How long should a job posting stay up?
There is no standard: of 612,889 job postings we watched come down, half had been up 24 days or less, and the middle half between 11 and 46 days.
That is what employers actually do on their own careers sites. It is a description, not advice: how long a posting should stay up depends on the role, and nothing in a posting’s lifespan tells you whether it was the right length.
How long employers kept postings up
The middle half of removals ran from 11 to 46 days. The spread is the finding: there is no common interval after which employers take a posting down.
What is listed right now
Of the 530,865 postings we track that carry an employer’s date, the median has been listed 34 days, and 18.7% have been listed 90 days or longer. For the full distribution, see how long job postings stay listed.
Check a specific posting
Paste a job link to see whether Zeltru tracks the posting and how long it has been open, by the employer’s own posting date. No account needed.
What this doesn’t tell you
We see when a listing comes down, not why. A role filled in a week and one cancelled in a week look the same from a careers page, so these durations say nothing about how long hiring takes.
Our window is short. We count removals between July 24, 2026 and October 5, 2026, so postings that stay up for years are under-represented. The 24-day median is a floor on how long listings last, not an estimate of it.
It covers the employers we track. Only postings with an employer’s own date are counted, from the employers whose careers sites we read.
Related questions
- How long job postings stay listedThe full distribution of posting age across every board we crawl, with the industry breakdown.
- How long does it take to hear back after applying?Nobody can measure an employer's reply from outside. What can be measured is how long the posting lasts.
- Why am I not hearing back from jobs?How much of what is listed right now has been listed for a very long time, and what that does and does not explain.
- What does it mean when a job posting is taken down after an interview?How old postings are when they come down, how often they come back, and why removal is not a decision.
- How can I tell if a job listing has been reposted?How to check whether a listing came back as a new posting, how often a new one with the same title follows, and what that can't tell you.
- How many applications does it take to get a job?We cannot answer this one, and we say why. What we can show you is the size and staleness of what is open.
- Does the date on a job posting mean what it says?Most boards publish the date a listing went up. One publishes the date its record was created — and we mistook the two on our own homepage.
- What does it mean when a job posting stays up for months?How long a posting has been listed can be measured; why it is still up cannot. Here is the duration, and where the line sits.
- How long does the hiring process take?Posting lifespan is a floor on hiring time, not a measure of it. The difference matters and is explained.
- What can a job posting's age tell you?Why a posting is still up is not observable from a careers page. How long it has been up is. What the duration data supports, and what it does not.
- Why is a job still posted after I was rejected?How long listings stay up before they come down, measured, and why a listing that is still up says nothing about your application.
- Which US states have the most job postings?Active postings by state on employers' own careers sites, with a link to every state's job board.
Or look up a specific employer: browse the companies we track, open the job posting checker on its own page, see the longest-open postings, or read how these numbers are produced.