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The Netherlands beside its neighbours. Every paper here sets a Dutch figure next to the same figure for Belgium, Germany, France, the Nordic countries, or the EU as a whole, on Eurostat's harmonised definitions.
The Netherlands is Europe's home-working country. In 2025, 11.3% of employed people aged 15 to 64 usually worked from home and 41.0% sometimes did, together 52.3%. Sweden follows at a distance with 44.5% and the EU average stands at 23.0%. The total has been nearly stable since 2021, but the mix shifted: fully remote fell from 20.4% to 11.3%, while occasional home working rose from 33.5% to 41.0%. Hybrid won. For recruitment this means commuting distance matters less in the Netherlands than anywhere else in Europe.
Unemployment in the Netherlands is mostly a pass-through. Over the four quarters to the first quarter of 2026, an average of 37.0% of unemployed people were in work one quarter later, more than one in three. The EU average stands at 23.1%, and only Denmark sits higher at 39.2%. At the peak of the tight market the Dutch outflow was higher still: 41.5% over the same quarters in 2022 and 2023. The other side is small but growing: the share of workers becoming unemployed rose within a year from 1.0% to 1.4% per quarter.
Europe officially counts 2,617 reported shortage occupations and 2,177 surplus occupations, and the same occupations regularly appear on a shortage list in one country and a surplus list in another. The Netherlands is an extreme: 195 shortage occupations, second only to Italy, against 8 surplus occupations, nearly the fewest in Europe. There is almost nothing left to reallocate domestically. Around 53 million European workers, about a quarter of employment, sit in an occupation with widespread shortages or surpluses.
Nowhere in the EU does working life last as long as in the Netherlands: 44.0 expected years in 2025, against 43.4 in Sweden and 37.5 on average in the EU. More striking is the pace at which it happened. In 2000 the Netherlands stood at 35.5 years; 8.5 years were added in 25 years, driven by women's labour participation and later retirement. For replacement demand this is the softest cushion there is: people keep working longer. But the cushion is largely used up, because a working life can hardly be stretched much further.
The Dutch economy runs on technology, but its working population is thinly educated in it. In 2025, 9.0% of employed people held a completed tertiary degree in the STEM fields of science, engineering or ICT, against 11.1% on average in the EU. That puts the Netherlands 22nd of the 30 measured countries; Lithuania leads with 15.1%. The stock is growing, from 748,700 workers in 2021 to 869,500 in 2025, a rise of 16%. Of them, 65% work as professionals and some 12% outside the knowledge occupations.
Every plan that counts on activating young people runs, in the Netherlands, into an empty reserve. Of people aged 15 to 29, 5.3% were neither in work nor in education or training in 2025, the lowest share in the EU; the average is 11.0% and Sweden follows at 5.9%. Within that small group, most are willing: 4.3 of the 5.3 percentage points say they want to work. The reserve is not unwilling but thin, and whoever recruits from it competes with all of Europe for the continent's smallest surplus.
The European outlook for the Dutch labour market to 2035 confirms what the replacement figures already showed, and extends it a decade. Of all expected job openings between 2022 and 2035, 68% stem from replacing departing workers; among technicians and associate professionals it is 91%. Professionals account for 44% of all openings and 72% of openings require high qualifications, some 12 points above the EU average. The Dutch labour force aged 55 and over grows 16% to 2035, against just under 10% in the EU.
Every quarter the European Commission asks firms what limits their production. In July 2026 three of the four constraints in industry fell: insufficient demand to 33.9%, the lowest since July 2023, material shortages to 12.6% and financial constraints to 5.2%. Only the shortage of labour rose, by 0.6 points to 17.1%. In construction, 28.5% of firms called the labour shortage a constraint in December 2025, nearly as many as the 31.0% naming insufficient demand. The economy is picking up, and the first thing that pinches then is staff.
Nowhere in the EU do as many people stack jobs as in the Netherlands. In 2025, 983,000 workers aged 15 to 64 held a second job, 10.4% of all employed people, against an EU average of 4.1%. Denmark follows at 9.7%, Germany stands at 5.1%. The explanation sits close to the part-time structure: where main jobs are small, there is room to stack. For recruitment the second job is an underrated signal: nearly a million people demonstrate they can and will work more hours than their main job offers.
While the IT vacancy rate fell sharply after 2022, the business register kept moving the other way: from 92,620 ICT enterprises in 2021 to 111,713 in 2024, growth of 21% in three years. Employment in the sector grew along to 386,306 people in 2023, 8% more than in 2021, at fewer than four people per enterprise. The sector stands at 3.8% of Dutch employment, against 3.4% on average in the EU, and 5.3% of value added. The growth sits mostly in very small firms, and that is the real finding.
While 77% of European employers already struggled in 2019 to find people with the right skills, good documentation of what firms actually do about it is scarce. The European foundation for working conditions studied it at 17 organisations across 13 member states. The measures cluster in four groups: partnering with education and intermediaries, offering more than pay, recruiting smarter through referrals and wider catchment areas, and selecting on aptitude rather than diplomas. The most striking finding: the will to recruit internationally exceeds its use.
The catch-up in Dutch collectively agreed wages is past its top. After growth of 6.0% in 2023 and 6.6% in 2024, the crest of the wave, the annual rate sank to 5.0% in 2025 and 3.9% in July 2026. The euro area moves the same way: the ECB wage tracker, fed by collective agreements from nine countries including the Netherlands, points to 2.3% for 2026 and 2.7% for early 2027, against 3.2% in 2025. Dutch wages still grow faster than the currency area's, but the gap narrows and the direction is down everywhere.
Whoever reads Dutch scarcity as a local problem misses half the story. Across the OECD, unemployment stood at 4.9% in May 2026, close to its lowest point since records began, while employment and participation reached first-quarter records of 72.1% and 76.7%. The Netherlands sits below that at 3.8% unemployment in June, against 6.0% in the EU. At the same time employment growth slows, with 0.3% expected for 2026, and real wages in a third of member countries still sat below their early 2021 level.
In the fourth quarter of 2025 the Netherlands had 377,000 job vacancies against 407,000 unemployed people: 93 vacancies per 100 unemployed, the highest ratio of the 24 member states that publish both series. Malta follows on 80 and Germany on 66; Romania closes the list on 6, or eighteen unemployed people per vacancy. At the European peak in mid-2022 the Netherlands ranked third, behind Czechia (186) and Germany (140). Since then the Dutch ratio has fallen by 31%, against 53% in Germany, 60% in Austria and 72% in Czechia. Elsewhere that fall tracks economic growth (correlation 0.70 across 24 countries), yet the Dutch economy grew only 2.1% over the same period. What sets the Netherlands apart is the level it settles at: a job vacancy rate of 4.0% against its own pre-pandemic record of 3.3%, on the highest part-time share in the EU at 42.3%.
