COBOL Developer Contract Job Trends

COBOL Developer
UK

The median COBOL Developer daily rate in the UK is £363, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 5 January 2026.

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

 6 months to
5 Jan 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 577 522 586
Rank change year-on-year -55 +64 +183
Contract jobs requiring a COBOL Developer 9 4 13
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.024% 0.012% 0.030%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.027% 0.013% 0.033%
Number of daily rates quoted 6 1 8
10th Percentile £340 - £390
25th Percentile £344 - £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £363 £400 £456
Median % change year-on-year -9.38% -12.33% +8.63%
75th Percentile £496 - £477
90th Percentile £556 - £500
UK excluding London median daily rate £350 - £400
% change year-on-year - - +21.21%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 0
Median hourly rate - £72.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - -

All Contract IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. 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 with a recognized job title 33,604 29,846 39,976
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.27% 92.67% 93.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,305 18,264 26,748
10th Percentile £300 £293 £281
25th Percentile £405 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £638
90th Percentile £719 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £480 £500
% change year-on-year -1.04% -4.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,949 929 1,593
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.52 £14.18
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.05 £19.05
Median hourly rate £26.50 £32.50 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.46% -26.97% +36.92%
75th Percentile £60.00 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.50 £73.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.52 £45.00
% change year-on-year -20.21% -29.96% +68.54%

COBOL Developer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'COBOL Developer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

COBOL Developer job vacancy trend in the UK

COBOL Developer
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for COBOL Developer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for COBOL Developer job vacancies in the UK

COBOL Developer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing COBOL Developer over the 6 months to 5 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for COBOL Developer in the UK

COBOL Developer
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for COBOL Developer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for COBOL Developer job vacancies in the UK

COBOL Developer
Top 10 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing COBOL Developer within the UK over the 6 months to 5 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 -52 6 £350 -12.50%
UK excluding London -55 6 £350 -
Work from Home -4 4 £525 -
North of England - 4 £340 -
Yorkshire - 3 £340 -
London -4 1 £365 -8.75%
Scotland - 1 £550 -
Midlands - 1 - -
North West - 1 - -
West Midlands - 1 - -

COBOL Developer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 5 January 2026, COBOL 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 featuring COBOL Developer in the job title.

1 9 (100.00%) COBOL
2 4 (44.44%) SQL
3 3 (33.33%) DB2
3 3 (33.33%) JCL
3 3 (33.33%) Problem-Solving
3 3 (33.33%) VME
4 2 (22.22%) Adabas
4 2 (22.22%) Agile
4 2 (22.22%) CICS
4 2 (22.22%) IBM
4 2 (22.22%) ICL
4 2 (22.22%) Natural
4 2 (22.22%) NonStop SQL
5 1 (11.11%) AngularJS
5 1 (11.11%) Architectural Design
5 1 (11.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 1 (11.11%) Azure
5 1 (11.11%) Bash
5 1 (11.11%) Batch Processing
5 1 (11.11%) Batch Scheduling
5 1 (11.11%) Bootstrap
5 1 (11.11%) BPSS Clearance
5 1 (11.11%) CA Agile Central
5 1 (11.11%) CA Endevor
5 1 (11.11%) ChangeMan
5 1 (11.11%) CMS
5 1 (11.11%) Code Quality
5 1 (11.11%) Concurrent Programming
5 1 (11.11%) Continuous Improvement
5 1 (11.11%) Control-M

COBOL Developer Skill Set
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 (22.22%) CICS
2 1 (11.11%) CMS
Business Applications
1 1 (11.11%) VisionPLUS
Cloud Services
1 1 (11.11%) Azure
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (33.33%) DB2
2 2 (22.22%) Adabas
2 2 (22.22%) NonStop SQL
3 1 (11.11%) Oracle Database
3 1 (11.11%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (11.11%) Redis
Development Applications
1 1 (11.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
1 1 (11.11%) ChangeMan
1 1 (11.11%) Git
1 1 (11.11%) Jenkins
1 1 (11.11%) JIRA
1 1 (11.11%) JUnit
1 1 (11.11%) Maven
1 1 (11.11%) Mockito
1 1 (11.11%) Postman
1 1 (11.11%) REST Assured
1 1 (11.11%) SoapUI
1 1 (11.11%) SonarQube
1 1 (11.11%) Subversion
1 1 (11.11%) Xcode
1 1 (11.11%) XCTest
General
1 2 (22.22%) Banking
1 2 (22.22%) Social Skills
2 1 (11.11%) Finance
2 1 (11.11%) French Language
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (11.11%) AngularJS
1 1 (11.11%) Bootstrap
1 1 (11.11%) CSS
1 1 (11.11%) CSS3
1 1 (11.11%) Hibernate
1 1 (11.11%) HTML
1 1 (11.11%) HTML5
1 1 (11.11%) J2EE
1 1 (11.11%) JPA
1 1 (11.11%) Kafka
1 1 (11.11%) Material-UI
1 1 (11.11%) REST
1 1 (11.11%) SOAP
1 1 (11.11%) Spring
1 1 (11.11%) Spring Boot
1 1 (11.11%) Spring Cloud
1 1 (11.11%) Spring MVC
1 1 (11.11%) Swagger
1 1 (11.11%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 5 (55.56%) Mainframe
2 2 (22.22%) IBM Mainframe
3 1 (11.11%) Data Protection Act
3 1 (11.11%) Distributed Systems
3 1 (11.11%) Legacy Systems
3 1 (11.11%) VSAM
Operating Systems
1 3 (33.33%) VME
2 1 (11.11%) Linux
2 1 (11.11%) Unix
2 1 (11.11%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 3 (33.33%) Problem-Solving
2 2 (22.22%) Agile
3 1 (11.11%) Concurrent Programming
3 1 (11.11%) Continuous Improvement
3 1 (11.11%) Data Protection
3 1 (11.11%) DevOps
3 1 (11.11%) Front End Development
3 1 (11.11%) High Availability
3 1 (11.11%) Infrastructure Automation
3 1 (11.11%) Mentoring
3 1 (11.11%) Microservices
3 1 (11.11%) Multithreading
3 1 (11.11%) SDLC
3 1 (11.11%) Software Architecture
3 1 (11.11%) Software Testing
3 1 (11.11%) Static Code Analysis
3 1 (11.11%) Structured Programming
3 1 (11.11%) Task Automation
3 1 (11.11%) TDD
3 1 (11.11%) Unit Testing
Programming Languages
1 9 (100.00%) COBOL
2 4 (44.44%) SQL
3 3 (33.33%) JCL
4 2 (22.22%) Natural
5 1 (11.11%) Bash
5 1 (11.11%) Groovy
5 1 (11.11%) Java
5 1 (11.11%) JavaScript
5 1 (11.11%) PL/SQL
5 1 (11.11%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 1 (11.11%) BPSS Clearance
1 1 (11.11%) SC Cleared
1 1 (11.11%) Security Cleared
System Software
1 1 (11.11%) Docker
Systems Management
1 1 (11.11%) CA Endevor
1 1 (11.11%) Control-M
1 1 (11.11%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 2 (22.22%) IBM
1 2 (22.22%) ICL
2 1 (11.11%) CA Agile Central
2 1 (11.11%) Dynatrace
2 1 (11.11%) Fujitsu
2 1 (11.11%) HP
2 1 (11.11%) Oracle
2 1 (11.11%) Splunk
2 1 (11.11%) VMware