The median open job has been open for 52 days

Job boards present every listing as equally live. They are not. We hold 10,305 open roles from 57 companies, refreshed every six hours from the employers' own pages, so we can say exactly how long each has been sitting there. The median is 52 days.

That is the middle. Half of everything open right now has been open longer than seven weeks.

The distribution

• Posted today — 1%
• In the last week — 8%
• 8 to 30 days — 24%
• 31 to 90 days — 34%
• 91 to 180 days — 16%
• Over 180 days — 17%

A quarter of live listings are more than four months old. One in six has been open for over half a year. The 90th percentile is 247 days, and the oldest roles still on these boards were posted in 2023.

Why a job stays open for months

Rarely because nobody applied. The usual reasons, roughly in order of how often we see them:

• It is an evergreen requisition. Large companies keep a standing posting for roles they hire continuously, and it never closes.
• It was filled and nobody took it down. Removing the listing is somebody's job and it is nobody's priority.
• Headcount was frozen. The role is real, the budget is paused, and the posting outlives the plan.
• The bar is genuinely hard to clear, and they will wait.
• It is a pipeline posting, collecting candidates for a role that is not open yet.

Only one of those means the job is fake. The rest mean it is real but the timeline is not what the posting implies.

Age varies more by company than by role

Among companies with more than 60 openings, the difference is stark.

• Palantir — 321 roles, median age 456 days
• Scale AI — 203 roles, median age 122 days
• Databricks — 887 roles, median age 96 days
• Lyft — 175 roles, median age 31 days
• Elastic — 384 roles, median age 31 days
• Spotify — 79 roles, median age 33 days

A Palantir listing being fifteen months old is not a signal about that specific job. It is how that company runs its board. The same age at Lyft, where the median is 31 days, would be unusual and worth noticing.

So should you apply to old postings?

Yes, but with your expectations set correctly. A four-month-old posting at a company whose whole board is four months old is ordinary. A four-month-old posting at a company that otherwise turns over in three weeks is a role that has stalled, and a slower or less certain process.

The practical move is to apply to the fresh ones first. A posting from this week is one where the hiring manager is actively reading, the requisition is definitely funded, and you are early in the pile rather than candidate 400. Where effort is limited, spend it there.

This is also the honest argument for automating the rest. Applying to a three-month-old posting is a low-probability action with a non-zero payoff, which makes it exactly the kind of thing worth doing when it costs you almost nothing and not worth doing when it costs you an evening.

How we counted

All 10,305 active listings on 57 company career boards on 27 September 2026, aged from the posted date the employer publishes. 131 listings — 1.3% — are more than three years old; excluding them moves the median by a single day, so they are left in. Medians rather than means throughout, because a handful of very old postings would otherwise drag the average somewhere unrepresentative.