State of Jobs — October 2026 archive

Key figures

How old are the listings?

Median open posting is 41 days old, measured across 6,897,072 postings with a publish date.

These are listing ages from the publication date the source platform reports — not a confirmation that the role is still open. A long-listed posting is the classic ghost-job signal; we measure listing age here, publish how much of the market is 90+ days old and still being served, and verify liveness separately (see the data-health report).

Pay transparency by country

How many postings state what they pay, and how many stay open past 60 days.

Who hides pay — by job family

Share of postings that state a pay figure, per job family (title keywords).

Which platforms post what

Postings per hiring platform, with pay disclosure and how stale they get.

Stated salaries (USD, annualized)

653,545 US postings state a yearly figure; 420,711 quote an hourly rate and 376,485 an annual salary.

How we measure

This edition measures every posting in the index instead of sampling: every crawled record was de-duplicated (101,740 duplicate records dropped) and all of them measured. 6,897,072 postings carry an employer publish date (528,998 do not), 535,557 companies and 217,015 cities appear in the index.

Remote, hybrid or on-site?

5.9% of postings say which arrangement they are. Of those that say: 55.5% fully remote, 36.7% hybrid, 7.8% on-site. The rest do not state it either way — a silence, not a preference.

Does remote pay more or less?

Mean stated annual pay (US-dollar postings that state a figure) for fully remote postings vs every other posting. Stated pay only — not a modelled estimate.

How useful is a stated pay range?

6.4% of postings state an actual minimum and maximum. 12.1% of those ranges are wider than $50,000 — a range that wide tells a candidate almost nothing. A further 5.8% talk about pay without ever stating a figure (“competitive salary”, “DOE”).

Posted by an employer or a recruiter?

5.9% of postings come from a staffing agency or recruiting firm (matched on the company name and the platform), not a direct employer. They state pay 20.3% of the time.

Visa sponsorship and work authorisation

Share of postings that explicitly offer sponsorship, and share that demand an existing right to work or citizenship. Keyword-based; most postings say nothing either way.

Compliance wording (EEO and pay-transparency law)

Share of postings carrying equal-opportunity boilerplate, and share using the pay-transparency phrasing that US state laws and the EU directive require (“pay range”, “compensation range”).

Which postings mention AI?

2.2% of postings mention AI or a related technology (LLM, ChatGPT, Copilot, machine learning, prompt engineering…).

The same job on several boards

7.7% of postings repeat a job we already saw under the same employer, title and place from a different platform — the same vacancy listed more than once. Duplicates across boards are indexed once per listing here, so the market is smaller than the count suggests.

Seniority and entry-level share

Seniority from the job title (senior/lead/principal/director vs junior/intern/entry). 12.9% of postings state a years-of-experience requirement; of those, 20.6% ask for one year or less.

Do job titles oversell the job?

0.1% of postings — roughly one in a thousand — carry a title that outranks the work: a hype word, a ceremonial office title, or a rank bolted onto a plainly junior role. The matching is deliberately narrow, so read this as a floor, not an estimate. Most common: “guru” (hype word) — 1,431, “lead” on a junior role — 1,147, “senior” on a junior role — 525.

How much of the market is not in English?

21.4% of postings are not written in English. Detected from the script, common non-English job-ad words and accented text — a coarse heuristic, not a language model, and it is reported as such.

How concentrated is hiring?

The largest employers post a disproportionate share of everything we index. HHI is the standard concentration index (10,000 = one employer posts everything).

Most requested skills

Curated skill keywords most often named in titles and descriptions.

What's hiring right now — most common job-title terms

Top hiring companies

Where the jobs are — top countries

Top cities

Top sources (hiring platforms)

Methodology: this edition is a full-corpus pass, not a sample — every crawled record was de-duplicated (101,740 duplicate records dropped), and all of them were measured. Salary coverage counts postings whose own text states a pay figure (regex extraction, model-independent). Listing age uses the employer publish stamp, country and role breakdowns use the same location/title parse as the search index. Postings are aggregated from public ATS/board feeds; figures are indicative, not exhaustive. Every measure and the signals only we produce are in the data library, and coverage/liveness in the data-health report. Refreshed October 2026.