"Move to London or don't bother" is the advice every UK graduate gets. It is repeated constantly and almost never with a number attached.
The ONS publishes new online job advert counts by occupation and by region. Here is what it says for the thirteen graduate entry occupations we track, for September 2026.
London takes a quarter, and the spread is the story
Across all thirteen occupations, London accounts for 25.3% of UK adverts. That single figure is close to useless on its own, because the range behind it runs from 14.4% to 31.7% depending on what you do.
| Occupation | UK | London | London share | Top region outside London |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data analysts | 1,583 | 502 | 31.7% | South East (13.8%) |
| Programmers and software development professionals | 9,570 | 2,974 | 31.1% | South East (14.0%) |
| Finance and investment analysts and advisers | 5,213 | 1,558 | 29.9% | South East (16.2%) |
| Management consultants and business analysts | 4,633 | 1,352 | 29.2% | South East (15.8%) |
| IT business analysts, architects and systems designers | 10,205 | 2,770 | 27.1% | South East (24.7%) |
| Advertising and marketing associate professionals | 5,111 | 1,273 | 24.9% | South East (15.2%) |
| Sales accounts and business development managers | 14,051 | 3,498 | 24.9% | South East (16.1%) |
| Graphic and multimedia designers | 1,266 | 307 | 24.2% | South East (14.3%) |
| Chartered and certified accountants | 1,570 | 359 | 22.9% | South East (15.7%) |
| Civil engineers | 2,795 | 578 | 20.7% | South East (14.4%) |
| Human resources and industrial relations officers | 7,072 | 1,366 | 19.3% | South East (16.2%) |
| Project support officers | 1,691 | 303 | 17.9% | South East (13.8%) |
| Mechanical engineers | 4,842 | 697 | 14.4% | South East (32.9%) |
Two things jump out.
Mechanical engineering is the exception that proves the rule. It is the only one of the thirteen where the South East beats London, and it is not close: 32.9% against 14.4%. If you are a mechanical engineering graduate, the advice to move to London is actively wrong. The adverts are in the South East, and after that the North West and the West Midlands.
The most London-weighted roles are the screen based ones. Data analysts, software developers, finance analysts and management consultants all sit near or above 29%. That is not surprising, but it is useful to know the number is 30% and not 70%. Seven in ten adverts for a software developer are somewhere other than London.
The whole regional picture
| Region | Adverts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| London | 17,537 | 25.3% |
| South East | 12,497 | 18.0% |
| North West | 6,789 | 9.8% |
| South West | 5,631 | 8.1% |
| East of England | 5,586 | 8.1% |
| West Midlands | 5,223 | 7.5% |
| Yorkshire and The Humber | 4,270 | 6.2% |
| East Midlands | 3,846 | 5.6% |
| Scotland | 3,473 | 5.0% |
| Wales | 1,618 | 2.3% |
| North East | 1,502 | 2.2% |
| Northern Ireland | 1,266 | 1.8% |
London and the South East together are 43.3% of all adverts in these thirteen occupations. The other ten regions share the remaining 57%.
What this does not tell you
I would rather state the limits than have someone quote this as more than it is.
These are adverts, not vacancies. One role can be advertised several times, by the employer and by multiple agencies. An advert count is a measure of hiring activity, not of open positions, and the two are not interchangeable.
These are all experience levels, not graduate roles. ONS does not split by seniority. A graduate reading the software developer row is looking at a number that includes principal engineers.
Adverts are not per capita. London has more adverts partly because London has more people and more firms. Comparing a region's advert share to its population share is a different and more careful calculation than the one on this page, and I have not done it here.
Remote work is invisible. A London advertised role that is remote first counts as London. That almost certainly overstates how much you need to physically be there, and there is no way to correct for it in this dataset.
Method, and the data
Thirteen four digit SOC 2020 codes, Table 3 of the ONS release, rows where the region is each ITL1 area. No adjustment, no smoothing, no interpolation. September 2026 has no suppressed values for any of the thirteen at regional level.
The extraction script is published at thecareery.com/ons-extract.py. It rebuilds the CSVs from the raw workbook and has a --verify-against flag that exits non zero if the output differs from what was published.
Source: Office for National Statistics, "Labour demand volumes by Standard Occupation Classification (SOC 2020), UK", January 2017 to September 2026 edition, released 23 October 2026, Table 3. Open Government Licence v3.0.
Full per occupation pages, with the twelve month series and every region:
- UK job advert volumes by occupation
- Mechanical engineer adverts, the one worth reading if you were about to move to London for an engineering job
- Software developer adverts
- Data analyst adverts
- Job adverts are not vacancies, the longer version of the caveat above
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