How many job postings are fake?

I build the ranking system that decides which job listings AppStride surfaces every morning, so I’ve spent more hours than I’d like staring at a posting that reappears on a company’s board every six weeks with nothing changed but the date. Ghost jobs aren’t internet lore. They’re a measurable share of what shows up when you search, and the receipts are worth walking through.

What actually counts as a ghost job

The Congressional Research Service, in an April 2025 brief on the practice, defines a ghost job plainly: an online posting “for positions that do not exist, or that employers are not planning to fill immediately.” That second half matters. Not every old listing is a lie. Some postings sit open because a hiring freeze landed mid-search, or because a role is genuinely hard to fill and stays live for months. The line that separates a stale posting from a ghost job is intent. Was a real person ever working this requisition, or was it posted to be seen and nothing more.

How common is it, actually

Estimates vary by study, which is normal for a practice nobody is required to disclose, but they land in the same neighborhood. A MyPerfectResume survey of 753 recruiters found 81% admitted their employer had posted a ghost job. A separate ResumeBuilder.com survey of hiring managers found 40% had posted a listing with no intention of filling it, and three in ten companies had one live at the moment they were asked. Those aren’t the same question, but they agree on the shape of the problem: this is routine, not rare.

What the government’s own hiring numbers show

Survey data comes from asking people to admit something. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey is a structural check that doesn’t depend on anyone’s honesty: in June 2026, U.S. employers reported 7.4 million open positions against 5.3 million hires, a gap of roughly 2.1 million. That gap isn’t proof that 2.1 million postings are fake. Slow hiring, mismatched candidates, and genuine understaffing all widen it too. What it shows is that the country is posting jobs faster than it is filling them, month after month, which is exactly the condition ghost jobs live in. The problem is visible enough now that state lawmakers have started introducing bills aimed directly at it.

New York’s ghost-job bill, and who’s following

New York is furthest along of any state. The Senate and Assembly passed S8877 on June 2, 2026: employers with 100 or more workers, and the third-party job boards that carry their listings, would have to disclose in every posting whether they intend to fill the role within 90 days, with fines starting at $2,500 per posting and doubling every 30 days a violation goes uncorrected. As of this writing, the bill is sitting on Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk, unsigned. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, and Kentucky all have similar bills moving through committee. None of it changes what shows up in your search results today, a bill on a desk isn’t a bill in force, but it’s the clearest sign yet that the problem has moved from an open secret to a regulatory target.

Why companies post jobs they don’t intend to fill

This isn’t always an accident. In the surveys above, recruiters gave consistent reasons: keeping a pipeline of resumes ready for a role that might open later, testing whether a job description attracts applicants before a requisition is approved, and projecting growth or normal hiring activity during a freeze or a slow quarter. It is about the posting doing a job for the company that has nothing to do with hiring anyone. None of it is about you specifically.

How to actually spot one

Four checks catch most of them, and none require a tool.

• Age. A listing that has been live for 60 to 90 days with no edits is far more likely to be dormant than a role a company is actively trying to close.
• Reposting without change. If the exact same title from the exact same company keeps reappearing every four to six weeks, especially one you already applied to, that’s a recycling pattern, not a new opening.
• The company’s own careers page. Search for the role directly on the employer’s site. If it’s on Indeed or LinkedIn but nowhere in the company’s own listings, either the board hasn’t caught up to something that already closed, or it was never a real requisition to begin with.
• No movement. Hundreds of applicants, no “actively reviewing” signal, no update in weeks. A process that’s actually running leaves some trace of motion.

What AppStride does about this

This is the part I actually have data on. The scoring behind AppStride’s Daily Brief weighs how fresh a listing really is before it’s ever shown to you: how old the posting is, whether the employer still marks it active, and whether it looks like a near-duplicate of another listing the same company has already run, matched on the actual wording, not just the title, so a lightly reworded repost still gets caught. A posting needs a verified date within the last 48 hours to count as genuinely fresh; everything else isn’t hidden, just ranked behind the postings that show real signs of life. It isn’t a lie detector. Nobody outside the company can build one of those. It’s a way to stop a six-week-old repost from reading as urgent, breaking news.

Ghost jobs aren’t going away, because they’re doing something useful for the company that posted them, at your expense. The best defense isn’t applying harder. It’s spending your effort on listings that show signs someone is actually on the other end.