September 2026
Jobs ReportReleased October 2026
How are tech jobs faring in the hiring market?
Tech job postings increased 9% month-over-month in September, following a 2% decrease in August. Year-over-year, postings are up 17% compared to September 2025.
AI and machine learning tech postings grew 88% year-over-year (September 2026 vs. September 2025), about five times the 17% growth rate for tech postings overall.
Where are tech job postings concentrated?
Technology led month-over-month industry growth in September, with tech job postings up 30%. Finance/banking (+26%), Healthcare (+23%), and Aerospace/defense (+22%) also grew month-over-month.
Year-over-year, Manufacturing, Aerospace/defense, and Technology were all at or above 50% growth.
Several of these industry gains line up with the job titles and skills discussed below. Industry reporting describes financial services and fintech as among the most security-intensive sectors, which fits this month’s growth in security titles, security skills, and FinTech.
Regional Hiring Patterns
All of the top 10 states by tech hiring volume grew month-over-month in September, led by Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. The five states that declined in August (Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and New York) all grew in September.
Year-over-year, every top 10 state grew, led by Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Strong growth in Massachusetts and the Boston metro aligns with a broader trend of AI companies establishing and expanding their presence in the Boston area this year.
Metro areas followed a similar pattern, with all of the top 10 showing positive growth month-over-month in September. Washington DC and Baltimore sit within a region with a large defense and federal contracting base. Northern Virginia is also home to a data center cluster where hiring analyses list mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineers and critical facilities engineers among the highest-demand roles. Atlanta, despite negative year-over-year growth, improved 11% month-over-month in September.
Who are companies hiring right now?
Job titles with MoM growth above 150% (concentrated across security, engineering and quality, and analyst and delivery roles): Security Architects, Infrastructure Security Engineers, Automation Controls Engineers, Deployment Engineers, Quality Assurance Specialists, Technical Support Analysts, Functional Analysts, Reporting Analysts, Principal Program Managers, Professional Services Consultants.
These titles describe work on both sides of a technology rollout: designing and securing systems (Security Architects, Infrastructure Security Engineers), building and testing them (Automation Controls Engineers, Deployment Engineers, Quality Assurance Specialists), and supporting, reporting on, and managing delivery once they are in use (the analyst, program, and consulting titles). That mix is consistent with organizations moving from planning AI and enterprise system projects to implementing them.
Month-over-month skills growth
Skills with 40%+ MoM growth span security, data and systems, engineering and design, and people skills. Endpoint Detection and Response and Intrusion Detection and Prevention match the Security Architect and Infrastructure Security Engineer titles above. Staffing industry analyses describe strong demand for professionals who can manage, tune, and interpret AI-driven security platforms, as AI-driven threats increase in speed and sophistication.
Electronic Engineering and Autodesk Revit are the two fastest-growing skills and neither is a software skill. Revit is a building design and modeling tool, and Electronic Engineering sits alongside the Automation Controls Engineers title above. One explanation is physical AI infrastructure: US data center construction spending reached a record annual rate of $50.7 billion in April, per Census figures, and data center hiring analyses list controls and electrical engineers among in-demand roles.
Year-over-year skills growth (200%+)
Agentic AI, AI Agents, Responsible AI, and Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure continue a cluster seen in recent months’ reports. A September 30 industry newsletter describes agentic AI in financial services moving from experimentation toward operational use, with governance, fraud, and accountability questions that fit the Responsible AI growth.
Claude AI and Tooling suggest employers are naming specific AI tools in their requirements, while AI Adoption, Engineering Practices, Product Family Engineering, and Enterprise Integration point to the organizational and process work of moving AI from pilots into production.
Report Methodology
To present the insights in this report, Dice used job posting data provided by Dice’s partner, Lightcast, which has a database of more than 3 billion current and historical job postings worldwide. Dice pulled data on October 5, 2026 and analyzed over 7 million tech job postings in the U.S. to gather our specific dataset, which we then filtered for “Information Technology” jobs that fall under “Full Time,” “Part Time” and “Flexible Hours.”
We gathered the list of top employers in the “Industry Analysis” section by using the above criteria, with an additional filter for job postings that only derive from employer sites. This report is based entirely on real-time job posting data and is independent of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employment reports.
This Dice report provides timely labor market insights derived directly from employer hiring activity rather than survey-based employment statistics. The information in this report is a snapshot of tech job posting data as of October 5, 2026, and backward revisions to prior month’s data may occur from the sources used in this report.
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