Open Roles by Company Size: How Many Is Normal in November 2026?

How many open jobs is normal for a company depends on its size. In this open roles by company size benchmark, the median hiring company with 11-50 employees has 2 active job openings, while the median hiring company with 1,001-5,000 employees has 18. Both counts are ordinary for their band, so a flat qualification rule like “10+ open roles means a hot account” misreads hiring signals in both directions: it misses aggressive hiring at small accounts and flags routine volume at large ones.

To set the baselines, we measured active openings across nine employee-size bands and directly analyzed 922,188 companies: every eligible company in the five largest bands, plus a reproducible 0.5% sample from the four smallest. Together, they represent an eligible universe of 17.68M companies worldwide. Below you will find the benchmark table, typical-versus-exceptional thresholds for each band, how sales teams can apply them, and the analysis behind them.

Snapshot: active openings, October 26 to 30, 2026. Trend comparison: October vs. September 2026. Source: PredictLeads proprietary company and job-opening data.

TLDR:

• Observed hiring participation rises with size, from 1.09% of companies with 2-10 employees to a peak of 29.01% at 1,001-5,000, then eases to 21.65% at 10,001+.
• Hiring intensity runs the other way: about 33 open roles per 100 employees for the median small hiring company, against 0.6 at 1,001-5,000 employees.
• “Normal” climbs from a median of 2 active openings in the smallest bands to 58 at 10,001+, and the 90th percentile of each band marks “exceptional.”
• No single employer dominates enterprise hiring, but a few misclassified companies dominate the smallest bands, so small-company figures lead with medians, not totals.
• The benchmark runs on the PredictLeads Job Openings dataset: 279.2M+ postings since 2018, each timestamped with first_seen_at and last_seen_at.

Open Roles by Company Size: The November 2026 Benchmark

Median active openings rise with every band above 50 employees, while the share of companies with an observed opening peaks in the middle of the size range. An active opening is a posting not marked closed and re-confirmed by a crawl in the snapshot’s last five days; medians and percentiles cover only companies with at least one.

Share, median, percentile, and trend figures in the 1 through 51-200 rows come from a reproducible 0.5% sample; company counts and all other rows are full counts. *Median openings divided by the band’s midpoint headcount (6 employees for 2-10, for example), so approximate; single-employee companies are omitted. †New postings in these sampled bands fell 43% to 51% in one month because of a few atypical employers, while the number of companies posting moved only 1% to 5%. ‡Uses a 10,001-employee floor, which overstates intensity for the largest companies in the band. Source: PredictLeads proprietary company and job-opening data.

Participation Rises With Size, Intensity Falls

Scale buys breadth of hiring, not intensity. Observed participation, meaning PredictLeads found at least one qualifying active opening for a company in the snapshot, climbs until 1,001-5,000 employees and then eases. Intensity falls at every step from 2-10 to 5,001-10,000 employees.

Measured at the median, a hiring company with 2-10 employees posts roughly 56 times as many openings per employee as one with 1,001-5,000. That multiple rests on band midpoints, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise figure. The practical meaning: one new role at a 6-person company is a material change in headcount, while one new role at a 3,000-person company barely registers. Every posting in the Job Openings dataset carries first_seen_at and last_seen_at, so you can compute the same active count for any account.

What Is Typical vs. Exceptional for Each Company Size

An open-role count is typical if it sits at or below its band’s median, elevated if it falls between the median and the 90th percentile, and exceptional if it reaches the 90th percentile, the top 10% of hiring companies in that band. These thresholds apply only once a company is hiring; most companies, especially small ones, have no observed active opening at any given moment.

Single-employee companies are left out because that band’s sample holds only 29 hiring companies. Source: PredictLeads proprietary company and job-opening data.

Compare a 150-person company with 6 open roles and a 3,000-person company with 15. The first is already elevated for the 51-200 band, where typical is 1-4. The second is still typical for the 1,001-5,000 band, even with two and a half times as many postings. These thresholds use active openings, so compare them with an active count, not a 30-day tally of new postings. To get that count for any account, call the Job Openings endpoint with active_only=true.

How Sales Teams Can Use Size-Adjusted Hiring

Replace flat open-role thresholds with band-relative ones, and you stop missing aggressive hiring at small accounts and over-flagging routine volume at large ones.

• Qualify by percentile, not by count. A rule like “10+ open roles = qualified” misses a 40-person company with 8 active openings, exceptional for its band, and flags a 5,000-person company with 12, which is typical. Use the thresholds table instead.
• Weight headcount-adjusted intensity in account scoring. A 30-person company with 3 open roles is hiring at about 10 per 100 employees; a 5,000-person company with 25 is at 0.5. In a lead scoring model built on growth signals, the smaller account can deserve the higher score.
• Read function mix as a qualifier. A shift toward Engineering or Information Technology roles at a company that historically posts mostly Operations or Manual Work roles is a more specific signal than a rise in total count.
• Read a zero carefully. PredictLeads observed no qualifying active opening for about 78% of companies with 10,001+ employees in this snapshot. That is not proof they are not hiring: hiring can run through a parent or subsidiary domain or through channels outside this snapshot’s coverage, or the company may be between requisitions. Check the corporate hierarchy before writing the account off.
• Flag a newly appearing function. A company posting its first Sales Engineering, RevOps, or IT role may be standing up a function that did not exist before, which is worth routing to the right rep even at low volume.

A Four-Step Workflow to Score Accounts by Size Band

1. Pull accounts by band. Call GET /discover/companies with location and sizes. The API writes bands without thousands separators, for example sizes=51-200 or sizes=1001-5000. Our guide to discovering companies by location and size walks through the request.
2. Count active openings per account. Call GET /companies/{company_id_or_domain}/job_openings with active_only=true.
3. Place each count against its band. Tag every account typical, elevated, or exceptional using the thresholds above.
4. Qualify the top tier. Check job categories for function mix, compare 30-day first_seen_at counts with the account’s own 12-month average, and route accounts that are both elevated and surging first. See how to prioritize accounts with hiring signals to turn this into a working priority list.

Companies Hiring Above Their Own Baseline

The benchmark shows what is normal for a company’s peers; a surge check shows what is abnormal for the company itself. On October 30, 2026, we flagged 10 companies whose new postings over the last 30 days, company-wide, in a department, or at one location, ran at 3.2x to 15x their own monthly average for the prior 12 months. Three stand out for what they teach:

• PDR-Team (11-50 employees, auto services, France): 16 new postings against a baseline of 1.2 a month, a 13.3x step change. At under 50 employees, a jump that size may indicate a new location or service line.
• UNC Rockingham (501-1,000 employees, hospitals and health care): four department-level surges in the same run, with 32 new postings at 4.7x its baseline. Simultaneous surges across teams are more consistent with a broader expansion than with backfilling one role.
• SICK AG (10,001+ employees, automation machinery): one department posting at 15x its normal rate, only 3 new postings in absolute terms. At 10,001+, where total new postings fell 4.2% in October, a company-wide count would hide it.

None of this proves a contract, funding round, or launch. A surge is a change in observable hiring allocation, so treat it as a reason to look closer and confirm with a second signal. Our guides to treating hiring as a buying signal and to building per-company baselines for hiring spikes cover how.

The Full Watchlist

All 10 flagged companies, one or more from every size segment, are listed below. You can run the same check on Job Openings data by counting postings by first_seen_at over 30 days against the trailing 12-month monthly average, overall, by job category, or by location.

For department- and location-level signals, the posting count covers that scope only, not the whole company. Source: PredictLeads proprietary company and job-opening data.

How the Job-Function Mix Changes as Companies Scale

The job-function mix shifts in a consistent direction as companies grow: the smallest companies lead with software, design, and marketing roles, and the largest with healthcare, operations, and frontline roles.

Company size	Top four job categories by active openings
1 employee (sample of 153 openings)	Software Development, Design, Marketing, Information Technology
51-200 (sample of 6,078 openings)	Engineering, Manual Work, Information Technology, Operations
201-500	Manual Work, Healthcare Services, Operations, Engineering
1,001-5,000	Healthcare Services, Operations, Manual Work, Sales
5,001-10,000	Healthcare Services, Operations, Manual Work, Management
10,001+	Healthcare Services, Operations, Management, Sales

The single-employee row rests on a small base (153 sampled openings from 29 hiring companies), so read it as a pattern rather than a precise mix. From 201 employees up, Healthcare Services, Operations, and Manual Work hold the top three spots at 201-500, 1,001-5,000, and 5,001-10,000 employees, and Management edges out Manual Work at 10,001+. Healthcare Services alone accounts for 342,075 active openings at 1,001-5,000 employees.

That is consistent with a large-employer population weighted toward health systems, logistics and retail operators, and multi-site service businesses, whose high-turnover roles generate far more postings than a software company of the same size. So “10,001+ employees, 400 open roles” says little about engineering or GTM headcount until you check the categories. Every PredictLeads job opening carries job categories and an O*NET code in onet_data, which turns that check into a filter. Our hiring momentum tracker shows which industries are adding roles fastest.

What Changed From September to October 2026

Every band from 201 employees up saw fewer new postings in October than in September, with declines from 1.3% (501-1,000) to 7.8% (5,001-10,000). Breadth held up better than volume: at 10,001+, the number of companies posting new roles fell 2.0% against a 4.2% drop in postings, and at 201-500 it rose 1.4% while postings fell 2.7%. One month is a short window and these figures are not seasonally adjusted, so read them as a pulse rather than a trend. Separating breadth from volume is the same discipline behind our US Sales Hiring Index. In the smallest bands, posting volume swung far more, for the reason covered next.

A Data-Quality Finding: Misclassified Companies in the Smallest Bands

In the three smallest size bands, a few companies whose declared LinkedIn headcount is almost certainly stale or mismatched post a hugely disproportionate share of all openings. We are naming the pattern directly rather than smoothing it out.

• 2-10 employees: one company with 10 members listed on LinkedIn accounted for 3,613 of the 7,972 active openings in that band’s sample, 45.3% on its own. Its pattern is consistent with a franchise-style or independent-contractor recruiting operation, not an ordinary small employer.
• 11-50 employees: one company accounted for 1,421 of 6,057 sampled openings, or 23.5%.
• 51-200 employees: a related issue. A wellness-franchise corporate page listed 51-200 employees alongside 6,893 LinkedIn-associated members, a sign that a franchise headquarters’ page can understate the scale of its network.

Together, the 10 biggest employers hold 80.2% of sampled openings in the 2-10 band and 43.1% in the 11-50 band, against 4.0% at 201-500. We did not strip these companies out, because there is no clean, defensible rule for doing so yet. That is why the smallest bands lead with medians and percentiles: a percentile does not move when one company posts thousands of roles, while totals and averages do. The 2-10 band’s mean is 15.94 openings per hiring company; its median is 2.

For your own scoring, a “2-10 employee” account with hundreds of active openings is a classification problem first and a hot lead second, so check it against the parent and subsidiary relationships in the Companies dataset before you route it.

Methodology, Coverage, and Limitations

What the Benchmark Measures

This benchmark measures how many active openings companies in each employee-size band carry at one point in time, and what share of them have any. Official statistics answer different questions: the BLS JOLTS size-class estimates cover US private-sector openings by establishment size, not firm size, and OECD enterprise-size indicators count micro, small, medium, and large enterprises without showing which are hiring. This benchmark is company-level and global: 29.4% of eligible companies are US-headquartered, 18.7% carry no headquarters country, and 51.9% are headquartered elsewhere.

Source, Population, and Sample

Source: PredictLeads proprietary company and job-opening data.

Eligible companies carry a known LinkedIn-derived employee-size band, belong to a website category PredictLeads extracts job openings from (job boards, news outlets, and similar non-employer sites are excluded), and are not classified in a staffing, recruiting, HR-services, executive-search, or temporary-help industry, so volume reflects direct employers rather than agencies. That leaves 17,678,037 eligible companies worldwide, out of 18,029,108 with a known size band. Most of the 120M+ companies PredictLeads tracks do not yet carry a size band, which is the largest coverage gap in this benchmark.

We directly analyzed 922,188 of those companies. The five largest bands (201-500 through 10,001+, 838,332 companies) were measured in full. The four smallest (1, 2-10, 11-50, and 51-200, holding 1.4M to 9.2M companies each) were too large for a full per-company join within our query-time budget, so we drew a reproducible 0.5% sample of 83,856 companies, 7,083 to 46,011 per band. Their hiring rates, percentiles, and function mix come directly from the sample; their hiring-company counts are scaled to the full band, roughly 200x, and are estimates.

Definitions and Time Windows

Active openings are not marked closed and were re-confirmed by a crawl within the final five days of the snapshot window, October 26 to 30, 2026, closely mirroring the Job Openings API’s active_only filter. New postings, used only for the trend column, count each posting in the period it was first discovered: October 1 to 30 vs. September 1 to 30, 2026. One measures inventory and the other flow, so we never combine them.

What We Checked, and What We Do Not Claim

• Inventory vs. flow: we tested building active inventory from last-seen and closure dates against counting by first-discovery date, and kept the two as separate metrics.
• Employer concentration: a handful of companies drive the three smallest bands (see the data-quality finding); from 201 employees up, the 10 largest employers hold only 4.0% to 8.3% of each band’s openings.
• Banded headcount: band midpoints bias the per-100-employee ratio by construction, most of all in the open-ended 10,001+ band.
• No causal or absence claims: hiring is an observable allocation signal, not proof of a purchase, financing event, or business outcome, and a company with no observed active opening is not proof that it is not hiring. The benchmark is one snapshot plus one month-over-month comparison, it is not seasonally adjusted, and it has no country-level breakouts.

How PredictLeads Job Openings Data Powers This Benchmark

This benchmark runs on two datasets you can access directly: Job Openings for postings and Companies for size. PredictLeads Job Openings holds 279.2M+ postings since 2018 from 2.9M+ company websites, with 10.2M active openings at any time, sourced from company websites, career subpages, LinkedIn profiles, and ATS integrations and refreshed approximately every 36 hours. Each record carries first_seen_at, last_seen_at, status, job categories, an O*NET code in onet_data, seniority, and structured location_data. The Companies dataset covers 120M+ companies in 195 countries, with employee ranges and parent and subsidiary relationships.

Hiring is strongest next to other signals. Financing Events (210,800+ since 2016) show whether a surge follows fresh capital, News Events (10M+ since 2016 across 37 categories, including increases_headcount_by and opens_new_location) can corroborate an expansion, and Technology Detections (2B+ since 2018, covering 240,000+ technologies) provide evidence of which tools a company uses or has recently used. See how teams combine hiring, news, funding, and technology signals, or compare vendors with our guide to job posting and hiring intent data providers.

PredictLeads delivers every dataset via API, flat files, webhooks, and MCP, collects only publicly available information, and is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR and CCPA compliant. Start with the PredictLeads API documentation or explore the Job Openings dataset.

Final Thoughts on Open Roles by Company Size

A raw open-role count only means something next to company size. Score each account against its band, check which functions the roles belong to, and compare the company with its own baseline before you act. Our remote tech job statistics apply the same size bands to workplace type. Market-wide numbers describe the landscape; the band-relative view tells you which accounts to call.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How many open roles is normal for a company in 2026?

It depends on company size. Among companies that are hiring, the median is 2 active openings at 1-50 employees, 4 at 51-200, 6 at 201-500, 10 at 501-1,000, 18 at 1,001-5,000, 34 at 5,001-10,000, and 58 at 10,001+. Simple averages run much higher because a few very large hirers pull them up; at 1,001-5,000 employees the mean is 52.23. These figures come from PredictLeads proprietary company and job-opening data, October 26 to 30, 2026.

Is 10 open roles a lot for a company?

It depends on company size. Ten active openings is exceptional for a company with 2-10 or 11-50 employees, where the 90th percentile is 8. It is exactly the median at 501-1,000 employees and on the low side of typical at 10,001+. Compare against band thresholds rather than a flat cutoff; the active_only filter on the PredictLeads Job Openings API returns the active count you need.

What percentage of companies are hiring right now?

In the October 26 to 30, 2026 snapshot, PredictLeads observed at least one active opening at about 3.5% of eligible companies, an estimated 616,000 of 17.68M. The share runs from 0.35% of single-employee companies to a peak of 29.01% at 1,001-5,000 employees, then 21.65% at 10,001+. A company with no observed opening is not proof that it is not hiring; it may post through a parent or subsidiary domain or through channels outside this snapshot’s coverage.

How does hiring intensity change with company size?

It falls as companies grow. The median hiring company with 2-10 employees posts about 33 open roles per 100 employees at the band midpoint, compared with 3.2 at 51-200, 0.60 at 1,001-5,000, and 0.45 at 5,001-10,000. One role at a 6-person company is a large share of headcount; one role at a 3,000-person company is not. The ratios use band midpoints, so treat them as approximate, and because they are built on medians, outliers in the smallest bands do not distort them.

How can open-role benchmarks improve lead scoring?

They replace a flat open-role cutoff with a band-relative score. Score each account by where its active openings fall against its band’s median and 90th percentile, weight intensity relative to headcount, and add points for a shift in function mix or a surge against its own 12-month baseline. That way a 40-person company with 8 openings, exceptional for its band, outranks a 5,000-person company with 12, which is typical. PredictLeads Job Openings supplies the inputs through active_only, categories, and first_seen_at.