Do German IT job offers meet the Blue Card salary threshold?

What this means for your application

For an IT applicant, the salary threshold is rarely the thing that fails. Software and ICT roles sit in ISCO-08 group 25, which counts as a shortage occupation, so the applicable figure is €45,934.20 rather than €50,700. Not one of the 144 advertised ranges in this sample tops out below that number. The constraint sits earlier in the process: getting the offer, and having your degree accepted.

The gap between the two thresholds is worth 64% versus 81% of ranges clearing at the floor. If your role is classified outside group 25, roughly a fifth of the market that would have qualified for you no longer does. That classification is decided by the job you are actually doing, not the title on the contract, so a mismatch between title and duties is worth catching before you file.

Advertised ranges by role

Counts are small for individual roles. Read the columns as direction, not as a precise market rate, and note the sample size on each row before quoting it.

Most German postings do not publish a salary at all

Of the 767 vacancies we opened, only 164 disclosed a range, about 21%. German employers have no obligation to advertise pay, and the ones who do skew towards larger firms and public-sector employers with fixed pay bands. A posting with no figure tells you nothing about whether the role clears the threshold, and it is a normal thing to ask about directly.

This also bounds what the numbers above can support. They describe the 21% of the market that publishes pay, not the whole market, and the direction of that bias is unknown.

How we measured this

• Source: the Bundesagentur für Arbeit Jobbörse public API, the German federal employment agency's own job board. Collected 12 August 2026.
• We took the most recent postings for nine IT roles and opened each one for its detail record. Of 767 postings, 164 disclosed a salary range. Removing duplicates, hourly pay and mislabelled units (below) leaves the 144 annual ranges every figure on this page is calculated from.
• Duplicate listings (same employer, title and range under different reference numbers) were removed before any figure was calculated.
• Hourly-paid postings are reported separately and never pooled with annual figures. 5 of the disclosed ranges were hourly and are excluded from every number on this page.
• The job board's own pay-period label is unreliable: 2 postings marked as annual carried a weekly or monthly figure. We excluded any “annual” value below €25,000, which is beneath the statutory minimum wage for full-time work and therefore cannot be an annual salary, rather than guess the intended unit.
• Thresholds compared against: €45,934.20 for shortage occupations including IT, and €50,700 general, per the BMI announcement of 18 December 2025.