The number nobody has

We spent part of September 2026 tracing the ghost-job percentages that circulate online back to their sources, reading the cited documents rather than the articles citing them, and not one trail ended at a measurement. The most honest statement we found came from Congress’s own research service, and it is not a number. It is a sentence.

The sentence Congress’s researchers wrote

The Congressional Research Service, Congress’s own non-partisan research agency, published an explainer titled “Ghost” Job Postings (In Focus IF12977) on April 25, 2025. Its authors, labor policy analyst Elizabeth Weber Handwerker and legislative attorney Alexander H. Pepper, state it plainly: “There are no official statistics on the magnitude of ghost jobs.” The explainer is standing documentation, unchanged since publication; we re-verified it against the live PDF in late September 2026.

CRS also examined where the circulating estimates come from. “The firms behind these studies market hiring-related services, including job posting verification tools. They have released varying levels of information regarding the methodologies of the surveys and analyses, making it difficult to assess the quality of ghost job prevalence estimates based on these data.”

The one hard number in the explainer belongs to a different problem. Reports of job and employment agency scams nearly tripled from 2020 to 2024; the figure sits in the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network database, and CRS is careful to keep scams separate from ghost jobs. A scam has no employer behind it, only an impersonator. A ghost job is a real employer’s posting with no live vacancy behind it.

Where the trails ended

Our own tracing, stated as generally as honesty allows, found that the circulating figures end in one of two places. Some end at surveys run by firms selling hiring-related services, which is exactly the concern CRS raised. And some end nowhere at all. One widely repeated sector figure is attributed to a law review article that does not contain it; we know because we read the full article. Numbers passed from page to page, each citation pointing at another citation, gaining authority at every step while the source stayed missing. That is the current state of ghost job statistics.

What the official openings count measures

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has addressed how its own openings count is built. On August 28, 2026, BLS published “Debunking common misconceptions about the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey” in its Monthly Labor Review, written by Larry Akinyooye, Mark Crankshaw and Sean McIllece. “JOLTS is an establishment-based survey that collects data directly from the sampled establishments,” the authors write. “JOLTS relies on job openings data collected directly from businesses, not from external sources such as online job boards.” On postings without vacancies behind them, the paper says the JOLTS job openings measure “is unlikely to be substantially impacted.”

BLS is not saying ghost jobs are fine. It is saying its survey counts openings reported by employers, not job ads.

What we can say instead

CoBlack sources openings only from validated employer career pages and ATS feeds. That lets us offer facts about specific postings rather than a confident rate about all postings everywhere. When someone asks us how many job postings are ghosts, the answer we hold ourselves to is a sentence, not a percentage: a number without a source is not a fact.

So here is the honest limit. None of this tells anyone how many ghost jobs exist. CoBlack cannot count them either. Nobody can, yet. The problem is real; people apply to postings that go nowhere, and their evenings are really spent. What is missing is the measurement, not the harm.

Until someone builds that measurement, the truthful answer to the ghost-job question is the one Congress’s researchers already wrote, and we would rather repeat their sentence than invent our percentage.