New York has passed legislation requiring employers with 100 or more employees to disclose whether they actually intend to fill a posted position — a direct response to "ghost jobs," listings that remain open indefinitely with no genuine hiring activity behind them.

Bill S8877 goes beyond a simple yes-or-no checkbox. It requires job postings to include a specific time frame within which the employer expects to hire. Both employers and third-party platforms — job boards and aggregators like Indeed or LinkedIn — face fines for non-compliance. That last detail matters: it holds job platforms accountable too, giving them a financial incentive to catch violations before they go live rather than waiting for regulators to investigate individual listings.

The rule applies to mid-size and large employers, which exempts most small businesses from having to comply. The bill now awaits the governor's signature.

Ghost jobs are not uncommon. Multiple industry surveys have found that a sizable portion of active listings on major job boards correspond to roles that are already filled, frozen indefinitely, or maintained simply to gather résumés for future openings. Job seekers lose time submitting applications to positions that don't really exist, get false signals about what jobs are available, and see salary expectations distorted by roles that have no actual vacancy attached. More broadly, inflated posting counts skew unemployment statistics and complicate workforce planning on both sides of the hiring table.

This law is part of a wider shift. Bloomberg Law reported in May 2026 that state-level job advertisement laws are moving past the initial wave of pay-transparency mandates — where Colorado, New York, California, and others required employers to post salary ranges — and into two related areas: ghost jobs and how employers use artificial intelligence in hiring and job postings. The progression is telling. Pay-range laws were straightforward to enforce: a number is either there or it isn't. Ghost job disclosure and AI labeling are harder to verify because they depend on whether an employer was truly hiring and on how opaque the automated systems are.

New York's approach sidesteps some of that difficulty by requiring a time frame for hiring — a concrete, checkable fact — rather than asking employers to swear that a job is "real." That design choice makes enforcement easier. Whether regulators will actually staff and fund the auditing work remains to be determined.

For technology companies, the rules create competing pressures. Large tech firms that keep "evergreen" postings live — to stay visible on job sites or to feed their recruiting metrics — will need to either set genuine hiring time frames or remove the listings. HR and recruiting software vendors operating in New York will need to build compliance tools, likely including automatic checks when a listing is submitted. Given how many tech-sector employers are based in or operate from New York, the practical effect reaches well beyond the state itself.

What makes this bill structurally different is that it holds third-party platforms liable alongside employers. Job aggregators suddenly have the technical means to block or flag non-compliant postings as they arrive — and now they have a cost incentive to do it. This dynamic will likely push compliance faster than any regulatory audit schedule alone could achieve.

The real question is whether other states will copy this model. Pay transparency started with a few states and has become a standard practice for companies hiring at any significant scale. If ghost job disclosure spreads the same way, the specific choices in S8877 — the time-frame requirement, the platform liability, the 100-employee threshold — could become the template for how other legislatures tackle the problem.