Java Engineer Contract Job Trends in England

Java Engineer
UK > England

The median Java Engineer daily rate in England is £520, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 2 February 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 378 357 453
Rank change year-on-year -21 +96 -104
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 174 120 97
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.53% 0.46% 0.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.58% 0.49% 0.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 107 80 73
10th Percentile £350 £424 £385
25th Percentile £391 £513 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £600 £588
Median % change year-on-year -13.33% +2.13% -6.00%
75th Percentile £605 £831 £725
90th Percentile £825 £888 £788
UK median daily rate £540 £595 £575
% change year-on-year -9.24% +3.48% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 9 1
10th Percentile £48.90 £37.95 -
25th Percentile £52.50 £57.50 £58.75
Median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% +4.00% -4.73%
75th Percentile £65.00 £68.75 £66.25
90th Percentile £88.00 - -
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year -15.38% -1.89% +0.98%

All Contract IT Job Roles
England

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in England. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in England with a recognized job title 30,066 24,417 35,598
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.62% 93.06% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,145 15,033 24,004
10th Percentile £300 £300 £270
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £644
90th Percentile £725 £750 £745
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,886 731 2,091
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.92 £13.25
25th Percentile £18.60 £21.25 £17.00
Median hourly rate £30.00 £35.00 £35.95
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% -2.64% +2.71%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.50 £61.69
90th Percentile £71.00 £75.00 £72.75
UK median hourly rate £29.61 £33.00 £35.95
% change year-on-year -10.27% -8.21% +2.71%

Java Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Java Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Java Engineer job vacancy trend in England

Java Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Java Engineer job vacancies in England.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Java Engineer job vacancies in England

Java Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Java Engineer in England over the 6 months to 2 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Java Engineer in England

Java Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Java Engineer job vacancies in England.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Java Engineer job vacancies in England

Java Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Java Engineer in England over the 6 months to 2 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Java Engineer in England

Java Engineer
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Java Engineer within the England region over the 6 months to 2 February 2026. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London -26 94 £565 -5.83% 31
North of England -23 33 £478 -9.05% 16
North West -8 21 £438 - 5
Midlands -35 17 £442 -15.90% 9
South East -11 16 £365 -43.85% 20
West Midlands -25 15 £451 -14.14% 5
South West -24 11 £384 -31.88% 22
North East - 7 £575 - 6
Yorkshire -56 5 £523 -0.48% 6
East Midlands - 2 £313 - 4
Java Engineer
UK

Java Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England

For the 6 months to 2 February 2026, Java Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the England region featuring Java Engineer in the job title.

1 174 (100.00%) Java
2 82 (47.13%) Software Engineering
3 78 (44.83%) Spring
4 71 (40.80%) AWS
5 70 (40.23%) Microservices
6 67 (38.51%) Kubernetes
7 65 (37.36%) Spring Boot
8 62 (35.63%) CI/CD
9 55 (31.61%) Agile
10 36 (20.69%) Docker
11 35 (20.11%) DevOps
11 35 (20.11%) TDD
12 30 (17.24%) Kafka
12 30 (17.24%) SQL
13 28 (16.09%) Containerisation
14 27 (15.52%) Full-Stack Development
15 26 (14.94%) Test Automation
16 25 (14.37%) Gradle
17 24 (13.79%) GitLab
18 23 (13.22%) Problem-Solving
18 23 (13.22%) Python
19 22 (12.64%) Security Cleared
20 21 (12.07%) Git
20 21 (12.07%) PostgreSQL
20 21 (12.07%) QA
20 21 (12.07%) SC Cleared
21 20 (11.49%) Event-Driven
21 20 (11.49%) MongoDB
22 19 (10.92%) JUnit
22 19 (10.92%) RESTful

Java Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 12 (6.90%) Apache
2 9 (5.17%) Apache Airflow
3 5 (2.87%) Apache Spark
4 4 (2.30%) JBoss
4 4 (2.30%) WebLogic
5 1 (0.57%) Adobe Experience Manager
5 1 (0.57%) Camunda
5 1 (0.57%) Confluence
5 1 (0.57%) Ethereum
5 1 (0.57%) Hyperledger
5 1 (0.57%) Luigi
5 1 (0.57%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 1 (0.57%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (1.15%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 71 (40.80%) AWS
2 18 (10.34%) Azure
3 16 (9.20%) AWS Lambda
3 16 (9.20%) Serverless
4 15 (8.62%) Amazon S3
4 15 (8.62%) GCP
5 14 (8.05%) Amazon EC2
6 12 (6.90%) Amazon ECS
6 12 (6.90%) GitHub
7 10 (5.75%) Snowflake
8 9 (5.17%) AWS CloudFormation
8 9 (5.17%) AWS Step Functions
8 9 (5.17%) OpenShift
9 8 (4.60%) Amazon Kinesis
9 8 (4.60%) dbt
10 7 (4.02%) Cloud Computing
11 6 (3.45%) GitHub Actions
12 4 (2.30%) Amazon EKS
12 4 (2.30%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 3 (1.72%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.15%) HTTP
2 1 (0.57%) FTP
2 1 (0.57%) Kerberos
2 1 (0.57%) SSL
2 1 (0.57%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (12.07%) PostgreSQL
2 20 (11.49%) MongoDB
3 13 (7.47%) MySQL
4 12 (6.90%) Amazon RDS
5 11 (6.32%) Apache Cassandra
6 9 (5.17%) Hadoop
7 8 (4.60%) Amazon Athena
7 8 (4.60%) Apache Arrow
7 8 (4.60%) Apache Iceberg
7 8 (4.60%) Apache Ignite
7 8 (4.60%) Data Lake
7 8 (4.60%) Dremio
7 8 (4.60%) NoSQL
8 7 (4.02%) Big Data
9 5 (2.87%) DynamoDB
10 3 (1.72%) BigQuery
10 3 (1.72%) HBase
10 3 (1.72%) Relational Database
11 2 (1.15%) Elasticsearch
11 2 (1.15%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 25 (14.37%) Gradle
2 24 (13.79%) GitLab
3 21 (12.07%) Git
4 19 (10.92%) JUnit
5 17 (9.77%) Jenkins
6 16 (9.20%) Cucumber
6 16 (9.20%) IntelliJ
7 11 (6.32%) Maven
8 9 (5.17%) Selenium
9 7 (4.02%) JMeter
9 7 (4.02%) Sonatype Nexus
10 4 (2.30%) Eclipse
10 4 (2.30%) JIRA
10 4 (2.30%) Postman
11 3 (1.72%) Artifactory
11 3 (1.72%) Mockito
12 2 (1.15%) Gatling
12 2 (1.15%) SonarQube
13 1 (0.57%) REST Assured
13 1 (0.57%) Serenity BDD
General
1 40 (22.99%) Finance
2 34 (19.54%) Social Skills
3 18 (10.34%) Banking
4 13 (7.47%) Front Office
5 11 (6.32%) Investment Banking
6 9 (5.17%) Public Sector
7 4 (2.30%) Influencing Skills
8 2 (1.15%) Analytical Skills
9 1 (0.57%) Financial Institution
9 1 (0.57%) Law
9 1 (0.57%) Military
9 1 (0.57%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 78 (44.83%) Spring
2 65 (37.36%) Spring Boot
3 30 (17.24%) Kafka
4 19 (10.92%) RESTful
5 14 (8.05%) REST
6 12 (6.90%) Hibernate
6 12 (6.90%) React
7 11 (6.32%) OpenTelemetry
8 10 (5.75%) gRPC
8 10 (5.75%) Middleware
9 9 (5.17%) Swagger
10 8 (4.60%) GraphQL
10 8 (4.60%) NumPy
10 8 (4.60%) Pandas
10 8 (4.60%) Protocol Buffers
10 8 (4.60%) SciPy
11 7 (4.02%) HTML
11 7 (4.02%) JSON
11 7 (4.02%) Node.js
12 6 (3.45%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 25 (14.37%) Cloud Native
2 21 (12.07%) Distributed Systems
3 12 (6.90%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 11 (6.32%) Derivative
5 9 (5.17%) Equities
5 9 (5.17%) Hedge funds
6 8 (4.60%) Fixed Income
6 8 (4.60%) Onboarding
6 8 (4.60%) Pricing Data
7 5 (2.87%) Data Protection Act
7 5 (2.87%) Virtual Team
8 4 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
8 4 (2.30%) Product Ownership
9 3 (1.72%) Legacy Applications
9 3 (1.72%) Public Cloud
10 2 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
11 1 (0.57%) Data Structures
11 1 (0.57%) Mobile App
11 1 (0.57%) Over-the-Top Content
11 1 (0.57%) TWAP
Operating Systems
1 15 (8.62%) Linux
2 8 (4.60%) Unix
3 1 (0.57%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 82 (47.13%) Software Engineering
2 70 (40.23%) Microservices
3 62 (35.63%) CI/CD
4 55 (31.61%) Agile
5 35 (20.11%) DevOps
5 35 (20.11%) TDD
6 28 (16.09%) Containerisation
7 27 (15.52%) Full-Stack Development
8 26 (14.94%) Test Automation
9 23 (13.22%) Problem-Solving
10 20 (11.49%) Event-Driven
11 19 (10.92%) Software Testing
12 18 (10.34%) Clean Code
13 15 (8.62%) BDD
14 13 (7.47%) Fintech
14 13 (7.47%) Migration
14 13 (7.47%) Observability
14 13 (7.47%) Scrum
15 12 (6.90%) API Development
15 12 (6.90%) Code Quality
Programming Languages
1 174 (100.00%) Java
2 30 (17.24%) SQL
3 23 (13.22%) Python
4 16 (9.20%) JavaScript
5 15 (8.62%) Kotlin
5 15 (8.62%) TypeScript
6 6 (3.45%) Scala
7 5 (2.87%) C++
7 5 (2.87%) Go
8 4 (2.30%) Ada
9 2 (1.15%) Bash
9 2 (1.15%) C#
9 2 (1.15%) PL/SQL
9 2 (1.15%) Rust
9 2 (1.15%) Shell Script
10 1 (0.57%) Ruby
10 1 (0.57%) Solidity
Qualifications
1 22 (12.64%) Security Cleared
2 21 (12.07%) SC Cleared
3 7 (4.02%) Degree
4 6 (3.45%) Computer Science Degree
5 4 (2.30%) BPSS Clearance
6 3 (1.72%) OCP
6 3 (1.72%) Oracle Certification
7 2 (1.15%) Master's Degree
8 1 (0.57%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 21 (12.07%) QA
2 4 (2.30%) Accessibility
2 4 (2.30%) Def Stans
2 4 (2.30%) IEC 61508
3 2 (1.15%) Data Quality
4 1 (0.57%) ISO 15022
4 1 (0.57%) ISO 20022
4 1 (0.57%) WCAG
System Software
1 36 (20.69%) Docker
Systems Management
1 67 (38.51%) Kubernetes
2 15 (8.62%) Grafana
3 9 (5.17%) Terraform
4 6 (3.45%) Ansible
5 5 (2.87%) Puppet
6 4 (2.30%) Progress Chef
7 2 (1.15%) Argo
8 1 (0.57%) Kibana
Vendors
1 9 (5.17%) Google
2 8 (4.60%) Oracle
3 4 (2.30%) Databricks
3 4 (2.30%) Microsoft
3 4 (2.30%) Splunk
3 4 (2.30%) VMware
3 4 (2.30%) webMethods
4 3 (1.72%) IBM
5 2 (1.15%) Dynatrace
5 2 (1.15%) New Relic
5 2 (1.15%) Red Hat
5 2 (1.15%) Solace
6 1 (0.57%) Actian
6 1 (0.57%) Confluent
6 1 (0.57%) Netlify
6 1 (0.57%) ServiceNow
6 1 (0.57%) SnapLogic
6 1 (0.57%) Teradata
6 1 (0.57%) Virgin Media
6 1 (0.57%) Zoomdata