The Berlin hiring pulse for July 2026

I want to make this a monthly habit: a plain read of what the Pegel feed shows about Berlin startup hiring, using only numbers I can query against the live database. As of July 17, 2026, 2,843 roles were open across 316 Berlin startups on the site. Every breakdown below comes from that same pull, so the parts add up to the whole.

A counting change I have to flag first

Pegel records one snapshot a day of how many Berlin roles are open. From May 25 to July 14 that snapshot only ever went up, from 2,214 to 4,504, without a single down day. That is not because hiring never cooled for a day. It is because expired roles were not being cleared, so every posting that ever went live stayed counted. On July 15 the stale postings were removed and the snapshot fell to 2,829.

So the honest thing to say is that I cannot hand you a clean month-over-month number this time. The count before July 15 and the count after it are measuring two different things. My direct query on July 17 returned 2,843 open roles, and that is the figure I trust. The earlier 4,460 figure included a long tail of postings that were no longer live. I would rather say that plainly than publish a 37 percent drop that never happened in the real market.

Which sectors are hiring

Climate is the largest sector on the board, 650 of the 2,843 roles, nearly a quarter of everything open. Fintech is next at 474 (about 17 percent), then ai-ml at 422 (about 15 percent). Marketplace and SaaS follow close together near 290 roles each. Climate leading is not new for Berlin, and the cluster of solar and energy names further down this post explains part of it.

Which stages are hiring

Open roles sit across company maturity rather than piling at one end. Series A companies post the most (537 roles, about 19 percent), but seed-stage firms are right behind at 426, late private scaleups at 454, and Series D companies at 398. Early-stage roles (pre-seed through Series A) come to 1,062, a little over a third of the board. Both young and established companies are hiring, which is worth holding in mind before reading any single figure as the state of "startups."

The English-friendly share

Of the 2,843 open roles, all 2,843 carry a language classification, so the denominator here is complete rather than a sample. 1,324 of them, about 47 percent, do not require German. That leaves a small majority that do. The split has held near even for months. It is the number I would check first if I were job-hunting from outside Germany, because it decides whether half the board is even open to me.

Pay is still almost never posted

164 of the 2,843 roles, under 6 percent, show any salary figure at all, whether a floor or a ceiling or both. About one in seventeen. Germany's pay-transparency rules are on their way, but on this month's feed they have not landed. If you want to know what a Berlin startup role pays before you apply, the posting almost never tells you, and I will not invent a band to fill the gap.

The concentration is still here, smaller now

Enpal is the single largest employer on the board, 284 open roles, one in ten of everything. In the stale count before the cleanup, Enpal held 495 roles. The cleanup cut its count by roughly 43 percent, a steeper drop than the board as a whole, which tells you a good share of its old total was postings that had aged out of the real market. The next four companies (Auto1, Flix, 1KOMMA5, Scalable Capital) sit between 52 and 60 roles each. The top five together hold 502 roles, about 18 percent of the board.

What these numbers cannot tell you

An open role is a posting, not a hire. I can see that a job is listed and that it has stayed listed; I cannot see whether anyone was hired into it, or whether the team means to fill it at all. The sector and stage labels come from the company, not the specific role, so a climate company's finance opening still counts under climate. And after this month's counting change, treat any comparison to my earlier totals with care. The figure I stand behind is the one I can query today: 2,843 roles, open on July 17, at 316 Berlin startups.

Sources: role counts, sector and stage splits, language-tier figures, and salary-disclosure counts are Pegel's own database, queried July 17, 2026.