What is and isn't available

Sources

/v1/meta/sources lists these with the release each is currently serving.

Pay measures

At UK level every ASHE measure is available: annual_pay_gross, annual_pay_incentive, weekly_pay_gross, weekly_pay_excl_overtime, basic_pay_incl_other, overtime_pay, hourly_pay_gross, hourly_pay_excl_overtime, hours_paid_total, hours_paid_basic and hours_paid_overtime.

By region, only annual_pay_gross, weekly_pay_gross and hourly_pay_gross are served. Asking for another measure by region says so explicitly.

Known gaps

Vacancy counts. There is no open source of vacancy counts by occupation. /job-adverts counts new online job adverts each month, which is the closest open measure. It misses jobs that are not advertised online and is not a count of vacancies open at any moment. The Employer Skills Survey gives survey estimates of vacancies every two years.

Occupation-level data below region. ONS does not publish four-digit occupation pay or employment for local authorities or smaller areas. Job adverts are the one exception, served by local authority. The nearest open source, the 2021 Census, uses broader occupation groups, covers England and Wales only, and is a once-a-decade snapshot taken during furlough, so it is not used.

England-wide and Northern Ireland pay. ONS publishes four-digit pay for the UK and for regions, but not for England as a whole or for Northern Ireland.

Regional employment. The employment survey's sample cannot support four-digit occupations by English region. Employment is UK and nation only.

Pay for the self-employed. ASHE covers employees only. No open source covers self-employed earnings by occupation.

Withheld figures. Within the areas and measures above, ONS withholds individual figures that are too uncertain or could identify someone - roughly four in ten region-by-occupation pay figures, for instance. These come back as null.

Skills

Three unit groups have no skills data. All three gaps are in ESCO itself:

• 5443 Florists (ISCO-08 7549) - ESCO lists no occupations in this group.
• 1121 Production managers and directors in manufacturing (ISCO-08 1321) and 2121 Civil engineers (ISCO-08 2142) - ESCO lists one occupation in each, but its own API returns an error for both.

Demand

The publisher does not assess the 44 "not elsewhere classified" occupations, which are catch-alls for jobs that fit nowhere else, so 368 of 412 have a demand level. It is UK-wide only. Its wage and hours indicators come from ASHE, which excludes Northern Ireland and the self-employed. It is an official statistic in development, and its method changed in 2025: the release re-ran 2024 on the new method, and that is the earlier year served. Its levels are not comparable with the original 2024 publication.

Workforce

ONS publishes this breakdown as user-requested data, roughly every one to two years, and not as a regular dataset. It gives weighted survey counts with no confidence intervals, only ONS's own marking: withheld (served as unreliable, with no figure) and shaded for a small sample (acceptable). The release also breaks occupations down by ITL3 area. That is not served, because nearly every local figure is from a small sample and many are visibly implausible. Industry names are ONS's abbreviated SIC 2007 labels.

Apprenticeships

Skills England codes each of its occupations to a SOC 2020 unit group, and often partly to others as well. match says which applies. About 200 of its 1,282 occupations are not yet coded to SOC 2020, mostly ones still in development, and they cannot be reached from a unit group. Apprenticeships are England only. Retired and withdrawn standards are hidden unless asked for.

The harvester needs a free API key from Skills England, set as the app host's skills-england-api-key parameter.

How to become

The National Careers Service writes its 735 or so profiles per job, not per SOC unit group, and its website gives no SOC codes. Each profile is matched through the ONS coding index: by its title, then by the jobs a compound title names ("Bus or coach driver"), then by an alternative title. An alternative title only counts if it shares a distinctive word with the title, or if two alternatives agree, because alternatives are sometimes related jobs rather than other names. In October 2026 that matched 624 profiles and left 107 unmatched. Unmatched profiles are kept but cannot be reached from a unit group.

The careers service also offers a job profile API, but access to it requires confirming no financial gain is made from the data. The website is under the Open Government Licence without that condition, so it is read instead, once a week, a page at a time.

Job adverts

ONS's labour demand volumes are an official statistic in development, built on adverts that Textkernel scrapes from about 90,000 job boards. ONS reissues the whole series every month and revises history. Source problems since mid-2025 have led ONS to suppress some months (served as null) and impute others. Each response carries ONS's own notices about this, in notices. ONS also publishes the figures quarterly by local authority, for four-digit occupations. Only the last twelve quarters are served, and only from the latest release. London comes as one area, because ONS does not split it by borough. Recent quarters are suppressed for many area and occupation pairs.

Work visas

The Home Office has coded visas to four-digit occupations only since Q4 2024. Earlier quarters were converted from SOC 2010 and stop at three digits, so they are not served. The figures are entry clearance visas for main applicants applying from outside the UK. They leave out people switching to a work visa or extending one inside the UK, and dependants. The latest two quarters are provisional until the Home Office revises them. The occupation is whatever SOC code the sponsor entered, and the industry is whatever the sponsor called itself.

Vacancies

The Employer Skills Survey withholds figures based on fewer than 30 employers. In 2024 that left 71 of 412 occupations with their own figures for the UK; the rest get their minor, sub-major or major group, and the response says which. Figures are published for the UK and the four nations, not English regions.

The Home Office's Immigration Salary List and Temporary Shortage List are not used: they are immigration policy rather than measurements, and almost every occupation on them is removed on 31 December 2026.

Work profile

No UK source rates occupations by interests or abilities, so these come from the US ONET database, reached through ISCO-08 and the official ESCO to ONET crosswalk. Most UK occupations map to several US ones, and the profile is their weighted average; basedOn lists them. Two occupations have no rated US match: 7131 Shopkeepers and owners - retail and wholesale, and 8215 Driving instructors.

Projections

Projections exist only for the 26 SOC 2020 sub-major groups, each covering about sixteen occupations; a four-digit occupation gets its group's figures. They are a one-off release with a 2020 base, made in 2021/22 - so years from 2021 onwards are modelled, including those that have passed. They are served for the UK, nations and English regions. The publisher's guidance is that local-area figures should be more aggregated than this, so local projections are not served.

The DfE also publishes projections for each four-digit occupation, in its Supply of skills for jobs in science and technology release. These apply each sub-major group's growth to every occupation in it, so every occupation in a group grows at the same rate. They add nothing to the group figures and are not used.

Not yet available

Planned, using open data that has been checked and confirmed:

• What graduates of each subject go on to do, from HESA's Graduate Outcomes. The data is open, but HESA's website blocks automated downloads, so it cannot be kept up to date automatically.