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

1,217

PhD-level research roles open right now, across 113 employers · 116 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 -8 over that window.

2026-05-122026-08-12

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 Learning335 open

~2,700 new U.S. PhDs / yr•12 open roles per 100 new PhDsRoomier, for a PhD field

Biology & Biomedical Science323 open

~13,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•2 open roles per 100 new PhDsTight

Physics, Engineering & Materials197 open

~13,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•2 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

Data Science & Statistics120 open

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

Computational Biology & Bioinformatics100 open

~1,500 new U.S. PhDs / yr•7 open roles per 100 new PhDsCompetitive

Other / Interdisciplinary69 open

spans several disciplines, no single PhD-supply figure

Computational Chemistry & Drug Discovery27 open

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

Economics & Social Science18 open

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

Chemistry14 open

~2,400 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.6 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

Clinical & Public Health Research8 open

~4,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.2 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

Earth & Environmental Science6 open

~3,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.2 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 & biotech510

Industry & AI labs343

AI / research labs223

U.S. federal science141

Who’s hiring the most PhDs right now

Amgen139

Databricks86

Thermo Fisher Scientific61

Anthropic54

Novartis54

NVIDIA54

OpenAI50

Perplexity46

AstraZeneca43

Scale AI38

Roche / Genentech34

Bristol Myers Squibb34

Pfizer31

Sanofi30

Cohere28

Browse and filter all 1,217 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.