The Federal Employment Agency records how long a registered vacancy stays unfilled on average. The figures for the period from April 2025 to March 2026 are now available. They are uncomfortable, and they are clearer than most companies assume.
The ranking
| # | Occupation | Time to fill |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Interior construction and drywall | 301 days |
| 2 | Leather and fur production and processing | 296 days |
| 3 | Plumbing, sanitation, heating, air conditioning | 296 days |
| 4 | Floor laying | 290 days |
| 5 | Natural stone, mineral and building material production | 289 days |
| 6 | Structural building construction | 285 days |
| 7 | Mining, opencast mining and blasting technology | 283 days |
| 8 | Driving and sports instruction at non-school educational institutions | 275 days |
| 9 | Construction and transport equipment operation | 274 days |
| 10 | Animal husbandry | 272 days |
| 11 | Non-medical therapy and healing professions | 268 days |
| 12 | Metal construction and welding technology | 263 days |
| 13 | Wood processing and treatment | 260 days |
| 14 | Tax consultancy | 260 days |
| 15 | Personal care | 259 days |
For comparison: across all skill levels, the average time to fill in Germany is 165 days. For positions at skilled worker level it is 183 days. Every occupation on this list is therefore at least 41 percent above the skilled worker average, and the front runner is even 64 percent above it.
What stands out: construction dominates the top
Six of the fifteen places go to construction and interior fit-out trades: interior construction and drywall, plumbing and sanitation, floor laying, building material production, structural building construction, and construction and transport equipment operation. Add metal construction with welding technology and wood processing as construction-related trades, and it is eight out of fifteen.
Four of the first six places are construction. That is not statistical noise, that is a structure.
So if you run a construction business, your occupation is not somewhere on this list — it is in the leading group. And that means the notion that you only need to improve the job ad or pay a little more misses the reality. You are not competing for one scarce applicant, you are competing in the occupational field with the lowest availability in the entire country.
What time to fill actually measures
So that the figures are read correctly, a brief look at the methodology.
Time to fill measures the period from the desired start date to the moment the employer withdraws the vacancy from the Federal Employment Agency. It therefore does not begin when the advertisement goes live, but on the date you would have needed the person. And it does not end when work starts, but when the vacancy is withdrawn.
Both effects distort the figure downwards rather than upwards. Anyone who withdraws a vacancy out of frustration without having filled it shortens the statistic. So does anyone who sets the desired start date realistically late. In many companies the actual waiting time is likely to be above the statistical value, not below it.
Time to fill is also only one of six indicators the Federal Employment Agency uses each year to determine whether an occupation counts as a shortage occupation. For 2024 it identified 163 shortage occupations nationwide. This list therefore does not show shortage occupations as a whole, but the fifteen with the longest time to fill.
The second figure that explains everything
The ranking shows where it hurts. The actual cause lies in another set of statistics from the same authority.
On an annual average for 2024, around 439,000 vacancies subject to social insurance contributions were registered for skilled workers, specialists and experts. Just under half of them were in shortage occupations. Of the skilled workers registered as unemployed, however, only a quarter were looking for work in precisely those occupations.
Read that again. The people who are available and the positions that are open do not match in occupational terms. This is not a shortage of people, but a shortage of people with the right qualification in the right place.
An uncomfortable consequence follows from this: a rising unemployment figure does not take the pressure off you. It increases the number of applications that do not fit. If you are hiring in interior construction and drywall, you will not find more drywall installers just because the unemployment rate goes up.
The surprises on the list
Three entries are worth a second look, because they show that shortages do not only affect physically demanding occupations.
Tax consultancy, 14th place with 260 days. An academic, well-paid office job with a clear career path — and still almost nine months to fill. Anyone who believes shortages are a problem of poorly paid or unattractive work will find the counterexample here.
Non-medical therapy and healing professions, 11th place with 268 days. Physiotherapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy. Regulation applies here on top: without recognition no treatment may be provided, which significantly lengthens the international route.
Leather and fur processing, 2nd place with 296 days. A small occupational field in which training numbers have fallen for years. When an occupation becomes so small that hardly anyone still learns it, the shortage does not arise from demand but from a shrinking supply.
What this means for your planning
Three consequences that follow directly from the figures.
First: calculate backwards, not forwards. If your occupation is on this list, you need between eight and a half and ten months. A position that is meant to be filled in January has to enter the planning in the spring of the previous year. Anyone who only starts searching once the resignation is on the desk is structurally too late.
Second: separate regulated from non-regulated positions. For therapy professions and parts of the skilled trades you need formal recognition, and that lengthens everything. For helper and semi-skilled roles in construction you do not. This distinction decides months, and in practice it is regularly overlooked.
Third: assess your channels by the size of the talent pool, not by the effort involved. If only a quarter of the unemployed skilled workers in Germany are looking for work in your occupational field, then your problem is not the reach of your advertisement. More budget on the same job boards does not enlarge the pool.
And the regional dimension comes on top
The list of occupations is only one half. The Federal Employment Agency also reports time to fill by federal state, and the spread there is considerable.
- Rhineland-Palatinate: 206 days
- Brandenburg: 186 days
- Saxony-Anhalt: 177 days
- Germany overall: 165 days
- Berlin: 134 days
These two effects add up. A drywall company in rural Rhineland-Palatinate is recruiting in the occupation with the longest time to fill and in one of the states with the longest time to fill at the same time. A Berlin business in the same trade has a measurably easier job, even though it runs the same advertisement and pays the same.
For workforce planning this means: the national average is only useful to you as a planning figure if you happen to sit exactly on the average. Otherwise you need your own combination of occupation and region, and for many businesses outside the metropolitan areas that combination is above the 300-day mark.
What is interesting here is that this relationship reverses with international recruitment. For someone who is changing country anyway, the difference between a city and the surrounding region matters far less than it does for a skilled worker who already has a home, a family and a circle of friends in Germany. Businesses in structurally weaker regions therefore gain relatively more than businesses in metropolitan areas. The prerequisite, however, is that accommodation and transport links are genuinely organised.
Where international recruitment works and where it does not
We do not sell international recruitment as the solution to everything, because it is not.
It works where the role does not require formal German recognition. Under the Western Balkans regulation pursuant to Section 26(2) of the German Employment Regulation, workers from six countries can be admitted for any type of employment, regardless of qualification. The prerequisites are a concrete job offer and the approval of the Federal Employment Agency. For interior construction and drywall, floor laying, construction and transport equipment operation, cleaning and logistics, this is the practical route.
It works less well where the practice of the occupation is regulated. In therapy, in nursing care and in parts of the skilled trades, the qualification has to be recognised first — and fewer than half of these procedures end in direct full equivalence. We have written up what that looks like in figures here: 2024 certification statistics.
And it does not work at all for tax consultancy. Nobody picks up German tax law on the side while abroad. Some shortages cannot be solved through immigration, only through training and retention. That is part of the honest answer.
The information in this article is intended as general orientation and does not replace legal advice.
If your occupation is on this list: free initial consultation, we will call you back.
Further reading
- 2024 Certification Statistics: 987 chefs, 21,699 nursing staff
- Recruiting Q2 2026: Insights for Workforce Planning
Sources
- Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit): Shortage occupations — occupations with the longest times to fill vacancies in Germany, April 2025 to March 2026.
- Federal Employment Agency: Skilled labour shortage analysis (Fachkräfteengpassanalyse).
- Federal Employment Agency: Shortage analysis — methodology and indicators.
- Federal Employment Agency: Qualified skilled workers still in demand. Press release no. 25, 2025.
- Federal Employment Agency: Time to fill vacancies by skill level and by federal state, April 2025 to March 2026.
