Job Posting Cost in 2026: Indeed vs LinkedIn vs ZipRecruiter vs Niche Boards

Job posting cost in the United States runs from $0 to about $999 per month, depending on where you post and how you buy. Indeed and LinkedIn both let you post free with heavy limits, then charge auction-style rates (you set a daily or monthly budget and pay per click or per application, so there is no fixed sticker price). ZipRecruiter sells monthly subscriptions per job slot and quotes you privately, with third-party reports landing in the $300 to $900 per month range. Niche boards, including MarketerJob at $199 for a 30-day post, sell a flat price per job with no auction and no surprise invoice.

Last updated July 2026.

Job posting cost at a glance: the 2026 comparison table

The most useful thing to understand before you spend anything: there are three completely different pricing models in this market, and comparing them by "price" alone is misleading. Auction platforms (Indeed, LinkedIn) have no fixed price at all. Subscription platforms (ZipRecruiter) charge a flat monthly fee per open slot. Flat-rate boards charge once per post. Here is how they actually stack up.

Platform	Pricing model	Typical cost	Best for
Indeed	Free tier, plus auction-based Sponsored Jobs (pay per click on daily budgets, pay per started application on monthly budgets)	$0 free (up to 3 posts/month). Sponsored has no published rate; Indeed sets it by market. Employers commonly report a few hundred dollars per month per role	Maximum raw volume and reach, high-turnover and hourly roles
LinkedIn	Free tier (one active post), plus Promoted Jobs on a daily or total budget, auction priced	$0 free with caps. Promoted jobs bill against a budget you set; LinkedIn does not publish a fixed per-click rate. Enterprise job slots are quote-based	Professional and senior roles, passive candidates, employer brand
ZipRecruiter	Monthly subscription per job slot, price quoted privately	No public price list. Third-party estimates commonly cite roughly $300 to $900 per month per slot. Short free trial available	Employers hiring continuously who want distribution plus resume matching
Glassdoor	No standalone job posting product. Jobs are bought through Indeed and appear on Glassdoor	Same as Indeed. Separate employer-branding contracts are sold annually and quote-based	Companies who care about reviews and employer reputation alongside the ad
MarketerJob (niche)	Flat rate per post, no auction	$199 for a 30-day post, $399 Featured, $999/month Unlimited	Marketing roles specifically, when you want fewer but more relevant applicants
Recruiting agency	Contingency fee on placement	Commonly 15% to 25% of first-year salary, so $15,000 to $25,000 on a $100,000 hire	Hard-to-fill senior roles where you need someone to do the sourcing for you

How much does it cost to post a job on Indeed?

Indeed lets you post up to three free jobs per month, each active for up to 30 days. Paid Sponsored Jobs have no published price. Indeed prices them by auction based on how competitive the role is, your location, and the supply of job seekers, then bills you against a daily or monthly budget you set yourself.

Two details matter more than the headline. First, the billing mechanism changes with the budget type: daily budgets generally charge per click, while monthly budgets can charge per started application. Second, Indeed invoices you on the first of the month or as soon as you hit a $500 cumulative spend threshold, whichever comes first. That threshold catches people off guard.

You will find third-party sites confidently quoting per-click figures like "$0.10 to $5.00." Treat those as observed ranges from other employers, not Indeed's rate card. Indeed does not publish one, and anyone telling you they know your exact cost per click before you run the campaign is guessing. The honest answer for budgeting: pick a number you're comfortable losing, cap it, and measure applications per dollar for two weeks before you scale.

The free tier is genuinely free and genuinely limited. Your post gets a burst of visibility, then sinks as newer listings push it down. For a role you actually need filled this quarter, the free post is a coin toss.

Is posting a job on LinkedIn free?

Yes, partially. LinkedIn allows one free job post active at a time, and a limited number of free posts within any 30-day window. A free post stays visible for about 14 days before it pauses, closes at 30 days, and caps how many applications it will accept. Anything beyond that requires you to promote the job with a paid budget.

Promoted jobs on LinkedIn work on an auction. You set either a daily average budget or a total budget spread across roughly 30 days, and LinkedIn spends it getting your post in front of relevant members. There is no flat "post a job for $X" price. Cost per applicant swings hard by role: a warehouse supervisor in a mid-size metro and a director of demand generation in New York are not going to cost the same, and no calculator can tell you otherwise.

Where LinkedIn earns its money is passive candidates. The person you want for a senior marketing role probably isn't scrolling job boards on a Tuesday night, but they are on LinkedIn. That's a real advantage and worth paying for on the right roles. It's also why LinkedIn tends to be the most expensive per applicant of the major platforms, and why some employers pair it with a cheaper channel. If that's the calculus you're running, we wrote a longer piece on choosing a LinkedIn Jobs alternative.

How much does ZipRecruiter cost per month?

ZipRecruiter charges a monthly subscription per active job slot rather than per click or per application, so your bill stays flat no matter how many applicants arrive. ZipRecruiter does not publish a public price list; you get a quote. Third-party trackers commonly report roughly $300 to $900 per month per slot depending on plan tier, market, and volume.

The predictability is the selling point. Unlike an auction, you know your number on day one, and a viral post doesn't cost you more. The tradeoff is that you're paying for the slot whether or not it produces, and add-ons (boosting a struggling post, for example) can meaningfully increase the real total. Ask what's included before you sign, and ask specifically about the price after the first term renews.

Does ZipRecruiter have a free option?

There's a short free trial, typically a few days and typically requiring a credit card, covering one posting. It's enough to see the interface and the candidate flow. It is not enough to fill a role, and it will convert to a paid plan unless you cancel it.

How much does it cost to post a job on Glassdoor?

You can't buy a standalone Glassdoor job post anymore. Glassdoor and Indeed are part of the same company, and job posting now runs through Indeed: you pay Indeed, and your sponsored job appears on Glassdoor as well. So "Glassdoor job posting cost" is, in practice, Indeed job posting cost.

What Glassdoor still sells separately is employer branding, meaning the profile, the review presence, the company page. Those are annual contracts, sold by a salesperson, priced by company size. There is no public number, and the ones floating around online are third-party estimates from procurement data, not a rate card. If someone quotes you a precise figure without a call, be skeptical.

What's the real cost of a job post? Look past the invoice

Here's the part most comparison pages skip. The line item on your credit card is not the cost of a job post. The cost is that number plus the hours your team spends on what the post produces.

A sponsored post on a mass-market board for a "Marketing Manager" role in a decent metro can pull 200 to 400 applications, and a large share will be from people who are not marketers, have never done the job, or applied to 300 roles that week with one click. Somebody has to go through them. If a hiring manager spends two minutes per application on 250 applications, that's eight hours, and eight hours of a $120,000-a-year manager's time is roughly $460. Your $200 job post just became a $660 job post, and that's before the phone screens.

There are two sane responses to this. One is to reduce the flood at the source by posting somewhere the audience is already qualified. The other is to accept the flood and stop processing it by hand: modern tooling means you can screen the first round automatically and only put human hours against candidates who've already demonstrated they can do the work. Plenty of teams do both. What doesn't work is buying maximum reach and then hand-reviewing the result at 2 a.m.

Where does a niche board fit?

Being straight with you: the big boards have scale that a niche board cannot match. Indeed's reach is enormous. LinkedIn's passive-candidate graph is genuinely unique. If you need 40 hires across five functions this year, you're going to use them, and you should.

Niche boards solve a narrower problem. When you post a marketing job on MarketerJob, it goes to an audience that is entirely marketers, so the applicant count is lower and the relevance is higher. You'll get fewer resumes. That's the point, and it's also the honest limitation: if you want 300 applicants, we're the wrong tool.

The pricing is deliberately boring. $199 buys a 30-day post. $399 makes it Featured. $999 a month is unlimited postings. There's no auction, no per-click meter running, no $500 invoice threshold, and no sales call. You know the number before you spend it, which is the main thing employers say they want and rarely get. Full details are on the MarketerJob pricing page.

For senior or genuinely hard-to-fill roles, the honest comparison isn't a board at all: it's a recruiter. Marketing recruitment agencies typically charge 15% to 25% of first-year salary on placement, which is $18,000 to $30,000 on a $120,000 CMO-track hire. That's a lot of money, and sometimes it's the right money, because they do the sourcing and you don't. But if you can fill the role with a $199 post and six hours of your own time, the math is not close.

How much should I actually budget?

A practical way to think about it, by situation:

• One role, not urgent, tight budget. Start with the free tiers on Indeed and LinkedIn. You lose nothing but time. If two weeks produce nothing usable, escalate.
• One role, need it filled this month. Budget $200 to $600. A flat-rate niche post plus a modest sponsored budget on one mass-market board covers most cases without an open-ended meter.
• Three to five roles, ongoing. This is where subscriptions start to beat per-post pricing. Compare a ZipRecruiter slot quote against an unlimited flat-rate plan, and do the division: cost per post is the only number that matters here.
• Constant hiring, 10+ roles a year. You need a mix, and you need to track cost per hire per channel, not cost per post. Most teams find one channel produces two-thirds of their hires and quietly cut the rest.
• One senior, business-critical role. Post it anyway, but plan for an agency fee if 30 days produce nothing. Budget accordingly rather than discovering it in week six.

The three mistakes that waste job-ad budget

Buying reach you don't need. A sponsored post that reaches four million people is only valuable if the marketers among them see it. Reach and relevance are different products, and most employers buy the first while needing the second.

Not capping the auction. Auction pricing means the platform will spend whatever you allow. Set the cap first. Check it on day three, not day thirty.

Measuring applications instead of hires. The channel that sends 300 applications and zero hires is more expensive than the one that sends 12 and one hire, regardless of what the invoices say. Track it per channel, even roughly, and one quarter of data will tell you where the money should go.

The short version

There is no single answer to "how much does it cost to post a job," because two of the four major platforms don't have a price, they have an auction. If you want certainty, buy flat-rate. If you want volume, buy the auction and cap it hard. If you want a marketer specifically and you'd rather read 15 relevant resumes than 300 random ones, that's the case for a niche board, and $199 for 30 days is a low-risk way to test whether it works for you.