Reference Data Contract Job Trends in England

Reference Data
UK > England

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Reference Data in contract job vacancies in England. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Reference Data over the 6 months leading up to 17 July 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 526 420 477
Rank change year-on-year -106 +57 +39
Contract jobs citing Reference Data 94 79 83
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.21% 0.29% 0.23%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 0.63% 0.83% 0.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 65 46 65
10th Percentile £419 £453 £425
25th Percentile £490 £528 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £625 £700
Median % change year-on-year -4.00% -10.71% +17.65%
75th Percentile £725 £750 £925
90th Percentile £790 £800 -
UK median daily rate £562 £600 £675
% change year-on-year -6.35% -11.11% +14.41%

All Generic Skills
England

Reference Data falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring generic IT skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 14,875 9,488 11,201
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 33.21% 34.87% 30.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,238 6,018 7,226
10th Percentile £317 £306 £290
25th Percentile £420 £409 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -
75th Percentile £638 £653 £675
90th Percentile £750 £788 £825
UK median daily rate £525 £525 £538
% change year-on-year - -2.42% -2.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 798 471 743
10th Percentile £16.01 £15.50 £12.50
25th Percentile £21.00 £18.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £33.05 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +33.01% -17.38% +14.29%
75th Percentile £72.50 £61.12 £65.00
90th Percentile £87.97 £80.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £30.25 £37.50
% change year-on-year +45.32% -19.33% +25.00%

Reference Data
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Reference Data relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Reference Data job vacancy trend in England

Reference Data
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Reference Data.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Reference Data

Reference Data
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Reference Data in England over the 6 months to 17 July 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Reference Data in England

Reference Data
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Reference Data.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Reference Data

Reference Data
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Reference Data within the England region over the 6 months to 17 July 2026. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London -81 70 £600 -4.00% 20
North of England -68 9 £610 +10.91% 1
East of England -17 5 £575 - 3
Yorkshire -41 5 £610 +10.91% 1
Midlands -55 4 £650 +18.18% 2
South East -61 4 £500 - 3
West Midlands - 4 £650 -
North West - 4 £388 -
Reference Data
UK

Reference Data
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 4 (4.26%) Confluence
2 2 (2.13%) Apache Airflow
3 1 (1.06%) Apache
3 1 (1.06%) Apache Spark
3 1 (1.06%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
Applications
1 4 (4.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (2.13%) MS Visio
3 1 (1.06%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 10 (10.64%) Aladdin
2 3 (3.19%) Endur
2 3 (3.19%) Finacle
2 3 (3.19%) SimCorp Dimension
3 2 (2.13%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (2.13%) SAP MDG
3 2 (2.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (1.06%) Loan IQ
4 1 (1.06%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 27 (28.72%) Azure
2 14 (14.89%) AWS
3 13 (13.83%) Power Platform
4 9 (9.57%) GCP
5 6 (6.38%) Snowflake
6 5 (5.32%) Amazon S3
6 5 (5.32%) Azure Data Factory
6 5 (5.32%) dbt
6 5 (5.32%) Microsoft Purview
7 4 (4.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 3 (3.19%) Azure AI
8 3 (3.19%) Collibra
8 3 (3.19%) Datadog
9 2 (2.13%) Azure DevOps
9 2 (2.13%) Azure Machine Learning
9 2 (2.13%) GitHub
9 2 (2.13%) Prefect
10 1 (1.06%) Lucidchart
10 1 (1.06%) PowerApps
10 1 (1.06%) Smartsheet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (28.72%) Metadata
2 13 (13.83%) Power BI
3 12 (12.77%) Data Warehouse
4 9 (9.57%) Data Lake
5 5 (5.32%) Relational Database
6 4 (4.26%) Amazon Athena
7 3 (3.19%) Neo4j
7 3 (3.19%) NoSQL
7 3 (3.19%) SQL Server
7 3 (3.19%) Tableau
8 2 (2.13%) Amazon Redshift
8 2 (2.13%) Ataccama
8 2 (2.13%) BigQuery
8 2 (2.13%) Delta Lake
8 2 (2.13%) MongoDB
8 2 (2.13%) PostgreSQL
8 2 (2.13%) TigerGraph
9 1 (1.06%) Apache Cassandra
9 1 (1.06%) Apache Hudi
9 1 (1.06%) Apache Iceberg
Development Applications
1 15 (15.96%) ERwin
2 8 (8.51%) ER Studio
2 8 (8.51%) JIRA
3 6 (6.38%) PowerDesigner
4 2 (2.13%) GitLab
5 1 (1.06%) Deequ
5 1 (1.06%) Git
5 1 (1.06%) Jenkins
5 1 (1.06%) MLflow
5 1 (1.06%) Postman
5 1 (1.06%) Robot Framework
5 1 (1.06%) SonarQube
General
1 47 (50.00%) Finance
2 26 (27.66%) Analytical Skills
3 23 (24.47%) Banking
4 18 (19.15%) Social Skills
5 10 (10.64%) Front Office
6 6 (6.38%) Financial Institution
6 6 (6.38%) Investment Banking
6 6 (6.38%) Legal
7 5 (5.32%) Public Sector
8 4 (4.26%) Retail
9 3 (3.19%) Marketing
9 3 (3.19%) Private Banking
10 2 (2.13%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (2.13%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (2.13%) Manufacturing
10 2 (2.13%) Publishing
10 2 (2.13%) Wholesale Banking
11 1 (1.06%) Back Office
11 1 (1.06%) Billing
11 1 (1.06%) Military
Job Titles
1 22 (23.40%) Analyst
2 20 (21.28%) Architect
2 20 (21.28%) Business Analyst
3 19 (20.21%) Data Architect
4 10 (10.64%) Data Modeller
4 10 (10.64%) Lead
5 9 (9.57%) Senior
6 8 (8.51%) Data Engineer
7 5 (5.32%) Consultant
7 5 (5.32%) Data Analyst
7 5 (5.32%) Developer
8 4 (4.26%) Data Business Analyst
8 4 (4.26%) Python Engineer
8 4 (4.26%) Senior Analyst
8 4 (4.26%) Senior Business Analyst
8 4 (4.26%) SQL Developer
9 3 (3.19%) Azure Developer
9 3 (3.19%) Data Migration Lead
9 3 (3.19%) Python Data Engineer
9 3 (3.19%) Senior Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (7.45%) PySpark
2 4 (4.26%) JSON
2 4 (4.26%) REST
3 3 (3.19%) Kafka
4 2 (2.13%) Great Expectations
4 2 (2.13%) Middleware
5 1 (1.06%) Hugging Face
5 1 (1.06%) Lightning Web Components
5 1 (1.06%) Pandas
5 1 (1.06%) pytest
5 1 (1.06%) Ruby on Rails
5 1 (1.06%) SOAP
5 1 (1.06%) Swagger
5 1 (1.06%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 14 (14.89%) Data Structures
2 11 (11.70%) Fixed Income
3 9 (9.57%) Equities
3 9 (9.57%) Onboarding
4 8 (8.51%) Product Ownership
5 7 (7.45%) Derivative
6 6 (6.38%) Cloud Native
7 5 (5.32%) Data Protection Act
8 4 (4.26%) Pricing Data
9 3 (3.19%) Algorithms
10 2 (2.13%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 2 (2.13%) Legacy Systems
10 2 (2.13%) Marketing Technology
11 1 (1.06%) Analytical Mindset
11 1 (1.06%) Clustering
11 1 (1.06%) Credit Risk
11 1 (1.06%) Distributed Systems
11 1 (1.06%) Life Science
11 1 (1.06%) Management Information System
11 1 (1.06%) Virtual Team
Processes & Methodologies
1 50 (53.19%) Data Modelling
2 34 (36.17%) Data Governance
3 30 (31.91%) Data Management
4 25 (26.60%) Validation
5 19 (20.21%) Analytics
5 19 (20.21%) Integration Patterns
6 17 (18.09%) Logical Data Model
6 17 (18.09%) Problem-Solving
6 17 (18.09%) Stakeholder Management
7 16 (17.02%) Data Architecture
7 16 (17.02%) Data Integration
7 16 (17.02%) ETL
8 15 (15.96%) Data Analysis
8 15 (15.96%) Migration
8 15 (15.96%) Physical Data Model
9 14 (14.89%) Data Lineage
9 14 (14.89%) Data Pipeline
10 13 (13.83%) Business Intelligence
11 12 (12.77%) Agile
11 12 (12.77%) Data Mapping
Programming Languages
1 35 (37.23%) SQL
2 20 (21.28%) Python
3 3 (3.19%) SPARQL
4 2 (2.13%) Bash
5 1 (1.06%) Apex Code
5 1 (1.06%) C
5 1 (1.06%) Java
5 1 (1.06%) Kusto Query Language
5 1 (1.06%) PL/SQL
5 1 (1.06%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 9 (9.57%) Security Cleared
2 5 (5.32%) SC Cleared
3 4 (4.26%) Degree
4 3 (3.19%) BPSS Clearance
5 2 (2.13%) DBS Check
6 1 (1.06%) Computer Science Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 35 (37.23%) Data Quality
2 5 (5.32%) GDPR
3 4 (4.26%) MiFID
4 3 (3.19%) QA
5 2 (2.13%) SLA
6 1 (1.06%) AIFMD
6 1 (1.06%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 1 (1.06%) EMIR
6 1 (1.06%) GRC
6 1 (1.06%) IFRS
6 1 (1.06%) IFRS 9
6 1 (1.06%) Sarbanes-Oxley
Systems Management
1 3 (3.19%) Grafana
2 1 (1.06%) Kibana
2 1 (1.06%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 22 (23.40%) Databricks
2 21 (22.34%) Microsoft
3 6 (6.38%) Informatica
4 5 (5.32%) Murex
5 4 (4.26%) Salesforce
5 4 (4.26%) SimCorp
6 3 (3.19%) Avaloq
6 3 (3.19%) Charles River
6 3 (3.19%) GoldenSource
6 3 (3.19%) Temenos
7 2 (2.13%) Bloomberg
7 2 (2.13%) IDERA
7 2 (2.13%) Oracle
7 2 (2.13%) SAP
7 2 (2.13%) Sparx
8 1 (1.06%) Google
8 1 (1.06%) ION Trading
8 1 (1.06%) MuleSoft
8 1 (1.06%) OpenLink
8 1 (1.06%) Talend