Nurse Shortage in Europe 2025: What the ELA Labour Market Report Shows

The European Labour Authority (ELA) publishes an annual analysis of labour market imbalances across EURES countries. Its 2025 edition makes clear that nursing professionals and other healthcare workers are among the most in-demand across Europe - and that the shortage is structural, not temporary.

The Overall Scale of Shortage

Across EURES countries in 2025, analysts reported 2,617 shortage occupations and 2,177 surpluses. Shortages are most common among professionals, skilled trades workers and machine operators - a grouping that includes healthcare roles.

The report notes that around one quarter of employment, covering 53 million workers, sits in occupations with widespread shortages or surpluses. Although the number of shortage occupations classed as widespread - those reported by more than half of countries - has declined, their severity has increased. Shortages are becoming more concentrated and critical, not easing.

Health and Care: Identified as a Persistent Hotspot

Health and care is singled out in the ELA report as a sector where shortages are "particularly severe and persistent." The sector employs around 25 million people across EURES countries.

Roles explicitly identified as facing widespread and critical shortages include nursing professionals, generalist medical practitioners, specialist medical practitioners, health care assistants and physiotherapists. The ELA has published separate dedicated analyses of each of these groups as part of the 2025 report.

Geographic spread matters here. The report notes that many occupations appear in shortage in some countries while showing surplus in others. This uneven distribution points to what the report calls untapped potential for cross-border labour matching within Europe - a key practical insight for nurses willing to move.

What Is Driving the Gap?

The report attributes labour shortages to demographic change, skills mismatches, job quality issues and limited labour mobility. Several patterns stand out for health and care:

• Older workers are over-represented in both shortage and surplus roles, pointing to significant upcoming replacement demand as experienced staff retire.
• Shortages are often linked to medium-level, occupation-specific skills, which the report says highlights the importance of vocational training.
• Women are under-represented in shortage occupations overall and over-represented in surplus ones, a pattern the report links to persistent occupational segregation across sectors.

These are structural factors, not cyclical ones - which is why the report calls for sustained policy responses rather than short-term fixes.

Cross-Border Mobility as a Partial Answer

The ELA report identifies labour mobility as one mechanism for addressing shortages. Mobile workers and migrants currently help ease shortages in some countries, according to the report. However, these workers are often overqualified or placed in surplus jobs. The report highlights that better skills recognition and matching are needed to make cross-border mobility work effectively as a solution.

For a nurse or healthcare professional considering work in another EU country, the data points to genuine demand across multiple markets at the same time. The report frames improving this cross-border matching as a policy priority for 2025.

What the Report Says Needs to Change

The ELA sets out specific measures needed in health and care: improving working conditions, expanding training capacity, and making better use of existing skills through innovation, digitalisation and organisational change.

The wider labour market picture reinforces urgency. The overall shift is toward imbalances driven by long-term structural factors, which the report says requires sustained policy responses rather than temporary measures.

For nursing professionals and care workers, this means the demand signals across Europe are not short-term noise. NewLuxJob lists healthcare and nursing vacancies from employers across Europe. Use the country and specialty filters to find roles that match your qualifications.

Source: European Labour Authority, Report on labour shortages and surpluses 2025, ela.europa.eu