Big Pharma Hiring Report: October 2026

Key findings

• Open roles rose 5% in October after a flat September. New postings ran at about 3,500 a week, the same pace as September, but fewer came down: 14,572, against 14,832 in September.
• Sales turned around: 3,285 postings opened and 2,773 closed, a net gain of 512, after a net drop of 212 in September. Medical Affairs also grew (+199), then Market Access (+74). Manufacturing & CMC and Drug Discovery & Preclinical dipped slightly (about −30 each).
• GSK, Otsuka, Boehringer Ingelheim, Regeneron and Sanofi added roles fastest, by 20–28% of their open roles. GSK reversed September's 21% cut. Merck, Bayer and Incyte cut fastest, then Bristol Myers Squibb.
• Much of Merck's drop is its 2027 intern and co-op program. 170 of Merck's 647 closures were internships, most taken down on October 8–9, and its open internships fell from 203 to 76. Across the other companies, open internships rose slightly, from about 1,010 to 1,060.
• Pay held steady: half of US roles post a salary, and the median posted midpoint is still $180,500, rising from $119,000 for associates to $339,000 for vice presidents.

Opened and closed in October

Job postings opened and closed across 43 of the 44 companies, October 1–31, 2026. New postings averaged about 3,500 a week.

Where the US jobs are

Open roles by metro area, with the three largest employers in each.

Boston still has the widest spread of employers. Chicago's total is almost entirely AbbVie (614 of 673 roles).

Who is adding jobs and who is cutting

Net change in postings in October (opened minus closed), as a share of each company's open roles. Companies with at least 100 open roles.

Most new postings

AstraZeneca, fourth in September with 867 new postings, is left out: our collection of its jobs broke on October 7 (see Method).

Jobs by function

Open roles worldwide and in the US, with postings opened and closed in October.

2,487 open roles (12%) don't map to a single function and are left out, along with smaller functions. On October 20 we started matching more job titles to a function (34% were unmatched in September), so open roles by function can't be compared with September. Opened and closed counts can.

US pay

4,480 of 9,199 US roles (49%) post an annual salary range. The median midpoint is $180,500; the middle half of roles sit between $141,000 and $218,167.

By seniority

By function

How this report is made

• Data comes from the public careers sites of 44 large pharmaceutical companies, collected daily by biopharma-careers.com. These are the same 44 companies as in the September edition. Biotechs, CROs and other employers added to the site in October are not included.
• Most companies' finance, HR and legal postings are not tracked, and neither are Johnson & Johnson's MedTech sales roles. When we checked on October 8, we tracked 86% of postings at the 22 companies whose careers sites report a full job count. Totals are therefore lower than each company's full job count, but changes over time are measured on the same set of roles every month.
• Open roles are postings still live after October 31, 2026. New postings and closures cover October 1–31, 2026, and are counted on the day our daily check first or last saw a posting, usually a day after the employer's change. A posting counts as closed once our checks stop finding it. Careers sites sometimes drop a live posting from their lists for a few days, so closures are counted only from postings still missing at least a week after month end (here, November 12).
• AstraZeneca changed the format of its job data around October 7, and our collection stopped recording its postings after that. Its 856 open roles are those live at its last complete check on October 7 (764 in the first version of this edition, which used a status that has since changed), and it is left out of new postings, closures and company rankings. Collection was fixed on November 4, and AstraZeneca will be back in full from the November edition.
• AbbVie's careers site kept listing some closed postings, and on our site their closures were delayed. That doesn't affect this report: closures are counted from the day a posting was last seen, so AbbVie's figures here are accurate.
• Merck's careers site stopped returning its full job list between October 9 and 12 (see the September edition). Postings that came back once collection was fixed are not counted as closed. Every posting we sampled from the roles that didn't come back now shows as gone on Merck's own site.
• BioMarin (first tracked September 28) counts as new from October 5, a week after it was first tracked. Every other company was tracked for all of October, so the posted and taken-down totals cover the same days. They match the change in open roles at the 43 companies: 18,887 at the end of September and 19,828 at the end of October (BioMarin's first-week postings account for the difference of 7).
• Companies sometimes take down and repost the same job, which raises new postings and closures equally. In October, 5.2% of new postings matched a posting from the same company, with the same title and city, taken down in the previous 30 days (5.5% in September), or 8.6% ignoring city. The net change is the more reliable measure.
• These figures count job postings, not employees. They can't show whether a new posting replaces someone who left or adds a new role, or whether a posting came down because it was filled, cancelled or put on hold.
• Pay figures use the midpoint of each posted annual range, for US roles that publish one. Intern and fellowship roles are left out.