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SpaceNexus Monthly Hiring Index
The monthly edition of our hiring dataset: who was hiring, how fast the picture moved, and where the roles were. For the live day-to-day view, see the hiring trends dashboard.
Correction, 6 Oct 2026: from 5 October until this date, this edition's top-10 and fastest-mover tables left out every employer whose counting rule we changed on 5 October, including SpaceX, the largest employer we track, because that later change was wrongly applied to this month's figures. The tables now show the month as it was recorded.
Logged on /corrections.
Why two different totals appear on this page. Two readings of one metric. 9,905 is the site-wide snapshot frozen on 2026-09-30, the last day of September 2026: that is the edition's headline and it will never move. 10,208 is the same count taken today, 2026-10-22 (up by 303), and it is what the remote-share and location panels below are computed over, because we hold no history of a posting's remote flag or location and will not reconstruct one. Both are the same query over the same table on two different days.
| # | Company | Active roles at month end |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SpaceX | 2,610 |
| 2 | Blue Origin | 1,764 |
| 3 | Rocket Lab | 533 |
| 4 | The Aerospace Corporation | 423 |
| 5 | Relativity Space | 333 |
| 6 | K2 Space | 245 |
| 7 |
| Company | Start | End | Δ | Δ % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Astranis | 86 | 164 | +78 | +91% |
| SpaceX | 2,549 | 2,610 | +61 | +2% |
| Blue Origin | 1,703 | 1,764 | +61 | +4% |
| Voyager Technologies | 156 | 192 | +36 |
Counted over the 10,208 postings active today (2026-10-22), not the 9,905 frozen at month end, because we hold no history of a posting's location. Remote-only postings (358) are excluded here and reported in the remote-share tile above.
Coverage change (2026-09-01): Blue Origin’s Workday board joined the tracker (+≈1,590 postings). Totals jump on this date reflects expanded coverage, not market hiring. Month-over-month comparisons spanning this date are affected accordingly.
Coverage change (2026-09-26): 35 employers joined the tracker (+1,834 postings: Inversion Space, Isar Aerospace, Spire Global, Katalyst Space, AST SpaceMobile, LeoLabs, BlackSky, HawkEye 360 and 27 more). Anduril now counts space-segment roles only (−2,252 postings of non-space work). Hermeus now counts space-segment roles only (−85 postings of non-space work). Hadrian now counts space-segment roles only (−143 postings of non-space work). Totals moving on this date reflect what we track, not market hiring. Month-over-month comparisons spanning this date are affected accordingly.
Coverage change (2026-09-27): 11 employers joined the tracker (+1,192 postings: Leonardo, Leidos, Boeing, KBR, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Northrop Grumman, Axiom Space, Sierra Space and 3 more). Totals moving on this date reflect what we track, not market hiring. Month-over-month comparisons spanning this date are affected accordingly.
The SpaceNexus Monthly Hiring Index is built from our jobs tracker, which syncs live postings daily from 62 employer sources: applicant-tracking-system boards (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and others) at space companies and roles employers post on SpaceNexus directly. At defense primes and large contractors only space-segment roles count: a role counts when its title names space work (a space discipline, program, customer or space business unit). The employer list and each one's rule are on the jobs board. A posting counts as active when it is live on the employer's own board at our most recent sync; postings that disappear from a board are marked inactive, and duplicates across boards are scrubbed during ingestion.
Per-company counts come from daily snapshots taken since August 13, 2026. “Active postings” is the last site-wide snapshot on or before the month's final day; “fastest movers” compares each company's first and last snapshot within the month. When the way an employer's roles are counted changed during the month (for example, narrowed to space roles), its movers reading starts on the day of the change, so the removed roles never show as a hiring drop. “New postings” counts roles whose posted date falls inside the calendar month (UTC). Companies without a linked profile appear under their board's name as-is.
SpaceNexus Monthly Hiring Index, September 2026 edition (data: SpaceNexus jobs tracker). https://spacenexus.us/hiring-index/2026-09 (retrieved 2026-10-22).
Free to cite and embed with attribution. Data updates continuously; the citation date pins your retrieval.
Explore further: live hiring trends · browse all job postings · company profiles & screener
| AST SpaceMobile |
| 235 |
| 8 | Vast | 204 |
| 9 | Impulse Space | 201 |
| 10 | Voyager Technologies | 192 |
Counted under the rules in force in September 2026. These employers' counting rules changed later: SpaceX (5 Oct 2026), Rocket Lab (5 Oct 2026), K2 Space (5 Oct 2026), Vast (5 Oct 2026), Voyager Technologies (5 Oct 2026), Apex (5 Oct 2026), Northwood Space (5 Oct 2026). Current figures are on the jobs board.
| +23% |
| K2 Space | 213 | 245 | +32 | +15% |
| Muon Space | 105 | 129 | +24 | +23% |
| Rocket Lab | 518 | 533 | +15 | +3% |
| Apex | 121 | 134 | +13 | +11% |
| The Aerospace Corporation | 434 | 423 | -11 | -3% |
| Relativity Space | 340 | 333 | -7 | -2% |
| Skylo | 46 | 41 | -5 | -11% |
| Stoke Space | 69 | 65 | -4 | -6% |
| Northwood Space | 80 | 77 | -3 | -4% |
Window: 2026-09-01 → 2026-09-30. Companies with fewer than 5 active roles excluded.
Same-employer change and the index level. The headline total moves when we start or stop tracking an employer, so each edition also compares month-end postings at employers tracked on the same basis at both month ends, the way retailers report same-store sales. An employer is left out of a month's comparison when its first snapshot came after the prior month end, or when its coverage rule changed during the month; an employer tracked at the prior month end with no job postings at this one counts as zero. Chaining those monthly changes gives the index level (2026-08 = 100), which coverage changes cannot move. This edition compares 21 employers; 36 new to the tracker are left out; left out for a rule change: AST SpaceMobile, Anduril, Apex, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Hadrian, Hermeus, ICEYE, Impulse Space, Isar Aerospace, Northrop Grumman, Relativity Space, Rocket Lab, Sierra Space, SpaceX, Stoke Space, True Anomaly, Varda Space Industries, Vast.
Two totals, and why. Every figure on this page describes September 2026 except the remote-share tile and the location table, which are computed over postings active today (2026-10-22) and are labelled “live” where they appear. We record no history of a posting's remote flag or location, so those two cannot be reconstructed for a past month, and we would rather say so than publish a month-end number we did not measure. The open-jobs chart plots the same site-wide snapshot series this page's headline is taken from, so the two agree by construction.
This index is free to cite with attribution. Questions or corrections: contact us.
This is the monthly SpaceNexus Hiring Index. Every edition is dated and permanently linkable, and every figure is computed from SpaceNexus data rather than written. The full release calendar shows where each franchise stands.
Next edition: October 2026, due 2026-11-04.
Cite this edition
SpaceNexus Hiring Index, September 2026. SpaceNexus, data as of 2026-09-30. https://spacenexus.us/hiring-index/2026-09
The complete row set, every column included, is available as CSV and JSON to SpaceNexus Research subscribers: export this edition (JSON, every table); for subscribers each table above also carries its own CSV download. The export is computed from exactly the rows behind the tables above, so the page and the file can never disagree.
The same credits are written into every CSV and JSON export of this data, so a downloaded file still names its sources.