What it is
Lightcast sells labor-market data: job postings, career profiles, salary observations, government employment statistics and a skills taxonomy, all normalized to the same occupation and skill codes. Its enterprise page lists 3 billion postings, 1.2 billion career profiles, 242 million salary observations, 34,000 skills and coverage of 165 countries, and says 67 of the Fortune 100 are customers. The company formed when Emsi and Burning Glass Technologies merged in 2021, took the Lightcast name in June 2022, is based in Moscow, Idaho, and is backed by KKR. Timothy van den Broek became permanent CEO in July 2026 after about seven months as interim CEO.
For talent acquisition, the product is Talent Analyst: supply and demand by role, competitor hiring activity, compensation by region, skills and experience, and location comparison down to metro area, county, ZIP code or drive time. The question it answers: is this role hireable at this salary in this market, and where should we open the req instead?
Why it shows up in recruiting stacks
Three jobs. First, req feasibility: before a hiring manager commits to “senior data engineer, Cincinnati, $140K”, Talent Analyst shows how many people hold that skill set locally, how many employers are posting for it, and what they advertise. Second, location strategy for a new office or hub, where the drive-time and county-level cuts matter. Third, skills-based hiring. Lightcast’s Fault Lines report (18 February 2026) found that 66% of job postings worldwide require a university degree while 31% of the workforce holds one. In January 2026 Lightcast added a STARs filter, built with Opportunity@Work, across Analyst, Talent Analyst and Developer to flag roles that workers without degrees already fill. See skills-based hiring.
Lightcast is also buying its way into consulting-led work. It acquired Stratigens (August 2024), Rhetorik (July 2025), Skill Collective (September 2025) and Simply (October 2025), all UK firms. In March 2026 it extended job-postings coverage from 41 to 165+ countries. Data teams can skip the interface: Data Shares deliver the raw tables to Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage or SFTP.
Pricing reality
Lightcast publishes no prices, and the pricing page is a contact form. Vendr’s buyer data puts the median contract at $20,000 a year, in a range of $12,000 to $144,400. Public records give two anchors. The Greater London Authority paid £29,000 for one year of London job-postings data (July 2023 to June 2024). Oakton College in Illinois approved $118,225 over three years for Analyst plus Career Coach in May 2026, rising from $37,859 in year one to $41,370 in year three.
Treat the public-sector records as a floor. A single-region, three-seat license sits at the bottom of Vendr’s range. An enterprise TA team buying national or multi-country Talent Analyst access, more seats and a Data Share should budget toward the upper half. The free route is narrow: the Open Skills taxonomy is free to browse, but free Skills API access is limited to nonprofits and public-good projects at 50 extraction calls a month. Commercial use needs a paid license.
Best for
Talent intelligence and TA operations leads at employers with 2,000+ staff who open reqs across many US metros or several countries. The job is deciding where to hire, whether a salary band can fill a role in a given market, and which degree requirements to drop. Staffing firms pricing client work in unfamiliar markets fit too.
Do not buy it if you hire fewer than about 50 people a year, hire mostly remote, or only need an offer benchmark: a compensation tool such as Ravio or Pave answers that for less. It also does not find candidates. If you need names and contact details, you need a sourcing tool such as SeekOut or Findem.
Versus the alternatives
LinkedIn Talent Insights is the other half of the category’s top two. Pick it when you already pay for LinkedIn Recruiter and your main question is who works where, at which competitor, with what profile. Pick Lightcast when you need posting history, government employment statistics and salary data that do not depend on who keeps a LinkedIn profile current.
TalentNeuron, sold by Gartner to Leeds Equity Partners in 2023, covers 200+ markets and launched Synappy, a conversational AI assistant, in March 2026. Shortlist it next to Lightcast for multi-country location strategy and let a head-to-head on your three hardest markets decide.
Revelio Labs is the fastest-growing entrant. Its Revelio Terminal, launched 28 July 2026, adds AI chat and MCP access across 1.1 billion profiles and 5 billion postings. Pick Revelio when analysts want company-level workforce composition inside their AI tools. Lightcast has no official MCP server; the only one is a community project that needs your own API credentials.
Watch-outs
- Postings measure advertised demand, not hires. Evergreen reqs, reposts and staffing-agency duplicates inflate counts. Guard: ask Lightcast for its deduplication rules during evaluation, and set every posting count against supply (profiles or employment) and your own ATS funnel before you move a req.
- Some figures lag. Gartner Peer Insights reviewers say parts of the data are a few years old or lean on government statistics. Guard: read the data vintage on each chart, and for fast-moving roles use postings from the last 90 days, not annual government wage series.
- Non-US depth is new. The jump from 41 to 165+ countries happened in March 2026. Guard: during evaluation, run your three largest non-US markets and check the counts against a local source, such as Indeed Hiring Lab’s free Job Postings Index in the countries it covers.
- Multi-year deals step up. Oakton’s contract rises about 3% and then 6% a year, and published Lightcast price lists sell national data and profile analytics as add-ons to a regional license. Guard: cap the renewal escalator in writing and price the national-data upgrade before signing, not at renewal.