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 18 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 51 45 43
Rank change year-on-year -6 -2 -3
Contract jobs citing Java 220 134 231
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 3.59% 4.44% 4.01%
As % of the Programming Languages category 18.20% 16.71% 17.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 133 74 161
10th Percentile £207 £321 £365
25th Percentile £357 £405 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £585
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -18.80% +11.43%
75th Percentile £600 £588 £675
90th Percentile £675 £638 £738
England median daily rate £525 £537 £585
% change year-on-year -2.23% -8.21% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 9 13
10th Percentile £55.50 £41.17 £39.50
25th Percentile £60.63 - £60.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -23.08% -5.45%
75th Percentile £70.00 £55.00 £67.02
90th Percentile - - £74.75
England median hourly rate £65.00 £50.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +30.00% -25.93% +3.05%

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 1,209 802 1,313
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 19.71% 26.57% 22.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 795 547 895
10th Percentile £311 £350 £325
25th Percentile £402 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £501
Median % change year-on-year - -0.20% -4.57%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £608
90th Percentile £688 £658 £675
England median daily rate £514 £522 £538
% change year-on-year -1.53% -2.97% -3.93%
Number of hourly rates quoted 66 26 90
10th Percentile £34.01 £36.38 £35.00
25th Percentile £43.81 £46.93 £46.25
Median hourly rate £60.00 £54.94 £62.25
Median % change year-on-year +9.22% -11.75% +9.24%
75th Percentile £70.00 £59.78 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £64.52 £75.25
England median hourly rate £65.00 £56.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +14.54% -9.20% -

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 18 June 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 18 June 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 18 June 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 -49 59 £450 -1.64% 24
Surrey +17 57 £511 +3.39% 7
Hampshire -6 51 £593 +24.41% 26
West Sussex +1 41 £360 -23.19% 5
Berkshire -43 40 £385 -23.00% 17
Buckinghamshire -34 13 £513 +34.87% 6
Sussex - 7 £475 - 2
Oxfordshire -27 6 £800 - 1
East Sussex -3 1 £600 +60.00% 2
Middlesex - 1 £725 - 1
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 8 (3.64%) Apache Spark
2 4 (1.82%) Documentum
2 4 (1.82%) NetWeaver
2 4 (1.82%) SAP EP
2 4 (1.82%) SharePoint
3 3 (1.36%) Apache Airflow
4 2 (0.91%) Adobe Experience Manager
5 1 (0.45%) Apache
5 1 (0.45%) CMS
5 1 (0.45%) Confluence
5 1 (0.45%) IIS
5 1 (0.45%) OpenStack
Applications
1 2 (0.91%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.45%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 4 (1.82%) SAP CRM
2 2 (0.91%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.45%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 58 (26.36%) AWS
2 55 (25.00%) Azure
3 31 (14.09%) GCP
4 26 (11.82%) OpenShift
5 21 (9.55%) GitHub
6 14 (6.36%) Amazon S3
7 12 (5.45%) GitHub Actions
8 10 (4.55%) Serverless
9 9 (4.09%) AWS Lambda
9 9 (4.09%) Azure DevOps
10 8 (3.64%) Snowflake
11 7 (3.18%) Amazon ECS
12 5 (2.27%) Amazon EKS
12 5 (2.27%) Power Platform
12 5 (2.27%) SuccessFactors
13 3 (1.36%) Amazon SQS
13 3 (1.36%) AWS CodePipeline
13 3 (1.36%) SaaS
13 3 (1.36%) Sauce Labs
14 2 (0.91%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.82%) HTTP
1 4 (1.82%) HTTPS
2 2 (0.91%) FTP
2 2 (0.91%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (14.09%) Relational Database
2 21 (9.55%) NoSQL
2 21 (9.55%) PostgreSQL
3 18 (8.18%) MySQL
4 13 (5.91%) Big Data
5 12 (5.45%) DynamoDB
6 8 (3.64%) Data Warehouse
6 8 (3.64%) SQL Server
7 7 (3.18%) Data Lake
8 5 (2.27%) Apache Cassandra
8 5 (2.27%) Couchbase
8 5 (2.27%) Power BI
9 4 (1.82%) MongoDB
10 3 (1.36%) Amazon Redshift
10 3 (1.36%) Metadata
10 3 (1.36%) Pinecone
10 3 (1.36%) Weaviate
11 2 (0.91%) BigQuery
11 2 (0.91%) Elasticsearch
11 2 (0.91%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 34 (15.45%) Git
2 25 (11.36%) Jenkins
3 18 (8.18%) SonarQube
4 12 (5.45%) Maven
5 11 (5.00%) JUnit
6 8 (3.64%) Gradle
6 8 (3.64%) JIRA
6 8 (3.64%) Selenium
7 7 (3.18%) Eclipse
8 6 (2.73%) GitLab
9 5 (2.27%) Bitbucket
9 5 (2.27%) WebDriver
10 4 (1.82%) Android Studio
10 4 (1.82%) Subversion
10 4 (1.82%) Visual Studio
11 3 (1.36%) Browser DevTools
11 3 (1.36%) Cucumber
11 3 (1.36%) SpecFlow
11 3 (1.36%) TeamCity
11 3 (1.36%) Xcode
General
1 58 (26.36%) Social Skills
2 23 (10.45%) Analytical Skills
3 21 (9.55%) Finance
4 7 (3.18%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 7 (3.18%) Public Sector
5 5 (2.27%) Banking
6 4 (1.82%) Marketing
7 3 (1.36%) Influencing Skills
8 2 (0.91%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.45%) Advertising
9 1 (0.45%) Aerospace
9 1 (0.45%) Organisational Skills
9 1 (0.45%) Pharmaceutical
9 1 (0.45%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 78 (35.45%) Developer
2 63 (28.64%) Java Developer
3 33 (15.00%) Java Engineer
4 25 (11.36%) Software Engineer
5 22 (10.00%) Architect
6 21 (9.55%) Senior
7 14 (6.36%) Technical Architect
8 12 (5.45%) Lead
8 12 (5.45%) Technical Support
9 10 (4.55%) Applications Developer
9 10 (4.55%) SC Cleared Java Developer
10 9 (4.09%) Senior Developer
10 9 (4.09%) Technical Engineer
11 8 (3.64%) DevOps Engineer
11 8 (3.64%) Support Engineer
12 7 (3.18%) Java Software Engineer
12 7 (3.18%) Senior Java Engineer
12 7 (3.18%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 7 (3.18%) Technical Support Engineer
13 6 (2.73%) Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 37 (16.82%) Spring
2 32 (14.55%) REST
3 28 (12.73%) AngularJS
4 27 (12.27%) Spring Boot
5 21 (9.55%) .NET
6 19 (8.64%) Kafka
7 18 (8.18%) Quarkus
7 18 (8.18%) React
8 15 (6.82%) GraphQL
8 15 (6.82%) RESTful
9 13 (5.91%) CSS
10 12 (5.45%) SOAP
11 10 (4.55%) HTML
12 9 (4.09%) Hibernate
13 8 (3.64%) OAuth
14 7 (3.18%) Web Services
15 6 (2.73%) JPA
15 6 (2.73%) Node.js
15 6 (2.73%) Spring MVC
16 5 (2.27%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 33 (15.00%) Distributed Systems
2 19 (8.64%) Cloud Native
3 8 (3.64%) Mobile App
4 7 (3.18%) Product Ownership
5 6 (2.73%) Self-Motivation
6 5 (2.27%) Data Protection Act
6 5 (2.27%) Distributed Architecture
6 5 (2.27%) Enterprise Software
7 4 (1.82%) Data Centre
7 4 (1.82%) Data Structures
8 3 (1.36%) Algorithms
8 3 (1.36%) Analytical Mindset
9 2 (0.91%) Security Posture
10 1 (0.45%) Enterprise Cloud
10 1 (0.45%) IoT
10 1 (0.45%) Low-Code
10 1 (0.45%) Marketing Technology
10 1 (0.45%) Robotics
10 1 (0.45%) Team-Oriented Environment
10 1 (0.45%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 21 (9.55%) Unix
2 20 (9.09%) Linux
3 16 (7.27%) Windows
4 8 (3.64%) Android
5 4 (1.82%) Apple iOS
6 2 (0.91%) VMS
7 1 (0.45%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 78 (35.45%) CI/CD
2 71 (32.27%) Agile
3 63 (28.64%) Software Engineering
4 50 (22.73%) DevOps
5 45 (20.45%) Test Automation
6 44 (20.00%) Microservices
7 43 (19.55%) Scrum
8 35 (15.91%) Problem-Solving
9 29 (13.18%) SDLC
9 29 (13.18%) Unit Testing
10 25 (11.36%) Sprint Planning
11 23 (10.45%) DevSecOps
11 23 (10.45%) High Availability
12 22 (10.00%) Front End Development
13 21 (9.55%) Containerisation
13 21 (9.55%) OOP
14 20 (9.09%) Event-Driven
14 20 (9.09%) Fintech
15 19 (8.64%) Sprint Review
16 17 (7.73%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 56 (25.45%) Python
2 47 (21.36%) SQL
3 37 (16.82%) JavaScript
4 24 (10.91%) Go
5 18 (8.18%) C#
6 11 (5.00%) Kotlin
6 11 (5.00%) Perl
7 8 (3.64%) PowerShell
7 8 (3.64%) Shell Script
8 7 (3.18%) C++
9 6 (2.73%) TypeScript
10 5 (2.27%) Bash
10 5 (2.27%) PL/SQL
11 4 (1.82%) ABAP
11 4 (1.82%) Scala
11 4 (1.82%) VB.NET
12 2 (0.91%) BeanShell
12 2 (0.91%) Groovy
12 2 (0.91%) R
12 2 (0.91%) VBScript
Qualifications
1 80 (36.36%) Security Cleared
2 70 (31.82%) SC Cleared
3 21 (9.55%) Degree
4 17 (7.73%) Computer Science Degree
5 5 (2.27%) AWS Certification
6 4 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
6 4 (1.82%) DBS Check
6 4 (1.82%) DV Cleared
7 3 (1.36%) Azure Certification
8 2 (0.91%) CISM
8 2 (0.91%) CISSP
8 2 (0.91%) Master's Degree
9 1 (0.45%) CEH
9 1 (0.45%) ISTQB
9 1 (0.45%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
9 1 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 1 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (12.27%) QA
2 5 (2.27%) GDPR
2 5 (2.27%) NCSC
3 4 (1.82%) Data Quality
4 3 (1.36%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.45%) Actionable Recommendations
5 1 (0.45%) Software Quality Assurance
5 1 (0.45%) WCAG
System Software
1 19 (8.64%) Docker
2 5 (2.27%) Active Directory
3 1 (0.45%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 52 (23.64%) Kubernetes
2 19 (8.64%) Argo
3 5 (2.27%) Terraform
4 4 (1.82%) Ansible
4 4 (1.82%) Grafana
4 4 (1.82%) Prometheus
5 3 (1.36%) Active Directory Federation Services
6 2 (0.91%) Kubeflow
6 2 (0.91%) Puppet
7 1 (0.45%) HP ALM
7 1 (0.45%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 17 (7.73%) Oracle
1 17 (7.73%) Red Hat
2 11 (5.00%) Microsoft
3 8 (3.64%) Google
4 7 (3.18%) Splunk
5 5 (2.27%) Ab Initio
5 5 (2.27%) Ariba
5 5 (2.27%) SAP
5 5 (2.27%) Teradata
6 4 (1.82%) Atlassian
7 3 (1.36%) Blue Prism
7 3 (1.36%) Dynatrace
7 3 (1.36%) UiPath
8 2 (0.91%) Adobe
8 2 (0.91%) Databricks
8 2 (0.91%) OpenAI
8 2 (0.91%) Sparx
9 1 (0.45%) HP
9 1 (0.45%) Remedy
9 1 (0.45%) Salesforce