What our booking
figures actually count.

One organiser’s records. A defined snapshot.

145 organisation-event commitments · 81 normalised organisation labels · 72 events · 50 cities. These are accepted bookings in The UK Careers Fair’s 2027 programme, not a survey of employers, a count of jobs or a forecast of hiring.

The UK Careers Fair produced this analysis from its own administrative records. It organises the events and operates the Jobs Board covered in the reporting, so it has a commercial interest in both. The records were read without changing customer data. No contact details, invoice identifiers or customer financial amounts are included in these public extracts.

A commitment is one distinct normalised organisation name at one current city and event date. A five-event package counts five commitments. Multiple contacts at the same organisation and event do not create extra commitments. Names are normalised for case, punctuation, “&”/“and” and common company suffixes. The resulting labels are not an independently audited count of legal entities or corporate groups.

How the records were reconciled

Booking changes were applied in chronological order using the same resolution rules as the operational system. Cancellations remain effective after later contact changes; moves follow their destination. Unplaced swaps, cancelled invoices, exclusively cancelled historical matches, missing-company records, clear internal or test labels and events outside the current catalogue were excluded. Duplicate change records were removed before applying the changes.

The published exhibitor terms treat invoice receipt as acceptance of a booking. An active issued invoice can therefore be included without being evidence of payment. Imported legacy bookings are accepted administrative records, rather than independent payment evidence. There is no separate confirmed/provisional flag. These counts must not be described as paid stands, physical stand quantities or guaranteed attendance.

The event catalogue was checked against the canonical public calendar: all 158 current event records matched on city, date, venue and region. Of those, 110 events are scheduled in 2027. The historical ledger added no unmatched active 2027 organisation-event commitments.

The 2027 baseline

The 145 commitments cover events from 24 February to 12 November 2027. The first-half cohort has 107 commitments from 72 normalised labels, covering 47 events and 45 cities. Nineteen labels have booked more than one event, accounting for 83 commitments; fourteen have booked across more than one city.

The programme contains 110 scheduled events across 63 cities on 69 different calendar days. Seventy-two events in 50 cities have an active booking; those events occupy 53 calendar days. Coverage counts an event once if it has at least one commitment. It does not measure stand capacity or how full a fair is.

Regional coverage

Locations are mapped to ONS regional names for context. The units remain organiser events and commitments. They are not a representative sample of regional labour demand. An organisation can contribute to several regional totals; unique-name counts should not be added across regions.

The 72 events with recorded participation

These counts describe the snapshot, not a final exhibitor list. Follow the event link for current arrangements.

London: Friday 6 November 2026

The ledger contains 38 active event entries, reduced to 37 distinct normalised organisation labels. There are 36 original contact-event keys because one contact represents more than one label. The figure is therefore described as 37 organisations recorded in the booking ledger, with this method linked. It is not evidence of 37 employers with live vacancies.

Public participation examples were checked against profiles explicitly showing the date and Hornsey Town Hall: Metropolitan Police, Deaf Progress and Reeta Vickers Recruitment. Historical logos on the event page were not treated as a current roster.

Three matched London organisations have five live job-type adverts on the board; four have a live listing of any type. One job-type advert is volunteer-labelled, while two others are located in Cambridge and Oxfordshire. This is not five paid London vacancies. An absent board listing is not evidence that an organisation is not recruiting elsewhere.

The separate salary audit

At 21:38:37 UTC, the board contained 787 live, unexpired listings from 189 employer accounts: 698 jobs, 25 apprenticeships, 55 courses and nine other opportunities. “Live” means the listing is live and has no expiry or an expiry after the snapshot. These are adverts, not verified positions or hires. Employer totals by listing type overlap.

Among the 698 job-type adverts, 612 have a positive structured lower pay bound and 631 have a numeric GBP pay display. Those are different tests. A unit-aware initial classification produces 331 hourly and 274 annual adverts, with 93 outside those two cohorts:

The exclusions are applied in order: voluntary or volunteer-labelled, commission, absent positive lower bound, descending range, then other or missing unit. The two remaining cohorts are not proof that every pay entry is accurate. For example, unusually low annual figures remain and need verification. The analysis publishes no pooled median, annualised hourly wage, full-time equivalent pay gap or comparison of advertised pay with actual ONS earnings.

The advertised lower and upper bounds describe offers, not earned wages. Employment type is supplied by the advertiser and does not establish contracted hours. Multi-opening adverts count once; unverified stated openings are not used as weights. ONS comparisons in the articles retain the definitions and reference periods of the official series.

What the data cannot establish

The observed 2026 cohort covers 2 July–6 November: 951 organisation-event pairs and 591 normalised labels. It is neither a complete calendar-year market nor a like-for-like comparator for the future 2027 programme. All 303 legacy booking rows carry a 1 January 2026 placeholder receipt date. No comparable same-day prior-year snapshot has been established, so neither year-on-year growth nor historical booking velocity is reported.

Organisation aliases may remain, sectors are too incomplete for a reliable breakdown, and bookings can change after this snapshot. The board is not a census of exhibitors’ vacancies. The audit does not measure interviews, successful hires, retention or the causal impact of attending a fair.

Download the booking aggregates (JSON) and salary classification (JSON). The original snapshot is retained; corrections should identify the changed field, reason and date. Queries can be sent through our corrections route.