Of entry-level roles that state a minimum, 55% ask for two years or more and 28.3% 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 2 years, across 11,979 postings at 2,150 employers. Internships are not exempt: 18.9% of those that state a minimum ask for three 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 | 2,676 | 240 | 12.8% | 1 | 26.3% | 18.9% |
| Entry level | 11,979 | 2,150 | 18.2% | 2 | 55% | 28.3% |
| Mid level | 195,135 | 10,189 | 30.4% | 3 | 78.8% | 55.2% |
| Senior | 48,100 | 5,896 | 61.5% | 5 | 97.5% | 88.8% |
| Staff | 13,158 | 2,079 | 59.7% | 8 | 93.7% | 88.5% |
| Lead | 20,651 | 3,042 | 53.7% | 5 | 87.8% | 77.4% |
| Manager | 49,471 | 5,642 | 52.4% | 5 | 93.8% | 80.3% |
| Director | 22,175 | 4,177 | 62.2% | 8 | 99.4% | 96.8% |
| Exec | 1,185 | 572 | 48.8% | 7 | 98.6% | 92.6% |
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.
How this was measured
Every figure counts only postings that state a minimum, and the share that do is in the table. Across all open roles, fewer than four in ten carry a stated minimum at all, and the ones that do not are concentrated at the junior end: about 81.8% 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. That is the honest reading of a partial field, and it 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 →