We tracked 20,392 internship postings. Here's what off-campus hiring in India actually looks like.

Diti & Rishit · Hopin

When we were applying in third year, we had no idea what a normal stipend was. Someone in our batch got ₹40,000 a month and we assumed we were doing something wrong. Someone else took an unpaid one at a company none of us had heard of and felt like they had lost. Nobody had numbers. Everyone had anecdotes.

We run a job tracker now, so we have the numbers. This is all of them.

We collected 20,392 internship postings aimed at students in India, most of them between April and July this year. Here is what is in there. The boring but important part - how we counted and what we threw away - is at the bottom, and we would rather you read it than not.

Almost nobody hiring you is hiring twice

10,878

companies posted exactly one internship. Out of 14,004 total.

That is 78% of every company in our data. Only 64 companies posted ten or more.

We sat with this one for a while, because it breaks the way everybody tells you to job hunt. You are told to build a list of dream companies and go after them properly. But the off-campus market is not a list of companies. It is a very long tail of small ones who need one person, once, and then never post again.

Which means the thing that actually decides whether you get an internship is not picking the right companies. It is seeing the posting in the first few days it exists, before it gets filled and taken down.

Half of them don't want a form

48.4% of the internships we tracked are applied to by messaging someone or commenting on a post. Not a careers page. Not an applicant tracking system. And 65.9% of postings had a recruiter's email address sitting right there in them.

If you have been firing applications into forms and hearing nothing back, this is probably a big part of why. A huge share of this market never goes near a form at all. It is one person on LinkedIn who needs an intern and said so.

What a stipend actually is

Of everything we collected, 3,178 postings had a monthly stipend that the employer stated themselves. Here is the spread.

So the median off-campus internship in India pays ₹12,000 a month, and half of everything sits roughly between ₹8,500 and ₹18,000.

The ₹40,000 your friend got is real. It is also the top 4%. If you are being offered ₹10,000 you are not being taken advantage of, you are being paid the going rate. We really wish someone had told us that in third year.

Remote pays like a small city

This is the one that surprised us most.

Bengaluru pays ₹18,000. Remote pays ₹10,000 - level with Noida, Pune, Ahmedabad and Kolkata, and barely above Jaipur.

Remote work was supposed to mean earning Bengaluru money from your hostel room in Indore. For internships it does not. You get Indore money and you save the rent. For plenty of people that is still a good trade, and we are not telling anyone to turn remote work down. Just go in knowing which trade you are making.

Most of this is still in an office

70.8% of the internships were on-site. 23.2% remote. 6.0% hybrid.

Remote internships are loud on the internet and a minority in the data.

What we would do differently

If we could go back to third year with this sitting in front of us, four things would change.

• We would stop building a dream company list, because 78% of this market posts once and disappears.
• We would check for new postings every day instead of every weekend, for the same reason.
• We would write to the recruiter's email address, since two out of three postings hand you one.
• We would stop treating ₹10,000 as an insult.

If you want to see what is open right now rather than what was open across four months, we keep a live list of off-campus internships in India and one of off-campus drives that rebuilds every day.

Cheering you on,
- Diti & Rishit