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

6 months to
5 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 526 443 467
Rank change year-on-year -83 +24 +60
Contract jobs citing Reference Data 106 60 56
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.23% 0.22% 0.17%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 0.69% 0.61% 0.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 67 38 44
10th Percentile £402 £446 £437
25th Percentile £433 £514 £514
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £650
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% -7.69% +10.26%
75th Percentile £688 £670 £847
90th Percentile £785 £783 £925
UK median daily rate £525 £590 £650
% change year-on-year -11.02% -9.23% +10.50%
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 15,471 9,838 9,964
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 33.71% 35.91% 30.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,448 6,210 6,274
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 £688
90th Percentile £750 £775 £825
UK median daily rate £525 £515 £550
% change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 975 488 458
10th Percentile £14.54 £15.50 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.53 £18.87 £22.00
Median hourly rate £38.25 £32.75 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.78% -40.45% +19.96%
75th Percentile £68.75 £60.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £77.50 £75.16
UK median hourly rate £38.72 £30.00 £47.50
% change year-on-year +29.07% -36.84% +10.14%

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 5 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 5 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 -58 71 £550 -12.00% 147
East of England -11 12 £550 - 1
North of England -63 8 £418 -23.95% 6
Midlands -50 7 £434 -15.41% 7
North West - 6 £418 - 5
East Midlands -16 4 £425 -22.82% 3
South East -68 4 £500 - 4
West Midlands -45 3 £535 +12.63% 4
Yorkshire -46 2 £510 -7.27% 1
South West - 2 £575 - 13
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 (4.72%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (1.89%) Apache Spark
2 2 (1.89%) Confluence
3 1 (0.94%) Apache
3 1 (0.94%) Blackberry Enterprise Server
3 1 (0.94%) Jupyter
3 1 (0.94%) MTS
3 1 (0.94%) PowerExchange
Applications
1 13 (12.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.94%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.94%) MS Visio
2 1 (0.94%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 7 (6.60%) Aladdin
2 3 (2.83%) Endur
2 3 (2.83%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 2 (1.89%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (1.89%) SAP MDG
3 2 (1.89%) SAP S/4HANA
3 2 (1.89%) SimCorp Dimension
4 1 (0.94%) Bloomberg TOMS
4 1 (0.94%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.94%) Finacle
4 1 (0.94%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.94%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.94%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.94%) Oracle SCM
4 1 (0.94%) ResourceLink
4 1 (0.94%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 35 (33.02%) Azure
2 21 (19.81%) AWS
3 15 (14.15%) GCP
4 14 (13.21%) Power Platform
5 10 (9.43%) Azure Data Factory
6 9 (8.49%) dbt
7 7 (6.60%) Amazon S3
7 7 (6.60%) Azure Databricks
7 7 (6.60%) Snowflake
8 6 (5.66%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 5 (4.72%) AWS Lambda
9 5 (4.72%) Microsoft Purview
9 5 (4.72%) Serverless
10 3 (2.83%) Alation
10 3 (2.83%) Azure AI
10 3 (2.83%) Collibra
10 3 (2.83%) Datadog
10 3 (2.83%) SaaS
11 2 (1.89%) Cloud Functions
11 2 (1.89%) GitHub
Database & Business Intelligence
1 43 (40.57%) Metadata
2 15 (14.15%) Data Warehouse
3 14 (13.21%) Power BI
4 11 (10.38%) Data Lake
5 9 (8.49%) Data Mining
6 7 (6.60%) Delta Lake
6 7 (6.60%) Relational Database
7 6 (5.66%) SQL Server
8 5 (4.72%) Amazon Redshift
8 5 (4.72%) BigQuery
9 4 (3.77%) Amazon Athena
9 4 (3.77%) Data Vault
9 4 (3.77%) PostgreSQL
10 3 (2.83%) Amazon Aurora
10 3 (2.83%) Amazon RDS
10 3 (2.83%) DynamoDB
10 3 (2.83%) Neo4j
10 3 (2.83%) SQL Server Integration Services
10 3 (2.83%) Tableau
11 2 (1.89%) Ataccama
Development Applications
1 18 (16.98%) ERwin
2 14 (13.21%) ER Studio
3 7 (6.60%) JIRA
4 6 (5.66%) PowerDesigner
5 3 (2.83%) Git
6 2 (1.89%) GitLab
7 1 (0.94%) Deequ
7 1 (0.94%) Jenkins
7 1 (0.94%) MLflow
7 1 (0.94%) Postman
7 1 (0.94%) Robot Framework
7 1 (0.94%) SonarQube
General
1 49 (46.23%) Finance
2 37 (34.91%) Analytical Skills
3 24 (22.64%) Social Skills
4 23 (21.70%) Banking
5 9 (8.49%) Investment Banking
6 8 (7.55%) Front Office
6 8 (7.55%) Legal
7 6 (5.66%) Financial Institution
7 6 (5.66%) Publishing
8 4 (3.77%) Billing
8 4 (3.77%) Retail
9 3 (2.83%) Marketing
9 3 (2.83%) Public Sector
10 2 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (1.89%) General Ledger
10 2 (1.89%) Pharmaceutical
10 2 (1.89%) Presentation Skills
11 1 (0.94%) Back Office
11 1 (0.94%) Manufacturing
11 1 (0.94%) Military
Job Titles
1 25 (23.58%) Analyst
2 23 (21.70%) Architect
3 21 (19.81%) Business Analyst
3 21 (19.81%) Data Architect
4 17 (16.04%) Data Engineer
5 12 (11.32%) Data Modeller
6 11 (10.38%) Senior
7 7 (6.60%) Data Business Analyst
8 5 (4.72%) Consultant
8 5 (4.72%) Data Analyst
8 5 (4.72%) Designer
8 5 (4.72%) Lead
8 5 (4.72%) Senior Analyst
9 4 (3.77%) Data Management Specialist
9 4 (3.77%) Developer
9 4 (3.77%) Python Engineer
9 4 (3.77%) Senior Business Analyst
9 4 (3.77%) Senior Data Engineer
9 4 (3.77%) Solutions Architect
10 3 (2.83%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (10.38%) PySpark
2 7 (6.60%) REST
3 6 (5.66%) JSON
4 5 (4.72%) Kafka
5 4 (3.77%) RESTful
6 3 (2.83%) Middleware
7 2 (1.89%) Great Expectations
7 2 (1.89%) Oracle Fusion
7 2 (1.89%) SOAP
7 2 (1.89%) XML
8 1 (0.94%) FpML
8 1 (0.94%) Hugging Face
8 1 (0.94%) Pandas
8 1 (0.94%) pytest
8 1 (0.94%) Ruby on Rails
8 1 (0.94%) Swagger
8 1 (0.94%) Terraform
Miscellaneous
1 16 (15.09%) Data Structures
2 13 (12.26%) Product Ownership
3 11 (10.38%) Onboarding
4 10 (9.43%) Fixed Income
4 10 (9.43%) Legacy Systems
5 9 (8.49%) Management Information System
6 8 (7.55%) Cloud Native
6 8 (7.55%) Equities
6 8 (7.55%) Pricing Data
7 5 (4.72%) Data Protection Act
7 5 (4.72%) Derivative
8 3 (2.83%) Algorithms
8 3 (2.83%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
8 3 (2.83%) Reinsurance
9 2 (1.89%) Analytical Mindset
9 2 (1.89%) FMCG
9 2 (1.89%) Marketing Technology
9 2 (1.89%) Replication
10 1 (0.94%) Life Science
10 1 (0.94%) Market Risk
Operating Systems
1 1 (0.94%) Linux
1 1 (0.94%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 69 (65.09%) Data Modelling
2 51 (48.11%) Data Governance
3 37 (34.91%) Data Management
4 35 (33.02%) Logical Data Model
5 31 (29.25%) Data Architecture
6 28 (26.42%) Validation
7 26 (24.53%) Physical Data Model
8 25 (23.58%) Metadata Management
8 25 (23.58%) Stakeholder Management
9 24 (22.64%) Integration Patterns
9 24 (22.64%) Reference Data Management
10 22 (20.75%) Analytics
10 22 (20.75%) Problem-Solving
11 21 (19.81%) Data Integration
11 21 (19.81%) Migration
12 20 (18.87%) Data Pipeline
13 19 (17.92%) ETL
14 17 (16.04%) Business Intelligence
14 17 (16.04%) Data Migration
14 17 (16.04%) Data Strategy
Programming Languages
1 55 (51.89%) SQL
2 18 (16.98%) Python
3 3 (2.83%) SPARQL
4 2 (1.89%) Bash
4 2 (1.89%) PL/SQL
5 1 (0.94%) Java
5 1 (0.94%) Kusto Query Language
5 1 (0.94%) Scala
5 1 (0.94%) Tcl
5 1 (0.94%) T-SQL
5 1 (0.94%) VBA
Qualifications
1 10 (9.43%) Security Cleared
2 8 (7.55%) SC Cleared
3 6 (5.66%) Degree
4 5 (4.72%) BPSS Clearance
5 2 (1.89%) DBS Check
6 1 (0.94%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 49 (46.23%) Data Quality
2 6 (5.66%) GDPR
3 5 (4.72%) MiFID
4 3 (2.83%) QA
5 2 (1.89%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 2 (1.89%) SLA
6 1 (0.94%) Accessibility
6 1 (0.94%) AIFMD
6 1 (0.94%) EMIR
6 1 (0.94%) GRC
6 1 (0.94%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 1 (0.94%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 3 (2.83%) Grafana
2 1 (0.94%) Kibana
2 1 (0.94%) Prometheus
2 1 (0.94%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 28 (26.42%) Databricks
2 20 (18.87%) Microsoft
3 10 (9.43%) Informatica
4 5 (4.72%) Google
4 5 (4.72%) Oracle
5 4 (3.77%) Bloomberg
5 4 (3.77%) Talend
6 3 (2.83%) GoldenSource
6 3 (2.83%) Salesforce
6 3 (2.83%) SAP
6 3 (2.83%) SimCorp
6 3 (2.83%) Sparx
7 2 (1.89%) Murex
8 1 (0.94%) Avaloq
8 1 (0.94%) Charles River
8 1 (0.94%) ION Trading
8 1 (0.94%) OpenLink
8 1 (0.94%) Sybase
8 1 (0.94%) Temenos
8 1 (0.94%) Tradeweb