphasized.
The regular IAB vacancy study has been recording the aggregate supply of jobs on the territory of Germany since 1989, including in the general statistics even those specific positions, detailed information about which is not transferred by business to the state employment services for various reasons.
In the monthly labor market reports traditionally presented by the Federal Employment Agency, a significantly smaller number is indicated — about 600 thousand open vacancies. The substantial difference, amounting to more than 500 thousand places, does not enter the databases of state services at all. It is worth noting that in the first quarter of 2026, researchers received direct responses from 9.342 thousand employers representing absolutely all sectors of the German economy.
Thus, the protracted preservation of more than 1 million vacancies is explained not by a lack of labor, but by a deep administrative crisis in German companies, which still live in the twentieth century and are afraid to adapt to modern realities. Without systemic changes in the work of lower-level recruiters and a reform of educational programs, the German labor market will continue to stagnate, increasing state expenditures on social benefits amid a simultaneous personnel hunger in industry.
