20.9% of dated open roles at 160 large employers have been up more than 90 days

In the week ending October 1, the median open role we can date had been up 51 days. In data, science, product and engineering, about a third of dated roles are past 90 days.

Correction, October 8, 2026: after this was published we found two errors in how the census counted. Some employers' career sites list postings from every country without saying where, and those were counted as US roles; and a posting whose title or place was edited was counted as one closed and one new. Both inflated the open, new, taken-down and repost figures, most of all for Accenture. The figures below are as first published. That week's recalculated figures →

What stands out this week

Many open roles at large employers are not new. Among the postings we can date, 20.9% have been open more than 90 days, and the median open role has been up 51 days. Ages are measured only on boards that date postings exactly. Boards that say no more than "30+ days" are left out.

At least 54,173 US roles were open at the 160 large employers we read in the week ending October 1. Twenty boards were only partly read, so that count is a floor.

This is the first week we can count new and closed roles, so there is no earlier week to set them against. The counts are 8,735 new, at least 5,220 closed and 1,836 reposts. Read them with one caution. Accenture accounts for 1,469 of the new roles and 1,469 of the closed, exactly the same number, and 966 of the reposts. We don't count matching numbers in and out as movement, so Accenture is not in the employer list below. Nor is any board that showed no new and no closed roles.

For scale, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 7.1 million job openings nationally in August. These 160 employers are a small, named slice of that, not the job market.

By kind of job

The roles that sit longest are in Data & analytics (38.7% open more than 90 days), Science & research (35.2%), Product & design (34.0%) and Engineering (33.3%). Sales follows at 29.7%.

Engineering is the largest named kind of job, with 12,607 roles open. Retail & stores is next with 8,646 open, 1,507 new and 540 closed.

Two kinds of job closed more roles than they opened:

Operations & management: 368 new, 406 closed.
Customer service: 55 new, 109 closed.

The new and closed counts by kind of job include Accenture's postings, which we can't separate out here. Closed counts are floors.

Few of these roles are remote: 3.3% overall. The share is highest in customer service and product & design (10.7% each) and data & analytics (10.4%), and lowest in retail (0.2%).

Senior roles

Director-level postings: 1,280 open, 169 new, 140 closed, and 20.0% open more than 90 days. Executive postings: 844 open, 94 new, 46 closed, and 22.0% over 90 days. Senior individual roles sit longest of the three, at 27.3% over 90 days. Director roles are remote more often than the rest, at 9.1%.

Where a range is stated, the median midpoint is $235,550 for director roles and $271,450 for executive roles. Read those with care. Pay is measured only on boards whose job list shows pay, and only 29.3% of the postings measured state it. This is the midpoint of posted ranges on those boards, not typical pay for all roles.

Employers with the most movement

Walmart posted 596 new roles and closed 615.
Wells Fargo posted 371 and closed 336.
Target posted 265 and closed 298. AT&T posted 185 and closed 220.
PepsiCo posted 236 and closed 166. Verizon posted 153 and closed 118.
On partly read boards the counts are floors, and closings aren't recorded: at least 732 new roles at Lowe's, 572 at RTX, 455 at Northrop Grumman, 426 at Starbucks, 347 at T-Mobile and 249 at Lockheed Martin.
Some boards are old throughout. At Palantir, the median posting has been up 428 days and 86.1% are past 90 days, with no new roles and 3 closed. At Databricks, the median is 111 days and 55.9% are past 90.

What these numbers cover

This is a count of 160 named employers, US postings only. It says nothing about employers we don't read. A repost is a signal worth noticing, not proof that a job isn't real. The boards we read only in part this week were Abbott, Booz Allen Hamilton, Boston Consulting Group, CVS Health, Citigroup, Costco, Deere & Company, HP, HPE, Lockheed Martin, Lowe's, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Northrop Grumman, PwC, Qualcomm, RTX, SLB, Starbucks and T-Mobile.

If you're job hunting

Check how long a role has been up before you spend an evening on it. A role open more than 90 days, or one that has been reposted, is worth a direct note to the recruiter asking if it's still being filled before you apply. Roles posted this week are worth applying to first.

Carbon Dean brings job seekers the new roles that fit their search each day.

Sources

From the employers' own career sites, US roles only. Figures for the very largest employers are minimums. All issues