8 platforms priced · 4 pricing models · US market

Job posting cost: how much it costs to post a job on Indeed, LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter in 2026

Two of the four biggest platforms do not have a price, they have an auction. Here is what each one actually charges, which numbers are published and which are only reported, and what to budget for a single marketing seat.

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Last updated August 2026 · US pricing · Reported ranges, not quotes

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A 30 day post is $199 flat, with no auction and no invoice threshold. Listings are illustrative.

The short answer

Job posting cost in the United States runs from $0 to about $999 a month, depending on where you post and how you buy. Indeed and LinkedIn both allow limited free posts and then price paid placement by auction, so neither publishes a rate: Indeed sponsorship has a widely reported minimum of about $25 a day per job, roughly $750 for a 30 day run, and LinkedIn promotion starts near $7 to $10 a day. ZipRecruiter sells monthly subscriptions per job slot and quotes privately, with reported tiers between $299 and $999 per job per month. Flat rate specialty boards publish one number instead: a 30 day post on MarketerJob is $199.

Indeed sponsored, 30 days

About $750 at the floor

ZipRecruiter, one slot

$299 to $999 a month

Flat rate, 30 days

$199 published

Before you compare prices

The 4 pricing models, and why comparing them by price alone misleads you

This is the part most cost comparisons skip. An auction, a subscription and a flat fee are three different products that happen to produce a similar looking invoice. Knowing which one you are buying tells you more about your final bill than any headline number.

Auction, billed against a budget

No published price at all

Indeed Sponsored Jobs, LinkedIn Promoted Jobs

You set a daily or total budget and the platform spends it buying clicks in a live auction. Your cost per click moves with how many other employers want the same audience, so a demand generation manager in New York and a marketing coordinator in Boise do not cost the same and no calculator can tell you otherwise in advance. The number you control is the cap, not the rate.

Subscription per open job slot

Flat monthly fee, quoted privately

ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn Job Slots, Glassdoor bundles

You rent a container that holds one open role at a time and swap roles in and out as seats fill. The bill stays flat no matter how many applications arrive, which is the appeal. The catch is that an empty slot bills exactly the same as a full one, so the model only pays if you hire continuously.

Flat rate per post

One published price, published up front

Niche and specialty boards, including MarketerJob

You pay once, the listing runs for a fixed window, and nothing meters in the background. There is no auction to cap, no invoice threshold to trip and no sales call to book. You get less raw reach than a mass market board, which is the honest trade, and you know your number before you spend it.

Contingency fee on placement

15% to 25% of first year base

Recruiting and executive search agencies

Not a posting product at all, but it is the real alternative employers weigh for senior seats. Nobody bills you until someone signs, and then the invoice is four figures at best and six at CMO level. Worth it when the person you need is not reading job advertisements, and poor value when they are.

Every price in one table

What each platform charges to post a job, August 2026

Only the MarketerJob row is a published rate card. Every other figure is what independent US pricing trackers and employers report paying, because Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter and Glassdoor publish no prices at all. Treat them as the shape of the market, then get your own quote.

Platform	Pricing model	Free tier	What US employers pay	Best for
Indeed	Free tier plus auction sponsorship	Yes, limited	Reported $0.10 to $5.00+ per click, with a minimum daily budget widely reported at about $25 per sponsored job since July 2025. Roughly $750 for a 30 day sponsored run at that floor. Most employers report $150 to $1,200 a month.	Maximum raw reach, hourly and high volume roles
LinkedIn	Free tier plus auction promotion, or annual job slots	Yes, one active post	Promoted jobs bill against a budget you set, with a reported daily minimum of $7 to $10. Reported cost per click $0.50 to $6.00 and cost per applicant commonly $1.45 to $4.45. Job Slots are reported at $200 to $1,000 per slot per month, most mid market buyers at $200 to $450.	Senior and specialist roles, passive candidates, employer brand
ZipRecruiter	Monthly subscription per job slot	Short trial only	No public rate card. Reported plan tiers land near $299 to $399 standard, $375 to $519 premium and $719 to $999 pro, per job per month, and a single standard slot is reported at roughly $3,600 to $4,800 a year. Every employer is quoted separately.	Continuous hiring, one post distributed to many sites
Glassdoor	No standalone posting product	Not applicable	Job posting runs through Indeed and appears on Glassdoor, so your posting cost is your Indeed cost. Employer branding is sold separately on annual slot bundles, reported in procurement data at $10,000 to $100,000+ a year depending on slot count.	Employers whose reviews and pay profile do the selling
Built In	Annual employer branding package	No	No published rate card. Sold as an annual package with a company profile plus a posting allowance, quoted by market and company size. Priced as brand marketing rather than per advertisement.	Selling culture to candidates who want a tech employer
Wellfound	Free and paid hiring tiers	Yes	Posting is free on the entry tier. Paid tiers that add sourcing, curation and applicant management are quoted on request and there is no published rate card.	Candidates who specifically want to work at a startup
MarketerJob	Flat rate per post, marketing roles only	No	$199 for a 30 day post, $399 featured, $999 a month for unlimited active roles. Published, flat, no auction and no invoice threshold.	A marketing seat you want to screen yourself, from a marketing only audience
Recruiting agency	Contingency fee, paid on placement	No fee until a hire signs	Commonly 15% to 25% of first year base salary, so $18,000 to $30,000 on a $120,000 marketing manager. Retained executive search runs 25% to 35% of total first year compensation.	Senior or confidential searches where the candidate is not applying to anything

One row deserves a warning. Indeed repriced its sponsorship twice in three years: it ran a pay per application model from 2021 and retired it in December 2023, then raised the minimum daily spend per sponsored job from roughly $10 to about $25 in July 2025. Comparison pages that were written before those changes are still circulating, still quoting a few dollars a day, and still ranking. Check the current floor inside your own employer account before you plan a budget. If the auction and the cumulative invoice threshold are what push you off Indeed, the flat rate case is on our Indeed alternative page, and all thirteen platforms sit side by side on where to post a marketing role.

Past the invoice

The real cost of a job post is the invoice plus the screening hours

The line item on your card is not what the post cost you. The post cost you that number plus every hour somebody spends on what it produced, and on a general board those hours are the larger figure by a wide margin.

Run the arithmetic once and you will never buy reach carelessly again. A sponsored marketing manager listing in a decent US metro can pull 200 to 400 applications. Most of them are not from marketers. At two minutes per application, 250 of them is more than eight hours, and eight hours of a $120,000 a year hiring manager costs roughly $460 in loaded time. A $200 job post has quietly become a $660 job post, and nobody has spoken to a candidate yet.

The volume is not your imagination either. US job postings averaged 95 applicants each in 2025, up from about 46 in 2021, while the monthly hiring rate fell from 4.5% to 2.8%. Candidates are not the bottleneck. Screening is. Buying more reach into that environment adds cost on both sides of the ledger at once.

There are two sane responses. Reduce the flood at the source by posting where the audience is already qualified, or stop processing it by hand and screen the first round automatically so human hours only go against people who have already shown they can do the work. Plenty of teams do both. What does not work is buying maximum reach and then reading the result at midnight. If your posting is pulling volume but nothing usable, the reasons a job posting is not getting the right applicants are worth ruling out before you raise the budget.

What the numbers say

95: applicants per US job posting in 2025, up from about 46 in 2021. Volume stopped being a useful signal.
$460: the loaded cost of eight hours of manager time, which is what 250 applications at two minutes each consumes.
39 days: median US time to fill a nonexecutive role, 45 for an executive one. Every extra week is a real cost the ad price hides.
$199: a flat 30 day post on a marketing only board, where the applicant pool is smaller and every person in it does this work.

What to actually budget

How much to spend, by hiring situation

Nobody needs an average. They need to know what their own situation costs, so here it is by the five cases US employers actually turn up in.

Your situation	Budget	What to buy
One role, not urgent	$0 to $199	Start with the free tiers on Indeed and LinkedIn and a flat rate listing on a board your audience already reads. You lose nothing but two weeks. If that produces nothing usable, you have learned something about the band or the scope before you spent real money.
One role, needs filling this month	$200 to $800	A flat rate specialty post plus one capped sponsored budget on a mass market board covers most single searches. Cap the auction on day one and check the spend on day three rather than day thirty. Splitting the budget across two channels also tells you which one produced the hire.
Three to five roles, ongoing	$600 to $2,500 a month	This is where a subscription starts to beat per post pricing, but only if the slots stay full. Do the division before you sign: total monthly fee divided by roles actually filled is the only number that matters, and an unlimited flat rate plan often wins it outright.
Constant hiring, ten or more roles a year	Track cost per hire, not cost per post	At this volume you need a mix, and you need channel level reporting. Most teams who measure honestly find that one channel produces about two thirds of their hires and quietly cut the rest at renewal. One quarter of data is enough to make that call.
One senior, business critical seat	Post first, budget for a fee	Run the posting for 30 days because it costs almost nothing relative to the alternative, and plan for an agency fee if it produces nothing. Discovering a $30,000 contingency invoice in week six of an unbudgeted search is how executive hiring goes wrong.

One number is missing from every row above on purpose: the salary. The posting fee is a rounding error next to the seat itself, and the range you publish inside the ad drives applicant quality far harder than the budget behind it. Current US bands for nineteen marketing roles are in the 2026 marketing salary guide, the full cost stack of an actual hire is in what it costs to hire a marketer, and if you are weighing a board against an agency, the percentages are on marketing recruiter fees.

Where the money goes

The 5 mistakes that waste job advertising budget

Buying reach when you needed relevance

A sponsored post that reaches four million people is only worth anything if the marketers among them see it. Reach and relevance are separate products sold at similar prices, and most employers buy the first while needing the second. If the last three hires all came from one narrow channel, that is your answer.

Leaving the auction uncapped

Auction pricing means the platform will spend whatever you allow it to spend. Indeed also invoices on the first of the month or as soon as you cross a cumulative spend threshold, whichever comes first, and that threshold catches people out. Set the cap before the post goes live, not after the first invoice.

Counting applications instead of hires

A channel that delivers 300 applications and zero hires is more expensive than one that delivers twelve and fills the seat, whatever the invoices say. US postings averaged 95 applicants each in 2025, up from about 46 in 2021, so volume has stopped being a useful signal on its own.

Ignoring the screening hours in the total

The card charge is not the cost of the post. A sponsored marketing manager listing in a decent metro can pull 200 to 400 applications. At two minutes each, 250 applications is over eight hours, and eight hours of a $120,000 manager costs roughly $460. A $200 post just became a $660 post before the first phone screen.

Posting without a salary band

Thirteen states plus the District of Columbia now require a pay range in the posting, and beyond compliance the range is the single biggest driver of application quality. Omitting it buys you applications from people who will decline your offer, which is the most expensive kind of volume there is.

The last one is also a legal question in a growing number of places. Thirteen states plus the District of Columbia now require a pay range inside the posting itself, with different employer size thresholds and different rules for remote roles, and the list moved twice in 2026. Check yours against pay transparency laws by state before the ad goes live, and if you want the ad itself to pull better, marketing job posting examples shows what a strong listing looks like next to a weak one.

Being straight about it

Where a flat rate specialty board fits, and where it does not

The big boards have scale a niche board cannot match. Indeed's index is enormous. LinkedIn's passive candidate graph is genuinely unique and there is no substitute for it on a senior search. If you are hiring 40 people across five functions this year you are going to use both, and you should.

A specialty board solves a narrower problem. When you post a marketing job on MarketerJob it goes in front of an audience that is entirely marketers, so the application count is lower and the relevance is higher. You will get fewer resumes. That is the point, and it is also the honest limitation: if what you want is 300 applicants, this is the wrong product.

The pricing is deliberately boring. $199 buys a 30 day post. $399 makes it featured across the specialty spotlight. $999 a month is unlimited active roles. No auction, no per click meter, no cumulative invoice threshold and no sales call. You know the number before you spend it, which is the thing employers say they want and almost never get. The detail is on the pricing page.

For senior or genuinely hard to fill seats the honest comparison is not a board at all, it is a recruiter. A marketing recruitment agency typically charges 15% to 25% of first year salary on placement, which is $18,000 to $30,000 on a $120,000 hire. Sometimes that is the right money, because they do sourcing you cannot do yourself. But if the role can be filled with a $199 post and six hours of your own time, the arithmetic is not close.

$199

A single 30 day post, published price, no auction.

$399

Featured placement, specialty spotlight and matched subscriber email.

$999

Unlimited active roles per month, for teams hiring continuously.

Frequently asked

Job posting cost questions employers actually search

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

Posting on Indeed is free for a limited number of active roles, and sponsored placement has no published price. Indeed prices sponsorship by auction and bills it against a daily or monthly budget you set. The minimum daily spend per sponsored job is widely reported at about $25 since July 2025, which puts a 30 day sponsored run near $750 on one role.

Does Indeed charge to post a job?

Not for a basic listing. Indeed lets employers post a limited number of free jobs, each running up to 30 days, and it charges only when you sponsor a role to keep it visible. The free listing gets an initial burst of exposure and then sinks as newer postings push it down, which is why most employers who need a seat filled this quarter end up sponsoring.

Is posting a job on LinkedIn free?

Partly. LinkedIn allows one free job post active at a time, with a cap on how many applications it will accept and a visibility window of roughly two weeks before it pauses. Anything beyond that requires a promoted budget. Promoted jobs run on an auction with a reported daily minimum of $7 to $10, so a month of promotion starts near $210.

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

LinkedIn has three price points: free for one active post, promoted jobs billed against a daily budget from a reported $7 to $10 minimum, and Job Slots sold on annual contracts. Reported cost per click sits around $0.50 to $6.00 and cost per applicant around $1.45 to $4.45. Job Slots are reported at $200 to $1,000 per slot per month.

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

ZipRecruiter does not publish a rate card and quotes every employer separately by industry, location, company size and slot count. Third party reporting puts plan tiers near $299 to $399 standard, $375 to $519 premium and $719 to $999 pro, per job per month. A single standard slot works out around $3,600 to $4,800 a year.

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

You cannot buy a standalone Glassdoor job post anymore. Glassdoor and Indeed are part of the same company and job posting runs through Indeed, so your sponsored job appears on Glassdoor and your Glassdoor posting cost is simply your Indeed cost. Employer branding is a separate annual contract, sold by a salesperson and priced by company size.

What is a sponsored job on Indeed?

A sponsored job is a paid listing that Indeed keeps near the top of relevant search results instead of letting it fall down the index as newer posts arrive. You set a budget, Indeed enters your role into an auction against other employers targeting the same candidates, and you are billed for the traffic it buys rather than for the listing itself.

Is it worth paying to post a job?

It is worth paying when the free listing has already failed or when the seat has a real cost of staying empty. Free tiers on the mass market boards give you a short burst of visibility and then bury the post. If two weeks of free exposure produce nothing usable, paying is cheaper than a third week of an unfilled role.

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

Craigslist charges a flat one time fee per job posting that varies by metro, from about $10 to $75. San Francisco sits at the top around $75, most major metros at $45, a large tier of markets at $35 and smaller markets down near $10. The post runs 30 days with no upsells, and Craigslist shows the exact fee for your city at checkout before you pay.

What is the average cost to post a job online?

Across the main US channels most employers spend somewhere between $200 and $500 for a 30 day listing on a paid board, and $150 to $1,200 a month once auction sponsorship is running. Flat rate specialty boards sit at the low end of that, subscription slots at the high end, and agency fees are an order of magnitude above both.

Why do so few job boards publish their prices?

Because auction and subscription pricing both let the vendor charge different employers different amounts for the same product. An auction prices by competition in real time, and a quoted subscription prices by what your company looks like it can pay. Flat rate boards publish a number precisely because they have only one.

How much should I budget to post a marketing job?

For a single marketing role that needs filling this month, $200 to $800 covers a flat rate specialty listing plus one capped sponsored budget on a mass market board. Below that you are relying on free tiers and luck. Above that you are usually paying for reach you do not need on a specialist seat.

Does a paid job posting get more applicants?

Yes, and that is not automatically good. Paying buys placement, and placement buys volume, but on a general board most of that volume is people who are not marketers and applied to 300 roles that week. More applications only helps if you have the screening capacity to work through them, which is why relevance usually beats reach on specialist roles.

How to read the figures on this page: only the MarketerJob prices are a published rate card. Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, Built In and Wellfound publish nothing, so every number attached to them here comes from independent US pricing trackers and employer reporting checked in August 2026. Auction rates move weekly and subscription quotes move by industry, location, company size and how many slots you buy. Use these to know whether the quote in front of you is normal, then verify inside your own account before you commit a budget.

One price, published, before you spend it.

MarketerJob lists marketing roles and nothing else, and every card carries its salary band. A 30 day post is $199 flat, with no auction running in the background and no invoice you did not expect.

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