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JobLobster Research

Primary-source studies from 558,596 live job postings.

JobLobster continuously indexes job ads directly from employer applicant-tracking systems. These studies count what employers actually write in their postings — no surveys, no panels, no vibes. Free to cite with a link; custom cuts for journalists usually same-day: hello@joblobster.ai.

28.5%
AI skills in job postings, 2026
AI requirements have left the engineering department — and senior roles demand them 3× more than entry-level. Plus: which AI tools employers name.
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41.9%
The salary transparency report
Who shows the money in 2026 — and why remote employers are ~1.5× more transparent than on-site ones. Median posted pay for 17 professions.
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15.9%
The remote-work map, mid-2026
Fully-remote is now 1 in 6 openings. Where remote survived, where hybrid won, and which professions went back to the office.
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1.3%
The entry-level squeeze
Only 7,250 of 558,596 live postings carry a beginner title — and 41% of entry-level ads still demand 2+ years of experience.
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70% vs 44%
Do pay-transparency laws work?
Salary disclosure in posting-law states vs the rest, across 31 metros and 25 states — plus Virginia’s pre-law baseline, days before its law took effect.
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Methodology

JobLobster maintains a live index of job postings pulled directly from public employer applicant-tracking-system feeds (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and others) — primary-source ads, not scraped aggregator copies. This analysis covers all 558,596 postings active in the corpus during the first week of July 2026. Professions come from JobLobster’s deterministic role classifier; work modes from posting metadata (postings with unknown mode are excluded from mode shares); salary figures use only postings that disclose numeric bands. The corpus skews toward North American professional roles; percentages describe this corpus, not the entire global labor market. Full AI-skills companion study: AI skills in job postings, 2026.

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