Official ONS data · latest period Jul to Sep 2026 · free to cite
UK Tech Hiring Index
How much UK tech employers are hiring, read straight from official statistics. Each month we take the Office for National Statistics vacancy series for the information and communication industry and set it against the whole UK labour market, so anyone planning a tech hire can see the demand they are competing with. Public data only, every figure traceable to its ONS series. See the methodology and how to cite it.
Source: ONS, released 20 October 2026. Levels are rolling three-month averages, seasonally adjusted. Checked 11 November 2026.
What the numbers show
In Jul to Sep 2026, UK employers in the information and communication industry had an estimated 37,000 open vacancies, 5.4% of the 691,000 vacancies across the whole economy.
Against a year earlier (Jul to Sep 2025), vacancies in the sector were unchanged, while vacancies across all industries were down 37,000 (-5.1%). The sector's share of all vacancies went from 5.1% to 5.4%, so over the year tech hiring demand held up better than the wider labour market. On the previous three months (Apr to Jun 2026) the sector was down 3,000, against down 20,000 for all industries.
The sector's job openings rate, which sets vacancies against the number of employee jobs, was 2.5%, against 2.5% a year earlier. Over the 24 periods below, sector vacancies ranged from 34,000 (May to Jul 2025) to 40,000 (Dec 2025 to Feb 2026).
What this means if you are hiring
Vacancies measure demand: how many roles employers are actively trying to fill. When the tech sector's share of all vacancies rises, a larger part of the market's open roles sits with tech-sector employers, the firms most likely to be competing for the technical people you want. When it falls, less of it does. Neither tells you, on its own, how hard a particular role will be to fill, because this series does not count candidates, applications or time to hire, and it does not cover tech roles at employers outside the industry (a bank's or a retailer's engineers sit in their own industries). For the pay side of the same decision, see our UK tech salary statistics and salary benchmarks, and for what an empty seat costs, the cost of vacancy calculator.
The last 24 months
Vacancies in information and communication (ONS JP9P) with the all-industry total (ONS AP2Y) and the sector's job openings rate (ONS N4JN). Each row is a rolling three-month average, so neighbouring rows share two months of data.
| Period | Tech sector vacancies | All UK vacancies | Tech share | Openings rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul to Sep 2026 | 37,000 | 691,000 | 5.4% | 2.5% |
| Jun to Aug 2026 | 36,000 | 704,000 | 5.1% | 2.5% |
| May to Jul 2026 | 38,000 | 707,000 | 5.4% | 2.6% |
| Apr to Jun 2026 | 40,000 | 711,000 | 5.6% | 2.8% |
| Mar to May 2026 | 39,000 | 710,000 | 5.5% | 2.7% |
| Feb to Apr 2026 | 39,000 | 713,000 | 5.5% | 2.7% |
| Jan to Mar 2026 | 37,000 | 718,000 | 5.2% | 2.6% |
| Dec 2025 to Feb 2026 | 40,000 | 725,000 | 5.5% | 2.8% |
| Nov 2025 to Jan 2026 | 38,000 | 734,000 | 5.2% | 2.6% |
| Oct to Dec 2025 | 37,000 | 739,000 | 5% | 2.6% |
| Sep to Nov 2025 | 34,000 | 730,000 | 4.7% | 2.3% |
| Aug to Oct 2025 | 35,000 | 728,000 | 4.8% | 2.4% |
| Jul to Sep 2025 | 37,000 | 728,000 | 5.1% | 2.5% |
| Jun to Aug 2025 | 36,000 | 738,000 | 4.9% | 2.5% |
| May to Jul 2025 | 34,000 | 727,000 | 4.7% | 2.3% |
| Apr to Jun 2025 | 35,000 | 730,000 | 4.8% | 2.4% |
| Mar to May 2025 | 35,000 | 738,000 | 4.7% | 2.4% |
| Feb to Apr 2025 | 36,000 | 759,000 | 4.7% | 2.4% |
| Jan to Mar 2025 | 35,000 | 775,000 | 4.5% | 2.3% |
| Dec 2024 to Feb 2025 | 35,000 | 793,000 | 4.4% | 2.4% |
| Nov 2024 to Jan 2025 | 36,000 | 798,000 | 4.5% | 2.4% |
| Oct to Dec 2024 | 38,000 | 805,000 | 4.7% | 2.5% |
| Sep to Nov 2024 | 38,000 | 810,000 | 4.7% | 2.6% |
| Aug to Oct 2024 | 39,000 | 828,000 | 4.7% | 2.6% |
Methodology
Sources and series
Every figure on this page comes from the Office for National Statistics, published in the VACS02: Vacancies by industry table and the Labour Market Statistics time series dataset. We use three series:
- AP2Y: UK vacancies, all industries (thousands, seasonally adjusted).
- JP9P: UK vacancies, Information and communication (thousands, seasonally adjusted).
- N4JN: Job openings rate, Information and communication (%, seasonally adjusted).
The latest data come from the ONS release of 20 October 2026 (next ONS release: 17 November 2026).
Definitions
A vacancy, in the ONS Vacancy Survey, is a job that an employer is actively recruiting for from outside the business. "Tech sector" here means section J of the UK Standard Industrial Classification (SIC 2007), information and communication. It is the closest official industry match for tech, covering software publishing, computer programming and consultancy, information services and telecoms, but it also includes publishing, film, television, music and broadcasting. The survey covers the whole economy except agriculture, forestry and fishing (SIC section A), households as employers (section T) and employment agencies (division 78). The job openings rate is the ONS measure of vacancies relative to employee jobs, expressed as a percentage. ONS introduced it in September 2026 in place of its earlier vacancies per 100 jobs ratio, so it is not directly comparable with ratios published before then.
What we calculate
Only simple arithmetic on the published figures: the latest level, the difference from the previous non-overlapping three-month period, the difference from the same period a year earlier, and the sector's share of all vacancies. ONS publishes levels rounded to the nearest thousand, so our differences are between rounded figures and can differ by about a thousand from the change rows in the VACS02 spreadsheet, which ONS works out from unrounded data. For the same reason we do not show percentage changes for the sector itself: on a base of a few tens of thousands, rounding alone moves them by several points.
The rolling-average caveat
Each figure is an average of three consecutive months, so a month-on-month move is mostly two shared months and says little. That is why we compare with the previous non-overlapping three-month period and with a year earlier, as ONS does. Figures are seasonally adjusted by ONS. ONS revises recent estimates, so we re-read the whole series at each update and earlier rows may change.
Update cadence
ONS publishes these series monthly with its labour market release. We refresh this page automatically each month after that release. If the ONS data cannot be fetched or fail our checks (missing, non-numeric, out of range, or older than what is already published here), the page keeps the previous figures rather than showing anything estimated.
What it is not
- Not an index in the statistical sense: it is not rebased to 100 and it is not a composite score.
- Not a count of every tech job: it counts vacancies at employers in the information and communication industry, whatever the role, and misses tech roles in other industries.
- Not OpenSource data: no figure from our own searches, clients or candidates is used or blended in.
- Not a forecast, and not adjusted by us in any way.
We looked at the ONS experimental series of online job adverts (source: Textkernel) as a more current signal and left it out for now: it has no single IT category with a published series identifier, it is not seasonally adjusted, its latest months are partly imputed, and it currently runs no later than the vacancy survey. We will add it if that changes.
How to cite
The underlying figures are ONS data under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Our compilation and commentary are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; please attribute both ONS and OpenSource with a link. Suggested attribution:
“Source: OpenSource UK Tech Hiring Index, from ONS vacancy data (open-source.io/uk-tech-hiring-index)”
Writing about the tech hiring market and want a comment from a recruiter who works in it? Get in touch.