What is Lightcast API?
The Lightcast API is not one API but a family of more than thirty separately scoped services behind a single OAuth login. They cover skills, titles and occupation taxonomies, text classification, job postings analytics for several regions, anonymized worker profiles, and modelled products such as salary and career pathway data. Which services a token can reach is set by your contract with Lightcast, not by a public pricing page.
Every authenticated service uses the OAuth client credentials flow: you exchange a client ID and secret for a short-lived bearer token, and the scope you request decides what it unlocks. Typical scopes are lightcast_open_free for the open skills tier, classification_api for taxonomy lookups, skill extraction and title normalisation, and postings:us or postings:global for the postings datasets. The Job Postings API is an analytics interface first. Each request carries a filter object with a required when key, and the main endpoints return totals, time series, rankings by company, skill, title or geography, and salary distributions. A row-level postings endpoint exists, but the documentation warns that not all fields are present and points you to Lightcast if you need more records than it returns. Since 2026, free access is reserved for approved nonprofit and public-sector use, and commercial use requires a licence.
That shape suits trend questions and is awkward for a product that needs the postings themselves. JobsPipe is built the other way round: POST /v1/jobs/search returns individual live postings by default, filtered with job_title_or, skills_or, company_name_or, description_or or posted_at_gte, each with the company, the original listing and a status. Skills are matched as lowercase slugs rather than exact display names, occupations are coded to ISCO-08, and the /v1/insights/ endpoints answer the aggregate questions about demand, skills and advertised pay from the same corpus.
If you need the Lightcast taxonomy or its historical postings analytics, request access through its developer documentation and budget for a sales cycle, using the time-bound test access to evaluate. If you need live postings in an application this week, call the JobsPipe sandbox search endpoint, which needs no key, then take a free-tier key for real data. Our longer Lightcast API guide on the JobsPipe blog covers scopes, rate limits and tooling.
The full treatment is on Job data vendors and tools.
Related questions
Is the Lightcast API free?
Only in a narrow case. Per its developer documentation, public-good access is free for nonprofits and public-sector or community initiatives after approval, and includes the skills taxonomy through the Classification API with a small monthly cap on skill extraction. Any for-profit or production use needs a licence arranged through sales. The skills library itself remains free to browse on the website.
How do you authenticate with the Lightcast API?
With the OAuth client credentials flow. You post your client ID, client secret, grant type and a space-delimited scope to the token endpoint and receive a bearer token that expires after an hour, which the documentation asks you to cache and reuse. Requesting a scope your contract does not include fails, so authentication errors are often really entitlement questions.
Can you download individual job postings from the Lightcast API?
There is a postings endpoint that returns individual records, but it is secondary to the analytics endpoints. The documentation notes that not every field is present, that the listing address is returned only for currently active postings, and that larger pulls require contacting Lightcast. Bulk delivery is a separate track through data shares into cloud storage and warehouses.
What are the rate limits on the Lightcast API?
The documentation sets per-second request limits that vary by service, with lower limits on the skills, titles and companies services and a separate window for its government statistics service. Some classification endpoints also carry a monthly quota on the base tier, and other quotas are usage-based and disclosed by your account manager. Exceeding a limit returns the standard too many requests response.
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