Nearly 700,000 job postings are live on our board right now, across 3,321 employers. About 80,500 of them are tech roles: people who write, test, deploy, and secure software. That’s roughly one posting in nine.
Of those, the number at software and technology companies is 9,794. Twelve percent.
Consulting and professional-services firms hold 26,330, nearly three times as many. Banks and financial-services companies hold 11,055. Then defense contractors, staffing firms, manufacturers, hospital systems. On this board, the tech industry is the third-largest employer of the skill it’s named after.
What counts as a tech job
Job titles are not a taxonomy. Searching titles for the word “engineer” returns 122,867 postings here, and only about half involve software. Mechanical, civil, electrical, and chemical engineering account for thousands on their own, and those are different professions entirely. Past that clean line, the word means genuinely different work at different companies, and where software ends and adjacent work begins is a question reasonable people answer differently.
So rather than defend one perfect definition, we drew a line around building, testing, running, and securing software, then checked whether the finding depended on where we drew it. A tight line, counting only people shipping application code, gives about 72,700 postings and puts 12.4% at tech companies. Our line gives 80,544 and 12.2%. The widest defensible line, taking in IT operations and enterprise-platform work, gives about 94,000 and 12.4%.
The ratio doesn’t care where you draw the line.
Where software jobs actually live
| Industry | Live tech postings | Share | Employers posting them |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional services and consulting | 26,330 | 32.7% | 60 |
| Financial services | 11,055 | 13.7% | 353 |
| Software and technology | 9,794 | 12.2% | 536 |
| Aerospace and defense | 6,675 | 8.3% | 104 |
| Staffing and recruiting | 5,752 | 7.1% | 56 |
| Industrial and manufacturing | 4,346 | 5.4% | 85 |
| Healthcare and life sciences | 3,472 | 4.3% | 261 |
| Security, risk, and compliance | 2,561 | 3.2% | 169 |
| Retail and e-commerce | 2,489 | 3.1% | 75 |
| Media, entertainment, and sports | 1,708 | 2.1% | 86 |
Look at the last column, because it changes the story. Those 26,330 consulting postings come from just 60 employers, roughly 440 openings apiece: “consulting hires the most engineers” really means a handful of global firms hiring constantly across hundreds of client projects. The staffing row is 56 intermediaries hiring on behalf of other companies, a channel rather than a destination. Software and technology is the opposite shape, 536 employers averaging 18 openings each. More companies than any other industry here, each with a modest handful of roles, and every engineer’s job search pointed at them.
If you’re thinking this is all offshore delivery work, we checked. Restrict to postings that name a US location and the ordering shifts but the conclusion doesn’t: aerospace and defense leads at 20.4%, financial services is next at 18.5%, and software and technology is still third at 15.3%. Five of every six US tech postings are at non-tech employers. What changes is which doors they are: banks and defense contractors in the US, consulting delivery hubs abroad.
None of this claims a bank’s platform team is interchangeable with a startup’s. Stacks age differently, interview loops differ, defense work may want a clearance, and plenty of these roles are on-site in cities tech forgot. It’s a claim about where the doors are, and most of them are not where most engineers are knocking.
The board’s actual shape
Healthcare and life sciences is the largest industry on the board at 18.4%, and it’s broad: 396 employers, with the top three holding only 30% of its postings. Retail’s 16.7% is the opposite shape, 100 employers with two-thirds of the volume from three of them. Software and technology, the industry most job-search advice orbits, holds 6.3% of postings while fielding more employers than any other industry, 611 of them. If the tech job market feels crowded, that’s structural.
By role rather than industry, tech work is about 11% of live postings and clinical healthcare roles are about 10%. The engineer and the nurse are in nearly equal demand; only one of them hears about it constantly.
Geographically, 64% of postings name a US location. Second is India at just under 10%, more than Canada and the United Kingdom combined, and more than half of those come from the global consulting firms staffing their delivery hubs. About 2% of postings name no country at all, a pattern familiar from our work-mode data: postings that won’t say where also tend not to say much else.
What this changes about your search
Widen the industry filter before you touch anything else. For every tech-company posting there are seven elsewhere, most with shorter applicant lines than anything on a startup careers page. Browse the board by industry rather than by whatever the feed surfaces, and before assuming the move costs you money, check what disclosed salaries actually show instead of the folklore.
Don’t trust the word “engineer” as a filter. Half the postings carrying it aren’t software at all, and plenty of software roles carry titles a keyword search will never surface. Searching by title is searching by marketing copy.
Composition is invisible from inside a feed. The board’s biggest industry is healthcare, its most crowded is tech, its second country is India, and none of that is knowable by scrolling newest-first. That’s the case for having something read every posting against your criteria instead: Fitcheck checks each one whatever industry or title it arrives under, and hands back Apply, Review, or Skip with reasons, so a bank’s platform role finds you even when you’d never have looked in that aisle.
Crossover with the rest of the series
This is the composition baseline for the series: pay disclosure, posting lifespans, and benefits silence all vary by industry, and now you know how big each industry actually is. These are live inventory shares, deliberately free of growth claims; our measurement of which fields are growing arrives once our tracking panel supports a full quarter. The whole series lives at the job posting statistics hub.
How we counted
A snapshot of live postings on the JobWeb Board taken July 28, 2026: 697,746 postings across 3,321 companies, sourced directly from employer career sites. Industry comes from each employer’s primary classification, so a bank’s software role counts as financial services, which is the point.
Tech roles come from keyword rules on posting titles covering software development, infrastructure and operations engineering, data and machine learning, security engineering, and quality and test engineering. Physical engineering disciplines are excluded, as are roles where the title indicates the work is primarily commercial or analytical rather than building software. Title-based classification has an irreducibly fuzzy edge, which is why we report the count under three definitions and lean on the ratio, which holds across all of them.
Countries come from the locations stated on each posting; about 2% state none, and postings listing several are counted once per country. These are shares of live inventory, not hires, and the board skews toward employers whose career sites we track directly, so the exact percentages are ours. We doubt the shape is.