How many cybersecurity jobs are open in Germany?

The numbers

Collected from public job advertisements in August 2026.

The ratio is the number that matters. At 3.1 roles per employer, most German employers are replacing or adding individuals rather than standing up whole teams, so speed and shortlist quality decide who wins.

Germany against the other six markets

The same August 2026 snapshot, counted the same way in seven countries. The full comparison is in cybersecurity hiring in Europe, seven countries counted.

See also how many cybersecurity jobs are open in France.

Where the roles are

Cybersecurity hiring concentrates far more tightly than most functions, because it follows financial and government clusters rather than population.

A further 338 adverts are tagged Deutschland with no city, and German adverts frequently name a district rather than a city, so Altstadt, Mitte and similar entries are counted separately and excluded here. Berlin leads, but Frankfurt matters more than its size suggests because banking concentrates regulated security work there.

What drives hiring here

German demand is driven hardest by regulation. BaFin supervision of financial institutions and the KRITIS rules for critical infrastructure both create roles that must be filled rather than roles a company would like to fill.

Across Europe the same three forces apply. NIS2 and DORA turned security into a board obligation rather than a technical concern. Public incidents release budget faster than any vendor pitch. And cloud migration creates roles that did not previously exist.

Why these roles stay open

The qualified pool is small and is not growing at the rate demand is. Employers compete internationally for the same people, so a local salary competes with a foreign one.

Clearance and certification narrow the field further in defence and finance. And many job specifications ask for a combination of skills few individuals actually hold, which is a specification problem rather than a market one.

For a recruiter that last point is the opening. A role open three months usually has a describable reason, and naming it beats any pitch.

How the roles were counted

Two numbers are stated on this page and they measure different things. The larger one is everything our security searches returned in DE: 4,424 adverts at 1,609 employers. The smaller one, 2,878 adverts at 931 employers, is the subset whose job title actually names a security function.

The gap exists because job boards return adjacent listings. Searching for security roles pulls back general IT engineering, infrastructure projects, recruiters advertising unrelated vacancies and, in a few cases, jobs with nothing to do with technology at all. An earlier version of this page published the larger figure as a cybersecurity count. It was not one, and this page now leads with the verified subset.

Verification is done on the advert title, matching security terms across the languages in the dataset: cyber, security, sécurité, Sicherheit, bezpieczeństwo, beveiliging, along with function names such as SOC, SIEM, DevSecOps, pentest, IAM, GRC, CISO and RSSI. A title-based test is conservative. A genuine security role advertised under a generic engineering title is not counted, so the verified figure is a floor and the query-set figure is a ceiling.

These are public postings on one date. Roles filled through agencies, internal transfer or referral never appear, and employers recruiting only through their own careers pages are under-represented.

Using it as a recruiter

Start with where you can actually supply candidates rather than with the biggest number. Then use the roles-per-company ratio to decide whether you are selling single placements or a team build, because those are different conversations with different buyers.

We build the company-level list behind these counts for clients entering a market, filtered to the regions and seniority they can serve.