Product Designer leads the field
Product Designer is the most in-demand design role (326 open, 47% of the field), followed by Design Engineer (91).
Design · State of the market
State of the Design job market.
A live read on design hiring, built from 688 open roles across 296 companies - the 10th-largest field we track, and 1% of everything open. Updated hourly from public job postings.
Synced from public job postings · snapshot September 2026
688
Open roles
+69
Posted this week
296
Companies hiring
$202k
Median base, where disclosed
What the data says
Four things the listings tell us
There are 688 open design roles across 296 companies on LandEarly right now, with 69 posted in the past week. Senior-level roles make up 53% of the openings, and 59% of roles that specify a work model are fully remote.
Weighted toward senior experience
53% of open design roles read as senior-level. Entry-level (intern + junior) roles are 6% - a signal of how open this field is to early-career candidates.
A remote-friendly field
Of design roles that specify a work model, 59% are fully remote and 10% are hybrid. (Many listings don't declare one - this is the share among those that do.)
Companies hiring right now
Stripe is the most active employer in design (24 open roles, 3% of the field), but the openings are spread across 296 companies in total.
Where the demand is
One field, 16 different jobs
“Design” is a bucket, not a job. It rolls up 16 titles that share a craft but not a day - different scope, different level, different pay band. Which title you're chasing is the first cut worth making.
Open roles by title
Share of 688 listingsExperience level
All open rolesIntern3%
Junior3%
Mid24%
Senior53%
Staff10%
Principal2%
Executive5%
Read off each posting at ingest, not a field employers fill in - so this is a share of all 687 open roles, with nothing left out.
Work model
Where declaredOn-site 31%Hybrid 10%Remote 59%
Only 383 of 688 design listings declare a work model. These shares cover those, and no others.
Freshness
What’s open, by the week it posted
How old the live design pipeline is - the window where applying early still puts you in front of a human instead of a stack.
Jun 22This week
+69
design roles posted in the last seven days, across 296 employers - 10% of everything open in the field.
Each bar is the open roles posted that week, not a count of everything posted then: roles that have since closed are gone from it, so older weeks read lighter by design. The window starts when we began ingesting design listings, because a week-by-week series that ran further back would measure our board coverage rather than the market. 23 listings carry no posting date and sit out of this chart.
Pay, where disclosed
Base salary, from listings that state one
Base only. Bonus, commission and equity are real money but listings describe them too inconsistently to compare, so they stay out of the maths rather than inflate it.
25th percentile
$167k
The bottom of the middle 50%
Median
$202k
Half of priced listings pay more
75th percentile
$233k
Top of the middle 50%
$167k$202k$233k
What the number is
Computed from the 161 open design listings that state an annual base range - one midpoint per listing. The other 527 state none, and are not estimated in.
Product Designer salary guideWho's hiring, and where
296 companies, 10 metros
Most active employers
Open design roles
Top locations
Open design rolesSan Francisco, CA162
New York, NY108
Denver, CO10
Seattle, WA9
Toronto, ON7
Menlo Park, CA6
Waco, TX4
Berlin, DE3
Chicago, IL3
Foster City, CA3
Employers write locations as free text, so every spelling of a city is resolved to one market before it’s counted. A listing naming several markets counts in each, so these don’t sum to the field. The 378 that name no city - remote, “Hybrid”, a campus or a building - sit out entirely rather than get attributed to one.
Methodology
How we compute this
Short version: we count listings, we don't model them. Where the data is thin, the page says so instead of guessing.
Counted, not estimated
Every figure comes from the 688 active design listings we track across 11 applicant-tracking systems, ingested hourly from public job boards. A role that closes this morning drops out this afternoon.
Shares state their own denominator
Work-model percentages cover only the 383 listings that declare one. Experience level is read off every posting at ingest, so those shares cover the whole field. We’d rather show the smaller base than fill the gap.
A field rolls up related titles
Design covers Product Designer, Design Engineer, Brand Designer and 13 more titles. A posting joins a title when its own text describes that job - the roll-up is on the classified role, never on a keyword in the headline.
FAQ
Common questions
How many design jobs are open right now?
688 as of September 2026, across 296 companies, with 69 posted in the last seven days. The count is recomputed every hour and roles that close drop out the same day.
Which design roles are most in demand?
Product Designer (326 open), Design Engineer (91 open), and Brand Designer (61 open) - out of 16 design titles carrying at least one open role today.
Are design jobs remote?
Of the 383 design listings that declare a work model, 59% are fully remote, 10% hybrid and 31% on-site. Most listings never say, so this is the share among those that do - not of the whole field.
What does a design job pay?
Median disclosed base is $202k, with the middle 50% between $167k and $233k. That is base only, computed from the 161 open design listings that state an annual range - bonus, commission and equity are excluded because listings describe them too inconsistently to compare.
What experience level are design jobs?
53% of open design roles read as senior-level, and 6% are entry-level (intern or junior). The level is read off each posting when we ingest it, so every open role is counted here.
Other fields
Beyond Design
Same method, same hourly refresh - each with its own live count.
Go further
Act on these numbers
Browse design jobs
Every open design role, refreshed hourly - apply to any of them with one profile.
Open the feedProduct Designer salaries
Percentile pay by market, computed from the listings that disclose a band.
Check the payThe whole market
How Design stacks up against every other field we track.
See all fieldsEvery design title we track
Each board has a matching salary page and remote board. For how to apply to them, start with the guides.
Apply to every Design role with one profile.
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