Senior Backend Developer Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Senior Backend Developer
UK > UK excluding London

The median Senior Backend Developer daily rate in the UK excluding London is £500, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 6 December 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 408 361 403
Rank change year-on-year -47 +42 +104
Contract jobs requiring a Senior Backend Developer 3 3 6
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.017% 0.019% 0.030%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.019% 0.020% 0.032%
Number of daily rates quoted 2 0 4
10th Percentile £425 - £404
25th Percentile £444 - £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 - £425
75th Percentile £569 - £447
90th Percentile £595 - £464
UK median daily rate £575 £600 £625
% change year-on-year -4.17% -4.00% -7.41%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK excluding London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the UK excluding 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 the UK excluding London with a recognized job title 16,143 14,762 18,876
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.02% 92.34% 93.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,973 8,622 12,382
10th Percentile £210 £213 £214
25th Percentile £363 £369 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £495 £500
Median % change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -
75th Percentile £575 £594 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,588 938 1,248
10th Percentile £13.80 £15.22 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.12 £18.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -26.97% +78.00%
75th Percentile £56.69 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.16 £72.50 £77.15
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £43.90
% change year-on-year -28.14% -20.27% +39.88%

Senior Backend Developer
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Senior Backend Developer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Senior Backend Developer job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Senior Backend Developer
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Senior Backend Developer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Senior Backend Developer job vacancies in the UK excluding London

Senior Backend Developer
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Senior Backend Developer in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 6 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Senior Backend Developer in the UK excluding London

Senior Backend Developer
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Senior Backend Developer within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 6 December 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
South East - 2 £575 - 11
North of England -46 1 £425 - 3
North West - 1 £425 - 3
Senior Backend Developer
UK

Senior Backend Developer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London

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

1 3 (100.00%) AWS
1 3 (100.00%) GitHub
2 2 (66.67%) Amazon EC2
2 2 (66.67%) Amazon S3
2 2 (66.67%) CI/CD
2 2 (66.67%) Docker
2 2 (66.67%) Git
2 2 (66.67%) GitHub Actions
2 2 (66.67%) Grafana
2 2 (66.67%) Jenkins
2 2 (66.67%) Kubernetes
2 2 (66.67%) Mentoring
2 2 (66.67%) Microservices
2 2 (66.67%) Performance Tuning
2 2 (66.67%) PostgreSQL
2 2 (66.67%) RabbitMQ
3 1 (33.33%) Agile
3 1 (33.33%) AI
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon ECR
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon ECS
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon ELB
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon OpenSearch
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (33.33%) Apache NiFi
3 1 (33.33%) API Development
3 1 (33.33%) Architectural Design
3 1 (33.33%) Argo
3 1 (33.33%) Artifactory
3 1 (33.33%) AWS CloudFormation

Senior Backend Developer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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:

Cloud Services
1 3 (100.00%) AWS
1 3 (100.00%) GitHub
2 2 (66.67%) Amazon EC2
2 2 (66.67%) Amazon S3
2 2 (66.67%) GitHub Actions
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon ECR
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon ECS
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon ELB
3 1 (33.33%) Amazon OpenSearch
3 1 (33.33%) AWS CloudFormation
3 1 (33.33%) Azure
3 1 (33.33%) Datadog
3 1 (33.33%) GCP
3 1 (33.33%) SaaS
3 1 (33.33%) Virtual Private Cloud
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (66.67%) PostgreSQL
2 1 (33.33%) Amazon RDS
2 1 (33.33%) Big Data
2 1 (33.33%) DynamoDB
2 1 (33.33%) HBase
2 1 (33.33%) MongoDB
2 1 (33.33%) MySQL
2 1 (33.33%) NoSQL
2 1 (33.33%) Redis
2 1 (33.33%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 2 (66.67%) Git
1 2 (66.67%) Jenkins
2 1 (33.33%) Artifactory
2 1 (33.33%) Cucumber
2 1 (33.33%) Gatling
2 1 (33.33%) Gradle
2 1 (33.33%) JMeter
2 1 (33.33%) JUnit
2 1 (33.33%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1 (33.33%) Manufacturing
1 1 (33.33%) Social Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (66.67%) RabbitMQ
2 1 (33.33%) Apache NiFi
2 1 (33.33%) Bootstrap
2 1 (33.33%) Django
2 1 (33.33%) FastAPI
2 1 (33.33%) Flask
2 1 (33.33%) HTML
2 1 (33.33%) Kafka
2 1 (33.33%) Laravel
2 1 (33.33%) Node.js
2 1 (33.33%) OAuth
2 1 (33.33%) OAuth2
2 1 (33.33%) OpenAPI
2 1 (33.33%) OpenID
2 1 (33.33%) REST
2 1 (33.33%) RESTful
2 1 (33.33%) Spring
2 1 (33.33%) Spring Boot
2 1 (33.33%) Swagger
2 1 (33.33%) Vue
Processes & Methodologies
1 2 (66.67%) CI/CD
1 2 (66.67%) Mentoring
1 2 (66.67%) Microservices
1 2 (66.67%) Performance Tuning
2 1 (33.33%) Agile
2 1 (33.33%) AI
2 1 (33.33%) Business Strategy
2 1 (33.33%) Containerisation
2 1 (33.33%) Disaster Recovery
2 1 (33.33%) E-Commerce
2 1 (33.33%) ERP
2 1 (33.33%) Functional Testing
2 1 (33.33%) Generative AI
2 1 (33.33%) Incident Response
2 1 (33.33%) Logistics
2 1 (33.33%) Migration
2 1 (33.33%) OWASP
2 1 (33.33%) Roadmaps
2 1 (33.33%) SOA
2 1 (33.33%) Test Strategy
Programming Languages
1 1 (33.33%) Java
1 1 (33.33%) PHP
1 1 (33.33%) Python
Qualifications
1 1 (33.33%) DV Cleared
1 1 (33.33%) OCP
1 1 (33.33%) Oracle Certification
1 1 (33.33%) SC Cleared
1 1 (33.33%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (33.33%) GDPR
1 1 (33.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 1 (33.33%) NIST
1 1 (33.33%) QA
System Software
1 2 (66.67%) Docker
Systems Management
1 2 (66.67%) Grafana
1 2 (66.67%) Kubernetes
2 1 (33.33%) Argo
2 1 (33.33%) Prometheus
2 1 (33.33%) Terraform
Vendors
1 1 (33.33%) Google