AI Labor Tracker

Software Developer Postings on Indeed Are Up 23% From a Year Ago. Customer Service, Administrative and Accounting Postings, Where AI Was Supposed to Bite First, Are Flat to Slightly Down.

Indeed's economists said Thursday that tech job categories are helping lift US job postings, 'somewhat unexpectedly, considering the concern over AI replacement.' Its daily data show the rebound is real for software and IT, from a very deep hole. The office and support jobs that sit closest to what AI does well haven't joined it.

On Thursday, Daniel Culbertson, an economist at Indeed’s Hiring Lab, published the job site’s quarterly look at the US tech labor market. One line in it stopped me.

“Somewhat unexpectedly, considering the concern over AI replacement, tech job categories are contributing to the recent uptick in job postings,” he wrote. Every tech category Indeed tracks was up from a year ago, led by software development. Overall US postings on Indeed had turned positive year over year “for the first time in nearly four years.”

That runs against almost everything people have been told about AI and coding jobs this year. So I downloaded the data behind it. Indeed publishes its daily postings index by occupation on GitHub, and you can check it yourself in a few minutes.

If AI is replacing work, you’d expect to see it first in hiring, because companies can stop posting a job long before they lay anyone off. That’s what the Reserve Bank of Australia’s business liaison found when it published its results on Monday, and it’s the pattern we’ve reported from several US studies.

So which jobs are employers posting more of, and which are they posting less of? And does the pattern look like AI, or like something else?

What the postings say

Indeed’s index sets each occupation’s postings at 100 on Feb. 1, 2020, just before the pandemic. It’s seasonally adjusted and smoothed over seven days. I compared the latest reading, for Nov. 6, 2026, with the same weekday a year earlier.

Software development postings rose about 23%. Scientific research and development rose about the same.

The other tech categories rose too, by less. IT systems and solutions was up about 13%. IT infrastructure and support and data and analytics posted smaller single-digit gains. [Chart: year-over-year change in Indeed postings, tech vs office and support sectors, and level vs February 2020.]

Now the other side of the ledger. Customer service postings were essentially unchanged from a year earlier. Marketing was flat. Administrative assistance and accounting each slipped about 2%.

Medical information, the Indeed category whose example titles include coding specialists and patient services representatives, was down about 6%.

Those office and support jobs are the ones most often named as closest to what large language models do well: answering routine questions, drafting standard text, keying and checking records. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s research note on Monday listed general clerks and call center workers among the occupations where job ads slowed most. The US postings data point the same way.

The hole software dug first

Before anyone reads this as “AI is creating coding jobs,” look at where software postings started. Indeed’s software development index peaked at about 234 in February 2022, during the hiring frenzy that followed the pandemic. By May 2025 it had fallen to about 61. That’s a drop of nearly three quarters in a little over three years.

The current reading of about 81 is a third above that low. It’s also still almost a fifth below February 2020, and about two thirds below the 2022 peak. Culbertson put it this way: every tech category is up from a year ago, “but all categories remain well below their early-2020 levels.”

So what we’re seeing in software is a rebound from the bottom of a bust. The slide began in 2022, the year the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates and months before ChatGPT came out that November, so AI coding tools can’t have started it. A rebound from that hole tells you the worst of the hiring freeze is over. It doesn’t tell you AI has stopped mattering.

Office and support jobs never had that boom or that bust. Customer service postings are about an eighth below February 2020. Administrative assistance is down less than a tenth. Accounting is above its 2020 level. These are flatter, steadier lines, and right now they’re the ones not growing while the rest of the market picks up.

The rest of the world doesn’t look like this

Here’s the part that surprised me most. Indeed publishes the same index for other countries, so I ran the same comparison for the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and France. [Chart 2: year-over-year change in postings, software development and office sectors, six countries.]

The US software rebound is close to unique. In the UK, software development postings rose about 3% on the year. In Canada, France and Australia they fell, and in Germany they dropped about 15%. Only the US shows a rise anywhere near a fifth.

That’s not because those countries had a better 2025 to fall from. Germany’s and France’s software postings were already a little over half their early-2020 level a year ago, a deeper hole than America’s two thirds, and they kept sinking.

The office side looks weaker abroad, too, and in some places much weaker. Accounting postings fell about a fifth in the UK and nearly as much in France. Administrative assistance fell by double digits in the UK, Australia, Germany and France. Canada was the exception, with customer service and administrative postings up a little.

Each country’s index is built separately, so you can’t compare levels across borders, only each country’s own direction. But the direction is telling. If cheaper AI were simply reducing demand for programmers everywhere, you’d expect software postings to look similar across rich countries that all have access to the same tools. They don’t. The US, where the largest AI labs are based, is where software hiring is coming back.

That fits a simple explanation, though I can’t prove it with postings alone. Building AI takes software engineers, and a large share of that building is happening in America. Using AI, which every country can do, doesn’t seem to be creating software jobs anywhere.

Postings are a signal of intent. Pay is a better signal of how much employers actually want someone. Here too the tech data look stronger. Indeed’s wage tracker shows software development pay growth in posted wages at 2.9% in September, “nearly double its rate of 1.5% a year earlier.” Wage growth for IT systems and for data and analytics climbed more than 3 percentage points in six months, Culbertson wrote.

If employers were confident AI could do a developer’s job, they wouldn’t be raising the pay they advertise for developers. That’s the most useful fact in the report, in my view. Prices tell you what people believe more honestly than surveys do.

But workers aren’t acting like the market is hot. Culbertson noted that the quits rate in professional and business services was 2.1% in September, “nearly a full percentage point below its 2019 average,” and the information industry’s quits rate is also still below its 2019 average. People quit when they’re confident they can find something better. Tech workers, on this data, still aren’t.

What could explain the split

I want to be careful here, because a pattern in postings is not proof of a cause. Several things could explain why software is rebounding while office support jobs sit still.

The first is simply the cycle. Software fell much further, so it has more room to bounce. A sector at 61 can rise a third without getting back to normal. A sector near its 2020 level has no such cushion.

The second is AI itself, in both directions. Companies building AI products need software engineers, data infrastructure people and researchers. The engineering categories in Indeed’s data, mechanical, electrical and industrial, are up even more than software, which fits a buildout of data centers, power and factories. At the same time, the clerical and support jobs that AI can partly handle are the ones not growing. That is what you’d expect if AI were shifting demand rather than shrinking it across the board.

The third is everything else: tariffs, interest rates, immigration, and the general slowdown in hiring. Overall postings are up only about 4% on the year, and still not far above their 2020 level. A flat line in customer service could just mean the economy doesn’t need more call center staff right now.

Postings also aren’t hires. One posting can stay up for weeks, and Indeed sorts jobs into categories from their titles, which can drift as titles change. A job that used to be called “customer service representative” might now be posted as “customer success associate” and land in a different bucket.

Indeed is one job site, and not every employer posts there. But it’s one of the largest, and its methods and data are public. A 23% rise in software postings on Indeed is a strong signal that the tech hiring freeze has thawed. A flat line for customer service and administrative jobs is a weaker signal, because it’s an absence of change rather than a drop.

The pattern also squares with what we’ve reported from inside companies. Our pieces on the KT call centers in South Korea and on hospital medical coders found the same shape at the level of real teams: AI takes the routine cases first, and those are the cases new people used to be hired and trained on. The postings data are what that looks like from the outside.

My read

In my opinion, the place to worry about AI and jobs this fall isn’t the coders. It’s the clerks, the coders of a different kind in hospital back offices, and the people answering phones. Software postings are climbing out of a hole that was mostly dug by interest rates and overhiring. Office and support postings aren’t climbing at all, in a market where most other categories are.

That isn’t proof AI is holding them down. The honest limit is that I can’t separate AI from the business cycle with postings data alone, and Indeed’s categories are built from job titles that change. But if you asked me where to look for the first real hiring effect of AI in the US, I’d point at those flat lines, not at software.

The upside is real, and it’s in the same data. Engineers, developers and researchers are in demand again, with pay to match. Jobs that build and run the new systems are being posted. Jobs that the systems partly do are not.

Where it stands

Indeed’s data run through Nov. 6, and the index refreshes weekly. Culbertson’s report ends where his data do: postings and pay are up for tech, and workers are staying put. The next federal check on hiring by industry comes with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ job openings survey for October.

My recommendation, if you work in customer service, administration, accounting or medical records: look at the postings for your own job title in your own city, on Indeed or anywhere else, once a month. Write the count down. If it keeps falling while the jobs around it grow, that’s your signal to start adding skills from the categories that are growing, before your employer makes the decision for you.

Chart note: Indeed Job Postings Index by occupational sector, United States, total postings, seasonally adjusted, seven-day trailing average, Feb 1, 2020 = 100. Year-over-year change compares Nov 6, 2026 with Nov 7, 2025 (364 days, same weekday; our arithmetic). “Tech” and “office/support” groupings are our editorial choice, not Indeed’s. Postings are not hires. Source: Indeed Hiring Lab, job_postings_tracker (GitHub), data through Nov 6, 2026, retrieved Nov 13, 2026. CSV: indeed-postings-tech-vs-office-2026.csv.

Chart 2 note: Percent change in the Indeed Job Postings Index (same definition), Nov 7, 2025 to Nov 6, 2026, for software development, customer service, administrative assistance and accounting in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and France. Each country’s index is built separately by Indeed; compare directions, not levels, across countries. Source: Indeed Hiring Lab job_postings_tracker country sector files, retrieved Nov 13, 2026. CSV: indeed-postings-international-2026.csv.

Sources

1. Indeed Hiring Lab, Daniel Culbertson, “2026 Q3 US Tech Labor Market Update,” Nov 12, 2026. https://hiringlab.indeed.com/2026/11/12/2026-q3-us-tech-labor-market-update/ (“Somewhat unexpectedly…” quote; overall postings up 3.1% in the year to Oct 23, first positive in nearly four years; every tech category up, all well below early-2020 levels; software development wage growth 2.9% in September vs 1.5% a year earlier; IT systems and data and analytics wage growth up more than 3 points in six months; PBS quits 2.1% in September, nearly a point below 2019 average; information quits below 2019 average).
2. Indeed Hiring Lab, job_postings_tracker, US sector and aggregate files. https://github.com/hiring-lab/job_postings_tracker (raw: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hiring-lab/job_postings_tracker/master/US/job_postings_by_sector_US.csv), data through Nov 6, 2026, retrieved Nov 13, 2026 (all sector index values; software development peak 233.8 on Feb 28, 2022 and low 61.1 on May 17, 2025; aggregate total postings SA 104.56 on Nov 6, 2026 vs 100.71 on Nov 7, 2025). Country files GB, CA, AU, DE, FR used for Chart 2 (software development: UK +3.0%, Canada -5.1%, France -7.2%, Australia -9.9%, Germany -15.1%; UK accounting -20.0%, France accounting -17.9%; administrative assistance UK -14.1%, Australia -10.7%, Germany -15.3%, France -21.6%; Canada customer service +3.7%, administrative +3.2%). Medical information example titles per sector-job-title-examples.csv. Methodology per repository README (seasonally adjusted, seven-day trailing average, Feb 1, 2020 baseline, sectors from normalized job titles).
3. Reserve Bank of Australia, Mike Major, “Monitoring Early Effects of AI on the Labour Market,” RBA Insight, Nov 9, 2026. https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/insights/australian-economy/2026/monitoring-early-effects-of-ai-on-the-labour-market.html (occupations driving slower job ads include general clerks and call or contact centre workers).
4. Post Labor Economics, earlier pieces: https://postlaboreconomics.com/posts/rba-firms-slowed-hiring-not-cuts/ ; https://postlaboreconomics.com/posts/kt-ai-calls-technicians-eight-visits/ ; https://postlaboreconomics.com/posts/medical-coders-ai-took-the-training-cases/

Derived values (our arithmetic): year-over-year changes Nov 7, 2025 to Nov 6, 2026: software development +23.3% (66.03 to 81.40), scientific R&D +22.9%, IT systems and solutions +12.9%, IT infrastructure, operations and support +8.3%, data and analytics +3.9%, customer service +0.3%, marketing -0.5%, administrative assistance -1.9%, accounting -2.2%, medical information -5.9%; mechanical engineering +45.4%, industrial engineering +42.0%, electrical engineering +36.4%; aggregate total postings +3.8%. Software development: 81.4 is +33% vs the May 2025 low, -18.6% vs Feb 2020, about -65% vs the Feb 2022 peak.