Series: Developer Market Monitor, August 2026 · Measured on 28 August 2026

Almost 1,000 open developer vacancies: Dutch market measurement, August 2026

Our own August 2026 market measurement: 957 open developer roles across 385 Dutch companies. Where demand sits, which roles stay open and what these numbers do not say.

On 28 August 2026 we measured our own prospect market of Dutch tech companies. Not to describe the national picture, but to answer one question: where are the open developer roles that stay open, and what kind of company posts them?

In that measurement, 957 open developer roles were live across 385 companies, an average of 2.5 open developer roles per company.

That demand does not sit apart from the rest of the labour market. CBS reports 375,000 open vacancies nationally at the end of the second quarter of 2026, of which 16,300 in information and communication. For every 100 unemployed people there were 95 vacancies, with unemployment at 3.9%. Our measurement says nothing about that national picture, but it does show the market these companies are recruiting in.

Vacancies stay open for a long time, in the subset with a known date

Only 110 of the 957 vacancies (11%) had a company-published posting date. Within that subset of 110 vacancies, 63% had been open longer than 60 days, with a median vacancy age of 80 days.

So that figure describes the dated subset, not all 957 roles. And a very old vacancy is sometimes an evergreen recruitment page that is permanently open. We present it as a signal, not as a hard time-to-hire number.

Demand is not limited to the Randstad

36% of placeable demand, 314 roles, sat outside the Randstad. The largest regions outside it: Noord-Brabant with 130 roles, Gelderland with 80 roles and Overijssel with 53 roles.

That matters because regional companies often compete with Amsterdam salary levels without the Amsterdam candidate flow. For them, organising capacity outside the local labour market is usually a necessity rather than an optimisation.

This is mostly a mid-market problem

Among the companies whose size we could validate (42% of companies), 73% had between 11 and 200 employees.

That matches what we hear in conversations. Companies that size have a real product and a real team, but no recruitment department that can fill several technical roles every month.

Which roles are open?

Software engineering, backend and full-stack together make up 40% of open roles. Data and AI is 17%. DevOps and cloud is 13%.

So the core of the demand is not an exotic specialism. It is build capacity: people who ship features and maintain the codebase.

What this is not

This measurement is not a nationally representative sample. It is our own prospect market, so companies that fit our profile are over-represented. The date analysis covers 11% of vacancies and company size is validated for 42% of companies.

We publish it because the direction is consistent with what we see every day, not because the numbers are precise.

What you can do with it

If a technical role of your own has been open for more than two months, the first question is rarely whether you should pay more. It is usually which cost layer you are comparing and which route fits the role. In what a software developer costs in the Netherlands we separate salary, employer cost and client fee.

Want to know how we organise build capacity for teams that struggle to hire locally? Read our explanation of nearshore developers or how Developer as a Service works in practice.

Want to see the monthly cost side by side? In what a developer really costs per month in 2026 we calculate employment, freelance and our from-prices with the same methodology.