Metadata Contract Job Trends

Metadata
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Metadata skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 3 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 209 300 354
Rank change year-on-year +91 +54 +32
Contract jobs citing Metadata 713 279 213
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.34% 0.84% 0.55%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 8.75% 4.64% 3.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 459 193 137
10th Percentile £386 £308 £379
25th Percentile £453 £450 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £671 £638 £775
90th Percentile £752 £750 £925
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £425 £475
% change year-on-year +23.53% -10.53% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 4 9
10th Percentile £30.69 - -
25th Percentile £57.63 £13.25 £13.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £19.25 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +250.65% -40.77% -8.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £42.50 £33.75
90th Percentile - £69.50 £48.18
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £13.50 £13.50
% change year-on-year +400.00% - -66.25%

All Database & BI Skills
UK

Metadata falls under the Databases and Business Intelligence category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring database or business intelligence skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for database or business intelligence skills 8,147 6,013 7,066
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 15.33% 18.16% 18.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,407 4,064 5,009
10th Percentile £355 £344 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.48% -3.33% -3.67%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £475
% change year-on-year - - -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 257 91 101
10th Percentile £16.42 £19.25 £15.00
25th Percentile £24.25 £23.50 £20.75
Median hourly rate £39.50 £35.00 £35.50
Median % change year-on-year +12.86% -1.41% -35.45%
75th Percentile £60.75 £64.38 £59.95
90th Percentile £76.20 £78.70 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.25 £31.64 £30.00
% change year-on-year +20.89% +5.47% -42.86%

Metadata
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Metadata relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Metadata job vacancy trend in the UK

Metadata
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Metadata.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Metadata

Metadata
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Metadata over the 6 months to 3 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Metadata in the UK

Metadata
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Metadata.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Metadata

Metadata
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Metadata over the 6 months to 3 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Metadata in the UK

Metadata
Top 16 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Metadata within the UK over the 6 months to 3 August 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
England +74 603 £525 - 284
London +53 346 £525 -9.68% 170
UK excluding London +65 282 £525 +23.53% 154
Work from Home +50 207 £525 -8.70% 140
North of England -13 72 £515 +14.36% 26
Midlands -5 62 £589 +450.47% 33
West Midlands -19 58 £613 +472.43% 25
South East -46 49 £525 +23.53% 55
Scotland +34 47 £525 +10.53% 13
Yorkshire -9 38 £515 -4.25% 9
East of England +8 31 £463 +13.08% 9
North West -34 29 £575 +83.12% 15
South West -18 25 £550 -8.33% 10
North East -33 7 £463 +1.37% 2
East Midlands -14 4 £500 +21.95% 8
Wales -15 3 £750 +191.91% 2

Metadata
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 41 (5.75%) SharePoint
2 33 (4.63%) Apache Airflow
3 30 (4.21%) Apache Spark
4 25 (3.51%) Apache
5 19 (2.66%) CMS
6 17 (2.38%) Confluence
7 12 (1.68%) SAS
8 4 (0.56%) Palantir Foundry
9 3 (0.42%) ArcGIS
9 3 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.28%) Alfresco
10 2 (0.28%) Headless CMS
10 2 (0.28%) SharePoint Server
11 1 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 1 (0.14%) Apache Solr
11 1 (0.14%) Drupal
11 1 (0.14%) Jupyter
11 1 (0.14%) Liferay
11 1 (0.14%) Tomcat
11 1 (0.14%) WordPress
Applications
1 21 (2.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (0.98%) Navisworks
2 7 (0.98%) Notepad++
2 7 (0.98%) Revit
3 5 (0.70%) MS Visio
4 3 (0.42%) Spreadsheet
5 2 (0.28%) Adobe Creative Suite
5 2 (0.28%) Chatbot
5 2 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
6 1 (0.14%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.14%) Notion
Business Applications
1 13 (1.82%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 5 (0.70%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.56%) Summit
4 3 (0.42%) SAP HR
4 3 (0.42%) SAP MDG
5 2 (0.28%) HFM
5 2 (0.28%) Maximo
5 2 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
5 2 (0.28%) Workfront
6 1 (0.14%) Loan IQ
6 1 (0.14%) Oracle General Ledger
6 1 (0.14%) Oracle Payables
6 1 (0.14%) Oracle Receivables
Cloud Services
1 210 (29.45%) Azure
2 158 (22.16%) AWS
3 100 (14.03%) Power Platform
4 79 (11.08%) GCP
5 59 (8.27%) Collibra
6 52 (7.29%) Microsoft Purview
7 43 (6.03%) Azure Data Factory
8 42 (5.89%) Amazon S3
9 38 (5.33%) GitHub
10 36 (5.05%) dbt
11 34 (4.77%) Snowflake
12 32 (4.49%) Serverless
13 30 (4.21%) AWS Lambda
13 30 (4.21%) Azure DevOps
14 28 (3.93%) Azure Synapse Analytics
15 27 (3.79%) Microsoft 365
16 18 (2.52%) Microsoft Copilot
16 18 (2.52%) Power Automate
17 17 (2.38%) Amazon EMR
18 16 (2.24%) OneDrive
Communications & Networking
1 7 (0.98%) PuTTY
1 7 (0.98%) WinSCP
2 5 (0.70%) Intranet
3 4 (0.56%) SSL
4 3 (0.42%) Broadband
4 3 (0.42%) Firewall
4 3 (0.42%) HTTP
5 1 (0.14%) 4G
5 1 (0.14%) 5G
5 1 (0.14%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (16.27%) Data Warehouse
2 86 (12.06%) Power BI
3 79 (11.08%) Data Lake
4 36 (5.05%) Data Vault
5 34 (4.77%) Relational Database
6 30 (4.21%) NoSQL
6 30 (4.21%) Tableau
7 26 (3.65%) Delta Lake
8 21 (2.95%) BigQuery
8 21 (2.95%) Semantic Layer
9 20 (2.81%) Snowflake Schema
10 19 (2.66%) PostgreSQL
11 17 (2.38%) Amazon Redshift
12 16 (2.24%) SQL Server
13 15 (2.10%) Amazon Athena
13 15 (2.10%) Big Data
14 14 (1.96%) Db2
15 11 (1.54%) Elasticsearch
15 11 (1.54%) Hadoop
15 11 (1.54%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 42 (5.89%) ERwin
2 32 (4.49%) Git
3 27 (3.79%) ER Studio
4 19 (2.66%) JIRA
5 18 (2.52%) Jenkins
6 17 (2.38%) PowerDesigner
7 15 (2.10%) Maven
8 14 (1.96%) GitLab
9 10 (1.40%) SonarQube
10 3 (0.42%) Bitbucket
11 2 (0.28%) Artifactory
11 2 (0.28%) git-flow
11 2 (0.28%) Oracle Forms
11 2 (0.28%) Selenium
11 2 (0.28%) TestRail
12 1 (0.14%) Deequ
12 1 (0.14%) MLflow
12 1 (0.14%) Postman
12 1 (0.14%) Sonatype Nexus
12 1 (0.14%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 201 (28.19%) Finance
2 192 (26.93%) Social Skills
3 148 (20.76%) Analytical Skills
4 97 (13.60%) Banking
5 70 (9.82%) Public Sector
6 37 (5.19%) Investment Banking
7 36 (5.05%) Documentation Skills
8 19 (2.66%) Legal
9 18 (2.52%) Influencing Skills
10 17 (2.38%) Marketing
10 17 (2.38%) Retail
11 16 (2.24%) Publishing
12 13 (1.82%) Aviation
12 13 (1.82%) Presentation Skills
13 12 (1.68%) Front Office
14 11 (1.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 8 (1.12%) Manufacturing
15 8 (1.12%) Pharmaceutical
16 7 (0.98%) Military
17 6 (0.84%) Law
Job Titles
1 167 (23.42%) Architect
2 120 (16.83%) Data Architect
3 110 (15.43%) Data Engineer
4 89 (12.48%) Analyst
5 85 (11.92%) Lead
6 61 (8.56%) Senior
7 54 (7.57%) Data Analyst
8 53 (7.43%) Data Modeller
9 41 (5.75%) Developer
10 33 (4.63%) Business Analyst
11 26 (3.65%) Consultant
12 20 (2.81%) Data Business Analyst
12 20 (2.81%) Data Manager
13 18 (2.52%) Product Owner
14 17 (2.38%) DevOps Engineer
14 17 (2.38%) Senior Data Engineer
15 16 (2.24%) Lead Data Engineer
16 15 (2.10%) Solutions Architect
17 14 (1.96%) Governance Analyst
18 13 (1.82%) Designer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 48 (6.73%) PySpark
2 38 (5.33%) JSON
3 31 (4.35%) Kafka
4 23 (3.23%) REST
5 16 (2.24%) YAML
6 13 (1.82%) Spring Boot
7 12 (1.68%) Node.js
7 12 (1.68%) XML
8 10 (1.40%) .NET
8 10 (1.40%) OAuth
8 10 (1.40%) SLSA
9 9 (1.26%) React
10 8 (1.12%) GraphQL
10 8 (1.12%) Middleware
10 8 (1.12%) OAuth2
10 8 (1.12%) Spring
11 7 (0.98%) SPFx
12 6 (0.84%) ADO
12 6 (0.84%) CSS
12 6 (0.84%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 69 (9.68%) Cloud Native
2 63 (8.84%) Data Structures
3 58 (8.13%) Onboarding
4 53 (7.43%) Taxonomies
5 50 (7.01%) Product Ownership
6 45 (6.31%) Management Information System
7 44 (6.17%) Reference Data
8 41 (5.75%) Legacy Systems
9 19 (2.66%) Derivative
10 16 (2.24%) Data Protection Act
11 13 (1.82%) AI Agents
12 12 (1.68%) Distributed Systems
12 12 (1.68%) Equity Derivative
12 12 (1.68%) Self-Motivation
13 11 (1.54%) Life Science
14 10 (1.40%) Digital Media
14 10 (1.40%) Distributed Computing
15 9 (1.26%) Clustering
15 9 (1.26%) Data Fabric
15 9 (1.26%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 19 (2.66%) Unix
2 12 (1.68%) Linux
3 1 (0.14%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 356 (49.93%) Data Governance
2 341 (47.83%) Data Modelling
3 246 (34.50%) Metadata Management
4 233 (32.68%) Analytics
5 175 (24.54%) Data Architecture
6 169 (23.70%) AI
7 164 (23.00%) Data Pipeline
8 157 (22.02%) ETL
9 153 (21.46%) Agile
10 152 (21.32%) Data Engineering
11 141 (19.78%) CI/CD
12 135 (18.93%) Migration
13 132 (18.51%) Stakeholder Management
14 120 (16.83%) Data Lineage
15 117 (16.41%) Business Intelligence
15 117 (16.41%) Validation
16 113 (15.85%) Data Management
17 109 (15.29%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 107 (15.01%) DevOps
19 106 (14.87%) Logical Data Model
Programming Languages
1 276 (38.71%) SQL
2 186 (26.09%) Python
3 56 (7.85%) Java
4 23 (3.23%) PL/SQL
5 15 (2.10%) Shell Script
6 14 (1.96%) C#
7 13 (1.82%) Groovy
7 13 (1.82%) PowerShell
8 11 (1.54%) JavaScript
9 9 (1.26%) Bash
9 9 (1.26%) C++
10 8 (1.12%) Data Analysis Expressions
10 8 (1.12%) TypeScript
11 7 (0.98%) SPARQL
12 6 (0.84%) Bicep
12 6 (0.84%) T-SQL
13 5 (0.70%) Apex Code
13 5 (0.70%) Scala
14 4 (0.56%) Cypher
14 4 (0.56%) Perl
Qualifications
1 153 (21.46%) Security Cleared
2 116 (16.27%) SC Cleared
3 42 (5.89%) Degree
4 31 (4.35%) BPSS Clearance
5 17 (2.38%) DV Cleared
6 16 (2.24%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (1.68%) Azure Certification
8 11 (1.54%) TOGAF Certification
9 10 (1.40%) Master's Degree
10 7 (0.98%) AWS Certification
11 5 (0.70%) Microsoft Certification
12 3 (0.42%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 2 (0.28%) ACCA
13 2 (0.28%) CBAP
13 2 (0.28%) CIMA
13 2 (0.28%) CISM
13 2 (0.28%) CISSP
13 2 (0.28%) CompTIA Security+
13 2 (0.28%) DBS Check
13 2 (0.28%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 284 (39.83%) Data Quality
2 62 (8.70%) GDPR
3 41 (5.75%) Accessibility
4 36 (5.05%) QA
5 7 (0.98%) Solvency II
6 6 (0.84%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 6 (0.84%) GRC
6 6 (0.84%) ISO 19650
6 6 (0.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 6 (0.84%) NIST
7 5 (0.70%) WCAG
8 4 (0.56%) ISO 22301
8 4 (0.56%) MiFID
9 3 (0.42%) Cyber Essentials
9 3 (0.42%) HIPAA
9 3 (0.42%) ISO 31000
9 3 (0.42%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 3 (0.42%) NCSC
10 2 (0.28%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.28%) PMO
System Software
1 16 (2.24%) Docker
2 9 (1.26%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 30 (4.21%) Terraform
2 20 (2.81%) Kubernetes
3 10 (1.40%) Grafana
4 7 (0.98%) Prometheus
5 6 (0.84%) Single Sign-On
6 4 (0.56%) Active Directory Federation Services
6 4 (0.56%) CA Single Sign-On
6 4 (0.56%) PingFederate
7 2 (0.28%) Ansible
7 2 (0.28%) Kibana
8 1 (0.14%) Apache Ranger
8 1 (0.14%) Control-M
Vendors
1 124 (17.39%) Microsoft
2 110 (15.43%) Databricks
3 52 (7.29%) Oracle
4 50 (7.01%) Informatica
5 22 (3.09%) Google
6 18 (2.52%) Salesforce
7 16 (2.24%) IBM
8 15 (2.10%) SAP
9 14 (1.96%) Talend
10 13 (1.82%) Autodesk
10 13 (1.82%) Sparx
11 11 (1.54%) Sybase
12 10 (1.40%) Sonatype
13 8 (1.12%) Adobe
13 8 (1.12%) CA Agile Central
13 8 (1.12%) Denodo
13 8 (1.12%) Palantir
14 7 (0.98%) Aspera
14 7 (0.98%) Foundry
14 7 (0.98%) Signiant