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 30 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 252 384 336
Rank change year-on-year +132 -48 +32
Contract jobs citing Metadata 390 182 311
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.09% 0.50% 0.68%
As % of the Database & Business Intelligence category 6.22% 2.81% 4.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 264 119 217
10th Percentile £389 £359 £364
25th Percentile £449 £464 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £688
90th Percentile £700 £788 £747
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £488 £545
% change year-on-year -1.54% -10.55% +3.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 4 20
10th Percentile £38.93 £24.99 £15.15
25th Percentile £53.44 £33.51 £28.17
Median hourly rate £69.00 £43.84 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +57.39% -5.07% +129.52%
75th Percentile £85.63 £48.18 £49.50
90th Percentile £86.75 - £72.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £74.00 £48.18 £46.18
% change year-on-year +53.59% +4.33% +242.07%

All Database and Business Intelligence 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 6,275 6,487 7,696
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 17.51% 17.89% 16.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,306 4,279 5,397
10th Percentile £331 £345 £350
25th Percentile £410 £425 £435
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £530 £534
Median % change year-on-year -5.66% -0.75% -2.91%
75th Percentile £607 £650 £650
90th Percentile £713 £775 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £496 £500
% change year-on-year -4.25% -0.79% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 80 88 144
10th Percentile £23.43 £18.35 £16.62
25th Percentile £29.97 £23.81 £21.57
Median hourly rate £55.00 £31.55 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +74.35% -31.69% -2.78%
75th Percentile £70.50 £54.25 £65.00
90th Percentile £85.10 £65.30 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.31 £27.50 £46.18
% change year-on-year +119.29% -40.45% +13.38%

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 30 November 2025.

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 30 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Metadata in the UK

Metadata
Top 17 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 30 November 2025. 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 +110 336 £525 +2.44% 162
London +115 213 £550 - 94
UK excluding London +51 138 £480 -1.54% 139
Work from Home +61 111 £550 +5.77% 78
Midlands +1 35 £480 +25.90% 10
South East +2 26 £475 -17.39% 88
North of England -29 25 £475 +8.57% 19
West Midlands -2 24 £560 +46.89% 7
Scotland +9 20 £465 -32.12% 10
North West -9 17 £447 +11.75% 7
East of England -1 14 £496 +58.63% 3
South West +2 12 £568 +16.41% 9
East Midlands - 11 £423 - 2
Wales +9 10 £700 +29.63% 1
Yorkshire -24 8 £525 +5.00% 10
Channel Islands - 1 £760 -
Northern Ireland - 1 - -

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 34 (8.72%) SharePoint
2 29 (7.44%) Apache Spark
3 17 (4.36%) Apache
3 17 (4.36%) CMS
4 16 (4.10%) Confluence
5 12 (3.08%) SAS
6 10 (2.56%) Apache Airflow
7 7 (1.79%) Sitecore CMS
8 6 (1.54%) Drupal
8 6 (1.54%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (1.03%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 3 (0.77%) GeoServer
10 3 (0.77%) Smallworld
11 2 (0.51%) ArcGIS
11 2 (0.51%) Oracle Workflow
11 2 (0.51%) Umbraco
12 1 (0.26%) Alfresco
12 1 (0.26%) Documentum
12 1 (0.26%) Headless CMS
12 1 (0.26%) Hyperledger
Applications
1 18 (4.62%) Microsoft Excel
2 9 (2.31%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (2.05%) MS Visio
4 4 (1.03%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.51%) ProjectWise
6 1 (0.26%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.26%) FrameMaker
6 1 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.26%) Oracle Smart View
6 1 (0.26%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 13 (3.33%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 11 (2.82%) SAP S/4HANA
3 6 (1.54%) OpenText VIM for SAP
3 6 (1.54%) Salesforce CRM
3 6 (1.54%) SAP FI
3 6 (1.54%) SAP MM
4 3 (0.77%) Actimize
4 3 (0.77%) Maximo
5 2 (0.51%) FIS Private Capital Suite
6 1 (0.26%) Hyperion Planning
6 1 (0.26%) Misys Midas
6 1 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.26%) Primavera
6 1 (0.26%) SAP MDG
6 1 (0.26%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 118 (30.26%) Azure
2 92 (23.59%) AWS
3 69 (17.69%) Power Platform
4 45 (11.54%) GCP
5 38 (9.74%) Microsoft Purview
6 35 (8.97%) Collibra
7 32 (8.21%) Snowflake
8 31 (7.95%) Azure Data Factory
9 28 (7.18%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 24 (6.15%) Microsoft 365
11 19 (4.87%) Amazon S3
12 15 (3.85%) dbt
13 14 (3.59%) Serverless
14 12 (3.08%) AWS Lambda
14 12 (3.08%) Azure DevOps
14 12 (3.08%) GitHub
15 9 (2.31%) PowerApps
16 7 (1.79%) Alation
16 7 (1.79%) Contentful
16 7 (1.79%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 3 (0.77%) Kerberos
2 2 (0.51%) Hyperconnected
3 1 (0.26%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 72 (18.46%) Data Warehouse
2 58 (14.87%) Power BI
3 39 (10.00%) Data Lake
4 26 (6.67%) NoSQL
5 24 (6.15%) Big Data
6 20 (5.13%) Relational Database
7 19 (4.87%) Data Vault
7 19 (4.87%) SQL Server
8 17 (4.36%) PostgreSQL
8 17 (4.36%) Tableau
9 16 (4.10%) Metadata Repository
9 16 (4.10%) Snowflake Schema
10 15 (3.85%) Amazon Redshift
10 15 (3.85%) BigQuery
11 12 (3.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 11 (2.82%) Azure SQL Database
12 11 (2.82%) Spark SQL
13 10 (2.56%) Delta Lake
13 10 (2.56%) Hadoop
14 9 (2.31%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 26 (6.67%) ERwin
2 20 (5.13%) JIRA
3 19 (4.87%) Git
4 13 (3.33%) ER Studio
4 13 (3.33%) PowerDesigner
5 3 (0.77%) GitLab
5 3 (0.77%) Jenkins
6 2 (0.51%) Subversion
6 2 (0.51%) Visual Studio
7 1 (0.26%) MLflow
7 1 (0.26%) Poetry
7 1 (0.26%) Postman
7 1 (0.26%) Pylint
7 1 (0.26%) SonarQube
7 1 (0.26%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
General
1 158 (40.51%) Social Skills
2 103 (26.41%) Finance
3 70 (17.95%) Analytical Skills
4 51 (13.08%) Public Sector
5 38 (9.74%) Banking
6 26 (6.67%) Documentation Skills
7 14 (3.59%) Publishing
7 14 (3.59%) Retail
8 12 (3.08%) Legal
9 10 (2.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 10 (2.56%) Presentation Skills
10 8 (2.05%) Investment Banking
11 6 (1.54%) Aviation
11 6 (1.54%) Influencing Skills
11 6 (1.54%) Organisational Skills
11 6 (1.54%) Retail Banking
12 5 (1.28%) Billing
12 5 (1.28%) Corporate Banking
12 5 (1.28%) Military
12 5 (1.28%) Welsh Language
Job Titles
1 87 (22.31%) Architect
2 63 (16.15%) Analyst
2 63 (16.15%) Data Architect
3 43 (11.03%) Data Analyst
4 36 (9.23%) Data Engineer
4 36 (9.23%) Data Modeller
5 26 (6.67%) Lead
5 26 (6.67%) Senior
6 25 (6.41%) Developer
7 23 (5.90%) Consultant
8 19 (4.87%) Business Analyst
9 14 (3.59%) Governance Analyst
10 13 (3.33%) Data Manager
11 12 (3.08%) Azure Engineer
12 10 (2.56%) Technical Architect
13 9 (2.31%) AWS Engineer
13 9 (2.31%) Azure Data Engineer
13 9 (2.31%) SAP Consultant
14 8 (2.05%) Data Business Analyst
14 8 (2.05%) Data Quality Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 29 (7.44%) PySpark
2 25 (6.41%) Kafka
3 15 (3.85%) REST
4 10 (2.56%) JSON
5 9 (2.31%) XML
6 6 (1.54%) Lightning Web Components
6 6 (1.54%) SAP Basis
6 6 (1.54%) SAP Business Workflow
6 6 (1.54%) SAP Fiori
6 6 (1.54%) VML
7 5 (1.28%) React
7 5 (1.28%) RESTful
7 5 (1.28%) Visualforce
8 4 (1.03%) Apache NiFi
8 4 (1.03%) Hugging Face
8 4 (1.03%) OAuth
8 4 (1.03%) PyTorch
8 4 (1.03%) Regular Expression
8 4 (1.03%) SpaCy
8 4 (1.03%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 30 (7.69%) Data Structures
2 24 (6.15%) Taxonomies
3 23 (5.90%) Cloud Native
4 16 (4.10%) Management Information System
5 15 (3.85%) Onboarding
5 15 (3.85%) Reference Data
6 14 (3.59%) Legacy Systems
7 11 (2.82%) Product Ownership
8 9 (2.31%) Distributed Computing
9 7 (1.79%) Low-Code
10 6 (1.54%) Analytical Mindset
11 5 (1.28%) Data Fabric
12 4 (1.03%) Genomics
12 4 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
12 4 (1.03%) NHS
12 4 (1.03%) Omics
12 4 (1.03%) Replication
13 3 (0.77%) Data Protection Act
13 3 (0.77%) FMCG
13 3 (0.77%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 5 (1.28%) Linux
1 5 (1.28%) Unix
2 1 (0.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 209 (53.59%) Data Governance
2 195 (50.00%) Data Modelling
3 193 (49.49%) Metadata Management
4 124 (31.79%) Analytics
5 100 (25.64%) Data Architecture
6 94 (24.10%) Business Intelligence
7 88 (22.56%) ETL
8 81 (20.77%) Stakeholder Engagement
9 77 (19.74%) Data Lineage
10 75 (19.23%) Agile
11 68 (17.44%) Problem-Solving
12 64 (16.41%) Data Engineering
12 64 (16.41%) Data Pipeline
13 58 (14.87%) Validation
14 56 (14.36%) Migration
15 53 (13.59%) Data Management
16 51 (13.08%) Data Integration
17 49 (12.56%) AI
17 49 (12.56%) Data Transformation
18 48 (12.31%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 124 (31.79%) SQL
2 86 (22.05%) Python
3 16 (4.10%) Java
4 15 (3.85%) PowerShell
5 11 (2.82%) T-SQL
6 8 (2.05%) Scala
7 7 (1.79%) R
8 6 (1.54%) ABAP
8 6 (1.54%) Apex Code
9 5 (1.28%) C++
9 5 (1.28%) JavaScript
9 5 (1.28%) Shell Script
9 5 (1.28%) SOQL
9 5 (1.28%) SOSL
10 3 (0.77%) C#
10 3 (0.77%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 2 (0.51%) Bicep
11 2 (0.51%) Korn
11 2 (0.51%) PL/SQL
12 1 (0.26%) Rust
Qualifications
1 77 (19.74%) Security Cleared
2 52 (13.33%) SC Cleared
3 24 (6.15%) Degree
4 10 (2.56%) BPSS Clearance
5 9 (2.31%) Computer Science Degree
6 8 (2.05%) AWS Certification
6 8 (2.05%) Azure Certification
7 7 (1.79%) Master's Degree
8 4 (1.03%) DV Cleared
9 3 (0.77%) TOGAF Certification
10 2 (0.51%) AWS Certified Developer
10 2 (0.51%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.51%) Microsoft Certification
10 2 (0.51%) PMI Certification
10 2 (0.51%) PMP
11 1 (0.26%) CISSP
11 1 (0.26%) ISO 27001 Lead Implementer
11 1 (0.26%) MCP
11 1 (0.26%) MySQL Certification
11 1 (0.26%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 153 (39.23%) Data Quality
2 47 (12.05%) GDPR
3 20 (5.13%) QA
4 16 (4.10%) Accessibility
5 6 (1.54%) IFRS
5 6 (1.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (1.28%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 5 (1.28%) MiFID
6 5 (1.28%) Solvency II
7 3 (0.77%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.51%) Basel III
8 2 (0.51%) CRD IV
8 2 (0.51%) FINREP
8 2 (0.51%) IFRS 17
8 2 (0.51%) IFRS 9
8 2 (0.51%) ISO 9001
8 2 (0.51%) NIST
9 1 (0.26%) EU AI Act
9 1 (0.26%) GRC
9 1 (0.26%) ISO 19650
System Software
1 10 (2.56%) Docker
2 5 (1.28%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.77%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 16 (4.10%) Kubernetes
1 16 (4.10%) Terraform
2 4 (1.03%) Microsoft Intune
3 3 (0.77%) Hadoop YARN
3 3 (0.77%) Oozie
3 3 (0.77%) SCCM
4 1 (0.26%) Kubeflow
4 1 (0.26%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 79 (20.26%) Microsoft
2 54 (13.85%) Databricks
3 34 (8.72%) Informatica
4 33 (8.46%) Oracle
5 15 (3.85%) SAP
6 14 (3.59%) ServiceNow
6 14 (3.59%) Sparx
7 13 (3.33%) Salesforce
8 12 (3.08%) Google
9 11 (2.82%) Talend
10 9 (2.31%) OpenText
11 7 (1.79%) Sitecore
11 7 (1.79%) Teradata
12 6 (1.54%) IBM
12 6 (1.54%) Optimizely
13 5 (1.28%) Adobe
13 5 (1.28%) Alteryx
13 5 (1.28%) Palantir
14 4 (1.03%) Atlassian
14 4 (1.03%) Cognos