"It is a shortage occupation, so the permit will be straightforward."
That sentence is behind a lot of failed work permit applications, and it comes from a reasonable assumption: that Belgium has a shortage list, and that being on it means something consistent. Neither part is true.
Belgium has several lists, they are published by different bodies, and they exist for different purposes.
There is no single Belgian shortage list
Employment policy is regional, so shortage lists are regional.
Flanders has the VDAB list. Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region publish their own equivalents through their regional employment services. A function can be recognised as a shortage occupation in one region and not in the neighbouring one, for the same job with the same job description.
For an employer hiring across Belgium, that is not a detail. It means the answer depends on where the person will mainly work.
What the VDAB list is, and what it is for
The VDAB bottleneck occupations list counts 227 occupations for 2026.
It is built from two pillars: a quantitative analysis of VDAB data on vacancies and jobseekers, and a qualitative survey of VDAB experts and sector organisations. So it is not purely a vacancy count, and it is not purely opinion.
One caveat matters this year. VDAB thoroughly updated the occupational structure behind the list, which means the 2026 list cannot be compared like for like with previous years. Anyone telling you shortages went up or down based on list length is comparing two different things.
What this list drives is guidance and training: which retraining programmes are prioritised, where incentives point, what jobseekers are steered towards. It is a labour market instrument.
The migration list is a different list, and much shorter
This is the distinction that costs people permits.
For economic migration in Flanders, what matters is the ministerial list of medium-skilled shortage occupations, not the VDAB list. They are two separate instruments. Appearing on the VDAB list does not put you on the migration list.
From 1 January 2026, that migration list was cut to around twenty professions, down by more than a third, with everyday roles such as bus and truck drivers, bakers and butchers removed and niche trades added. Being on it removes the requirement for a prior labour market test for medium-skilled positions, which is worth roughly five weeks of mandatory vacancy advertising.
The practical rule: check the migration list, not the bottleneck list, before you assume a permit route. The full procedure is here: how to hire a non-EU tech professional in Belgium.
Where IT actually sits
On the labour market lists, comfortably. On the migration list, mostly not, and for a specific reason.
The migration shortage list addresses medium-skilled positions. Most IT roles that Belgian companies struggle to fill, developers, analysts, architects, engineers, are treated as highly skilled, which is a different route entirely. It runs on a salary threshold and on the role genuinely being a qualified one, not on list membership.
So for a typical tech hire the shortage list is usually irrelevant, and that is good news: the highly skilled route does not require a labour market test either.
The one sub-market where the numbers are unambiguous
Cybersecurity, where the shortage shows up in the vacancy rate rather than in a list.
Agoria's February 2025 analysis put the cybersecurity vacancy rate at 12.4 percent, against 5.3 percent across IT as a whole and 3.9 percent economy-wide, with around 4,000 cybersecurity vacancies that cannot be filled (source: Agoria).
A vacancy rate more than twice the IT average is a more useful signal than any list, because it measures what is actually happening rather than what is officially recognised. We looked at what is driving it here: NIS2 and cybersecurity hiring in Belgium.
Shortage does not mean easy to get hired
Worth saying plainly, because the lists get read as a promise.
A shortage occupation means employers struggle to fill the role. It does not mean they lower the bar, and in technical fields they mostly do not. What actually happens in a shortage market is that processes get faster and packages get better for the people who clear the bar, while everyone else gets rejected at the same rate as before.
If you are choosing where to specialise, the lists are a decent signal of where demand is durable. They are not a guarantee of a job, and a certification alone rarely moves someone across the bar.
In short
Belgium has regional shortage lists, not one national list, and in Flanders there are two that get confused: the VDAB bottleneck list of 227 occupations, which drives training and guidance, and the ministerial medium-skilled list of around twenty professions, which drives work permits.
Most IT roles sit on the first and not the second, because they qualify as highly skilled and take a different permit route that does not need a labour market test anyway.
And a shortage occupation is a statement about employer difficulty, not about how selective the hiring process will be. If you want to know where your profile actually sits in the Belgian market, start with the open roles or our technology hub.
