Free jobs API: the real options.
Every “free jobs API” comes with a catch - scope, volume, or freshness. That is not a complaint; it is how the economics work. Here are the eight genuinely free options in 2026, what each actually gives you, and which catch you can live with.
| Option | What’s free | Coverage | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| JobsPipe free tier | 100 requests/month, every source and every field unlocked | 30+ ATS and job-board sources, normalized to one schema | 100 requests is an evaluation allowance, not a production budget - paid plans start at $49/month. |
| Adzuna API | 1,000 calls/month with a self-serve app_id and app_key | Aggregated job ads across 16 countries, strongest in the UK and EU | Per-job detail is thin (often no structured salary or full description); higher volume is sales-led. |
| USAJOBS API | Everything - it is a government service with no paid tier | US federal government jobs only | Federal-only scope, current openings only, and the User-Agent-is-your-email auth convention trips people up. |
| Per-company ATS endpoints | Unauthenticated JSON per employer: Greenhouse boards-api, Lever postings, Ashby job-board | One company per call, any public customer of that ATS | No cross-company search and no discovery endpoint - you must already know each company's slug. |
| Remotive API | Full public feed, no key required | Remote jobs curated by Remotive, tech-heavy | Remote-only, single-source, modest volume; meant for casual use with rate limits enforced. |
| RemoteOK API | Full public feed at remoteok.com/api, no key required | Remote jobs posted to RemoteOK | Remote-only and single-source; attribution with a link back is required by their terms. |
| Arbeitnow API | Public job-board feed, no key required | Jobs posted to Arbeitnow, Europe-leaning with visa-sponsorship flags | Single-board inventory - useful as a supplement, not a market view. |
| JSearch free plan (RapidAPI) | A capped number of monthly requests on the Basic marketplace plan | Aggregated from Google for Jobs results (LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor mirrors) | The cap is prototype-sized, the data is a SERP-scrape of Google's downstream copy, and production tiers carry RapidAPI's markup. |
How to pick, in three questions
Federal jobs, remote tech jobs, or one known employer - a fully free source covers you. USAJOBS for federal (our USAJOBS guide covers setup), Remotive or RemoteOK for remote, and the per-company ATS endpoints documented on our sources pages for single employers.
Adzuna’s 1,000 free calls a month plus its aggregate salary and trend endpoints fit academic and analytical work - the per-job thinness matters less when you want aggregates. Our Adzuna comparison covers where it runs out.
Then the free tier’s job is to prove data quality before you pay, and breadth matters: JobsPipe’s 100 free monthly requests hit all 30+ sources with the full schema - structured salary, dedup, source attribution - so what you evaluate is what production looks like. The full surface is documented on the jobs API page.
A free request that shows the whole schema
One request from the free tier returns the same normalized record paid plans get - which is the point of evaluating on it:
curl https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \
-H "Authorization: Bearer jp_live_your_key_here" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{ "job_title_or": ["machine learning engineer"], "posted_at_gte": "2026-07-06" }'100 free requests a month, every source, full schema. Evaluate before you pay a cent.
Get a free API keyFAQ
Is there a completely free jobs API?+
Yes, with scope limits. USAJOBS is completely free but covers US federal jobs only. Remotive, RemoteOK, and Arbeitnow are free single-board feeds for remote and European jobs. Per-company ATS endpoints (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby) are free but return one employer per call. For broad multi-source coverage, free tiers exist - JobsPipe gives 100 requests/month, Adzuna 1,000 calls/month - but unlimited free multi-source coverage does not exist anywhere.
What is the best free job search API?+
It depends on what the search needs to cover. For US federal roles, USAJOBS. For remote tech roles, Remotive or RemoteOK. For UK and EU aggregates, Adzuna's free tier. For searching across 30+ ATS sources with structured salary and per-source attribution, JobsPipe's free tier is the broadest surface - 100 requests/month covers a real evaluation.
Why is there no unlimited free jobs API?+
Because the underlying work is expensive: crawling thousands of career sites continuously, parsing changing page structures, deduplicating mirrored postings, and serving the result with real uptime. Free feeds exist where someone else absorbs that cost - a government (USAJOBS), a job board marketing itself (Remotive, RemoteOK), or a vendor's evaluation tier (JobsPipe, Adzuna).
Can I use the free per-company ATS endpoints in production?+
For a handful of known companies, yes - boards-api.greenhouse.io, api.lever.co, and api.ashbyhq.com are stable public surfaces. The model breaks when you need many companies: there is no endpoint that lists an ATS's customers, so discovery and maintenance of company slugs becomes your infrastructure. That aggregation layer is what paid jobs APIs actually sell.
Does the JobsPipe free tier include all sources?+
Yes. The free tier's 100 monthly requests hit the same API as paid plans: every source, full normalized schema, structured salary, and per-source attribution. The tier exists so you can validate data quality against your use case before paying; paid plans from $49/month raise the request budget.
What happened to the free Indeed and LinkedIn job APIs?+
They are gone or gated. Indeed deprecated its free Publisher API in 2023 and current official APIs are employer-side and partner-gated. LinkedIn's job APIs have never been generally available. Free access to those inventories today means either their downstream mirrors in aggregated feeds or the upstream ATS sources where the same jobs are first published.