Market analysis · August 2, 2026

The state of the job market, August 2026

Most job-market commentary is written from surveys. This is written from the market itself: 3,579 unique live openings, aggregated from 38 job sources across 41 cities on the day of writing, with a global median advertised salary of USD 98,000. Every number below comes from a live page you can open.

Earlier editions

August 19, 2026 · 8 min readA law changed who counts as unemployed in France.French unemployment reached 8.3% in the second quarter of 2026, its highest reading since the pandemic quarter of 2020. INSEE publishes something most coverage leaves out: a decomposition showing that people brought into the count by the 2023 full-employment law account for nearly half of the rise across six quarters. That is not the same as saying the rise is not real - the majority of it comes from a population the law never touched - and holding both facts at once is the whole of this piece.Read the analysis →
August 18, 2026 · 7 min readEurope’s unmet need for work is twice its unemployment.Eurostat counts 23.7 million people in the European Union with an unmet need for employment. 12.0 million of them are unemployed. The other 11.7 million are working part-time and want more hours, or want work and are not searching, or are searching and cannot start yet - and the unemployment rate, 5.7%, sees none of them. This is the third edition in a row about a number that leaves people out, and the first about the number built to count them.Read the analysis →
August 17, 2026 · 7 min readOne unemployed American per job opening. That is not full employment.The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 1.0 unemployed person per job opening in the United States - a ratio that has sat between 1.0 and 1.1 for eight straight readings. Yesterday this desk reported the British equivalent at 2.5. The gap is real. What the American number does not say is that anyone who wants a job can have one, and the same release explains why: in the very month the ratio read one-to-one, 7.4 million openings sat unfilled while employers hired 5.3 million people and let 1.8 million go.Read the analysis →

3,579unique live openings

38job sources

41cities

USD 98,000median advertised

The transatlantic pay gap is not closing

The single loudest fact in the snapshot is how far apart the two sides of the Atlantic still sit. Boston (USD 121,500) and San Francisco (USD 120,500) top the advertised-median table; London leads Europe at GBP 70,000, and the large continental hubs advertise far below that — Paris at EUR 44,000, Amsterdam and Barcelona at EUR 36,000, Madrid at EUR 28,500.

Currencies differ, cost of living differs, and advertised is not paid — but even read generously, a San Francisco median close to three times Amsterdam’s is not a rounding artefact. For employers hiring remotely it is the arbitrage; for European candidates with remote-eligible skills it is the strongest argument in any salary negotiation this year.

Median advertised salary by city, 2 August 2026 (local currency, annualised)
City	Median advertised	Note
Boston	USD 121,500	highest in the snapshot
San Francisco	USD 120,500
Austin	USD 108,000
Los Angeles	USD 102,000
Chicago	USD 95,000
Toronto	CAD 90,500
Seattle	USD 84,000
London	GBP 70,000	leads Europe
Vienna	EUR 59,000
Birmingham	GBP 50,000
Paris	EUR 44,000
Amsterdam	EUR 36,000
Barcelona	EUR 36,000
Madrid	EUR 28,500

Remote is two markets wearing one name

Across the deduplicated global supply, 16% of openings are flagged remote-friendly. That average hides a split. In the large US and European hubs, remote share sits anywhere from 0% (London, Paris, New York in this snapshot) to the high double digits — Boston 88%, Lisbon 83%, Copenhagen 76%, Austin 74%.

The more interesting pattern is in the MENA hubs: Casablanca, Tunis, Cairo and Doha all show remote shares above 90%. Read carefully, that is not “Casablanca went remote” — it is the same pool of global, USD-denominated remote roles surfacing in every city where local listing volume is thinner. The remote layer of the market has become a single worldwide market that simply appears everywhere, and its salaries anchor to US figures, not local ones. That is the quiet mechanism behind salary convergence for remote-eligible skills — and it is why the transatlantic gap above matters most for on-site work.

Employers name character as often as code

Tally what employers actually write in their listings and the top of the table is not a programming language. Leadership (29 listings) leads, with Communication (16) and Project Management (14) close behind — together naming human skills as often as Python (16), Go (11) and JavaScript (7) combined. Accounting (17) outranks every language except Python, a reminder that the aggregated market is much wider than tech Twitter suggests.

The practical read for candidates: a profile that evidences leadership or delivery alongside a craft skill matches the stated demand far better than a longer list of frameworks.

Leadership — 29 listingshuman skill
Accounting — 17 listings
Python — 16 listings
Communication — 16 listingshuman skill
Project Management — 14 listingshuman skill
Go — 11 listings
JavaScript — 7 listings
Adobe Photoshop — 6 listings

Who is hiring hardest: the AI-adjacent cohort

The five employers with the most live roles in the snapshot are Rippling (239), OpenAI (125), Palantir (82), Uber (72) and ElevenLabs (70). Three of the five sell AI or are built on it, and the other two are infrastructure businesses scaling with it. Concentrated hiring by AI-adjacent companies — rather than broad hiring across sectors — is the clearest single trend in the data.

What we expect next

Forecasts below are our reading of the data’s direction, stated without invented precision:

The remote layer keeps converging on US pay. As long as identical remote roles surface simultaneously in Casablanca and Copenhagen, their salaries will anchor to the global price, not the local one. Expect the on-site/remote pay spread inside European cities to widen before it narrows.

AI-cohort hiring broadens. The current concentration (five employers holding hundreds of live roles) historically precedes diffusion, as the tooling those companies sell lowers the cost for everyone else to build. Watch the “hiring most” list diversify before headcount totals move.

Human-skill inflation continues. When employers can generate more of the routine craft output with tools, the listings language shifts toward what tools do not supply — judgment, leadership, communication. The skills table above is already halfway there.

Method & honest caveats

Source. All figures were read from babzituna.com/jobs and its city pages on 2 August 2026 — BabZituna’s live aggregation of 38 job sources. They change continuously; the page is the current truth, this article is a dated snapshot.
City counts are floors. Per-city queries cap at 120 results, which is why city pages read “120+”. The deduplicated global figure (3,579) counts each role once.
Salaries are advertised, not paid — annualised, in local currency, and only computed where enough listings publish a figure. Cities without a robust median are omitted. One quirk we excluded on purpose: four MENA cities shared an identical USD median, the fingerprint of the same global remote roles repeating — citing it as local data would be wrong.
Remote share partly reflects source coverage. Not every job source sets the remote flag, so a 0% city can mean “sources there don’t flag it” as much as “nobody hires remotely”. We flag the pattern rather than hide it.
Skills are counted from listings text, recognised against a curated ESCO-based vocabulary — an employment type, region name or company name never counts as a skill.

The live version of every number in this piece: browse jobs by city. And if you would rather the market read you — the app scores every role on six explained dimensions, free for job seekers.