We tried 26 job APIs. Here is what works and what does not

Job Badger searches free and official job sources in more than 30 countries at once. Building it meant trying every job API we could find, and most of what we learned is not in anyone's documentation. Here is all of it: what each API covers, how you get access, what surprised us, and the 9 we decided not to use. We re-ran our checks on 3 October 2026; where a finding is older, its date says so.

Five things we learned the hard way

1. Zero results is not an error. The worst failures are silent. EURES returns a perfectly ordinary empty answer for a region code it does not use: the 2021 code for Utrecht, nl31, gives 0 marketing jobs and the 2024 one, nl35, gives 695. jooble returned nothing for “Toronto, Canada”, and 14 jobs for “Toronto”, all in Toronto, Ohio. SmartRecruiters' search returned the same 88 jobs whatever location, country, city, offset or page we sent. Test every filter with a value that has to change the answer, and compare the IDs.

2. Check what the API thinks you asked for.The Bundesagentur für Arbeit matches place names loosely. “Zurich” becomes Aurich in East Frisia; “Belgrade, Serbia” becomes Serba, a village near Jena, and returns 89 jobs in Germany. Its response says what it matched, in woOutput.bereinigterOrt. We now only ask it about places in Germany.

3. Read the terms before you write the adapter.Remotive and Himalayas offer free APIs and, on the same pages, ask that their jobs not be submitted to third-party sites, naming Jooble, Google Jobs and LinkedIn Jobs. Adzuna allows commercial use only during a 14-day trial. CareerOneStop's licence expires 36 months after you apply. ReliefWeb has required a pre-approved app name since 1 November 2025. None of that shows up in a quick test, and all of it decides whether you can ship.

4. APIs change under you.The Bundesagentur retired versions 4 and 5 of its API; they now answer 403 with a one-byte body, and version 6 renamed most fields. In August, Remote OK's ?tags=filter started sending non-browser clients to its homepage; in October it filters again. In July, Himalayas returned the literal string “name” as the company of every job past the first few; by September it was fixed. A source that breaks quietly looks exactly like a source with no jobs, so check each one with a query that should always return something.

5. The data needs cleaning, and so does your code.NYC Jobs lists a job once per posting type, so the same job appears twice. ReliefWeb kept 54 of 1,130 listings published after their closing date. In September, Remote OK sent text double-encoded in UTF-8. Reed's salaries do not say whether they are yearly or hourly. And one bug was ours: Jobicy, Reed and ReliefWeb send numeric IDs, our helper read only strings, every job on those boards got the same empty ID, and de-duplication kept one job per board.

Two quirks are about where your code runs. USAJOBS wants your registered email address as the User-Agent. When we tried Careerjet in July, it tied a key to approved server IPs and wanted the end user's IP on every call, which a serverless function with changing addresses cannot satisfy.

The 17 APIs we use

These are the sources one search asks today, 12 of them with no key. The company boards are read one company at a time; we read 57 of them, picked by the markets they hire in.

• EURES

  31 European countries · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  The EU's job portal, fed by every national employment service. Its public search API is undocumented, and was down on and off for two weeks in September. A region code it does not use returns zero results with a 200, exactly like an empty search: the 2021 code for Utrecht (nl31) gives 0, the 2024 one (nl35) gives 695 marketing jobs. Pay is not in the search results, only in each vacancy's own record.

• Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Jobsuche)

  Germany · A public key, sent as a header · checked 3 October 2026

  Versions 4 and 5 are retired and answer 403 with a one-byte body; version 6 renamed most fields. The place filter is fuzzy: "Zurich" becomes Aurich in East Frisia, and "Belgrade, Serbia" becomes Serba near Jena, with 89 German jobs. The response says what it matched in woOutput.bereinigterOrt, so check it before trusting the results.

• JobTech JobSearch (Arbetsförmedlingen)

  Sweden · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  Fast, clean JSON with occupations already classified and the employer's own application link.

• MyCareersFuture

  Singapore · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  Every listing in our sample came with a pay range: 110 of 110.

• NYC Jobs (NYC Open Data)

  New York City government · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  The same job appears once per posting type, so keep the external postings, de-duplicate by job_id and drop closed ones. Every listing in our sample came with pay: 24 of 24.

• Jobicy

  Remote jobs · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  The tag parameter is a text search, and a term under three letters ("hr") returns a 400.

• Remote OK

  Remote jobs · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  In August its ?tags= filter sent non-browser clients to the homepage; in October it filters again. A salary of 0 means none was given, and in September we found text double-encoded in UTF-8 ("–" for a dash).

• Working Nomads

  Remote jobs · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  The latest listings only, and no pay field.

• Arbeitnow

  Germany and remote jobs · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  A paginated feed with no pay field.

• Greenhouse Job Board API

  Company career boards · No key, one board per company · checked 3 October 2026

  Add content=true and pay_transparency=true to the list endpoint and one call returns every ad in full with the employer's pay ranges.

• Ashby Posting API

  Company career boards · No key, one board per company · checked 3 October 2026

  includeCompensation=true adds the pay summary, and shouldDisplayCompensationOnJobPostings says whether the company shows it. Big boards are big: OpenAI's was 14.5 MB for 828 jobs.

• Lever Postings API

  Company career boards · No key, one board per company · checked 3 October 2026

  Postings carry an ISO country code, which beats parsing the location text.

• SmartRecruiters job search

  Across companies · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  The cross-company search returned the same 88 marketing jobs whatever location, country, city, offset or page we sent.

• Reed

  United Kingdom · Free key · checked 3 October 2026

  The key goes in a Basic-auth header as the username, with an empty password. Search results give a minimum and maximum salary without saying whether it is yearly or hourly, and nothing at all when the employer hid it.

• USAJOBS

  US federal government · Free key · checked 3 October 2026

  The User-Agent header must be the email address you registered with. Every listing in our sample carried its pay range: 33 of 33.

• jooble

  Aggregator · Free key · checked 26 September 2026

  Our key returned rows only for US places (New York 20; London, Berlin and Madrid 0). A location with a comma ("Toronto, Canada") returned nothing, and a bare "Toronto" returned Toronto, Ohio.

• ReliefWeb

  Humanitarian and development jobs · Free appname, approved by ReliefWeb · checked 3 October 2026

  Since 1 November 2025 the appname must be pre-approved. In September, 54 of 1,130 listings were still published after their closing date, so filter on the date yourself.

The 9 we do not use

Some of these work well for other purposes. They did not fit a free search that lists their jobs next to everyone else's, or they did not work from our servers.

• Remotive

  Remote jobs · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  Returned the same 16 jobs for "marketing" and for "nurse" (the nurse search led with back-end engineers). Its API page also asks that its jobs not be submitted to third-party sites, naming Jooble, Neuvoo, Google Jobs and LinkedIn Jobs.

• Himalayas

  Remote jobs · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  Its API page asks that its jobs not be submitted to third-party sites, naming Jooble, Neuvoo, Google Jobs and LinkedIn Jobs, which is close to what a job search does. In July every company name past the first few results came back as the literal string "name"; that was fixed by September.

• The Muse

  US-led, worldwide · No key · checked 3 October 2026

  No keyword search, only a fixed list of categories: "Marketing" returned 1 job and "Software Engineering" 96,981. A "Berlin, Germany" location returned 6,379 jobs led by remote and US ones.

• We Work Remotely

  Remote jobs · RSS feed · checked 3 October 2026

  The feed refused our servers in July, and its terms page refuses scripts, so we could not check what it allows.

• Careerjet

  Aggregator · Free key · checked 21 July 2026

  Every call must carry the end user's IP address and user agent, and the key is tied to approved server IPs. Serverless functions change theirs, and our valid key returned nothing.

• Adzuna

  Aggregator · Free key · checked 3 October 2026

  Commercial use is allowed only during a 14-day trial; the terms say so plainly. We kept the trial for when we would pay.

• CareerOneStop

  United States · Free key · checked 3 October 2026

  Royalty-free, but the licence expires 36 months after you apply. In July its registration did not accept our connection from outside the US.

• Job Bank

  Canada · Partner feed · checked 12 September 2026

  The job feed for partners requires a Canadian Business Number.

• Infostud

  Serbia · None · checked 3 October 2026

  No public API. Its robots.txt disallows the RSS feed and search for every crawler, and its terms prohibit commercial reuse without permission.

If you are building something similar

Start with the public employment services. They are free, they carry on-site jobs that remote boards never see, and national services often publish structured pay: our pay transparency report found pay on nearly every vacancy in 8 European countries. Then add the remote boards, whose listings carry their own location rules (the remote jobs report found 38% open to the US only), and company career boards for the markets nobody else reaches.

Give every source a timeout and let the rest answer without it. Keep a known query per source and alert when it comes back empty. Store the date you last checked each finding, because the next change will not be announced.

The result is Job Badger's search: one search across all 17 sources, free and without an account.

How we checked

On 3 October 2026 we re-ran each live behaviour described here from a script: the same query with different filters, compared by job ID, and each API's response read as it came. Terms are quoted from each API's own documentation page, listed under Sources. Findings we could not re-run, because we no longer call that API or could not register, keep the date we last saw them.