Ghost jobs: how long postings really stay listed
We do not guess whether a posting is a ghost job. We measure its listing age, and we cross the source's publish date with the date our own crawler last saw it in that source.
Key figures
| Measure | ||
|---|---|---|
| Listed more than 30 / 60 / 90 days | 62.1 / 41.4 / 35.8% | listing age, not a liveness check |
| Median listing age | 41 days | |
| 90-day-old postings still re-crawled | 83.7% | re-seen in our last crawl pass (40 days) |
| …re-crawled within 7 days | 0.25% | our crawl pace, not the ads |
| Dead links (probed one by one) | 0.81% | of 25,080 probed |
| Older than 90 days and re-crawled in the last 40 days | 28.42% | 2,125,081 postings — old, but still being re-crawled at the source |
| Older than 90 days, not re-crawled in 40 days | 5.53% | 413,501 postings |
| Newer than 90 days, re-crawled in the last 40 days | 55.44% | 4,145,479 postings |
| Newer than 90 days, not re-crawled in 40 days | 10.61% | 793,354 postings |
Frequently asked
What is a ghost job?
A posting that stays listed long after the role is filled or closed. We measure listing age and link liveness rather than guess.
How do you know a posting is old but still active?
We cross the source's publish date with the date our crawler last re-saw the posting in that source — a signal only a persistent crawl produces.
How many listing links are actually dead?
0.81% of the 25,080 employer URLs we probed one by one.
What does the 2×2 table say?
In this edition's crawl archive, 28.42% are both older than 90 days and were re-seen in our last crawl pass (40 days) — the cell that matters, because a posting nobody crawls any more is not really on the market. Inside a fixed seven days the same cell reads 0.09%, which measures how fast our crawler gets around, not the ads. The other three cells are the rest of the market.
Press, research and custom cuts: [email protected] · Cite as: DeUnemployment, “Ghost jobs and listing age — measured, 2026-11-06”, https://deunemployment.com/data/ghost-jobs (2026-11-06).
Where this connects. Outside work that defines or studies the measure on this page:
- Ghost jobs in lawmakers' crosshairs: the disclosure bills — HR Executive
- About one in five postings are not real, as platform data was reported nationally — The Independent
Need a different cut? Every figure on this page comes from one index, so we can extract almost any slice on request — a city, a role, an industry, a time window, or a comparison between platforms. Tell us what you need at [email protected] and we will pull it, publish it with its method, and hand you the numbers. All we ask in return is a citation.
More data
- Ghost index
- Pay & listing age
- Blog: the ads that never come down
- Free tool: check one posting
- All datasets & measures
- State of Jobs — monthly report
- Data health — what our corpus can vouch for
- Request a custom cut
“Still listed” is a listing-age measure from the source publish date, not a verification that a role is open; link liveness is measured separately. The percentages are the October 2026 edition (full pass, measured 2026-10-06); the index counts are rebuilt by every nightly update, most recently 2026-11-06. Page generated 2026-11-06.