Skip to main content
Job Lobster Research

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

Job Lobster 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.
Read the study →
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.
Read the study →
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.
Read the study →
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.
Read the study →
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.
Read the study →
+38%
The AI salary premium
Postings that mention AI advertise $155K vs $112K — a premium that survives seniority and profession controls, but shrinks to 7.5% at entry level. Plus: pay by AI tool named.
Read the study →

Methodology

Job Lobster 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 Job Lobster’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.

See which live roles fit you → Explore the free career tools