Two in three job postings are over a month old, a HiringNow study finds.

On October 4, 2026 we read every open posting on the public job boards of 1,035 employers, across six hiring systems. Each system records when a posting was first published. Counting from that date, the median posting was 54 days old. A quarter were younger than 20 days, and a quarter were older than 139 days.

Very little of what is listed is new. 10% of postings had gone up in the previous seven days, and 34% in the previous 30. At the other end, 35% had been open for more than 90 days and 10% for more than a year.

The median differs by system, from 26 to 151 days, but on 5 of the 6 more than half of open postings were over 30 days old. The result also holds employer by employer: among the 821 employers with at least five openings, the typical employer's median posting was 53 days old, and at 80% of them it was more than 30 days old. So the result is not the work of a few large employers.

Greenhouse publishes two dates for every posting: when it was first published and when it was last updated. That lets us see how often an old job carries a recent date. Across 32,822 open Greenhouse postings, the median posting was first published 53 days before we read it, and last updated 6 days before.

51% of the postings had been updated in the past seven days. Only 9% had been posted in that time. Among postings more than 30 days old, 45% had been updated within the past week.

We can't see from outside what each update was: a change to the text, to the settings, or something the system does by itself. What the numbers do show is that any site or alert that orders jobs by their last-updated date will present about half of all postings as this week's, when fewer than one in ten are.

To test this we needed job boards that publish their listings as open data, with the date each listing went up. Six do. We collected 4,123 of their newest listings and matched each to the same job on the employer's own hiring system, by company name and exact job title. 1,025 listings from 474 employers matched one posting and no other. Nearly all of them had been dated by the board within the previous seven days.

For those listings, the employer's first-published date was a median of 9.5 days earlier than the date on the board. 17% of listings were dated within a day of the employer's posting, and 32% were dated more than 30 days after it.

The boards differ a great deal. Arbeitnow dated its listings a median of 1.9 days after the employer; Himalayas dated its listings a median of 84.5 days after the employer; Jobicy dated its listings a median of 54.3 days after the employer. A late date can mean the board found the job late, or that it gave an old listing a new date; from outside we can't tell which. For a job seeker the effect is the same: 52% of these listings were for jobs the employer had posted more than a week before the date shown.

We did not measure this. LinkedIn and Indeed do not offer open data, and LinkedIn's terms do not allow automated reading of its pages, so their listings are not in our sample. What follows is what each company, and the hiring systems that feed them, publish about their own timing.

Put together, the published figures describe a free LinkedIn listing that arrives between several hours and two days after the employer posts the job: the hiring system refreshes its feed (LinkedIn recommends every 12 hours), LinkedIn collects it (every six hours), and the hiring systems themselves tell customers to allow up to 48 hours. Listings sent through LinkedIn's direct integrations can appear at once. LinkedIn also renews listings fed from a hiring system every 30 days, which is one way an old job can come to look recent.

On weekdays, and on no weekday in particular. Of 22,728 postings that went up in the four weeks before we collected the data, 98% were posted Monday to Friday. No day stood out: each took close to a fifth. If there is a best day to look for new jobs, it is every working day.