Design · State of the market

State of the Design job market.

A live read on design hiring, built from 1,011 open roles across 377 companies - the 9th-largest field we track, and 2% of everything open. Updated hourly from public job postings.

Synced from public job postings · snapshot October 2026

1,011
Open roles
+83
Posted this week
377
Companies hiring
$193k
Median base, where disclosed
What the data says

Four things the listings tell us

There are 1,011 open design roles across 377 companies on LandEarly right now, with 83 posted in the past week. Senior-level roles make up 50% of the openings, and 44% of roles that specify a work model are fully remote.

47%

Product Designer leads the field

Product Designer is the most in-demand design role (472 open, 47% of the field), followed by Creative Director (83).

50%

Weighted toward senior experience

50% 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.

44%

A remote-friendly field

Of design roles that specify a work model, 44% are fully remote and 31% are hybrid. (Many listings don't declare one - this is the share among those that do.)

377

Companies hiring right now

Monks is the most active employer in design (65 open roles, 6% of the field), but the openings are spread across 377 companies in total.

Where the demand is

One field, 14 different jobs

“Design” is a bucket, not a job. It rolls up 14 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.

Remote Product Designer board

Experience level

All open roles
Intern2%
Junior4%
Mid30%
Senior50%
Staff7%
Principal2%
Executive5%

Read off each posting at ingest, not a field employers fill in - so this is a share of all 1,010 open roles, with nothing left out.

Work model

Where declared
On-site 25%Hybrid 31%Remote 44%

Only 548 of 1,011 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.

Aug 3This week
+83

design roles posted in the last seven days, across 377 employers - 8% 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. 6 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
$164k

The bottom of the middle 50%

Median
$193k

Half of priced listings pay more

75th percentile
$230k

Top of the middle 50%

$164k$193k$230k

What the number is

Computed from the 243 open design listings that state an annual base range - one midpoint per listing. The other 768 state none, and are not estimated in.

Product Designer salary guide
Who's hiring, and where

377 companies, 10 metros

All companies

Top locations

Open design roles
San Francisco, CA162
New York, NY141
Toronto, ON14
Seattle, WA11
Denver, CO10
Chicago, IL9
Los Angeles, CA7
Menlo Park, CA7
Pittsburgh, PA6
Dallas, TX5

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 612 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 1,011 active design listings we track across 13 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 548 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, Creative Director, Design Engineer and 11 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?

1,011 as of October 2026, across 377 companies, with 83 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 (472 open), Creative Director (83 open), and Design Engineer (81 open) - out of 14 design titles carrying at least one open role today.

Are design jobs remote?

Of the 548 design listings that declare a work model, 44% are fully remote, 31% hybrid and 25% 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 $193k, with the middle 50% between $164k and $230k. That is base only, computed from the 243 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?

50% 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.

Go further

Act on these numbers

Every 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.

LandEarly tailors your resume and screening answers to each design posting, with every line traced back to your real experience. No re-typing the same form for every role.

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