Agile Contract Job Trends

Agile Software Development
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Agile skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 1 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 4 4 3
Rank change year-on-year 0 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing Agile 6,706 5,477 7,737
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.08% 16.51% 18.01%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 20.53% 18.69% 20.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,604 3,548 5,464
10th Percentile £358 £363 £400
25th Percentile £413 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £623 £663 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £499 £510 £525
% change year-on-year -2.16% -2.86% -2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 140 93 173
10th Percentile £25.45 £22.54 £45.00
25th Percentile £45.46 £35.00 £57.33
Median hourly rate £58.72 £55.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +5.80% -14.62% -
75th Percentile £65.25 £68.75 £72.00
90th Percentile £93.76 £75.00 £79.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £62.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -12.00% -3.85% -

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Agile falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 32,670 29,303 37,803
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.06% 88.34% 87.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,630 17,837 25,180
10th Percentile £304 £308 £306
25th Percentile £406 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,024 946 1,523
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.62 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.30 £18.98
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -26.97% +27.14%
75th Percentile £52.72 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.25 £74.60 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.58 £30.45 £45.21
% change year-on-year -22.58% -32.65% +44.86%

Agile
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Agile relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Agile job vacancy trend in the UK

Agile
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Agile.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Agile

Agile
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Agile over the 6 months to 1 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Agile in the UK

Agile
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Agile.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Agile

Agile
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Agile over the 6 months to 1 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Agile in the UK

Agile
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Agile within the UK over the 6 months to 1 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
England 0 5,753 £515 -9.65% 3,704
UK excluding London +2 3,030 £499 -2.16% 2,511
London 0 2,964 £540 -10.00% 1,520
Work from Home 0 2,068 £502 -8.73% 2,111
North of England +3 878 £475 -5.00% 739
South East 0 688 £525 -4.55% 692
Midlands +2 556 £475 -5.00% 365
West Midlands +1 422 £500 -4.76% 225
Yorkshire +1 412 £500 - 241
North West +1 381 £435 -13.00% 436
South West +4 366 £550 -6.78% 295
Scotland +1 361 £473 +5.14% 150
East of England 0 151 £484 +9.07% 231
East Midlands -3 135 £402 -6.57% 134
North East +5 99 £450 -5.26% 66
Wales +3 70 £425 -17.68% 48
Northern Ireland -15 13 £438 -2.78% 36

Agile
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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
1 631 (9.41%) Confluence
2 155 (2.31%) SharePoint
3 98 (1.46%) Apache
4 89 (1.33%) SAS
5 85 (1.27%) Apache Airflow
6 81 (1.21%) Apache Spark
7 70 (1.04%) CMS
8 31 (0.46%) nginx
9 23 (0.34%) WebLogic
10 22 (0.33%) IIS
11 21 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 19 (0.28%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 17 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
14 14 (0.21%) OpenStack
15 13 (0.19%) CICS
16 12 (0.18%) Anypoint
17 11 (0.16%) JBoss
18 10 (0.15%) SugarCRM
19 8 (0.12%) Oracle Service Bus
19 8 (0.12%) WordPress
Applications
1 203 (3.03%) Microsoft Excel
2 191 (2.85%) Microsoft Project
3 177 (2.64%) Microsoft Office
4 119 (1.77%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 96 (1.43%) MS Visio
6 47 (0.70%) Chatbot
7 35 (0.52%) Trello
8 33 (0.49%) Sketch
9 24 (0.36%) Adobe XD
10 17 (0.25%) Adobe Creative Suite
11 11 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
12 10 (0.15%) InVision
13 9 (0.13%) Adobe Illustrator
14 8 (0.12%) Photoshop
15 6 (0.089%) Adobe Captivate
15 6 (0.089%) Weka
16 5 (0.075%) Notion
16 5 (0.075%) Zeplin
17 4 (0.060%) Autodesk Inventor
18 3 (0.045%) UserZoom
Business Applications
1 101 (1.51%) Dynamics CRM
2 77 (1.15%) SAP S/4HANA
3 36 (0.54%) Endur
4 27 (0.40%) Aladdin
5 20 (0.30%) Payment Gateway
6 18 (0.27%) Salesforce CRM
7 16 (0.24%) NetSuite
8 15 (0.22%) Oracle ERP
9 14 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 13 (0.19%) Oracle Payables
11 12 (0.18%) Maximo
11 12 (0.18%) Oracle BPM
11 12 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
11 12 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
12 11 (0.16%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 10 (0.15%) Oracle Receivables
13 10 (0.15%) Primavera
13 10 (0.15%) VisionPLUS
14 9 (0.13%) Oracle EBS R12
14 9 (0.13%) SAP PM
Cloud Services
1 1,523 (22.71%) Azure
2 1,285 (19.16%) AWS
3 551 (8.22%) Azure DevOps
4 476 (7.10%) Power Platform
5 449 (6.70%) GitHub
6 432 (6.44%) GCP
7 371 (5.53%) Serverless
8 228 (3.40%) GitHub Actions
9 189 (2.82%) SaaS
10 180 (2.68%) AWS Lambda
11 157 (2.34%) Microsoft 365
12 156 (2.33%) Dynamics 365
13 152 (2.27%) Amazon S3
14 136 (2.03%) Power Automate
15 129 (1.92%) PowerApps
16 128 (1.91%) Figma
17 121 (1.80%) Snowflake
18 119 (1.77%) Azure Data Factory
19 107 (1.60%) OpenShift
20 104 (1.55%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 124 (1.85%) Firewall
2 59 (0.88%) HTTP
3 58 (0.86%) TCP/IP
4 55 (0.82%) DNS
5 42 (0.63%) Network Security
6 38 (0.57%) VPN
7 24 (0.36%) WAN
8 21 (0.31%) SD-WAN
8 21 (0.31%) SSH
9 20 (0.30%) Internet
9 20 (0.30%) SSL
10 19 (0.28%) Ethernet
11 16 (0.24%) DHCP
11 16 (0.24%) LAN
12 14 (0.21%) VSAN
13 13 (0.19%) Kerberos
14 11 (0.16%) BGP
15 10 (0.15%) Broadband
16 9 (0.13%) OSPF
17 8 (0.12%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 336 (5.01%) Power BI
2 289 (4.31%) PostgreSQL
3 228 (3.40%) NoSQL
4 218 (3.25%) Relational Database
5 198 (2.95%) Data Warehouse
6 179 (2.67%) SQL Server
7 178 (2.65%) MongoDB
8 99 (1.48%) Tableau
9 93 (1.39%) Data Lake
9 93 (1.39%) Oracle Database
10 91 (1.36%) MySQL
11 80 (1.19%) Big Data
12 79 (1.18%) Metadata
13 75 (1.12%) Amazon RDS
14 63 (0.94%) BigQuery
15 58 (0.86%) DynamoDB
16 55 (0.82%) Redis
17 46 (0.69%) Amazon Athena
17 46 (0.69%) Azure SQL Database
18 43 (0.64%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 1,272 (18.97%) JIRA
2 710 (10.59%) Git
3 498 (7.43%) Jenkins
4 337 (5.03%) GitLab
5 178 (2.65%) Selenium
6 137 (2.04%) JUnit
7 135 (2.01%) Postman
8 126 (1.88%) Cucumber
9 90 (1.34%) Cypress.io
10 86 (1.28%) Bitbucket
11 60 (0.89%) Mockito
12 53 (0.79%) JMeter
13 52 (0.78%) REST Assured
13 52 (0.78%) SonarQube
14 50 (0.75%) Visual Studio
15 45 (0.67%) Maven
16 41 (0.61%) SpecFlow
17 40 (0.60%) Liquibase
18 39 (0.58%) Oracle APEX
19 35 (0.52%) Gradle
General
1 2,691 (40.13%) Social Skills
2 1,730 (25.80%) Finance
3 1,015 (15.14%) Public Sector
4 1,001 (14.93%) Analytical Skills
5 681 (10.16%) Banking
6 188 (2.80%) Documentation Skills
7 180 (2.68%) Influencing Skills
8 170 (2.54%) Retail
9 167 (2.49%) Presentation Skills
10 156 (2.33%) Marketing
11 147 (2.19%) Front Office
11 147 (2.19%) Investment Banking
12 131 (1.95%) Telecoms
13 130 (1.94%) Organisational Skills
14 120 (1.79%) Military
15 119 (1.77%) Legal
16 92 (1.37%) Financial Institution
17 88 (1.31%) Manufacturing
18 85 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
19 57 (0.85%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 1,190 (17.75%) Developer
2 876 (13.06%) Analyst
3 866 (12.91%) Senior
4 627 (9.35%) Business Analyst
5 535 (7.98%) Lead
6 506 (7.55%) Project Manager
7 469 (6.99%) Architect
8 293 (4.37%) Software Engineer
9 256 (3.82%) Java Developer
10 208 (3.10%) Consultant
10 208 (3.10%) Senior Developer
11 188 (2.80%) Data Engineer
12 179 (2.67%) Designer
13 175 (2.61%) DevOps Engineer
14 157 (2.34%) Product Owner
15 151 (2.25%) Delivery Manager
16 145 (2.16%) Full-Stack Developer
16 145 (2.16%) Solutions Architect
17 130 (1.94%) Senior Manager
18 129 (1.92%) Product Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 577 (8.60%) REST
2 430 (6.41%) React
3 409 (6.10%) RESTful
4 343 (5.11%) Node.js
5 333 (4.97%) .NET
6 317 (4.73%) Kafka
7 307 (4.58%) HTML
8 272 (4.06%) CSS
9 269 (4.01%) Spring
10 242 (3.61%) AngularJS
11 229 (3.41%) Spring Boot
12 222 (3.31%) SOAP
13 209 (3.12%) JSON
14 159 (2.37%) XML
15 152 (2.27%) Playwright
16 130 (1.94%) Web Services
17 107 (1.60%) Middleware
18 104 (1.55%) OAuth
19 103 (1.54%) FastAPI
20 102 (1.52%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 704 (10.50%) Product Ownership
2 406 (6.05%) Cloud Native
3 177 (2.64%) Onboarding
4 147 (2.19%) Management Information System
5 139 (2.07%) Distributed Systems
6 131 (1.95%) Legacy Systems
7 129 (1.92%) Mobile App
8 128 (1.91%) Virtual Team
9 111 (1.66%) Data Structures
10 107 (1.60%) Self-Motivation
11 101 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
12 99 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
12 99 (1.48%) Public Cloud
13 91 (1.36%) Greenfield Project
13 91 (1.36%) PMI
14 89 (1.33%) Algorithms
15 82 (1.22%) Derivative
15 82 (1.22%) PKI
16 80 (1.19%) Enterprise Software
17 78 (1.16%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 474 (7.07%) Linux
2 293 (4.37%) Windows
3 170 (2.54%) Unix
4 79 (1.18%) Windows Server
5 72 (1.07%) Android
6 61 (0.91%) Apple iOS
7 36 (0.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 24 (0.36%) Windows 10
9 21 (0.31%) Mac OS X
10 19 (0.28%) VMS
11 15 (0.22%) Mac OS
12 11 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 10 (0.15%) Windows 7
13 10 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
14 9 (0.13%) zOS
15 6 (0.089%) Ubuntu
16 4 (0.060%) Debian
17 3 (0.045%) AIX
17 3 (0.045%) CentOS
17 3 (0.045%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,804 (26.90%) DevOps
2 1,613 (24.05%) Problem-Solving
3 1,559 (23.25%) CI/CD
4 1,465 (21.85%) Scrum
5 1,290 (19.24%) Stakeholder Management
6 963 (14.36%) Continuous Improvement
7 846 (12.62%) Test Automation
8 779 (11.62%) Stakeholder Engagement
9 758 (11.30%) Project Management
10 715 (10.66%) Microservices
11 698 (10.41%) Roadmaps
12 649 (9.68%) Software Engineering
13 646 (9.63%) Waterfall
14 628 (9.36%) Analytics
15 588 (8.77%) Migration
16 586 (8.74%) AI
17 570 (8.50%) Containerisation
18 555 (8.28%) User Stories
19 519 (7.74%) Data Modelling
20 516 (7.69%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 1,179 (17.58%) Python
2 1,102 (16.43%) SQL
3 845 (12.60%) Java
4 662 (9.87%) JavaScript
5 441 (6.58%) TypeScript
6 416 (6.20%) C#
7 224 (3.34%) PowerShell
8 132 (1.97%) Bash
9 119 (1.77%) C++
10 111 (1.66%) PL/SQL
11 103 (1.54%) Go
11 103 (1.54%) Shell Script
12 90 (1.34%) Scala
13 61 (0.91%) Apex Code
14 55 (0.82%) Ruby
15 48 (0.72%) Kotlin
16 47 (0.70%) Bicep
17 43 (0.64%) PHP
18 36 (0.54%) R
18 36 (0.54%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,534 (22.88%) Security Cleared
2 1,174 (17.51%) SC Cleared
3 799 (11.91%) Degree
4 279 (4.16%) PMI Certification
5 237 (3.53%) Computer Science Degree
6 231 (3.44%) PMP
7 225 (3.36%) DV Cleared
8 220 (3.28%) BPSS Clearance
9 137 (2.04%) Master's Degree
10 109 (1.63%) Azure Certification
11 83 (1.24%) AWS Certification
12 73 (1.09%) ISTQB
13 69 (1.03%) CISSP
14 50 (0.75%) CBAP
15 49 (0.73%) Microsoft Certification
16 48 (0.72%) TOGAF Certification
17 44 (0.66%) CISM
18 34 (0.51%) CSPO
19 32 (0.48%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
20 29 (0.43%) IIBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 635 (9.47%) QA
2 361 (5.38%) Accessibility
3 269 (4.01%) Data Quality
4 220 (3.28%) GDPR
5 180 (2.68%) PMO
6 112 (1.67%) WCAG
7 84 (1.25%) NIST
8 77 (1.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 39 (0.58%) PCI DSS
10 37 (0.55%) SLA
11 36 (0.54%) GRC
12 34 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 30 (0.45%) PSD2
14 27 (0.40%) MiFID
15 25 (0.37%) ISO 20022
16 24 (0.36%) Disclosure Scotland
16 24 (0.36%) NCSC
17 22 (0.33%) Actionable Recommendations
18 21 (0.31%) Basel III
19 19 (0.28%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 774 (11.54%) Docker
2 129 (1.92%) Active Directory
3 86 (1.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 44 (0.66%) vSphere
5 36 (0.54%) Virtual Machines
6 19 (0.28%) GPFS
7 17 (0.25%) Hyper-V
8 16 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (0.22%) Oracle RAC
10 13 (0.19%) NFS
11 9 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
12 7 (0.10%) VMware NSX
13 6 (0.089%) Lustre
13 6 (0.089%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 5 (0.075%) KVM
15 4 (0.060%) Microsoft App-V
16 3 (0.045%) ISA Server
16 3 (0.045%) Squid
16 3 (0.045%) vCloud
17 2 (0.030%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 771 (11.50%) Kubernetes
2 500 (7.46%) Terraform
3 257 (3.83%) Ansible
4 198 (2.95%) Grafana
5 142 (2.12%) Prometheus
6 61 (0.91%) Single Sign-On
7 46 (0.69%) Argo
8 38 (0.57%) Puppet
9 37 (0.55%) vRealize
10 30 (0.45%) OPNET
10 30 (0.45%) SCCM
11 26 (0.39%) Kibana
12 20 (0.30%) Packer
13 18 (0.27%) Control-M
14 17 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
15 16 (0.24%) Nessus
16 15 (0.22%) Progress Chef
16 15 (0.22%) WMI
17 14 (0.21%) Consul
18 13 (0.19%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 927 (13.82%) Microsoft
2 497 (7.41%) Oracle
3 297 (4.43%) ServiceNow
4 261 (3.89%) Salesforce
5 256 (3.82%) SAP
6 203 (3.03%) Google
7 187 (2.79%) Databricks
8 138 (2.06%) VMware
9 126 (1.88%) Splunk
10 120 (1.79%) Atlassian
11 81 (1.21%) Adobe
12 72 (1.07%) Cisco
13 69 (1.03%) IBM
14 59 (0.88%) MuleSoft
15 56 (0.84%) Workday
16 55 (0.82%) Remedy
17 44 (0.66%) Red Hat
17 44 (0.66%) Talend
18 39 (0.58%) HP
19 35 (0.52%) Denodo