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Space station startup Vast cut 4% of its employees this week, Business Insider has learned.
The startup is building a commercial replacement for the International Space Station.
A Vast spokesperson said the cuts were performance-related and the startup is looking to backfill them.
Space station startup Vast has cut 4% of its workforce as the new space race heats up.
The startup, which is developing a commercial replacement for the International Space Station (ISS), fired 46 employees on Wednesday, Business Insider has learned.
The cuts come months after Vast raised $500 million in a funding round aimed at launching the world's first commercial space station in 2027.
A spokesperson for the startup confirmed the cuts, which they said were performance-related. They added that the company was still hiring and had 277 open roles.
"As part of our mid-year review cycle, Vast parted ways with employees who were not meeting expectations. We are backfilling these positions and are continuing to grow and execute," the spokesperson said.
Business Insider spoke to two employees affected by the job losses, who said no issues had been raised about the quality or output of their work during their 1:1s with managers or in performance reviews over the past few months.
A rendering of Haven-2, Vast's proposed ISS replacement.
The California-based startup plans to launch Haven-1, its first space station, next year on a SpaceX rocket. Vast says it will begin launching Haven-2, the modular 12-person space station the company plans to use to replace the ISS, by 2028.
Like Elon Musk's SpaceX, Vast's long-term plans sound like something pulled from science fiction. The company's ultimate ambition is to build space stations that will rotate in orbit to produce their own artificial gravity.
Recently, Vast has expanded into satellite manufacturing and struck a deal with the European Space Agency to send its astronauts to the ISS.
It comes amid uncertainty over NASA's plans to fund a new generation of commercial space stations. In March, the agency proposed a new post-ISS strategy based around a single space station, but withdrew it in June after backlash from across the space industry.
On Tuesday's episode of the "Rodeo Time" podcast hosted by Dale Brisby, Sheridan said his purchase of the Four Sixes Ranch prompted him to sign a deal with Paramount and continue working.
"I was set up to retire. I was going to be done after 'Yellowstone,'" Sheridan said.
The writer and producer said he had already paid cash for another ranch in Weatherford, Texas, and "didn't owe anybody anything."
"I was going to put my feet up and show horses, and have my little hobby herd over here, and that was it," Sheridan said.
However, buying the Four Sixes Ranch meant Sheridan couldn't retire just yet. "I knew that if I bought this ranch, I was not going to be quitting my day job for a while," he said.
The opportunity to buy the ranch came after its then-owner, Anne Marion, died.
Sheridan, who had met her while filming "Yellowstone" there, said the ranch was set to be divided and sold, but Marion had asked her estate to find someone who would "maintain her vision."
"And, so, the person they came up with was me," Sheridan said.
When they approached Sheridan about buying the ranch, the property came with a heftyprice tag. "I said, 'Well, boys, I'm a little short. In fact, I'm about $300 million short,'" Sheridan said, recalling his response.
He said the prospect of buying the ranch led him to reconsider an "exclusive deal" with Paramount, which he had previously resisted.
"They were terrified that I was going to go to greener pastures and leave them and go somewhere else, which I probably was," Sheridan said.
"But once this happened, I called them, and I said, 'You know what? I think I'm ready to make an overall deal.' And they said, 'That's great. Do you have a number in mind?' And I said, 'Why yes, I do,'" Sheridan said.
However, Sheridan's partnership with Paramount may soon be winding down. Puck reported in 2025 that he was set to leave Paramount for NBCUniversal once his current deal expires.
Inside Sheridan's piece of Texas history
Founded by Samuel "Burk" Burnett in 1870, the Four Sixes Ranch is known for its Angus cattle and Quarter horses, per its website. It remained under the Burnett family for generations, eventually passing to Marion, Burnett's great-granddaughter.
Marion's will required the family's ranching operations to be sold after her death, according to the property's listing. The main Four Sixes Ranch, spanning 142,372 acres in King County, was listed for $192.2 million. It was offered together with two separate properties, the Dixon Creek and Frisco Creek ranch divisions, which were listed for $137.3 million and $12.2 million, respectively.
Texas Land Magazine reported in June 2022 that Sheridan put together a group of investors to buy the ranch. It said the deal closed in January that year, and "all parties signed a confidentiality agreement preventing disclosure of the final sale price."
"The deal was all-inclusive — three ranches and all inventory," Sam Middleton, the listing agent and broker who represented Marion's estate during the sale, told the magazine.
Sheridan, meanwhile, said the scripts he wrote while "Yellowstone" production was shut down during the pandemic helped him secure a controlling stake in the investment.
"I wrote a bunch," Sheridan said in an interview with The Land Report published in June 2022. "I sold enough scripts that I was able to become the majority owner in the partnership."
Americans' wallets are feeling the strain of inflation outpacing wages.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
US consumer sentiment is worse than in the pandemic years.
One likely reason is that wage growth isn't keeping up with inflation.
The sky-high inflation of a few years ago has had lingering effects on workers.
Americans' wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living, and it's likely dragging down how they feel about the economy.
The economy is still slowly growing, consumers are still spending, and both unemployment and layoffs are low. However, consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan's monthly survey, remains worse than during the COVID period. One big factor could explain why: Inflation has exceeded wage growth for four straight months.
"Consumers' frustration over the erosion of their purchasing power continues to mount," Joanne Hsu, University of Michigan's surveys of consumers director, said.
The survey showed almost three-quarters of consumers in August thought price growth would outpace their income growth over the next year. Hsu said many people are worried that higher energy prices will affect other parts of the economy.
"A sustained drop in gasoline prices over the course of several months (in contrast to temporary dips) would go a long way in boosting consumer views of the economy," Hsu said.
Wage growth lagging inflation is not the only concerning trend in the economy. For instance, labor force participation is at its lowest level in decades outside the pandemic. However, it can be tough for consumers to ignore the higher prices blasted on gas station signs and posted along grocery aisles.
Even though inflation is down from its post-COVID peak, it's still above historical norms, and the long-running impact of that spike is still being felt in Americans' wallets years later.
A new working paper from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business's Erik Hurst and Christina Patterson, and ADP Research's Nela Richardson and Liv Wang, used ADP's payroll data through 2025 to examine purchasing power. They found that the unexpected and temporary inflation shock as the economy reopened in the wake of the pandemic resulted in a "persistent downward shift in real wages, helping explain why Americans' dissatisfaction outlasted the inflation episode itself."
The researchers found that real wages fell between December 2020 and 2024 for nearly 40% of workers, higher than the roughly 24% of workers pre-pandemic.
"Inflation has slowed, but many people never fully recovered the purchasing power they lost when prices surged," Richardson said in a blog post about the findings.
She said that a 3% raise was usually sufficient to get a "modest" real income gain pre-pandemic. She added that when inflation skyrocketed in 2022, employers gave raises that didn't keep pace with the higher inflation.
"Hence this once-in-a-generation inflation shock led to a decline in U.S. consumer purchasing power that persists today," she said.
Despite an uptick in the average share of workers getting a bonus from 2021 to 2023 compared to 2017 to 2019, the researchers found bonuses "did very little to stem the real wage losses that workers experienced." Off-cycle raises helped moderate real wage declines for job stayers.
The importance of real wage gains
Mark Hamrick, chief economic analyst at The Hamrick Brief, told Business Insider that persistently high inflation above the Fed's 2% target is contributing to Americans' pessimistic feelings about the economy.
"Americans are literally paying the price for high inflation through elevated price levels," he said.
"Even if you're making more money numbers-wise, with the way prices are rising, you have less money left over at the end of the month," ZipRecruiter economist Nicole Bachaud told Business Insider. "That's really going to impact the large consumer base of America, middle- and low-income households, who are really dependent on wage growth to help them remain economically viable."
People with different levels of wealth aren't experiencing the economy equally. Hamrick said those lacking substantial wealth are constantly reminded of the gap. As an example, he noted that on many airlines, higher-paying passengers at the front of the plane typically receive a higher level of service than "those who sit in the back and are scrunched up."
"At the end of the day, it's affordability challenges and a growing wealth divide that ends up disenfranchising a good number of people," he said.
While Hamrick said there will always be divides in wealth, sustained wage gains adjusted for inflation would help mitigate the problem, which hasn't been happening in aggregate.
"A number of people are being taken financial prisoner by that," he said.
Reach out to this reporter to share how the economy has affected you financially, at mhoff@businessinsider.com.
The Hims and Hers CEO said that companies with their own datasets stand to save a lot of money by using open-weight models.
NYSE
Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum touted the use of open-weight models to achieve cost savings in AI.
He said companies that generate large amounts of internal data can save up to 80% using open-weight models.
This is one of the hottest topics in the tech sphere as enterprises strategize to improve returns.
One executive is touting open-weight models, especially if your company produces lots of data.
In an interview with CNBC Squawkbox, released on Tuesday, Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum said companies that already have large datasets should shift away from using big AI models and toward using open-weight models.
He cited his company, a telehealth provider that delivers prescription drugs and personal care products through a subscription-based service. He said the company has a large closed-loop dataset of patients it has worked with, which he called a "real asset" because it can be used to train AI models.
"I think for companies that have the resources and scale, if they have an independent dataset, that is a path that they will go, no question," he said to CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin. "The cost can be upward of 70, 80% less."
Open-weight models let users access and customize a model's trained parameters, and can be cheaper to run at scale. More importantly, Dudum said models trained on a company's actual use cases would perform better.
"And so what we launched, our first version, immediately outsurpassed what we could get in market," he said. "But the trajectory of what's possible in just six months is transformative because it's continuously learning on every new patient that comes into Hims & Hers."
Dudum's comments come as saving AI costs is one of the hottest topics in the tech and business spheres. Companies are phasing out tokenmaxxing, in which employees were urged to burn as many AI tokens as possible, and are now focusing on getting the most value from their spending.
Many are model routing, referring to matching tasks to AI models based on their complexity. Some executives, like Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, have implemented the use of Chinese models like Kimi K2.7 and GLM 5.2 as default models within their companies.
Kimi K3, an open-weight model developed by the Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, made waves in Silicon Valley last month for promising to rival the capabilities of models from OpenAI and Anthropic at lower costs.
Meanwhile, data has become one of the most sought-after resources in the AI space, as it is crucial to model training. Earlier this month, Google paid $10 million for internal data from the shuttered carrier Spirit Airlines, which included internal documents, workflows, emails, and millions of Teams messages.
AI training firm Handshake AI has promised to pay $6 per page of "high-quality" work documents, capped at $30,000, in a bid to gain access to more data.
Ilia Penzin and Liliia Penzina at their café, T.O.L.K., in Bushwick.
Paola Chapdelaine for BI
Ilia Penzin and Liliia Penzina run T.O.L.K., a café in Bushwick, NYC, facing financial hurdles.
T.O.L.K., opened in 2025, serves as both a coffee shop and art gallery, promoting local artists.
Despite financial struggles, Penzin and Penzina remain hopeful, aiming to expand their NYC business.
Ilia Penzin and Liliia Penzina call their café and art gallery their baby.
"A big baby," Penzina said, laughing. The entrepreneurs' first year running T.O.L.K. in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick has been defined by the personal sacrifice and precarity of running a small business in one of the most expensive cities in the US. To fund the startup costs, they moved in with roommates to save on rent, took a $30,000 loan from family, and went into credit card debt. Still, they remain optimistic and would encourage other would-be entrepreneurs to follow their dreams.
The café is located at 286 Stanhope St, Brooklyn, NY 11237.
Paola Chapdelaine for BI
"The United States is the best country to try a business," Penzin said. "We love coffee, we love hospitality. We decided to open a café."
For Business Insider's Cost of the City series, the couple detailed what it took to get off the ground, the day-to-day costs, and why they have yet to turn a profit.
Managing the costs of a business in NYC
Penzin and Penzina, who met in school in Russia 15 years ago, applied for asylum in the US after the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. Knowing little English, they worked in hospitality and cafes to get by, but they desired to build something for themselves.
With a dream in mind, they cut personal expenses, including moving from a one-bedroom apartment into a $1,150 room in a three-bedroom apartment. Penzin spent three months building the space that would become T.O.L.K. while Penzina worked three barista jobs.
Now that they're open for business, Penzin handles management, vendors, budgeting, and banking, while Penzina handles the café and art gallery's daily operations. The café's white walls are normally covered with local artwork, and the rest of the open space is taken up by a sofa, a few circular tables, and a dog station with water and treats.
Ilia Penzin and Liliia Penzina have been together for 15 years, and married for six.
Paola Chapdelaine for BI
Nearly a year in, the coffee shop is not making enough to cover its costs. Records provided by the owners show the café generated an average of about $5,600 net sales a month from January to June and paid $2,700 in monthly rent, almost half of the monthly net sales. After paying rent, food expenses, and additional costs, the café was left with a cash shortfall of roughly $900 a month.
Penzin said the main challenge is getting more customers. The café has averaged 24 checks per day at around $8.76 each, totaling roughly $212 in gross sales per day — not enough to have the business pay for itself.
To supplement the income, Penzin works as a handyman, assembling furniture, doing small renovations, and painting. He uses the same tools and the 2008 Toyota Highlander he bought for the coffee shop.
The couple has only taken three days off this year and put all their energy into running the café, but they consider it worth it.
"It's not making us unhappy. We're just working; it's our job to make this business operate," Penzin said. Penzina added, "You are motivated already because you try to survive. If you don't have money, it's your motivation."
Ilia Penzin helping out a T.O.L.K. customer.
Paola Chapdelaine for BI
Think, Observe, Listen, Know.
T.O.L.K. stands for: Think, Observe, Listen, Know — reflecting how the couple wants customers to experience the space. The name also transcends its English acronym. In Russian, tolk means "meaning, understanding, and having a sense or purpose," while in various Scandinavian languages it refers to an "interpreter," someone meant to translate and understand ideas for others — something T.O.L.K. strives to do by being a community space.
"That felt especially fitting for a space built around art, coffee, conversation, and community: a place where people can exchange perspectives, discover new ideas, and find meaning in what they see and experience," he said.
The café strives to be a place where beginner artists can display their work affordably; T.O.L.K. doesn't take commission. At the same time, guests who may not have time to visit galleries can enjoy art on their daily coffee runs.
Temporary art exhibition displayed on the café walls.
Paola Chapdelaine for BI
"Everybody has the time at least once a day to go to any coffee shop and get coffee," Penzin said. "But they never go to see the local arts."
Penzina usually creates a special drinks menu inspired by the current artist and exhibition at the coffee shop.
"I try to find how to combine coffee and art," she said. "It's like a liquid version of the person and a liquid version of their art."
With all the money, energy, and time the couple has put in, they don't see quitting or burning out as an option. Their dream is to expand their business and open more spots in the future, possibly moving upstate or to Long Island.
T.O.L.K. daily menu.
Paola Chapdelaine for BI
"We definitely will not give up on our entrepreneur journey — we definitely will fight until we succeed."
For them, the cost is worth it to live in NYC. They find the business and cultural opportunities in the five boroughs unmatched.
"You pay for those opportunities, for convenience, for your dream," he said. Referencing a popular Russian phrase that alludes to the feeling of relief, he emphasized: "When we drive back from different states, and we see the sign 'New York City,' we feel a stone, a rock, fall from our soul."
Lance Yan, Kavitta Ghai, and Boris Skurikhin shared four days of sleep schedules with Business Insider.
Lance Yan; Kavitta Ghai; Boris Skurikhin
As Silicon Valley embraces hardcore work schedules, founders debate the best sleeping habits.
Business Insider tracked the sleep schedules of three young founders for four days.
One founder got admittedly bad sleep. Another had a clear regimen to get her seven hours.
The young class of AI founders has gone hardcore, with sober lifestyles and 996 schedules.
Sleep, however, remains an open question.
There are two competing sleep cultures in Silicon Valley. The biohackers say that rest helps optimize performance. The hustlers say that founders should work through the night. To sleep or not to sleep, that is the question.
Business Insider asked three young founders to share their sleep habits. And to be scientific about it, we didn't just take their word for it. We spent four days tracking their shut-eye, requesting early morning texts detailing their prior night.
Some founders demanded their Zzzs. Others stayed up grinding.
Lance Yan knows he doesn't sleep enough
Traverse founder Lance Yan said he knows there has to be "a balance between chilling and locking in." He hasn't found it.
Lance Yan
Lance Yan knows sleep is important. Bryan Johnson gave a talk to his Y Combinator batch, after all.
And yet, the 19-year-old founder of the AI startup Traverse often gets only 5 to 6 hours of sleep. "If there's any work, I usually end up staying on longer and dragging it out," he said.
It's still better than his YC days. "We would wake up when it was dark, and go to sleep when it was sunny," Yan said.
Yan works late, then doomscrolls in bed until he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he starts working almost immediately. He knows it's bad.
"There has to be a balance between chilling and locking in," he said.
Yan's sleep diary:
Monday: 3 hours of sleep. Slept "horribly" and was in bed from 4 to 8 a.m.
Tuesday: 6.5 hours of sleep. Worked late, but let himself sleep in. Was in bed from 3 to 10 a.m.
Wednesday: 5 hours of sleep, from 4 to 9 a.m. His health stats "got cooked" because he had only one meal and a "tiny bit" of water.
Thursday: 5 hours of sleep, between 3 and 8 a.m. It was "also not the best," but he felt good after eating regular meals.
Kavitta Ghai has firm sleeping rules
Kavitta Ghai wears a sleep mask and takes magnesium every night.
Kavitta Ghai
Kavitta Ghai will never, ever pull an all-nighter.
The 29-year-old cofounder of the ed-tech startup Nectir can see instantly when she hasn't slept enough. It shows up in her work and in her cognitive function. So, she'll stop everything to get her 7 hours.
Ghai's best thinking comes in the late evening and early morning, so she often doesn't sleep until 3 a.m. Her chief of staff knows: no meetings until 11 a.m.
She wants her employees to be able to work when they function best, too. Nectir is remote, and will always remain remote, she said. "It allows people to do their work on their schedule," she said.
Ghai is exacting about her sleep. She takes magnesium every night and sets the temperature between 66 and 68 degrees. She wears a sleep mask and a Whoop band. Her body doesn't touch the bed until it's bedtime.
It works: Ghai said that she falls asleep in under 3 minutes.
Ghai's sleep diary:
Monday: 7 hours and 32 minutes of sleep. Had "a ton of dreams," but forgot to journal them in the morning.
Tuesday: 8 hours and 2 minutes of sleep. That's "a little longer than I prefer," Ghai said. So she woke up groggy.
Wednesday: 7 hours and 28 minutes of sleep. Usually meditating before bed helps her dream, but this night she had no dreams that night, "which sucks."
Thursday: 7 hours and 7 minutes of sleep. Ghai wished she had gotten 30 more minutes.
Boris Skurikhin is not a grindmaxxer
Boris Skurikhin has yet to build his IKEA bed frame.
Boris Skurikhin
Boris Skurikhin has an expensive mattress with no bed frame.
Well, he does have a bed frame, but he hasn't gotten around to assembling it. "I will do it soon," the 26-year-old cofounder of the AI startup Docket said. "I keep telling myself this."
Skurikhin gets in bed around 12 a.m. and then starts watching something on his laptop. He's not scrolling. He prefers a documentary or a long YouTube video.
He's not one to cut down on his sleep. He described what might be called a "grindmaxxer" in his coworking space who works constantly and never sleeps.
"He was also the hospitalmaxxer," he said. "It's just not healthy."
Skurikhin's sleep diary:
Monday: 7.5 hours of sleep. Fell asleep at 2 a.m. to UFC videos. Woke up briefly at 7:30 a.m. because he "drank too much tea before bed."
Tuesday: 8 hours and 40 minutes of sleep. Fell asleep at 1:30 a.m. and woke up at 10:10 a.m.
Wednesday: 7 hours of sleep. Fell asleep at 1:30 a.m. to videos about athlete rivalries in sports. Woke up early because he left his window open.
Thursday: 7 hours and 20 minutes of sleep. Fell asleep at 2 a.m. while watching the 2002 movie "Copenhagen."
A higher share of US job postings mentioned 401(k) plans than several years ago.
Daisy-Daisy/Getty Images
Small businesses can attract and retain staff with 401(k) plans.
Business owners can offer it in lieu of more costly benefits that they can't yet afford.
It can help reduce first-year quits, a Gusto analysis found.
Sara Marye wanted to get more serious about the benefits she offered.
Several months after promoting a part-time employee to full-time status at her school-curriculum small business in 2024, she wanted to ensure it remains an attractive place to work.
"If I want to keep her, I need to give her reasons to stay," said Marye, an educator turned entrepreneur in 2015 when she started The Stellar Teacher Company. The employee had been working there since 2021.
Marye thought about what she could afford that she could add on top of the existing flexible perks. Offering a 401(k) plan was the answer, a perk that would also benefit Marye herself and help with retention beyond the full-time worker.
Most of her four part-time workers are former teachers who still want to be involved in education while staying home as parents.
"The fact that they are able to have a part-time job with a 401(k), I think, gives them just a lot more comfort in the fact that they aren't having to sacrifice their future financial security for the time that they want to spend raising their family now," said Marye, who has been offering the 401(k) plan since 2025.
When small businesses are starting out, they have to figure out how to get off the ground, market their work, and manage their expenses. As businesses make a name for themselves, grow their profits, and staff up, they need to figure out how to attract and retain employees. Having a 401(k) plan — the kind of benefit that's typically more often offered by larger employers — can help, especially if they can't yet afford more costly benefits, like healthcare. It can also be a financial perk for business owners on payroll.
Maintaining staff
A Gusto analysis of its internal small-business data shows that offering a 401(k) to workers translates to roughly 8% fewer quits in the first year of employment compared to those that don't offer one.
Nich Tremper, a senior economist at Gusto, said these employers don't have to face a gap in work coverage until they can backfill a position, which can affect productivity, or waste time and money looking for and training a new hire. Tremper said employers face the greatest risk of an employee quitting in their first year, so they can try to reduce that risk by offering retirement plans, even if employees can't enroll right away.
"We see 401(k)s having the highest ROI on retention," Tremper said, adding, "because it's a benefit that tells your employees that you are invested in their long-term financial future."
Howard Telson has been running the remote accounting firm Scale CPA since 2022. He started offering a 401(k) plan about a year and a half ago.
He likes it as a recruiting tool, since his firm hires pretty consistently, and to keep his current staff, many of whom come from larger companies where they're accustomed to this perk.
"We're often competing against bigger companies or bigger firms that do offer these types of benefits," he said. "It's been important to be competitive in the marketplace."
Telson works with small businesses at his firm, where he discusses tax-optimization strategies, such as retirement plans.
"It's kind of a multi-tier benefit that we'll recommend, a 401(k) plan or another type of retirement plan to clients, one, to allow them to basically have some tax deferral and save on their personal taxes, two, to attract talent, and three, it also offers some tax credits as well for the first three years when you set up the program," he said.
Affording retirement plans
Marye worried about whether she would be able to afford having a retirement plan as a small-business owner, and setting it up seemed daunting. However, she said it wasn't complicated and wasn't as big an expense as she thought it would be.
Payroll platforms like Gusto and ADP offer 401(k) plan management services at relatively low costs for small businesses, charging a modest base fee and then single-digit monthly fees per participant. Retirement offerings also tend to be less expensive for small business owners than healthcare benefits; Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed the average employer contribution for family medical care coverage at businesses with fewer than 50 workers has surpassed $1,000 per employee since 2021.
Ashley Kent also offers 401(k) benefits to her workers and herself. Kent, who has been in business since 2018, said she can't justify offering healthcare just yet since the cost is too much for the business's size.
"It allowed me to then offer this to employees and was something that was very attractive to new employees coming in here," said Kent, founder and CEO of Clearstart, a marketing brand and growth consultancy for healthcare organizations.
Kent has 10 full-time workers, and they were eligible to enroll after a year of employment, so she thinks it helps with retention. "Agencies are known for very high turnover, and so that was something that was important to me to try and retain individuals," Kent said.
As she hires more senior workers, she would consider adding healthcare benefits, since they could be important for job seekers weighing the trade-offs of different job opportunities.
Looking beyond small business
Small businesses aren't the only organizations offering 401(k)s to boost recruitment and retention.
Indeed's data covering all sizes of employers showed that job postings mentioning 401(k)s have increased since 2020. Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, thinks employers could be doing so to improve their recruiting. Some reasons for the uptick in advertised plans, she said, include employers publishing more thorough job descriptions, job seekers wanting to know the full compensation package, and companies dealing with the mismatch between available jobs and people's skills.
"If you look at the immediate post-COVID period, you might have seen companies start advertising it more because it was a really hard time to find workers, and then I'm guessing over time, it's just more and more companies have realized that it's a good way to show more total compensation versus just value," Ullrich said.
Mentions in education and instruction were 15% in spring 2026, the lowest share among the occupations, and up from 7%. Ullrich said pensions, rather than defined contribution plans like 401(k)s, are more common in that type of work, so that could explain why the share is relatively low.
Employers are also advertising better 401(k) matches, which Ullrich said could help make employees more hesitant to switch jobs.
"When indexed to January 2020, the three-month-moving-average share of postings advertising a 401(k) match of 5% or higher has risen more than fivefold, outpacing the growth in any other category of retirement benefit," a report by Indeed Hiring Lab economist An Nguyen said, adding that postings just saying "retirement plan" didn't change much from the baseline.
