What is the job market?
The job market is the meeting point between people who want work and employers who want to hire. Its state is the balance between the two: how many openings employers advertise, how many people are looking, how quickly roles fill, how freely workers quit, and what pay is offered. Economists call the same thing the labor market.
It is measured from several angles that do not always agree. Household and employer surveys produce unemployment, participation and payroll figures. Administrative data such as jobless claims and vacancy counts track the flows in and out. Job postings are the fastest and most granular signal: every posting names an occupation, a location, often the skills and sometimes the pay, and it appears the day the employer publishes it. What a posting cannot tell you is whether anyone was hired, how many people applied, or how the employed population changed.
Read posting data for composition and for what employers are asking for: which occupations and industries carry the largest share of live openings, what share of postings state pay and at what level, which skills are named per function, and which boards carry which kinds of work. Do not read it for a headline verdict on the economy. Coverage depends on which boards are collected, employers post unevenly, and a share can move because the crawl changed rather than because hiring did. The Labour Market Pulse publishes the shares with that caveat attached.
The underlying rows are queryable. POST /v1/jobs/search returns live and closed postings with filters for occupation_code_or, isic_division_or, job_country_code_or, skills_or and posted_at_max_age_days, and each row carries date_posted, discovered_at, status and closed_at, so a posting's lifecycle can be followed from first sighting to close. The aggregate endpoints under /v1/insights return occupation demand, salary percentiles and AI exposure without pulling rows. The free tier covers 1,000 jobs a month.
The full treatment is on Job market data.
Related questions
What is the current job market?
The current cross-section from live postings is on the Labour Market Pulse: hiring demand by occupation and industry as shares of postings, advertised salary percentiles with sample sizes, and the share of postings mentioning AI tooling. It is refreshed daily with a monthly archived snapshot. This page does not repeat the figures, because they change with every refresh.
What is the difference between the job market and the labor market?
They are the same thing. Labor market is the economists' term and covers the whole population of workers and employers; job market is the everyday phrase and usually refers to the openings a person could apply for. Statistics such as unemployment describe the labor market; job postings describe the job market as it looks from the outside.
What is a tight job market?
A tight market has more openings than available workers, so employers compete: vacancies stay open longer, pay is bid up, requirements are relaxed and workers quit more freely because the next job is easy to find. A loose or slack market is the reverse, with more candidates than openings and the bargaining power on the employer side.
How do you measure the job market?
By the unemployment rate and participation from surveys, vacancies and quits from employer data, and job postings for the fastest and most detailed view. Each measures something different. Postings show what employers ask for and where, in near real time, but not whether anyone was hired, so the honest picture combines them rather than picking one.
Is the job market the same everywhere?
No. It differs by country, city, occupation and industry, and a national figure hides that. Posting data can be cut by job_country_code_or, occupation_code_or and isic_division_or, which is how you get the market that applies to a particular role in a particular place rather than the average of everything.
More answers
Query live postings yourself, 1,000 jobs a month free.
Get a free API key