How many jobs should you apply to? As many as are open to you

Apply to every job you can find that will actually consider you. In October 2026 we read 967,730 US tech postings, and 5.1% of the software engineering roles in that pile were open to entry level. The scarce thing is not your applications. It is the postings.

Everything below is the arithmetic behind that, and it comes from counted postings rather than from opinion.

The pool sets the number

The usual advice is to choose a handful of roles you really want and tailor every application to them. That advice is not wrong. It assumes a pool big enough to be selective inside, and for an entry-level candidate in tech that assumption does not hold.

So the useful question is not how many you should send. It is how many are there.

We can answer that from the postings themselves. Our software reads employer career pages on a daily cycle and keeps a copy of what each one advertises, because that is the only way to fill in the applications sitting behind them. The October 2026 report built from that archive covers 967,730 live US tech postings across 82,954 career pages. It is a count of advertisements. We come back to why that matters further down.

What the October count shows

Of those 967,730 postings, we could read a role and a seniority level off 34,401. The rest were not specific enough to sort. That leaves 1,717 written for someone at entry level, or 5.0%.

Software engineering is the largest family we track, at 17,929 postings. 907 of them were open to entry level. That is 5.1%.

The spread across roles is wider than the headline number:

A data scientist sees roughly seven times the entry-level share a backend engineer does. If you are deciding where to point the effort, that right-hand column is the one to read. Our August read of the same market makes the same point with a smaller pile of postings.

Fifteen a week is about 7% of it

Suppose you aim at fifteen applications a week. That is roughly 65 in a month.

Against the 907 entry-level software engineering postings we saw in October, 65 applications is 7% of what exists. Two hundred applications would be about a fifth of it.

None of this is an argument for carelessness. It is an argument about the denominator. Being selective quietly assumes that there are hundreds of suitable jobs sitting there for you, and that the only real question in front of you is which of them to write to, and in what order, and with what opening line. For an entry-level engineer in this market the pool is small, and the smallness is the problem, not your temperament.

There is a caveat in the other direction, and it is a real one. The 907 covers one role family in one month. Somebody open to several of them, anywhere in the US, sees more than that. Somebody anchored to one city sees far less. Treat the number as a starting point you adjust, not a verdict.

Two other counts agree

We are not the only people reading this. Indeed Hiring Lab published seniority data on 23 July 2026 and put entry level at 4.5% of software development postings for the first quarter of 2026. We get 5.1% for October.

Those are two different pipelines. They read their own job site. We read employer career pages directly, and we read seniority off the title while they use required years of experience. Landing within a point of each other is about as much agreement as a number like this ever gets.

The same piece carries two more figures worth keeping. Senior-level postings were up 14.7% year over year, and entry-level postings were down 7.5%. In software development specifically, 69.3% of postings were senior.

A companion piece from the same day adds the half nobody mentions. 30% of the applications that went to entry-level postings came from people with ten or more years of experience. So those 907 postings are not sitting there waiting for a new graduate. Experienced people are applying to them in numbers, and almost half of what that group sent went to entry-level roles.

A posting is not an opening

Every figure above counts postings. It does not count jobs.

One posting can advertise several identical seats. It can also advertise none, if the employer is collecting resumes for later. The other side of this is measured, and not by us. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 7.1 million job openings and 5.2 million hires across the whole US economy in August 2026, in the release published on 29 September 2026.

Read those two numbers together and the gap is the point. Openings and hires are different things, collected in the same national survey a month apart. A posting is a third thing again. It is an advertisement on a career page, and it may or may not correspond to a seat somebody is actively trying to fill this month. Advertise the same role in four cities and you have four postings. Run it for eight months without hiring anyone and you have one that never becomes a job at all.

So our 5.1% is a share of advertisements. That is what it is, and we are not going to dress it up as anything else. It is still the most useful denominator you have, because the advertisement is the thing you actually apply to.

What to do with this

• Work inside the pool instead of around it. The share of postings open to you is the constraint. An application to a role that wants five years of experience is not a lottery ticket, it is a rejection with extra steps.
• Apply early. The postings we measured in September 2026 stayed up a median of 9 days, and that figure reads short because our watching window was only 67 days long. The 25th percentile was 3.9 days, so one posting in four was gone inside four days. How we counted that sets out the method and its limits.
• Read the form for the questions that decide you. In a count of 129 real application forms, 100 of them asked about visa sponsorship, 77.5%. That question usually is not in the posting at all. What those forms actually ask is the detail.
• Check the employer, not just the role, if you are on a visa. Whether a company has filed for H-1B workers is a public record, and where to find it is worth ten minutes before you spend an evening on one application.

The reason we can publish a count like this at all is that our software reads those career pages directly, whether or not anybody applies to the posting on them. Typing the repeated parts is what we built Apiva to do, and the plans sit on the pricing page. The full October report, every role and every city, is on the reports page.