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 25 July 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 515 437 454
Rank change year-on-year -78 +17 +57
Contract jobs citing Reference Data 111 77 79
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.25% 0.28% 0.23%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 0.74% 0.81% 0.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 76 45 62
10th Percentile £413 £452 £425
25th Percentile £472 £525 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £583 £625 £700
Median % change year-on-year -6.80% -10.71% +18.85%
75th Percentile £691 £750 £925
90th Percentile £775 £800 -
UK median daily rate £550 £600 £650
% change year-on-year -8.33% -7.69% +10.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 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 15,052 9,548 10,797
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 33.34% 34.85% 31.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,337 6,029 7,015
10th Percentile £316 £306 £300
25th Percentile £420 £408 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -
75th Percentile £638 £650 £675
90th Percentile £750 £775 £825
UK median daily rate £525 £525 £540
% change year-on-year - -2.78% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 813 479 649
10th Percentile £16.01 £15.50 £12.36
25th Percentile £21.00 £18.87 £16.63
Median hourly rate £43.96 £32.77 £44.74
Median % change year-on-year +34.15% -26.75% +6.52%
75th Percentile £71.50 £60.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £87.43 £80.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £30.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +46.53% -25.00% +6.67%

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 25 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 25 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 -55 78 £587 -6.10% 25
East of England -9 10 £575 - 2
North of England -71 10 £610 +10.91% 1
Yorkshire -48 5 £610 +10.91%
North West - 5 £426 - 1
Midlands -51 4 £650 +18.18% 3
South East -67 4 £500 - 5
West Midlands - 4 £650 - 1
South West - 2 £575 -
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 (4.50%) Confluence
2 2 (1.80%) Apache Airflow
3 1 (0.90%) Apache
3 1 (0.90%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.90%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
3 1 (0.90%) Jupyter
Applications
1 10 (9.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.80%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 2 (1.80%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.90%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 11 (9.91%) Aladdin
2 3 (2.70%) Endur
2 3 (2.70%) SAP MDG
2 3 (2.70%) SimCorp Dimension
2 3 (2.70%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 2 (1.80%) Finacle
3 2 (1.80%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (1.80%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.90%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.90%) Loan IQ
4 1 (0.90%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.90%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.90%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.90%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 35 (31.53%) Azure
2 15 (13.51%) AWS
2 15 (13.51%) Power Platform
3 12 (10.81%) GCP
4 10 (9.01%) Azure Data Factory
5 7 (6.31%) Snowflake
6 6 (5.41%) dbt
7 5 (4.50%) Amazon S3
7 5 (4.50%) Microsoft Purview
8 4 (3.60%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (2.70%) Azure AI
9 3 (2.70%) Collibra
9 3 (2.70%) Datadog
10 2 (1.80%) Azure DevOps
10 2 (1.80%) Azure Machine Learning
10 2 (1.80%) Cloud Functions
10 2 (1.80%) Entra ID
10 2 (1.80%) GitHub
10 2 (1.80%) Prefect
10 2 (1.80%) SaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 40 (36.04%) Metadata
2 15 (13.51%) Power BI
3 14 (12.61%) Data Warehouse
4 11 (9.91%) Data Lake
5 6 (5.41%) Data Mining
5 6 (5.41%) Relational Database
6 5 (4.50%) Delta Lake
7 4 (3.60%) Amazon Athena
7 4 (3.60%) BigQuery
7 4 (3.60%) SQL Server
7 4 (3.60%) Tableau
8 3 (2.70%) Data Vault
8 3 (2.70%) Neo4j
8 3 (2.70%) NoSQL
9 2 (1.80%) Amazon Redshift
9 2 (1.80%) Ataccama
9 2 (1.80%) MongoDB
9 2 (1.80%) RDBMS
9 2 (1.80%) SAP BW
9 2 (1.80%) TigerGraph
Development Applications
1 21 (18.92%) ERwin
2 14 (12.61%) ER Studio
3 9 (8.11%) JIRA
4 7 (6.31%) PowerDesigner
5 2 (1.80%) Git
5 2 (1.80%) GitLab
6 1 (0.90%) Deequ
6 1 (0.90%) Jenkins
6 1 (0.90%) MLflow
6 1 (0.90%) Postman
6 1 (0.90%) Robot Framework
6 1 (0.90%) SonarQube
General
1 54 (48.65%) Finance
2 35 (31.53%) Analytical Skills
3 24 (21.62%) Banking
4 22 (19.82%) Social Skills
5 11 (9.91%) Front Office
6 7 (6.31%) Financial Institution
6 7 (6.31%) Investment Banking
7 6 (5.41%) Legal
7 6 (5.41%) Public Sector
8 4 (3.60%) Marketing
8 4 (3.60%) Retail
9 2 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
9 2 (1.80%) Influencing Skills
9 2 (1.80%) Manufacturing
9 2 (1.80%) Pharmaceutical
9 2 (1.80%) Private Banking
9 2 (1.80%) Publishing
9 2 (1.80%) Wholesale Banking
10 1 (0.90%) Back Office
10 1 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 26 (23.42%) Architect
2 24 (21.62%) Analyst
2 24 (21.62%) Data Architect
3 22 (19.82%) Business Analyst
4 15 (13.51%) Data Engineer
4 15 (13.51%) Data Modeller
5 10 (9.01%) Lead
5 10 (9.01%) Senior
6 6 (5.41%) Data Analyst
7 5 (4.50%) Consultant
7 5 (4.50%) Data Business Analyst
7 5 (4.50%) Developer
7 5 (4.50%) Python Engineer
8 4 (3.60%) Designer
8 4 (3.60%) Python Data Engineer
8 4 (3.60%) Senior Analyst
8 4 (3.60%) Senior Business Analyst
8 4 (3.60%) Senior Data Engineer
8 4 (3.60%) SQL Developer
9 3 (2.70%) Senior SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (9.01%) PySpark
2 5 (4.50%) JSON
2 5 (4.50%) REST
3 3 (2.70%) Kafka
4 2 (1.80%) Great Expectations
4 2 (1.80%) Middleware
4 2 (1.80%) XML
5 1 (0.90%) Hugging Face
5 1 (0.90%) Lightning Web Components
5 1 (0.90%) Pandas
5 1 (0.90%) pytest
5 1 (0.90%) Ruby on Rails
5 1 (0.90%) SOAP
5 1 (0.90%) Swagger
Miscellaneous
1 19 (17.12%) Data Structures
2 13 (11.71%) Product Ownership
3 12 (10.81%) Fixed Income
4 11 (9.91%) Equities
5 9 (8.11%) Onboarding
6 8 (7.21%) Cloud Native
6 8 (7.21%) Derivative
7 7 (6.31%) Legacy Systems
7 7 (6.31%) Pricing Data
8 6 (5.41%) Management Information System
9 5 (4.50%) Data Protection Act
10 3 (2.70%) Algorithms
10 3 (2.70%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 2 (1.80%) FMCG
11 2 (1.80%) Marketing Technology
12 1 (0.90%) Credit Risk
12 1 (0.90%) Hedge funds
12 1 (0.90%) Life Science
12 1 (0.90%) Market Risk
12 1 (0.90%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Processes & Methodologies
1 66 (59.46%) Data Modelling
2 43 (38.74%) Data Governance
3 35 (31.53%) Data Management
4 31 (27.93%) Validation
5 30 (27.03%) Logical Data Model
6 27 (24.32%) Data Architecture
7 23 (20.72%) Analytics
7 23 (20.72%) Physical Data Model
7 23 (20.72%) Problem-Solving
8 21 (18.92%) Integration Patterns
8 21 (18.92%) Stakeholder Management
9 20 (18.02%) Metadata Management
10 19 (17.12%) Data Integration
10 19 (17.12%) ETL
11 18 (16.22%) Data Pipeline
12 17 (15.32%) Data Lineage
13 16 (14.41%) Data Analysis
13 16 (14.41%) Reference Data Management
14 15 (13.51%) Business Intelligence
15 14 (12.61%) Agile
Programming Languages
1 49 (44.14%) SQL
2 22 (19.82%) Python
3 3 (2.70%) SPARQL
4 2 (1.80%) Bash
5 1 (0.90%) Apex Code
5 1 (0.90%) C
5 1 (0.90%) Java
5 1 (0.90%) Kusto Query Language
5 1 (0.90%) PL/SQL
5 1 (0.90%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 12 (10.81%) Security Cleared
2 8 (7.21%) SC Cleared
3 7 (6.31%) Degree
4 5 (4.50%) BPSS Clearance
5 2 (1.80%) DBS Check
6 1 (0.90%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (0.90%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 42 (37.84%) Data Quality
2 6 (5.41%) GDPR
3 5 (4.50%) MiFID
4 3 (2.70%) QA
5 2 (1.80%) SLA
6 1 (0.90%) Accessibility
6 1 (0.90%) AIFMD
6 1 (0.90%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 1 (0.90%) EMIR
6 1 (0.90%) GRC
6 1 (0.90%) IFRS
6 1 (0.90%) IFRS 9
6 1 (0.90%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 1 (0.90%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 3 (2.70%) Grafana
2 1 (0.90%) Kibana
2 1 (0.90%) Prometheus
2 1 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 28 (25.23%) Databricks
2 22 (19.82%) Microsoft
3 7 (6.31%) Informatica
4 5 (4.50%) Murex
5 4 (3.60%) Salesforce
5 4 (3.60%) SAP
5 4 (3.60%) SimCorp
6 3 (2.70%) Bloomberg
6 3 (2.70%) Charles River
6 3 (2.70%) Google
6 3 (2.70%) Oracle
6 3 (2.70%) Sparx
7 2 (1.80%) Avaloq
7 2 (1.80%) GoldenSource
7 2 (1.80%) IDERA
7 2 (1.80%) Temenos
8 1 (0.90%) Calypso
8 1 (0.90%) ION Trading
8 1 (0.90%) ServiceNow
8 1 (0.90%) Talend