Thresholds
Thresholds live in the database and are read at runtime, not hard-coded in the application.
The traffic-light algorithm
The checks run in this order. The first matching case wins; later cases are not evaluated.
- 01Step one: hard block. If the occupation carries a legal exclusion — for example a role that cannot be held without German citizenship or without a licence — the result is closed. No further checks run.
- 02Step two: visa route. If no residence rule leads to employment in this occupation, that is the route value kein_zugang, the result is closed.
- 03Step three: salary threshold. If the profile needs a visa and the occupation's median salary is below the shortage-occupation threshold of EUR 45,934 per year, the result is closed. Anyone with a permanent permit or EU citizenship skips this check.
- 04Interim step: data coverage. If the applicants-per-100-jobs figure or the time to fill is missing for the occupation and district, the result is normal. Without data nothing is claimed.
- 05Step four: real gap. If fewer than 250 job seekers face 100 reported vacancies and filling takes longer than the federal median of 140 days, the result is real gap. People are genuinely missing.
- 06Step five: requirements problem. If 250 or more job seekers face 100 vacancies and filling still takes longer than 140 days, the result is requirements problem. Applicants exist; the employer is looking past them.
- 07If none of this applies, the result is normal. The market behaves unremarkably.
Ghost posting detection
An ad counts as suspicious if it stays active for more than 180 days, if it has three or more repostings, or if the same employer runs three or more parallel ads for the same occupation in the same district. The ghost share is the proportion of such ads among all collected ads for that combination.
Equal treatment
The analyses describe market conditions and legal conditions. They provide no selection criteria for persons and no statement about anyone's suitability.
Characteristics protected by § 1 AGG — ethnic origin, sex, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual identity — are not input variables. The country of qualification is used solely to determine which recognition and residence law applies.
Where countries of origin or corridors are compared, the order is an order by procedural effort: duration, cost and number of steps in the recognition and residence procedure. It is not a ranking of people by suitability.
Where statistics are reported by sex, they reproduce the official survey and name the cause of the differences, such as part-time share or interruption periods, not the person.
Selection decisions about applicants are subject to the German General Equal Treatment Act. That responsibility lies with the employer and is not removed by any analysis in this application.
Index of sources
Every official figure on this site is listed here with value, date, source and method. The table is generated directly from the database and therefore never falls behind what is displayed.
Our own survey
Alongside the official figures we collect our own. Job ads are retrieved through the Adzuna interface in a nightly run once a day, limited to a fixed number of occupation-region combinations per run.
From these retrievals we only show aggregates: number of ads observed, time to fill, repostings. Individual ads are neither published nor passed on.
Rights to the ads remain with the respective sources, that is Adzuna and the advertising employers or portals. Values from this survey are labelled everywhere as our own survey with the date of the last run, never as an official figure.
Sources
- IAB job vacancy surveyQ1/2026
Basis for the total number of open jobs including unreported vacancies.
- Federal Employment Agency statisticsmonthly
Reported vacancies, job seekers and time to fill per occupation and district.
- Collected job adsdaily
Daily snapshots for time to fill, repostings and requirements.
- Recognition and access rulesongoing
Mandatory requirements per occupation, such as licence, chamber or language level.
What we do not measure
The following attributes are not available in reliable form. They are neither estimated nor displayed.
- Company size and mid-market status
- Share of remote work and shift patterns
- Collective agreement coverage of the individual employer
- The actual hiring decision in a single case
Vianora is not legal, migration or career advice. Access requirements are decided case by case by the responsible authority.