Dutch Unemployment Falls Again as the Labour Market Tightens, Even Though Jobs are Harder to Find
Unemployment fell faster than the number of open vacancies, so shortages crept back up. Analysts say the extreme post-pandemic shortages are over, but an ageing population keeps the market tight.
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The Dutch labour market tightened again in the second quarter of 2026, with unemployment falling and shortages of workers creeping back up, even though the total number of jobs actually slipped. The picture, from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), is of an economy still running close to the limits of what its workforce can supply.
The headline figures
Unemployment fell to 3.9 percent of the labour force in the second quarter, down from 4.0 percent in the first. That left around 396,000 people out of work, 17,000 fewer than three months earlier. At the end of the quarter there were about 375,000 open vacancies, some 3,000 fewer than in the previous quarter.
The most closely watched measure is how those two numbers relate to each other. The tension, or tightness, of the labour market is expressed as the number of vacancies for every 100 unemployed people. In the second quarter that rose to 95, up from 91 in the first quarter. The number of unemployment benefit claims also fell: the benefits agency UWV counted around 197,000 at the end of June, 1.2 percent fewer than a month earlier, with the biggest drops in construction, agriculture and temp work, where seasonal jobs pick up in spring.
Why the market got tighter, not looser
At first glance it seems odd that shortages would increase when both jobs and vacancies are falling. The explanation lies in the balance between the two. Tightness rose not because employers advertised more jobs, but because the number of people looking for work fell faster than the number of vacancies. With fewer jobseekers chasing only slightly fewer vacancies, each open position becomes harder to fill.
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A cooling in the background
In other respects, the market is easing rather than heating up. The total number of jobs in the Netherlands, counting both employees and the self-employed, came to 11.6 million in the second quarter, around 8,000 fewer than in the first, when the figure had still been rising. There were also fewer people whose main job was as a self-employed worker. During the quarter, about 355,000 new vacancies opened up while employers filled 357,000, so the overall stock of open positions edged down.
CBS notes that the job figures from 2025 and the vacancy figures for the first half of 2026 are still provisional and may be revised.
The bigger picture
Taken together, the figures fit a pattern that economists have been describing for a while: the extreme shortages that followed the coronavirus pandemic have passed, but the labour market remains tight by historical standards. Tightness peaked in mid-2022, the tightest the Dutch labour market had been in more than half a century, then cooled year by year. In late 2025 it briefly tipped over, with more unemployed people than vacancies for the first time in four years, before creeping back up again now.
Analysts expect the balance to shift only gradually. De Nederlandsche Bank, the central bank, has forecast that unemployment will rise slowly, from around 3.9 percent this year to about 4.4 percent in 2027, describing this as a return to a more normal situation rather than a cause for alarm. Over the longer term, an ageing population is expected to keep workers in short supply, as more people retire than enter the workforce. That is one of the reasons the government recently launched a strategy to attract and train workers for sectors such as technology, energy and healthcare.
For people looking for work, the upshot is that jobs are still relatively easy to come by in many fields, even if the red-hot market of a couple of years ago has cooled. For employers, especially in the sectors with the deepest shortages, finding the right staff remains hard.