Which German companies are hiring the most truck drivers?

The headline

1,446 of 11,761 vacancies, about 12 percent, sit with 26 organisations. The other 88 percent are spread across roughly 7,000 employers advertising one to three seats each.

That is the defining fact about German driver demand. It is not a shortage concentrated in a few large fleets that could be solved with a handful of deals. It is seven thousand separate companies each missing one or two people.

Waste companies, not hauliers

REMONDIS at 453 vacancies is advertising more than twice as many driver seats as Deutsche Post. PreZero, ALBA, Knettenbrech + Gurdulic and Veolia are also in the top 26.

Add them together and waste and recycling accounts for 588 of the 1,446 vacancies held by large advertisers, which is more than parcel, freight forwarding and retail combined.

The reason is structural. Municipal waste collection runs on fixed routes with fixed contractual service levels, so a missing driver is a breached contract rather than a delayed delivery. Waste firms also compete for the same C and CE licence holders as long-distance haulage while offering local routes and home-every-night schedules, which is why they recruit continuously.

Anyone selling driver supply into Germany who is calling logistics companies and skipping Entsorgung is working the smaller half of the market.

The full list

Vacancies count the seats stated on each advert. Adverts count the postings. Locations count the distinct places named across those postings.

What the location count tells you

The ratio of locations to vacancies separates network employers from site employers, and they buy differently.

REMONDIS advertises 453 vacancies across 192 locations, so roughly two per site. That is a decentralised network where each depot recruits for itself, which means there is no single buyer and a national deal is hard to land but a regional one is easy.

GRIESHABER Logistik shows 22 vacancies across 4 locations and Lekkerland 33 across 15. Those are concentrated operations where one person controls hiring for the whole requirement, which is a single conversation worth having.

For a staffing supplier that distinction decides the whole approach: chase the concentrated employers for volume contracts and the networked ones depot by depot.

Who is missing from this list

The absence of the big freight forwarders is the second surprise. Dachser appears at 34 and Raben at 27, both far below what their fleet size would suggest, and several of the largest German logistics names do not appear at all.

That is a data artefact rather than a market fact. Large forwarders recruit through their own careers portals and through framework agreements with staffing firms, so their demand never reaches the public job boards this snapshot reads. Treat their absence as invisibility, not as satisfaction with headcount.

It also means the 11,761 figure is a floor. Public postings are the visible part of German driver demand.

Company snapshots: top locations

All figures below are CE driver roles from the same 22 July 2026 scan as the table above. The ratio and top locations are the detail the ranked list does not show.

The pattern repeats: a ratio near 1 (4WHEELS, team energie, Alfred Amenda) means a service network filling one seat at a time everywhere; a ratio above 2 (Raben, Knettenbrech + Gurdulic, GP Günter Papenburg) means a smaller number of sites each carrying several open roles at once, which is the easier conversation to start.

Reading a single employer's signal

Deutsche Post, counted on its own, shows 88 CE driver roles. Our 22 July 2026 scan found Deutsche Post AG Zentrale advertising 88 open driver roles that day, distinct from the 185-vacancy Deutsche Post DHL Group total in the table above, which rolls up its regional and group entities. The gap between the two numbers is the same lesson as REMONDIS: a single legal entity of a large group can carry a hiring problem large enough to matter on its own, before you even look at the wider group. For a staffing agency, 88 roles at one entity is a large-account conversation, not a one-off placement.

REMONDIS is not one employer but a federation of regional GmbHs, each running its own budget and its own hiring. Central HR at group level is the slowest entry point; the people who feel an empty driver seat sit at the regional company, in roles like Niederlassungsleiter, Disponent or Fuhrparkleiter. Municipal collection contracts commit an operator to fixed routes on fixed days, so the shortfall repeats: a regional entity that needed drivers in July needs them again after the next licence-refresher cycle. Work the regional entity that posted the advert, not the group name at the top of the table.

How to use it commercially

If you supply drivers, start with waste. Five waste companies in the top 26, 588 vacancies between them, continuous demand and a contractual reason to fill fast.

If you sell fleet products, read the list as fleet growth. A company adding twenty drivers is adding trucks, and that is when telematics, fuel cards, insurance and maintenance contracts get reviewed.

If you sell to the long tail, forget the list. Seven thousand employers with one or two seats each is the real market, and reaching it needs the full vacancy dataset rather than a top 26.

Who to approach first, by what you sell

The same logic applies to any role family: a vacancy that has been advertised and not filled is a supplier gap stated in public. Hiring Signals for Recruitment Agencies: What to Track sets out the signal types, and 6 Best Hiring Signal Tools for Recruitment Agencies (2026) compares tools. For the equivalent picture in Poland, see Polish Blue-Collar Hiring Market: 7,094 Open Roles, and for turning demand like this into clients, read How to Get Clients for a Recruitment Agency in 2026.

How the index was built

Driver adverts were collected from German job sources in July 2026 and deduplicated on source identifier, employer and location. The vacancy column sums the seats stated on each advert; where no number is stated the advert counts as one.

Employer names were merged where the same organisation appeared under regional or legal-entity variants. REMONDIS in particular files under many regional companies, so its 453 is an organisation-wide total rather than one legal entity, and the same applies to Deutsche Post DHL Group, ALBA, PreZero and Knettenbrech + Gurdulic. Exact-name totals for those organisations are substantially lower.

Sector labels are assigned from the organisation, not from the advert.

This is a snapshot on one date. Roles filled internally, through framework agreements or through a company careers portal never appear.

The numbers

Figures come from public job advertisements collected on 22 July 2026. Every one was posted by the company itself.

At 2.2 roles per location this is a network-wide pattern rather than one depot struggling. That distinction matters, because it changes who decides and how much they can commit.

Where the roles sit

The largest concentrations at the time of the snapshot.

Spread across this many sites usually means a central framework decision with local execution. A supplier who can serve several of these locations at once is worth more to them than one who covers a single city well.