What Did 2026 Actually Do To Ireland’s Tech Talent Market?
This blog is my attempt to give you an understanding of the labour market at the end of 2026 and look out to the first half of 2027. My focus will be predominantly on the tech and data centre talent markets, as these are the ones we serve and know the most about.
I’ve pulled information from the CSO, the Employment & Recruitment Federation of Ireland monthly monitor and also anecdotally from what we are seeing and hearing on the ground in GemPool.
One thing to keep in mind is that predicting the future is a futile exercise. The one constant is change. But hopefully we can use the recent past and present to glean some clues as to what might be coming.
What is the state of Ireland’s tech labour market in late 2026?
At the end of September 2025 I wrote that the labour market was mixed, that big tech in Ireland might grow headcount again in 2026, and that I would report back. This is a continuation of that analysis following my commentary from February this year, and then July also.
In 2026 the country did what a full employment economy does when it cools rather than cracks. The CSO puts employment at 2,839,300 in the second quarter, 21,200 higher than a year earlier. The monthly unemployment rate in September was 5.0%. That is still a strong labour market.
The Labour Force Survey with the CSO puts employment at 2.79 million in the first quarter and 2.84 million in the second quarter of 2026. There were 101,900 people in temporary agency work in the first quarter, 9,400 fewer than in the previous quarter.
It is not the labour market a software engineering hiring manager found themselves in this year.
Across tech in Ireland we continued to see redundancies impacting many people. Of the roughly 360,000 people who work in tech in Ireland, many of these are working for US multinationals. This cohort of companies have been very cautious about growth, with a focus on profitability, and building their capabilities with AI. This meant a lot slower hiring across the sector in Ireland.
Nationally, the market cooled, but employment held
It is worth being plain about the national numbers, because they get used to wave away what is happening in software:
- Unemployment ended 2025 at 4.6%.
- The official rate in the second quarter of 2026 was 5.1%, and the monthly estimate in September was 5.0%.
- Employment grew by 21,200 in the year to the second quarter.
- The employment rate for people aged 15 to 64 is 74.3%. People are at work.
- They are not in work in the same pattern as two years ago.
- The labour force got older over the year to the second quarter: fewer people aged under 45, and many more aged 45 to 64.
- Hours worked across the economy were flat on the year, at 89 million a week.
- Pay across the economy is still forecast to rise, by around 4% in 2026 and again in 2027.
- A rising average and a frozen tech offer are not the same fact. I’ll come back to that.
The spring forecasts for 2026 were too high, and they were revised down in the summer. The 2027 forecasts still assume the labour market speeds up a little. That is a reasonable national view. It is not yet a reason for a software company to staff a year of growth.
Focusing in on the tech sector
The loss of tech jobs is not a mood. In the year to the first quarter, information and communication employment fell by 20,300, or 10.7%. Almost all of that, 16,200 jobs, was in computer programming and consultancy. That is software engineering and the consulting around it, not a vague ‘tech’ bucket.
I do not have a second headline number of the same kind for the second quarter, and I am not going to invent one. What the second quarter does show is that weekly hours in information and communication fell again, from 6.2 million to 6.0 million. The work did not snap back in the summer.
The largest employment fall in the second quarter was somewhere a data centre operator should also look. Professional, scientific and technical activities lost 17,100 jobs, and 11,800 of those were in architectural and engineering activities and technical testing. Construction employment had risen by 20,500 in the year to the first quarter. The country is still building. The professional engineering workforce got smaller in the same year Irish data centre projects were trying to work out if they had a route back to a grid connection.
The ERF’s reading of the first quarter was the same shape in different words: high-tech services lost about 35,000 jobs, while construction, industry and transport added 56,500 between them. Take the survey volatility seriously. The direction has been consistent for a year.
The Recruitment Agency Barometer
I have used the ERF monthly monitor for two years as a barometer, with the caveat that it covers every sector. It is still the cleanest month-by-month read we have, and the tech market has rhymed with it.
January opened with 56% of agencies expecting vacancies to rise over the next three months. By March that was 39%. The year then settled into a grind: permanent vacancies up for about a third of agencies in May and June, salaries flat for roughly eight in ten, and contract placements improved. In August the permanent vacancy reading went backwards, with 26% seeing an increase and 31% seeing a fall. In the same survey, 57% expected vacancies to rise over the following three months. That is a stronger forward number than January.
I would not build a hiring plan on it yet. We have already watched one optimistic reading fade. What I would take from the year is narrower. Contract placements stayed positive. Permanent time to hire got worse and then only partly healed: 48% of agencies still said it had lengthened. And a third of agencies signed no new clients in August. If there is a 2027 reopening, it looks more like existing clients releasing critical roles than a broad return of new hiring programmes.
In GemPool, what we have seen is pockets of hiring. That is to say, there are a smaller number of companies hiring rather than many companies. We have won two large hiring projects in 2026 (30+ jobs). But we have seen a lower number of new clients signing our T&C’s as a whole.
The Rise of Augmented Software Engineering
In my blog from July-How is the Irish Tech Recruitment Market Evolving in the first half of 2026? on I wrote that engineering leaders were pausing volume hiring because senior teams, with agentic tools, could carry more of the work. The second half did not reverse that. I have not seen a return to team-by-team growth hiring. I have seen the same critical roles, open for longer, and a lot of work that would have been a headcount request in 2022 being absorbed.
The roles that still get approved are the ones that were already on the market in February. Companies are hiring people who can put language models into a real product, and people who can run a platform without the cloud bill quietly doubling.
What has changed since July is the duration. A pause for a quarter is a management choice. A pause for a year starts to describe the structure of a software team. The risk is not that nothing gets built. The risk is that the team that remains is a layer of seniors doing the work, the reviews, the incidents and the mentoring that used to be shared, and calling it productivity.
Where are all the Junior Software Engineers?
I also wrote in July that cutting the junior pipeline was short sighted, and that I was being introduced to people’s children more often than at any point I can remember. That has not eased off. The companies who decided a model could cover the junior work have now had a year of that decision.
The CSO age split is the national version of the same choice. In the year to the second quarter the labour force shrank below 45 and grew sharply between 45 and 64. The Department of Finance has already noted weaker employment growth for younger workers in the sectors most exposed to AI, even where those sectors were not shrinking overall. Software is the sharp end of that.
The 2027 consequence is practical. A senior who has spent a year doing junior work is tired, and a tired senior is the retention problem you will be recruiting for next year. There is also no homegrown mid level forming behind them. The cheapest hire a software company can make in the first quarter of 2027 may be a small, deliberate graduate intake, taught to use the tools inside that company’s own stack. Waiting for the market to produce mid level engineers in 2028 will not work, because those people were the graduates of now.
The Data Centre talent market outlook
In September 2025 in my blog on-Q4 2025 Labour Market Report: What Employers in Ireland Need to Know, I wrote that Microsoft’s pullback at the start of that year had been a wobble rather than a collapse, and that the real constraint was still the grid. New investment was being announced, and the sites were not in Ireland. Irish companies kept winning work across Europe. That export of talent and delivery is still the market I recognise.
What changed, and what a 2027 plan has to absorb, is that there is now a written route to a connection. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities published it in December 2025. EirGrid’s updated process followed in May 2026. A new data centre above a modest threshold has to bring dispatchable generation or storage with it, and it has to show how it will cover most of its annual demand with additional Irish renewable power over six years. That is a pathway. It is not a return to the build rate of the last fifteen years. Offers still have to be earned, and a hall does not staff up on the day a policy is published.
The hiring consequence is a wider spec. Commissioning managers, mechanical and electrical engineers, and critical facilities people were already the scarce list, and they still are. On top of that, 2027 searches will include people who can deliver on site or nearby generation and storage, people who can get a project through a grid process, and people who can contract renewable supply that actually counts as additional. Those are not the same CVs as a shift lead.
Supply moved the wrong way in the same year. Architectural and engineering employment fell by 11,800 in the year to the second quarter. And the competing offer is often not another Dublin permanent role. It is a contract in Frankfurt, or a relocation to the Nordics, at a rate a permanent Irish package struggles to match. I said last year that shift lead pay was being pulled toward a median above €80,000 by that continental demand. The all sector salary data for 2026, which is flat, does not describe this part of the market. Treat them as different markets when you are writing an offer.
Another consideration across the data centre sector in Ireland is the need for refurbishment and retrofitting of the existing data centre sites. Most are now over 10 years old and can significantly improve their sustainability, water usage and power usage, by upgrading their systems. Also, there is the emerging demand for sovereign AI, which requires data centre halls to reconfigure in order to support GPU’s (which are heavier and hotter) than CPU’s (that are currently used).
Are tech salaries still rising? 2026 pay trends explained
Rates of pay in the ERF Irish labour market monthly monitor have been the dullest line in the pack, and that is the point. In August, 84% of agencies said permanent salaries were unchanged from the month before, and 86% said the same of contract rates. The bidding war is not the market we are in for a standard software role.
That is easy to misread. Average earnings across the economy are still expected to rise by around 4% this year and next. A company that freezes an ordinary developer band is inside the market. A company that tries to reopen a senior platform, security or commissioning role at a 2023 number is not. The scarce roles did not get cheaper because the average role stopped moving. In data centres, the competing offer may not even be Irish.
Pay transparency is the other lazy assumption. It was reasonable, in February, to say the directive would force ranges into adverts this year. Ireland did not transpose it by the June deadline. The Minister has said employers will not be penalised for that delay and that the rest will come in phases. Gender pay gap reporting for larger employers is already live. I would still put a range on the offer. Candidates ask, the process is already slow, and a hidden band is a good way to lose the one person you actually needed.
5 Strategic Tactics for 2027 Tech Hiring Plans
| Priority Area | Tactical Action | Why It Matters for 2027 |
| 1. Requisition Audit | Name essential roles needed by March; drop placeholder headcount. | Prevents wasted search cycles on low-priority requisitions. |
| 2. Agile Contracting | Use contractors for workload spikes, compliance, and commissioning. | Maintains flexibility in a market where permanent demand fluctuates. |
| 3. Junior Pipeline | Re-establish small, targeted graduate intakes in early 2027. | Stops senior developer burnout and prevents a mid-level skills gap in 2028. |
| 4. Salary Transparency | Publish salary bands in the initial candidate conversation. | Speeds up extended time-to-hire and prevents late-stage dropouts. |
| 5. Critical Role Targeting | Offer competitive rates for scarce platform, security, and power roles. | Standard developer bands are flat, but niche skills still command premium packages. |
Key Questions On The Irish Labour Market
A: The national labour market is intact, with unemployment around 5% and employment still growing. Software hiring is not recovering in the activity data. Permanent vacancies were weaker in August than in May. What did jump was the three month outlook, and the last time it jumped, in January, the activity did not follow.
A: In the year to the first quarter, computer programming and consultancy employment fell by 16,200. That was most of the 20,300 fall in information and communication. Weekly hours in the sector were still down in the second quarter.
A: Yes, in small numbers, on purpose. A year of replacing juniors with tools has already happened. Another year of it is how you end up with no mid level engineers and a tired senior team.
A: There is now a formal route to a connection, with conditions on dispatchable power and additional Irish renewables. That is not the same as a return to the old build rate. Irish commissioning and engineering talent is still being hired into European projects.
A: Not as a rule. Around eight in ten agencies reported unchanged rates through the year. Whole economy earnings are still forecast to rise by about 4%. Scarce roles, especially in critical facilities and in the security and platform work that still gets signed off, were never part of the flat average
