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Do you have to be in London? ONS advert data for 13 graduate roles

TheCareery — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 03:01:59 +0000

"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

One more month of ONS data turned a +23% software trend into -6.3%

TheCareery — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 21:02:25 +0000

Last month a post on this account worked through twelve months of UK online job advert volumes for thirteen graduate entry occupations, taken from the ONS dataset "Labour demand volumes by Standard Occupation Classification (SOC 2020), UK". The headline figure was that adverts for programmers and software development professionals were up 23% across the window.

The September 2026 edition was released on 23 October 2026. The same calculation, on the same thirteen occupations, from the same table, now reads -6.3%.

Nothing was revised. The window moved by one month.

What actually changed

Programmers and software development professionals, UK total, new online job adverts:

Window	Start	End	Change
Sep 2025 to Aug 2026	9,404	11,591	+23.3%
Oct 2025 to Sep 2026	10,213	9,570	-6.3%

August 2026 was a local high. September 2026 came in below the previous October. That is the whole story, and it is worth sitting with, because a twelve month endpoint to endpoint change is a two number statistic and both of those numbers are a single month of adverts. The earlier headline was not wrong about the data. It was over confident about what two months can carry.

The fix is not a smarter metric. It is publishing the series and letting people see the shape.

The full thirteen, October 2025 to September 2026

Occupation	Oct 2025	Sep 2026	Change
Sales accounts and business development managers	14,528	14,051	-3.3%
IT business analysts, architects and systems designers	7,674	10,205	+33.0%
Programmers and software development professionals	10,213	9,570	-6.3%
Human resources and industrial relations officers	6,565	7,072	+7.7%
Finance and investment analysts and advisers	6,158	5,213	-15.3%
Advertising and marketing associate professionals	5,465	5,111	-6.5%
Mechanical engineers	2,609	4,842	+85.6%
Management consultants and business analysts	3,501	4,633	+32.3%
Civil engineers	2,285	2,795	+22.3%
Project support officers	1,621	1,691	+4.3%
Data analysts	1,606	1,583	-1.4%
Chartered and certified accountants	1,582	1,570	-0.8%
Graphic and multimedia designers	1,224	1,266	+3.4%

Mechanical engineers at +85.6% deserves the same caution as software did. October 2025 was 2,609 and September 2026 was 4,842, but the twelve months in between run from 1,383 to 4,842 and move around a lot. Read the series, not the headline.

Two series changes in this edition

The July 2026 gap is filled. The August 2026 edition had no July figure for these occupations. The September edition does. Anything published off the August edition that described a July gap is now out of date.

March 2026 is suppressed for all thirteen. ONS marks it [x]. A suppression marker is not a zero and should not be treated as one, and it should not be interpolated. Carry it through verbatim or leave the month out.

The extraction script

Last month this script lived on one machine, which is the opposite of the point of publishing a series. It is now downloadable at thecareery.com/ons-extract.py, and it is boring on purpose: it selects thirteen SOC codes from Table 3, filters to the rows where the region is Total UK, and reshapes wide month columns into long format. It does not adjust, smooth, interpolate or recompute a single figure, and it carries [x] through unchanged.

SOC_CODES = [2121, 2122, 2133, 2134, 2142, 2421, 2422,
             2431, 3543, 3544, 3554, 3556, 3571]

SHEET = "Table 3"
HEADER_ROW = 5
UK_LABEL = "Total UK"
TREND_MONTHS = 12

It has a --verify-against flag that diffs freshly generated CSVs against a published copy and exits non zero on any difference. That is what makes the monthly refresh checkable rather than trusted.

The header check is the part that matters most:

if str(header[0]).strip() != "Region":
    sys.exit("unexpected header, ONS may have changed the layout, stop and check")

A silent column shift in a 50 MB workbook is how a pipeline starts publishing confident nonsense. Fail loudly instead.

Source and the pages built from it

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. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The per occupation breakdowns, including the regional splits and the full twelve month series, are published here:

UK job advert volumes by occupation
Software developer job adverts
Mechanical engineer job adverts
Job adverts are not vacancies, the caveat page for anyone tempted to read advert counts as hiring

Twelve months of ONS job advert data for 13 graduate roles: software is up 23%, accountancy is down

TheCareery — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:26:43 +0000

The Office for National Statistics publishes a monthly count of new online job adverts in the UK, broken down by SOC 2020 occupation code and by region. It is free, it is authoritative, and almost nobody reads it, because it ships as a wide spreadsheet workbook that is painful to work with programmatically.

We pulled out thirteen occupations that UK graduates actually enter, reshaped the whole thing into long format CSV, and put it in a public repository with a DOI. Here is what twelve months of it says.

Change in new online job adverts, UK, Sep 2025 to Aug 2026

Occupation	Sep-25	Aug-26	Change
Management consultants and business analysts	3,380	5,494	+62.5%
IT business analysts, architects and systems designers	6,417	9,861	+53.7%
Graphic and multimedia designers	1,160	1,707	+47.2%
Mechanical engineers	2,120	3,036	+43.2%
Programmers and software development professionals	9,404	11,591	+23.3%
Project support officers	1,511	1,842	+21.9%
Civil engineers	2,282	2,721	+19.2%
Human resources and industrial relations officers	6,241	6,888	+10.4%
Sales accounts and business development managers	11,776	12,837	+9.0%
Data analysts	1,692	1,800	+6.4%
Finance and investment analysts and advisers	5,854	6,205	+6.0%
Advertising and marketing associate professionals	4,843	4,922	+1.6%
Chartered and certified accountants	1,702	1,474	-13.4%

Three things that surprised me

Software is not the story people think it is. Given the last two years of coverage you would expect programmer postings to be falling. They are up 23.3%, and they remain the second largest category in the set by absolute volume. The much larger jump is in IT business analysts and systems designers, up 53.7%, which is the specification and integration end of the work rather than the implementation end.

Data analyst is the weakest technical role here. It grew 6.4%, slower than HR officers. It is also the second smallest category in the table at 1,800 adverts. If you are picking between a data analyst track and a software track on the assumption that data is the growth area, this particular measure does not support that.

Accountancy is the only outright decline. Chartered and certified accountants fell 13.4%, the only negative in thirteen occupations, during a period when every other professional category grew.

What these numbers are not

Worth stating plainly, because advert counts get misread constantly.

This counts adverts, not vacancies, not hires and not headcount. One role advertised across three boards can appear more than once. A company that fills a position internally never appears at all. A rising count can mean more demand, or it can mean the same demand being advertised more aggressively or churning faster.

ONS also writes [x] where it did not publish a figure for an occupation in a given month. We carried that through unchanged rather than smoothing it, dropping the row or converting it to zero. If you sum a column containing one, say so.

The occupation selection is ours. The measurement is ONS's, and ONS does not endorse the selection or anything concluded from it.

The data

Two CSVs, long format, UTF-8, with a header row. One is August 2026 by occupation and by all twelve ITL1 regions, the other is UK monthly totals from Sep 2025 to Aug 2026.

Dataset and DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23344785
Original ONS source: Labour demand volumes by Standard Occupation Classification (SOC 2020), UK
A readable breakdown by region: thecareery.com/uk-job-adverts

Columns are soc_2020, occupation, area, month, new_online_job_adverts. CC BY 4.0, so use it however you like as long as you cite ONS as the source of the measurement.

If you pull it apart and find something we missed, we would like to hear it.

Disclosure: we build free CV and career tools at thecareery.com, which is why we were digging through this data in the first place.