How long a Craigslist ad stays on page one

A Craigslist post expires after 30 days. Almost everybody treats that as the number that matters, and almost nobody checks the one that actually does.

We measured it in October 2026, across 25 of the busiest Craigslist markets and four categories. A for-sale listing in Los Angeles is pushed off page one in about six minutes. An office and commercial listing in Detroit holds page one for eleven days. Same site, same week, a spread of roughly 2,700 to one.

Why page one is the only number that counts

Craigslist shows 120 results per page and sorts them newest first. There is no ranking, no relevance score, nothing to optimise. Every listing posted after yours pushes yours down one slot, and once 120 newer listings exist, you are on page two.

Almost nobody goes to page two.

So a post has two lifespans. The official one is 30 days, after which it expires. The real one is however long it takes the market to produce 120 newer listings — and in a busy category that can be minutes.

What we found

For each market and category we read the live listing feed, took the timestamp of the newest listing and the timestamp of the 120th, and measured the gap. That gap is how long a new post holds page one.

Market	For sale	Gigs	Jobs	Office & commercial
New York City	6 min	2.2 days	20 hours	26 hours
SF Bay Area	6 min	2.5 days	40 hours	26 hours
Dallas	30 min	2.9 days	29 hours	2.2 days
Chicago	24 min	3.4 days	32 hours	2.0 days
Phoenix	6 min	3.4 days	41 hours	2.2 days
Los Angeles	6 min	2.2 days	28 hours	47 hours
Atlanta	54 min	3.2 days	40 hours	2.2 days
Seattle	6 min	4.5 days	2.1 days	2.3 days
Washington DC	12 min	4.1 days	2.0 days	2.3 days
Houston	36 min	4.0 days	2.0 days	2.2 days
Boston	18 min	4.5 days	2.4 days	3.0 days
Miami	42 min	4.1 days	32 hours	2.1 days
Minneapolis	18 min	5.3 days	3.2 days	3.4 days
Philadelphia	48 min	5.2 days	2.5 days	3.2 days
Austin	24 min	4.5 days	2.2 days	4.2 days
San Diego	1 min	4.2 days	2.1 days	2.2 days
Denver	12 min	5.1 days	2.1 days	2.5 days
Detroit	36 min	8.3 days	2.4 days	11.3 days
Orlando	1 hours	6.4 days	2.4 days	4.2 days
San Antonio	1 hours	6.2 days	2.4 days	4.2 days
Pittsburgh	42 min	6.7 days	3.0 days	4.2 days
Tampa	24 min	5.6 days	2.4 days	6.0 days
Portland	12 min	6.2 days	2.4 days	2.3 days
Orange County	6 min	4.4 days	2.8 days	3.8 days
Charlotte	1 hours	5.3 days	2.3 days	4.1 days

Where a market has fewer than 120 live listings in a category, nothing can displace a post before it expires, so it holds page one for the full month.

Three things worth drawing out

For sale is a different sport. Los Angeles carries 167,806 live for-sale listings and takes roughly 39,000 new ones a day. New York takes 25,000. At that rate page one is a six-minute window, and a single post is close to meaningless — which is why the people who actually sell on Craigslist post continuously rather than once.

Jobs and office listings behave like real markets. Most metros sit between one and three days. That is slow enough that a considered posting schedule works, and fast enough that posting once a month means being invisible for most of it.

The quiet markets are the bargain, and almost nobody exploits them. A market with under 120 live listings in a category gives you page one for the entire 30 days from a single post. The same money that buys six minutes of visibility in Los Angeles buys a month of it somewhere smaller.

What this means for how often to post

There is no universal answer, which is the point. The honest cadence for a given listing is a function of its market and its category, and those two numbers vary by more than three orders of magnitude.

Roughly:

Minutes to an hour — for sale in any large metro. Continuous posting or nothing.
One to three days — jobs and office listings in most metros. A post every few days holds the front page.
A week or more — mid-size and smaller markets. Weekly to monthly is genuinely enough.
The full month — any category thin enough to have fewer than 120 live listings. Post once.

The caveats, because they matter

This is a snapshot, and the rate moves with the day of the week. We measured Los Angeles office and commercial twice, 24 hours apart, and got 26 hours and then 47 — weekend posting is slower, and that single variable moved the answer by almost double. Treat any one reading as a band rather than a figure.

Craigslist also publishes no API for this. The numbers come from reading the public listing feed each market serves, which is the same data any visitor sees.

We re-measure every market monthly, and the current figures for each one sit on its city page.

Scale Classifieds posts ads on Craigslist for people who would rather not. We write the listing, post it from our own accounts, pay Craigslist's fees, and set the cadence from the market's actual turnover rather than a guess. See pricing.