In the third quarter of 2026 we tracked 1,684 distinct computational biology, bioinformatics and biostatistics postings from 247 companies. This report describes who posted them, where, for which roles and levels, and what they said they would pay.
Read this first: these numbers describe our coverage, not the industry
These numbers reflect the growth of CompBioJobs, not of the industry. Posting counts on this board are NOT a measure of industry hiring: we added sources all year (companies with postings went 110 in Q1, 196 in Q2, 247 in Q3), and the nightly targeted sweep that went live 2026-09-09 took the apparent posting rate from 13.8 to 32.6 a day by surfacing roles that already existed. A rising count mostly means we are seeing more of the market, so we do not report quarter-over-quarter volume: every figure is a share or a distribution within the quarter.
So this quarter we report no quarter-over-quarter totals. We checked whether a like-for-like comparison was possible and it wasn't (see Q2's three questions). The figures below are shares and distributions within Q3, which hold up far better when coverage changes.
Q3 2026 at a Glance
Who Posted: Large Pharma at the Top, a Long Tail Below
Amgen posted the most roles we tracked (115), followed by AstraZeneca (98), Johnson & Johnson (89), Merck (MSD) (79), Genentech (77). No single employer accounted for more than 6.8% of postings. Below the large pharma companies sits a long tail: 121 of 247 companies posted exactly one role and 78 posted two to five.
The five biggest posters accounted for 27.2% of Q3 roles
CompBioJobs.com · Bioinformatics Job Market Report, Q3 2026
www.compbiojobs.com/blog/bioinformatics-job-market-q3-2026
| Company | Postings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Amgen | 115 | 6.8% |
| AstraZeneca | 98 | 5.8% |
| Johnson & Johnson | 89 | 5.3% |
| Merck (MSD) | 79 | 4.7% |
| Genentech | 77 | 4.6% |
| Novartis | 60 | 3.6% |
| Bristol Myers Squibb | 59 | 3.5% |
| Gilead | 56 | 3.3% |
| GSK | 40 | 2.4% |
| Lila Sciences | 39 | 2.3% |
| Pfizer | 39 | 2.3% |
| Sanofi | 37 | 2.2% |
Beyond Big Pharma: Who Else Is Hiring
The largest posters are big pharmaceutical companies, but they are not the whole market. 75 venture-backed startups posted 221 roles (13.1%), established biotech and pharma companies outside the largest group posted 373, and universities, hospitals and research institutes 152.
Venture-backed startups posted 13.1% of Q3 roles, from 75 companies
CompBioJobs.com · Bioinformatics Job Market Report, Q3 2026
www.compbiojobs.com/blog/bioinformatics-job-market-q3-2026
Venture-backed startups hiring this quarter
75 venture-backed startups posted 221 computational roles in Q3, 13 of them founded in 2020 or later (marked New). They are mostly two kinds of company: AI and software platforms (43% of startup postings) and drug developers (38% of startup postings), with 12.2% from tools and diagnostics companies. Their hiring leans heavily toward AI/ML: 59.7% of startup roles are AI/ML roles, against 42.1% at every other kind of employer. Geographically they cluster even more than the market as a whole: Boston / Cambridge, MA (33%), SF Bay Area (29%), London / Oxford / Cambridge UK (12.2%).
They also post higher pay at every level. Compared with large pharma at the same seniority, startups' typical advertised starting salary is scientist / mid-level +22.1%, senior +20.5%, principal +25.3%, director +39.2%.
| Level | Startups | Large pharma | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scientist / mid-level | $140,000 (n=30) | $114,650 (n=54) | +22.1% |
| Senior | $155,500 (n=24) | $129,000 (n=102) | +20.5% |
| Principal | $179,500 (n=12) | $143,200 (n=71) | +25.3% |
| Director | $240,000 (n=13) | $172,400 (n=94) | +39.2% |
Read this with two cautions. The startup samples are small (12 to 30 disclosed salaries per level), so treat the size of each gap as rough. And startups concentrate in California, New York and Massachusetts, where living costs are high and California and New York require pay ranges in postings, so part of the gap is location rather than employer type. Starting salaries also leave out equity, which is typically a larger part of startup pay.
AI/ML Roles: 44.4% of Postings, and a Pay Premium That Fades at Director Level
44.4% of Q3 postings (748) were AI/ML roles: an AI/ML job title, or concrete AI/ML skills in the posting itself. That counts classical machine learning and statistical learning as well as deep learning, so we call it AI/ML rather than "AI". Only 57.6% of them say so in the job title. The other 317 carry other job titles and ask for AI/ML skills in the body of the posting, so searching job titles for "machine learning" misses a large share of this work.
AI/ML work is concentrated below the leadership levels. It peaks at scientist / mid-level (50.6% of those postings) and falls to 36.9% at director level. It also varies by type of employer: Venture-backed startups 59.7%, Large pharma 48.6%, Established biotech & pharma 34.9%, Academic, hospital & nonprofit 32.2%, Tools & diagnostics 30.3%.
So the useful pay question is not "do AI/ML roles pay more overall?". Because AI/ML roles sit mostly at the individual-contributor levels, an overall average would mix in a different seniority profile and mislead in either direction. Instead we compared advertised starting salaries within the same seniority level:
AI/ML roles advertise higher starting salaries at every level below director
CompBioJobs.com · Bioinformatics Job Market Report, Q3 2026
www.compbiojobs.com/blog/bioinformatics-job-market-q3-2026
| Level | AI/ML typical starting salary | Other roles | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scientist / mid-level | $126,000 (n=79) | $103,900 (n=86) | +21.3% |
| Senior | $138,600 (n=99) | $128,800 (n=110) | +7.6% |
| Principal | $171,900 (n=76) | $147,956 (n=77) | +16.2% |
| Director | $178,000 (n=89) | $181,000 (n=131) | -1.7% |
The premium is largest for scientist / mid-level roles (+21.3%). At director level it disappears (-1.7%): leadership pay converges whatever the specialty. Which AI/ML skills these postings ask for →
Highest posted salary ceilings this quarter
Where the Jobs Are
Boston / Cambridge, MA (24.3%), SF Bay Area (18.2%), New York / New Jersey (9.7%) were the largest hubs. 6.2% of postings were remote. Our metro grouping assigns 82.1% of postings; the rest are smaller locations, state-only locations, or genuinely ambiguous ones like a bare "Cambridge", which we leave unassigned rather than guess.
New this quarter: jobs outside the US. In response to reader demand, we expanded our coverage beyond the United States in Q3. Postings outside the US went from 3.8% of what we tracked in Q2 to 22% in Q3, led by India and the United Kingdom. That is a change in our coverage, not a measure of international hiring, so we don't read it as growth abroad.
| Metro | Country | Postings | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boston / Cambridge, MA | US | 409 | 24.3% |
| SF Bay Area | US | 306 | 18.2% |
| New York / New Jersey | US | 163 | 9.7% |
| London / Oxford / Cambridge UK | UK | 87 | 5.2% |
| Hyderabad | India | 80 | 4.8% |
| San Diego | US | 51 | 3% |
| Memphis | US | 26 | 1.5% |
| Chicago area | US | 23 | 1.4% |
| Indianapolis | US | 23 | 1.4% |
| Philadelphia | US | 22 | 1.3% |
| Remote | Any | 105 | 6.2% |
| Country | Postings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 1,241 | 73.7% |
| United Kingdom | 120 | 7.1% |
| India | 102 | 6.1% |
| France | 24 | 1.4% |
| China | 19 | 1.1% |
| Switzerland | 14 | 0.8% |
| Germany | 12 | 0.7% |
| Spain | 12 | 0.7% |
4.3% of postings have no derived country (mostly "Remote" and ambiguous city names), so these shares are minimums.
Which Roles Were Posted
Role categories come from the job title only, and a posting can fall into more than one (a "Bioinformatics Data Scientist" counts twice). 18.3% of postings matched none of these categories.
| Role category | Postings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| AI / machine learning | 748 | 44.4% |
| Data science / data engineering | 279 | 16.6% |
| Biostatistics / statistical programming | 276 | 16.4% |
| Bioinformatics | 134 | 8% |
| Clinical / real-world data | 101 | 6% |
| Computational biology | 82 | 4.9% |
| Genomics / NGS | 69 | 4.1% |
| Computational chemistry / structural | 53 | 3.1% |
Seniority and Posted Pay
Computational hiring skews experienced. Senior, principal, director and executive roles together made up 65.4% of postings; internships, entry-level roles and postdocs 13%.
The typical advertised starting salary rises from $115K at mid-level to $179.3K at director
Dot: one posting · box: middle half · whiskers: 10th to 90th percentile · thick line: median
CompBioJobs.com · Bioinformatics Job Market Report, Q3 2026
www.compbiojobs.com/blog/bioinformatics-job-market-q3-2026
| Level | Share of postings | Typical starting salary | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internship | 5.1% | too few | |
| Entry level | 4.3% | $75,000 | $60K–$83.8K (n=37) |
| Postdoc | 3.6% | $72,000 | $71.8K–$78K (n=30) |
| Scientist / mid-level | 19.6% | $115,000 | $100K–$136.1K (n=165) |
| Senior | 24.6% | $131,400 | $116K–$151.5K (n=209) |
| Principal | 14.7% | $155,600 | $135K–$187.4K (n=153) |
| Director | 24.6% | $179,250 | $159.9K–$212K (n=220) |
| Executive | 1.5% | $272,794 | $261.3K–$290K (n=12) |
Pay columns use US postings that disclosed an annual salary; levels with fewer than 6 such postings show "too few". Internship pay is mostly quoted hourly, so it is not shown as a salary here.
The shape of posted pay
Half of Q3 postings (49.8%) disclosed a US annual salary. Their advertised starting salaries ran from $86,500 at the 10th percentile to $215,420 at the 90th, with a median of $142,500. We report percentiles rather than an average: posted pay is skewed, and a single high posting moves an average a long way.
Half of advertised starting salaries fall between $114.2K and $176.6K
CompBioJobs.com · Bioinformatics Job Market Report, Q3 2026
www.compbiojobs.com/blog/bioinformatics-job-market-q3-2026
Q2's Three Questions: What We Can and Can't Answer
Our Q2 report ended with three questions for Q3. We checked each against the data before answering, and two of them can't be answered honestly yet.
1. Was there a summer slowdown, and did biostatistics resist it? Can't tell yet.
Answering this needs a like-for-like count, and our collection changed too much in 2026 to give one. Holding the employer set fixed wasn't enough: 10 of the 14 employers whose counts moved most did so because of how we collected them, not how they hired (Eli Lilly fell from 38 to 10 because its old job board stopped working and its replacement only joined our coverage at the end of September). Holding the job feeds fixed wasn't enough either: 85.8% of Q2's comparable postings arrived in a one-off collection burst in late May, against 8.4% of Q3's. Any Q2-to-Q3 change would mostly measure us. Collection has been steady since June, so Q4 against Q3 should be the first fair comparison.
2. Do the AI-native labs keep their pay lead?
Partly answerable, because it is about posted pay rather than counts. Lila Sciences set Q2's ceiling at $570K across 4 postings; across 39 Q3 postings its highest ceiling was $336K, so Q2's figure looks like one exceptional role rather than a going rate. The highest ceilings this quarter came from OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic, Genentech (see above), and at the same seniority AI/ML roles posted higher starting salaries at most levels.
3. Is the field de-concentrating away from Boston? Can't tell yet.
Boston and Cambridge were 24.3% of Q3 postings. A change in that share is exposed to the same collection effects as question 1 (losing or gaining a single Boston employer's feed moves it), so we don't compare it with Q2.
What We're Watching Into Q4
The first fair quarter-over-quarter comparison
With collection stable since June, Q4 against Q3 can finally test a seasonal pattern, and the biostatistics and Boston questions above.
Whether the AI/ML premium holds at mid-level
The within-level premium is the most robust pay signal we have. If it narrows, AI/ML skills are becoming standard rather than scarce.
What This Means for Your Search
Mid-level scientists
This is where AI/ML skills paid most in Q3. If your work already uses machine learning, say so concretely in your applications. Browse ML/AI roles →
Biostatisticians and statistical programmers
One of the largest role categories by title. Browse biostatistics roles →
Outside the US
At least 22% of postings were outside the United States, with India and the UK largest. Listings show a country flag on non-US roles.
Benchmark an offer
Compare against the level-by-level medians above, not the overall figure. Salary tracker →
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a bioinformatics or computational biology job pay in 2026?
Across 838 Q3 2026 US postings that disclosed an annual salary, the typical advertised starting salary was $142,500 and the middle half ran from $114,220 to $176,600. The median posted ceiling was $214,000. By level, typical starting salaries ran from $115,000 for scientist/mid-level roles to $179,250 for directors.
Which companies posted the most computational biology jobs in Q3 2026?
Amgen (115), AstraZeneca (98), Johnson & Johnson (89), Merck (MSD) (79), Genentech (77) posted the most roles we tracked. No employer accounted for more than 6.8% of postings, and 121 of 247 companies posted exactly one role.
Do AI and machine learning roles pay more?
Compared within the same seniority level, AI/ML roles advertised higher starting salaries at most levels: scientist / mid-level +21.3%, senior +7.6%, principal +16.2%. At director level there was no premium (-1.7%).
Where are computational biology jobs located?
Boston / Cambridge, MA (24.3%), SF Bay Area (18.2%), New York / New Jersey (9.7%) were the largest hubs in Q3 2026. 6.2% of postings were remote. At least 22% of postings were outside the United States, led by India and the United Kingdom.
Did hiring slow down over the summer?
We can't tell from our data, and we would rather say so than guess. Our collection changed during 2026: in the comparison window, 85.8% of Q2's postings arrived in a one-off collection burst in late May, against 8.4% of Q3's, so a quarter-over-quarter count mostly measures our own coverage. Collection has been stable since June, so Q4 versus Q3 should be comparable.
Methodology
What is counted. Computational biology, bioinformatics, biostatistics and related postings first tracked on CompBioJobs between July 1 and September 30, 2026, counted once per posting URL. Postings that later closed are included: a job posted in July and filled in August was still a real opening. Postings we removed as off-topic or as duplicates are excluded.
Pay. "Starting salary" means the bottom of the salary range an employer advertised: for a posting listing $142,500 to $214,000, it is $142,500. We report percentiles of those starting salaries ("typical" is the median), over US postings with an annual salary. Hourly and monthly figures, and non-US currencies, are excluded rather than converted. Means are not reported.
Seniority is assigned by a language-model classifier from the title. AI/ML is a rule-based check for an AI/ML title or concrete AI/ML skills in the posting. Role categories match the title only and overlap. Metros group the free-text location with a curated list and leave ambiguous places unassigned.
Known limits.
- posted_at defaults to now(); 81% of Q3 rows carry a posted_at within an hour of first capture, meaning it records when we found the job rather than when it was published.
- 770 of 1684 Q3 rows were first seen on or after 2026-09-09, when collection changed.
- remote_type comes from a text heuristic over the free-text location (src/utils/remote-type-detector.js) which is known to read "Remote, US" as hybrid, and defaults to onsite when it finds a city. The onsite share is therefore an upper bound and the remote share a lower bound; treat the split as indicative, not measured.
- 4.3% of Q3 rows have no derived country. That is not missing data so much as ambiguous data: a bare "Remote" resolves to NULL by design (remote_type already carries that meaning), as does a single-word city that could be two places ("Cambridge" is MA or UK). Country shares below are shares of ALL rows, so they are floors, not estimates of the true split.
Changes from earlier reports. Earlier reports counted database rows. An audit for this report found that a posting which closed and reappeared was sometimes stored more than once, so Q3 counts each posting URL once. Our Q1 and Q2 reports are left as published.
Which postings count. A posting is on the board when our relevance classifier scores it as computational life-science work. That classifier currently reads the job title and the opening of the description, so postings that open with a long employer introduction are judged mostly on their title. We are testing a longer reading window; it would mainly tighten the board by removing commercial-AI and wet-lab roles that a title alone lets through.
Every figure on this page is generated by scripts/q3-2026-data.js and is reproducible from our database. Download the aggregate data (CSV).
CompBioJobs (2026). Bioinformatics Job Market Q3 2026: 1,684 Postings from 247 Companies. https://www.compbiojobs.com/blog/bioinformatics-job-market-q3-2026
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