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GuideReed

Guide·Aug 15, 2026·6 min read

# Reed API: the UK jobs API you can actually get a key for

Indeed retired its Publisher API and LinkedIn sits behind partner programmes, but Reed.co.uk still hands out free API keys in minutes - for a real search endpoint over live UK postings. Here is how the Jobseeker API works: basic auth with the key as the username, the full filter surface, 100 results per page, and the details call you need for full descriptions. And where it stops - one board, one country, keyword-only filtering - plus what to reach for when that ceiling matters.

![Dvir Atias](/authors/dvir-atias.jpg)

Dvir Atias

Founder, JobsPipe

Getting job data out of the household names is a story of closed doors: Indeed [retired its Publisher API](/blog/indeed-publisher-api), LinkedIn’s job endpoints sit behind partner programmes, and Google never shipped a read API at all. Reed.co.uk, one of the UK’s largest job sites, is the standing exception. Register on its developer portal and you get a free key for a genuine search API - keyword, location and salary filters over live postings, not an affiliate widget. Here is exactly how the Jobseeker API works, the two-call pattern it forces on you, and the points where one board in one country stops being enough.

## A real key, in minutes

Reed’s developer portal issues Jobseeker API keys self-serve: no sales call, no partner agreement, no site audit. Authentication is HTTP basic auth with a detail that trips people up - the API key goes in the _username_ field and the password stays empty. The current version is 1.0, and the whole API is two endpoints. Search looks like this:

```
curl -u "$REED_API_KEY:" \
  "https://www.reed.co.uk/api/1.0/search?\
keywords=data%20engineer&\
locationName=London&\
distanceFromLocation=15&\
minimumSalary=70000&\
fullTime=true"
```

Note the trailing colon after the key in the `-u` argument - that is the empty password. Get it wrong and you see 401s with a perfectly valid key.

## The search surface

The filter set is compact but genuinely useful:

-   `keywords`, plus `locationName` with `distanceFromLocation` - a radius in miles that defaults to 10.
-   Employment-shape booleans: `permanent`, `contract`, `temp`, `partTime`, `fullTime`.
-   `minimumSalary` and `maximumSalary`, in annual GBP.
-   Poster filters: `postedByRecruitmentAgency`, `postedByDirectEmployer`, and a `graduate` flag.
-   Employer scoping: `employerId` or `employerProfileId` - set only one; if both are present the profile id wins.
-   Paging: `resultsToTake`, capped at 100 per call, with `resultsToSkip` as the offset.

Each search result carries the job id, the employer id and name, the job title, the location, a shortened description, and the salary band the poster set. One documented caveat worth respecting: if the salary was hidden on reed.co.uk, the API returns no salary information for that job at all - the fields are absent, not zero.

## The second call you always end up making

The search response is a listing preview, not the posting. The full text and the structured detail live behind `https://www.reed.co.uk/api/1.0/jobs/{jobId}`: the complete job description, the currency, a salary type (per hour, day, week, month or annum) plus computed yearly equivalents, the contract type, full-time or part-time, the expiration date, an external application URL when applying happens off-site, and the canonical reed.co.uk job URL. In practice every pipeline becomes two-phase: page through search, then fetch details per job - a full page of 100 results costs 101 requests. The documentation names no rate limit; read that as undocumented, not unlimited, and pace your crawler accordingly.

## The agency layer

Those two poster filters exist for a reason: a large share of UK job inventory is posted by recruitment agencies rather than employers, and Reed carries both. The practical consequence is duplication of a kind no jobId can solve - the same underlying role surfacing through several agencies, each as its own posting, often with different salary bands and anonymised employer names. If you are counting demand or deduplicating openings, `postedByDirectEmployer=true` is the honest baseline, at the cost of a much smaller result set.

## Where it stops

-   **One board, one country.** `locationName` expects UK place names and the radius is measured in miles. There is no US, EU or APAC coverage to configure - this is reed.co.uk’s own inventory, full stop.
-   **Keyword-only semantics.** Beyond salary and the employment booleans, everything is a keyword search. There is no skills filter, no occupation or industry classification, and no structured remote flag - “remote” is a string you put in `keywords`, with all the noise that implies.
-   **Snippets in search.** Anything that parses requirements, skills or stacks out of postings needs the per-job details call, and the request count scales with corpus size.
-   **Poll-only.** No webhooks, no change feed. Detecting closed jobs means re-crawling and diffing expiration dates yourself.

## When Reed is the right choice

If your product or analysis is UK-scoped, Reed’s API is one of the best free options in the market - and notably more data-friendly than the publisher-API family. There are no mandatory visitor parameters tying every call to a live human search, the way [Careerjet](/blog/careerjet-api) requires, and job URLs point at reed.co.uk or the employer’s own application page rather than a tracking redirect. Among free keys with UK depth, its closest neighbour is [Adzuna](/blog/adzuna-api), which trades Reed’s single-board depth for aggregation plus documented analytics endpoints. We compare the whole free tier of this market on the [free jobs API](/free-jobs-api) page.

## When one board stops being enough

The UK job market is much bigger than any single board. As of mid-August 2026, JobsPipe tracks over 160,000 live UK postings across its sources - roughly 90,500 first published on LinkedIn, 62,900 on Indeed, and thousands more read directly from Workday, Workable and Ashby career sites that never hit a job board at all. If your reason for wanting an API is coverage - sourcing, market analytics, feeding an AI agent - the single-board ceiling is the first thing you will hit, and the keyword-only filtering is the second:

```
curl https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer jp_live_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "job_country_code_or": ["GB"],
    "skills_or": ["python"],
    "posted_at_max_age_days": 7
  }'
```

One call, every source, full descriptions included - no per-job detail fetch. Records carry classification you can filter on: `skills_or` for skills, `occupation_code_or` for ISCO-08 occupations, `isic_division_or` for industries, alongside `job_title_or` and the country filter above. The free tier includes 1,000 jobs per month.

A fair split: Reed’s API for UK-only products that live inside one board’s inventory - it is free, honest and self-serve, which is more than most of this market offers. A cross-source API the moment coverage or structured filtering is the point.

Every UK source in one call - full postings, skills filters, free tier included.

[

Next →

Careerjet API: a 90-country jobs API built for publishers, not pipelines

](/blog/careerjet-api)

---
Canonical URL: https://jobspipe.dev/blog/reed-api
Title: Reed API: the UK jobs API you can actually get a key for
Description: Indeed retired its Publisher API and LinkedIn sits behind partner programmes, but Reed.co.uk still hands out free API keys in minutes - for a real search endpoint over live UK postings. Here is how the Jobseeker API works: basic auth with the key as the username, the full filter surface, 100 results per page, and the details call you need for full descriptions. And where it stops - one board, one country, keyword-only filtering - plus what to reach for when that ceiling matters.

---
AI agents: the full machine-readable index of this site is https://jobspipe.dev/llms.txt?src=md-twin - API quickstart, no-key sandbox (POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/sandbox/jobs/search), MCP server, pricing. Free key: https://jobspipe.dev/signup