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 12 September 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 531 448 470
Rank change year-on-year -83 +22 +58
Contract jobs citing Reference Data 108 63 56
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.23% 0.23% 0.17%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 0.69% 0.63% 0.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 67 40 44
10th Percentile £402 £452 £437
25th Percentile £433 £508 £514
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £600 £650
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -7.69% +10.17%
75th Percentile £688 £685 £847
90th Percentile £785 £778 £925
UK median daily rate £525 £590 £650
% change year-on-year -11.02% -9.23% +10.36%
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 15,653 10,005 10,138
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 33.77% 35.96% 30.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,494 6,293 6,311
10th Percentile £325 £300 £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 £675
90th Percentile £750 £775 £825
UK median daily rate £525 £515 £543
% change year-on-year +1.94% -5.07% -1.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,023 500 434
10th Percentile £14.17 £15.50 £14.17
25th Percentile £18.00 £18.87 £22.50
Median hourly rate £37.50 £32.95 £57.35
Median % change year-on-year +13.83% -42.55% +25.00%
75th Percentile £69.13 £59.08 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £75.00 £75.16
UK median hourly rate £37.50 £30.00 £50.00
% change year-on-year +25.00% -40.00% +13.84%

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 12 September 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 12 September 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 -54 70 £550 -12.00% 81
East of England -10 12 £550 - 1
Midlands -43 10 £434 -15.41% 3
North of England -70 7 £411 -25.27% 6
West Midlands -44 6 £535 +12.63% 2
North West - 6 £418 - 5
South East -56 5 £494 -1.25% 5
East Midlands -15 4 £425 -22.82% 1
South West - 2 £575 - 13
Yorkshire -48 1 £410 -25.45% 1
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 (4.63%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (1.85%) Apache Spark
2 2 (1.85%) Confluence
3 1 (0.93%) Apache
3 1 (0.93%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
3 1 (0.93%) Jupyter
3 1 (0.93%) MTS
3 1 (0.93%) PowerExchange
3 1 (0.93%) SharePoint
Applications
1 16 (14.81%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (2.78%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.93%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.93%) Microsoft Project
3 1 (0.93%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 7 (6.48%) Aladdin
2 4 (3.70%) ResourceLink
3 3 (2.78%) Endur
3 3 (2.78%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 2 (1.85%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (1.85%) SAP MDG
4 2 (1.85%) SAP S/4HANA
4 2 (1.85%) SimCorp Dimension
5 1 (0.93%) Bloomberg TOMS
5 1 (0.93%) Dynamics CRM
5 1 (0.93%) Finacle
5 1 (0.93%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.93%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.93%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.93%) Oracle SCM
5 1 (0.93%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 35 (32.41%) Azure
2 21 (19.44%) AWS
3 15 (13.89%) GCP
4 14 (12.96%) Power Platform
5 10 (9.26%) Azure Data Factory
6 9 (8.33%) dbt
7 7 (6.48%) Amazon S3
7 7 (6.48%) Azure Databricks
7 7 (6.48%) Snowflake
8 6 (5.56%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 5 (4.63%) AWS Lambda
9 5 (4.63%) Microsoft Purview
9 5 (4.63%) Serverless
10 3 (2.78%) Alation
10 3 (2.78%) Azure AI
10 3 (2.78%) Collibra
10 3 (2.78%) Datadog
10 3 (2.78%) SaaS
11 2 (1.85%) Cloud Functions
11 2 (1.85%) GitHub
Database & Business Intelligence
1 43 (39.81%) Metadata
2 15 (13.89%) Data Warehouse
3 14 (12.96%) Power BI
4 11 (10.19%) Data Lake
5 9 (8.33%) Data Mining
6 7 (6.48%) Delta Lake
6 7 (6.48%) Relational Database
7 6 (5.56%) SQL Server
8 5 (4.63%) Amazon Redshift
8 5 (4.63%) BigQuery
9 4 (3.70%) Amazon Athena
9 4 (3.70%) Data Vault
9 4 (3.70%) Oracle BI Publisher
9 4 (3.70%) PostgreSQL
9 4 (3.70%) Power Query
10 3 (2.78%) Amazon Aurora
10 3 (2.78%) Neo4j
10 3 (2.78%) Oracle Reports
10 3 (2.78%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (2.78%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 18 (16.67%) ERwin
2 14 (12.96%) ER Studio
3 10 (9.26%) JIRA
4 6 (5.56%) PowerDesigner
5 3 (2.78%) Git
6 2 (1.85%) GitLab
7 1 (0.93%) Deequ
7 1 (0.93%) Jenkins
7 1 (0.93%) MLflow
7 1 (0.93%) Postman
7 1 (0.93%) Robot Framework
7 1 (0.93%) SonarQube
General
1 48 (44.44%) Finance
2 39 (36.11%) Analytical Skills
3 24 (22.22%) Social Skills
4 22 (20.37%) Banking
5 11 (10.19%) Legal
6 9 (8.33%) Investment Banking
7 8 (7.41%) Front Office
8 6 (5.56%) Financial Institution
8 6 (5.56%) Publishing
9 4 (3.70%) Billing
9 4 (3.70%) Retail
10 3 (2.78%) Marketing
10 3 (2.78%) Public Sector
11 2 (1.85%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (1.85%) General Ledger
11 2 (1.85%) Military
11 2 (1.85%) Pharmaceutical
11 2 (1.85%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.93%) Back Office
12 1 (0.93%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 25 (23.15%) Analyst
2 22 (20.37%) Architect
3 21 (19.44%) Business Analyst
4 20 (18.52%) Data Architect
5 17 (15.74%) Data Engineer
6 12 (11.11%) Data Modeller
7 11 (10.19%) Senior
8 7 (6.48%) Data Business Analyst
9 6 (5.56%) Lead
10 5 (4.63%) Consultant
10 5 (4.63%) Data Analyst
10 5 (4.63%) Designer
10 5 (4.63%) Senior Analyst
11 4 (3.70%) Data Management Specialist
11 4 (3.70%) Developer
11 4 (3.70%) Python Engineer
11 4 (3.70%) Senior Business Analyst
11 4 (3.70%) Senior Data Engineer
11 4 (3.70%) Solutions Architect
12 3 (2.78%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (10.19%) PySpark
2 10 (9.26%) REST
3 6 (5.56%) JSON
4 5 (4.63%) Kafka
4 5 (4.63%) Oracle Fusion
4 5 (4.63%) SOAP
5 4 (3.70%) RESTful
6 3 (2.78%) Middleware
7 2 (1.85%) Great Expectations
7 2 (1.85%) XML
8 1 (0.93%) FpML
8 1 (0.93%) Hugging Face
8 1 (0.93%) Pandas
8 1 (0.93%) pytest
8 1 (0.93%) Ruby on Rails
8 1 (0.93%) Swagger
8 1 (0.93%) Terraform
Miscellaneous
1 19 (17.59%) Data Structures
2 12 (11.11%) Legacy Systems
2 12 (11.11%) Onboarding
2 12 (11.11%) Product Ownership
3 10 (9.26%) Management Information System
4 9 (8.33%) Fixed Income
5 8 (7.41%) Cloud Native
5 8 (7.41%) Pricing Data
6 7 (6.48%) Equities
7 5 (4.63%) Data Protection Act
7 5 (4.63%) Derivative
8 3 (2.78%) Algorithms
8 3 (2.78%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
8 3 (2.78%) Reinsurance
9 2 (1.85%) Analytical Mindset
9 2 (1.85%) FMCG
9 2 (1.85%) Marketing Technology
9 2 (1.85%) Replication
10 1 (0.93%) Life Science
10 1 (0.93%) Market Risk
Operating Systems
1 3 (2.78%) Windows
2 1 (0.93%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 68 (62.96%) Data Modelling
2 50 (46.30%) Data Governance
3 37 (34.26%) Data Management
4 35 (32.41%) Logical Data Model
5 31 (28.70%) Data Architecture
6 30 (27.78%) Validation
7 27 (25.00%) Integration Patterns
8 26 (24.07%) Physical Data Model
9 25 (23.15%) Metadata Management
9 25 (23.15%) Stakeholder Management
10 24 (22.22%) Migration
10 24 (22.22%) Reference Data Management
11 22 (20.37%) Analytics
11 22 (20.37%) ETL
11 22 (20.37%) Problem-Solving
12 21 (19.44%) Data Integration
13 20 (18.52%) Business Intelligence
13 20 (18.52%) Data Migration
13 20 (18.52%) Data Pipeline
14 19 (17.59%) Data Analysis
Programming Languages
1 58 (53.70%) SQL
2 18 (16.67%) Python
3 5 (4.63%) PL/SQL
4 3 (2.78%) SPARQL
5 2 (1.85%) Bash
6 1 (0.93%) Java
6 1 (0.93%) Kusto Query Language
6 1 (0.93%) Scala
6 1 (0.93%) Tcl
6 1 (0.93%) T-SQL
6 1 (0.93%) VBA
Qualifications
1 12 (11.11%) Security Cleared
2 10 (9.26%) SC Cleared
3 6 (5.56%) Degree
4 5 (4.63%) BPSS Clearance
5 2 (1.85%) DBS Check
6 1 (0.93%) Master's Degree
6 1 (0.93%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 50 (46.30%) Data Quality
2 6 (5.56%) GDPR
3 5 (4.63%) MiFID
3 5 (4.63%) QA
4 2 (1.85%) California Consumer Privacy Act
4 2 (1.85%) SLA
5 1 (0.93%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.93%) AIFMD
5 1 (0.93%) EMIR
5 1 (0.93%) GRC
5 1 (0.93%) ISO 9001
5 1 (0.93%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 1 (0.93%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 3 (2.78%) Grafana
2 1 (0.93%) Kibana
2 1 (0.93%) Prometheus
2 1 (0.93%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 28 (25.93%) Databricks
2 23 (21.30%) Microsoft
3 10 (9.26%) Informatica
4 8 (7.41%) Oracle
5 5 (4.63%) Google
6 4 (3.70%) Bloomberg
6 4 (3.70%) Talend
7 3 (2.78%) GoldenSource
7 3 (2.78%) Salesforce
7 3 (2.78%) SAP
7 3 (2.78%) SimCorp
7 3 (2.78%) Sparx
8 2 (1.85%) Murex
9 1 (0.93%) Avaloq
9 1 (0.93%) Charles River
9 1 (0.93%) ION Trading
9 1 (0.93%) OpenLink
9 1 (0.93%) Sybase
9 1 (0.93%) Temenos
9 1 (0.93%) Tradeweb