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 16 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 79 70 78
Rank change year-on-year -9 +8 +54
Contract jobs citing Computer Science 1,170 1,070 1,212
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.19% 3.13% 2.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.60% 3.55% 3.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 750 642 813
10th Percentile £175 £350 £350
25th Percentile £313 £450 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £473 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -14.08% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £638 £700 £700
90th Percentile £750 £850 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £400 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -20.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 29 32
10th Percentile £26.75 £27.60 £33.34
25th Percentile £33.50 £41.25 £50.00
Median hourly rate £41.50 £52.50 £59.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.95% -11.02% +8.76%
75th Percentile £67.00 £68.75 £69.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.25 £79.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £33.50 £50.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year -33.00% -11.11% +7.14%

All Process and 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 32,471 30,121 39,108
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.45% 87.99% 88.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,452 18,385 26,091
10th Percentile £300 £306 £308
25th Percentile £406 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £745 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,090 1,000 1,510
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.61 £14.49
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.30 £19.02
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.85
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.88% +25.29%
75th Percentile £48.75 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £74.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.04 £32.39 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.87% -27.21% +39.06%

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 16 December 2025.

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 16 December 2025.

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 16 December 2025. 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 1,035 £475 -17.39% 1,281
UK excluding London +12 567 £400 -20.00% 1,211
London -30 499 £541 -9.79% 267
Work from Home 0 307 £466 -19.00% 788
North of England +41 188 £375 -28.57% 231
South East +25 132 £330 -34.00% 375
Midlands -9 101 £475 -5.00% 188
Yorkshire +26 96 £450 -18.18% 97
North West +16 89 £358 -28.40% 111
West Midlands -16 69 £500 -13.04% 92
South West +9 57 £425 -39.29% 135
East of England -27 47 £438 -12.50% 188
Scotland +7 42 £450 -4.51% 78
East Midlands 0 32 £447 +25.56% 87
Wales +5 12 £160 -60.00% 27
North East -11 4 £333 -35.07% 25
Northern Ireland -9 3 - - 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 57 (4.87%) Confluence
2 46 (3.93%) SharePoint
3 32 (2.74%) Apache Spark
4 24 (2.05%) Microsoft Exchange
5 13 (1.11%) Apache
5 13 (1.11%) Apache Airflow
6 8 (0.68%) Jupyter
7 7 (0.60%) IIS
7 7 (0.60%) nginx
8 5 (0.43%) Skype for Business
8 5 (0.43%) Smallworld
9 4 (0.34%) GeoServer
9 4 (0.34%) SAS
10 3 (0.26%) Ethereum
10 3 (0.26%) Hyperledger
10 3 (0.26%) Luigi
10 3 (0.26%) OpenStack
10 3 (0.26%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.17%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 2 (0.17%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 54 (4.62%) Microsoft Office
2 25 (2.14%) Microsoft Excel
3 8 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 5 (0.43%) Chatbot
4 5 (0.43%) MS Visio
4 5 (0.43%) Simulink
5 2 (0.17%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.085%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 24 (2.05%) SAP S/4HANA
2 11 (0.94%) Dynamics CRM
3 6 (0.51%) Workday HCM
4 4 (0.34%) Aladdin
4 4 (0.34%) Salesforce CRM
4 4 (0.34%) SAP ERP
5 3 (0.26%) Bloomberg AIM
5 3 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
5 3 (0.26%) SAP MDG
5 3 (0.26%) SAP PLM
5 3 (0.26%) Temenos T24
6 2 (0.17%) Endur
6 2 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
6 2 (0.17%) Maximo
6 2 (0.17%) Oracle EBS R12
6 2 (0.17%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.17%) SAP FS
6 2 (0.17%) SAP GRC
6 2 (0.17%) SAP Travel Management
6 2 (0.17%) SAP VC
Cloud Services
1 283 (24.19%) Azure
2 229 (19.57%) AWS
3 131 (11.20%) GCP
4 74 (6.32%) GitHub
5 73 (6.24%) Power Platform
6 70 (5.98%) Serverless
7 54 (4.62%) Microsoft 365
8 43 (3.68%) Azure DevOps
9 35 (2.99%) SaaS
10 29 (2.48%) GitHub Actions
11 25 (2.14%) Entra ID
12 23 (1.97%) Cloud Computing
13 20 (1.71%) AWS Lambda
14 19 (1.62%) Azure Data Factory
14 19 (1.62%) Power Automate
14 19 (1.62%) PowerApps
14 19 (1.62%) Snowflake
15 17 (1.45%) Amazon S3
15 17 (1.45%) Azure Logic Apps
15 17 (1.45%) Azure Machine Learning
Communications & Networking
1 45 (3.85%) Firewall
2 38 (3.25%) DNS
3 24 (2.05%) DHCP
4 21 (1.79%) HTTP
5 19 (1.62%) Network Security
5 19 (1.62%) VPN
5 19 (1.62%) Wireless
6 15 (1.28%) SSH
7 13 (1.11%) Cisco IOS
7 13 (1.11%) Skype
7 13 (1.11%) TCP/IP
8 11 (0.94%) VoIP
8 11 (0.94%) WAN
9 10 (0.85%) BGP
9 10 (0.85%) Internet
10 9 (0.77%) LAN
11 8 (0.68%) Unified Communications
11 8 (0.68%) VLAN
12 7 (0.60%) IPv4
12 7 (0.60%) OSPF
Database & Business Intelligence
1 76 (6.50%) PostgreSQL
2 68 (5.81%) NoSQL
3 61 (5.21%) Relational Database
4 53 (4.53%) Power BI
5 45 (3.85%) SQL Server
6 42 (3.59%) Data Warehouse
7 31 (2.65%) MySQL
8 30 (2.56%) Big Data
8 30 (2.56%) Tableau
9 15 (1.28%) MongoDB
10 14 (1.20%) Redis
11 13 (1.11%) RDBMS
12 12 (1.03%) Amazon RDS
13 11 (0.94%) Metadata
14 10 (0.85%) Data Lake
14 10 (0.85%) Elasticsearch
14 10 (0.85%) Hadoop
15 9 (0.77%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 8 (0.68%) Apache Cassandra
17 7 (0.60%) KDB
Development Applications
1 114 (9.74%) JIRA
2 95 (8.12%) Git
3 93 (7.95%) Jenkins
4 86 (7.35%) GitLab
5 29 (2.48%) Liquibase
6 22 (1.88%) Postman
7 18 (1.54%) Artifactory
8 16 (1.37%) Selenium
9 15 (1.28%) Visual Studio
10 10 (0.85%) Bitbucket
10 10 (0.85%) Cypress.io
11 9 (0.77%) JUnit
12 8 (0.68%) Cucumber
12 8 (0.68%) MLflow
13 7 (0.60%) SonarQube
13 7 (0.60%) TeamCity
14 6 (0.51%) Appium
14 6 (0.51%) CircleCI
14 6 (0.51%) IntelliJ
14 6 (0.51%) PyCharm
General
1 554 (47.35%) Social Skills
2 310 (26.50%) Finance
3 253 (21.62%) Analytical Skills
4 132 (11.28%) Banking
5 63 (5.38%) Public Sector
6 44 (3.76%) Financial Institution
7 39 (3.33%) Marketing
8 38 (3.25%) Front Office
9 34 (2.91%) Organisational Skills
10 32 (2.74%) Influencing Skills
10 32 (2.74%) Investment Banking
11 30 (2.56%) Legal
12 29 (2.48%) Manufacturing
13 27 (2.31%) Telecoms
14 25 (2.14%) Documentation Skills
15 24 (2.05%) Presentation Skills
16 21 (1.79%) Electronics
17 17 (1.45%) Retail
18 15 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
19 12 (1.03%) Military
Job Titles
1 227 (19.40%) Developer
2 101 (8.63%) Analyst
2 101 (8.63%) Architect
3 94 (8.03%) Senior
4 73 (6.24%) Lead
5 61 (5.21%) Software Engineer
6 37 (3.16%) Solutions Architect
7 36 (3.08%) Java Developer
8 34 (2.91%) Senior Developer
9 33 (2.82%) Data Scientist
10 31 (2.65%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 31 (2.65%) Business Analyst
11 29 (2.48%) Consultant
11 29 (2.48%) Python Engineer
12 25 (2.14%) Data Engineer
12 25 (2.14%) IT Support
12 25 (2.14%) Python Developer
13 24 (2.05%) Full-Stack Developer
14 22 (1.88%) AWS Engineer
15 21 (1.79%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 126 (10.77%) REST
2 83 (7.09%) RESTful
3 69 (5.90%) .NET
4 58 (4.96%) HTML
5 54 (4.62%) React
6 45 (3.85%) Elastic Stack
6 45 (3.85%) Kafka
7 44 (3.76%) CSS
8 42 (3.59%) Node.js
9 41 (3.50%) JSON
9 41 (3.50%) Middleware
10 38 (3.25%) SOAP
11 37 (3.16%) TensorFlow
12 36 (3.08%) OAuth
12 36 (3.08%) PyTorch
12 36 (3.08%) XML
13 31 (2.65%) LangChain
14 29 (2.48%) Spring
15 28 (2.39%) AngularJS
16 27 (2.31%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 111 (9.49%) Management Information System
2 97 (8.29%) Algorithms
3 92 (7.86%) Cloud Native
4 64 (5.47%) Distributed Systems
5 57 (4.87%) Data Structures
6 51 (4.36%) Product Ownership
7 39 (3.33%) Public Cloud
8 35 (2.99%) Data Protection Act
9 27 (2.31%) Equities
10 26 (2.22%) Security Posture
11 24 (2.05%) Derivative
11 24 (2.05%) Mobile App
12 23 (1.97%) Enterprise Software
12 23 (1.97%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 22 (1.88%) Data Centre
13 22 (1.88%) Fixed Income
13 22 (1.88%) Onboarding
13 22 (1.88%) Virtual Team
14 19 (1.62%) Analytical Mindset
14 19 (1.62%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 161 (13.76%) Linux
2 113 (9.66%) Windows
3 60 (5.13%) Unix
4 27 (2.31%) Android
5 25 (2.14%) Mac OS
5 25 (2.14%) Windows Server
6 18 (1.54%) Apple iOS
7 9 (0.77%) Windows 10
8 6 (0.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 4 (0.34%) VMS
10 2 (0.17%) Ubuntu
11 1 (0.085%) CentOS
11 1 (0.085%) Debian
11 1 (0.085%) Kali Linux
11 1 (0.085%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 387 (33.08%) Problem-Solving
2 346 (29.57%) Agile
3 252 (21.54%) DevOps
4 232 (19.83%) CI/CD
5 196 (16.75%) Software Engineering
6 180 (15.38%) AI
7 151 (12.91%) Microservices
8 144 (12.31%) Containerisation
9 127 (10.85%) Machine Learning
10 123 (10.51%) Analytics
11 113 (9.66%) Cybersecurity
11 113 (9.66%) Data Science
12 111 (9.49%) Mathematics
13 105 (8.97%) Continuous Improvement
13 105 (8.97%) Stakeholder Management
14 99 (8.46%) Decision-Making
15 98 (8.38%) ITIL
16 96 (8.21%) Data Modelling
17 91 (7.78%) Change Management
18 90 (7.69%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 394 (33.68%) Python
2 213 (18.21%) SQL
3 173 (14.79%) Java
4 118 (10.09%) JavaScript
5 70 (5.98%) TypeScript
6 69 (5.90%) PowerShell
7 66 (5.64%) C#
8 60 (5.13%) Go
9 51 (4.36%) Bash
9 51 (4.36%) C++
10 22 (1.88%) Perl
11 21 (1.79%) R
12 14 (1.20%) Kotlin
12 14 (1.20%) Ruby
13 13 (1.11%) Shell Script
14 9 (0.77%) Apex Code
14 9 (0.77%) C
14 9 (0.77%) MATLAB
15 8 (0.68%) Bicep
15 8 (0.68%) Swift
Qualifications
1 952 (81.37%) Degree
2 638 (54.53%) Computer Science Degree
3 232 (19.83%) Master's Degree
4 128 (10.94%) Security Cleared
5 93 (7.95%) SC Cleared
6 61 (5.21%) DBS Check
7 58 (4.96%) CISSP
8 52 (4.44%) PhD
9 40 (3.42%) AWS Certification
9 40 (3.42%) Azure Certification
10 37 (3.16%) Microsoft Certification
11 36 (3.08%) Cisco Certification
12 34 (2.91%) CISM
13 27 (2.31%) PMI Certification
14 25 (2.14%) BPSS Clearance
15 23 (1.97%) PMP
16 21 (1.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 21 (1.79%) CCNA
16 21 (1.79%) CCNP
16 21 (1.79%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 79 (6.75%) QA
2 67 (5.73%) GDPR
3 64 (5.47%) Data Quality
4 43 (3.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 26 (2.22%) NIST
6 19 (1.62%) GRC
7 17 (1.45%) Accessibility
8 14 (1.20%) PCI DSS
9 12 (1.03%) SLA
10 11 (0.94%) Def Stans
11 8 (0.68%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 8 (0.68%) Cyber Essentials
12 7 (0.60%) HIPAA
13 6 (0.51%) COBIT
14 5 (0.43%) DO-254
14 5 (0.43%) PMO
14 5 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.26%) NCSC
15 3 (0.26%) NIST 800
15 3 (0.26%) PSD2
System Software
1 162 (13.85%) Docker
2 46 (3.93%) Active Directory
3 25 (2.14%) VMware Infrastructure
4 7 (0.60%) Firmware
4 7 (0.60%) VMware NSX
5 5 (0.43%) Microsoft Virtual Server
5 5 (0.43%) Virtual Servers
6 4 (0.34%) Hyper-V
6 4 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
6 4 (0.34%) vSphere
7 2 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
8 1 (0.085%) BitLocker
8 1 (0.085%) HDFS
8 1 (0.085%) PowerHA
8 1 (0.085%) Tivoli Workload Scheduler
Systems Management
1 150 (12.82%) Kubernetes
2 106 (9.06%) Terraform
3 79 (6.75%) Ansible
4 56 (4.79%) Grafana
5 43 (3.68%) Prometheus
6 18 (1.54%) Puppet
7 16 (1.37%) SCCM
8 10 (0.85%) Kibana
9 9 (0.77%) Microsoft Intune
10 7 (0.60%) Argo
10 7 (0.60%) CSIRT
11 6 (0.51%) Progress Chef
11 6 (0.51%) QRadar
11 6 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
11 6 (0.51%) WSUS
12 5 (0.43%) SCOM
13 4 (0.34%) vCenter Server
14 3 (0.26%) HP ALM
14 3 (0.26%) Kiali
14 3 (0.26%) vRealize
Vendors
1 199 (17.01%) Microsoft
2 80 (6.84%) Splunk
3 72 (6.15%) Google
4 51 (4.36%) SAP
5 47 (4.02%) Oracle
6 40 (3.42%) Cisco
7 38 (3.25%) Databricks
7 38 (3.25%) Salesforce
8 37 (3.16%) ServiceNow
9 30 (2.56%) VMware
10 27 (2.31%) IBM
11 17 (1.45%) Red Hat
12 14 (1.20%) Palo Alto
13 12 (1.03%) BiZZdesign
13 12 (1.03%) OpenAI
14 11 (0.94%) Informatica
15 10 (0.85%) CheckPoint
15 10 (0.85%) Fortinet
15 10 (0.85%) Foundry
16 9 (0.77%) CyberArk