Freelance, employee leasing or employment: how many IT contracts in Germany are truly freelance?
In Q3 2026, 71% of the 31,239 listings on German IT freelance project boards offered a freelance contract. 14% offered employee leasing (Arbeitnehmerüberlassung, ANÜ), 0.5% fixed-term and 2.2% permanent employment; 13% stated no contract type. This page explains how the contract types differ, how they spread across developer roles and how their shares develop quarter by quarter.
Freelance, employee leasing (ANÜ), fixed-term and permanent employment: the difference
The points below restate what the linked German laws say; they are not legal advice. What applies to a given project is set by its contract.
- Freelance: you work self-employed on your own account, usually for an hourly or daily rate, and are employed neither by the client nor by the agency placing you.
- Employee leasing (temporary agency work, Arbeitnehmerüberlassung, ANÜ): a lender – such as a staffing agency – employs you and hires you out to a client, the hirer. There you are integrated into the client's organisation and follow its instructions; this is only allowed when you have an employment relationship with the lender, and the lender needs a permit (Section 1(1) AÜG). It may hire you out to the same client for at most 18 consecutive months (Section 1(1b) AÜG). For the time of the assignment the equal-treatment principle applies: the essential working conditions, including the pay, of a comparable employee of the client (Section 8(1) AÜG); a collective agreement may deviate from it on pay for the first nine months (Section 8(4) AÜG).
- Fixed-term employment (befristete Anstellung): an employment contract for a limited time – with an end date or, as a purpose-limited contract, until a task such as a project is done (Section 3(1) TzBfG). A purpose-limited contract ends when the purpose is achieved, at the earliest two weeks after the employer has informed you in writing (Section 15(2) TzBfG). A fixed term needs an objective reason, such as a merely temporary need; without one, a term with an end date is allowed for up to two years, and it must be agreed in writing (Section 14 TzBfG).
- Permanent employment (Festanstellung): an employment contract without an end date, for instance after a direct placement with the client. Such positions appear on project boards too.
In employee leasing and in both kinds of employment you are an employee; this page groups them as employment. An employment in employee leasing may itself be fixed-term; a listing that names employee leasing as its contract form still counts as employee leasing here.
How many listings are truly freelance?
In Q3 2026, 22,173 listings offered a freelance contract, 4,312 employee leasing, 155 fixed-term and 694 permanent employment. Together, 17% of the listings are employment. Of the listings stating a contract type, 81% are freelance.
Contract types in development, consulting and operations
Projects without development work are for instance consulting, project management, administration, IT operations and work outside IT. The share of employment is higher in development projects (20%) than in projects without development work (15%). The value on the right is the share of employment; below each bar are the shares of all contract types.
Contract types by developer role
The role with the highest share of employment is Java Fullstack Developer (33%), the one with the lowest PLC / Automation Programmer (6.5%). The roles are ordered by their share of employment; each bar shows all contract types of the role in Q3 2026.
Contract types quarter by quarter
Shifts between the contract types show over years, not from month to month. The table therefore sums the listings per quarter and grows by one row with every completed quarter. The series starts with Q3 2026.
| Quarter | listings | freelance | leasing | fixed-term | permanent | not stated | Change of the freelance share (percentage points) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2026 | 31,239 | 71% | 14% | 0.5% | 2.2% | 13% |
Salaries in employee leasing and employment
For employment, listings sometimes state a yearly or monthly salary instead of an hourly rate; monthly salaries count twelve times here, counted in steps of €5,000. 180 of the employee-leasing listings state a yearly or monthly salary (4.2%). The median lies in the range €80,000–85,000 gross per year, the middle half of the salaries in the range €70,000–95,000. 56 of the fixed-term and permanent employment listings state a yearly or monthly salary (6.6%). The median lies in the range €75,000–80,000 gross per year, the middle half of the salaries in the range €70,000–90,000. The hourly rates of freelance projects are covered by the analysis of IT contractor rates.
On the projects page you can filter the current listings by contract type; Projectmatch matches new projects against your profile automatically. Try it now.
See also: Most in-demand developer roles in German IT freelance projects, IT contract length in Germany, How remote are IT freelance projects?, Security clearance for IT contracts in Germany and IT recruitment agencies in Germany (contract type per agency).
Method
An AI model reads every project description and records the contract type only when the description states it explicitly: freelance, employee leasing (also Leiharbeit, Zeitarbeit or "AÜG"), fixed-term employment (such as "befristete Festanstellung" or employment for the duration of the project) or permanent employment. A fixed-term employment that the listing merely compares with employee leasing ("vergleichbar mit ANÜ") counts as fixed-term employment; when a listing offers several contract types to choose from, the one it names first counts. Where a project board states the contract type in a field of its own, that field applies; only positions a board files as permanent employment are split by their description into fixed-term and permanent employment. Listings recorded before the analysis began to tell fixed-term from permanent employment in October 2026 were read again when their text mentions an employment. Roles and kinds of project are those of the role analysis; roles with fewer than 300 listings in the quarter are hidden, because their shares depend too much on chance.
Every project has been analysed this way since July 2026. Projects count in the month they were first listed; a quarter is the sum of its three months, and only completed quarters are shown – the series therefore starts with Q3 2026, and the incomplete second quarter of 2026 is left out. The figures are updated monthly and published under the CC BY 4.0 licence: you may use them freely, also commercially, crediting "Projectmatch (projectmatch.io)" and, online, linking to this page.