6 papers
Where employment, firms, and the demand for staff are growing, and where the growth comes from.
Of the 9.42 million Dutch people working between the ages of 15 and 64, 1.87 million are between 55 and 64: 19.9%. They leave the labour market within roughly ten years. That is not a cycle and not a growth scenario, it is an age structure already fixed. The demand for staff it creates exists regardless of what the economy does, while the inflow meant to absorb it is smaller than the outflow.
The Dutch labour cost index went from 113.1 to 143.1 between mid-2021 and mid-2025, a rise of 26.5%. That is more than Germany at 23.1% and nearly double France at 14.1%. Yet only 39% of Dutch employers name candidate salary expectations as a reason an IT vacancy is hard to fill, below the EU average of 42%. Together those facts mean paying more does not fix a matching problem.
The Netherlands produced 8,710 ICT graduates at bachelor and master level in 2024, against 3,101 in 2015. That is a rise of 181% in nine years, far faster than the 28% growth in total graduates. Yet the share of companies with hard-to-fill IT vacancies stayed around 63%. More supply from education has not resolved the shortage, and this report sets out why.
Labour scarcity is no longer a matter of the business cycle. The Dutch central bank concluded in 2024 that an ageing population leaves labour supply barely growing through to 2040. If supply stops growing, demand adapts: firms scale work back, raise its price, or automate it. Business services already shows this. In numbers the gap is nearly closed; in quality it is wide.
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.
Seven Dutch regulators that have kept the same form since 2010 grew from 2,730 to 4,772 full-time staff, a rise of 75%. The data protection authority went from 79 to 312, the mines inspectorate from 57 to 188, the healthcare authority from 254 to 521. The financial markets regulator AFM grew 70% and the central bank DNB 54%. The central government as a whole employed 160,016 full-time staff at the end of 2025 against 114,328 at the end of 2010, up 40.0%. The whole Dutch economy grew 19.6% in full-time years over the same period. Inside the central government, inspection work grew 33.5% between 2021 and 2025, against 22.0% for all staff. The growth tracks new legal duties: the GDPR in 2018, online gambling in 2021, the Groningen earthquakes, and new European financial rules. The Jetten cabinet books €1.4bn of savings on the government apparatus in 2030. The CPB, the government's own forecaster, counts €0.2bn of it and calls the rest implausible while no tasks are dropped. Growth already stalled in 2025: the competition authority shrank, the health inspectorate shrank, the healthcare authority stood still, and the central government added 1.9%.
