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 15 May 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 499 397 443
Rank change year-on-year -102 +46 +87
Contract jobs citing Reference Data 89 71 90
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.22% 0.29% 0.25%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 0.68% 0.86% 0.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 61 35 62
10th Percentile £447 £505 £451
25th Percentile £513 £537 £531
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £610 £670 £650
Median % change year-on-year -8.96% +3.08% +4.00%
75th Percentile £738 £750 £925
90th Percentile £825 £890 -
UK median daily rate £604 £640 £650
% change year-on-year -5.64% -1.54% +4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 2 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £78.75 £78.75 -
Median hourly rate £80.50 £80.50 -
75th Percentile £83.13 £82.25 -
90th Percentile £83.65 - -
UK median hourly rate £80.50 £80.50 -

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 13,084 8,243 11,201
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 32.12% 34.06% 30.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,268 5,401 7,348
10th Percentile £312 £300 £270
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £540 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.63% -1.82% -3.51%
75th Percentile £626 £675 £675
90th Percentile £750 £788 £800
UK median daily rate £509 £525 £540
% change year-on-year -3.14% -2.78% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 666 328 820
10th Percentile £16.01 £16.67 £12.25
25th Percentile £21.00 £20.94 £15.17
Median hourly rate £46.00 £34.50 £33.50
Median % change year-on-year +33.33% +2.99% +48.99%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £88.00 £85.00 £70.00
UK median hourly rate £42.60 £32.05 £31.50
% change year-on-year +32.93% +1.75% +40.09%

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 15 May 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 15 May 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 65 £625 -6.72% 20
East of England -27 10 £525 - 1
North of England -59 7 £610 +1.67% 4
Yorkshire -54 6 £610 +1.67%
South East -56 2 £500 - 7
West Midlands -60 2 £650 -
Midlands -66 2 £650 +8.33%
North West - 1 £700 - 4
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 5 (5.62%) Confluence
2 1 (1.12%) Apache Airflow
Applications
1 7 (7.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (2.25%) MS Visio
3 1 (1.12%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 7 (7.87%) Aladdin
2 6 (6.74%) Finacle
3 3 (3.37%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 2 (2.25%) SAP S/4HANA
4 2 (2.25%) SimCorp Dimension
5 1 (1.12%) Endur
5 1 (1.12%) Loan IQ
5 1 (1.12%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (1.12%) SAP MDG
Cloud Services
1 21 (23.60%) Azure
2 14 (15.73%) AWS
3 10 (11.24%) GCP
4 9 (10.11%) Power Platform
5 5 (5.62%) Amazon S3
6 4 (4.49%) dbt
7 3 (3.37%) Snowflake
8 2 (2.25%) Azure AI
8 2 (2.25%) Azure Data Factory
8 2 (2.25%) Azure Machine Learning
8 2 (2.25%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 2 (2.25%) Microsoft Purview
9 1 (1.12%) AWS CodePipeline
9 1 (1.12%) Boomi
9 1 (1.12%) Collibra
9 1 (1.12%) Datadog
9 1 (1.12%) Entra ID
9 1 (1.12%) GitHub
9 1 (1.12%) Lucidchart
9 1 (1.12%) Prefect
Database & Business Intelligence
1 30 (33.71%) Metadata
2 10 (11.24%) Data Warehouse
3 9 (10.11%) Power BI
4 6 (6.74%) Data Lake
5 5 (5.62%) Relational Database
6 4 (4.49%) Amazon Athena
7 3 (3.37%) BigQuery
8 2 (2.25%) Amazon Redshift
8 2 (2.25%) Ataccama
8 2 (2.25%) Neo4j
8 2 (2.25%) PostgreSQL
8 2 (2.25%) RDBMS
8 2 (2.25%) SQL Server
8 2 (2.25%) Tableau
8 2 (2.25%) TigerGraph
9 1 (1.12%) Apache Hudi
9 1 (1.12%) Apache Iceberg
9 1 (1.12%) Metadata Repository
9 1 (1.12%) Power Query
9 1 (1.12%) Semantic Layer
Development Applications
1 14 (15.73%) ERwin
2 8 (8.99%) ER Studio
2 8 (8.99%) JIRA
3 6 (6.74%) PowerDesigner
4 1 (1.12%) Deequ
4 1 (1.12%) Git
General
1 38 (42.70%) Finance
2 25 (28.09%) Banking
3 23 (25.84%) Analytical Skills
4 19 (21.35%) Social Skills
5 14 (15.73%) Front Office
6 7 (7.87%) Investment Banking
7 6 (6.74%) Private Banking
7 6 (6.74%) Retail
8 5 (5.62%) Public Sector
8 5 (5.62%) Publishing
9 4 (4.49%) Financial Institution
10 3 (3.37%) Legal
11 2 (2.25%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (2.25%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (2.25%) Law
11 2 (2.25%) Marketing
11 2 (2.25%) Wholesale Banking
12 1 (1.12%) Back Office
12 1 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
12 1 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 19 (21.35%) Architect
2 17 (19.10%) Data Architect
3 15 (16.85%) Lead
4 12 (13.48%) Analyst
4 12 (13.48%) Business Analyst
5 11 (12.36%) Data Modeller
6 10 (11.24%) Developer
7 8 (8.99%) Data Engineer
8 7 (7.87%) Python Developer
9 6 (6.74%) Data Migration Lead
10 5 (5.62%) Data Analyst
10 5 (5.62%) Senior
11 3 (3.37%) Perl Developer
11 3 (3.37%) Python Data Engineer
11 3 (3.37%) Python Engineer
11 3 (3.37%) Senior Data Engineer
11 3 (3.37%) Technical Business Analyst
12 2 (2.25%) DataOps Engineer
12 2 (2.25%) Investment Management Business Analyst
12 2 (2.25%) Treasury Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (5.62%) JSON
2 4 (4.49%) REST
3 3 (3.37%) PySpark
4 2 (2.25%) Kafka
4 2 (2.25%) Middleware
4 2 (2.25%) XML
5 1 (1.12%) Great Expectations
5 1 (1.12%) Lightning Web Components
5 1 (1.12%) NumPy
5 1 (1.12%) Pandas
5 1 (1.12%) Ruby on Rails
Miscellaneous
1 16 (17.98%) Fixed Income
2 14 (15.73%) Data Structures
3 10 (11.24%) Equities
4 8 (8.99%) Derivative
4 8 (8.99%) Legacy Systems
5 7 (7.87%) Onboarding
5 7 (7.87%) Product Ownership
6 6 (6.74%) Cloud Native
6 6 (6.74%) Management Information System
7 4 (4.49%) Life Science
8 3 (3.37%) Data Protection Act
9 2 (2.25%) Algorithms
9 2 (2.25%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 2 (2.25%) Marketing Technology
9 2 (2.25%) Pricing Data
10 1 (1.12%) Clustering
10 1 (1.12%) Credit Risk
10 1 (1.12%) Distributed Systems
10 1 (1.12%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Processes & Methodologies
1 47 (52.81%) Data Modelling
2 24 (26.97%) Data Governance
3 21 (23.60%) Data Management
4 20 (22.47%) Migration
4 20 (22.47%) Problem-Solving
4 20 (22.47%) Validation
5 17 (19.10%) Data Architecture
6 16 (17.98%) Analytics
6 16 (17.98%) Data Analysis
6 16 (17.98%) Integration Patterns
7 15 (16.85%) Data Mapping
7 15 (16.85%) Data Migration
7 15 (16.85%) Logical Data Model
7 15 (16.85%) Stakeholder Management
8 14 (15.73%) Physical Data Model
9 13 (14.61%) Data Lineage
9 13 (14.61%) ETL
9 13 (14.61%) Metadata Management
10 12 (13.48%) Design Patterns
10 12 (13.48%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 33 (37.08%) SQL
2 20 (22.47%) Python
3 6 (6.74%) Java
4 5 (5.62%) C#
4 5 (5.62%) Perl
4 5 (5.62%) PowerShell
5 2 (2.25%) Bash
5 2 (2.25%) SPARQL
6 1 (1.12%) Apex Code
6 1 (1.12%) C
6 1 (1.12%) Groovy
6 1 (1.12%) PL/SQL
6 1 (1.12%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 9 (10.11%) Security Cleared
2 5 (5.62%) SC Cleared
3 3 (3.37%) Degree
4 2 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
5 1 (1.12%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.12%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 30 (33.71%) Data Quality
2 4 (4.49%) MiFID
3 3 (3.37%) GDPR
4 2 (2.25%) QA
4 2 (2.25%) SLA
5 1 (1.12%) AIFMD
5 1 (1.12%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 1 (1.12%) EMIR
5 1 (1.12%) GRC
5 1 (1.12%) IFRS
5 1 (1.12%) IFRS 9
Systems Management
1 3 (3.37%) Grafana
2 1 (1.12%) Kibana
2 1 (1.12%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 15 (16.85%) Databricks
2 13 (14.61%) Microsoft
3 7 (7.87%) Murex
4 6 (6.74%) Avaloq
4 6 (6.74%) GoldenSource
4 6 (6.74%) Temenos
5 3 (3.37%) Charles River
5 3 (3.37%) Informatica
5 3 (3.37%) SAP
5 3 (3.37%) Sparx
6 2 (2.25%) IDERA
6 2 (2.25%) Oracle
6 2 (2.25%) Salesforce
6 2 (2.25%) SimCorp
7 1 (1.12%) Bloomberg
7 1 (1.12%) Calypso
7 1 (1.12%) Google
7 1 (1.12%) ION Trading
7 1 (1.12%) OpenLink
7 1 (1.12%) Reuters