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Where is Europe's IT talent actually growing?

Poland's ICT sector employs 687,000 people at an average $2,937/month — 43% of the German ICT wage. Czechia pays the region's top rates and still has the deepest specialist bench.

ILOSTAT (ISIC Rev.4 J), Eurostat, World Bank — 2024/2025 reference periods · verified as of

ICT-sector employment

ISIC Rev.4 section J — information and communication. One definition, one source, so countries are directly comparable.

MetricValueSegmentPeriodSource
Germany1,683kreference market2025ilostat.ilo.org
Poland687klargest CEE ICT workforce2025ilostat.ilo.org
Czechia211k2025ilostat.ilo.org
Romania205k2025ilostat.ilo.org
Hungary164k2025ilostat.ilo.org
Bulgaria129k2025ilostat.ilo.org

Average monthly ICT wage (US$)

The arbitrage founders actually price: a Czech ICT month costs 57% of a German one; a Hungarian month costs 24%.

MetricValueSegmentPeriodSource
Germanyhistorical$6,810latest available2022ilostat.ilo.org
Czechia$3,914region's top rate2024ilostat.ilo.org
Poland$2,9372024ilostat.ilo.org
Bulgaria$2,6262024ilostat.ilo.org
Romania$2,3302024ilostat.ilo.org
Serbia$1,8452024ilostat.ilo.org
Hungary$1,629region's lowest2024ilostat.ilo.org

Depth of the market

Specialist share shows saturation; enterprise counts show where new supply is forming.

MetricValueSegmentPeriodSource
ICT specialists, share of total employment — Czechia4.7%occupation-based2025ec.europa.eu
ICT specialists — Hungary4.6%2025ec.europa.eu
ICT specialists — Poland4.5%2025ec.europa.eu
ICT specialists — Romania2.7%most headroom2025ec.europa.eu
Software enterprises (NACE J62), Czechia41,667 → 51,281+23% in three years2021–2024ec.europa.eu
ICT service exports, share of service exports — Bulgaria25.7%region's most IT-dependent exporter2025api.worldbank.org
ICT service exports — Czechia18.2%2025api.worldbank.org

Why "IT market size" numbers disagree

Two definitions hide behind the same phrase. "ICT-sector employment" (ISIC J) counts everyone employed by information-and-communication companies — including telecom, media and publishing staff. "ICT specialists" (Eurostat, occupation-based) counts people doing IT work in any industry — a bank's developers count here, a telecom's accountants don't. Vendor marketing freely mixes the two, which is how the same country gets both "700k IT workers" and "4.5% of employment" headlines. One country figure from our own graph — Serbia's sector employment — failed our internal plausibility gate and is excluded from this page until re-verified; only the wage figure is shown.

ILOSTAT — employment by economic activity · Eurostat — ICT specialists in employment

Methodology

Every number on this page is a fact node in the God of Startups Atlas — a knowledge graph where each metric carries its source URL, reporting period and evidence tier. Tier 1 here means ILOSTAT, Eurostat and the World Bank. Where a figure failed our plausibility checks it is excluded and said so, not silently dropped.

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EU Business AI Adoption

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