The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) counted 16,482 workers at pure-play quantum companies in its State of the Global Quantum Industry 2026 report, published April 14, 2026. The consortium said that workforce grew 14% from 2024, “an increase of 2,000 workers in a single year.”
In that total, QED-C counted every employee of the 556 pure-play companies it identified among the 7,418 quantum-engaged organizations it tracked worldwide at the end of 2025. A pure-play company is one that works only on quantum technology.
QED-C counted 8,261 new quantum-related position openings in 2025, up 11% from 2024. In its release, the consortium said the growth was in job and internship openings. It also noted “a shift toward business-oriented roles.”
Disclosure: Quantum Observer’s Editor-in-Chief Marin Ivezic is the founder of and an instructor at Quantum Academy, a quantum education and training provider.
How QED-C counts
In the methodology for its 2025 report, QED-C defined a pure-play company as one with “100% of resources dedicated to work related to a quantum-relevant technology.” It defined quantum-engaged organizations as entities that actively take part in the research, development, or application of quantum technologies.
The consortium drew headcounts from public online sources, including job sites and companies’ own websites, and estimated some from indirect data such as job listings and funding announcements. QED-C wrote that the methodology for the 2026 report is “fundamentally the same” as the one for the prior report.
QED-C put the global quantum market at $1.9 billion in 2025, with quantum computing at $1.4 billion and quantum sensing at $470 million. It projected that the quantum computing market will grow 30% a year to reach $3 billion by 2028.
In its monthly workforce monitor, published July 16, QED-C reported that new quantum job postings rose 13.9% worldwide in June from May, in preliminary figures. Postings rose 23.9% in Europe and 11.5% in North America.
Degree requirements in job postings
In a peer-reviewed analysis published in EPJ Quantum Technology on March 2, 2026, Simon Goorney, Jacob Sherson, and five co-authors reported that employers sought PhD candidates in 1,233 of 3,641 job posts, or 34%. They sought bachelor’s and master’s graduates in 1,486 posts.
The authors collected the posts weekly from one online platform between March 2023 and June 2024, with the search location set to worldwide. Of the posts, 1,424 came from the United States and 1,210 from the European Union’s 27 member states.
Research and development scientists or engineers accounted for 1,839, or 68.72%, of the corporate roles in the sample. The authors wrote that the sector “remains in its early stages, dominated by large technology firms.”
The Chicago Quantum Exchange, a consortium based at the University of Chicago, reported on September 10, 2024, on 5,187 postings from the QED-C and Quantum Computing Report job boards. For 2022 and 2023, 55% of the jobs in its database required only a bachelor’s degree, an associate degree, or no degree. In the industry sector, 19% of jobs posted from 2021 through 2023 required a PhD.
From 2021 to 2023, the share of bachelor’s-level jobs rose from about 35% to 38%, according to the exchange. Over the same years, jobs requiring a PhD fell from about 35% of postings to 29%.
The exchange cautioned that a quantum job open to applicants without a PhD is not necessarily an entry-level job. It also noted that it could not tell from its data whom employers hired.
In November 2025, the World Economic Forum reported, citing MIT’s Quantum Index Report 2025, that the share of U.S. job postings requiring quantum skills had almost tripled since 2018.
Federal workforce order
On June 22, 2026, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14413, “Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation.” Under its workforce section, the Office of Personnel Management must develop a government-wide recruitment and retention strategy for quantum information science and technology, or QIST, within 90 days.
Within 120 days, the Labor Department and the National Science Foundation must develop an approach to tracking labor statistics, including a definition of “QIST-relevant occupations.” Within 180 days, the foundation must start a network of National QIST Workforce Development Institutes. Counted from June 22, those deadlines are September 20, October 20, and December 19, 2026.
Update, November 12, 2026: In its Quantum Index Report 2026, published October 26, MIT reported that the share of U.S. job postings requiring quantum skills “has grown more than fivefold from the start of 2011 to the first quarter of 2026.”
