Engineering is 42-44% of postings in Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. The four cities are one market by composition. Bengaluru holds 47.8% of the country's engineering openings. Same job, seven times the shots — and a free skill-gap analysis to see which is blocking you.
I read 14,851 openings off 217 companies' own career pages on 8 August and expected four different cities. Engineering titles came back at 44.1% of Hyderabad's postings, 43.9% of Bengaluru's, 43.8% of Pune's, 42.3% of Chennai's. Four cities inside 1.8 percentage points. The mix is the same in all four. What changes is how many times the mix repeats: Bengaluru carries 2,086 engineering openings, Chennai carries 300.
The four cities are one market
Each row below is a share of that city's own openings.
| City | Openings | Engineering | Data/AI | BFSI |
|---|
| Hyderabad | 1,822 | 44.1% | 16.0% | 9.7% |
| Bengaluru | 4,756 | 43.9% | 14.4% | 13.7% |
| Pune | 1,155 | 43.8% | 16.3% | 7.5% |
| Chennai | 709 | 42.3% | 12.1% | 17.1% |
| Mumbai | 1,388 | 13.8% | 13.1% | 33.0% |
| Noida | 474 | 13.3% | 9.9% | 12.2% |
| Gurugram | 659 | 12.1% | 19.3% | 22.9% |
| Delhi NCR | 373 | 5.4% | 10.7% | 38.3% |
The gap between Chennai and Mumbai is 28 points in a single column. The gap between Hyderabad and Chennai is 1.8.
Same market, different number of doors
Your chances need a different denominator: out of every engineering opening in the country, how many sit in each city. There were 4,362 of them in the batch.
| City | Engineering openings | Share of national pool | Against Bengaluru |
|---|
| Bengaluru | 2,086 | 47.8% | — |
| Hyderabad | 803 | 18.4% | 2.6× fewer |
| Pune | 506 | 11.6% | 4.1× fewer |
| Chennai | 300 | 6.9% | 7.0× fewer |
The four cities together are 84.7%, which leaves 15.3% for every other city in India put together.
A Chennai engineer who relocates to Bengaluru gets seven times as many chances at the role they were already qualified for. If you have been applying for four months and hearing nothing, that ratio is probably doing more to your outcome than your CV is.
Whether to move at all depends on what you do
Run the same calculation for other roles and Bengaluru's grip loosens.
| Your role | Bengaluru's share of the national pool | Does moving help? |
|---|
| Engineering | 47.8% | More than anything else you can do |
| Data / AI | 35.7% | Yes, though Mumbai and Gurugram are live options |
| Sales | 19.5% | Barely |
| BFSI | 16.4% | No |
The more technical the role, the more it lives in one city. BFSI's top six cities add up to only 45% of its national pool, because banks staff branches everywhere. A relationship manager in Indore who moves to Mumbai trades a known cost of living for a marginally larger pool. The engineer sitting next to them has a much better reason to buy the ticket.
In July I mapped these metros by the skills named in their postings and came away thinking each city specialised. Reading them by job title instead, the four southern and western tech metros look far more alike than that cut suggested. Titles are what the employer wrote. I trust them more.
What this means for you
Early-career (0–3 years). Relocation buys you the most right now, because volume is the only lever you have before you have a track record. If you are targeting engineering and you are not in the four cities, you are competing for 15.3% of the market. Pick Hyderabad over Bengaluru if cost is the binding constraint: 18.4% of the national pool at a materially lower burn rate is the best ratio on this table.
Mid-career (3–10 years). The 2.6× between Hyderabad and Bengaluru is the smallest jump that still changes anything, and Hyderabad's composition is identical. Before you move, check whether your last six months of rejections were about market size or about your profile. If you applied to fewer than 30 roles, the city is not your problem yet.
Senior (10+ years). Read your role's row in the table above rather than the city ranking. At senior level the pool is thin everywhere and hiring runs through people, so a 2.6× difference in postings matters less than who already knows your work. If you are in BFSI, staying put costs you almost nothing.
The one move to make this week
Count the engineering openings within commuting distance of where you sleep. If that number is under 100, your next promotion is a logistics problem before it is a skills problem. Run your role against the live market and see which of the two is actually blocking you.
Methodology
14,851 job openings read from 217 companies' own career pages on 8 August 2026, across 46 different application systems (Workday, Oracle, SAP, RippleHire and 42 others). Counts are taken from a single scrape date rather than a live-status filter, so a posting counted here may have closed since.
Role buckets come from regular-expression matching on the job title string as the employer wrote it, not from our own classification layer. That is deliberate and it is imprecise at the edges: "Sales Engineer" lands in engineering, "Data Centre Technician" lands in data. The buckets are wide enough that a few hundred edge cases do not move a 42-point gap.
Three caveats worth stating. This is 217 large employers with their own career sites, so startups, agencies and anything hiring only through job boards are absent, and the panel skews to consulting and BFSI. City labels come from the posting; "Delhi NCR", "Gurugram" and "Noida" arrive as three separate labels, so NCR reads smaller in this table than it is (combined across our full pool it is 6,731 openings, level with Mumbai). And one date is a snapshot, not a trend.