Free job APIs in 2026: what's actually free, what's free-tier, and what's a trap

Search for a free job API and you get a list. What you do not get is the thing that actually matters: whether the free option on that list will still work when your project has real users. Some of them are public government infrastructure. Some are a 200-request sample designed to make you upgrade. One of the best-known has not resolved in DNS for years and still ranks.

This page sorts every option into four categories by what “free” means, with the current limits pulled from each provider’s own docs and terms in July 2026. Where a free option beats JobsPipe for your use case, that is said plainly.

The four things “free” means in a job API

Almost every argument about free job data is two people using the word differently. The four meanings, in descending order of how free they actually are:

• Public and unmetered. Government data and public ATS job-board endpoints. No cost, often no key, and the limit is your own politeness rather than a quota.
• A free tier on a commercial API. A real allowance, then a paid plan. Honest, but sized for evaluation rather than production. This is what JobsPipe offers.
• Free to start, metered per result. The marketplace and scraper model. Free is a credit balance, and your bill scales with the number of postings you pull.
• Advertised as free, effectively closed. Dead or partner-gated APIs whose old docs still outrank the working alternatives.

Free job API comparison table

Every row was checked against the provider’s own docs, pricing page or live endpoint while writing this post. Providers that publish no free tier were left out rather than guessed at.

Tier 1: the genuinely free job listing APIs

USAJOBS is the strongest genuinely free job API in English. It is run by the US Office of Personnel Management, it covers every federal job announcement, and the key is free: fill in a form with your name, email, company and intended use, then send an Authorization-Key header with every request. The published limits are about result size rather than request volume, at 10,000 rows per query and 500 rows per page, with no documented daily quota. See our USAJOBS API walkthrough for the query parameters. The catch is coverage, not cost: US federal roles only, which answers one question extremely well and every other question not at all.

Public ATS endpoints are the free job data nobody markets, because no vendor makes money from you using them. Greenhouse states it directly: job board data is publicly available, so authentication is not required for any GET endpoint. Lever is the same for reads. Both are keyed by company rather than by query, so you get one employer at a time.

curl https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/stripe/jobs
curl "https://api.lever.co/v0/postings/leverdemo?mode=json"
curl https://www.arbeitnow.com/api/job-board-api

The first of those returned 535 live postings from one board token, with no key and no signup. That is the honest ceiling of free job data: excellent depth per company, zero discovery. You have to know which companies to ask about, and you maintain the company-to-board-token mapping yourself as employers rename boards and switch vendors. Our guides to the Greenhouse job board API and the Lever postings API cover the response shapes, and which ATS platforms are public versus gated tells you how far this approach scales.

Arbeitnow and Remotive are free public feeds with no key at all. Arbeitnow returns 100 jobs per page with pagination and refreshes hourly, skewed toward Germany and the wider European market. Remotive is the cautionary one: the free feed carried 35 postings in total when we called it for this post, jobs are held back by 24 hours on purpose, the team asks you not to call more than about four times a day, and their private API starts at a $5,000 per month budget. The free endpoint is a shop window, and they say so in the payload.

Tier 2: free tiers on commercial APIs

Adzuna is the one most people mean by “the free jobs API.” The key is free and instant, coverage is broad across many countries, and the docs are good. The limits live in the terms of service rather than the docs, which is why they surprise people: 25 hits per minute, 250 per day, 1,000 per week and 2,500 per month by default. Commercial, government and academic organizations get a 14-day window strictly to evaluate data coverage, after which a licence agreement may be required, and you must display a “Jobs by Adzuna” logo of at least 116 by 23 pixels linking back. Our Adzuna API field guide goes deeper.

The Muse has the most generous free rate limit here: 500 requests per hour with no key at all, and 3,600 once you register one. The trade-off is inventory. It is a curated employer-brand site rather than an aggregator, so you get a specific slice of the market, not a representative one.

What the JobsPipe free tier actually is

JobsPipe is a commercial API with a free tier, and the tier is exactly this: 100 requests per month, 2 requests per second, a maximum page size of 25, and no webhooks. Do the arithmetic out loud. At 25 results per request and 100 requests, the ceiling is 2,500 postings a month, and that is only if every page comes back full. Spread evenly, that is three calls a day.

That is enough to build an integration against 30-plus sources, run a weekly digest for one narrow query, validate that the data supports a product idea before you pay anyone, or power a personal job search agent that checks a couple of queries a day. It is not enough for a public job board, a daily refresh of a whole market, anything user-facing where each visitor triggers a query, or backfilling a dataset. Those need a paid plan, and it is better to know that on day one. The limits per plan are on the pricing page.

You can check the response schema before signing up for anything. POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/sandbox/jobs/search takes no key and returns a sample payload in the exact shape the live endpoint uses, so you can write your parsing code first and decide whether the normalized fields cover what you need.

curl -X POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/sandbox/jobs/search \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"job_title_or":["engineer"],"limit":2}'

Tier 3: free to start, metered per result

Marketplace APIs are where free stops meaning “a plan” and starts meaning “a balance.” JSearch on RapidAPI gives you 200 requests a month with no card, then $25 a month for 10,000 requests and $0.003 for each one beyond that, or $0.005 on pay-as-you-go. That free allowance is a demo, not a runway. Our breakdown of what JSearch returns covers what you get per call.

Apify and similar actor marketplaces work the same way with a different unit: $5 of platform credit per month on the free plan, consumed by compute time rather than request count. For a one-off pull this model is genuinely cheap. For a service that runs every day it is the most expensive option here, because the cost never amortizes. The pattern to watch for: if the pricing page counts results or compute rather than requests, your bill grows linearly with your product forever.

Tier 4: advertised as free, effectively closed

The Indeed Publisher API is the canonical trap. It was free, it was excellent, and it is gone. The old documentation URLs now permanently redirect to Indeed’s partner site, and api.indeed.com, the host that served the old /ads/apisearch endpoint, has no DNS record at all. It does not time out; it does not resolve. Everything Indeed still documents is employer and ATS side, gated behind partner approval, and none of it exposes a job search endpoint. The full story is in our post on the Indeed Publisher API.

A softer version of the same trap is the API that exists but publishes no terms, so you cannot size a project without a sales conversation first. Jooble requires a form with your name, company, website and phone number to obtain a key, and publishes no limits or pricing anywhere public; see our Jooble API notes for the request format. Reed needs a key in a basic auth header and caps responses at 100 results, with no published pricing. Careerjet issues a key per publisher website and requires every call to carry the IP address and user agent of the real end user who triggered it, which rules out dataset building: it is built for rendering results to a human visitor.

Free to call is not free to redistribute

A free API grants you access. It does not grant you a licence to republish what comes back, and the terms attached to these free tiers are more restrictive than most people assume, including the government one.

• USAJOBS states that data provided through the API is for the explicit use of the company named on the registration form, that no other use is permitted without prior written approval, and that you may not rent, lease, loan, sell, trade or create derivative works from it. Public information does not mean an unrestricted feed.
• Adzuna prohibits using the data in its original form or in aggregate, including derived vacancy counts and average salaries, without written consent, and requires you to remove all data on termination.
• Remotive forbids submitting its jobs to third-party job boards, requires a link back and a source credit, and treats using the listings to collect email signups as a breach.
• The Muse requires a link back, prohibits cloning its content, and requires deletion of all copies on termination.

Read that list again with a job board in mind: several of these free options specifically prohibit the thing a job board does. This is not legal advice, but the practical rule is simple. Before you build on a free job API, open its terms and search for the words redistribute, aggregate, derivative and attribution. If you are picking a source for something commercial, our guides to where to get job posting data and how to build a job board cover the licensing question in more depth.

Which free job search API fits your project?

• US federal jobs, any volume: USAJOBS. Nothing else comes close and it costs nothing.
• A known list of target companies: Greenhouse and Lever board endpoints. Free, keyless, deep, and you maintain the company list.
• A remote-jobs side project: Arbeitnow for volume, Remotive if 35 curated postings and an attribution link work for you.
• A prototype that needs many sources at low volume: the JobsPipe sandbox to check the schema, then the free tier at 100 requests a month, or an Adzuna key at 2,500 a month if you can meet the attribution requirement.
• A one-off dataset pull: a metered marketplace actor. Paying per result is correct when there is only one result set.
• Anything in production: a paid plan, chosen after reading the redistribution terms. Our comparison of jobs APIs in 2026 covers the paid options side by side.
• Indeed listings specifically: there is no free route and no self-serve paid route. Plan around it.

Free job APIs are excellent at narrow, bounded questions and poor at broad ones. The moment the requirement becomes “most of the market, kept current,” every free option either restricts redistribution, caps the volume below what you need, or bills per result.