Disclosure first: the ads come from a US data center job board I run, so this is my own data and a link to my own project. Nothing is paywalled or email-gated.
What it is. Once a month I freeze every live ad on the board at one recorded UTC instant and publish the aggregates. August 2026 is the first release:
- 1,341 live ads, 62 employers, 41 states, 254 city-state pairs
- 769 ads (57.3%) carry employer-stated pay
- Two CSVs: aggregates (live jobs by state, role family and employer, with shares) and pay bands (median advertised lower and upper bound by role and pay period)
- CC BY 4.0
Zenodo, version DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22261858 — the series DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22261857 always resolves to the newest edition.
Original source, where the method and every edition live: https://datacenterjobhub.com/data-center-hiring-index/2026/08
Method. The population is every ad live and approved at the cutoff, 2026-09-02T10:15:54Z. Pay is employer-stated only: where a job feed supplied its own estimate the ad counts as not stating pay, and ads with a floor but no ceiling are excluded from the bands. Annual and hourly are reported separately and never converted. A role x pay-period group is published only at 8 or more ranges. "Median advertised lower bound" is the median of the ranges' minimums, so it is a statistic about advertised ranges, not about earnings.
One cut that is not in the bundle yet. I ran the stated-pay rate by state against the twelve US jurisdictions that require a pay range in the advertisement itself. This was read at a later cutoff, 2026-09-03T15:10:37Z and 1,351 live ads, so it does not tie exactly to the frozen edition above:
- 86.1% of ads state pay in the 9 mandate states that have live ads; 51.8% in the other 31
- dropping the largest employer, which states pay in 174 of its 175 ads, widens that to 84.9% against 44.0%
- 13 employers run 5 or more ads on each side of the line. Compared with themselves: 93.8% in mandate states, 81.0% elsewhere. So it is not only employer mix
- of the eight largest data center markets, only California has a posting mandate. Virginia has none and states pay in 76% of 152 ads; Texas manages 41% of 340
That CSV goes into the September edition's folder so it is citable rather than just asserted here.
Limits. One board's ads, not the market: it skews to employers whose careers sites are ingested, and 62 employers is not the industry. Mandate status is as of 2026-01-30. 33 ads carry no state and sit outside the state figures. Every number above comes from a script in the repo.