Cybersecurity hiring in Europe: 10,056 open roles across seven countries

Cybersecurity hiring by country and what it means for a recruiter

Volume tells you where the roles are and roles per employer tells you what you are selling. The table reads the August 2026 counts that way. The sale-type column follows the page's reading of team size: a high ratio means an employer is building a function, a low one means it wants a specific person fast.

Country detail is in how many cybersecurity jobs are open in Germany and how many cybersecurity jobs are open in France. The employers behind the counts are in which employers advertise the most cybersecurity jobs in Europe.

The seven-country picture

Cybersecurity is one of the few functions hiring at volume across every European market at once, and one of the hardest to fill. We counted it in seven countries on the same date.

The company column sums to 6,217, but only 3,454 companies are distinct. The difference is employers hiring in more than one country, which is itself useful: those are the groups running cross-border security operations and the ones most likely to need a supplier who can work in several markets.

Lithuania is included for completeness and to make a point about market size. Our home market is small in this category, and we would rather show that than pretend otherwise.

Volume tells you where, team size tells you who

Germany has the most open roles, and Germany and Poland tie on the highest roles-per-employer ratio at 3.1. An employer in either market that is advertising is on average building a team of three rather than replacing one person.

That number decides what you are selling. Where the ratio is low, the buyer wants a specific person quickly and a recruiter competes on speed and shortlist quality. Where it is high, the buyer is standing up a function, and the conversation is about capability, retention and sometimes a managed service instead of a hire.

Poland reads as a build market: a growing share of European security operations centres sit there, staffed locally and serving clients elsewhere.

United Kingdom: where the roles are

UK hiring concentrates more tightly than most functions, because it follows financial and government clusters rather than population. London holds 624 of the 2,781 verified roles, more than one in five. A further 421 adverts are tagged UK with no city, and London district tags such as The City and Farringdon are counted separately and are not folded into the London figure.

UK demand follows financial services and government. The concentration in the City and Farringdon is banking and fintech, and the regional clusters follow defence and public sector work.

What drives cybersecurity hiring

Three forces move this market, and none of them are seasonal.

Regulation. NIS2 and DORA pushed security from a technical concern to a board obligation across the EU. Companies that never employed a security specialist now need one on paper as well as in practice.

Incidents. A breach at a competitor moves budget faster than any vendor pitch. Hiring often spikes in a sector weeks after a public incident in it.

Cloud and outsourcing. Every migration creates roles that did not exist before, and managed security providers hire to serve clients who gave up hiring themselves.

Why these roles stay open

Cybersecurity vacancies stay open far longer than most technical roles, and the reasons matter if you recruit into the field.

The qualified pool is genuinely small, and it is not growing at the rate demand is. Employers compete internationally for the same people, so a Warsaw salary competes with a Zurich one. Clearance and certification requirements narrow the field further in defence and finance. And many job specifications ask for a combination of skills that few individuals actually hold, which is a specification problem rather than a market one.

For a recruiter, that last point is the opening. An employer whose role has sat open for three months usually has a describable reason, and naming it is a better first line than any pitch.

What this dataset is not

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

The count is of advertised roles rather than headcount, and the classification is broad: it covers IT security, information security and cyber defence roles rather than a narrow job title. Treat the totals as a floor and the ratios as directional.

Using it to pick a market

If you place cybersecurity people and are choosing where to expand, the volume ranking is the wrong first cut. Start with where you can actually supply candidates, then use team size to decide whether you are selling single placements or a build.

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

How the roles were counted

Every figure on this page is the title-verified subset, not the raw query result. Our security searches returned 18,149 adverts across the seven markets. 10,056 of them carry a job title that actually names a security function, and those are the numbers in the table above.

The gap is job board behaviour rather than a collection error. A search for security roles also returns general IT engineering, infrastructure projects, recruiters advertising unrelated vacancies and occasionally jobs with no technology content at all. An earlier version of this page published the raw figure as a cybersecurity count. It was not one.

Verification matches security terms in the advert title across the languages present: cyber, security, sécurité, Sicherheit, bezpieczeństwo, beveiliging, plus function names such as SOC, SIEM, DevSecOps, pentest, IAM, GRC, CISO and RSSI. A title test is conservative, so a real security role advertised under a generic engineering title is missed. Read the verified count as a floor and the query set as a ceiling.

The verification rate varies a lot by market, from 67 percent in the United Kingdom and 65 percent in Germany down to 26 percent in the Netherlands and 25 percent in Switzerland. The low rates reflect the sources available in those markets, where general job portals dominate and return broader result sets.