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

6 months to
26 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 519 454 480
Rank change year-on-year -65 +26 +41
Contract jobs citing Reference Data 109 60 47
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.23% 0.21% 0.14%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 0.69% 0.60% 0.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 71 39 34
10th Percentile £405 £456 £437
25th Percentile £443 £518 £485
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £650
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% -7.69% +4.00%
75th Percentile £694 £700 £825
90th Percentile £775 £780 £925
UK median daily rate £550 £595 £625
% change year-on-year -7.56% -4.80% +5.04%
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 15,878 10,064 10,138
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 34.11% 36.02% 30.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,585 6,317 6,179
10th Percentile £325 £300 £296
25th Percentile £425 £413 £419
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 £520 £538
% change year-on-year +0.96% -3.26% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,102 513 394
10th Percentile £14.00 £15.48 £15.39
25th Percentile £17.85 £18.87 £24.18
Median hourly rate £35.82 £30.50 £57.35
Median % change year-on-year +17.44% -46.82% +27.44%
75th Percentile £68.75 £56.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £73.75 £75.16
UK median hourly rate £37.50 £29.33 £50.00
% change year-on-year +27.86% -41.34% +12.36%

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 26 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 26 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 -56 73 £586 -6.22% 120
East of England -25 10 £625 - 5
Midlands -38 10 £434 -15.41% 4
North of England -69 7 £411 -25.27% 7
West Midlands -40 6 £535 +12.63% 2
North West - 6 £418 - 5
South East -68 5 £494 -1.25% 5
East Midlands -13 4 £425 -22.82% 2
South West - 2 £575 - 18
Yorkshire -45 1 £410 -25.45% 2
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 (4.59%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (1.83%) Apache Spark
2 2 (1.83%) CMS
2 2 (1.83%) Confluence
3 1 (0.92%) Apache
3 1 (0.92%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
3 1 (0.92%) Jupyter
3 1 (0.92%) MTS
3 1 (0.92%) PowerExchange
3 1 (0.92%) SharePoint
Applications
1 16 (14.68%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (2.75%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.92%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.92%) Microsoft Project
3 1 (0.92%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 8 (7.34%) Aladdin
2 4 (3.67%) ResourceLink
3 3 (2.75%) Endur
4 2 (1.83%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (1.83%) SAP MDG
4 2 (1.83%) SAP S/4HANA
4 2 (1.83%) SimCorp Dimension
4 2 (1.83%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
5 1 (0.92%) Actimize
5 1 (0.92%) Bloomberg TOMS
5 1 (0.92%) Dynamics CRM
5 1 (0.92%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.92%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.92%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.92%) Oracle SCM
5 1 (0.92%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 36 (33.03%) Azure
2 20 (18.35%) AWS
3 15 (13.76%) GCP
4 13 (11.93%) Power Platform
5 11 (10.09%) Azure Data Factory
6 8 (7.34%) dbt
6 8 (7.34%) Snowflake
7 7 (6.42%) Azure Databricks
7 7 (6.42%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 6 (5.50%) Amazon S3
8 6 (5.50%) Microsoft Purview
9 5 (4.59%) AWS Lambda
9 5 (4.59%) Serverless
10 4 (3.67%) Collibra
11 3 (2.75%) Alation
11 3 (2.75%) Azure AI
11 3 (2.75%) Datadog
11 3 (2.75%) SaaS
12 2 (1.83%) Azure DevOps
12 2 (1.83%) Cloud Functions
Database & Business Intelligence
1 41 (37.61%) Metadata
2 13 (11.93%) Data Lake
2 13 (11.93%) Data Warehouse
2 13 (11.93%) Power BI
3 9 (8.26%) Data Mining
4 7 (6.42%) Delta Lake
4 7 (6.42%) Relational Database
5 5 (4.59%) SQL Server
6 4 (3.67%) Amazon Redshift
6 4 (3.67%) BigQuery
6 4 (3.67%) Data Vault
6 4 (3.67%) Oracle BI Publisher
6 4 (3.67%) PostgreSQL
6 4 (3.67%) Power Query
7 3 (2.75%) Amazon Athena
7 3 (2.75%) Amazon Aurora
7 3 (2.75%) Amazon RDS
7 3 (2.75%) DynamoDB
7 3 (2.75%) Neo4j
7 3 (2.75%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 16 (14.68%) ERwin
2 13 (11.93%) ER Studio
3 10 (9.17%) JIRA
4 6 (5.50%) PowerDesigner
5 2 (1.83%) Git
5 2 (1.83%) GitLab
6 1 (0.92%) Deequ
6 1 (0.92%) Jenkins
6 1 (0.92%) MLflow
6 1 (0.92%) Postman
6 1 (0.92%) Robot Framework
6 1 (0.92%) SonarQube
General
1 46 (42.20%) Finance
2 37 (33.94%) Analytical Skills
3 21 (19.27%) Social Skills
4 19 (17.43%) Banking
5 11 (10.09%) Legal
6 10 (9.17%) Investment Banking
7 9 (8.26%) Front Office
8 6 (5.50%) Financial Institution
8 6 (5.50%) Publishing
9 4 (3.67%) Billing
10 3 (2.75%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (2.75%) Marketing
10 3 (2.75%) Public Sector
10 3 (2.75%) Retail
11 2 (1.83%) Back Office
11 2 (1.83%) General Ledger
11 2 (1.83%) Military
11 2 (1.83%) Pharmaceutical
11 2 (1.83%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.92%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 28 (25.69%) Analyst
2 24 (22.02%) Business Analyst
3 21 (19.27%) Architect
4 19 (17.43%) Data Architect
5 16 (14.68%) Data Engineer
6 15 (13.76%) Senior
7 11 (10.09%) Data Modeller
8 10 (9.17%) Data Business Analyst
9 7 (6.42%) Senior Analyst
10 6 (5.50%) Consultant
10 6 (5.50%) Lead
10 6 (5.50%) Senior Business Analyst
11 5 (4.59%) Data Analyst
12 4 (3.67%) Data Management Specialist
12 4 (3.67%) Designer
12 4 (3.67%) Developer
12 4 (3.67%) Python Engineer
12 4 (3.67%) Senior Data Engineer
12 4 (3.67%) Transformation Analyst
13 3 (2.75%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (9.17%) PySpark
2 8 (7.34%) REST
3 5 (4.59%) JSON
3 5 (4.59%) Oracle Fusion
3 5 (4.59%) SOAP
4 4 (3.67%) Kafka
4 4 (3.67%) RESTful
5 3 (2.75%) XML
6 2 (1.83%) Great Expectations
6 2 (1.83%) Middleware
7 1 (0.92%) FpML
7 1 (0.92%) Hugging Face
7 1 (0.92%) Pandas
7 1 (0.92%) pytest
7 1 (0.92%) Swagger
7 1 (0.92%) Terraform
Miscellaneous
1 18 (16.51%) Data Structures
2 12 (11.01%) Legacy Systems
2 12 (11.01%) Onboarding
3 11 (10.09%) Fixed Income
3 11 (10.09%) Product Ownership
4 10 (9.17%) Management Information System
5 9 (8.26%) Cloud Native
5 9 (8.26%) Equities
6 8 (7.34%) Pricing Data
7 7 (6.42%) Derivative
8 6 (5.50%) Data Protection Act
9 3 (2.75%) Algorithms
9 3 (2.75%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 3 (2.75%) Reinsurance
10 2 (1.83%) Analytical Mindset
10 2 (1.83%) FMCG
10 2 (1.83%) Replication
11 1 (0.92%) Hedge funds
11 1 (0.92%) Life Science
11 1 (0.92%) Market Risk
Operating Systems
1 3 (2.75%) Windows
2 1 (0.92%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 67 (61.47%) Data Modelling
2 53 (48.62%) Data Governance
3 37 (33.94%) Data Management
4 34 (31.19%) Logical Data Model
5 31 (28.44%) Data Architecture
6 30 (27.52%) Validation
7 28 (25.69%) Migration
8 26 (23.85%) Stakeholder Management
9 25 (22.94%) ETL
9 25 (22.94%) Metadata Management
9 25 (22.94%) Physical Data Model
10 24 (22.02%) Integration Patterns
11 23 (21.10%) Analytics
11 23 (21.10%) Data Migration
11 23 (21.10%) Reference Data Management
12 22 (20.18%) Data Integration
13 21 (19.27%) Problem-Solving
14 20 (18.35%) Data Pipeline
15 19 (17.43%) Business Intelligence
16 18 (16.51%) Lakehouse
Programming Languages
1 59 (54.13%) SQL
2 17 (15.60%) Python
3 5 (4.59%) PL/SQL
4 3 (2.75%) SPARQL
5 2 (1.83%) Bash
6 1 (0.92%) C#
6 1 (0.92%) Java
6 1 (0.92%) Kusto Query Language
6 1 (0.92%) Scala
6 1 (0.92%) Tcl
6 1 (0.92%) T-SQL
6 1 (0.92%) VBA
Qualifications
1 11 (10.09%) Security Cleared
2 10 (9.17%) SC Cleared
3 6 (5.50%) Degree
4 5 (4.59%) BPSS Clearance
5 2 (1.83%) DBS Check
6 1 (0.92%) CFA
6 1 (0.92%) Master's Degree
6 1 (0.92%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 48 (44.04%) Data Quality
2 6 (5.50%) GDPR
3 5 (4.59%) MiFID
4 4 (3.67%) QA
5 2 (1.83%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 2 (1.83%) SLA
6 1 (0.92%) Accessibility
6 1 (0.92%) AIFMD
6 1 (0.92%) EMIR
6 1 (0.92%) GRC
6 1 (0.92%) ISO 9001
6 1 (0.92%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 1 (0.92%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 3 (2.75%) Grafana
2 2 (1.83%) Single Sign-On
3 1 (0.92%) Kibana
3 1 (0.92%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 29 (26.61%) Databricks
2 24 (22.02%) Microsoft
3 10 (9.17%) Informatica
4 8 (7.34%) Oracle
5 6 (5.50%) Bloomberg
6 5 (4.59%) Google
7 4 (3.67%) Talend
8 3 (2.75%) GoldenSource
8 3 (2.75%) Salesforce
8 3 (2.75%) SAP
8 3 (2.75%) SimCorp
9 2 (1.83%) Murex
9 2 (1.83%) Sparx
10 1 (0.92%) BEA
10 1 (0.92%) eFront
10 1 (0.92%) MuleSoft
10 1 (0.92%) OpenAI
10 1 (0.92%) Refinitiv
10 1 (0.92%) ServiceNow
10 1 (0.92%) Workday