Five dollars a day, or $150 a month. Those are the two starting budgets on Indeed's pricing page, and the one you pick decides what you are billed for. Pick a daily budget and you are charged when someone clicks to view the post. Pick a monthly budget and you are charged when someone clicks to apply.
That is Indeed's own sentence, not a summary of it: "You're charged when job seekers click to view your job post with daily budgets or when job seekers click to apply to your job post on monthly budgets."
It matters because the billing unit is the whole cost question. A view is cheap and common. A started application is neither. Two buyers on the same $150 can end up with completely different invoices depending on a radio button.
Everything priced below was read on Indeed's own pages on 14 September 2026, in US dollars: the employer pricing page, the how pricing works guide, the post a job page, the free versus sponsored guide, the Smart Sourcing subscription page, and the Pay Per Started Application article in the employer help centre. Every figure that came from somewhere else is attributed to whoever published it first.
What Indeed actually publishes
| What | Indeed's published figure | Where it says so |
|---|---|---|
| Free posting | Up to three free jobs per calendar month, each live up to 30 days | Post a job page and the free versus sponsored guide |
| Sponsored minimum | $5 per day or $150 per month, varying by role, title and location | Employer pricing page |
| What triggers a charge | A click to view on daily budgets, a click to apply on monthly budgets | Employer pricing page |
| When your card is hit | First day of the month, or when account spend reaches $500, whichever comes first | Employer pricing page and the how pricing works guide |
| New account offer | $75 credit to sponsor a first job, US accounts | Free versus sponsored guide |
| Resume database | Smart Sourcing Professional, $520 per month or $4,992 per year, 100 contacts | Smart Sourcing subscription page |
Read the minimum with its caveat attached. The pricing page says Sponsored Jobs start at $5 a day or $150 a month "although prices may vary based on role, title, and location", so $5 is a floor and not a price. What you pay is whatever the recommendation engine puts in front of you for that title in that market. The same page promises you see it first: "You'll always see the price upfront before sponsoring."
There are two sponsored tiers, Standard and Premium, and Indeed prices Premium above Standard without publishing either number. The performance claims attached to them are Indeed's own marketing: three times more applications than a free post for Standard, and for Premium, appearing in the top three search results twice as often. Treat those as vendor claims, because that is what they are.
Which budget you pick decides what you pay for
Indeed's how-pricing-works guide puts the split in one line: "With a daily budget you may pay per click (PPC), and in other setups, you may pay per started application (PPSA)."
The help centre article then defines what starts an application, and the definition is wider than it sounds. Clicking an apply button counts. So does opening a link to start or continue an application, using a chatbot or a QR code to begin applying, and scheduling an interview when that step replaces the application form.
That last one is worth a second read. If your flow sends candidates to book a slot instead of filling in a form, the booking is the billable event. You are paying at the top of a funnel that some employers assume is the bottom of it.
Indeed also says the auction "adjusts bids in real time to help deliver more started applications", and that a budget "may be spent faster or slower". A monthly budget is a cap, not a schedule. If the auction gets what it wants in week two, week two is where your $150 went.
Why the pricing guides tell you something else
Search the question and you get a consistent answer that does not match the pages above.
Forbes Advisor, audited and verified on 30 October 2025, says Indeed "uses a pay-per-click pricing model" and that the pay-per-application model was "phased out at the end of 2023". Pin's guide, published 28 February 2026 and updated 2 June 2026, describes cost per click only, and dates the discontinuation to 18 December 2023, citing SHRM.
The December 2023 change was real. The conclusion drawn from it is the stale part, because Indeed's help centre publishes a live Pay Per Started Application article today and the pricing page names the budget type that triggers it. A recruiter who budgets from the Forbes page is modelling clicks on a product that may bill them for applications.
There is a fair version of this on the same SERP. Truffle's guide does quote a per-application range, and labels it an estimate rather than a price. Labelling is the difference between a useful guide and a rumour with a dollar sign.
The free tier, and the asterisk that removes it
Four of the six People Also Ask questions on this SERP are versions of "is it still free". The answer has two halves.
Direct employers get up to three free jobs per calendar month, each live for up to 30 days. That is the cap, and it is recent enough that plenty of pages still describe free posting as effectively unlimited.
Then there is the asterisk. On the post a job page it reads: "Terms, conditions, quality standards, and usage limits apply. Feature availability may be limited, and does not apply to staffing agencies." The free versus sponsored guide is more specific about what gets pushed into paid, listing identical jobs posted in multiple locations, jobs with a confidential or generic company name, commission-only roles, hard-to-fill roles, and jobs posted by "a staffing agency, recruitment process outsourcer, or other recruitment-based company".
So if you bill a client for the placement, the free tier does not apply to you at all. Your Indeed cost starts at the sponsored minimum, and there is no unpaid way to test whether the board works for your role before you commit budget to it.
The number that moved while the SERP looked away
Indeed's resume product is now called Smart Sourcing, and its subscription page shows one plan: Professional, $520 a month or $4,992 a year, 100 contacts a month with a six-month rollover, and $5.20 for each extra contact. Contacts expire after six months, which the help centre states separately.
The figure circulating on the SERP is $120 a month for Standard and $300 for Professional, with annual prices of $1,150 and $2,880. ShiftNow publishes those on a post dated 22 June 2026 with no source attached. Pin reproduces them and credits ShiftNow. Truffle reproduces them too, calls them "widely reported US rates", and notes that Indeed announced a Professional increase effective 4 May 2026.
The contact allowance is the tell. Both the $300 plan and the $520 plan include 100 contacts a month, so this is one plan at two prices, and only one of them is live. Budget from the circulating figure and you are short by $220 a month per seat.
That gap is the whole argument for pricing per contact rather than per subscription, which is what our sourcing credit math piece works through across vendors. At $5.20 a contact, Indeed is not cheap, and its contacts expire.
What nobody on this page can source
Three numbers travel this SERP without a first-party origin.
Cost per application, usually given as $15 to $50. Indeed publishes no per-application price anywhere on its employer pages, and the publishers quoting the range describe it as practitioner-reported.
Cost per click, usually given as $0.10 to $5 and higher for competitive roles. Same status. Pin traces its band to a third-party pricing site rather than to Indeed.
A $25 minimum per job. This one has better provenance than the others. PriceTimeline reported on 1 July 2025 that Indeed began enforcing a $25 per job minimum calculated across every job in a campaign rather than only the active ones, and published a screenshot of the notice. It is not on Indeed's pricing page today, so treat it as a campaign-level rule that may apply to your account rather than as the published price, and check your own campaign settings before you plan around it.
None of this makes the ranges useless. It makes them forecasts, and a forecast you cannot trace is a forecast you cannot defend to a client.
What to budget, with the assumptions showing
One role, one month, US market, and every assumption stated.
| Path | What you commit | What you are billed for | What $150 buys, on the circulating estimates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily budget | $5 a day, 30 days | Clicks to view | 30 to 1,500 views at $0.10 to $5 a click, unsourced range |
| Monthly budget | $150 for the month | Started applications | 3 to 10 started applications at $15 to $50, unsourced range |
Both rows spend the same money. The right-hand column is the reason to read the budget screen carefully, and it is built on the ranges that nobody can trace, which is why the honest version of this table has a range that wide.
Two things are firm. Indeed shows the recommended price before you confirm, so the first trustworthy number in this whole exercise arrives inside the product, not in any guide including this one. And a started application is not a submitted application, so the cost per candidate you can actually speak to is higher than the cost per started application, by whatever your drop-off is.
For a second reference point on the same question at a different vendor, our LinkedIn job posting cost piece works through what a daily budget really means there, and the ZipRecruiter pricing review covers the subscription model instead of the auction one.
What this changes for an agency desk
If you place candidates for clients, the Indeed maths is simpler and worse than it looks. No free tier. A floor of $150 a month per role if you take the monthly path, or $5 a day if you take the daily one. A billing event that fires when a candidate starts something rather than finishes it. And a $500 account threshold that pulls your card forward the moment volume picks up.
That is a fine cost of doing business on a role with real inbound demand. It is a poor one on a hard-to-fill role, which is exactly the category Indeed flags as likely to require sponsorship in the first place. The narrower the talent pool, the more you pay per started application and the less the auction has to work with.
The comparison worth running is against direct sourcing rather than against a cheaper board. Same money, spent on the side of the market that does not raise its hand: finding the people who fit the role and reaching them yourself, instead of paying per click for the ones already scrolling. That is what Glozo's sourcing is built for, with a market compensation estimate and an Open to Offers signal on each profile so you can see who is in budget and likely to answer before you spend anything. Job boards and sourcing are different purchases, and the cost comparison only works if you price them per person you actually reach, not per posting.