Of entry-level roles that state a minimum, 44.8% ask for two years or more and 21.9% ask for three or more. JobShifu measures this by crawling employer applicant-tracking systems directly rather than buying a job feed, so the figure comes from the posting the employer published rather than from a board's copy of it.
The median entry-level minimum is 1 year, across 25,205 postings at 3,159 employers. Internships are not exempt: 8.4% of those that state a minimum ask for three years or more. The method changed on 2026-09-13, so this is not comparable with the edition of 2026-09-08 (54.8% of entry-level postings asking for two years or more).
By level
Every row counts only the postings that state a minimum. Share stating is how much of that level does, and it is the number to read the rest of the row against.
| Level | Postings | Employers | Share stating | Median | 2+ yrs | 3+ yrs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Internship | 3,563 | 398 | 9.3% | 1 | 23.5% | 8.4% |
| Entry level | 25,205 | 3,159 | 21.4% | 1 | 44.8% | 21.9% |
| Mid level | 354,503 | 10,195 | 39.9% | 2 | 70.7% | 47% |
| Senior | 77,660 | 6,695 | 70.3% | 5 | 96.6% | 88% |
| Staff | 19,496 | 2,374 | 70.6% | 8 | 98.3% | 94.2% |
| Lead | 27,162 | 3,535 | 63.7% | 5 | 90.2% | 79.7% |
| Manager | 81,913 | 6,536 | 58.7% | 5 | 89.5% | 76% |
| Director | 32,946 | 5,123 | 71.9% | 8 | 98.5% | 95.5% |
| Exec | 1,543 | 777 | 58.4% | 6 | 97.3% | 90.7% |
What a rate cannot tell you
A rate describes a market. It cannot tell you whether the posting you are looking at is one of them. That is a different question, and it is settled by one requisition's own crawl history: the date the posting was first seen, whether the same requisition was listed before, and how long it has been up since.
Check one posting → · Search open jobs → · See roles as employers open them →
Common questions
How many years of experience do entry-level jobs ask for?
Among entry-level postings that state a minimum, the median is 1 year. 44.8% ask for two years or more, 21.9% for three or more and 6.6% for five or more, across 25,205 postings at 3,159 employers, read from each employer's own job board.
How many entry-level postings state a years-of-experience requirement at all?
21.4% of entry-level postings state a minimum number of years. The other 78.6% say nothing about years, so the rates on this page describe the postings that do state one, not entry-level hiring as a whole.
Should you apply if an entry-level job asks for more experience than you have?
A posting cannot tell you how strictly the employer holds to its number, and neither can this data. What it does show is how common the ask is: 44.8% of entry-level postings that state a minimum ask for two years or more, so running into one that asks for more than you have is ordinary at this level.
How this was measured
The method changed on 2026-09-13. The extractor that reads stated experience was widened to read spelled-out minimums such as "at least one (1) year" and "two or more years". Most of what it added are one-year minimums, which the earlier version missed, so it overstated the junior figures. Editions before 2026-09-13, including the 54.8% of entry-level postings asking for two years or more published on 2026-09-08, were measured differently and are not comparable with this one.
Every figure counts only postings that state a minimum, and the share that do is in the table. Across all open roles, 44% carry a stated minimum at all, and the ones that do not are concentrated at the junior end: about 78.6% of entry-level postings say nothing about years. If the postings that do state a number are the more demanding ones, these figures read high. Low minimums are easy to miss, too: "one (1) year" and "two or more years" were not read at all before 2026-09-13, and a posting worded in a way the extractor still misses drops out of the count. Both effects push the figures up rather than down, which is why the denominator sits next to every rate rather than in a footnote.
Postings recorded as zero are excluded rather than counted as none. The extractor writes zero both when a posting genuinely asks for no experience and when it says nothing about experience at all, and nothing in the record separates the two. Counting them as none would mix silence into the answer and pull every figure down.
The level is read from the role's scope, not from its years. A posting's level comes from what the job is (who it manages, what it owns), so comparing that against the years it asks for is not circular. Both are read from the same posting in one pass, though, so a posting that leads with "5+ years" could nudge how its level was read.
Any figure resting on fewer than 25 postings, or fewer than 5 employers, is withheld rather than shown.
How long postings stay open → · How often postings are relisted →
Data and citation
Every figure above comes from one snapshot file, published so the numbers can be checked, replotted or reused: experience-required.json (JSON, updated 2026-10-04). It is the same file this page is built from, so there is no version of these numbers that is not in it.
License. CC BY 4.0. Use the figures anywhere, including commercially, as long as JobShifu is credited.
Cite as. JobShifu (2026). Years of experience requested by seniority band. https://jobshifu.com/research/experience-required