Code Quality Contract Job Trends

Code Quality (Software Quality)
UK

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

6 months to
6 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 230 243 274
Rank change year-on-year +13 +31 +70
Contract jobs citing Code Quality 649 372 324
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.19% 1.13% 0.86%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.41% 1.25% 1.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 411 253 210
10th Percentile £358 £352 £325
25th Percentile £425 £413 £414
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% - -9.09%
75th Percentile £625 £600 £579
90th Percentile £738 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £478
% change year-on-year - +4.71% -4.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 7 7
10th Percentile £34.90 £40.50 -
25th Percentile £38.25 - £61.25
Median hourly rate £60.00 £50.00 £72.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -30.56% -4.00%
75th Percentile £72.50 - £85.00
90th Percentile £77.00 £68.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.75 £50.00 £72.00
% change year-on-year +17.50% -30.56% -2.37%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Code Quality 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 46,176 29,707 32,376
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.50% 90.53% 85.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,774 18,450 19,527
10th Percentile £325 £297 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,315 1,863 1,324
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.14 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £38.50 £25.15 £41.08
Median % change year-on-year +53.08% -38.77% -3.91%
75th Percentile £65.41 £43.21 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.40 £65.00 £74.31
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.72 £22.32 £42.50
% change year-on-year +73.52% -47.49% -

Code Quality
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Code Quality job vacancy trend in the UK

Code Quality
Daily Rate Trend

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

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Code Quality

Code Quality
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Code Quality over the 6 months to 6 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Code Quality in the UK

Code Quality
Hourly Rate Trend

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

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Code Quality

Code Quality
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Code Quality over the 6 months to 6 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Code Quality in the UK

Code Quality
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 Code Quality within the UK over the 6 months to 6 October 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 +10 555 £525 +5.00% 1,447
London -3 295 £529 +0.67% 799
UK excluding London +2 294 £500 - 859
Work from Home -49 173 £500 - 605
North of England -25 115 £500 +5.26% 184
Yorkshire -18 58 £500 - 46
Midlands -15 49 £500 +44.93% 96
North West -22 48 £560 +56.42% 104
West Midlands -11 44 £550 +4.76% 67
South East -36 42 £513 -12.39% 171
Scotland -6 37 £458 -15.75% 201
South West -24 23 £470 -20.71% 99
East of England -10 20 £600 +20.00% 58
North East -32 9 £453 -24.50% 35
Wales -15 6 £750 +57.89% 21
Northern Ireland +10 5 £413 - 29
East Midlands -17 5 £500 +47.06% 29

Code Quality
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 34 (5.24%) Confluence
2 17 (2.62%) Apache Spark
3 11 (1.69%) Apache
4 9 (1.39%) Apache Airflow
5 6 (0.92%) CMS
5 6 (0.92%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.46%) Apache Pulsar
7 2 (0.31%) Anypoint
7 2 (0.31%) Moodle
7 2 (0.31%) Umbraco
8 1 (0.15%) Apache Solr
8 1 (0.15%) Appian
8 1 (0.15%) CICS
8 1 (0.15%) IIS
8 1 (0.15%) MQSeries
8 1 (0.15%) nginx
8 1 (0.15%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 1 (0.15%) WebSphere
8 1 (0.15%) WordPress
Applications
1 5 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
2 2 (0.31%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.15%) Adobe XD
3 1 (0.15%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.15%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.15%) Simulink
3 1 (0.15%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 5 (0.77%) Dynamics CRM
2 3 (0.46%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.31%) SAP CRM
4 1 (0.15%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
4 1 (0.15%) Dynamics NAV
4 1 (0.15%) PeopleSoft HCM
4 1 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.15%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 236 (36.36%) AWS
2 215 (33.13%) Azure
3 127 (19.57%) GitHub
4 118 (18.18%) GCP
5 66 (10.17%) Serverless
6 65 (10.02%) Azure DevOps
6 65 (10.02%) GitHub Actions
7 38 (5.86%) AWS Lambda
8 33 (5.08%) Amazon S3
9 28 (4.31%) Amazon EKS
10 26 (4.01%) Amazon ECS
10 26 (4.01%) GitHub Copilot
11 22 (3.39%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 20 (3.08%) Amazon EC2
13 18 (2.77%) Power Platform
14 16 (2.47%) Anthropic Claude
15 15 (2.31%) Azure Service Bus
15 15 (2.31%) OpenShift
16 14 (2.16%) Azure Functions
17 13 (2.00%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 9 (1.39%) Network Security
2 3 (0.46%) HTTP
3 2 (0.31%) DNS
3 2 (0.31%) Firewall
3 2 (0.31%) OpenLDAP
4 1 (0.15%) Kerberos
4 1 (0.15%) OpenVPN
4 1 (0.15%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 61 (9.40%) PostgreSQL
2 54 (8.32%) Relational Database
3 37 (5.70%) NoSQL
4 32 (4.93%) SQL Server
5 26 (4.01%) MySQL
6 23 (3.54%) MongoDB
7 15 (2.31%) Redis
8 14 (2.16%) Power BI
9 12 (1.85%) Metadata
10 11 (1.69%) Delta Lake
10 11 (1.69%) DynamoDB
11 10 (1.54%) Data Lake
11 10 (1.54%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 9 (1.39%) Data Warehouse
13 8 (1.23%) Flink
14 6 (0.92%) Elasticsearch
15 5 (0.77%) Amazon Aurora
15 5 (0.77%) Azure SQL Database
15 5 (0.77%) Big Data
15 5 (0.77%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 186 (28.66%) Git
2 112 (17.26%) Jenkins
3 61 (9.40%) GitLab
4 58 (8.94%) JIRA
5 40 (6.16%) JUnit
6 34 (5.24%) SonarQube
7 30 (4.62%) Maven
8 27 (4.16%) Claude Code
9 24 (3.70%) Selenium
10 19 (2.93%) Cucumber
10 19 (2.93%) Mockito
11 17 (2.62%) Postman
12 13 (2.00%) Gradle
13 11 (1.69%) TestNG
14 10 (1.54%) Bitbucket
15 9 (1.39%) WebDriver
16 8 (1.23%) Cypress.io
16 8 (1.23%) JMeter
16 8 (1.23%) REST Assured
16 8 (1.23%) Visual Studio
General
1 202 (31.12%) Social Skills
2 136 (20.96%) Finance
3 79 (12.17%) Banking
4 74 (11.40%) Public Sector
5 71 (10.94%) Analytical Skills
6 33 (5.08%) Investment Banking
7 26 (4.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 23 (3.54%) Retail
9 13 (2.00%) Front Office
9 13 (2.00%) Organisational Skills
10 9 (1.39%) Documentation Skills
11 8 (1.23%) Automotive
11 8 (1.23%) Law
12 7 (1.08%) Aerospace
12 7 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
12 7 (1.08%) Military
13 6 (0.92%) Financial Institution
14 5 (0.77%) Games
15 4 (0.62%) Pharmaceutical
16 3 (0.46%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 295 (45.45%) Developer
2 133 (20.49%) Senior
3 102 (15.72%) Lead
4 71 (10.94%) Java Developer
5 54 (8.32%) Senior Developer
6 53 (8.17%) Software Engineer
7 45 (6.93%) Full-Stack Developer
8 41 (6.32%) Python Developer
9 34 (5.24%) Lead Developer
10 32 (4.93%) Technical Leader
11 31 (4.78%) .NET Developer
12 28 (4.31%) DevOps Engineer
13 27 (4.16%) Python Engineer
14 25 (3.85%) Java Engineer
14 25 (3.85%) Software Developer
15 22 (3.39%) Architect
15 22 (3.39%) Data Engineer
16 21 (3.24%) Backend Developer
17 18 (2.77%) React Developer
18 16 (2.47%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 150 (23.11%) RESTful
2 140 (21.57%) REST
3 121 (18.64%) Spring
4 117 (18.03%) React
5 105 (16.18%) Spring Boot
6 100 (15.41%) Terraform
7 90 (13.87%) .NET
8 73 (11.25%) Kafka
9 64 (9.86%) HTML
10 61 (9.40%) Node.js
11 58 (8.94%) CSS
12 50 (7.70%) AngularJS
13 41 (6.32%) SOAP
14 37 (5.70%) Web Services
15 34 (5.24%) Django
15 34 (5.24%) OAuth
16 29 (4.47%) FastAPI
17 28 (4.31%) HTML5
18 27 (4.16%) .NET Framework
18 27 (4.16%) CSS3
Miscellaneous
1 161 (24.81%) Cloud Native
2 74 (11.40%) Product Ownership
3 62 (9.55%) Distributed Systems
4 36 (5.55%) Onboarding
5 33 (5.08%) Enterprise Software
6 25 (3.85%) Data Structures
7 23 (3.54%) Self-Motivation
8 19 (2.93%) Algorithms
9 17 (2.62%) Data Protection Act
10 15 (2.31%) Mobile App
11 14 (2.16%) Legacy Systems
12 12 (1.85%) AI Agents
12 12 (1.85%) Linux Command Line
12 12 (1.85%) Virtual Team
13 11 (1.69%) Derivative
13 11 (1.69%) Legacy Applications
13 11 (1.69%) Legacy Code
14 10 (1.54%) Market Risk
15 8 (1.23%) Enterprise Cloud
15 8 (1.23%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 42 (6.47%) Linux
2 28 (4.31%) Unix
3 16 (2.47%) Windows
4 14 (2.16%) Android
5 11 (1.69%) Apple iOS
6 4 (0.62%) FreeRTOS
6 4 (0.62%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 4 (0.62%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.46%) Mac OS X
8 2 (0.31%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 430 (66.26%) CI/CD
2 326 (50.23%) Agile
3 291 (44.84%) DevOps
4 222 (34.21%) Test Automation
5 206 (31.74%) Microservices
6 197 (30.35%) Software Engineering
7 182 (28.04%) Continuous Improvement
8 162 (24.96%) Problem-Solving
9 150 (23.11%) Containerisation
10 133 (20.49%) AI
11 128 (19.72%) Infrastructure as Code
12 120 (18.49%) Technical Leadership
13 119 (18.34%) Mentoring
14 117 (18.03%) Scrum
15 111 (17.10%) Observability
16 95 (14.64%) Full-Stack Development
17 93 (14.33%) Event-Driven
18 86 (13.25%) SDLC
19 85 (13.10%) Performance Optimisation
20 80 (12.33%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 210 (32.36%) Python
2 203 (31.28%) Java
3 179 (27.58%) SQL
4 135 (20.80%) JavaScript
5 110 (16.95%) TypeScript
6 89 (13.71%) C#
7 40 (6.16%) Shell Script
8 24 (3.70%) Bash
9 22 (3.39%) Kotlin
10 16 (2.47%) C++
10 16 (2.47%) Go
11 14 (2.16%) Scala
12 13 (2.00%) Apex Code
13 12 (1.85%) Ruby
14 11 (1.69%) PowerShell
14 11 (1.69%) T-SQL
15 8 (1.23%) Bicep
15 8 (1.23%) PHP
16 7 (1.08%) PL/SQL
17 5 (0.77%) Rust
Qualifications
1 142 (21.88%) Security Cleared
2 123 (18.95%) SC Cleared
3 49 (7.55%) Degree
4 36 (5.55%) BPSS Clearance
5 26 (4.01%) Computer Science Degree
6 20 (3.08%) DV Cleared
7 18 (2.77%) Master's Degree
8 11 (1.69%) AWS Certification
9 6 (0.92%) Microsoft Certification
10 5 (0.77%) PhD
11 3 (0.46%) ISTQB
12 2 (0.31%) Azure Certification
13 1 (0.15%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 118 (18.18%) QA
2 58 (8.94%) Accessibility
3 34 (5.24%) Data Quality
4 8 (1.23%) Software Quality Assurance
4 8 (1.23%) WCAG
5 6 (0.92%) GDPR
5 6 (0.92%) MISRA
6 5 (0.77%) Basel III
7 4 (0.62%) MISRA C
8 3 (0.46%) GRC
9 2 (0.31%) IEC 62304
9 2 (0.31%) ISO 13485
9 2 (0.31%) ISO 20022
9 2 (0.31%) NCSC
9 2 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 1 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
10 1 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
10 1 (0.15%) HL7
10 1 (0.15%) SLA
10 1 (0.15%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 179 (27.58%) Docker
2 9 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
3 5 (0.77%) Active Directory
3 5 (0.77%) zsh
4 1 (0.15%) Embedded Firmware
4 1 (0.15%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 164 (25.27%) Kubernetes
2 27 (4.16%) Ansible
3 22 (3.39%) Grafana
4 18 (2.77%) Prometheus
5 14 (2.16%) Kibana
6 4 (0.62%) Control-M
6 4 (0.62%) Kustomize
6 4 (0.62%) Podman
7 3 (0.46%) HP ALM
8 2 (0.31%) HP Quality Center
9 1 (0.15%) Argo
9 1 (0.15%) CA Endevor
9 1 (0.15%) HP Fortify
9 1 (0.15%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.15%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 74 (11.40%) Microsoft
2 47 (7.24%) Google
3 33 (5.08%) Databricks
4 26 (4.01%) Salesforce
5 24 (3.70%) Oracle
6 11 (1.69%) MuleSoft
7 6 (0.92%) Dynatrace
7 6 (0.92%) OpenAI
7 6 (0.92%) SAP
8 5 (0.77%) Checkmarx
9 4 (0.62%) IBM
9 4 (0.62%) Red Hat
9 4 (0.62%) ServiceNow
9 4 (0.62%) Solace
9 4 (0.62%) UiPath
10 3 (0.46%) Foundry
10 3 (0.46%) HP
10 3 (0.46%) Sitecore
10 3 (0.46%) Snow
11 2 (0.31%) Workday