In April 2025, the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of the United States Congress, formally acknowledged ghost jobs as a labor market phenomenon and concluded that no official statistics exist to measure them. That sentence should stop anyone who has sent out 80 applications and heard back from three. There are no official numbers because no government agency tracks how many job postings are fake. The companies posting them are not required to say. And yet the data that does exist points to the same conclusion from every angle: somewhere between one in four and one in three American job listings right now describe a position that is not actually being filled.
In February 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 6.9 million job openings in the United States and 4.8 million actual hires. That gap of 2.1 million positions was not a rounding error. It was not a lag in the data. It was a structural feature of a labor market that has learned to produce the appearance of opportunity on an industrial scale.
What a Ghost Job Actually Is
A ghost job is a job posting for a position with no current intent to hire. The company is real. The application portal is real. The confirmation email arrives and says your materials are under review. What does not exist or what has already been filled, or paused, or approved only on paper, is the job.
The term entered mainstream use around 2023, but the practice is older than the internet. What changed is the economics. Posting a job on LinkedIn or Indeed costs little. Leaving it live indefinitely costs less. The old friction that kept job boards relatively clean, the cost and effort of placing a newspaper ad, is gone. When it is free to post and free to ignore, companies have no incentive to take listings down, and every incentive to leave them up.
The scale of what followed is documented in employer surveys conducted between 2024 and 2026. A January 2025 Clarify Capital survey of 1,000 employers found that nearly one in three admit to posting jobs with no current intent to hire. A LiveCareer survey of 918 HR professionals in March 2025 found that 45 percent say they regularly post ghost jobs, while another 48 percent do so occasionally. A ResumeBuilder survey of 649 hiring managers found that 40 percent of companies posted a fake job in the past year. A ResumeUp.AI analysis of LinkedIn data estimated that 27.4 percent of all active US job listings are likely ghost jobs. The Congressional Research Service report found no official statistics but noted that the hires-per-posting ratio has fallen significantly from levels observed in 2018 and 2019.
None of these figures measures the same thing. The Clarify Capital number captures employer intent. The ResumeUp.AI number captures the outcome. The JOLTS gap captures both real mismatches and ghost jobs together. Different methodologies, consistent direction. The true ghost-job rate across all industries likely sits somewhere between 20 and 35 percent. That range means that somewhere between one in five and one in three applications you have ever submitted may have landed in a system no one was watching.
Five Reasons Companies Do It — and Only One Is Innocent
The companies posting ghost jobs have explanations. Some are defensible. The problem is that only one of them is actually honest about what is happening to the person on the other side of the application portal.
The most common driver, cited by 50 percent of HR professionals in the LiveCareer survey, is pipeline building. When a real role opens, the company wants a ready pool of pre-screened candidates. They post the job not to hire but to collect. The application you spent two hours on went into a database. You were the product, not the candidate.
The second driver is growth signaling. Forty-three percent of companies in the ResumeBuilder survey said they post ghost jobs to project expansion to make investors, competitors, and their own employees believe the company is hiring even when it is not. The listing is investor relations. You were the audience.
The third is compliance. Federal contractors are required to post jobs publicly before making internal hires. The external listing is legally mandated paperwork. The job was always going to the person already in the building.
The fourth is the one that should make any worker pause. A ResumeBuilder survey of 649 hiring managers found that 62 percent of companies that post ghost jobs do so specifically to make existing employees feel replaceable. The listing is not a job offer. It is a threat. If you can see your own role advertised externally, the company calculates, you will work harder and complain less. Ghost jobs as a management tool. Ghost jobs are a way to suppress wages and dissent without having to say anything directly.
The fifth driver is inertia. Postings get filled, then forgotten. No one owns the task of removing them. They stay alive for months, collecting applications from people who do not know the position is gone.
The Number That Measures What It Costs
Jobright.ai analyzed 4.4 million job applications submitted through its platform in 2025 and estimated that the average ghost-job application cycle costs a candidate 9 hours. That includes research, resume tailoring, cover letter writing, and the waiting that follows. Nine hours, multiplied by the millions of ghost-job applications submitted every month across every platform, is an enormous quantity of human time and effort transferred from job seekers to employer databases with nothing given in return.
The Columbia Law Review’s November 2025 analysis of BLS data documented that the hires-per-posting ratio has fallen by half since 2019, from roughly 8 hires per 10 postings four years ago to approximately 4 hires per 10 postings by 2024. That collapse tracks the rise of ghost jobs. It also tracks the rise of AI-assisted bulk application tools, which allow candidates to submit hundreds of applications automatically, which in turn gives companies cover to post hundreds of ghost-job listings, because the application volume makes every posting look like genuine demand. Both sides of the market are now faking it. The difference is that one side loses time and mental health, and sometimes money. The other side builds a database.
The mental health dimension is not peripheral. A 2025 survey found that 72% of job seekers say the job search negatively affects their mental health, driven by long hiring cycles, silence from employers, and the grinding uncertainty of a process that gives candidates almost no feedback. Ghost jobs are a significant contributor, not because rejection is harmful, but because the silence is not rejection. It is an absence. The brain does not rationally conclude “that posting was never real.” It concludes “I was not good enough.” The same economic fragility that squeezes household budgets in 2026 hits unemployed and underemployed workers first, and ghost jobs extend the duration and psychological cost of every job search.
Why Not All of This Is Malicious
The honest version of the employer’s defense is worth understanding.
Some ghost jobs are genuinely accidental. A position gets filled. The hiring manager closes the ATS requisition internally. The job board’s scraper does not update for another six weeks. No one acted in bad faith. The system failed to sync. That category of ghost job is real, frustrating, and not the result of deliberate deception.
Evergreen postings have a legitimate rationale in high-turnover industries. A hospital that is always looking for nurses, or a call center that knows it will need 200 agents every quarter, is not deceiving anyone by keeping a pipeline posting live. The role will be filled by someone. The timing is genuinely uncertain. Pulling the posting down and reposting it every month creates unnecessary friction for both sides.
The talent-pipeline argument also has honest elements. Companies do need to be able to move quickly when real roles open. Pre-screening takes time. Building a candidate pool before the need is urgent is a legitimate operational interest.
The defense collapses when 62 percent of companies cite employee suppression as a deliberate motivation. That is not operational efficiency. That is using the fiction of opportunity to manage workers who might otherwise ask for raises or organize. And it collapses when the aggregate effect of 2.1 million more listed openings than actual hires, every month, sustained for over two years, distorts the labor market data that policymakers use to set economic policy. Ghost jobs make unemployment look lower, and the job market look tighter than it is. When the Federal Reserve looked at JOLTS data in 2023 and 2024 to assess labor market conditions, it was reading a number inflated by listings that were never meant to be filled.
The Laws That Are Starting to Catch Up
California passed legislation in March 2025 requiring all private employers who publicly advertise jobs to disclose whether the posting is for an existing vacancy or not, with enforcement through the state’s unfair competition law. New Jersey introduced similar legislation in 2024. Ontario, Canada, passed a law requiring companies to inform applicants of their candidacy status and banning ghost postings, effective January 2026. Kentucky introduced a ghost-job ban in January 2025.
The Congressional Research Service noted these legislative efforts and flagged ghost job advertising as a topic for the House Joint Labor Task Force. The FTC has authority over deceptive advertising practices. Whether the political will exists to extend that authority to job postings is an open question.
What is not open is what ghost jobs do to the people submitting applications. The same at-will employment doctrine that lets companies fire workers for any reason also contains no legal requirement to post jobs honestly. The employer’s obligation ends with the law. Everything else, including the decision to harvest 10,000 resumes for positions that do not exist, is permitted.
The Application You Will Never Send Back
The job market in 2026 has a fundamental information asymmetry. The company knows whether the job is real. You do not. The company knows it received 400 applications for a position it has no intention of filling. You do not know your application was one of them. You tailor the resume. You write the cover letter. You research the company. You wait.
The non-compete clause in your last job kept you from leaving. The employee monitoring software tracked whether you were at your desk. Now the ghost job keeps you applying to a market that is partly imaginary while the company collects your data, signals growth to investors, and keeps its current employees too nervous to ask for what they are worth.
In February 2026, there were 6.9 million job openings and 4.8 million hires. Somewhere in the gap between those two numbers is the time you spent on an application that was never going to go anywhere. The Congressional Research Service acknowledged the problem exists. It noted there are no official statistics to measure it. That means there are no official obligations to fix it. The job was never real. The application was. That deal was never disclosed.
