The CoBlack Index: three in ten open jobs are at least 90 days old, July 2026

Three in ten have been open for 90 days

A job posting that has been up for three months is telling you something. This month, CoBlack counted how many of them there are.

CoBlack maintains its own database of job postings, ingested directly from employer hiring systems and re-verified against those systems every night. In the July snapshot, 139,054 postings from 9,540 employers were confirmed live at the source. Of those, 42,019, or 30.2 percent, were posted at least 90 days earlier. More than half, 54.4 percent, had been open for at least 30 days. One posting in fifteen, 6.5 percent, had been open for six months or more.

The median verified open posting is 33 days old. These are not dead links or expired pages. Every one of them was still accepting applications at the employer's own careers site when it was last checked.

Where the old postings pool

Age is not spread evenly. In defense and space manufacturing, 44.7 percent of open postings are at least 90 days old. Mental health care is close behind at 43.5 percent, and business consulting at 39.4 percent. At the other end, advertising services carries the freshest inventory, with 19.2 percent of postings past 90 days, followed by internet and technology companies at 20.9 percent and biotechnology at 23.2 percent. Software development, the largest sector in the corpus, sits at 27 percent.

An old posting is not automatically a ghost job. Some roles genuinely take months to fill, and clearance-heavy industries like defense run long by nature. But the applicant experience is the same either way: the longer a posting has been open, the more applications have already passed through it, and the weaker the signal that anyone is actively hiring against it.

Postings die young, then linger

The other half of the story is how fast postings disappear. In CoBlack's nightly verification sweeps through mid July, each sweep confirmed between roughly 3,300 and 6,500 postings closed at the source since the sweep before.

The scale of that decay shows most clearly in one number. When CoBlack ran its first full verification pass on July 5 over 334,712 postings collected since late March, 179,620 of them, 53.7 percent, had already closed at the employer's system. Postings gathered over a single spring, and more than half were gone before summer.

Put the two findings together and the market has a barbell shape. Most postings close within weeks. A stubborn third of what remains sits open for a quarter of a year or longer. A job board that does not re-check its listings drifts toward the dead half. A job seeker applying from stale listings inherits that drift as silence.

One in three will not say what it pays

Of the 139,054 verified open postings, 92,564 carry a stated pay figure or range on the listing. That is 66.6 percent. One posting in three still says nothing about pay.

Disclosure splits sharply by industry. Mental health care postings state pay 85.7 percent of the time, biotechnology 85.5 percent, and defense and space manufacturing 78 percent. Medical practices disclose on just 41.1 percent of postings, IT services and consulting on 55.2 percent, and real estate on 57.9 percent. Two health adjacent sectors, mental health care and medical practices, sit at opposite ends of the same table.

CoBlack sources postings only from validated employer career pages and applicant tracking feeds, verifies them nightly, and removes the ones that die. The point of this Index is the same point that drives the product: a job search should start from what is real. The postings above are the ones that are.

Methodology

The CoBlack Index is computed from CoBlack's production job database. Postings are ingested directly from employer hiring systems on the Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby platforms, never scraped from job boards or aggregators. This edition analyzes 139,054 active postings from 9,540 employers, snapshotted on July 21, 2026.

A posting counts as open only if its listing was live at the employer's own careers system in the most recent nightly verification sweep, completed July 21. About one percent of postings returned transient check errors in that sweep and rest on the July 18 sweep instead. Posting ages come from the posted date each employer's system reports and are measured as of July 14, 2026, the last date new postings were added, so the age shares are not inflated by the collection pause that followed.

Exclusions: 1,000 postings from Workday sit outside the verification sweep and were removed from the analysis. Industry figures are reported only for industries with at least 1,500 postings from at least 50 employers where no single employer holds more than 30 percent of the postings, so one company cannot move a sector's number.

Known limits: collection began in late March 2026 and paused during part of April, so postings first published in April are underrepresented; this mainly affects the 60 to 90 day band, which is why the Index reports 30, 90, and 180 day thresholds. Pay disclosure counts postings whose listing carries a machine readable figure or range; pay stated only in free text may be missed, so true disclosure could run slightly higher. The corpus skews toward employers on modern hiring systems and is 60.5 percent on-site, 20.1 percent hybrid, and 19.2 percent remote or remote friendly, so shares describe this corpus, not the entire economy.