Ghost Jobs in 2026: How Many Posts Stay Up for Months

Ghost jobs are real, but the popular numbers about them are mostly wrong. Nobody measures employer intent at scale. What can be measured is how long a job has been up. On 5 November 2026 we checked 250,259 live jobs on company career pages: 29% were posted more than 90 days ago, 14% more than 180 days ago, and 6% more than a year ago.

That doesn't mean 29% are fake. Some hiring really does take three months. But one in seven live job ads is half a year old, so before you write a cover letter it's worth knowing which ones those are. This guide covers what our data shows, what the well-known studies actually measured, how to check a posting in five minutes, and how a ghost job differs from a scam.

What is a ghost job?

A ghost job is a job ad for a role the company isn't actively trying to fill. Greenhouse, the applicant tracking system, defines it as a position advertised with no intent to hire.

Plenty of things get called ghost jobs that aren't quite that:

• Pipeline roles. "Always hiring" ads that collect CVs for future openings. Honest when labelled, misleading when they look like one open seat.
• Frozen roles. A real opening whose budget was pulled, and nobody took the ad down.
• Internal hires. The role is real, but a colleague already has it lined up and the ad is there to meet a policy.
• Compliance ads. In the US, the PERM green card process requires employers to advertise a role before they can sponsor someone already in it.
• Forgotten ads. The job was filled weeks ago and the listing lives on, often on a job board that copied it.

From the applicant's side they look the same: you apply and nothing happens.

How many job postings are months old?

Here is what we found across 250,259 live jobs on company career pages, from the posted date each company gives:

Posted	Share of live jobs
Within the last 30 days	39%
30 to 90 days ago	32%
More than 90 days ago	29%
More than 180 days ago	14%
More than a year ago	6%

Some of the oldest ads are honest about it. They say "multiple openings" or "talent pool" and are meant to stay up. Many don't say anything, and that's where the trouble is.

Now compare that with how long jobs stay up once they do close. We watched 142,664 jobs open and close between 20 August and 5 November 2026. Half came down within 12 days. A quarter were gone in three days, and three-quarters within 26 days. That window is only 11 weeks long, so it can't see the slowest searches. Still, it shows the difference: most jobs that get filled or cancelled disappear within a month, while almost a third of what's open right now has been up for three months or more.

Do some hiring systems have more old postings than others?

Yes, and the gap is large. This is the same data split by the applicant tracking system behind the careers page:

System	Live jobs	Posted over 90 days ago	Over 180 days	Median age
Greenhouse	64,097	34%	18%	56 days
Workday	57,886	15%	5%	29 days
Ashby	43,825	39%	17%	64 days
SmartRecruiters	29,805	30%	19%	37 days
Lever	11,811	44%	28%	71 days

Two cautions before reading too much into it. Startups use Ashby and Lever heavily, and startups often post a role early and hire slowly. And some systems, Workday among them, show a new posted date when a company reposts a job, so a "fresh" Workday date proves less than it looks. The posted date tells you when the company last published the ad, not when it started looking.

By role, software engineering (34% older than 90 days) and AI and machine learning (36%) have the most old postings. Finance (22%) and project management (23%) have the fewest. Internships are the freshest of all, with only 16% older than 90 days, because they follow a hiring calendar.

What do the famous ghost job statistics actually say?

Most of the numbers you've seen are real studies, quoted as something they never measured. The ones that come up most:

Claim you'll see	Where it's from	What it actually measured
"40% of job postings are fake"	ResumeBuilder, June 2024	40% of hiring managers surveyed said their company posted a fake job in the past year. A share of companies, not of ads.
"18-22% of jobs are ghost jobs"	Greenhouse, December 2024	Postings on Greenhouse classified as ghost jobs in a quarter. Their method isn't public.
"27.4% of LinkedIn jobs are ghosts"	ResumeUp.AI, September 2025	LinkedIn listings older than 30 days. An age cut-off, not proof of intent. Not a LinkedIn study.
"34% of UK jobs are ghost jobs"	StandOut CV, updated March 2025	Indeed UK ads tagged "30+ days" in May and June 2023.
"30% of openings go nowhere"	MyPerfectResume, November 2025	Government job openings minus monthly hires. Those two numbers don't measure the same thing, so the gap isn't a count of fake ads.

The best counterweight comes from Ashby, which can see what happened to each job. In its 2025 analysis, 82% of its customers' open jobs in 2024 were filled, and 97.5% of jobs at companies with 50 or more staff moved someone into interviews. A job that isn't filled isn't automatically fake. Budgets get frozen and searches fail.

The US Congressional Research Service put it plainly in April 2025: there are no official statistics on how many ghost jobs exist. Our numbers don't fix that either. They measure age, which is the part anyone can check.

How long should a real job stay open?

Longer than most ghost job checklists assume. Ashby's 2026 benchmarks, built from 93,000 jobs, put the median time to fill a technical role at 75 days, against 60 for business roles. Junior roles took 52 days, senior roles 71. SmartRecruiters' 2025 report gives a global median of 38 days from application to hire.

So a 30-day rule throws out real engineering jobs. We'd use these rough lines instead:

• Under 60 days: normal for almost any role.
• 60 to 120 days: normal for senior and technical roles, slow for junior or sales roles.
• Over 180 days and not labelled as a pool or "multiple openings": check before you apply.

How can you tell if a job posting is real?

No single sign proves a job is fake. Four checks together get you most of the way, and they take about five minutes:

1. Find it on the company's own careers page. If the role is on LinkedIn or a job board but not on the company's site, it's probably closed. Most companies post first on their own system, which is usually Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby or Workday (here's how those systems work).
2. Check when it was first posted. Look at the date on the careers page, not the board. Compare it with the guide above for that kind of role.
3. Look for an owner and a date. A real opening usually names a team, a hiring manager or a start date. "Join our talent community" is a pool, which is fine as long as you know that's what it is.
4. Ask once you're talking to someone. "Is headcount approved for this role, and when do you expect to decide?" A recruiter with a real opening will answer straight away.

One thing that doesn't prove much: getting an interview. ResumeBuilder found that some companies that admitted to fake listings still interviewed people for them.

Applying on the company's own site also helps for another reason. You reach the system the recruiter actually reads, instead of a copy on a board that may be weeks out of date. That's why landed only applies through company career pages, and why the job board shows when each role was posted.

Is a ghost job the same as a job scam?

No, and mixing them up is how people lose money. A ghost job wastes your time: a real company, a role it isn't filling. A scam is after your money or your identity: someone pretending to be a recruiter.

In India the scams are common and organised. In an Indeed India survey of 1,161 people, reported in July 2026, 93% said they had come across suspicious or fraudulent job offers and 3% said they had lost money. The government's cybercrime centre blocked more than 100 websites running "task-based" part-time job fraud, which typically starts on WhatsApp or Telegram.

The signs of a scam are different from the signs of a ghost job:

• They ask you to pay for anything: training, a "registration fee", equipment, or a deposit to unlock tasks.
• They want your bank details, Aadhaar or PAN before an interview.
• The offer comes fast, over WhatsApp or Telegram, with no interview.
• The email comes from a Gmail address or a domain that doesn't match the company.

If you see any of those, stop and contact the company through the details on its own website. In India, report it on the cybercrime helpline 1930 or at cybercrime.gov.in.

Are ghost jobs illegal?

Mostly not yet. Here is where the rules stood in November 2026:

Where	Status	What it requires
Ontario, Canada	In force since 1 January 2026	Employers with 25 or more staff must say whether an advertised vacancy exists, and tell interviewed candidates within 45 days whether a decision was made.
New Jersey	Bill, not law	Would make employers take filled ads down and say whether a vacancy is real.
New York	Passed both houses, not signed	Would require a hiring timeline and vacancy status for employers with 100 or more staff.
California and Kentucky	Bills, stalled	Disclosure (California) or a ban with penalties (Kentucky).
US federal	A private draft	The "Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act" is a proposal by a working group, not a bill in force.
India	No specific rule	Fraud is covered by general cybercrime law; ghost listings are not regulated.

Job boards have their own rules. LinkedIn's posting guidelines require real, current openings, and Indeed's policy bans jobs "without a definite hiring need". Neither publishes how many listings it removes.

How we counted

We read every live job in landed's index on 5 November 2026: 250,259 roles, collected directly from company career pages on Greenhouse, Workday, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Lever and other hiring systems, with duplicates removed. Age is measured from the posted date each company publishes. The closing figures cover 142,664 jobs we first saw after 20 August 2026 that had closed by 5 November, measured from the first time we saw each one to the last.

These numbers describe age, not intent. We don't claim to know which jobs are ghosts. We'll update this page each month with the same method.