The short answer

Hiring in the US is slow but steady. Employers added only 29,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate was 4.2%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Layoffs are down a lot from last year, but so is the number of people quitting, which usually means people don't feel sure they could find something better.

That's the national picture. Inside it, plenty of companies are still hiring hard. On November 2, the 642 companies Hiring Tempo checks every day had 53,842 open jobs posted on their own career pages. Here's where those jobs are, who added the most in the last month, and what it means if you're looking.

What the latest government numbers say

Three reports tell you most of what you need to know about the job market. Here are their latest numbers.

TableThe job market in four numbers
Measure Latest What it means
Jobs added (September) 29,000 Well below the pace of a strong market
Unemployment rate (September) 4.2% Has stayed between 4.1% and 4.3% since March
Job openings (August) 7.1 million About the same as the month before
Quit rate (August) 1.9% Low; fewer people are leaving jobs on their own

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation (Oct 2, 2026) and Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (Sep 29, 2026).

A few more details from the same reports are worth knowing:

  • Health care is still the steadiest field. It added 17,000 jobs in September, though that's slower than its average of 33,000 a month over the past year.
  • Construction and manufacturing added jobs too: 11,000 and 9,000.
  • Finance shrank. Financial activities lost 7,000 jobs in September and are down 129,000 since May 2025, mostly at insurance companies.
  • Earlier months were weaker than first reported. July and August together were revised down by 60,000 jobs, and July now shows a small loss.
  • Pay is growing slowly. Average hourly pay was $37.81, up 3.0% from a year earlier.

Layoffs are down, but tech is the exception

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm, counts the job cuts companies announce each month. Its September report found:

  • 43,281 announced cuts in September, 18% fewer than August and 20% fewer than September 2025.
  • 573,195 cuts so far this year, 39% fewer than the same nine months of 2025. Government cuts explain most of that gap: leaving government out, cuts are down 15%.
  • Technology is the top industry for cuts in 2026, with 165,925 so far, up 54% from last year. That's 29% of all cuts this year.
  • AI is the most common reason given this year. Companies have named artificial intelligence for 120,136 cuts, about 21% of the total.

Hiring plans tell a mixed story. Companies have announced plans to hire 210,612 people this year, up 3% from 2025, but September's plans were the lowest for that month since 2011. Seasonal hiring for the holidays has started slowly.

What this means for you: a tech job search is harder than the national numbers suggest, because layoffs there are up while they're down almost everywhere else. Look for companies that are clearly adding people, which is what the rest of this article covers.

Where the open jobs are

Here's how the 53,842 jobs open on November 2 break down by team. About one in four doesn't fit cleanly into one team (for example, "Program Manager" or "Technician"), so the shares below add up to less than 100%.

TableOpen jobs by team, November 2, 2026
Team Open jobs Share
Engineering 17,199 32%
Sales and go-to-market 7,091 13%
Operations 3,098 6%
Design 2,594 5%
Finance and legal 2,182 4%
Marketing 2,067 4%
Customer success and support 1,848 3%
Product 1,561 3%
Data and analytics 1,414 3%
People and recruiting 818 2%

Source: Hiring Tempo, open jobs on the career pages of 642 companies, November 2, 2026.

Engineering is the biggest group by far, so even with tech layoffs up, it's still where the most openings are. Sales is second. Companies that are growing need people to sell, so a lot of sales openings at a company is often a sign it's doing well.

The companies that added the most jobs in the last month

To see who is growing right now, we compared each company's open jobs on October 3 with November 2. This list only includes companies that had at least 30 openings in early October, so a jump from 2 jobs to 6 doesn't count as fast growth.

TableMost jobs added, October 3 to November 2, 2026
Company Oct 3 Nov 2 Added
Samsara 240 327 +87
Relativity Space 350 410 +60
Shield AI 596 656 +60
Cloudflare 397 456 +59
Affirm 189 240 +51
Harvey 326 376 +50
Saronic 207 255 +48
Qualtrics 52 95 +43
Skydio 144 187 +43
Anthropic 641 674 +33

Source: Hiring Tempo daily counts of open jobs on each company's careers page.

Two patterns stand out:

  • Defense and autonomy companies are growing fast. Shield AI, Saronic and Skydio all build drones or autonomous boats, and Relativity Space builds rockets. Together they added 211 openings in a month, mostly in engineering and operations.
  • Software companies that sell to other businesses are hiring salespeople. Samsara's biggest group of openings is in sales (103 jobs), and Cloudflare has 149 sales openings next to 187 in engineering.

Across all 228 companies big enough to make this list, the total number of openings stayed about the same over the month. Most of the change was a few companies growing while a few others shrank, which matches the slow, steady picture in the government numbers.

Where the jobs are located

Most open jobs on Hiring Tempo name at least one city. These had the most on November 2:

TableCities with the most open jobs
City Open jobs
San Francisco 6,701
New York City 4,834
London 2,077
Bangalore 1,596
Seattle 1,433
Santa Clara 1,332
Nashville 933
Austin 903
Washington, DC 885
Los Angeles 835

Source: Hiring Tempo, November 2, 2026. A job listed in more than one city counts in each.

Nashville stands out on a list that's otherwise the usual big hubs. Almost all of its openings are at Oracle, which is building a large campus there, so the count says more about one employer than about the city as a whole.

Remote jobs and pay ranges

Two numbers people ask about a lot:

  • About 16% of open jobs are remote. That's 1 in 6. Because anyone in the country can apply, remote jobs tend to draw big applicant pools, so applying early matters even more for them.
  • About 20% of US jobs show a pay range. Several states, including California, Colorado, New York and Washington, require employers to post pay in job ads, so you'll see ranges more often for jobs in those states.

AI jobs are a smaller share than you might think

There's a lot of talk about AI jobs. In the data, about 6% of open jobs have "AI," "ML," "LLM" or "machine learning" in the title, and the share was the same for jobs posted in the last week. Plenty of other jobs use AI tools day to day, but jobs built around AI are still a small slice of the total.

What to do with this

  • Apply early. About 31% of the jobs open right now were posted in the last 30 days, and 4,555 were posted in the last week. Recruiters often review applications as they come in, so early ones get read first.
  • Follow the companies that are growing. A company adding jobs every week will probably keep adding them, so it's a better target than one whose list is shrinking.
  • In tech, widen your search. With layoffs up in tech, look at companies that sell to other businesses, defense and hardware companies, and health care companies that hire for tech roles.
  • Watch the next reports. The September job openings report comes out November 3, and the October jobs report comes out November 6.

Sources