Recruitment Advertising Cost Benchmarks

Cost per click is the public unit closest to what an ad actually buys. Appcast counts a click "when a user clicks on a search, social, or job board advertisement."³ Its yearly benchmark report is the main public source. The 10th edition came out in February 2026, with 2025 US data.¹

The job-board figures cover nearly 1,200 employers and over 302 million clicks. They count only ads that send people to the employer's own application; easy-apply ads, duration-based posts and slots are left out.¹ The search figures come from a smaller set of over 200 employers. Appcast launched its own search and social ad products in 2025, so read them as one platform's numbers.²

Appcast also reports social cost per click from campaigns it buys itself, "mostly in the $0.40 - $1.30 range."² Those are one buyer's results, not a market median, so social stays out of the chart.

What the chart shows.

• Healthcare has the priciest job-board click of the four groups. Retail has the cheapest.
• Job-board clicks got dearer through 2025. The monthly median ended December at $0.92, against $0.83 for the full year.⁵
• Why? Appcast's chief economist gave SHRM one reason in April 2026: "The job boards started to realize that their take rate was flat, and they wanted to change their pricing." SHRM adds that Indeed and ZipRecruiter "have signaled shifts in monetization."⁶

Why search costs more than job boards.

Across all 12 groups Appcast reports for search, medians run from $1.19 (technology) to $3.55 (healthcare).² In the four groups above, a search click cost about 2.5 to 4.7 times a job-board click. Warehousing showed the widest gap: $3.51 against $0.75. Those ratios are our arithmetic on Appcast's medians.

Search ads show above and below search results when someone types certain words.³ Appcast gives two reasons the click costs more:²

Each channel does a different job, too. Appcast says job boards "still do the heavy lifting" for direct applications, while social keeps your brand in front of people "who aren't ready to apply yet."² So a pricier click isn't a worse buy. It's a different click. Price each channel on its own line, and never blend them.

One caution: the search and job-board medians come from different sets of employers. Treat the ratios as a rough guide, not a rate card.

A national median hides a wide spread. Joveo, a recruitment ad platform, publishes cost per click by occupation and state. Its figures are averages over a rolling 12 months, updated each quarter, across "millions of jobs published on hundreds of job sites."⁷

Depending on the role, the highest state costs about 2 to 10 times the lowest. And no state is cheap for everything: Rhode Island is the cheapest state for warehouse-worker clicks and the dearest for retail ones.

Two cautions. Joveo reports averages and Appcast reports medians, from different data, so don't mix them in one comparison. And read each location against a figure for the same role and state, not the national number.

Hiring at many sites at once? That's what our high-volume hiring campaigns are built for: one plan, with each location's budget kept on plan.

Appcast sees a yearly rhythm. Its cost per hire "shows a clear seasonal pattern, with a spike around October," then drops in December "as seasonal hiring winds down." The swing, Appcast adds, "can have a real impact on hiring budgets."⁸

That pattern is in cost per hire, not cost per click. The click data shows a separate trend: the job-board median rose all through 2025.⁵ So a late-year month can sit above a full-year median with nothing wrong.

Plan flights for the peak.

• Give the fall months their own caps in the plan. Set them before the peak, not as month-end catch-up.
• Pace to the calendar. On day 15 of a 30-day month, a budget should be about half spent. Our free budget pacing calculator does the math.
• Compare October with last October, not with a full-year median.
• Pause ads the day a job closes. An ad on a closed job keeps spending until someone stops it.
• Write the plan down. Our recruitment budget template gives each role group its own cap and a calendar-even plan.

New this year, Appcast tracks costs past the click. It uses "disposition data": applicant tracking system records that map each person through shared stages, from applied to hired.³ Each cost below is ad spend divided by the count at that stage, as a 2025 median.¹

Read these as Appcast's figures, measured in employers' ATS data, not by ad platforms. An ad platform sees the click. It doesn't see the screen, the interview or the offer. Those later costs also depend on your application form and how fast your team follows up.

So we don't stop at the click. We plan every campaign from your interview seats back: the right people, ads only on open jobs, every budget kept on plan. Our guide to recruitment marketing metrics maps each metric to the system that can count it.

Appcast warns that your own results "may differ based on roles, locations, employer brand, and other factors." Two employers advertising the same job "can see very different outcomes simply because of differences in brand strength."⁹ So a benchmark is a range to read against, not a target.

Five checks before you compare.

What not to compare.

None of these is a job-ad cost per click, so none of them belongs next to the figures above.

Comparing agencies or vendors? Ask each one which unit it reports and where the count comes from. Our guide on how to choose a recruitment marketing agency lists the questions to send.

A hypothetical: a finance lead gets October numbers for warehouse roles in one state, with the job board and search on separate lines.