DeUnemployment  ·  Data library

How often do employers mention a visa, a work permit or another language?

Global hiring is discussed far more than it is advertised. We counted how often postings mention visa sponsorship, demand that you already have the right to work, or simply are not written in English — and we report the silence too, because the silence is the point.

Key figures

Measure
Mention visa sponsorship0.7%about 1 in 143 postings
Require existing work authorisation0.4%you must already have the right to work
Not written in English23.5%heuristic language detection
Written in English76.5%
Countries with open roles82as reported by the source platform

Frequently asked

Does silence mean no sponsorship?

No — and that is the finding. Most postings say nothing either way: 0.7% mention sponsorship, 0.4% ask for existing authorisation, and the rest are simply quiet. If you need sponsorship, the posting usually will not tell you; you have to ask.

How is language detected?

Heuristically, from the posting text. It reliably separates English from non-English, but does not name the specific language.

Why does this matter?

Because it sets the odds. 23.5% of postings are not written in English, so a job search is less monolingual than it looks — and the visa question is almost never answered up front.

Sources & citation. Measured over the September 2026 edition record set — full-corpus pass (measured 2026-09-15), not a sample — and 25,080 probed links. The index holds 7,415,865 postings, 3,624,739 of them live with a full description. License CC BY 4.0. Data: JSON · CSV · data health · methodology.
Press, research and custom cuts: [email protected] · Cite as: DeUnemployment, “Visas, work authorisation and language in job postings — 2026-09-20”, https://deunemployment.com/data/working-across-borders (2026-09-20).

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

“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 September 2026 edition (full pass, measured 2026-09-15); the index counts are rebuilt by every nightly update, most recently 2026-09-20. Page generated 2026-09-21.