This is wild. Of the 10 companies that hired the most PMs in the world over the last year, 4 are banks or payment networks.
Amazon and Google are at the top, as you'd expect. Amazon made 691 outside PM hires worldwide in the 12 months to April 2026, and Google made 507. Right after them is Capital One.
Then Microsoft. JPMorgan Chase and Mastercard both sit ahead of Meta, and Visa is just behind Walmart.
If you're only thinking about big tech, you're missing a significant portion of the PM market. Capital One, JPMorgan Chase and Mastercard all hired more PMs than Meta.
On the other hand, if you look at job board data (what most reports look at), you'd see something different. TrueUp, for instance, shows 7,267 open PM jobs at tech companies this month, up 77% from the 2023 low.
This report doesn't mislead you with postings. It looks at actual hires: people who started a PM job at a new employer. Hires, not ads. Look at the difference between postings and hires. It's a totally different trend.
That's just one of the things I cover in today's deep dive.
I teamed up with Alex Hamilton and the team at Live Data Technologies, who track job changes across about 126 million professional profiles.
I also teamed up with Zuhayeer Musa and the team at Levels.fyi, who bring the pay data.
And this isn't only a Levels report. 276 of you answered my pay survey, so every pay cut in section 3 sits next to what Product Growth readers told me they earn. You won't find that anywhere else.
Together, we put together the most comprehensive, in-depth and accurate report on the PM hiring market that exists anywhere.
I went through all the other information out there. Every source was missing something:
Too focused on postings
No hires
No compensation
No global perspective
So I put together the report I would have wanted if I were weighing the PM market, whether as an aspiring PM, a hiring manager or someone job searching.
I've published on this before. Last November, I published the definitive report on the AI PM market.
This is the update. And this time it covers the whole PM market, globally, with all the data you need.
First - About the Data
What these numbers count: people who started a PM job at an employer they didn't work for before, from associate PM all the way up to CPO. Promotions and internal moves are left out. What that means, critically, is that a falling hire count is not necessarily a falling number of total PMs.
Everything in this report is worldwide unless I say US or name a region. The one exception is pay. The Levels.fyi data is mostly US, so pay is US unless a line says otherwise.
The reader survey is 276 PMs who read Product Growth, mostly in India and the US.
A few more notes on the data:
The AI PM career-path panel is 23,642 people worldwide who started an AI PM job since January 2021, with their full job histories. Section 2 uses a random 45% sample of it.
AI PM means the title. Some AI PMs are left out: people who do the work with "PM" in the title. So every AI PM share is a floor.
Recent months fill in late. Live Data's newest months arrive with a lag, so 2026 is an early read, even though we're publishing in October.
With all those data notes out of the way (you're a good analyst!), let's get into the report.
Today's Post
I've put together the definitive guide to the PM market in 2026.
The state of the PM job market in 2026
The AI PM deep dive
How much PMs are paid
Really quickly, I'm running two free webinars over the coming week:
How to build your PM interview and portfolio secret weapon with Claude Code, to land more of these jobs: Tuesday, October 27, at 2 PM PT
AI agents and MCP for PMs: Wednesday, October 28, at 9 AM PT
And if you want help landing the job itself, apply to my Land a PM Job program.
1. The state of the PM job market in 2026
The craziest trend in the PM job market is something you probably already knew.
PM hiring is down. We've been talking about it for years now.
The end of the ZIRP era in 2022 was a great time to be job switching. Since then, the market hasn't been as good.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Even though PM hiring is down 45% since 2022, it's mostly been flat through 2023, 2024 and 2025.
In 2026, the numbers are looking down, but I wouldn't read too much into it, because it's just February to June. It's an early signal, though, that 2026 is down 19% from 2025. That is a little bit concerning.
On the AI PM side, there are no concerns at all. AI PM hiring is up 2.5x since 2022, and up 10% from 2025 as well.
That's the core insight, and the most important thing I got from this research: PM hiring is down, and AI PM hiring is up.
But there are six additional insights I put together that I think are really worth knowing about this market.
Insight 1 - The 2023 reset is still holding
As we covered, the big drop was in 2023. Man, was it a bad year to be in the PM market.
We saw layoffs, we saw a drop in postings, and we saw a drop in hiring:
Layoffs: 262,735 tech employees laid off
Postings: open PM jobs fell 59%, 10,062 to 4,115
Hiring: outside PM hires fell 33%, 52,664 to 35,483
Layoffs: 2023. Postings: August 2022 to March 2023. Hires: February to June, 2022 to 2023.
Since then the market has barely moved: down 3.8% in 2024 and up 5.2% in 2025. The 2026 early read is down about 19%, with May and June still filling in.
When you look closely at 2023, the drop happened earliest and hardest in the US, which was down 41%.
Since then, the US has actually held up better: down about 10% in 2026, against 23% everywhere else. (I include more on the full regional trends in Insight 6.)
As I mentioned earlier, hiring is just one thing. The cleanest way to really look at the market is hires per exit. That is to say, how many PMs does a company hire from outside for every PM who leaves?
This helps us understand how the PM field is doing at a specific point in time, and how a subset like AI PM is doing too.
So let's look at the numbers.
Back in 2022, when PM was growing, we saw 1.16 outside PM hires for every PM who left. That's 16% more people coming in than going out.
Since then, it has come down: 0.94 in 2023, 0.92 in 2024 and 0.92 in 2025.
And here you can see that AI PM is the title that's been growing like crazy. Its outside hires ran 89% above exits in 2022, 74% in 2023, 72% in 2024, and 47% in 2025.
Now, this isn't a perfect metric either. It doesn't mean PM teams shrink 8% a year, because promotions and internal moves still fill seats.
What it does mean is that the outside door is narrower, and that's what matters when you're searching for a job.
That door is much wider in AI PM and narrower in PM overall.
So if your search feels harder than the one you ran in 2022, this is why.
Insight 2 - Though PM hiring is down, PM pay is up
You might think that with PM hiring dynamics changing the way they did, and hiring down, pay would be down too.
That's not the case at all.
I looked at all of the PM compensation submitted to Levels.fyi by year. Median compensation has been going up: $220K in 2022, then $210K in 2023. Yes, there was a drop there. But it was $224K in 2024, $236K in 2025, and now $250K in 2026.
So PM pay at the median is up 14% from 2022. Meanwhile, US PM hires are down 48%.
Here's what it looks like when you put pay and PM hires on the same chart, indexed to 100 for where they were in 2022.
As you can see, AI PM hires are up to 215 and pay is up to 114. Meanwhile, all PM hires are down to 52. In people, US AI PM hires went from 389 to 835.
That's the real story of the market. It's what you see when you look at the three variables that matter, and it's what most of the prior hiring reports you'd find online miss.
So what's going on with that 14% increase in pay?
Part of it is level mix. If you hold the level fixed, the jump is smaller. At Levels.fyi's L3, for example, the median went from $306K to $319K, up 4.5%. I left that line off the chart because it would crowd it.
So how much of it is real? That takes a closer look at levels, and it's the next insight.
PM pay did not fall with PM hiring. Hiring is massively down, but pay is up. And so are PM levels.
Insight 3 - The PM field has gotten more senior
That's right: the fear everybody had is kind of true.
The share of PMs who reported as super junior, which is coded as L1 in the Levels.fyi data, is down from 17% in 2022 to 11% of reports in 2026. That's pretty wild.
Now, Levels.fyi is trying to synchronize levels across all companies. So here's what those levels look like, for US PMs over the last 12 months:
L1: 5 years of experience at the median, median pay $175K
L2: 7 years, $228K
L3: 9 years, $296K
L4: 12 years, $385K
L5: 16 years, $500K
So you can think of L3 as a senior PM, and L5 as a principal-level PM.
Companies have different ladders on top of these. For instance, a Google L5 PM is an L3 on Levels.fyi, and a Google L6 is an L4. A Meta L5 PM is an L3, and an L6 is an L4.
If we look across the levels, we see some interesting trends. Across L3, L4 and L5, the share of PMs went up, from 50% to 61% of reports.
So PMs have gotten more senior. The people with PM experience are progressing, and fewer people are entering PM at the bottom.
And in terms of pay, interestingly, the most junior and the most senior PM pay is down:
L5 pay is down 18%, from $511K to $419K
L1 is down 16%
On the other hand, the middle of the range is up: L2, L3 and L4 are up 5.0%, 4.5% and 5.8%.
Weigh the five levels by how many PMs reported at each one, and pay is up about 6%. Nearly all of that comes from the shift to higher levels.
About 3 in 10 submissions don't carry a level, so I can't split the full 14% exactly, and L1 and L5 are the smaller, noisier groups. Read this as directional.
PMs have gotten more senior, and the middle tier of PMs is getting paid more.
Insight 4 - Don't let anyone tell you AI PM is everything
At the top, we've been talking about how AI PM is growing. That's the positive spin on the PM hiring market. But it's not everything.
Let's take a look at the share.
Back in 2022, there were 1.5 AI PM hires for every 100 PM hires. Now it's 6.8, about 4.5x more. But that doesn't mean it's everything. It's still just 6.8.
There's core PM, regular PM and other titles in PM that still matter. The AI PM title is only 7 in every 100 PM hires.
Of course, I also looked at PM postings. In February 2024, AI PM was 2% of open PM jobs. Today it's 46%.
That's the thing with the Live Data numbers: they're looking at AI PM in the title. AI PM in hiring may be a bit higher than 7, but I doubt it's anywhere near the share of postings.
A lot of the hires are in fields outside AI PM.
You can totally get a PM job even if you're not an AI PM.
Insight 5 - Who hires the most PMs
One of the numbers I was most keen to look at is who the top hirers of PMs are, and how their hiring has changed over time.
The results were fascinating.
Most of big tech made fewer outside PM hires this year. Meta is down 30% (366 to 256). Microsoft is down 31% (625 to 431). Amazon is down 21% (870 to 691). Google held level. It was pretty brutal there.
On the other hand, the financial companies actually increased their PM hiring: JPMorgan Chase is up 17% (345 to 404), Visa is up 32% (165 to 217) and Mastercard is up 55% (219 to 339).
So there's almost been a shift from tech companies to financial companies in the PM market over the past year. That's one of the most significant things I learned in this research.
Now zoom out. These are only the top 10, and together they made 3,756 of the 79,164 outside PM hires worldwide.
The top 10 made under 5% of PM hires worldwide. When everybody talks about those big companies, the tail is where 95% of the hiring is.
I put the full worldwide top 25 in a downloadable target list: ranked, tagged by sector, with each employer's change over the last year and its PM pay range where Levels.fyi has one.
That's five of the six insights. The sixth is just past the paywall: outside the US, 2026 is harder. I break it down by region: the US, Europe, India and the rest of the world.
And that's not all you get in the paid section. I cover all the cuts of the market you want to see.
Plus:
The AI PM deep dive. Where AI PMs come from and how they break into the top labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, whether to stay and move internally or switch, the titles to search for (agent PM, forward deployed PM and the rest), and where AI PMs go when they leave.
How much PMs are paid. All the information you need to negotiate your next offer: pay by level, geography, company size and employer.
Plus 3 downloads:
A 71-page PDF covering everything you need to know, in the classic market-report style
The top 25 PM employer target list, worldwide
A Claude skill that reads your LinkedIn and places you on a route into AI PM
Don't forget: if you become an annual subscriber, you get access to my bundle. And if you become a founding subscriber, you get access to all my paid products, including PM OS, Content OS and more.