Black Duck Contract Job Trends

Black Duck
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring knowledge or experience of Black Duck products and/or services. It includes a benchmarking guide to contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Black Duck over the 6 months leading up to 16 January 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

The figures below represent the IT contractor job market in general and are not representative of contractor rates within Black Duck Software.

6 months to
16 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 587 529 582
Rank change year-on-year -58 +53 +172
Contract jobs citing Black Duck 3 6 9
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.008% 0.019% 0.021%
As % of the Vendors category 0.018% 0.041% 0.048%
Number of daily rates quoted 2 0 5
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £679 - -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £683 - £475
Median % change year-on-year - - -17.39%
75th Percentile £686 - -
90th Percentile - - £505
UK excluding London median daily rate £683 - £475

All Vendors
UK

Black Duck falls under the Vendor Products and Services category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring knowledge or experience of all vendor products and services.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for knowledge or experience of vendor products and services 17,128 14,609 18,842
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 46.06% 45.86% 44.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,046 8,663 11,892
10th Percentile £300 £281 £255
25th Percentile £410 £408 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -2.42%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £700 £713 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -1.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 799 427 690
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.62 £13.97
25th Percentile £17.87 £19.96 £17.72
Median hourly rate £23.75 £27.35 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year -13.16% -36.40% +39.84%
75th Percentile £47.50 £60.06 £63.00
90th Percentile £73.75 £78.50 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £21.00 £25.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -16.00% -43.82% +74.44%

Black Duck
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Black Duck job vacancy trend in the UK

Black Duck
Daily Rate Trend

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

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Black Duck

Black Duck
Hourly Rate Trend

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

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Black Duck

Black Duck
Top 5 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Black Duck within the UK over the 6 months to 16 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
UK excluding London -54 2 £683 - 1
Scotland - 2 £683 - 1
London -12 1 - -
England -51 1 - -
Work from Home - 1 - -

Black Duck
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 2 (66.67%) Confluence
Cloud Services
1 3 (100.00%) Azure
1 3 (100.00%) Azure DevOps
1 3 (100.00%) GitHub
1 3 (100.00%) GitHub Actions
2 1 (33.33%) Amazon EKS
2 1 (33.33%) Azure AKS
2 1 (33.33%) Azure Key Vault
2 1 (33.33%) Datadog
2 1 (33.33%) Google Kubernetes Engine
2 1 (33.33%) Pulumi
Communications & Networking
1 2 (66.67%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (33.33%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 3 (100.00%) GitLab
1 3 (100.00%) Jenkins
2 2 (66.67%) JIRA
2 2 (66.67%) Snyk
3 1 (33.33%) Artifactory
3 1 (33.33%) git-flow
General
1 2 (66.67%) Finance
2 1 (33.33%) Documentation Skills
2 1 (33.33%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 2 (66.67%) Design Engineer
1 2 (66.67%) Security Engineer
2 1 (33.33%) Senior
2 1 (33.33%) Site Engineer
2 1 (33.33%) Site Reliability Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (66.67%) SLSA
2 1 (33.33%) Kafka
2 1 (33.33%) OAuth
2 1 (33.33%) OAuth2
2 1 (33.33%) OpenID
2 1 (33.33%) RabbitMQ
2 1 (33.33%) SAML
2 1 (33.33%) Spring
2 1 (33.33%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 2 (66.67%) Cloud Native
Processes & Methodologies
1 3 (100.00%) Application Security
1 3 (100.00%) CI/CD
1 3 (100.00%) DevOps
1 3 (100.00%) Microservices
2 2 (66.67%) Computer Science
2 2 (66.67%) Containerisation
2 2 (66.67%) Cybersecurity
2 2 (66.67%) Dynamic Application Security Testing
2 2 (66.67%) Interactive Application Security Testing
2 2 (66.67%) OWASP
2 2 (66.67%) Remediation Plan
2 2 (66.67%) SABSA
2 2 (66.67%) SDLC
2 2 (66.67%) Security Testing
2 2 (66.67%) Software Engineering
2 2 (66.67%) Static Application Security Testing
2 2 (66.67%) Technical Leadership
2 2 (66.67%) Threat Modelling
2 2 (66.67%) TOGAF
2 2 (66.67%) UML
Programming Languages
1 1 (33.33%) Go
1 1 (33.33%) Java
1 1 (33.33%) PowerShell
1 1 (33.33%) Python
Qualifications
1 2 (66.67%) CISM
1 2 (66.67%) CISSP
1 2 (66.67%) Degree
1 2 (66.67%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (66.67%) NIST
Systems Management
1 3 (100.00%) Kubernetes
2 1 (33.33%) Argo
2 1 (33.33%) Grafana
2 1 (33.33%) Opsgenie
2 1 (33.33%) Terraform
Vendors
1 2 (66.67%) BiZZdesign
1 2 (66.67%) Checkmarx
1 2 (66.67%) Tenable
2 1 (33.33%) AppDynamics
2 1 (33.33%) Google
2 1 (33.33%) Intel
2 1 (33.33%) PagerDuty
2 1 (33.33%) Qualys
2 1 (33.33%) Splunk
2 1 (33.33%) Veracode