The most in-demand skills in US and European job ads (2026)

Source. FindAJobAI's job index: postings read from employers' own applicant tracking systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday, SmartRecruiters and others) and public job boards. No LinkedIn or Indeed data. A posting is included while it is live: posted in the last 60 days, or still listed on the employer's careers page in the past week, and not flagged as spam or a duplicate. Re-posts of the same job (same company, title and location, or the same description) are counted once.

Regions. Each location is resolved to a country by fixed rules. "Europe" is the EU and EEA, the UK and Switzerland. Postings with no resolvable country ("Remote", "Remote, EMEA") are left out. We counted 191,498 live US postings and 148,140 European ones.

Skills sample. A random sample (stable between runs) of up to 5,000 English-language postings per region, with at most 20 per employer, so one big hirer can't tilt the shares: N = 5,000 (US) and 3,717 (Europe). Drawn postings were skipped when the description was a near-copy of another (2,049), shorter than 400 characters (53) or not in English (5,154, almost all in Europe; our skill dictionary is English, so non-English ads would be undercounted). Role families are separate samples of up to 1,000 postings each, chosen by job title.

How skills are matched. The same deterministic matcher as our resume keyword pages and ATS CV checker: a dictionary of several hundred skills, tools and certifications with their common synonyms (k8s = Kubernetes), counted once per posting. Benefits, pay and legal text are ignored; business and soft skills count only in the duties and requirements, not in the company's description of itself. Three terms are left out of the all-jobs list because they mostly match something else there ("branding", "multi-threading" deals and "on-call" shifts). No AI model reads or classifies the postings.

Remote, hybrid, on-site. Hybrid when the title, location or description names a hybrid arrangement ("hybrid role", "3 days a week in the office"); otherwise remote when the job board marks the posting remote; everything else is on-site or not stated.

Salary transparency. A posting has a salary when the employer's structured pay field is filled, or its text has a pay range with a currency ("$120,000 – $150,000", "€55k–65k"). Single figures and "competitive salary" don't count, so the shares are a floor. Europe covers the euro area and the UK only (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, United Kingdom), because ranges in other currencies aren't detected. Every live posting in those places is counted, not a sample.

Thresholds. We never estimate or fill in a number. A skill needs 10+ mentions, a role family 150+ postings, a salary row 200+ postings from 20+ employers. Anything below is hidden.

Limitations. Our index leans towards companies that use modern applicant tracking systems (technology, SaaS, finance, healthcare networks), so small local employers and staffing agencies are under-represented. A mention isn't a hard requirement: "nice to have" skills count too. The data is a snapshot that refreshes daily; numbers on this page can move slightly between visits.