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 22 August 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 519 453 478
Rank change year-on-year -66 +25 +30
Contract jobs citing Reference Data 112 65 54
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.24% 0.24% 0.16%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 0.73% 0.66% 0.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 74 42 43
10th Percentile £406 £460 £435
25th Percentile £448 £542 £514
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £562 £625 £650
Median % change year-on-year -10.10% -3.85% +8.33%
75th Percentile £684 £744 £913
90th Percentile £793 £800 £925
UK median daily rate £550 £600 £650
% change year-on-year -8.33% -7.69% +9.24%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 0 0
Median hourly rate £70.00 - -
UK median hourly rate £70.00 - -

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 15,428 9,829 10,218
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 33.63% 35.62% 30.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,456 6,204 6,582
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £425 £408 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -
75th Percentile £638 £650 £681
90th Percentile £750 £775 £825
UK median daily rate £525 £520 £550
% change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 943 495 511
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.48 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.34 £18.87 £19.06
Median hourly rate £42.50 £32.71 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +29.93% -34.58% +14.06%
75th Percentile £70.00 £60.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £78.73 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £30.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year +41.67% -33.33% +10.31%

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 22 August 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 22 August 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 -61 72 £591 -5.48% 80
East of England -10 12 £550 - 1
North of England -57 12 £518 -5.86% 4
Midlands -44 7 £447 -18.73% 4
Yorkshire -35 6 £610 +10.91%
North West - 6 £418 - 4
East Midlands -15 4 £425 -22.82%
South East -66 4 £500 -16.67% 3
West Midlands - 3 £650 - 4
South West - 2 £575 - 6
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 (3.57%) Apache Airflow
2 3 (2.68%) Confluence
3 2 (1.79%) Apache Spark
4 1 (0.89%) Apache
4 1 (0.89%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
4 1 (0.89%) Jupyter
4 1 (0.89%) MTS
4 1 (0.89%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 12 (10.71%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.89%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.89%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.89%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 9 (8.04%) Aladdin
2 3 (2.68%) Endur
2 3 (2.68%) SimCorp Dimension
2 3 (2.68%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 2 (1.79%) Finacle
3 2 (1.79%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (1.79%) SAP MDG
3 2 (1.79%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.89%) Bloomberg TOMS
4 1 (0.89%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.89%) Loan IQ
4 1 (0.89%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.89%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.89%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.89%) Oracle SCM
4 1 (0.89%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 34 (30.36%) Azure
2 22 (19.64%) AWS
3 14 (12.50%) GCP
3 14 (12.50%) Power Platform
4 9 (8.04%) Azure Data Factory
5 8 (7.14%) Amazon S3
5 8 (7.14%) dbt
5 8 (7.14%) Snowflake
6 6 (5.36%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 5 (4.46%) AWS Lambda
7 5 (4.46%) Microsoft Purview
7 5 (4.46%) Serverless
8 3 (2.68%) Alation
8 3 (2.68%) Azure AI
8 3 (2.68%) Collibra
8 3 (2.68%) Datadog
8 3 (2.68%) SaaS
9 2 (1.79%) Azure Machine Learning
9 2 (1.79%) Cloud Functions
9 2 (1.79%) GitHub
Database & Business Intelligence
1 42 (37.50%) Metadata
2 16 (14.29%) Data Warehouse
3 14 (12.50%) Power BI
4 12 (10.71%) Data Lake
5 9 (8.04%) Data Mining
6 8 (7.14%) Relational Database
7 6 (5.36%) Delta Lake
7 6 (5.36%) SQL Server
8 5 (4.46%) Amazon Athena
8 5 (4.46%) Amazon Redshift
8 5 (4.46%) BigQuery
9 4 (3.57%) Data Vault
9 4 (3.57%) PostgreSQL
10 3 (2.68%) DynamoDB
10 3 (2.68%) Neo4j
10 3 (2.68%) NoSQL
10 3 (2.68%) Tableau
11 2 (1.79%) Amazon Aurora
11 2 (1.79%) Amazon RDS
11 2 (1.79%) Ataccama
Development Applications
1 20 (17.86%) ERwin
2 14 (12.50%) ER Studio
3 7 (6.25%) JIRA
3 7 (6.25%) PowerDesigner
4 3 (2.68%) Git
5 2 (1.79%) GitLab
6 1 (0.89%) Deequ
6 1 (0.89%) Jenkins
6 1 (0.89%) MLflow
6 1 (0.89%) Postman
6 1 (0.89%) Robot Framework
6 1 (0.89%) SonarQube
General
1 52 (46.43%) Finance
2 38 (33.93%) Analytical Skills
3 25 (22.32%) Banking
4 24 (21.43%) Social Skills
5 9 (8.04%) Front Office
5 9 (8.04%) Investment Banking
6 7 (6.25%) Legal
7 6 (5.36%) Financial Institution
7 6 (5.36%) Publishing
8 5 (4.46%) Public Sector
8 5 (4.46%) Retail
9 3 (2.68%) Billing
9 3 (2.68%) Marketing
10 2 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (1.79%) General Ledger
10 2 (1.79%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (1.79%) Pharmaceutical
10 2 (1.79%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (1.79%) Private Banking
11 1 (0.89%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 27 (24.11%) Architect
2 25 (22.32%) Analyst
2 25 (22.32%) Data Architect
3 21 (18.75%) Business Analyst
4 19 (16.96%) Data Engineer
5 13 (11.61%) Data Modeller
6 12 (10.71%) Senior
7 7 (6.25%) Lead
8 6 (5.36%) Data Business Analyst
9 5 (4.46%) Consultant
9 5 (4.46%) Data Analyst
9 5 (4.46%) Developer
9 5 (4.46%) Python Engineer
9 5 (4.46%) Senior Analyst
9 5 (4.46%) Senior Data Engineer
10 4 (3.57%) Data Management Specialist
10 4 (3.57%) Designer
10 4 (3.57%) Senior Business Analyst
10 4 (3.57%) Solutions Architect
10 4 (3.57%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (8.93%) PySpark
2 6 (5.36%) JSON
2 6 (5.36%) REST
3 5 (4.46%) Kafka
4 4 (3.57%) RESTful
5 3 (2.68%) Middleware
6 2 (1.79%) Great Expectations
6 2 (1.79%) XML
7 1 (0.89%) FpML
7 1 (0.89%) Hugging Face
7 1 (0.89%) Oracle Fusion
7 1 (0.89%) Pandas
7 1 (0.89%) pytest
7 1 (0.89%) Ruby on Rails
7 1 (0.89%) SOAP
7 1 (0.89%) Swagger
7 1 (0.89%) Terraform
Miscellaneous
1 18 (16.07%) Data Structures
2 12 (10.71%) Product Ownership
3 11 (9.82%) Fixed Income
3 11 (9.82%) Onboarding
4 10 (8.93%) Cloud Native
5 9 (8.04%) Equities
5 9 (8.04%) Management Information System
6 8 (7.14%) Legacy Systems
7 7 (6.25%) Derivative
7 7 (6.25%) Pricing Data
8 5 (4.46%) Data Protection Act
9 3 (2.68%) Algorithms
9 3 (2.68%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 2 (1.79%) Analytical Mindset
10 2 (1.79%) FMCG
10 2 (1.79%) Marketing Technology
10 2 (1.79%) Reinsurance
11 1 (0.89%) Credit Risk
11 1 (0.89%) Life Science
11 1 (0.89%) Market Risk
Operating Systems
1 1 (0.89%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 71 (63.39%) Data Modelling
2 48 (42.86%) Data Governance
3 36 (32.14%) Data Management
4 35 (31.25%) Logical Data Model
5 30 (26.79%) Data Architecture
6 27 (24.11%) Validation
7 26 (23.21%) Problem-Solving
8 25 (22.32%) Metadata Management
8 25 (22.32%) Physical Data Model
9 24 (21.43%) Integration Patterns
9 24 (21.43%) Stakeholder Management
10 23 (20.54%) Analytics
11 22 (19.64%) Data Integration
12 21 (18.75%) Reference Data Management
13 19 (16.96%) ETL
13 19 (16.96%) Migration
14 18 (16.07%) Data Pipeline
15 17 (15.18%) Data Lineage
15 17 (15.18%) Data Strategy
16 16 (14.29%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 56 (50.00%) SQL
2 22 (19.64%) Python
3 3 (2.68%) SPARQL
4 2 (1.79%) Bash
4 2 (1.79%) PL/SQL
4 2 (1.79%) T-SQL
5 1 (0.89%) C
5 1 (0.89%) Java
5 1 (0.89%) Kusto Query Language
5 1 (0.89%) Scala
5 1 (0.89%) Tcl
5 1 (0.89%) VBA
Qualifications
1 10 (8.93%) Security Cleared
2 7 (6.25%) Degree
2 7 (6.25%) SC Cleared
3 4 (3.57%) BPSS Clearance
4 2 (1.79%) DBS Check
5 1 (0.89%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (0.89%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 47 (41.96%) Data Quality
2 6 (5.36%) GDPR
3 5 (4.46%) MiFID
4 2 (1.79%) California Consumer Privacy Act
4 2 (1.79%) QA
4 2 (1.79%) SLA
5 1 (0.89%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.89%) AIFMD
5 1 (0.89%) EMIR
5 1 (0.89%) GRC
5 1 (0.89%) IFRS
5 1 (0.89%) IFRS 9
5 1 (0.89%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 1 (0.89%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 3 (2.68%) Grafana
2 1 (0.89%) Kibana
2 1 (0.89%) Prometheus
2 1 (0.89%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 27 (24.11%) Databricks
2 19 (16.96%) Microsoft
3 9 (8.04%) Informatica
4 5 (4.46%) Oracle
5 4 (3.57%) Bloomberg
5 4 (3.57%) Google
5 4 (3.57%) SimCorp
6 3 (2.68%) GoldenSource
6 3 (2.68%) Murex
6 3 (2.68%) Salesforce
6 3 (2.68%) SAP
6 3 (2.68%) Sparx
6 3 (2.68%) Talend
7 2 (1.79%) Avaloq
7 2 (1.79%) Charles River
7 2 (1.79%) Temenos
8 1 (0.89%) MarketAxess
8 1 (0.89%) OpenLink
8 1 (0.89%) Sybase
8 1 (0.89%) Tradeweb