How much does it cost to advertise a job on Reed, Totaljobs and Indeed? The prices on 1 October 2026, read from an agency's side

A single job advert costs £220 on Totaljobs and from £89 plus VAT on Reed, and Indeed has no price per advert at all: you set a budget. Those are the figures the three boards showed on their own pages on 1 October 2026. Two of them are less simple than they look, and one line on each of two pages is written for recruitment agencies and nobody else.

What this is, and is not. A desk check of public price pages on one day. We bought nothing and tested no advert's response. Prices on these pages change with offers, so read the live page before you pay.

The prices each board showed

Reed's prices are stated plus VAT. With VAT at 20%, £89 becomes £106.80, £225 becomes £270 and £599 becomes £718.80. The Totaljobs page did not say whether its prices include VAT, so ask before comparing the two.

A Reed Premium credit can be used at any time in the 12 months after you buy it. Totaljobs also sells two subscriptions, All Jobs Starter and All Jobs, and gives no price for either: both are by quote.

The first advert is not the price

Both headline figures are offers for a customer who has never bought before.

Totaljobs shows the arithmetic. The first Pro advert is £69 and every one after it is £220. Ten adverts in a year cost £69 plus nine at £220, which is £69 plus £1,980, or £2,049. An agency that advertises four roles a month places 48 adverts a year: £69 plus 47 at £220 is £69 plus £10,340, or £10,409, unless a subscription quote comes in lower. At an 18% fee on a £38,000 salary, which the fee and rebate calculator works out as £6,840, that is about one and a half placements spent on advertising.

Reed is harder to read. Its main page gave £89 plus VAT for a Premium job credit, labelled as a new customer offer, and showed no standard price for that credit. A separate Reed offer page gave £89 plus VAT for a first Premium+ job and £175 plus VAT as its normal price, which is £210 with VAT. The product names on the two pages differ, so we cannot say what a second Premium credit costs. Ask Reed for the price of the second advert before you buy the first.

Indeed: free for employers, not for agencies

Indeed's UK pricing page says an employer can post three free jobs a month directly on Indeed. The same page carries this line under the free account: "Agencies are ineligible for free accounts". An agency on Indeed is therefore a paying advertiser from its first post.

The paid product is the Sponsored Job. There is no price list. Indeed recommends a budget from the job title, the location and the description, and you may set a different amount above a minimum that the page says varies by job. You are billed on the first day of the month or when the account's spending reaches £500, whichever comes first.

Reed's allowance for agencies

Reed has a page for recruitment agencies, and it offers something an employer does not get. Under what it calls Freecruitment, a new client can download 100 CVs and an existing client can post up to 10 jobs without charge. The allowance is available once in a 12-month period and only to recruitment consultancies. It is claimed by phone or by asking for a call back; the page has no buy button.

Ten free adverts set against the Totaljobs sum above are worth asking for before any card is used.

CV search, where a price was shown

Reed prices its CV database by time:

Reed also advertises a monthly plan with job adverts and CV search together, starting from £125 a month. We did not open the plan page, so we cannot say what that includes.

What we could not read

• CV-Library: its advertising page refused our reader, so no CV-Library price appears here. Read it yourself before comparing.
• LinkedIn Recruiter: not checked.
• Whether the Totaljobs prices include VAT.
• The standard price of a Reed Premium credit after the first.
• Any subscription or contract price. Those are quoted, and a quote for a recruitment agency may differ from one for an employer.

What no advert price includes

The reading. A priced advert buys applications, and somebody has to read each one against the brief before a shortlist exists. The admin scorecard counts those hours for one consultant, and the guide to AI CV screening and the ICO's rules sets out what must be in place before software reads a CV. The board is one cost and the CRM is another; the recruitment CRM prices guide covers that one.

Overlyft is an agency, not a job board, so it is not in the table. It can set up an AI Resourcer that reads each application on a live role against the written brief and writes a short note for the consultant. Who is shortlisted and put forward is the consultant's decision.