German service sector losing jobs

Employment in Germany's services sector fell by 0.1% on the year, or 27,000, in the second quarter compared with the same quarter last year, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) reported on Tuesday.

The fall was the first recorded since the Covid pandemic.

There was a 1.5% increase in employment in the public sector, including education and healthcare, while most other service sectors weakened. In the trade, transport, and hospitality sectors, the number of people employed fell by 1.1%.

The downward trend that has been evident for some time continued in the industrial sector. Employment there fell by 2%. There were also fewer jobs in construction, down 0.7% and in agriculture and forestry, down 1.5%.

A total of around 45.7 million people were employed in Germany in the second quarter of 2026. After seasonal adjustment, this was 0.1% fewer than in the first quarter and 0.5% fewer than a year earlier.

Of these, 3.6 million were self-employed - a figure that once again declined at a faster rate.

On average, employed people worked just under 315 hours during the three-month period, unchanged from the previous period. Because of the decline in employment, total hours worked across the economy fell by 0.5% to 14.4 billion hours.