Computer Science Contract Job Trends

Computer Science
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Computer Science skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 19 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 92 70 72
Rank change year-on-year -22 +2 +55
Contract jobs citing Computer Science 1,173 960 1,233
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.71% 3.28% 2.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.15% 3.62% 3.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 732 569 774
10th Percentile £175 £300 £319
25th Percentile £304 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -7.10% -2.37% -6.88%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £661
90th Percentile £774 £800 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £400 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -20.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 72 29 85
10th Percentile £26.75 £26.86 £23.00
25th Percentile £57.44 £30.78 £42.50
Median hourly rate £83.00 £43.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +93.02% -21.82% +4.76%
75th Percentile £88.00 £63.25 £66.25
90th Percentile - £82.39 £74.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £83.00 £37.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +121.33% -31.82% +10.00%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Computer Science 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 37,265 26,485 38,452
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.97% 90.43% 86.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,631 17,037 25,025
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £638 £638
90th Percentile £723 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,203 922 2,327
10th Percentile £14.97 £15.25 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £32.12
Median % change year-on-year -7.69% +1.20% -8.24%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.52 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.50 £70.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £31.76 £30.91
% change year-on-year -13.41% +2.74% -11.68%

Computer Science
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Computer Science job vacancy trend in the UK

Computer Science
Daily Rate Trend

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

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Computer Science

Computer Science
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Computer Science over the 6 months to 19 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Computer Science in the UK

Computer Science
Hourly Rate Trend

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

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Computer Science

Computer Science
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Computer Science over the 6 months to 19 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Computer Science in the UK

Computer Science
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 Computer Science within the UK over the 6 months to 19 March 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 -18 1,037 £475 -9.52% 809
UK excluding London -9 609 £400 -20.00% 603
London -27 452 £550 -8.33% 334
Work from Home -25 276 £523 -5.00% 307
South East +3 194 £355 -29.00% 211
North of England +13 185 £371 -30.08% 123
Yorkshire +10 94 £525 +14.88% 40
Midlands -38 91 £463 +29.92% 81
North West +6 87 £273 -50.54% 61
West Midlands -42 66 £475 +143.59% 46
South West -19 54 £500 -4.76% 58
East of England -24 42 £403 -38.08% 76
Scotland 0 35 £610 +19.02% 45
East Midlands -23 25 £447 +21.80% 35
Wales -19 15 £160 -44.35% 18
Northern Ireland -4 5 £369 -38.54% 7
North East -7 5 £207 -64.09% 22

Computer Science
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 70 (5.97%) Confluence
2 43 (3.67%) Apache Spark
3 34 (2.90%) SharePoint
4 19 (1.62%) Apache
4 19 (1.62%) Microsoft Exchange
5 14 (1.19%) Apache Airflow
6 6 (0.51%) Jupyter
7 5 (0.43%) Smallworld
8 4 (0.34%) GeoServer
8 4 (0.34%) OpenStack
8 4 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 4 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
9 3 (0.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 3 (0.26%) Ethereum
9 3 (0.26%) Hyperledger
9 3 (0.26%) IIS
10 2 (0.17%) CMS
10 2 (0.17%) nginx
10 2 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
10 2 (0.17%) WebSphere
Applications
1 34 (2.90%) Microsoft Office
2 20 (1.71%) Microsoft Excel
3 17 (1.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 11 (0.94%) MS Visio
5 5 (0.43%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.34%) Simulink
7 2 (0.17%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.17%) Trello
Business Applications
1 21 (1.79%) SAP S/4HANA
2 8 (0.68%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.43%) Payment Gateway
4 4 (0.34%) Aladdin
4 4 (0.34%) SAP ERP
5 2 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
5 2 (0.17%) Oracle General Ledger
5 2 (0.17%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 2 (0.17%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
5 2 (0.17%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.17%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.085%) FLEXCUBE
6 1 (0.085%) Maximo
6 1 (0.085%) Misys Equation
6 1 (0.085%) Oracle FAH
6 1 (0.085%) Oracle HRMS
6 1 (0.085%) SAP PM
6 1 (0.085%) SAP SM
6 1 (0.085%) SAP Travel Management
6 1 (0.085%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 324 (27.62%) Azure
2 207 (17.65%) AWS
3 118 (10.06%) GCP
4 70 (5.97%) GitHub
5 67 (5.71%) Power Platform
6 51 (4.35%) Microsoft 365
7 50 (4.26%) SaaS
8 44 (3.75%) Azure DevOps
8 44 (3.75%) Serverless
9 41 (3.50%) Entra ID
10 28 (2.39%) GitHub Actions
11 23 (1.96%) IaaS
12 22 (1.88%) Snowflake
13 19 (1.62%) AWS CloudFormation
13 19 (1.62%) Azure Data Factory
13 19 (1.62%) Azure Machine Learning
13 19 (1.62%) Cloud Computing
14 17 (1.45%) Power Automate
14 17 (1.45%) PowerApps
15 16 (1.36%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 50 (4.26%) Firewall
2 32 (2.73%) DNS
3 28 (2.39%) TCP/IP
4 22 (1.88%) Network Security
5 17 (1.45%) WAN
6 16 (1.36%) HTTP
7 15 (1.28%) BGP
7 15 (1.28%) LAN
8 14 (1.19%) VLAN
9 13 (1.11%) SSH
9 13 (1.11%) Wireless
10 11 (0.94%) VPN
11 10 (0.85%) DHCP
11 10 (0.85%) IPv4
11 10 (0.85%) OSPF
12 9 (0.77%) Skype
13 8 (0.68%) Cisco IOS
13 8 (0.68%) HTTPS
14 7 (0.60%) Internet
14 7 (0.60%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 81 (6.91%) PostgreSQL
2 53 (4.52%) NoSQL
3 50 (4.26%) Power BI
4 45 (3.84%) Relational Database
5 44 (3.75%) Data Warehouse
5 44 (3.75%) SQL Server
6 41 (3.50%) Big Data
7 35 (2.98%) MySQL
8 25 (2.13%) Tableau
9 23 (1.96%) Hadoop
10 20 (1.71%) Metadata
11 18 (1.53%) MongoDB
12 16 (1.36%) Data Lake
12 16 (1.36%) Elasticsearch
13 11 (0.94%) Redis
13 11 (0.94%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 10 (0.85%) Amazon RDS
15 8 (0.68%) Snowflake Schema
16 7 (0.60%) Star Schema
16 7 (0.60%) Tick Data
Development Applications
1 101 (8.61%) Git
2 93 (7.93%) JIRA
3 65 (5.54%) Jenkins
4 58 (4.94%) GitLab
5 28 (2.39%) Rational DOORS
6 12 (1.02%) MLflow
6 12 (1.02%) Postman
7 11 (0.94%) Selenium
8 10 (0.85%) Liquibase
9 9 (0.77%) Jaeger
10 8 (0.68%) Bitbucket
10 8 (0.68%) CircleCI
10 8 (0.68%) Gradle
11 7 (0.60%) JUnit
12 6 (0.51%) Cypress.io
13 5 (0.43%) Artifactory
13 5 (0.43%) Cucumber
13 5 (0.43%) PyCharm
13 5 (0.43%) Visual Studio
14 4 (0.34%) REST Assured
General
1 505 (43.05%) Social Skills
2 285 (24.30%) Finance
3 248 (21.14%) Analytical Skills
4 111 (9.46%) Banking
5 78 (6.65%) Public Sector
6 47 (4.01%) Marketing
7 46 (3.92%) Aerospace
8 45 (3.84%) Documentation Skills
9 39 (3.32%) Legal
10 37 (3.15%) Presentation Skills
11 36 (3.07%) Influencing Skills
12 33 (2.81%) Telecoms
13 32 (2.73%) Financial Institution
14 30 (2.56%) Front Office
15 25 (2.13%) Electronics
16 24 (2.05%) Organisational Skills
17 23 (1.96%) Manufacturing
18 22 (1.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 22 (1.88%) Investment Banking
19 17 (1.45%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 166 (14.15%) Developer
2 111 (9.46%) Architect
3 98 (8.35%) Lead
4 91 (7.76%) Analyst
5 88 (7.50%) Senior
6 47 (4.01%) Software Engineer
7 41 (3.50%) Solutions Architect
8 40 (3.41%) Data Scientist
9 39 (3.32%) Delivery Manager
10 35 (2.98%) Product Manager
11 32 (2.73%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 30 (2.56%) Python Developer
13 28 (2.39%) Product Delivery Manager
14 27 (2.30%) Business Analyst
14 27 (2.30%) Technical Support
15 25 (2.13%) Consultant
16 24 (2.05%) Java Developer
17 23 (1.96%) Cloud Engineer
17 23 (1.96%) Data Engineer
18 22 (1.88%) Systems Delivery Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 101 (8.61%) REST
2 59 (5.03%) React
3 58 (4.94%) RESTful
4 53 (4.52%) .NET
5 46 (3.92%) Kafka
6 41 (3.50%) Middleware
7 37 (3.15%) PyTorch
8 36 (3.07%) Elastic Stack
8 36 (3.07%) TensorFlow
9 35 (2.98%) Spring
10 34 (2.90%) OAuth
11 32 (2.73%) Spring Boot
12 31 (2.64%) JSON
12 31 (2.64%) XML
13 30 (2.56%) HTML
14 27 (2.30%) Node.js
14 27 (2.30%) SOAP
15 23 (1.96%) CSS
15 23 (1.96%) LangChain
16 22 (1.88%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 119 (10.14%) Management Information System
2 95 (8.10%) Algorithms
3 92 (7.84%) Cloud Native
4 83 (7.08%) Product Ownership
5 66 (5.63%) Data Structures
6 58 (4.94%) Distributed Systems
7 57 (4.86%) Onboarding
8 33 (2.81%) Equities
8 33 (2.81%) Virtual Team
9 25 (2.13%) Data Protection Act
10 24 (2.05%) AI Agents
10 24 (2.05%) Derivative
11 23 (1.96%) Data Centre
11 23 (1.96%) Distributed Computing
11 23 (1.96%) Enterprise Software
12 22 (1.88%) Analytical Mindset
13 21 (1.79%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 20 (1.71%) Public Cloud
15 19 (1.62%) Security Posture
16 18 (1.53%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 151 (12.87%) Linux
2 126 (10.74%) Windows
3 53 (4.52%) Unix
4 25 (2.13%) Android
5 20 (1.71%) Windows Server
6 18 (1.53%) Mac OS
7 12 (1.02%) Apple iOS
8 10 (0.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 7 (0.60%) Windows 10
10 5 (0.43%) VMS
11 4 (0.34%) Debian
11 4 (0.34%) Ubuntu
12 3 (0.26%) Rocky
13 2 (0.17%) Robot Operating System
14 1 (0.085%) Embedded Linux
14 1 (0.085%) Kali Linux
14 1 (0.085%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 373 (31.80%) Problem-Solving
2 322 (27.45%) Agile
3 251 (21.40%) AI
4 237 (20.20%) CI/CD
5 229 (19.52%) DevOps
6 195 (16.62%) Software Engineering
7 152 (12.96%) Continuous Improvement
8 150 (12.79%) Microservices
9 142 (12.11%) Machine Learning
10 135 (11.51%) Analytics
11 133 (11.34%) Containerisation
12 132 (11.25%) Cybersecurity
13 122 (10.40%) Stakeholder Management
14 119 (10.14%) Data Science
15 113 (9.63%) Data Modelling
16 110 (9.38%) Mathematics
17 109 (9.29%) Data Governance
18 108 (9.21%) Decision-Making
19 102 (8.70%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 95 (8.10%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 356 (30.35%) Python
2 206 (17.56%) SQL
3 147 (12.53%) Java
4 84 (7.16%) JavaScript
5 63 (5.37%) PowerShell
6 58 (4.94%) TypeScript
7 50 (4.26%) C#
8 42 (3.58%) Go
9 39 (3.32%) Bash
10 37 (3.15%) C++
11 22 (1.88%) R
12 17 (1.45%) Perl
12 17 (1.45%) Shell Script
13 14 (1.19%) Rust
14 11 (0.94%) Kotlin
15 8 (0.68%) Scala
16 7 (0.60%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 7 (0.60%) Ruby
17 5 (0.43%) C
17 5 (0.43%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 956 (81.50%) Degree
2 592 (50.47%) Computer Science Degree
3 213 (18.16%) Master's Degree
4 202 (17.22%) Security Cleared
5 120 (10.23%) SC Cleared
6 77 (6.56%) CISSP
7 57 (4.86%) DBS Check
8 56 (4.77%) PhD
9 51 (4.35%) CISM
10 40 (3.41%) Azure Certification
11 33 (2.81%) TOGAF Certification
12 32 (2.73%) PMI Certification
13 30 (2.56%) Microsoft Certification
14 28 (2.39%) Cisco Certification
14 28 (2.39%) DV Cleared
15 27 (2.30%) PMP
16 24 (2.05%) AWS Certification
16 24 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
17 23 (1.96%) CompTIA Security+
18 18 (1.53%) CompTIA CySA+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 70 (5.97%) QA
2 57 (4.86%) Data Quality
2 57 (4.86%) GDPR
3 45 (3.84%) NIST
4 44 (3.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 23 (1.96%) PCI DSS
6 17 (1.45%) Accessibility
7 11 (0.94%) NCSC
8 10 (0.85%) GRC
9 9 (0.77%) HIPAA
9 9 (0.77%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 8 (0.68%) Actionable Recommendations
10 8 (0.68%) NIST 800
11 7 (0.60%) DO-254
12 6 (0.51%) Cyber Essentials
12 6 (0.51%) PSD2
13 5 (0.43%) COBIT
13 5 (0.43%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
13 5 (0.43%) Government Security Classifications
13 5 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 20000
System Software
1 154 (13.13%) Docker
2 58 (4.94%) Active Directory
3 20 (1.71%) VMware Infrastructure
4 12 (1.02%) Firmware
5 6 (0.51%) VMware NSX
6 4 (0.34%) Hyper-V
7 3 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
7 3 (0.26%) VMware ESXi
8 2 (0.17%) KVM
8 2 (0.17%) Virtual Desktop
8 2 (0.17%) vSphere
9 1 (0.085%) BitLocker
9 1 (0.085%) HDFS
9 1 (0.085%) Microsoft Virtual Server
9 1 (0.085%) PowerHA
9 1 (0.085%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 162 (13.81%) Kubernetes
2 90 (7.67%) Terraform
3 58 (4.94%) Ansible
4 50 (4.26%) Grafana
5 41 (3.50%) Prometheus
6 21 (1.79%) Microsoft Intune
7 16 (1.36%) Single Sign-On
8 15 (1.28%) Puppet
9 12 (1.02%) Kibana
10 9 (0.77%) Kiali
11 8 (0.68%) Argo
12 7 (0.60%) SCCM
13 5 (0.43%) Progress Chef
14 4 (0.34%) SCOM
15 3 (0.26%) Control-M
15 3 (0.26%) Foglight
15 3 (0.26%) Kubeflow
15 3 (0.26%) PowerCLI
15 3 (0.26%) vCenter Server
16 2 (0.17%) vRealize Orchestrator
Vendors
1 185 (15.77%) Microsoft
2 69 (5.88%) Splunk
3 63 (5.37%) Google
4 58 (4.94%) Oracle
5 49 (4.18%) SAP
6 48 (4.09%) Databricks
7 41 (3.50%) IBM
8 28 (2.39%) ServiceNow
9 25 (2.13%) BiZZdesign
10 23 (1.96%) Cisco
10 23 (1.96%) VMware
11 21 (1.79%) Informatica
12 19 (1.62%) Salesforce
13 18 (1.53%) Palo Alto
14 17 (1.45%) Red Hat
15 14 (1.19%) Okta
16 13 (1.11%) CheckPoint
17 12 (1.02%) Foundry
17 12 (1.02%) OpenAI
17 12 (1.02%) Software AG