Developer insights: where are the software developers in Germany? — 2022 numbers

Germany remains decentralized in developer populations in 2022, but large urban centers grow more quickly. See detailed maps below.

Finding reliable data on the number of developers is challenging. Luckily, the Federal Agency for Employment in Germany annually publishes an overview of job categories for all salaried employees by agency district.

The “software development and programming” subcategory

Product owners, ux designers and data scientists are often lumped into generic categories and there is no single subcategory for them. That is different for developers.

In the dataset we are able to trace how many software developers there are per hub/region, which gender they identify with (unfortunately, only the binary men/women is available), which percentage has German citizenship and so forth. This is accessible via its own subcategory.

The number of developers in Germany

For 2022, the agency has 304,010 developers in Germany in the books. This is an increase by over 20,000 year over year! In 2018, this number was just 224,380.

All studies that I’ve read on the data quality for developers assume 10–15% of all developers to be freelancers. With a rough calculation that leaves us…