How can you tell if a job posting is real?

You can't confirm it from the posting alone. Age is one input you can check: of 524,322 live postings we track, 19.1% have been listed 90 days or longer. A long-listed posting is worth weighing before you invest hours in an application, but it is not proof of anything.

What percentage of job postings are fake?

We don't know, and we won't publish a figure. Producing one would mean knowing what employers intended, which no public dataset contains. Any percentage you see quoted for this is either from a survey of recruiters' self-reports or is uncited.

Do companies post fake jobs?

Q: Do companies post fake jobs?

Whether a posting is "fake" depends on the employer's intent, which cannot be observed from outside. We measure how long postings stay listed and when they come down, and nothing in that data distinguishes a posting nobody means to fill from a role that is simply hard to hire for. We don't publish an estimate we can't support.

We can’t answer that, and we won’t pretend to. “Fake” is a claim about what an employer intended, and intent is not visible on a careers page. There is no measurement — ours or anyone else’s — that separates a posting nobody means to fill from a role that has simply proved hard to hire for.

What is measurable: 19.1% of the 524,322 postings we track have been listed 90 days or longer, and 4.4% for a year or longer. That is a fact about duration. It is not a fake-job rate, and the difference between those two sentences is the entire subject of this page.

524,322 live postings1,077 employers we crawl dailyas of September 8, 2026How we measure

Why intent isn't measurable from outside

Everything we collect comes from employers’ own public careers pages: what is listed, the date the employer gives for it, and the day it stops appearing. That is enough to say how long something was advertised. It is not enough to say why.

Consider two postings, both listed for eight months. In one, the role was cancelled in month two and nobody took the listing down. In the other, the employer has interviewed eleven people and not found the right one. From a careers page these are byte-for-byte indistinguishable. Any site that tells you which is which has decided rather than measured.

The reasons commonly offered for keeping listings up — building a candidate pool, projecting growth, satisfying an internal policy that roles be advertised — are things people report, not things we observe. We pass them on as claims and don’t attach numbers to them.

What the duration data does support

32 days

Median age of the 524,322 live postings we track

19.1%

Listed 90 days or longer (99,913 postings)

19,136

Postings that came down and went back up, July 24, 2026 – September 8, 2026; no fleet read on August 23, 2026, August 31, 2026; 4 more days not confirmed complete (see Methodology)

Two things are worth saying plainly. First, the majority of what we track is recent and unremarkable — the median posting has been up 32 days. Second, there is a persistent tail that does not clear: 99,913 listings at three months or more, and the oldest currently at 5,010 days.

The removal data adds a wrinkle rather than a verdict. Of 267,708 postings we watched come down, 19,136 later reappeared under the same listing. That is a real pattern with several possible causes, and we can distinguish the pattern without being able to distinguish the causes.

What you can do instead of guessing

Check the age. It is the one input available to you before you spend an evening on an application, and unlike a fakeness verdict it is a fact. Paste any posting below and we’ll tell you how long it has been listed and whether it is still up.

You can also look at the longest-open postings we track, read what people mean by a ghost job, or see how we date and count postings.

Check how long a posting has been listed

What this doesn’t tell you

Nothing here is an estimate of how many postings are fake. We publish how long listings have been up. Reading a duration figure as a fakeness figure substitutes a definition for a measurement, and we would be doing that on behalf of employers we name elsewhere on this site.

Long-lived postings have ordinary explanations. Specialist roles with small candidate pools, approvals that sit with someone for months, hiring freezes that arrive after a listing goes up, and listings nobody remembers to remove all look the same from outside.

We name no employer on this page. Not as an example, not as a counter-example. Our company pages publish posting counts and ages and let readers draw their own conclusions; that is a different thing from associating a company with this question.