Product Designer leads the field
Product Designer is the most in-demand design role (460 open, 43% of the field), followed by Creative Director (94).
Design · State of the market
State of the Design job market.
A live read on design hiring, built from 1,059 open roles across 398 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
1,059
Open roles
+91
Posted this week
398
Companies hiring
$194k
Median base, where disclosed
What the data says
Four things the listings tell us
There are 1,059 open design roles across 398 companies on LandEarly right now, with 91 posted in the past week. Senior-level roles make up 49% of the openings, and 44% of roles that specify a work model are fully remote.
Weighted toward senior experience
49% 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, 44% are fully remote and 30% are hybrid. (Many listings don't declare one - this is the share among those that do.)
Companies hiring right now
VML is the most active employer in design (61 open roles, 6% of the field), but the openings are spread across 398 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 1,059 listingsExperience level
All open rolesIntern2%
Junior4%
Mid31%
Senior49%
Staff7%
Principal2%
Executive5%
Read off each posting at ingest, not a field employers fill in - so this is a share of all 1,058 open roles, with nothing left out.
Work model
Where declaredOn-site 26%Hybrid 30%Remote 44%
Only 574 of 1,059 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.
Jul 20This week
+91
design roles posted in the last seven days, across 398 employers - 9% 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
$157k
The bottom of the middle 50%
Median
$194k
Half of priced listings pay more
75th percentile
$230k
Top of the middle 50%
$157k$194k$230k
What the number is
Computed from the 252 open design listings that state an annual base range - one midpoint per listing. The other 807 state none, and are not estimated in.
Product Designer salary guideWho's hiring, and where
398 companies, 10 metros
Most active employers
Open design roles
Top locations
Open design rolesSan Francisco, CA168
New York, NY149
Toronto, ON16
Denver, CO11
Seattle, WA11
Chicago, IL8
Los Angeles, CA8
Menlo Park, CA8
Kansas City, MO5
Pittsburgh, PA5
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 639 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 1,059 active design listings we track across 14 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 574 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 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?
1,059 as of October 2026, across 398 companies, with 91 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 (460 open), Creative Director (94 open), and Design Engineer (91 open) - out of 16 design titles carrying at least one open role today.
Are design jobs remote?
Of the 574 design listings that declare a work model, 44% are fully remote, 30% hybrid and 26% 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 $194k, with the middle 50% between $157k and $230k. That is base only, computed from the 252 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?
49% 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.
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.
Set up in minutes · Cancel anytime · No contract