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

6 months to
2 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 38 56 52
Rank change year-on-year +18 -4 -20
Contract jobs citing Java 208 118 198
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 4.57% 3.71% 3.60%
As % of the Programming Languages category 22.08% 12.76% 16.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 152 78 142
10th Percentile £204 £278 £307
25th Percentile £259 £390 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £418 £575 £530
Median % change year-on-year -27.39% +8.49% -3.64%
75th Percentile £564 £638 £638
90th Percentile £638 £658 £712
England median daily rate £515 £585 £575
% change year-on-year -11.97% +1.74% -8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 0 12
10th Percentile £27.50 - £45.59
25th Percentile £40.00 - £60.50
Median hourly rate £50.00 - £65.00
75th Percentile £58.75 - £67.02
90th Percentile £60.00 - £67.45
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 942 925 1,174
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 20.68% 29.07% 21.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 681 583 810
10th Percentile £294 £350 £325
25th Percentile £400 £425 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £485 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.96% -3.81% -0.94%
75th Percentile £575 £620 £613
90th Percentile £660 £675 £678
England median daily rate £513 £535 £550
% change year-on-year -4.21% -2.73% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 28 90
10th Percentile £41.46 £44.25 £35.00
25th Percentile £46.25 £54.09 £46.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £61.50 £58.30
Median % change year-on-year -10.57% +5.49% -2.83%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.15 £67.02
90th Percentile £60.18 £72.34 £76.53
England median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% +5.00% -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 February 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 February 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 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
Hampshire +25 69 £467 -25.24% 30
Thames Valley -9 67 £400 -31.03% 28
Berkshire -11 58 £375 -34.78% 14
Surrey +15 45 £208 -27.19% 19
West Sussex -17 15 £360 -17.24% 13
Buckinghamshire -5 8 £575 -9.80% 9
Middlesex - 5 £725 - 1
Sussex - 4 £475 - 5
East Sussex +2 3 £450 +50.00% 5
Oxfordshire -9 1 £500 - 5
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 5 (2.40%) Apache
1 5 (2.40%) Apache Spark
2 3 (1.44%) Documentum
2 3 (1.44%) IIS
2 3 (1.44%) Tomcat
3 2 (0.96%) Confluence
3 2 (0.96%) JBoss
4 1 (0.48%) Adobe Experience Manager
4 1 (0.48%) CMS
4 1 (0.48%) NetWeaver
4 1 (0.48%) SAP EP
4 1 (0.48%) WebLogic
Applications
1 3 (1.44%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 3 (1.44%) Maximo
1 3 (1.44%) Oracle BRM
2 2 (0.96%) SAP FI
3 1 (0.48%) Oracle CRM
3 1 (0.48%) SAP CRM
Cloud Services
1 58 (27.88%) AWS
2 47 (22.60%) GitHub
3 36 (17.31%) Azure
4 25 (12.02%) OpenShift
5 24 (11.54%) GitHub Actions
6 23 (11.06%) GCP
7 20 (9.62%) SaaS
8 16 (7.69%) Sauce Labs
9 10 (4.81%) Entra ID
10 9 (4.33%) Amazon S3
10 9 (4.33%) Datadog
11 8 (3.85%) AWS Lambda
11 8 (3.85%) Serverless
12 6 (2.88%) Azure DevOps
12 6 (2.88%) Snowflake
13 4 (1.92%) Amazon EC2
13 4 (1.92%) Tricentis Tosca
14 3 (1.44%) Amazon Cognito
14 3 (1.44%) AWS CloudFormation
14 3 (1.44%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 13 (6.25%) Wireless
2 5 (2.40%) HTTP
2 5 (2.40%) Kerberos
3 4 (1.92%) FTP
3 4 (1.92%) Wireshark
4 3 (1.44%) Broadband
4 3 (1.44%) Firewall
4 3 (1.44%) GPRS
4 3 (1.44%) GSM
4 3 (1.44%) NFC
4 3 (1.44%) PPP
4 3 (1.44%) SSL
5 2 (0.96%) Bluetooth
5 2 (0.96%) DHCP
5 2 (0.96%) DNS
6 1 (0.48%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 44 (21.15%) Relational Database
2 38 (18.27%) MySQL
3 33 (15.87%) PostgreSQL
4 16 (7.69%) MongoDB
5 15 (7.21%) NoSQL
6 9 (4.33%) DynamoDB
7 8 (3.85%) HBase
8 6 (2.88%) SQL Server
9 5 (2.40%) Pinecone
9 5 (2.40%) Weaviate
10 4 (1.92%) Big Data
11 3 (1.44%) RDBMS
12 2 (0.96%) BigQuery
12 2 (0.96%) Data Warehouse
12 2 (0.96%) Elasticsearch
13 1 (0.48%) Amazon Aurora
13 1 (0.48%) Couchbase
Development Applications
1 34 (16.35%) Jenkins
2 29 (13.94%) JUnit
3 28 (13.46%) Cucumber
4 24 (11.54%) Gradle
5 20 (9.62%) Android Studio
5 20 (9.62%) Browser DevTools
5 20 (9.62%) Git
6 19 (9.13%) Eclipse
7 18 (8.65%) Sonatype Nexus
8 16 (7.69%) Xcode
9 13 (6.25%) Maven
10 11 (5.29%) JMeter
11 10 (4.81%) GitLab
11 10 (4.81%) JIRA
12 8 (3.85%) Artifactory
13 7 (3.37%) Bitbucket
13 7 (3.37%) Selenium
14 5 (2.40%) SonarQube
15 4 (1.92%) Cypress.io
15 4 (1.92%) WebDriver
General
1 68 (32.69%) Social Skills
2 27 (12.98%) Finance
3 20 (9.62%) Analytical Skills
4 17 (8.17%) Public Sector
5 6 (2.88%) Marketing
6 4 (1.92%) Banking
6 4 (1.92%) Billing
6 4 (1.92%) Electronics
7 3 (1.44%) Aerospace
7 3 (1.44%) Manufacturing
7 3 (1.44%) Telecoms
8 2 (0.96%) Back Office
8 2 (0.96%) Front Office
9 1 (0.48%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 1 (0.48%) Influencing Skills
9 1 (0.48%) Legal
9 1 (0.48%) Retail
Job Titles
1 83 (39.90%) Developer
2 60 (28.85%) Java Developer
3 36 (17.31%) Technical Support
4 25 (12.02%) Support Engineer
5 24 (11.54%) Technical Engineer
5 24 (11.54%) Technical Support Engineer
6 19 (9.13%) Full-Stack Developer
7 17 (8.17%) Senior
7 17 (8.17%) UX Engineer
8 16 (7.69%) Java Engineer
9 13 (6.25%) Front-End Engineer (Client-Side Engineer)
10 12 (5.77%) Full-Stack Java Developer
10 12 (5.77%) Lead
10 12 (5.77%) Senior Developer
11 10 (4.81%) AWS Developer
12 9 (4.33%) Architect
12 9 (4.33%) Senior Java Developer
12 9 (4.33%) Software Engineer
13 8 (3.85%) Automation Engineer
14 6 (2.88%) Mid-Level Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 49 (23.56%) Spring
2 39 (18.75%) React
3 38 (18.27%) Spring Boot
4 35 (16.83%) AngularJS
5 30 (14.42%) CSS
6 27 (12.98%) Kafka
7 26 (12.50%) REST
8 23 (11.06%) GraphQL
9 17 (8.17%) Ajax
10 15 (7.21%) RESTful
11 14 (6.73%) HTML
12 12 (5.77%) XML
13 11 (5.29%) Hibernate
13 11 (5.29%) Node.js
14 10 (4.81%) SOAP
15 8 (3.85%) SailPoint
16 7 (3.37%) JSON
16 7 (3.37%) Vue
17 6 (2.88%) RabbitMQ
18 5 (2.40%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 21 (10.10%) Mobile App
2 14 (6.73%) Distributed Systems
3 3 (1.44%) Cloud Native
3 3 (1.44%) IPTV
3 3 (1.44%) Security Posture
3 3 (1.44%) Self-Motivation
3 3 (1.44%) Smartcard
4 2 (0.96%) Data Centre
4 2 (0.96%) Linux Command Line
4 2 (0.96%) Product Ownership
5 1 (0.48%) AI Agents
5 1 (0.48%) Algorithms
5 1 (0.48%) Distributed Architecture
5 1 (0.48%) EMV
5 1 (0.48%) Java Card
5 1 (0.48%) Legacy Applications
5 1 (0.48%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (0.48%) Onboarding
5 1 (0.48%) Private Cloud
5 1 (0.48%) Team-Oriented Environment
Operating Systems
1 54 (25.96%) Windows
2 53 (25.48%) Linux
3 38 (18.27%) Unix
4 24 (11.54%) Android
5 5 (2.40%) Apple iOS
5 5 (2.40%) Windows Server
6 4 (1.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 3 (1.44%) Ubuntu
8 2 (0.96%) VMS
8 2 (0.96%) Windows Server 2016
8 2 (0.96%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 73 (35.10%) CI/CD
2 53 (25.48%) Agile
3 41 (19.71%) OO
4 39 (18.75%) DevOps
5 37 (17.79%) Test Automation
6 34 (16.35%) Problem-Solving
7 29 (13.94%) Microservices
7 29 (13.94%) User Experience
8 25 (12.02%) Software Engineering
9 24 (11.54%) Containerisation
10 23 (11.06%) Full-Stack Development
11 22 (10.58%) OOP
12 21 (10.10%) Observability
13 18 (8.65%) Computer Science
13 18 (8.65%) Mobile Application Development
13 18 (8.65%) Scrum
13 18 (8.65%) Software Testing
14 17 (8.17%) AI
14 17 (8.17%) High Availability
15 16 (7.69%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 75 (36.06%) Python
2 72 (34.62%) JavaScript
3 45 (21.63%) SQL
4 30 (14.42%) Perl
5 19 (9.13%) PowerShell
6 15 (7.21%) C#
7 10 (4.81%) Go
8 8 (3.85%) Bash
8 8 (3.85%) BeanShell
8 8 (3.85%) C++
9 6 (2.88%) TypeScript
10 4 (1.92%) Shell Script
11 3 (1.44%) C
11 3 (1.44%) Jython
11 3 (1.44%) PL/SQL
12 2 (0.96%) Ada
12 2 (0.96%) Groovy
12 2 (0.96%) MATLAB
12 2 (0.96%) PHP
12 2 (0.96%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 49 (23.56%) Security Cleared
2 39 (18.75%) SC Cleared
3 20 (9.62%) Degree
4 16 (7.69%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (4.81%) OCP
5 10 (4.81%) Oracle Certification
6 8 (3.85%) DV Cleared
7 4 (1.92%) ISTQB
8 3 (1.44%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 2 (0.96%) BPSS Clearance
9 2 (0.96%) ISEB
10 1 (0.48%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
10 1 (0.48%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (5.29%) QA
2 3 (1.44%) Def Stans
3 2 (0.96%) Accessibility
3 2 (0.96%) Data Quality
System Software
1 17 (8.17%) Docker
2 12 (5.77%) Active Directory
3 9 (4.33%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (0.96%) Virtual Machines
5 1 (0.48%) NDS
5 1 (0.48%) NetIQ eDirectory
Systems Management
1 48 (23.08%) Kubernetes
2 21 (10.10%) Ansible
3 14 (6.73%) Terraform
4 9 (4.33%) Grafana
4 9 (4.33%) Progress Chef
5 4 (1.92%) Argo
6 3 (1.44%) Prometheus
6 3 (1.44%) Proxmox
6 3 (1.44%) Rundeck
6 3 (1.44%) Salt
7 2 (0.96%) SCCM
8 1 (0.48%) vRealize
Vendors
1 42 (20.19%) Oracle
2 28 (13.46%) Microsoft
3 21 (10.10%) Splunk
4 17 (8.17%) VMware
5 16 (7.69%) ServiceNow
6 8 (3.85%) SAP
7 5 (2.40%) Red Hat
8 3 (1.44%) Ariba
8 3 (1.44%) OpenAI
8 3 (1.44%) Salesforce
9 2 (0.96%) Ab Initio
9 2 (0.96%) Citrix
9 2 (0.96%) CyberArk
9 2 (0.96%) Google
9 2 (0.96%) Teradata
9 2 (0.96%) webMethods
10 1 (0.48%) Adobe
10 1 (0.48%) NetIQ
10 1 (0.48%) OpenText
10 1 (0.48%) Virgin Media