In the first quarter of 2026, Luxembourg counted 232,919 cross-border employees out of 495,775 employees in total, 47% of salaried employment, according to STATEC data: 130,163 live in France, 51,464 in Belgium, 51,292 in Germany. These people spend their days in Luxembourg, and their evenings, weekends and online purchases in another country. A campaign set to Luxembourg reaches them during office hours and loses them as soon as they go home. A campaign set to their home municipality reaches them at home and misses the searches they run from the office. The right setting requires knowing these figures and the actual options of the ad platforms.
The facts
- STATEC data on salaried employment by place of residence, first quarter 2026: 232,919 cross-border workers out of 495,775 employees (47.0%), of whom 130,163 from France (55.9% of cross-border workers), 51,464 from Belgium and 51,292 from Germany. The STATNEWS of 8 January 2026 notes that in the third quarter of 2025 cross-border employment grew by 0.6% over the quarter, slightly faster than resident employment (+0.5%), and that the number of cross-border workers living in Germany fell by 0.6% over one year.
- STATEC Regards 01, March 2026: 225,840 cross-border employees in 2023, of whom 54.2% living in France (51.7% in 2005), 23% in Germany and 22.7% in Belgium. Average annual growth of 3.7% between 2005 and 2023, slowing to 2.2% in 2023. Wages paid to incoming cross-border workers reached 16.4 billion euros in 2023, 39.8% of the wage bill paid by resident employers, first in Europe according to Eurostat.
- Same publication: cross-border workers living in France earned on average about 58,300 euros a year in 2023, close to 12,400 euros less than those living in Belgium and 11,400 less than those living in Germany, a gap STATEC links to sectors: French cross-border workers are proportionally more numerous in retail and hospitality.
A campaign set to Luxembourg reaches cross-border workers at the office and loses them at home
Google Ads offers two location options, described in its help page: Presence or interest, the default setting, which serves people located in the area and people who show interest in it, and Presence, limited to people located in the area. Google states that location accuracy is not guaranteed in every situation. A cross-border worker at the office in Kirchberg is present in Luxembourg; the same person in the evening in Thionville no longer is, and their interest in Luxembourg depends on the words of their search.
Meta works on the same principle. Its help page on location targeting describes a location as the way to reach people who live there, who have recently been there or who go there often, and adds that the accuracy of location targeting is not guaranteed. A cross-border worker enters the Luxembourg audience as someone who goes there often, on the strength of their daytime positions. Campaigns that run mostly in the evening and at the weekend, when consumers buy, therefore see less of them than their daily presence in the country suggests, and the outcome depends on how Meta has classified each person.
Cross-border workers form three audiences, with different languages and incomes
More than half live in France, a little over a fifth in Belgium, as many in Germany. The first two groups search and read mostly in French; the third in German. A campaign written in French for Luxembourg therefore speaks to three cross-border workers in four and leaves the fourth in front of an ad that is not addressed to them. The census of residents, whose figures we detailed in our article on languages in Luxembourg, counts none of these people.
Incomes differ too. The gap of 11,000 to 12,000 euros in average annual salary between French cross-border workers and their Belgian or German neighbours comes from the sectors they work in. For an advertiser, that changes the message and the product put forward in each area: an offer designed for finance employees does not address the same cross-border worker as an offer designed for retail or hospitality.
What these figures change in the settings of a campaign
The first choice concerns where the customer buys. A shop, a restaurant or a service delivered on site in Luxembourg sells to the cross-border worker at lunchtime and after work: a Luxembourg campaign in Presence mode, with an ad schedule on working hours, suits it. A product bought from the sofa, insurance, housing, equipment, training, is bought in the evening from Thionville, Longwy, Arlon or Trier: the residence areas then have to be added to the campaign, with their own language and budget, provided the offer can legally be sold to a resident of that country.
The second choice concerns how results are read. In Search Console as in Google Ads, a cross-border worker counts as Luxembourg from the office and as France, Belgium or Germany from home. Part of the traffic attributed to France on a Luxembourg website comes from people who work in Luxembourg. Separating campaigns by residence area makes that share readable; a single country setting dissolves it into the mass.
AIxH's view
Since 2024 we have worked with Frontaliers Grand Est, the information service for cross-border workers from Lorraine, on its documentary chatbot and its campaigns: the questions that come in every day from these audiences feed the way we set up campaigns for our other clients. Our Google Ads team separates residence areas from work areas, assigns a budget and a language to each, and reads results area by area; our Social Ads campaigns follow the same split. If your account currently targets only Luxembourg, compare the volume of your conversions during the day and in the evening: the gap tells you what you are leaving on the other side of the border.
