n 2021 a total of approximately 568,000 enterprises active in the German crafts sector employed around 5.4 million persons. More than 4.1 million of them were employed subject to social insurance contribution. Roughly 650,000 were employed in marginal employment. As the Federal Statistical Office further reports, these enterprises realised a turnover of about 659 billion Euros.
The skilled crafts sector accounted for 16.8% of all companies active in the overall economy (sections B to N, P to S of the Classification of Economic Activities, 2008 edition). This is an increase of 0.2 percentage points compared with the previous year.
Economic Significance
According to reports by the Business Register (only in German) there where about 3.4 million economically active legal units in 2021 in Germany. On average for the year, they employed about 31.4 million people subject to social security contributions and realized a turnover of around 7,789 billion Euros. Taking this into account around 16.8% of the economically active legal units were part of the crafts sector. Around 13.2% of the employment subject to social security contributions took place in the crafts sector while it realized 8.5% of the overall turnover in 2021.
The construction sector (Section F of the Classification of Economic Activities, Edition 2008) is of special relevance in the crafts sector. In 2021 about 67.7% of the roughly 386,000 legal units active in construction were organized in the chambers of crafts. They employed 79.9% of the roughly 1.9 million persons subject to social security contributions and realised 70.3% of the 356 billion Euros turnover in the construction sector.
Meanwhile 42.2% of around 217,000 active legal units in Manufacturing (Section C of the Classification of Economic Activities, Edition 2008) belonged to the crafts sector. 16.4% of the around 6.9 million persons employed subject to social security contributions in Manufacturing were employed by crafts enterprises and 7.4% of the 2,249 billion Euros in turnover were realized by them.
A characteristic feature of the crafts sector is the large number of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). In 2021, 99.6% of all enterprises in crafts with compulsory and non-compulsory approval were SMEs. Here, 81.2% of the persons employed in the crafts sector generated 74.1% of turnover.
Additional information on this statistics and detailed results for crafts are contained in the tables of the census oft crafts (53111) in the GENESIS-Online Database.