High-tech hiring improves, but software developers lag behind
Employment Service report shows rising vacancies and narrowing wage gaps.
A decline in the number of high-tech job seekers was recorded, from an all-time high of 19,800 last June to 16,300 in December, according to a special report published on Sunday by the Employment Service on the high-tech sector in 2025. The peak in June was likely linked to the war with Iran. However, the number of job seekers from the sector is still 126% higher than in December 2022, when it stood at 7,205. The Employment Service attributes the fluctuations in the number of high-tech job seekers mainly to changes in the size of the sector in recent years. The high-tech sector expanded over the previous decade, reaching 441,000 employees in 2023. However, during 2024, likely in the shadow of the war, employment is estimated to have declined to 424,000, before rising again to 435,000 in 2025. The future trend remains unclear.
Another encouraging statistic is a relatively steady 15% increase in the number of high-tech vacancies over the past year. At the end of 2025, there were approximately 18,300 open positions, compared to about 15,900 at the beginning of the year. The ratio between job seekers and vacancies stood at 1.12 in December 2025, meaning 112 job seekers for every 100 open positions. The Director General of the Employment Service, Inbal Mashash, said that “the slowdown in the growth rate of high-tech job seekers and the expansion in the number of opportunities in the industry are very encouraging.”
However, the positive data does not extend to software developers. The number of job seekers who are software developers was 1.75 times higher in December 2025 than in December 2022. Among high-tech professions, the smallest increase in job seekers was recorded among mechanical engineers and mechanical engineering technicians, whose numbers were only 1.05 times higher than in December 2022. While the overall number of high-tech job seekers has stabilized in recent months, the number of job seekers from software-related fields continues to rise. In December 2025, they accounted for about 51% of all high-tech job seekers, together with systems analysts.
The Employment Service estimates that the growing use of artificial intelligence in coding, along with a shift in investment toward hardware, is making it harder for software professionals to find work and may require retraining. However, it also notes that increased adoption of programming tools could expand the overall number of people employed in the field under different market conditions.
The Employment Service also examined wage gaps among job seekers. The wage gap between high-tech workers and workers in other industries stood at approximately 18,800 shekels ($6,085) in the last quarter of 2025. While a high-tech employee earned an average of 32,500 shekels ($10,518) per month at the end of 2025, a worker in other industries earned an average of 13,700 shekels ($4,434). The wage gaps among job seekers remain substantial, although they have narrowed. In the last quarter of 2025, the average expected wage among high-tech job seekers stood at approximately 21,700 shekels ($7,023), compared to about 11,700 shekels ($3,786) among job seekers in other industries.
