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

1,235

PhD-level research roles open right now, across 117 employers · 140 remote-friendly.

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

How the market is moving

We started tracking the market on 2026-05-12. A trend line appears here once there are a couple of weeks of daily snapshots, check back soon.

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 Learning371 open

~2,700 new U.S. PhDs / yr•14 open roles per 100 new PhDsRoomier, for a PhD field

Biology & Biomedical Science274 open

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

Physics, Engineering & Materials220 open

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

Data Science & Statistics112 open

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

Computational Biology & Bioinformatics95 open

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

Other / Interdisciplinary85 open

spans several disciplines, no single PhD-supply figure

Chemistry22 open

~2,400 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.9 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

Economics & Social Science20 open

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

Computational Chemistry & Drug Discovery15 open

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

Earth & Environmental Science11 open

~3,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.4 open roles per 100 new PhDsVery tight

Clinical & Public Health Research10 open

~4,000 new U.S. PhDs / yr•0.3 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 & biotech429

Industry & AI labs410

AI / research labs220

U.S. federal science176

Who’s hiring the most PhDs right now

Databricks101

Amgen95

xAI61

Thermo Fisher Scientific61

NVIDIA58

OpenAI57

Anthropic52

AstraZeneca43

Perplexity42

Bristol Myers Squibb37

Scale AI36

Cohere33

Mistral AI32

Sanofi31

Roche / Genentech30

Browse and filter all 1,235 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.