Java Contract Job Trends in the South East

Java
England > South East

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the South East requiring Java skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 2 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 41 53 58
Rank change year-on-year +12 +5 -25
Contract jobs citing Java 225 112 187
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 4.58% 3.64% 3.36%
As % of the Programming Languages category 22.52% 12.70% 16.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 150 74 128
10th Percentile £204 £300 £363
25th Percentile £307 £413 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £425 £580 £559
Median % change year-on-year -26.72% +3.80% +3.71%
75th Percentile £569 £638 £680
90th Percentile £629 £661 £738
England median daily rate £519 £585 £575
% change year-on-year -11.24% +1.74% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 0 11
10th Percentile £35.00 - £44.60
25th Percentile £50.00 - £63.75
Median hourly rate £55.00 - £65.00
75th Percentile £67.50 - £67.02
90th Percentile £68.75 - £75.00
England median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +4.00% - -3.85%

All Programming Languages
South East

Java falls under the Programming Languages category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring coding skills in the South East.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 999 882 1,161
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 20.33% 28.66% 20.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 721 574 789
10th Percentile £309 £350 £325
25th Percentile £403 £420 £418
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.48% -3.33% -
75th Percentile £588 £615 £610
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
England median daily rate £508 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 41 26 82
10th Percentile £27.88 £43.51 £46.25
25th Percentile £46.25 £48.75 £46.56
Median hourly rate £55.00 £59.13 £59.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.98% +0.21% +7.27%
75th Percentile £68.75 £63.44 £67.50
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.43 £76.53
England median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year +3.59% +4.58% -7.69%

Java
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Java relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East.

Java job vacancy trend in the South East

Java
Daily Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Java.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Java

Java
Daily Rate Histogram in the South East

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Java in the South East over the 6 months to 2 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Java in the South East

Java
Hourly Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Java.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Java

Java
Hourly Rate Histogram in the South East

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Java in the South East over the 6 months to 2 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Java in the South East

Java
Contract Job Locations in the South East

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Java within the South East region over the 6 months to 2 March 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
Thames Valley -18 70 £406 -30.56% 58
Hampshire +21 69 £456 -27.08% 37
Berkshire -4 59 £375 -35.90% 34
Surrey +21 46 £208 -51.60% 33
West Sussex -9 26 £360 -17.24% 21
Buckinghamshire -10 10 £575 -4.17% 13
Sussex - 6 £475 - 5
Middlesex - 5 £725 - 1
East Sussex +4 3 £450 +33.33% 10
Oxfordshire -12 1 £500 - 11
Java
England

Java
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East 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 6 (2.67%) Apache
1 6 (2.67%) Apache Spark
2 3 (1.33%) IIS
2 3 (1.33%) Tomcat
3 2 (0.89%) Adobe Experience Manager
3 2 (0.89%) CMS
3 2 (0.89%) Confluence
3 2 (0.89%) NetWeaver
3 2 (0.89%) SAP EP
4 1 (0.44%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.44%) Documentum
4 1 (0.44%) JBoss
4 1 (0.44%) WebLogic
Applications
1 3 (1.33%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.44%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 3 (1.33%) Maximo
1 3 (1.33%) Oracle BRM
2 2 (0.89%) SAP CRM
2 2 (0.89%) SAP FI
3 1 (0.44%) Oracle CRM
Cloud Services
1 63 (28.00%) AWS
2 48 (21.33%) GitHub
3 37 (16.44%) Azure
4 29 (12.89%) OpenShift
5 26 (11.56%) GCP
6 25 (11.11%) GitHub Actions
7 16 (7.11%) SaaS
8 13 (5.78%) Sauce Labs
9 11 (4.89%) Amazon S3
10 10 (4.44%) Entra ID
11 9 (4.00%) AWS Lambda
11 9 (4.00%) Datadog
11 9 (4.00%) Serverless
12 7 (3.11%) Snowflake
13 5 (2.22%) Amazon EC2
14 4 (1.78%) Azure DevOps
14 4 (1.78%) Tricentis Tosca
15 3 (1.33%) AWS CloudFormation
15 3 (1.33%) Azure Machine Learning
15 3 (1.33%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 10 (4.44%) Wireless
2 6 (2.67%) HTTP
3 5 (2.22%) Kerberos
4 4 (1.78%) FTP
4 4 (1.78%) Wireshark
5 3 (1.33%) Broadband
5 3 (1.33%) GPRS
5 3 (1.33%) GSM
5 3 (1.33%) HTTPS
5 3 (1.33%) NFC
5 3 (1.33%) PPP
5 3 (1.33%) SSL
6 2 (0.89%) Bluetooth
6 2 (0.89%) Firewall
7 1 (0.44%) DHCP
7 1 (0.44%) DNS
7 1 (0.44%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 39 (17.33%) Relational Database
2 36 (16.00%) PostgreSQL
3 31 (13.78%) MySQL
4 19 (8.44%) NoSQL
5 16 (7.11%) MongoDB
6 11 (4.89%) DynamoDB
7 8 (3.56%) HBase
8 6 (2.67%) Big Data
9 5 (2.22%) Pinecone
9 5 (2.22%) SQL Server
9 5 (2.22%) Weaviate
10 3 (1.33%) BigQuery
10 3 (1.33%) Data Warehouse
11 2 (0.89%) Elasticsearch
11 2 (0.89%) RDBMS
12 1 (0.44%) Amazon Aurora
12 1 (0.44%) Amazon RDS
12 1 (0.44%) Couchbase
Development Applications
1 35 (15.56%) Jenkins
2 30 (13.33%) JUnit
3 27 (12.00%) Cucumber
4 25 (11.11%) Gradle
5 24 (10.67%) Git
6 19 (8.44%) Eclipse
7 18 (8.00%) Maven
7 18 (8.00%) Sonatype Nexus
8 17 (7.56%) Android Studio
9 16 (7.11%) Browser DevTools
10 13 (5.78%) JIRA
10 13 (5.78%) Xcode
11 11 (4.89%) JMeter
12 8 (3.56%) Artifactory
12 8 (3.56%) SonarQube
13 7 (3.11%) GitLab
13 7 (3.11%) Selenium
14 6 (2.67%) Bitbucket
15 4 (1.78%) Cypress.io
15 4 (1.78%) Toad
General
1 68 (30.22%) Social Skills
2 29 (12.89%) Finance
3 20 (8.89%) Analytical Skills
4 15 (6.67%) Public Sector
5 8 (3.56%) Marketing
6 4 (1.78%) Aerospace
6 4 (1.78%) Banking
6 4 (1.78%) Billing
6 4 (1.78%) Electronics
7 3 (1.33%) Manufacturing
7 3 (1.33%) Telecoms
8 2 (0.89%) Documentation Skills
8 2 (0.89%) Influencing Skills
9 1 (0.44%) Back Office
9 1 (0.44%) Front Office
9 1 (0.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 1 (0.44%) Legal
9 1 (0.44%) Retail
Job Titles
1 99 (44.00%) Developer
2 74 (32.89%) Java Developer
3 29 (12.89%) Technical Support
4 21 (9.33%) Support Engineer
5 20 (8.89%) Java Engineer
5 20 (8.89%) Technical Engineer
5 20 (8.89%) Technical Support Engineer
6 19 (8.44%) Full-Stack Developer
7 18 (8.00%) Senior
8 15 (6.67%) Lead
8 15 (6.67%) Software Engineer
9 13 (5.78%) Senior Developer
9 13 (5.78%) UX Engineer
10 12 (5.33%) Full-Stack Java Developer
11 11 (4.89%) AWS Developer
12 10 (4.44%) Front-End Engineer (Client-Side Engineer)
12 10 (4.44%) Senior Java Developer
13 8 (3.56%) Architect
14 7 (3.11%) Applications Developer
14 7 (3.11%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 58 (25.78%) Spring
2 47 (20.89%) Spring Boot
3 36 (16.00%) React
4 35 (15.56%) AngularJS
5 30 (13.33%) Kafka
6 27 (12.00%) REST
7 26 (11.56%) CSS
8 19 (8.44%) GraphQL
9 18 (8.00%) RESTful
10 16 (7.11%) Hibernate
11 15 (6.67%) XML
12 14 (6.22%) HTML
13 13 (5.78%) Ajax
14 11 (4.89%) Node.js
14 11 (4.89%) SOAP
15 8 (3.56%) JSON
15 8 (3.56%) SailPoint
15 8 (3.56%) Vue
15 8 (3.56%) Web Services
16 7 (3.11%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 18 (8.00%) Mobile App
2 17 (7.56%) Distributed Systems
3 6 (2.67%) Cloud Native
4 5 (2.22%) Self-Motivation
5 4 (1.78%) Data Centre
6 3 (1.33%) Data Structures
6 3 (1.33%) IPTV
6 3 (1.33%) Product Ownership
6 3 (1.33%) Security Posture
6 3 (1.33%) Smartcard
7 2 (0.89%) Algorithms
7 2 (0.89%) Distributed Architecture
7 2 (0.89%) Linux Command Line
8 1 (0.44%) AI Agents
8 1 (0.44%) Clustering
8 1 (0.44%) EMV
8 1 (0.44%) Java Card
8 1 (0.44%) Onboarding
8 1 (0.44%) Private Cloud
8 1 (0.44%) Team-Oriented Environment
Operating Systems
1 44 (19.56%) Linux
2 40 (17.78%) Windows
3 32 (14.22%) Unix
4 22 (9.78%) Android
5 6 (2.67%) Apple iOS
6 4 (1.78%) Windows Server
7 3 (1.33%) Ubuntu
8 2 (0.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 2 (0.89%) VMS
9 1 (0.44%) Windows Server 2016
9 1 (0.44%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 80 (35.56%) CI/CD
2 64 (28.44%) Agile
3 43 (19.11%) DevOps
4 42 (18.67%) Test Automation
5 39 (17.33%) Microservices
6 36 (16.00%) OO
6 36 (16.00%) Software Engineering
7 33 (14.67%) Problem-Solving
8 29 (12.89%) Scrum
9 27 (12.00%) Containerisation
10 25 (11.11%) User Experience
11 24 (10.67%) Full-Stack Development
12 22 (9.78%) OOP
13 19 (8.44%) Observability
13 19 (8.44%) Software Testing
14 18 (8.00%) Computer Science
15 17 (7.56%) AI
16 16 (7.11%) High Availability
17 15 (6.67%) Analytics
18 14 (6.22%) Mobile Application Development
Programming Languages
1 66 (29.33%) Python
2 63 (28.00%) JavaScript
3 46 (20.44%) SQL
4 23 (10.22%) Perl
5 16 (7.11%) PowerShell
6 14 (6.22%) C#
7 12 (5.33%) Go
8 8 (3.56%) BeanShell
8 8 (3.56%) C++
9 7 (3.11%) TypeScript
10 6 (2.67%) Kotlin
11 5 (2.22%) Bash
12 4 (1.78%) PL/SQL
13 3 (1.33%) C
13 3 (1.33%) Groovy
13 3 (1.33%) Jython
13 3 (1.33%) Shell Script
14 2 (0.89%) ABAP
14 2 (0.89%) PHP
14 2 (0.89%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 56 (24.89%) Security Cleared
2 48 (21.33%) SC Cleared
3 21 (9.33%) Degree
4 17 (7.56%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (4.44%) OCP
5 10 (4.44%) Oracle Certification
6 5 (2.22%) ISTQB
7 4 (1.78%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
8 3 (1.33%) DV Cleared
9 2 (0.89%) BPSS Clearance
9 2 (0.89%) ISEB
9 2 (0.89%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
10 1 (0.44%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (5.78%) QA
2 3 (1.33%) Data Quality
2 3 (1.33%) Def Stans
3 1 (0.44%) Accessibility
System Software
1 21 (9.33%) Docker
2 11 (4.89%) Active Directory
3 5 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
4 1 (0.44%) NDS
4 1 (0.44%) NetIQ eDirectory
4 1 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 54 (24.00%) Kubernetes
2 17 (7.56%) Ansible
3 11 (4.89%) Terraform
4 10 (4.44%) Grafana
5 9 (4.00%) Progress Chef
6 7 (3.11%) Argo
7 4 (1.78%) Prometheus
8 1 (0.44%) HP ALM
8 1 (0.44%) SCCM
Vendors
1 34 (15.11%) Oracle
2 23 (10.22%) Microsoft
3 18 (8.00%) Splunk
4 13 (5.78%) VMware
5 11 (4.89%) ServiceNow
6 9 (4.00%) SAP
7 8 (3.56%) Red Hat
8 4 (1.78%) Ariba
9 3 (1.33%) Ab Initio
9 3 (1.33%) Atlassian
9 3 (1.33%) Google
9 3 (1.33%) OpenAI
9 3 (1.33%) Salesforce
9 3 (1.33%) Teradata
10 2 (0.89%) Adobe
10 2 (0.89%) webMethods
11 1 (0.44%) Citrix
11 1 (0.44%) HP
11 1 (0.44%) IBM
11 1 (0.44%) NetIQ