August 2026
Jobs Report

Tech job postings decreased 10% month-over-month in July, a pullback after several months of steady expansion. Year-over-year, postings are still up 10% compared to July 2025, so the annual trend remains positive even as the monthly pace has cooled.

AI skill requirements reached 79% of U.S. tech job postings in July, up from 75% in June. Year-over-year, that figure is up 144% from July 2025. AI fluency continues to sit at the center of most tech hiring rather than at its margins, even as overall posting volume softened for the month.

Regional hiring patterns show continued recovery

Only Pennsylvania (+4%) grew month-over-month among the top 10 states in July, a sharp reversal from June, when more than half of the top 10 posted gains. Year-over-year, half of the top 10 states still grew, led by Maryland (+48%) and New York (+32%); the rest were roughly flat.

Similarly, Baltimore (+3%) was the only top-10 metro with month-over-month growth, while San Jose and San Francisco’s declined. Year-over-year, Baltimore again led all metros (+50%), consistent with its position in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, where defense and federal-adjacent cybersecurity work has supported tech hiring.

Job titles posting month-over-month growth above 150% in July cluster into a few groups: healthcare and enterprise systems (Epic Application Analysts, SAP Finance Consultants), core engineering (Front End Software Engineers, Software Engineering Specialists, Directors/Software Engineers, IT Solutions Architects, Analytics Consultants), and cloud/security infrastructure (Azure DevOps Engineers, Vulnerability Management Engineers). The healthcare and finance-systems titles line up with the industry-level gains noted above in Healthcare and Finance/banking, while the cloud and security titles track with the broader infrastructure and governance themes showing up in the skills data below.

Month-over-month skills growth

The fastest-growing skills in July were Organizational Change Management (42%), Quality Improvement (37%), Ruby (Programming Language) (32%), Operational Performance Management (24%), Organizational Leadership (21%), Responsible AI (21%), Data Access (21%), Technical Projects (20%), and Business Transformation (+19%)

Several of these point to the people and process side of AI adoption rather than the technology itself. Organizational Change Management, Organizational Leadership, Operational Performance Management, Quality Improvement, and Technical Projects form a cluster around managing transformation, which lines up with industry commentary this year identifying AI literacy and change management as top priorities as companies move from piloting AI tools to operating them across the business. Responsible AI and Data Access reflect the governance and data-pipeline work that supports that same rollout.

Year-over-year skills growth (250%+)

Skills growing 200% or more year-over-year include Responsible AI, Agentic AI, AI Agents, Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure, Enterprise Integration, Product Family Engineering, Vector Database, Operational Performance Management, Maintainability, Observability, Cloud-Native Architecture, Prompt Engineering, and Tooling.

This list closely tracks the year-over-year skills trend identified in June’s report: Agentic AI, AI Agents, Responsible AI, AI Infrastructure, Vector Database, and Prompt Engineering form the same cluster tracking the shift from assistive AI to systems that complete multi-step tasks with limited oversight, while Enterprise Integration continues to reflect the work of connecting those systems to existing infrastructure and data. Maintainability, Observability, and Cloud-Native Architecture reflect the reliability and monitoring work required to run agentic systems continuously in production rather than as pilots. Operational Performance Management’s appearance here, alongside its presence on the month-over-month list, suggests the operational-management theme is not a one-month blip.