The Rust Hiring Report Q3 2026

Collection and counting

We poll 1,737 company careers pages once a day. A job ad counts if it was open when the snapshot was taken at 14:38 UTC on 16 September 2026 and had been seen on its board within the previous 21 days. Ads are counted per posting and not de-duplicated: a role posted separately for several locations counts once per posting, and 1 of the 753 Rust ads repeats the exact wording of another at the same company. A job ad is not the same as a hire: one ad can cover several roles, and several ads can cover one. Since we started tracking on 10 June 2026, 89 companies that had Rust job ads no longer have any open.

Which companies we track

Companies enter tracking through searches of applicant tracking sites for Rust, Scala and Go jobs, Hacker News "Who's hiring" threads, job aggregators and manual additions. A person approves each company and records whether it is a direct employer or a consultancy before its board is polled. The tracked set therefore leans toward companies that already hire in those languages.

How accurate the sorting is

Sorting is automated. Of the 2,898 ads that mention Rust, 753 were sorted as required, 1,595 as one option among several, 549 as a nice-to-have, and 1 could not be sorted. We checked the sorting against 112 ads that mention Rust, labelled by hand: a random sample from each group, weighted to match all ads that mention Rust. The automated sorting and the reviewer agreed on whether Rust was required for about 7 in 10. Disagreements ran both ways, and most involved Rust listed as one of several acceptable languages, or wording such as "familiarity with Rust" that sits between required and nice-to-have. A sample this size gives an estimate, not an exact rate.

warning: this job description mentions Rust but does not require it
  --> senior-backend-engineer, one of 1,595 like it:14
   |
14 |    Strong experience in Go, Rust or C++
   |                             ^^^^ one acceptable option among three
   |
   = note: 1,595 of the 2,898 open job descriptions that mention Rust look like this
   = note: a further 549 mention it only in passing
   = note: 1 carries no classification and is counted nowhere

Industries and locations

Each company has one industry, taken from our research on the company and sorted into the 12 groups in Figure 1 by keyword, with defense checked first. Every Rust job ad at a company counts toward its industry, whatever the role. Locations are matched from each ad's location text: a US state name or code first, place names as whole words, and a region such as "North America" counted in each market it covers. Text naming no recognised place falls into "Rest of world". Of 642 ads that state a working setup, defense has 57 of 171 ads with no setup stated, against 54 of 582 elsewhere, so the defense remote figure is less certain. Of all 753 ads, 40 list no location and 111 state no working setup. Ads listing several regions count in each region, so location shares add up to more than 100%. Remote roles can still be limited to certain countries or time zones.

Most Rust-focused companies

The share counts all of a company's open jobs, including sales and operations, so it understates Rust's weight at companies with large non-engineering teams. These shares rest on a handful of job ads per company, so a single new opening can change the ranking.

Salaries

Salaries are advertised base pay only: not final offers, and excluding bonus and equity. Each job ad contributes the middle of its advertised range. The median is the middle of those, and the typical range runs from the lower to the upper quarter, with quartiles interpolated between values; a median advertised range runs from the median minimum to the median maximum. Salary ranges, periods and currencies are extracted from each ad automatically; only annual ranges are used. Figure 5 uses the 225 US ads with an annual US-dollar range and a stated seniority level. US ads (466) and the pay-transparency state groups (347 ads with a US-dollar range) are identified from each ad's location text, the same way as Figure 3. For Europe, 25 of 165 ads show a range, so European pay isn't reported. Junior (8 ads) and Mid (21 ads) figures rest on few job ads.

Seniority

279 of 753 Rust job ads (37.1%) don't state a level and are left out of seniority shares. Talent Network levels are extracted automatically from the roles on members' CVs, not self-reported, and members may not be looking for work. Our Talent Network isn't the whole job market, so Figure 6 compares two mixes of levels, not the number of engineers available.

How long job ads stay advertised

The comparison follows every job ad we first saw between 3 July–18 July 2026, on the same careers pages, and records whether it was still advertised 30 and 45 days later. An ad coming down doesn't prove the role was filled. The ± figures below show how much each 45-day number could move by chance alone, given how many ads are in each group; they don't account for several ads coming from one company, and we don't test the gaps between groups. The Scala and Rust groups are the smallest, so treat the language comparison as a guide.

Comparing editions

This first edition is a snapshot taken on 16 September 2026, before the end of the quarter. The set of careers pages we can read changes over time, so future changes may reflect coverage as well as the market, even with unchanged definitions (market-report-v2).