Software Engineer Jobs in Europe 2026: Where the Openings Went and Which Visa Gets You In

TL;DR

Europe employs more software people than ever: Eurostat counts 10.45 million ICT specialists in the EU in 2025, up 33% since 2019. Openings went the other way. The job vacancy rate in the information and communication sector fell from 4.3% in Q2 2022 to 2.2% in Q4 2025, and Germany, the biggest market, went from about 79,000 open posts in the sector to 40,000. The highest vacancy rates are in the Netherlands (4.8%), Malta, Belgium and Portugal, and Portugal and Cyprus are the only markets in my sample where open posts grew. Cyprus is the clearest outlier: its ICT workforce more than doubled since 2019 and its sector vacancies rose from 331 to 818. If you need a visa, pick the route before you pick the country, because the salary floors differ by tens of thousands of euros.

The two numbers that explain the 2026 job hunt

Ask developers in Berlin or Warsaw about the market and the common complaints are hundreds of applicants per role, ghosted after the third interview, recruiters who went quiet in 2023 and never came back. Then read an EU policy paper and you hear about a skills shortage so severe the Commission set a target of 20 million ICT specialists by 2030. Both are accurate descriptions of the same market.

Eurostat publishes the data that reconciles them, and it’s free to query. One dataset (isoc_sks_itspt) counts people employed as ICT specialists, from software developers to sysadmins. The other (jvs_q_nace2) counts open, unfilled posts by sector each quarter. The first measures how many people have the job, and the second, which is the one a job seeker actually faces, measures how many doors are open right now.

I pulled both on 14 October 2026 with a short script, so you can rerun it when the next quarter lands.

import json
import urllib.request

API = "https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/api/dissemination/statistics/1.0/data/"
COUNTRIES = ["EU27_2020", "DE", "NL", "IE", "ES", "PT", "PL", "CY", "FR", "SE"]


def series(dataset, **filters):
    """Return {(geo, period): value} for one Eurostat dataset slice."""
    query = "&".join(f"{k}={v}" for k, v in filters.items())
    with urllib.request.urlopen(f"{API}{dataset}?format=JSON&{query}", timeout=90) as r:
        d = json.load(r)
    geos = {i: g for g, i in d["dimension"]["geo"]["category"]["index"].items()}
    times = {i: t for t, i in d["dimension"]["time"]["category"]["index"].items()}
    n_time = len(times)
    # geo and time are the last two dimensions; every other dimension is filtered to size 1
    return {(geos[int(k) // n_time], times[int(k) % n_time]): v for k, v in d["value"].items()}


heads = series("isoc_sks_itspt", unit="THS_PER", sinceTimePeriod="2019")
vac = series("jvs_q_nace2", indic_em="JOBVAC", nace_r2="J", s_adj="NSA",
             sizeclas="TOTAL", sinceTimePeriod="2022-Q2")
rate = series("jvs_q_nace2", indic_em="JVR", nace_r2="J", s_adj="NSA",
              sizeclas="TOTAL", sinceTimePeriod="2022-Q2")

print(f"{'geo':<10}{'ICT 2019':>9}{'ICT 2025':>9}{'growth':>8}"
      f"{'vac 22Q2':>10}{'vac 25Q4':>10}{'JVR 22Q2':>10}{'JVR 25Q4':>10}")
for g in COUNTRIES:
    a, b = heads[(g, "2019")], heads[(g, "2025")]
    v1, v2 = vac.get((g, "2022-Q2")), vac.get((g, "2025-Q4"))
    r1, r2 = rate.get((g, "2022-Q2")), rate.get((g, "2025-Q4"))
    fmt = lambda x: f"{x:,.0f}" if x is not None else "n/a"
    print(f"{g:<10}{a:>8,.0f}k{b:>8,.0f}k{(b / a - 1):>8.0%}"
          f"{fmt(v1):>10}{fmt(v2):>10}{r1 if r1 is not None else 'n/a':>9}%{r2 if r2 is not None else 'n/a':>9}%")

It needs nothing beyond the standard library. Running it prints:

geo        ICT 2019 ICT 2025  growth  vac 22Q2  vac 25Q4  JVR 22Q2  JVR 25Q4
EU27_2020    7,880k  10,451k     33%       n/a       n/a      4.3%      2.2%
DE           1,687k   2,319k     37%    79,458    39,658      5.5%      2.5%
NL             505k     709k     40%    28,800    16,400      8.2%      4.8%
IE             113k     172k     53%     2,200     1,700      2.0%      1.6%
ES             734k   1,061k     45%     8,492     6,564      1.6%      1.0%
PT             175k     284k     63%     3,480     5,446      3.4%      3.9%
PL             547k     779k     42%    13,992     5,070      3.8%      1.4%
CY              12k      25k    115%       331       818      2.5%      2.8%
FR           1,132k   1,428k     26%    43,417    24,112      4.4%      2.6%
SE             360k     471k     31%    14,671     7,300      5.8%      3.0%

Two caveats before reading too much into it. The vacancy series covers the whole information and communication sector (NACE section J), so it includes telecoms, publishing and broadcasting jobs along with software houses, and it misses developers hired by banks, retailers and carmakers. Eurostat also doesn’t publish an EU-wide vacancy count for this slice, only the rate. Neither caveat changes the direction: Germany, France, Poland and Sweden have roughly half the open posts they had in mid-2022, the Netherlands is down 43%, and employment kept climbing in all of them.

My read: Europe’s software workforce kept growing straight through the US layoff wave of 2023. People who have a job are keeping it, companies are filling seats internally, and the posts that do open attract far more applicants than they did when the vacancy rate sat at 4-5%. A stable workforce with low churn feels like a frozen market from the outside, which matches what job seekers describe.

Where software engineer jobs in Europe are in 2026

Ranking countries by vacancy rate in the Q4 2025 data gives a different map from the one most relocation guides draw.

Netherlands (4.8%) has the highest rate of any large market and about 16,400 open posts in the sector. That’s down from 28,800 in 2022, but the rate is still double the EU average. English-language hiring at Amsterdam and Eindhoven employers, plus a fast employer-sponsored permit, make it a common first application for non-EU engineers.

Belgium (4.2%) and Malta (4.6%) both sit well above average, but they’re small: 5,777 and 625 open posts. In Brussels a lot of that demand comes from consultancies and contractors around the EU institutions, where French or Dutch often helps. Malta’s tech employers lean toward iGaming and payments.

Portugal (3.9%) is the only mid-sized market where both the rate and the count went up since 2022, from 3,480 posts to 5,446, and its ICT workforce grew 63% since 2019. A good part of that growth appears to come from foreign companies opening engineering centres in Lisbon and Porto.

Germany (2.5%) still has the most open posts in absolute terms, nearly 40,000, about as many as France and the Netherlands combined. The rate has halved, though, and German employers report the hardest time filling the roles they do open (more on that below). For a mid-level generalist who doesn’t speak German, Germany in 2026 is harder than the headline count suggests.

In France the rate is 2.6%, and open posts dropped from 43,400 to 24,100. Paris has an AI-lab cluster around Mistral and the European research arms of the US labs, but those teams are small, senior and very competitive.

Ireland (1.6%), Spain (1.0%) and Poland (1.4%) have low vacancy rates despite strong employment growth. Dublin’s market is dominated by US multinationals running lean after their 2023-2025 cuts. Spain and Poland grew their ICT workforces by 45% and 42%, partly through outsourcing centres and remote work for foreign employers, which don’t always show up as local vacancies.

Cyprus, at 2.8%, gets its own section below, because its numbers moved against most of the trends in the table.

The Nordics sit in between: Sweden at 3.0% (down from 5.8%), Denmark at 3.2%, Norway at 3.0%, Finland at 1.7%.

Why employers still say they can’t hire

European employers still report trouble hiring even with half the openings, and Eurostat measures that too. Its enterprise survey (isoc_ske_itrcrn2) records what share of companies that tried to recruit ICT specialists had vacancies they found hard to fill.

Share of enterprises (10+ employees, excluding finance) that recruited or tried to recruit ICT specialists. Source: Eurostat, pulled 14 Oct 2026.

Two things stand out. First, difficulty eased everywhere between 2022 and 2024, in line with the falling vacancy rate. Second, the struggle is concentrated in Germany and the Netherlands, where a lack of applications leads the complaints, just ahead of missing qualifications. When a German Mittelstand firm says it can’t find anyone, that often means it got no applications from people with five years of experience, German at C1 and an on-site address within commuting distance of Ulm. That shortage is real, but it applies to experienced German speakers, so a junior React developer in Warsaw sees little of it.

Juniors should look at a reason that doesn’t top any single country’s list but sits close behind everywhere: across the EU, 40.9% of firms that tried to hire ICT specialists in 2024 said applicants lacked relevant work experience. Employer surveys say the same thing from the other side. The Linux Foundation’s State of Tech Talent Europe 2026 report, published in June, found European organisations 3.7 times more likely to upskill existing staff than to hire externally. Respondents expected a net hiring effect of +27% for technical roles in 2026, but the largest organisations came in at −15%, which the report ties to recent layoffs. A follow-up post on who will become the senior engineers of 2036 says entry-level technical roles in Europe contracted 3% in 2025 while the rest of the world grew junior hiring 14%. The author is upfront about the limits: 398 respondents, all from organisations already investing in AI, reporting perceptions rather than payroll data. I covered the global version of this squeeze in Junior Developer Jobs in 2026, and the European numbers are a little worse.

Which visa gets you into a European software job

For non-EU engineers, the route decides more than the country does. The EU Blue Card is the one people have heard of, but in several markets a national permit is cheaper, faster, or has a lower salary floor.

Thresholds from IND, Make it in Germany, enterprise.gov.ie, GOV.UK, Grant Thornton Poland, ARC Legal and Cyprus Mail. The Spanish, Polish and Cyprus figures come from law-firm or press relays of the official numbers. Confirm with the immigration authority before you sign anything.

Reading the table against the vacancy data gives a few practical rules.

The Netherlands combines the highest vacancy rate of any large market with the simplest employer-led permit. The under-30 rate of €4,357 a month (about €52,000 a year before the holiday allowance) is within reach of a mid-level offer, and the employer files the application. That pairing helps explain why so many non-EU engineers start there.

Germany’s reduced Blue Card floor of about €46,000 is low enough that almost any full-time developer offer clears it. The no-degree IT route is one of the few options for self-taught engineers with experience, though the labour-agency check adds time. The harder filter in Germany is the job market: with half the open posts it had in 2022, non-German speakers compete for a smaller English-language slice.

Ireland’s €40,904 Critical Skills floor is the lowest of the large English-speaking markets. But Ireland’s 1.6% vacancy rate is among the lowest in the table, so the permit is easy to get while the openings are scarce.

The UK sits outside the EU’s free movement now, and the Skilled Worker going rate for programmers (£54,700) is the highest floor here. London still has a deep market, but the cost of sponsorship means smaller employers often won’t consider candidates who need it.

The Blue Card is portable inside the EU in a way national permits aren’t. Under the 2021 Blue Card directive, after 12 months on a Blue Card in one member state you can move to a job in another under a simplified procedure, which national permits like the Dutch kennismigrant or the Irish CSEP don’t offer.

Cyprus: the outlier in the data

Cyprus is a small market. It had about 24,700 ICT specialists in 2025 and 818 open posts in the information and communication sector at the end of 2025. In percentage terms, though, it has the fastest growth of any country in the Eurostat series. Its ICT workforce grew 115% between 2019 and 2025, faster than Lithuania (98%) and nearly twice as fast as Portugal (63%). Vacancies in the sector rose from 331 in Q2 2022 to 818 in Q4 2025, while they halved in Germany and France.

The growth has known causes. Thousands of tech workers relocated from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine after 2022, and companies followed them, using Cyprus’s fast-track process for foreign-interest firms. Limassol’s fintech, forex and iGaming employers kept adding posts through 2023-2025, which is what the vacancy series shows. The 2026 tax reform added an incentive for incoming high earners, covered in detail in the Cyprus software engineer salary guide.

For a non-EU developer, Cyprus has two doors. The EU Blue Card, available since July 2025, needs a gross salary of at least €43,632 and is limited to ICT, pharmaceutical research and shipping. The older and more widely used route is the fast-track scheme for companies with foreign ownership, which lets them employ third-country staff on a reported floor of €2,500 a month. Tax changes the math for anyone above €55,000: PwC’s Cyprus summary confirms the 50% exemption on first-employment income above that amount, available for 17 years to people who weren’t Cyprus-resident in the previous 15 years.

The market’s size is its limit. Specialist and senior roles are slow to fill, English is the working language at most tech employers on the island, and salaries sit below Amsterdam and Munich. The salary-by-country breakdown shows that after tax and rent the gap narrows a lot, and for some offers it flips.

Remote work from Europe: jobs that never appear in vacancy data

Spain and Poland are a puzzle in the table: big ICT workforce growth, low vacancy rates. Part of the answer is that many of those developers work for employers in other countries. A Valencia-based engineer on a US company’s payroll through an employer of record counts as an ICT specialist in Spain, but the post was never a Spanish vacancy.

Indeed’s job-posting data points the same way. In a July 2026 Hiring Lab analysis, the share of all postings that are software development roles was rising in most large developed economies, with Germany and France the exceptions. The share is recovering in most places, but not in Europe’s two biggest markets.

If your employer isn’t in the country you want to live in, the visa question changes. Digital nomad permits cover remote work for a foreign employer or your own foreign clients, and they don’t need a local job offer at all.

These floors move with minimum wages and get revised quietly, so treat the table as a shortlist and check the consulate page before you apply. Tax residence is the trap: stay more than 183 days and most of these countries will expect income tax on your salary. Cyprus’s 60-day rule, which grants tax residence after 60 days on the island if you work or run a business there, keep a home there and spend no more than 183 days in any other single country, is one of the few regimes built for people with mobile, foreign-sourced income.

How to use this if you’re job hunting

Here’s how I’d read the data if I were applying this quarter.

1. Apply where the rate is high, not where the count is high. A 4.8% rate in the Netherlands means more open seats per employed person than Germany’s 2.5%, even though Germany has more than twice the posts.
2. If you’re non-EU, compare the national permit with the Blue Card before you apply. Recruiters in Amsterdam, Dublin and Nicosia know their fast track. Recruiters at smaller firms often don’t, and a candidate who arrives with the route already worked out is easier to hire.
3. Learn German if Germany is the target. It widens the job pool a lot: the German market has the most posts and the worst applicant shortage, and most of that shortage is for German speakers.
4. For juniors, the European market is internal-first. Internships, apprenticeship-style programmes and graduate schemes at large employers are where entry roles still open, because companies retrain before they hire.
5. Check whether the country you’re targeting has passed its pay transparency law. Where it has, you’ll see the salary range before the first interview, which saves weeks on roles that were never going to meet your number.
6. If you work on AI systems, the EU AI Act’s compliance deadlines are creating governance and documentation roles that are much rarer in the US market.

FAQ

Is it hard to get a software engineer job in Europe in 2026?

Harder than in 2021-2022. Eurostat’s job vacancy rate for the information and communication sector fell from 4.3% in Q2 2022 to 2.2% in Q4 2025, so there are about half as many openings per employed person. Employment didn’t fall, though. Experienced engineers with the local language still get hired, and the Netherlands, Malta, Belgium and Portugal post vacancy rates near 4-5%.

Which European country has the most software engineer jobs?

By open posts, Germany: about 39,700 vacancies in the information and communication sector in Q4 2025, followed by France (24,100) and the Netherlands (16,400). By vacancy rate, which better reflects your odds per application, the Netherlands leads the large markets at 4.8%.

Which European countries sponsor visas for software engineers?

All EU countries except Denmark and Ireland issue the EU Blue Card, which needs a job offer above a national salary floor: €50,700 in Germany (€45,934.20 for IT roles), €41,356 in Spain (reported), €43,632 in Cyprus. Several also run national routes that are often faster, like the Dutch highly skilled migrant permit (€5,942 a month at 30+), Ireland’s Critical Skills Employment Permit (€40,904) and the UK Skilled Worker visa (£41,700, or £54,700 for programmers). Only companies registered as sponsors can use the fast national routes, so check the employer’s status first.

Can Americans get software engineer jobs in Europe?

Yes, through the same routes as any non-EU national: the EU Blue Card or a national skilled-worker permit, both of which need a job offer above a salary floor. Expect lower gross pay than in the US. The salary-by-country breakdown linked above covers how much of that gap closes after tax, healthcare and rent.

Are entry-level software engineer jobs in Europe disappearing?

They’re shrinking. The Linux Foundation reports that entry-level technical roles in Europe contracted 3% in 2025 while they grew 14% in the rest of the world. In Eurostat’s survey, 40.9% of EU firms that tried to hire ICT specialists in 2024 cited applicants’ lack of work experience as a difficulty.

Sources

• Eurostat, ICT specialists in employment (isoc_sks_itspt): headcount and share of total employment, 2019-2025
• Eurostat, job vacancy statistics by NACE Rev. 2 (jvs_q_nace2): quarterly vacancies and vacancy rate, sector J
• Eurostat, enterprises that recruited or had hard-to-fill ICT vacancies (isoc_ske_itrcrn2): hard-to-fill share and reasons, 2019-2024
• Linux Foundation, Who will be the senior engineers of 2036?: European entry-level hiring data
• Linux Foundation, State of Tech Talent Europe 2026 press release: net hiring effect, upskilling ratio
• European Commission, State of the Digital Decade 2026: 20 million ICT specialists target and 2025 progress
• IND, required income amounts: Netherlands highly skilled migrant and Blue Card thresholds
• Make it in Germany, EU Blue Card: German Blue Card rules and 2026 thresholds
• Irish Department of Enterprise, Critical Skills Employment Permit: Irish permit thresholds
• GOV.UK, Skilled Worker visa and going rates by occupation: UK salary floors
• Cyprus Mail, EU Blue Card scheme operable in Cyprus: Cyprus threshold and eligible sectors
• PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, Cyprus: 50% first-employment exemption, plus the residence rules behind the 60-day rule
• Grant Thornton Poland, ARC Legal and KPMG: Polish and Spanish Blue Card thresholds for 2026
• Directive (EU) 2021/1883: the revised EU Blue Card rules, including intra-EU mobility
• Indeed Hiring Lab, AI and job postings: software development share of postings by country

Bottom line

Headcount is high and openings are low. The EU has a third more ICT specialists than in 2019 and is still about halfway to the Commission’s 20 million target, but the open posts that let outsiders in have roughly halved since 2022. That’s why both the “shortage” headlines and the “nobody is hiring” threads are right.

If I were applying from outside the EU this quarter, I’d start with the Netherlands, where the vacancy rate and the permit both work in your favour. I’d treat Germany as a German-language market with a cheap Blue Card attached, and look hard at Portugal and Cyprus, the two markets in my table where both the workforce and the openings grew. Then I’d rerun the script above whenever Eurostat adds a quarter (the newest one in the dataset on 14 October was Q4 2025), because a vacancy rate that has fallen for three years running will turn at some point, and I’d want to see it in the data before the job boards fill up again.