The Q3 2026 market report from freelance.de, published on 7 October 2026, counts about 45,300 freelance projects from January to September, 5.3 % more than a year earlier. IT did not keep pace. It recovered in Q3, but IT's share of all projects still fell from 33.4 % at the start of the year to 28.9 %, and Q3 carried about 16 % fewer IT projects than Q1. My read: in 2026 the German freelance market grew around IT more than through it.
I work as a firewall and network-security contractor in Germany, so I read these reports for one question: what do they say about the seat I sit in? Here are the numbers first, and then what I take from them.
What do the Q3 2026 numbers actually say?
freelance.de counted about 15,600 projects in Q1 2026, about 14,700 in Q2 and about 15,000 in Q3. Within Q3, July had about 5,200, August 4,600 and September 5,200. Q3 was 4.5 % above Q3 2025 (about 14,400), and September alone was 10.9 % above the previous September. Overall volume is up on the year. The IT slice is up on Q2 but still well below Q1.
| Quarter 2026 | All projects | IT share | IT projects (my estimate) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | ~15,600 | 33.4 % | ~5,200 |
| Q2 | ~14,700 | 27.9 % | ~4,100 |
| Q3 | ~15,000 | 28.9 % | ~4,300 |
The IT column is my own calculation from the published totals and shares. freelance.de itself puts Q2 IT about 21 % below Q1 in absolute numbers (in its Q2 report), and, in the Q3 report, Q3 IT about 6 % above Q2 but still about 16 % below Q1. One platform, all sectors, project listings only: it counts demand, not hours or rates.
Where did the growth go?
The growth went mainly into engineering, construction and procurement, three of the four categories that gained share in every quarter of 2026 (the fourth is healthcare, from 2.1 % to 2.4 %). Ingenieurwesen (engineering) went from 14.5 % to 15.0 % to 15.4 % of all projects. Bauwesen und Bergbau (construction and mining) went from 4.6 % to 5.5 % to 6.1 %. Einkauf und Lagerhaltung (procurement and warehousing) went from 3.6 % to 4.3 % to 4.4 %.
The losers in Q3 sat elsewhere: art, culture and media dropped by about 19 % in absolute projects, administration and customer service by about 5 %, insurance and finance by about 4 %. The report's conclusion ends with: "Unternehmen setzen Freelancer zunehmend gezielt in Bereichen jenseits der klassischen IT ein." (Companies are increasingly using freelancers in a targeted way in areas beyond classic IT.)
The report gives no cause for the shift. Any explanation of why is interpretation, mine included.
Does a smaller IT share mean less money for IT contractors?
A second source says the price of an hour held while the monthly total did not. freelancermap's Freelancer-Kompass 2026, in its article of 21 April 2026, puts average monthly project revenue at 6,653 euros, down from 8,022 euros in 2025, a drop of 17.1 %. Over the same period the average hourly rate moved from 104 to 103 euros. freelancermap draws the same conclusion: with the rate flat, the drop comes from fewer billed project hours.
The same article reports that income satisfaction fell from 66 % to 55 %, and that 43 % of respondents had no secured utilisation.
Two caveats. The Kompass surveys all freelancers, not only IT, and the article gives no sample size. And these are two platforms with two methods: they point the same way, but they do not prove the same thing. I looked at the rate side in more detail in the experience premium in 2026 rates, and at the Kompass itself in why projects stall on the client side.
What does this look like from a firewall contractor's seat?
In my experience, the work that disappeared first is the open-ended seat: "support the network team for six months". The work that still gets bought has a date and a deliverable: a migration before an end-of-support deadline, evidence for an audit, a segmentation that a regulator asked for. Those briefs are fewer, shorter and better defined than the ones I saw in 2024.
My read on the engineering growth is about operational technology. In my experience, OT in many German plants belongs to the engineering department, not to IT. When a plant tenders an OT segmentation project, it can land in Ingenieurwesen on a platform rather than in IT. That is a hypothesis; the report does not measure it.
The client side is changing too. NIS2 pushes security duties down the supply chain, which I covered in NIS2 supplier clauses, and the consultancies are splitting into winners and losers, as in the consulting market is sorting.
What would I do with these numbers as an IT security contractor?
I would change four things in how I look for and price work. None of them depends on the market turning.
- Quote by deliverable and date, not by open hours. A brief with an end date survives a budget review that a six-month support seat does not.
- Search outside the IT category. Read engineering and procurement listings for OT, network and security work that is filed somewhere else.
- Plan cash for fewer billed months. A stable hourly rate with 17 % less monthly revenue means fewer billed months rather than a lower price, and that needs a buffer.
- Do not read one quarter as a trend. IT gained a point from Q2 to Q3; the next report decides whether that was the floor.
The rules for how contractors are engaged are shifting at the same time, through the EU platform work directive.
The headline number says the freelance market grew. For IT contractors the picture is narrower: more projects overall, a smaller share of them in IT, and the IT briefs that remain usually come with an end date.
Related field notes: