When Dutch Hiring Actually Peaks: Why September Is the Worst Time to Start Applying

Every year the same advice does the rounds in expat groups and on LinkedIn. The Dutch market is dead in July and August, nobody is hiring, wait until everyone is back from holiday, September is when it all restarts. It sounds sensible. In the part that matters, it's also backwards.

So we went and looked at the vacancy figures CBS publishes every quarter. Not the headline number for how many vacancies are open, but the two flows sitting underneath it: how many new vacancies opened, and how many got filled. Those two tell you something the headline number can't, which is which direction the market is moving and when. For the summer quarter, they say the same thing four years running.

What actually happens over the Dutch summer

Here is Q3, meaning July, August and September, for the last four years. New vacancies opened against vacancies filled, taken from CBS's unadjusted figures.

Read that last column again. In every one of those four summers, Dutch employers filled more vacancies than they posted, and the pool of open roles shrank. It came down by 27,900 in 2022 and by roughly 20,000 a year since. Between the end of June and the end of September 2025, the number of open vacancies in the country went from 402,700 to 384,300.

That isn't a market on holiday. It's a market clearing. Managers who posted a role in May spend the summer shortlisting, interviewing and signing, and the reason the job boards feel quiet is that roles are leaving them faster than new ones arrive. Which is a very different situation from nothing happening.

The posting peak is spring, not autumn

The other half of the story is where new roles actually come from. If September really were the great restart, you would expect the second half of the year to post more new roles than the first. It doesn't, and it hasn't once in the last four years.

Zoom in on 2025 quarter by quarter and the shape is a slow slide rather than a bounce: 376,000 new vacancies in Q1, 360,000 in Q2, 350,000 in Q3, then 331,000 in Q4. Q4 has been the smallest posting quarter every year since 2022. The calendar tilts towards the first half of the year, consistently, and the autumn rebound that people organise their whole job search around simply isn't in the numbers.

For what it's worth, 2026 is tracking the same way. There were 374,000 new vacancies in Q1 and 363,000 in Q2, so 737,000 across the first half, which is essentially identical to 2025's 736,000. Nothing in the data suggests this second half will break the pattern.

So what does surge in September?

Applicants. That's the side of the market that really does go on holiday and come back all at once. The CV gets updated on the flight home, the saved searches get run again, and a good share of everyone who spent August promising themselves they'd start in September starts in the same week.

We should be straight about the evidence here, because it isn't symmetrical. The vacancy side of this article is measured. It comes from CBS's quarterly figures and you can go and look it up yourself. The applicant side is an observation about how people behave, not a Dutch statistic. There's no current national figure for applications per vacancy by month, and the numbers that get quoted on this tend to be recycled from recruiter surveys done before 2020. So take it as the mechanism that explains what job seekers report every autumn, not as a measured fact.

The practical arithmetic holds either way. If the number of new roles in September is at best in line with the rest of the year, and the number of people applying to each one jumps, then September is a worse month to be starting from scratch, not a better one.

The market you're actually applying into

None of this means the market is bad. It means it's normal, and still tight. At the end of Q2 2026 there were about 375,000 open vacancies in the Netherlands on a seasonally adjusted basis, or 387,300 unadjusted, against roughly 396,000 unemployed people. That works out at about 95 vacancies for every 100 unemployed, with unemployment at 3.9%.

For context, the Netherlands still has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, well under half the EU average, as we went through in Netherlands unemployment vs the rest of Europe. "Fewer vacancies than in 2022" and "no vacancies" are very different statements, and it's the first one that's true.

Where those roles sit matters more than how many of them there are. Three parts of the economy hold just over half of every open vacancy in the country:

• Trade, meaning wholesale and retail together. Around 73,400 open roles, of which retail on its own accounts for about 43,200.
• Health and social care. Around 70,500.
• Business services. Around 62,300.

That's roughly 206,000 out of 387,300 open vacancies, or 53%. If you're applying from outside the country and you need sponsorship, the filter that matters next is which of those employers can actually sponsor you. That's a much smaller set, and narrowing it down is what our visa-sponsored jobs board is for. We mapped who was really hiring internationals in who's actually hiring visa-sponsored talent right now.

What to do with this, concretely

1. Treat the last two weeks of August as a window, not a dead zone

It's about the best set of conditions you'll get for a while. Decision makers are back at their desks and clearing inboxes, the September flood hasn't landed yet, and the roles still open are the ones that survived the summer, which usually means they're either genuinely hard to fill or freshly posted for an autumn start. Both of those are good news if you show up now.

2. Don't hold work back for a date on the calendar

The most expensive version of the September myth is the one where you spend August getting ready. Polishing, researching, waiting for the market to wake up, and then sending your first application in the busiest week of the autumn. If your CV is 90% there, send it. A live application in a quiet week beats a perfect one in a loud one.

3. If you're starting now, start with the format

The one thing genuinely worth fixing before you send anything is the shape of the document. Dutch recruiters read CVs in a particular format and screen out unfamiliar ones quickly: no photo and personal details maximalism, no five pages, clear CEFR language levels. That's an afternoon of work rather than a month. Have a look at how to format your CV for the Dutch market, or take the free template and fill it in.

4. Aim where the doors are already open

With more candidates around than in 2022 and no autumn posting boom on the way, targeting beats volume. Point yourself at employers who already hire internationally by default: IND recognised sponsors, the English first sectors, the clusters we covered in finding English-speaking jobs in the Netherlands. And be realistic about the language question, which has been quietly hardening. That's the subject of the Dutch language wall.

5. Plan your own calendar around the first half of the year

If you have the luxury of choosing when to run a serious search, because you're planning a move or you're employed and looking without much urgency, the data points squarely at the first half of the year. January to June is when the most new roles appear, every year, by somewhere between 8 and 17%. Q4 is the thinnest stretch.

One honest caveat

Q3 covers July, August and September together, so a genuine pickup in September can hide inside a quarter that still nets negative overall. The monthly detail isn't published in this series, so we can't rule that out. The claim here is about the quarter as a whole, and about the split between the first and second half of the year, which is the sturdier of the two patterns and points the same way. What the data doesn't support is the stronger version of the folklore, that hiring stops over the summer and a wave of new roles arrives in the autumn. Neither of those is in the numbers.

The bottom line

The Dutch summer isn't a hiring pause so much as a hiring deadline. It's the quarter where spring's vacancies get decided, while half the applicant pool waits for a starting gun that never really fires. New roles cluster in the first half of the year. What clusters in September is competition. So if you were planning to start applying once everyone's back, that's precisely the problem. Everyone's back. Start this week instead.

Sources: CBS StatLine table 80472ned, Vacatures; SBI 2008 (all economic activities, not seasonally adjusted), quarterly figures from Q1 2022 to Q2 2026, accessed 18 August 2026. The seasonally adjusted vacancy stock, the unemployment level and the unemployment rate come from CBS's Q2 2026 labour market release of 30 July 2026 and from StatLine table 80590ned. Flow figures are published to the nearest thousand. The change in open roles is calculated from the open vacancy stock, which is published to the nearest hundred.