Press releases

Aachen has been and remains an important economic hub. The development of this city can be described from a wide variety of perspectives. For the past 125 years, municipal statistics have focused primarily on the workforce: Who works in which economic sectors, and how has the picture changed over time? A side glance at unemployment figures is always included.

Aachen as an Industrial City in 1911
Shortly after the Municipal Statistics Office was established, conducting a survey of the workforce was one of its first major tasks. The results, presented in a pie chart for the year 1911 (Figure 1), paint a picture of an industrial city at the beginning of the 20th century: A good quarter of all workers (26 percent) were employed in the textile industry, another 11 percent in the needle industry, and 10 percent in the retail sector. These were followed by mechanical engineering (9 percent), the metallurgical industry (7 percent), and the construction industry (6 percent).

Today: Health Care and Social Services Lead the Way
More than a century later, the economic landscape in Aachen looks completely different (Figure 2). The economic sector with the highest number of employees today is health care and social services, which accounts for nearly one in five workers (19 percent). This is followed by professional, scientific, and technical services at 12 percent; trade, including the maintenance and repair of motor vehicles (11 percent); manufacturing (11 percent); education and training (10 percent); and information and communication (8 percent).

This shift is in line with the nationwide trend: The service sector has grown significantly, while manufacturing has lost a considerable amount of ground. A comparison with cities of roughly the same size reveals a very similar distribution (Figure 3).

There has also been a change in who is working. The 1911 survey, which was based on members of local and company health insurance funds subject to mandatory insurance, counted 51,857 employed people in the city of Aachen—nearly two-thirds of whom were men (63 percent). This ratio remained unchanged in the 1970 census. In 1987, the proportion of male employees stood at just under 60 percent and has declined steadily since then: by 2025, it will be 53 percent.

Increased Commuting and Longer Commutes
At the same time, work has shifted increasingly toward cities. While significantly more people were employed in rural areas at the beginning of the 20th century, there were 33 employed people per 100 residents in Aachen in 1911—today, that number is 53. Improved infrastructure and increasing motorized mobility have also widened the distance between home and work; the option to work from home further reinforces this trend. More than half of those commuting into Aachen now travel at least 17 kilometers, and for half of them, the distance is as much as 27 kilometers or more.

The question remains: Where will the residents of Aachen work in the future? Over the past five years, the sectors of information and communication (+1.2 percentage points), other business services (+1.2 percentage points), and health and social services (+0.9 percentage points) recorded the largest growth. However, simply extrapolating these trends would be premature: global developments, as well as local initiatives and startups, are likely to bring some surprises.

125 Years – A Journey Through the Statistics
: The Statistics Office team is celebrating this anniversary year—in keeping with its mission—with a journey through many interesting and curious facts, figures, and data about the Imperial City. Topics range from population trends and changes in land area to attendance figures for Alemannia’s home games. Through August 2027, the City of Aachen will publish additional installments of this series at regular intervals on aachen.de/statistik.