How long does a job posting have to stay up?
In the United States there is no general legal minimum for how long a job posting has to stay up. Private employers can post a role for a day or a year and take it down at will. The exceptions are specific: some public-sector and federal-contractor hiring and certain visa-related recruitment set prescribed advertising periods.
The exceptions come from rules about fairness and labor-market testing rather than from job-board policy. Many government agencies and civil-service systems require a role to be advertised for a set period so that eligible candidates can apply. Federal contractors carry outreach and listing obligations for certain roles. Employer-sponsored permanent residence through the PERM process requires the employer to run prescribed recruitment steps, including advertising for a defined window, before filing. Each of these has its own timing and its own agency, so read the specific regulation before building a process around it.
Job boards add their own defaults on top. LinkedIn and Indeed listings run until the employer closes them or a listing expiry, roughly a month, takes them down, and renewing resets the clock. Boards fed straight from an applicant tracking system such as Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Paylocity and Y Combinator show a posting for exactly as long as the requisition is open, so a removal is detected at the next crawl after the employer closes it. Employers who want a posting to stay up longer generally renew it; employers who want it down sooner close the requisition.
The chart below shows the share of recently closed postings that closed within a week of first sighting, by board. On the boards with continuous closure detection a meaningful share is gone within a week, which is what a role filled fast looks like. Few close that early on Indeed and almost none on LinkedIn, because closure there is recorded at the expiry. JobsPipe returns status, closed_at and closed_reason on every record, and status set to closed on the jobs search endpoint returns the postings that came down.
- Lever43.8%
- Paylocity22.7%
- Greenhouse20.5%
- Ashby20.4%
- Y Combinator16.9%
- Indeed8.4%
- LinkedIn<0.5%
The full treatment is on Job posting lifespan.
Related questions
Is there a minimum number of days a job must be posted?
Not as a general rule for private employers in the United States. Prescribed minimums exist in specific settings: some public-sector and civil-service hiring, certain federal-contractor obligations, and visa-related recruitment such as PERM labor certification. Outside those, an employer can close a posting as soon as it wants.
Do internal candidates have to see a posting for a set time?
Only where a policy, collective agreement or public-sector rule says so. Many employers adopt an internal posting window as a matter of policy so current staff can apply before external candidates, but that is a company or union rule rather than a statutory one in most private-sector cases.
How long should I keep a job posting up?
As long as the role is open, and no longer. Postings left up after the hire are the raw material of ghost jobs: they collect applications nobody reads and score as stale in tools that track listings. On the boards JobsPipe collects, the roles that close quickly are the ones that got filled.
How long do job postings stay up by default?
It depends on the board. LinkedIn and Indeed run a listing until the employer closes it or an expiry of roughly a month ends it. Boards read from an applicant tracking system show the posting for as long as the requisition is open, and JobsPipe records the removal at the next crawl after it closes.
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