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How Long Do Job Postings Stay Up?

By The Job Alert Team · September 24, 2026

The honest answer is that a job posting’s visible lifetime and the vacancy’s actual lifetime are two different things, and the first one is longer. Understanding the gap saves you from writing careful applications into roles that closed a month ago.

The default lifetimes

Most postings run on a billing cycle rather than a hiring cycle.

Where it lives	Typical visible lifetime
Paid slot on a job board	30 days, sometimes 60, tied to what the employer bought
Employer’s own careers page	Until someone in HR removes it — no clock at all
Applicant tracking system	Until the requisition is closed internally
Recruitment agency listing	Often left up permanently to collect CVs for future roles
Aggregator or index	Until the source stops publishing it, plus a lag
Public-sector or government vacancy	A hard, published closing date — the one reliable case

Two more patterns matter. Evergreen postings are roles a company always needs — drivers, care workers, sales agents, warehouse staff — and they may run continuously for a year while dozens of people are hired against them. Reposts are the same role republished every few weeks to appear at the top of a date-sorted list; the requisition is months old, the posting date is yesterday.

Why a filled role lingers

Nobody is being deceitful in most of these cases. The mechanics simply do not favour prompt removal.

• The requisition is still open. An offer was accepted, but it has not been signed, or the company is hiring three of these and has filled one.
• A pipeline is being kept. Hiring managers in high-churn roles leave adverts up deliberately, because the next vacancy is four weeks away.
• Nobody owns closing it. The recruiter who opened it has moved on. Removal is an unassigned task.
• The advert was syndicated. The employer closed it on their own site; the six other places it was copied to never received the removal.
• The paid slot has time left. The employer bought thirty days and the role filled on day four. The advert keeps running.
• The agency listing was never a vacancy. Some agency postings exist to build a candidate database. If a listing has no employer name and no specifics, this is often what it is.

Research on hiring cycles consistently puts median time-to-fill in the region of six weeks across white-collar roles, and the advert is frequently still visible past that point. Treat a posting older than about a month as unconfirmed rather than open.

What “posted recently” does and does not mean

Freshness labels are the most over-read piece of information in job search. Depending on the source, “posted recently” or “new” can mean:

• The advert first appeared at the source within the last few days. Useful.
• The advert was edited recently — a typo fix, a salary change, a location tweak — and the date reset. Misleading.
• The advert was reposted on a schedule while the requisition stayed open. Misleading.
• The index first saw it recently, which says nothing about when the employer published it. Common, and widely misunderstood.
• Nothing at all: a static piece of interface text with no date behind it. Also common.

We should be plain about our own case here, because it is the last one. The upstream data Job Alert searches does not include a per-listing posting date, so the app shows a general freshness label rather than a timestamp you could count days from. The result set is refreshed daily, but that is a statement about the search, not about any individual advert. If you need the posting date, it is on the original page — which is where the app sends you. The mechanics are set out in what is a job aggregator and where listings come from.

How to tell whether a listing is still live

Run these in order. The first three take under two minutes.

1. Find it on the employer’s own careers page. Search the company site directly for the job title. If the employer’s own page does not list it, the vacancy is very likely closed regardless of what any other site shows.
2. Check the requisition number. Postings that carry an ID like REQ-20418 can be searched on the company’s careers site. Present means open; absent means closed.
3. Open the apply link. A tracking system that returns “this position is no longer accepting applications”, redirects to a job list, or throws a 404 has answered you.
4. Look for a stated closing date. Public-sector, university and large-corporate postings usually carry one and honour it.
5. Read the advert for staleness tells. A financial year, a product version, a “start in January” or a salary in an outdated currency band all date the text.
6. Ask. A two-line email to the recruiter — “Is requisition X still open? I’d like to apply today” — gets a straight answer surprisingly often, and it puts your name in front of a human before your CV arrives.

What to do when it is closed

A dead posting is still information. It tells you the company hires this role, what it calls it, and roughly what it pays for it.

• Apply anyway, briefly, if the fit is strong. Requisitions reopen when offers fall through, and a candidate already in the system is cheap to revisit.
• Write to the hiring manager rather than the portal. Two sentences: the role you saw, what you do, an offer to be considered if it reopens or if a similar one comes up.
• Note the pattern. If the same role has been posted three times in six months, it will be posted again. Add the company to a shortlist you re-check on a schedule.
• Search the neighbours. A company advertising one warehouse supervisor usually has adjacent openings that are not being advertised as loudly. How to find jobs not posted on the big job boards covers that ground.
• Do not repeat-apply weekly. One follow-up is diligence; four is a filter you have applied to yourself.

A workable habit

Search on a rhythm — two or three times a week beats twenty times a day — and confirm before you invest. Spend your effort on the confirmation step, not on volume. Ten applications to roles you checked are worth more than fifty into an index.

You can browse listings across 62 countries in Job Alert without creating an account, and each result opens the employer’s original posting so the confirmation step is one tap away. Free use covers three searches a day and five saved jobs. More on that in how it works.

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