Between 1 July and 28 September 2026, 9am collected 25,317 freelance postings for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Software engineering made up 61 %, business and consulting 23 %. Half wanted senior people, two thirds ran longer than six months, 83 % were full-time. Only 5 % printed an hourly rate; where they did, the median was 80 EUR (Germany 77, Switzerland 100). 29 % were remote, 40 % hybrid, 31 % on-site. Postings naming an AI skill reached 4.8 %, up from 1.7 % in early 2025. Like for like, July and August beat the same months of 2025.
This is the first of a quarterly series. Every figure below comes from our own job search, which collects postings from freelance boards and republishes the ones that pass our checks. We print the method before the numbers because the method is where reports like this usually cheat.
How we count, and what this cannot tell you
Postings, not hires. A posting is a client's intention on a given day. We do not know whether it was filled, at what rate, or whether it was one of the three copies a recruiter put on three boards. Where a posting reached us twice through different feeds we removed the duplicate by URL.
Every posting we collected, whether or not it passed our own publishing checks. A share of collected postings never reaches the 9am search because a field we require, usually a city for a hybrid role, could not be read. Those are real projects, so they count here.
DACH by stated location. A posting counts for Germany, Austria or Switzerland if the board says so, including remote roles, which almost always carry a country. Postings without a country are out.
Two data sets, and we say which is which. On 8 September 2026 our collection grew from essentially one feed to more than a dozen boards, including several recruiter sites. Snapshot figures for the quarter, the skills, rates and location shares, use everything. Any comparison with last year uses only the one feed that ran unchanged through both years, so a bigger net does not masquerade as a bigger market.
What we do not print. Time to fill, because most postings close on a timer, not on a hire. Number of clients, because most posters are recruiters and the end client is invisible. Skill shares compared with last year, because our skill tagging changed in between. And fine-grained service names, because the categorisation is machine-assigned and, frankly, ranks "2D modelling" far too high; only the broad category is used.
That leaves a smaller set of numbers than a glossy report would print. They are the ones we can defend.
Volume: what a quarter looks like
25,317 postings in the quarter: 7,254 in July, 4,691 in August, 13,372 in September. The September figure is the bigger net, not a September boom; see the method. Germany was 89.5 % of the total, Switzerland 6.4 %, Austria 4.1 %, and the Austrian and Swiss shares are understated before September because those feeds arrived with the expansion.
The like-for-like line is the one that matters. On the unchanged feed, July 2026 had 7,063 DACH postings against 5,179 in July 2025, and August 4,545 against 4,414. Both months up, July sharply. September 2026 on that feed reads 7,661 against 3,385, but part of that is a second scraper path on the same board, so we call September "up" and leave the number alone. After a 2025 in which the largest DACH platform reported about a third fewer projects than at its 2022 peak, this is the first time in our data that two consecutive months were up on the year before. One quarter is not a turn. It is a data point, and a better one than we had in spring.
What clients asked for
Category. Software engineering 61.0 %, business and consulting 22.7 %, architecture and engineering 9.9 %, finance and accounting 3.0 %, design and creative 1.2 %, marketing and communications 0.8 %. If you sell marketing or design services, the boards are not where DACH clients look for you, and the pipeline routine matters more than any job alert.
Seniority. Senior 50.1 %, mid-level 46.9 %, junior 3.0 %. Three postings in a hundred want a junior. That number belongs in every conversation about entry into freelancing: the market buys experience it does not want to train, which is also why the "freelancer or employee" day-rate comparison only makes sense from a few years in.
Duration and load. Where the posting stated a duration, 65 % ran longer than six months and another 26 % three to six months; under a month was 1 %. Where it stated the load, 83 % were full-time, 10 % thirty to forty hours, 7 % under thirty. The DACH freelance market, as posted, is a market for long, full-time engagements with one client at a time. That has a false-self-employment shadow we have covered elsewhere and will not repeat here, but it is worth saying that the boards are not where you find the two-days-a-week advisory work; that comes through people.
Start. Three quarters of postings state no start date. Of the rest, "immediately" outnumbers "in more than two weeks" by three to two.
Skills. Ranked by the number of postings naming them, with the required-only count in brackets. Project management 9,336 (7,684). Jira 1,834. Kubernetes 1,667. Python 1,646. CI/CD 1,599. Java 1,596. Documentation 1,498. SQL 1,330. SAP 1,273. Git 1,172. REST 1,166. Docker 1,134. Microsoft Office 1,074. Linux 1,073. Confluence 1,055. Microsoft Azure 888. SAP S/4HANA 857. Test automation 834. Technical documentation 819. Construction management 810. Automation 801. Quality assurance 782. Risk management 771. Testing 761. AWS 744. DevOps 742. TypeScript 740. Test management 716. Microsoft Excel 714. Process optimisation 700.
Two readings. First, "project management" in 37 % of all postings is not 9,336 project manager roles; it is the boards' habit of tagging coordination as a skill on developer and consultant roles. Read it as "can run your own workstream", which is the actual expectation. Second, the tools list, Jira, Confluence, Git, Docker, CI/CD, is the DACH corporate stack, and it appears in postings for consultants and testers as often as for developers. If it is not on your profile, the search does not find you, whatever you actually know.
The AI line. 1,181 postings, 4.7 % of the quarter, named at least one AI-related skill: "AI" as a generic tag 481, generative AI 156, machine learning 154, LLM 69, prompt engineering 67, RAG 56, AI tools 49, then the Copilot family, AI agents 27, NLP 26, AI governance 22 and LangChain 18. On the unchanged feed the share of postings with an AI skill went 1.7 %, 2.0 %, 3.0 %, 3.3 % through the quarters of 2025 and 3.8 %, 3.8 %, 4.8 % through 2026. That is a near-tripling in eighteen months and still a small minority of the work. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the second one is the one the conference stages leave out; our two-track market piece has the rate side of it.
What they paid
Nine postings in ten state no rate at all: open budget 90.9 %, hourly rate 4.8 %, fixed budget 3.7 %. That silence is the first fact about DACH freelance pricing. The client expects you to name the number, which is why the 187-days formula exists.
Where an hourly rate was printed, 1,208 postings after removing obvious typing errors, the spread was: lower quartile 56 EUR, median 80 EUR, upper quartile 95 EUR. By country: Germany median 77 (55 to 92), Austria 82 (62 to 135, on only 64 postings), Switzerland 100 (75 to 125, on 58 postings, printed as posted; some Swiss boards type francs into a euro field, so read it as a level, not a conversion). By working mode: hybrid 85, remote 77, on-site 40. The on-site figure is dragged down by first- and second-level support and other hourly service work, which is where most on-site hourly postings sit; it is not a remote premium. By category, on the postings that had a rate: finance and accounting 120 (30 postings), business and consulting 90 (243), architecture and engineering 85 (56), software engineering 75 (839).
Year over year, the printed medians did not move: 80 EUR in July and August of both years. September 2026 reads 72, and that is the new boards, whose postings skew to support work, not a price cut on the established feed. If you are negotiating this autumn, the posted market is flat, not falling, and the postings that print a number are the low end of the market by construction: the projects that pay 130 rarely advertise it. The raise-your-rate piece has the script.
Where the work was
Remote 28.5 %, hybrid 40.4 %, on-site 31.1 %. On the unchanged feed, remote went from 29.2 % in Q3 2025 to 30.7 % in Q3 2026, hybrid held at 47 %, on-site slipped from 24 % to 22.5 %. So the remote share is rising by about one point a year, not collapsing and not surging, and hybrid is the DACH default: nearly half of all postings expect you in an office some of the time, which, given that 90 % of them are in Germany, means the DACH freelance market is geographically a German-city market with a remote minority. The people who tell you "everything is remote now" are describing their own network, and the people who tell you "remote is over" are describing a memo, not the postings.
96 % of postings were written in German. English-language postings were 4 %. If you do not work in German, the DACH boards hold roughly a thousand postings a quarter for you, and the job-board ranking tells you which ones carry them.
What the quarter says, in four lines
The market, as posted, wants senior German-speaking engineers and consultants for long full-time engagements, with Jira and Git on the profile, at an unstated rate that turns out to be about 80 EUR an hour when it is stated. AI skills are named in one posting in twenty, three times as often as eighteen months ago. Remote is a steady 30 %. And, for the first time in our data, two clean months were up on the year before.
What to do on Monday
- Put the corporate stack on your profile in the boards' words: Jira, Confluence, Git, Docker, CI/CD, and the cloud you actually use. The search matches tags, not competence.
- Decide your AI line. If you use RAG, LLM APIs or agent frameworks in client work, tag them; 1,181 postings this quarter were looking. If you do not, do not fake it; the interview finds out.
- Price above the printed median unless you are junior. The postings that print 80 EUR are the low-information end of the market. Use the formula, then the script.
- Treat "hybrid" as a filter, not a deal-breaker. Nearly half the market expects some office days. Decide which cities you will do, and say so on your profile.
- Read the next report in January. Q4 is the seasonal trough; the question is whether the year-over-year arrow holds through it. Our seasonality piece has the calendar.
The 9am search reads these postings every day. A free 9am profile puts you in the results DACH clients see, and the alerts bring the postings to you instead of the other way round.
