5 papers
What work pays and what it costs: labour cost indices, negotiated wages, salary bands by market, and what a candidate's negotiation actually changes.
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.
A Dutch recruitment agency typically charges 22 to 32% of gross annual salary per placement on a contingency basis; retained search runs at 20 to 30%, with part of the fee paid up front. On a €55,000 salary at a 25% fee that is €13,750. An in-house corporate recruiter costs €65,000 to €80,000 a year, built from an average salary of roughly €41,000 to €55,000 (consulted August 2026), about 30% in employer charges, and several thousand euros in systems and job boards. That fixed cost only pays for itself from about five to seven placements a year that would otherwise have gone through an agency. Above that volume the in-house recruiter wins comfortably: the most recent Dutch benchmark (measured in 2020) put corporate cost per hire at €3,818, with recruiters carrying an average portfolio of 20 vacancies. Below that volume, a company pays more for its own recruiter than it would have paid in fees. And for scarce technical profiles the most expensive outcome looms: months of internal effort first, then the agency fee anyway.
How you ask for a starting salary decides whether asking pays. In a study of 149 American professionals, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2011, those who negotiated gained an average of $5,000 over the first offer. The gains came from two of the five styles measured: competing and collaborating. Compromising and accommodating produced no measurable gain, and risk-averse participants negotiated least and were least satisfied afterwards. A $5,000 difference at the start compounds to roughly $604,000 over forty years at 5% annual raises, by our own arithmetic.
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.
In 2025, 78.7% of Dutch employees in ICT occupations say they are satisfied with their work, against 78.6% of all employees. In 2018 IT led by 4.4 points. That lead is gone while the lead in freedom and pay stayed: 79.8% of IT workers regularly decide how they do their work, against 60.2% of all employees, and the median hourly wage is €34.80 against €26.90. Burn-out complaints run ahead instead, at 24.1% against 20.7%. This paper sets the figures of the Dutch working conditions survey beside the model of labour economist Peter van der Meer, which explains why pay and autonomy do not carry wellbeing at work on their own, and what that means for anyone recruiting IT staff.
