If you have typed "aba jobs near me" into Google, you already know what comes back: a wall of Indeed listings, a few ZipRecruiter pages, and the careers tab of whichever clinic happens to rank in your metro. None of it answers the question you were actually asking, which is not "are there any jobs" but "how good is my position in this market." This guide answers that instead, using the two datasets that make it answerable: the BACB's count of credentialed analysts in every state, and the BACB/Lightcast tally of every ABA job posting in the country.

The short version: in 2025 there were 132,307 job postings requiring or preferring BCBA certification, and 80,320 credentialed behavior analysts practicing in the United States. That is 1.65 openings advertised for every analyst in the country. But that national average is close to meaningless on its own, because the ratio ranges from 3.56 in Maryland down to 0.58 in Florida. Where you are matters more than most job seekers realize.

Are ABA Jobs in High Demand? The National Picture

Yes, and the trend is unusually consistent. According to the BACB's 2026 report with labor market analytics firm Lightcast, annual US job postings requiring or preferring BCBA or BCBA-D certification have increased every single year since 2010. The series starts at 789 postings in 2010 and ends at 132,307 in 2025, a 168-fold increase over sixteen years. The most recent jump was 28 percent, up from 103,150 postings in 2024.

On the supply side, the BACB's region-specific data shows 77,310 BCBAs and 3,010 BCBA-Ds registered in the United States, for 80,320 credentialed analysts total. Divide one by the other and you get the 1.65 figure above.

One thing worth knowing before you read any article about this shortage, including this one: the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish an occupation code for behavior analysts. There is no official BLS employment projection for this job the way there is for nurses or teachers. That absence is why the BACB and Lightcast postings series is the closest thing the profession has to a real labor market measure, and it is why so much of the writing about the "BCBA shortage" cites the same handful of numbers. We have gone a step further and divided those postings by the state-level supply, which is where it gets interesting.

For the national picture in more depth, see our guides to the BCBA shortage, how many BCBAs there are, and whether BCBAs are in demand.

ABA Jobs Near Me: 30 States Ranked by Postings Per Analyst

This is the table that does not exist anywhere else. We took the 30 states with the highest BCBA demand from the BACB/Lightcast report and divided each state's 2025 postings by the number of BCBAs and BCBA-Ds registered there. The result is a measure of market tightness rather than market size, and it reorders the map substantially.

Read it this way. A number above 1.65 means your state advertises more openings per analyst than the country as a whole, so you are the scarce side of the transaction and you have room to be selective. A number below 1.65 means comparatively more analysts are competing for each posting, and you should expect a slower search and firmer employers.

Teal rows sit above the national average of 1.65 postings per analyst; red rows sit below it. Analysts = BCBA plus BCBA-D registered in that state. Sources: BACB/Lightcast (2026) for postings; BACB Region-Specific Certificant Data for analyst counts.

Some of these will surprise people. Kansas is not a state anyone lists when they talk about ABA hotspots, and it generated only 1,215 postings in 2025. But it has just 406 analysts, so those 1,215 postings land on a very small pool. Nebraska is the same story at a smaller scale. Meanwhile Maryland combines genuinely large demand (4,751 postings, eleventh nationally) with a workforce of only 1,335 analysts, which is what produces the highest ratio in the country.

"A headline about your state having the most ABA jobs tells you almost nothing about your odds. Kansas, with 1,215 postings, is a tighter market for a job seeker than Texas with 7,792."

The Florida Paradox: More Analysts Than Openings

Florida is the one genuine outlier in the dataset, and if you live there you should know why. The state holds 9,233 BCBAs, roughly 12 percent of every BCBA in the country and second only to California. It also holds 57,780 RBTs, which is 21 percent of the entire national RBT workforce, and 1,827 BCaBAs, an extraordinary 41 percent of all BCaBAs in the United States.

What it does not have is proportionate demand. Florida generated 5,537 BCBA postings in 2025, seventh nationally, which works out to 0.58 postings per analyst. It is the only state in the top 30 where credentialed analysts outnumber the year's advertised openings.

This is not a reason to leave Florida, and it does not mean there is no work. It means three practical things. Your search will take longer than a colleague's in Maryland, so plan for that rather than reading it as a personal failing. Your leverage on any single offer is lower, so do your homework before you negotiate; our Florida salary guide and negotiation guide are the places to start. And the state's unusual credential mix means the BCaBA route and supervision-heavy clinic roles are far more established there than almost anywhere else, which changes what a realistic career ladder looks like. See our Florida BCBA jobs guide for the local detail.

The Five "Highest Demand" States Are Not the Tightest Markets

The BACB report names California, New Jersey, Texas, Massachusetts and North Carolina as the top five states by raw demand. Together they account for 38 percent of all postings, with California alone at 15 percent. Every article about this cites that list.

The problem is that raw demand ignores supply, and the states with the most jobs generally have the most analysts too. Once you divide, only North Carolina (3.05) and New Jersey (2.03) stay in the top ten. California falls to sixteenth of thirty at 1.81, Massachusetts to eighteenth at 1.79, and Texas all the way to twenty-eighth at 1.38. California's 20,258 postings are spread across 11,193 analysts, the largest workforce in the country.

If you are weighing a move, the ratio is the number to compare, not the headline count.

Which Local Markets Are Heating Up, and Which Are Cooling

Year-over-year change tells you where the map is moving. Four states grew demand sharply between 2024 and 2025: South Carolina at 102 percent, Utah at 94 percent, Nebraska at 81 percent and Missouri at 76 percent. North Carolina and New Hampshire both grew 63 percent, which is notable given North Carolina's already high ratio.

Three of the top 30 went backwards. Washington and Oregon each fell 10 percent, and Arizona fell 6 percent. Arizona is the interesting case, because it has a substantial RBT workforce of 7,465 and still shed demand, which suggests consolidation among employers rather than a shrinking client base.

Treat one year of movement carefully. A 102 percent rise on a small base, as in South Carolina, is not the same as sustained growth, so read the growth rate alongside the absolute number of postings in the table above. If your search radius is genuinely flexible, these are also the states worth pairing with travel roles or remote positions.

Why "ABA Jobs Near Me" Fails for Half the Country

Everything above is measured at the state level, which hides the part of this that matters most to a literal "near me" search. The best evidence on that comes from peer-reviewed research rather than job boards.

Yingling, Ruther and Dubuque, publishing in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders in 2022, mapped every BCBA in the country against all 3,138 US counties. In 2018, 54 percent of counties had no BCBA at all. By 2021 that had improved to 46 percent, with 266 counties gaining their first behavior analyst in that window.

The human cost sits behind those percentages. As of 2021, 22.3 million people and 29,297 children with autism lived in a county with no board certified behavior analyst, down from 31.3 million people and 42,546 children in 2018. Progress is real, but it is uneven: the counties that gained a BCBA had a mean population of 33,807, while those that stayed at zero averaged 15,628. Rural access is the part of the gap that is not closing on its own.

For a job seeker, this reframes the search entirely. If you live in or near one of those counties, you are not one applicant among many; you may be the only credentialed option for a wide radius. That changes your leverage, and it changes what you should ask about caseload and travel before you accept anything. It also makes telehealth roles and in-home positions the practical answer rather than a compromise, since both are how coverage actually reaches underserved counties.

What Jobs Can You Do With ABA?

"ABA jobs" is not one market. It is four credential tiers with very different supply and demand, plus a set of non-clinical roles most people never consider. Here is the current US registered population of each, from the BACB:

• ✓ RBT (Registered Behavior Technician), 270,607 in the US. The entry credential and by far the largest group. Requires a 40-hour training, a competency assessment and a background check rather than a degree. The BACB does not publish an RBT demand series, so no postings-per-RBT figure can be calculated. See the RBT certification guide.
• ✓ BCaBA (Board Certified Assistant Behavior Analyst), 4,471 in the US. A bachelor's-level credential that works under BCBA supervision. Quietly the strongest per-capita market of the lot: 10,717 postings against 4,471 certificants is 2.40 per person, well above the BCBA figure, even though BCaBA postings fell from 14,479 in 2024. See BCaBA jobs.
• ✓ BCBA, 77,310 in the US. Master's-level, the credential most job postings ask for, and the one this article's ratios are built on.
• ✓ BCBA-D, 3,010 in the US. A doctoral designation rather than a separate certification; it opens academic, research and senior clinical leadership roles.

Beyond direct service, ABA credentials open clinical director roles, insurance and utilization review positions, school district work, billing, recruiting and university faculty posts. Our guide to what you can do with a BCBA covers the full range.

The same job title means different work in different states

Here is a structural point the job boards will never tell you. Divide each state's RBT count by its analyst count and you get a rough picture of how ABA is actually delivered there. Nationally the figure is 3.4 RBTs per analyst. In Georgia and Florida it is 6.1. In New York it is 0.7, and in Washington 0.8.

A BCBA role in Georgia is therefore likely to be clinic-based and heavy on supervising a large technician team. A BCBA role in New York is far more likely to involve direct assessment and school-based consultation, because there simply are not enough RBTs per analyst for the supervision-heavy model to dominate. Same title, different job, different daily reality. Ask which model an employer runs before you accept, because it is one of the largest predictors of whether the role suits you.

How to Get a Job in ABA Therapy Without Scrolling Job Boards

Follow the logic of the data. In a market advertising 1.65 openings per credentialed analyst, and considerably more than that in half the states in the table, the scarce resource is not the job. It is you. Applying to postings one at a time, waiting on each response, puts you in the weakest possible negotiating position in a market where you hold most of the cards.

A better sequence looks like this:

1. Look up your state's ratio in the table above before you talk to anyone. It tells you whether to expect several competing offers or a longer search, and it is the single most useful thing to know going in.
2. Ask about caseload and supervision ratio explicitly. Use your state's RBT-per-analyst figure as a sanity check on what the employer describes. A number far above the local norm is worth probing.
3. Ask why the role is open. Growth and turnover produce the same posting; they do not produce the same job. Our interview questions guide and the list of best ABA companies to work for help here.
4. Get more than one offer on the table at once. Sequential applications guarantee you are always comparing an offer against nothing.

That last point is the hardest to do through conventional job boards, which are built around you applying outward one role at a time. It is the specific problem CertifyndABA was built to solve: you create an anonymous profile listing your credentials, setting and location preferences, and employers send you interview requests. Nothing identifying is revealed until you accept one, so your current employer never sees that you are looking, and you end up comparing several concrete opportunities side by side instead of chasing them one after another.

If your search is specifically BCBA-level, our companion guide to BCBA jobs near me goes deeper on search tactics, and ABA therapy jobs covers the wider field.

Methodology, and What These Numbers Cannot Tell You

Four limitations you should know about, because no other article on this topic states them:

• Postings are not vacancies. Lightcast removes duplicate postings, but a single hard-to-fill role can still be advertised repeatedly across a year. Treat the ratio as an index of demand intensity, not a literal count of empty chairs waiting for you.
• The two sides are measured differently. Certificant counts are a point-in-time snapshot; postings are a full year's accumulation. The ratio is a useful comparison between states, not an absolute odds calculation.
• We use US-only figures throughout. The BACB's headline worldwide count is 85,587 BCBAs as of 1 July 2026, larger than the 77,310 registered in the United States, because it includes international certificants. Mixing the two would understate every ratio. We also noticed the BACB's two published tables disagree on RBT totals, which is why we have deliberately avoided calculating any postings-per-RBT figure.
• Registration is not the same as location of work. Certificants are counted where they are registered, which increasingly diverges from where they practice as telehealth and multi-state licensure grow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are ABA jobs in high demand?

Yes. There were 132,307 US job postings requiring or preferring BCBA certification in 2025 against 80,320 credentialed analysts, a ratio of 1.65 postings per analyst. Demand has risen every year since 2010, when there were 789 postings, and grew 28 percent in the most recent year.

Which state has the most ABA jobs?

California, with 20,258 BCBA job postings in 2025, about 15 percent of the national total. But California also has the largest analyst workforce at 11,193, so it ranks only sixteenth of thirty states on openings per analyst.

Where are ABA jobs easiest to get?

By postings per credentialed analyst, the tightest markets in 2025 were Maryland (3.56), North Carolina (3.05), Kansas (2.99), Georgia (2.67) and Nebraska (2.41). All five advertise well above the national average of 1.65 openings per analyst.

Where is the ABA job market most competitive?

Florida. It is the only state in the top 30 by demand where credentialed analysts outnumber the year's postings, at 0.58 postings per analyst. Florida holds about 12 percent of all US BCBAs and 41 percent of all US BCaBAs.

Is behavior technician a stressful job?

It can be, and it is fair to go in knowing that. RBT roles carry high caseloads, physically demanding sessions and well-documented turnover, and pay sits substantially below the analyst tiers; see our RBT salary guide for current ranges. Workload also varies enormously by state, with 6.1 RBTs per analyst in Georgia and Florida against 0.7 in New York, which affects how much supervision and support you actually receive. Our article on burnout in the field covers the warning signs. Many people find the work genuinely rewarding; the point is to choose an employer deliberately rather than take the first offer.

Do I need to be a BCBA to work in ABA?

No. RBT is the entry credential and by far the largest group at 270,607 in the US, requiring a 40-hour training rather than a degree. BCaBA sits between RBT and BCBA at the bachelor's level, with 4,471 certificants nationally.

Can I work in ABA remotely?

Yes. Telehealth supervision, remote assessment and utilization review roles all exist, and they are the practical answer for the 46 percent of US counties with no BCBA. See our guides to remote BCBA jobs and telehealth roles.

How many ABA jobs are near me if I live rurally?

Possibly none within your county. Research published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found 46 percent of the 3,138 US counties had no BCBA at all in 2021, and the counties still at zero average about 15,600 residents. If that describes where you live, widen your commuting radius or look at telehealth and in-home roles, which is how coverage reaches those areas.

The Bottom Line

"ABA jobs near me" is a reasonable thing to search and a poor way to understand your position. The national market advertises 1.65 openings per credentialed analyst and has grown every year for sixteen years, but that average conceals a six-fold spread between Maryland and Florida, and a county-level access gap that leaves nearly half the country without a single BCBA. Find your state in the table, note whether you are above or below 1.65, and let that shape how selective you are willing to be.