WCAG Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring WCAG skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 329 326 374
Rank change year-on-year -3 +48 +53
Contract jobs citing WCAG 70 22 24
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.38% 0.16% 0.12%
As % of the Quality Assurance & Compliance category 2.31% 1.04% 0.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 54 14 22
10th Percentile £357 £349 £301
25th Percentile £400 £407 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £484 £425
Median % change year-on-year -1.91% +13.94% -15.00%
75th Percentile £550 £532 £532
90th Percentile £584 £597 £574
UK median daily rate £475 £468 £450
% change year-on-year +1.60% +3.89% -14.29%

All Quality Assurance and Compliance Skills
UK excluding London

WCAG falls under the Quality Assurance and Compliance category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring quality assurance or compliance skills in the UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for quality assurance or compliance skills 3,028 2,120 3,027
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 16.36% 15.51% 15.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,911 1,202 1,892
10th Percentile £300 £210 £260
25th Percentile £400 £356 £390
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +3.58% -5.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £593
90th Percentile £675 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 267 137 221
10th Percentile £14.85 £14.70 £12.58
25th Percentile £17.69 £19.83 £14.50
Median hourly rate £24.00 £29.00 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year -17.24% -3.33% +32.25%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.73 £60.00
90th Percentile £69.65 £73.85 £79.17
UK median hourly rate £26.11 £29.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year -9.97% -3.33% +21.73%

WCAG
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing WCAG relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

WCAG job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

WCAG
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing WCAG.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing WCAG

WCAG
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing WCAG in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 20 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for WCAG in the UK excluding London

WCAG
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing WCAG.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing WCAG

WCAG
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 WCAG within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 20 January 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
North of England -22 45 £454 +9.07% 17
North West -11 21 £475 -6.17% 6
West Midlands -20 14 £525 +28.21% 2
Midlands -29 14 £525 +28.21% 11
Yorkshire -39 14 £400 -13.04% 7
North East -2 11 £454 +29.71% 4
South East -20 4 £527 +0.38% 33
South West -2 3 £320 -46.67% 12
Wales - 3 £518 - 5
Scotland +6 2 £493 -0.60% 2
East of England - 1 £550 - 17
WCAG
UK

WCAG
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:

Application Platforms
1 2 (2.86%) CMS
1 2 (2.86%) Confluence
1 2 (2.86%) Drupal
2 1 (1.43%) SharePoint
2 1 (1.43%) Umbraco
Applications
1 6 (8.57%) Sketch
2 5 (7.14%) Adobe XD
3 1 (1.43%) InVision
3 1 (1.43%) Marvel
3 1 (1.43%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (1.43%) Adobe Campaign
1 1 (1.43%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 23 (32.86%) AWS
2 10 (14.29%) Azure
3 8 (11.43%) Figma
3 8 (11.43%) GitHub
4 7 (10.00%) GitHub Actions
5 6 (8.57%) AWS Lambda
5 6 (8.57%) Serverless
6 5 (7.14%) Amazon SQS
6 5 (7.14%) npm
7 3 (4.29%) Dynamics 365
7 3 (4.29%) Miro
8 2 (2.86%) Slack
8 2 (2.86%) Smartsheet
9 1 (1.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 1 (1.43%) Azure DevOps
9 1 (1.43%) Datadog
9 1 (1.43%) GCP
9 1 (1.43%) Google Analytics
9 1 (1.43%) Heroku
9 1 (1.43%) Power Platform
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (12.86%) Redis
2 6 (8.57%) NoSQL
3 3 (4.29%) MongoDB
4 2 (2.86%) DocumentDB
4 2 (2.86%) Oracle Database
4 2 (2.86%) SQL Server
5 1 (1.43%) Amazon Aurora
5 1 (1.43%) Amazon RDS
5 1 (1.43%) MariaDB
5 1 (1.43%) MS Access
5 1 (1.43%) MySQL
5 1 (1.43%) PostgreSQL
5 1 (1.43%) Power BI
5 1 (1.43%) Relational Database
5 1 (1.43%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 24 (34.29%) Git
2 17 (24.29%) Cypress.io
2 17 (24.29%) GitLab
3 13 (18.57%) Cucumber
3 13 (18.57%) Selenium
4 11 (15.71%) JUnit
5 10 (14.29%) Mocha
6 8 (11.43%) Mockito
7 6 (8.57%) CircleCI
7 6 (8.57%) Maven
8 4 (5.71%) ESLint
9 3 (4.29%) Axure RP
9 3 (4.29%) Jenkins
9 3 (4.29%) JIRA
9 3 (4.29%) REST Assured
9 3 (4.29%) SonarQube
10 1 (1.43%) Appium
10 1 (1.43%) Artifactory
10 1 (1.43%) Gatling
10 1 (1.43%) webpack
General
1 34 (48.57%) Public Sector
2 23 (32.86%) Social Skills
3 5 (7.14%) Publishing
4 4 (5.71%) Presentation Skills
5 2 (2.86%) Analytical Skills
5 2 (2.86%) Influencing Skills
5 2 (2.86%) Military
6 1 (1.43%) Banking
6 1 (1.43%) Legal
6 1 (1.43%) Welsh Language
Job Titles
1 30 (42.86%) Developer
2 16 (22.86%) Senior
3 13 (18.57%) Designer
4 12 (17.14%) Front-End Developer (Client-Side Developer)
5 10 (14.29%) Senior Developer
6 8 (11.43%) Full-Stack Developer
6 8 (11.43%) Test Engineer
7 7 (10.00%) Lead
7 7 (10.00%) UX Designer
8 6 (8.57%) Senior Front-End Developer
9 5 (7.14%) Java Developer
10 4 (5.71%) AWS Engineer
10 4 (5.71%) React Developer
11 3 (4.29%) Tester
12 2 (2.86%) Interaction Designer
12 2 (2.86%) Lead Designer
12 2 (2.86%) Operations Manager
12 2 (2.86%) Senior Designer
12 2 (2.86%) Software Developer
12 2 (2.86%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 35 (50.00%) React
2 23 (32.86%) HTML
3 22 (31.43%) Node.js
4 21 (30.00%) Jest
5 18 (25.71%) CSS
6 16 (22.86%) Playwright
7 15 (21.43%) REST
7 15 (21.43%) Spring Boot
8 14 (20.00%) Spring
9 8 (11.43%) AngularJS
10 7 (10.00%) Express.js
10 7 (10.00%) HTML5
10 7 (10.00%) RESTful
11 6 (8.57%) .NET
11 6 (8.57%) CSS3
11 6 (8.57%) JSON
11 6 (8.57%) Next.js
11 6 (8.57%) OAuth
11 6 (8.57%) OAuth2
11 6 (8.57%) Redux
Miscellaneous
1 8 (11.43%) Mobile App
2 4 (5.71%) Product Ownership
3 3 (4.29%) Blog
4 2 (2.86%) Client/Server
4 2 (2.86%) Legacy Systems
4 2 (2.86%) Public Cloud
5 1 (1.43%) Educational Technology
5 1 (1.43%) e-Learning
5 1 (1.43%) Greenfield Project
5 1 (1.43%) NHS
5 1 (1.43%) Onboarding
5 1 (1.43%) W3C
Operating Systems
1 4 (5.71%) Android
1 4 (5.71%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 48 (68.57%) Agile
2 33 (47.14%) CI/CD
3 27 (38.57%) User Experience
4 25 (35.71%) Microservices
5 20 (28.57%) Test Automation
5 20 (28.57%) UX Design
6 17 (24.29%) Front End Development
7 16 (22.86%) DevOps
7 16 (22.86%) User Research
8 14 (20.00%) Continuous Improvement
9 12 (17.14%) Scrum
10 10 (14.29%) End-to-End Testing
10 10 (14.29%) Stakeholder Management
10 10 (14.29%) User-Centered Design (UCD)
11 9 (12.86%) Code Quality
11 9 (12.86%) Full-Stack Development
11 9 (12.86%) Open Source
11 9 (12.86%) Problem-Solving
11 9 (12.86%) Software Engineering
11 9 (12.86%) Test Strategy
Programming Languages
1 30 (42.86%) JavaScript
2 23 (32.86%) TypeScript
3 21 (30.00%) Java
4 10 (14.29%) SQL
5 2 (2.86%) Python
6 1 (1.43%) Bash
6 1 (1.43%) C#
6 1 (1.43%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 15 (21.43%) Security Cleared
2 10 (14.29%) SC Cleared
3 3 (4.29%) BPSS Clearance
4 2 (2.86%) Degree
4 2 (2.86%) Master's Degree
5 1 (1.43%) CCA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 56 (80.00%) Accessibility
2 10 (14.29%) QA
System Software
1 14 (20.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 9 (12.86%) Kubernetes
2 6 (8.57%) Grafana
3 5 (7.14%) Kibana
4 1 (1.43%) Terraform
Vendors
1 6 (8.57%) Adobe
2 4 (5.71%) Microsoft
2 4 (5.71%) Xamarin
3 3 (4.29%) MuleSoft
3 3 (4.29%) Oracle
4 1 (1.43%) Dundas
4 1 (1.43%) Google
4 1 (1.43%) Hotjar
4 1 (1.43%) Salesforce
4 1 (1.43%) Splunk