The PhD job market, tracked

PhD Job Market Report

We pull the whole PhD-level research job market every night. Here’s how many roles are open, which fields are hiring, how tight each field is compared with how many new PhDs graduate, and which way the numbers are moving.

Browse & filter every role →·Differentiate in the AI era →

PhD job market, live

1,212

PhD-level research roles open right now, across 100 employers · 126 remote-friendly.

Aggregated nightly from AI labs, biotech & pharma, and U.S. federal science agencies. Last refresh: today.

How the market is moving

Open PhD-level roles tracked since 2026-05-12. That's -13 over that window.

2026-05-122026-09-26

Which fields are hiring, and how tight they are

Open roles by field, alongside roughly how many new U.S. PhDs that field produces each year. Field boundaries are fuzzy and many roles draw from several fields, so read the “roles per 100 new PhDs” as an order-of-magnitude reality check, not precise odds.

AI & Machine Learning343 open

~2,700 new U.S. PhDs / yr•13 open roles per 100 new PhDsRoomier, for a PhD field

Biology & Biomedical Science335 open

~13,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•3 open roles per 100 new PhDsTight

Physics, Engineering & Materials193 open

~13,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•1 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

Data Science & Statistics114 open

~2,200 new U.S. PhDs / yr•5 open roles per 100 new PhDsCompetitive

Computational Biology & Bioinformatics97 open

~1,500 new U.S. PhDs / yr•6 open roles per 100 new PhDsCompetitive

Other / Interdisciplinary59 open

spans several disciplines, no single PhD-supply figure

Computational Chemistry & Drug Discovery25 open

~1,200 new U.S. PhDs / yr•2 open roles per 100 new PhDsTight

Economics & Social Science19 open

~9,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.2 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

Chemistry17 open

~2,400 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.7 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

Earth & Environmental Science8 open

~3,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.3 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

Clinical & Public Health Research2 open

~4,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.1 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

PhD-production figures: NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates (latest available, ~2022). Open-role counts are a snapshot of currently-advertised positions, not annual hiring, actual hiring is higher, but the relative tightness across fields is the signal.

Where the roles are coming from

Pharma & biotech489

Industry & AI labs344

AI / research labs243

U.S. federal science136

Who’s hiring the most PhDs right now

Amgen140

Databricks79

NVIDIA58

OpenAI56

Anthropic55

Thermo Fisher Scientific50

Perplexity48

Pfizer44

AstraZeneca36

Scale AI35

Novartis33

Bristol Myers Squibb32

Gilead Sciences29

Roche / Genentech27

Reflection AI27

Browse and filter all 1,212 roles on the PhD Jobs Search →

A tight market rewards people who are clearly different

When there are dozens of qualified PhDs per opening, and AI is absorbing the routine parts of research and analysis, “I did a PhD” isn’t a differentiator on its own. What you can do that the next applicant (and the next model) can’t is.

How PhDs stay valuable in the AI era

Method: every night we fetch PhD-relevant roles from public employer career sites (Greenhouse, Ashby and Workday boards across AI labs, biotech and pharma) and the USAJobs API, classify them into broad fields, and store a snapshot. PhD-production figures come from the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates. Counts are estimates, not official statistics.