German truck driver demand by Bundesland

The national picture

11,761 open truck driver vacancies at 7,058 distinct German employers. That is 9,843 individual job adverts, some of which advertise more than one seat. 9,807 of those adverts, covering 11,723 vacancies, sit inside a Bundesland boundary and make up the table below.

The striking number is not the vacancy count but the employer count. Seven thousand separate companies are advertising for drivers at the same time, which means the shortage is spread across the whole haulage sector rather than concentrated in a few large fleets.

All sixteen Bundesländer

36 adverts of 9,843 could not be assigned to a Bundesland because their coordinates fall just outside the simplified state boundaries used, mostly on coastlines and national borders. They are excluded from the table and from the totals above.

What the ranking shows

The top four states hold two thirds of demand. Nordrhein-Westfalen, Bayern, Baden-Württemberg and Niedersachsen together account for 7,184 of 11,723 vacancies.

Nordrhein-Westfalen leading is expected: it is the largest state by population and it contains the Rhine-Ruhr logistics corridor. Bayern being almost level with it is less obvious and reflects the Munich and Nuremberg distribution clusters plus the Austrian and Czech transit routes.

Niedersachsen at 1,351 vacancies punches above its population, which is what you would expect from a state containing the Bremen and Hamburg hinterland, the Wolfsburg automotive supply chain and the North Sea ports corridor.

The three city states behave as you would expect. Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen show low absolute numbers because the depots that serve them sit in Brandenburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Niedersachsen respectively. Reading the city states alone will badly understate demand in those metropolitan areas.

Vacancies against adverts

The ratio of vacancies to adverts is 1.20 across the assigned adverts and barely moves between states, from 1.12 in Thüringen to 1.23 in Baden-Württemberg.

That consistency is itself informative. German hauliers advertise one or two seats at a time rather than posting bulk campaigns, which means each advert usually corresponds to a real named vacancy at a real depot rather than to a recruiter fishing for a pipeline.

What this means for anyone selling to German hauliers

Seven thousand employers advertising simultaneously is a targeting list, not a statistic. A company advertising for drivers is a company with capacity it cannot use, which is the moment it becomes receptive to anything that addresses driver supply, retention, route efficiency or subcontracting.

For recruitment agencies and driver staffing suppliers, the relevant filter is not the state but the employer: who is advertising repeatedly, and who has been advertising the same route for months.

For telematics, fuel, insurance and fleet software, the advert is a proxy for fleet growth. A haulier adding drivers is a haulier adding trucks.

How the data was built

Adverts were collected from German job sources in July 2026 and deduplicated on source identifier, employer and location. Each advert carries coordinates, and each was assigned to a Bundesland by point-in-polygon test against official state boundaries rather than by parsing a location string, because the location text on German driver adverts is inconsistent and frequently names a depot rather than an administrative area.

The vacancy column sums the number of seats stated on each advert. Where no number is stated, the advert counts as one.

This is a snapshot, not a flow. It counts what was open on the collection date, so it undercounts roles that were filled quickly and overcounts adverts left live after a hire.