The common "30 days" answer is a listing limit, not a lifespan: rechecked daily on employers' own career pages, 56% to 69% of postings were still listed 27 days after they first appeared, measured to 2026-09-15. Between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 are gone within two weeks, and there is no day when postings suddenly drop off.
JobShifu measures this by crawling employer applicant-tracking systems directly rather than buying a job feed, so it sees a requisition appear on the employer's own board and checks each day whether it is still there. After three weeks, 62% to 76% of postings are still up. For the one posting you have open, the job-status checker shows when the crawl first saw it and whether it is still listed.
Share still listed, day by day
- Boards read whole (Greenhouse, Ashby, iCIMS, SuccessFactors, Taleo), about 180,000 postings
- All direct employer sources, about 1,150,000 postings. Likely an understatement.
- Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever, 60-day boards, followed to day 42: a smaller sample of about 3,770 postings, mostly technology employers
At a glance
| Sources | Postings | Day 7 | Day 14 | Day 21 | Day 27 | Day 40 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All direct employer sources | ~1,150,000 | 82.9% | 71.1% | 61.5% | 55.6% | Not measured |
| Boards read whole | ~180,000 | 91.9% | 83.9% | 75.7% | 68.9% | Not measured |
| Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever, 60-day boards | ~3,770 | 88.2% | 81.7% | 75.2% | 69.4% | 58.5% |
"Not measured" is a limit of the crawl, not a gap in the market: the two broad groups are cut at day 27 so both describe the same window, and past it some providers in the all-sources group can no longer be observed. The last row is a smaller sample of postings first seen 2026-08-01 to 2026-08-15, mostly from technology employers.
Use the date to check, not to rule a job out
These are historical crawler observations, not a deadline for applying. A disappearance can reflect a removed listing, a temporary availability problem or a later return. The estimate does not distinguish all of those events, and it does not measure when a vacancy was filled. Treat the exact percentages as observation-based estimates, not hiring probabilities.
- Find the same job ID and location on the employer's careers site.
- Check the application form and any explicit closing date. A live description alone does not show that applications are accepted.
- If the route is open and your experience fits, apply and keep searching. If the employer says it is closed, look for another opening.
Use the job-status checker to inspect the available observations. For a practical decision checklist, read is a three-week-old job worth applying to?
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 long do job postings stay up?
Most are still up four weeks later. Rechecked daily on employers' own career pages, 56% to 69% of postings were still listed 27 days after they first appeared, and 71% to 84% after two weeks. On Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever boards with a 60-day window, a smaller sample that skews toward technology roles, 57% were still listed at day 42. These are crawler-observed availability estimates, not hiring outcomes. Temporary disappearance and later return can affect them; check the employer's current application route before deciding.
Should I apply to a job that was posted a month ago?
Usually it is worth checking. On the boards that can be followed past four weeks (Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever with a 60-day window), 67% of postings were still listed at day 30 and 57% at day 42. That sample is small and skews toward technology roles, so read it as a sign that a month-old posting is often still open, and confirm on the employer's own page. These are crawler-observed availability estimates, not hiring outcomes. Temporary disappearance and later return can affect them; check the employer's current application route before deciding.
Is a three-week-old job posting still open?
Usually. 62% to 76% of postings were still listed on the employer's own career page 21 days after they first appeared. The posting in front of you may be one of the others, so check the employer's page for that job before spending time on an application. These are crawler-observed availability estimates, not hiring outcomes. Temporary disappearance and later return can affect them; check the employer's current application route before deciding.
Why do other sources say job postings close much faster?
Two measurement problems both make postings look shorter-lived. Averaging only the postings that have already closed leaves out the long-lived ones that are still up. And a crawler that stops reading a posting at about 30 days records it as gone at about 30 days, because several applicant tracking systems stop listing a posting's exact age after a month. An earlier version of this page had the second problem. These figures use a Kaplan-Meier survival estimate and stop each group of sources at the last day all of them can still be observed. These are crawler-observed availability estimates, not hiring outcomes. Temporary disappearance and later return can affect them; check the employer's current application route before deciding.
How long after a job is posted is it too late to apply?
There is no cutoff date to be late against. 83% to 92% of postings are still on the employer's own board after a week, 71% to 84% after two weeks, 62% to 76% after three and 56% to 69% at four weeks. The share falls a little each day, and there is no day when postings suddenly drop off. These are crawler-observed availability estimates, not hiring outcomes. Temporary disappearance and later return can affect them; check the employer's current application route before deciding.
What does it mean if a job is no longer posted?
It means the requisition came off the employer's own board, which covers a filled role, a cancelled one and a paused one without separating them. It is also not always final: about one in 23 of the open roles counted in the companion relisting snapshot had been posted, closed and posted again on the same board. Disappearing is an event, not a verdict on your application. These are crawler-observed availability estimates, not hiring outcomes. Temporary disappearance and later return can affect them; check the employer's current application route before deciding.
Is 30 days the real number?
No. Thirty days is often a limit of how postings are listed rather than how long they stay open. Workday career sites stop showing a posting's exact age after 30 days, and a crawler that relies on that listing loses sight of the posting there. On boards that keep a 60-day window, 67% of postings were still listed at day 30. These are crawler-observed availability estimates, not hiring outcomes. Temporary disappearance and later return can affect them; check the employer's current application route before deciding.
How long do job postings stay up on Indeed or LinkedIn?
These figures read employers' own career pages rather than aggregator listings, so they describe the page the employer controls. The date an aggregator shows can be the date its copy of the listing was refreshed, which is a different event from the employer publishing the role. Read these figures as the life of the employer's page, and check that page when the two disagree. These are crawler-observed availability estimates, not hiring outcomes. Temporary disappearance and later return can affect them; check the employer's current application route before deciding.
How this was measured
A posting's life here is the time it stayed visible: from the first day the crawl saw it on the employer's career page to the last day the crawl confirmed it was still there. That is deliberately an observation rather than an inference. JobShifu does not know when an employer decided to stop hiring, only when the posting stopped being there.
Who is counted. Postings first seen between 2026-07-01 and 2026-08-15, and only those first seen within 3 days of their posted date, so a posting that was already old when the crawl found it is not counted as new. Postings still listed at the last sweep, on 2026-09-15, count as evidence for as long as they were watched and no longer. That is a Kaplan-Meier survival estimate: a posting that has not closed yet is neither dropped nor treated as closed.
Why the two broad curves stop at day 27. Some providers stop being observable at about 30 days, whatever the employer does: Workday career sites drop every "Posted 30+ Days Ago" row from the listing the crawl reads, Apple's careers site is walked with a fixed 30-day cutoff, and Amazon's listing is capped by page. Day 27 is the last day every provider can still be seen, so both broad curves stop there. Past it, a posting's last sighting would describe the crawler rather than the employer.
Why the answer is a range. Workday is about 70% of the all-sources group and under-reads live postings even before day 30, so that curve likely understates how long postings stay up. The group built from boards read in full on every sweep (Greenhouse, Ashby, iCIMS, SuccessFactors and Taleo) likely sits nearer the truth. Both were estimated from a 20% sample of rows.
The long tail is a small sample. Only Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever boards with a 60-day window can be followed past four weeks here. That group is about 3,770 postings first seen 2026-08-01 to 2026-08-15, it skews toward technology employers, and few of its postings are still being watched past day 40.
Every day shown rests on at least 25 postings still being watched on that day.
Correction. An earlier version of this page, dated 2026-09-08, measured every source together past day 27 and reported a sharp drop in listings around day 30 and a median lifespan under a month. Both came from the crawl losing sight of postings at about 30 days, not from employers taking them down. It has been replaced by the figures above.
Data and citation
Every figure above comes from one snapshot file, published so the numbers can be checked, replotted or reused: lifespan.json (JSON, updated 2026-09-15). 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). How long job postings stay open. https://jobshifu.com/research/how-long-jobs-stay-open