Java Contract Job Trends in the Thames Valley

Java
South East > Thames Valley

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the Thames Valley requiring Java skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 15 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 114 50 58
Rank change year-on-year -64 +8 -3
Contract jobs citing Java 39 67 76
As % of all contract jobs in the Thames Valley 1.26% 4.14% 3.43%
As % of the Programming Languages category 7.10% 16.22% 15.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 36 41 59
10th Percentile £284 £300 £389
25th Percentile £379 £358 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £450 £500
Median % change year-on-year +16.67% -10.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £558 £519 £650
90th Percentile £800 £575 £688
South East median daily rate £511 £450 £525
% change year-on-year +13.61% -14.29% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £27.75
Median hourly rate - - £28.50
75th Percentile - - £29.25
90th Percentile - - -
South East median hourly rate £70.00 £50.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +40.00% -16.67% -7.69%

All Programming Languages
Thames Valley

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 Thames Valley.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 549 413 482
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the Thames Valley 17.77% 25.51% 21.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 369 248 331
10th Percentile £335 £347 £363
25th Percentile £417 £405 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £493 £525
Median % change year-on-year +6.60% -6.19% -
75th Percentile £592 £550 £619
90th Percentile £675 £611 £660
South East median daily rate £525 £500 £513
% change year-on-year +5.00% -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 38 2 10
10th Percentile £33.70 £22.00 £34.80
25th Percentile £45.67 £26.88 £56.53
Median hourly rate £68.11 £36.00 £63.93
Median % change year-on-year +89.19% -43.69% +32.09%
75th Percentile £77.50 £45.38 £76.84
90th Percentile £83.66 £50.40 £88.13
South East median hourly rate £60.00 £55.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +9.09% -21.43% +26.06%

Java
Job Vacancy Trend in the Thames Valley

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

Java job vacancy trend in the Thames Valley

Java
Daily Rate Trend in the Thames Valley

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the Thames Valley citing Java.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the Thames Valley citing Java

Java
Daily Rate Histogram in the Thames Valley

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Java in the Thames Valley over the 6 months to 15 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Java in the Thames Valley

Java
Hourly Rate Trend in the Thames Valley

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the Thames Valley citing Java.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the Thames Valley citing Java

Java
Contract Job Locations in the Thames Valley

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Java within the Thames Valley region over the 6 months to 15 September 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
Berkshire -54 22 £444 -1.39% 44
Oxfordshire -16 10 £530 - 33
Buckinghamshire -35 7 £370 +13.69% 17
Java
South East

Java
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the Thames Valley 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 4 (10.26%) Apache Spark
2 1 (2.56%) WebSphere
Applications
1 1 (2.56%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (2.56%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 20 (51.28%) Azure
2 15 (38.46%) AWS
3 9 (23.08%) GCP
4 5 (12.82%) Azure DevOps
5 4 (10.26%) GitHub
6 2 (5.13%) Entra ID
6 2 (5.13%) OpenShift
7 1 (2.56%) AWS CloudFormation
7 1 (2.56%) Azure Service Bus
7 1 (2.56%) BrowserStack
7 1 (2.56%) GitHub Actions
7 1 (2.56%) Power Platform
7 1 (2.56%) SAP Fieldglass
7 1 (2.56%) Snowflake
7 1 (2.56%) SuccessFactors
Communications & Networking
1 1 (2.56%) HTTP
1 1 (2.56%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (15.38%) Relational Database
2 4 (10.26%) Big Data
3 3 (7.69%) Data Warehouse
3 3 (7.69%) Metadata
4 1 (2.56%) Amazon Redshift
4 1 (2.56%) BigQuery
4 1 (2.56%) Data Lake
4 1 (2.56%) Hadoop
4 1 (2.56%) NoSQL
4 1 (2.56%) Power BI
4 1 (2.56%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 5 (12.82%) Git
1 5 (12.82%) Jenkins
1 5 (12.82%) Selenium
2 4 (10.26%) Bitbucket
2 4 (10.26%) WebDriver
3 3 (7.69%) JIRA
3 3 (7.69%) SpecFlow
3 3 (7.69%) TeamCity
4 2 (5.13%) Cucumber
4 2 (5.13%) GitLab
4 2 (5.13%) JMeter
4 2 (5.13%) MSTest
4 2 (5.13%) REST Assured
5 1 (2.56%) Burp Suite
5 1 (2.56%) Gradle
5 1 (2.56%) LoadRunner
5 1 (2.56%) Maven
5 1 (2.56%) NeoLoad
5 1 (2.56%) NUnit
5 1 (2.56%) Postman
General
1 14 (35.90%) Social Skills
2 5 (12.82%) Analytical Skills
3 3 (7.69%) Finance
4 1 (2.56%) Advertising
4 1 (2.56%) Aerospace
4 1 (2.56%) German Language
4 1 (2.56%) Organisational Skills
4 1 (2.56%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 11 (28.21%) Senior
2 7 (17.95%) Java Engineer
3 5 (12.82%) Architect
3 5 (12.82%) Technical Architect
3 5 (12.82%) Test Engineer
4 4 (10.26%) Senior Software Engineer
4 4 (10.26%) Site Engineer
4 4 (10.26%) Site Reliability Engineer
4 4 (10.26%) Software Engineer
4 4 (10.26%) Test Automation Engineer
5 3 (7.69%) Developer
5 3 (7.69%) Java Developer
5 3 (7.69%) Senior Java Engineer
6 2 (5.13%) Data Engineer
6 2 (5.13%) Full-Stack Engineer
6 2 (5.13%) Lead
6 2 (5.13%) Senior Full-Stack Engineer
7 1 (2.56%) Core Java Developer
7 1 (2.56%) Platform Engineer
7 1 (2.56%) SailPoint Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 6 (15.38%) AngularJS
2 5 (12.82%) REST
2 5 (12.82%) Spring
3 3 (7.69%) Terraform
4 2 (5.13%) .NET
4 2 (5.13%) GraphQL
4 2 (5.13%) HTML
4 2 (5.13%) Middleware
4 2 (5.13%) React
4 2 (5.13%) SailPoint
5 1 (2.56%) CSS
5 1 (2.56%) Gherkin
5 1 (2.56%) Jakarta EE
5 1 (2.56%) JMS
5 1 (2.56%) JNDI
5 1 (2.56%) LDAP
5 1 (2.56%) OAuth
5 1 (2.56%) OpenID
5 1 (2.56%) RESTful
5 1 (2.56%) SAML
Miscellaneous
1 13 (33.33%) Distributed Systems
2 9 (23.08%) Cloud Native
3 4 (10.26%) Enterprise Software
4 2 (5.13%) Data Protection Act
4 2 (5.13%) Distributed Architecture
4 2 (5.13%) Security Posture
5 1 (2.56%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (2.56%) Enterprise Cloud
5 1 (2.56%) IoT
5 1 (2.56%) Legacy Applications
5 1 (2.56%) Product Ownership
5 1 (2.56%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 1 (2.56%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 20 (51.28%) CI/CD
2 13 (33.33%) DevOps
2 13 (33.33%) Test Automation
3 11 (28.21%) High Availability
4 9 (23.08%) Software Engineering
5 8 (20.51%) Agile
6 7 (17.95%) Microservices
7 6 (15.38%) Full-Stack Development
7 6 (15.38%) Secure Coding
7 6 (15.38%) Stakeholder Management
7 6 (15.38%) Validation
8 5 (12.82%) BDD
8 5 (12.82%) Event-Driven
8 5 (12.82%) Event-Driven Architecture
8 5 (12.82%) Integration Patterns
8 5 (12.82%) Problem-Solving
8 5 (12.82%) Release Management
8 5 (12.82%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 4 (10.26%) Data Pipeline
9 4 (10.26%) Digital Transformation Programme
Programming Languages
1 11 (28.21%) Python
2 8 (20.51%) SQL
3 6 (15.38%) Go
4 3 (7.69%) C#
4 3 (7.69%) JavaScript
5 2 (5.13%) BeanShell
5 2 (5.13%) PowerShell
5 2 (5.13%) Shell Script
6 1 (2.56%) Apex Code
6 1 (2.56%) Groovy
6 1 (2.56%) Scala
Qualifications
1 12 (30.77%) Security Cleared
2 10 (25.64%) SC Cleared
3 5 (12.82%) BPSS Clearance
4 1 (2.56%) AWS Certification
4 1 (2.56%) Azure Certification
4 1 (2.56%) CCNA
4 1 (2.56%) Cisco Certification
4 1 (2.56%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (7.69%) Data Quality
1 3 (7.69%) QA
2 1 (2.56%) Actionable Recommendations
2 1 (2.56%) GDPR
2 1 (2.56%) NCSC
System Software
1 4 (10.26%) Docker
2 2 (5.13%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 9 (23.08%) Kubernetes
2 1 (2.56%) Amdocs OSS
2 1 (2.56%) Argo
2 1 (2.56%) Podman
Vendors
1 1 (2.56%) Ariba
1 1 (2.56%) Cisco
1 1 (2.56%) Concur
1 1 (2.56%) Conga
1 1 (2.56%) Cramer
1 1 (2.56%) Databricks
1 1 (2.56%) Dynatrace
1 1 (2.56%) GoCardless
1 1 (2.56%) IBM
1 1 (2.56%) NetCracker
1 1 (2.56%) Nokia
1 1 (2.56%) Parasoft
1 1 (2.56%) Salesforce
1 1 (2.56%) SAP