The Dutch labour market has cooled since 2022, and that average hides the story that matters to employers. Vacancy rates fell sharply in ICT, trade, hospitality and financial services. In construction and healthcare they barely moved. Our reading of the Eurostat figures is a simple rule: the shortage eased where work can be postponed, moved or automated, and stayed where it cannot. The useful question for an employer is whether their own market is tight, whatever the national picture says.
What the average hides
The vacancy rate counts open vacancies against all posts in a sector. Comparing mid-2022 with mid-2025, the national rate fell noticeably. Information and communication fell furthest, from the tightest sector in the country to around the middle. Trade, transport and hospitality, financial services, professional services and manufacturing all eased clearly.
Construction did not. Its vacancy rate in 2025 is almost exactly what it was at the peak, and it is now the tightest sector in the Netherlands, well above the national average. Dutch construction is also far tighter than construction in neighbouring countries and the European average. Healthcare, which started lower, likewise held almost flat.
The rule underneath
Line the sectors up and a pattern appears. A software project can wait a quarter. A renovation already under way cannot. A marketing campaign can move abroad. An operation cannot. Some administrative work can be absorbed by software. A roof cannot.
Construction demand comes from programmes that do not follow the business cycle: housing, the energy transition, the renewal of roads, bridges and grids. Healthcare demand comes from demography, not from orders. Neither falls when the economy slows. The construction economics institute EIB expects education to supply only part of the workers needed, and grid operators report a lasting shortage of technicians. The rest has to come from people switching in from adjacent trades.
What this does not show
A sector rate is an average across all its occupations. A construction firm hiring office staff faces a different market than one hiring site engineers, and an ICT employer hiring security specialists may find little of the cooling. The comparison stops at mid-2025, and Denmark is missing from the European comparison. The rule about postponable work is our interpretation of the pattern, not something the statistics measure directly. A clear fall in construction and healthcare vacancy rates in the coming quarters would weaken it.
What you can do
- Use your sector's figures, not the national ones, when you plan hiring or brief your board. For construction, a cooling market is factually wrong.
- In construction, installation and healthcare, do not wait for the market to calm down. Nothing in the data suggests it will.
- Treat lateral entry as the main route rather than a fallback. Define which adjacent trades can be trained into your roles and recruit there deliberately.
- In ICT, trade and financial services, expect more room than in 2022, mostly among mid-career people. The vacancies that remain open are the hard ones.
- Ask of each role whether the work could wait. If it cannot, plan its hiring as if it were still 2022.
More on these fields: engineering and software engineering.