Lead Developer Contracts in London

Lead Developer
England > London

The median Lead Developer daily rate in London is £638, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 255 297 380
Rank change year-on-year +42 +83 -32
Contract jobs requiring a Lead Developer 98 94 113
As % of all contract jobs advertised in London 0.78% 0.53% 0.42%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.84% 0.57% 0.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 76 73 75
10th Percentile £461 £475 £495
25th Percentile £522 £521 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £638 £675 £600
Median % change year-on-year -5.56% +12.50% -7.69%
75th Percentile £731 £888 £716
90th Percentile £813 - £883
England median daily rate £600 £650 £600
% change year-on-year -7.69% +8.33% -1.23%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in London. 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 London with a recognized job title 11,726 16,625 25,758
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.45% 93.24% 95.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,034 12,022 18,663
10th Percentile £341 £325 £363
25th Percentile £431 £444 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -
75th Percentile £675 £675 £700
90th Percentile £800 £800 £800
England median daily rate £525 £525 £550
% change year-on-year - -4.55% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 143 336 290
10th Percentile £20.45 £16.01 £18.00
25th Percentile £23.90 £20.02 £22.53
Median hourly rate £34.00 £27.81 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +22.26% -20.54% -
75th Percentile £50.75 £43.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £64.75 £65.00 £76.03
England median hourly rate £30.62 £36.31 £45.00
% change year-on-year -15.67% -19.32% +100.00%

Lead Developer
Job Vacancy Trend in London

Job postings that featured Lead Developer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in London.

Job vacancy trend for Lead Developer in London

Lead Developer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in London

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Lead Developer in London.

Daily rate trend for Lead Developer in London

Lead Developer
Daily Rate Histogram in London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Lead Developer in London over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Lead Developer in London

Lead Developer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in London

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Lead Developer in London.

Hourly rate trend for Lead Developer in London

Lead Developer
Contract Job Locations in London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Lead Developer within the London region over the 6 months to 1 May 2025. 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
Central London +9 13 £670 +3.08% 11
West London +12 1 £625 +4.17% 1
Lead Developer
England

Lead Developer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in London

For the 6 months to 1 May 2025, Lead Developer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the London region featuring Lead Developer in the job title.

1 37 (37.76%) Azure
2 35 (35.71%) Java
3 30 (30.61%) DevOps
4 29 (29.59%) AWS
5 28 (28.57%) Social Skills
6 25 (25.51%) Full-Stack Development
6 25 (25.51%) CI/CD
7 24 (24.49%) Agile
8 23 (23.47%) PostgreSQL
9 22 (22.45%) TDD
9 22 (22.45%) Python
10 21 (21.43%) Mentoring
11 20 (20.41%) BDD
11 20 (20.41%) Security Cleared
11 20 (20.41%) .NET
12 19 (19.39%) SC Cleared
13 18 (18.37%) AngularJS
13 18 (18.37%) SQL
13 18 (18.37%) Software Engineering
14 17 (17.35%) Banking
14 17 (17.35%) C#
14 17 (17.35%) Azure DevOps
14 17 (17.35%) Problem-Solving
15 16 (16.33%) Kubernetes
16 15 (15.31%) Kafka
16 15 (15.31%) JavaScript
17 14 (14.29%) JUnit
17 14 (14.29%) Redis
17 14 (14.29%) Microservices
17 14 (14.29%) Docker

Lead Developer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 6 (6.12%) SAS
2 5 (5.10%) Confluence
3 4 (4.08%) Tomcat
4 3 (3.06%) CMS
4 3 (3.06%) JBoss
5 1 (1.02%) Apache Spark
5 1 (1.02%) Headless CMS
5 1 (1.02%) nginx
5 1 (1.02%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (2.04%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (1.02%) Endur
Cloud Services
1 37 (37.76%) Azure
2 29 (29.59%) AWS
3 17 (17.35%) Azure DevOps
4 12 (12.24%) Power Platform
5 9 (9.18%) Power Automate
6 8 (8.16%) PowerApps
7 7 (7.14%) GCP
8 6 (6.12%) Cloud Computing
8 6 (6.12%) GitHub
9 5 (5.10%) Slack
10 4 (4.08%) Azure Logic Apps
10 4 (4.08%) GitHub Actions
10 4 (4.08%) Serverless
11 3 (3.06%) Amazon S3
11 3 (3.06%) dbt
11 3 (3.06%) Dynamics 365
11 3 (3.06%) Snowflake
12 2 (2.04%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 2 (2.04%) Amazon SQS
12 2 (2.04%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 3 (3.06%) HTTP
2 2 (2.04%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 23 (23.47%) PostgreSQL
2 14 (14.29%) Redis
3 11 (11.22%) MongoDB
4 10 (10.20%) MySQL
4 10 (10.20%) Power BI
5 7 (7.14%) Oracle Database
6 6 (6.12%) SQL Server
7 5 (5.10%) Apache Cassandra
7 5 (5.10%) NoSQL
7 5 (5.10%) Relational Database
8 4 (4.08%) Elasticsearch
9 3 (3.06%) Data Warehouse
9 3 (3.06%) Geospatial Data
9 3 (3.06%) Neo4j
10 2 (2.04%) Amazon Athena
10 2 (2.04%) DynamoDB
11 1 (1.02%) Amazon Redshift
11 1 (1.02%) Big Data
11 1 (1.02%) Hadoop
11 1 (1.02%) MariaDB
Development Applications
1 14 (14.29%) JUnit
2 11 (11.22%) Git
3 8 (8.16%) JIRA
4 6 (6.12%) Cucumber
5 5 (5.10%) Jasmine
5 5 (5.10%) Maven
6 4 (4.08%) Gradle
6 4 (4.08%) SonarQube
7 3 (3.06%) Eclipse
7 3 (3.06%) IntelliJ
7 3 (3.06%) Mockito
7 3 (3.06%) Selenium
8 2 (2.04%) Jenkins
8 2 (2.04%) TestNG
9 1 (1.02%) Android Studio
9 1 (1.02%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 1 (1.02%) Bitbucket
9 1 (1.02%) Bitbucket Server
9 1 (1.02%) GitLab
9 1 (1.02%) WebDriver
General
1 28 (28.57%) Social Skills
2 17 (17.35%) Banking
3 12 (12.24%) Analytical Skills
3 12 (12.24%) Investment Banking
4 11 (11.22%) Public Sector
5 8 (8.16%) Finance
6 6 (6.12%) Telecoms
7 4 (4.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 3 (3.06%) Publishing
9 2 (2.04%) Marketing
9 2 (2.04%) Retail
10 1 (1.02%) Back Office
10 1 (1.02%) Electronics
10 1 (1.02%) Front Office
10 1 (1.02%) Games
10 1 (1.02%) Legal
10 1 (1.02%) Manufacturing
10 1 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
10 1 (1.02%) Presentation Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 20 (20.41%) .NET
2 18 (18.37%) AngularJS
3 15 (15.31%) Kafka
4 13 (13.27%) Spring
5 12 (12.24%) Node.js
5 12 (12.24%) REST
5 12 (12.24%) Spring Boot
6 11 (11.22%) CSS
6 11 (11.22%) HTML
6 11 (11.22%) RESTful
6 11 (11.22%) Vue
7 10 (10.20%) ActiveMQ
7 10 (10.20%) OpenAPI
7 10 (10.20%) Swagger
8 9 (9.18%) ASP.NET
9 8 (8.16%) React
10 7 (7.14%) .NET Core
10 7 (7.14%) .NET Framework
10 7 (7.14%) Web Services
11 5 (5.10%) Spring Security
Miscellaneous
1 8 (8.16%) Market Risk
2 5 (5.10%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
3 3 (3.06%) Derivative
3 3 (3.06%) Low-Code
4 2 (2.04%) Greenfield Project
4 2 (2.04%) Product Ownership
5 1 (1.02%) Algorithms
5 1 (1.02%) Cloud Native
5 1 (1.02%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (1.02%) Data Structures
5 1 (1.02%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (1.02%) Linux Command Line
5 1 (1.02%) Management Information System
5 1 (1.02%) Mobile App
5 1 (1.02%) NHS
5 1 (1.02%) Operational Technology
5 1 (1.02%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 13 (13.27%) Linux
2 5 (5.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 4 (4.08%) Windows
4 3 (3.06%) Android
4 3 (3.06%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 30 (30.61%) DevOps
2 25 (25.51%) CI/CD
2 25 (25.51%) Full-Stack Development
3 24 (24.49%) Agile
4 22 (22.45%) TDD
5 21 (21.43%) Mentoring
6 20 (20.41%) BDD
7 18 (18.37%) Software Engineering
8 17 (17.35%) Problem-Solving
9 14 (14.29%) Microservices
10 12 (12.24%) Containerisation
11 11 (11.22%) Architectural Design
11 11 (11.22%) Business Intelligence
11 11 (11.22%) Computer Science
11 11 (11.22%) Mathematics
12 10 (10.20%) API Development
12 10 (10.20%) Economics
13 9 (9.18%) Integration Testing
13 9 (9.18%) OO
13 9 (9.18%) Unit Testing
Programming Languages
1 35 (35.71%) Java
2 22 (22.45%) Python
3 18 (18.37%) SQL
4 17 (17.35%) C#
5 15 (15.31%) JavaScript
6 6 (6.12%) Bash
7 5 (5.10%) PowerShell
7 5 (5.10%) TypeScript
8 3 (3.06%) Kotlin
8 3 (3.06%) PL/SQL
9 1 (1.02%) Apex Code
9 1 (1.02%) C
9 1 (1.02%) Go
9 1 (1.02%) PHP
9 1 (1.02%) Ruby
9 1 (1.02%) Scala
Qualifications
1 20 (20.41%) Security Cleared
2 19 (19.39%) SC Cleared
3 11 (11.22%) Degree
4 10 (10.20%) Numerate Degree
5 7 (7.14%) DV Cleared
6 1 (1.02%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (7.14%) Accessibility
2 3 (3.06%) QA
3 2 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 20000
3 2 (2.04%) WCAG
4 1 (1.02%) Basel II
System Software
1 14 (14.29%) Docker
2 3 (3.06%) Active Directory
3 1 (1.02%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 16 (16.33%) Kubernetes
2 6 (6.12%) Terraform
3 2 (2.04%) Grafana
3 2 (2.04%) Kibana
3 2 (2.04%) Prometheus
4 1 (1.02%) Ansible
Vendors
1 12 (12.24%) Microsoft
2 9 (9.18%) Oracle
3 4 (4.08%) Google
4 3 (3.06%) ServiceNow
4 3 (3.06%) Splunk
5 1 (1.02%) OpenLink
5 1 (1.02%) OutSystems
5 1 (1.02%) Red Hat
5 1 (1.02%) Salesforce
5 1 (1.02%) SAP
5 1 (1.02%) Virgin Media