Short answer: no. Canada made them illegal this year and parts of the US are following. Britain has no such rule — here is what the law actually covers, and what you can do about a posting that looks fake.
Posting a job you have no intention of filling is not illegal in the UK. No statute requires an employer to confirm that an advertised vacancy is real, and the Employment Rights Act 2025 introduced no such duty. An employer can advertise a role to collect CVs, to look like it is growing, or to test the market, and break no law by doing it.
That surprises people, because it feels like it ought to be covered. It nearly is, in three places — none of which quite reaches the ghost job itself.
Misleading advertising. Consumer protection rules bite on adverts that mislead consumers into a transaction. A job advert sits awkwardly here: you are not buying anything, so the usual route is closed. Where an advert makes objective claims about pay or the role, misrepresentation principles can apply — but in practice no UK regulator polices ghost jobs as misleading advertising.
Recruitment agencies. If an agency is involved, the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 do apply, and they are enforced by the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate. Most importantly, an agency generally cannot charge you a fee for finding you work. If a "recruiter" asks a jobseeker for money, that is the clearest line in UK law in this whole area — and it is reportable.
Your data. An employer collecting CVs through a posting is processing personal data under UK GDPR, and needs a lawful basis, a retention period and a privacy notice. Harvesting CVs for a vacancy that does not exist is a weak position to defend if a candidate complains to the ICO — though this is untested ground rather than settled law.
Ontario is the clearest example of a government deciding this was worth legislating. Since 1 January 2026, employers with 25 or more employees must, on every publicly advertised external job posting:
Those duties come from the Working for Workers Four and Five Acts and O. Reg. 476/24. The interesting part for a UK reader is the second-to-last one: Ontario did not only ban the fake posting, it also put a clock on the silence afterwards. Ghosting a candidate after an interview is now a compliance question there, not just bad manners.
There is no UK bill in progress that would do what Ontario has done. The Employment Rights Act 2025 concentrated on employment status, unfair dismissal and zero-hours terms — the relationship after you are hired, not the advert that got you there. Recruitment advertising remains largely self-governed.
That leaves an odd gap. A UK employer must give a written statement of particulars on day one of a job, but faces no obligation to be truthful about whether that job exists in the first place.
More carefully than the headlines suggest. The most defensible number comes from Greenhouse, which can see its own platform: it reported that 18–22% of postings on it are classified as ghost jobs in a given quarter — measured from employer behaviour, not a survey.
Revelio Labs approached it differently, matching US postings to actual hires, and found the number of hires per posting fell from 0.75 in 2018 to below 0.5 by 2023. That is not a count of fake ads. It means the signal value of a job posting has roughly halved — which is the honest way to state it.
You will also see "one in three UK job ads are fake" quoted widely. Treat it with caution: it traces to a scrape that used "posted 30+ days ago" as a proxy for a ghost job, which measures a posting's age, not anyone's intent. A stale advert and a dishonest one are not the same thing.
What is not in doubt is the fraud trend. UK recruitment-fraud reports to Action Fraud more than doubled from 2,094 in 2022 to 4,876 in 2024.
If a recruiter asks you for money, report it to the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate. This is the one part of the system with real teeth — see the five checks for a UK recruitment agency for exactly how, and the narrow list of jobs where a fee is actually lawful.
If it is a scam rather than a ghost job — fake offer letters, requests for ID documents or bank details early on — report it to Action Fraud and to JobsAware, which exists specifically for unsafe work and job scams.
If it is simply a posting that never goes anywhere, there is no regulator to call. What you can do is stop spending your effort on it: check whether the same advert has been reposted for months, whether the company's own careers page lists it, and whether a named person is attached to it.
And treat the silence as information. An employer who cannot tell you where your application stands is telling you something about how they will treat you as an employee.
We verify the employer before a role goes live, and we publish our own posting-to-hire rate rather than asking you to take it on trust.
Related: Why you are not hearing back — what the same data means for your own applications. And How to check if an Indian company is actually hiring — the same problem in India, where the public registries make it checkable. And why skills-based hiring is replacing resumes.
This is general information about UK employment and recruitment rules, not legal advice; if a specific posting has caused you loss, take advice from a qualified solicitor. Ontario's requirements are set out in the Employment Standards Act, 2000 as amended by the Working for Workers Four Act, 2024 and Working for Workers Five Act, 2024, with detail in O. Reg. 476/24, in force 1 January 2026. Ghost-job prevalence figures are from Greenhouse's 2024 State of Job Hunting report (own-platform data) and Revelio Labs (US postings matched to hires). UK recruitment-fraud counts are Action Fraud figures reported by the BBC. UK agency conduct is governed by the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003. Current as of August 2026.