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 30 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 98 69 73
Rank change year-on-year -29 +4 +50
Contract jobs citing Computer Science 1,139 977 1,230
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.57% 3.34% 2.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.00% 3.69% 3.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 701 572 762
10th Percentile £176 £282 £316
25th Percentile £313 £401 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -5.58%
75th Percentile £653 £675 £650
90th Percentile £775 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £400 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -20.00% - -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 31 87
10th Percentile £26.75 £27.00 £22.73
25th Percentile £55.00 £30.78 £41.88
Median hourly rate £83.00 £43.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +93.02% -21.82% +4.76%
75th Percentile £88.00 £65.38 £65.63
90th Percentile - £82.25 £74.25
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 38,014 26,489 38,263
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.62% 90.44% 86.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,062 17,216 24,858
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 £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £484 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.72% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,249 972 2,349
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.00 £12.84
25th Percentile £18.87 £20.26 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.50 £31.88 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.36% -1.91% -9.72%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.25 £70.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.50 £31.50 £31.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% - -12.26%

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 30 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 30 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 30 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 -25 1,001 £495 -6.60% 826
UK excluding London -18 577 £400 -20.00% 618
London -30 451 £550 -8.33% 330
Work from Home -24 274 £525 -6.67% 306
North of England +7 177 £385 -28.79% 115
South East -11 177 £400 -20.00% 227
Yorkshire 0 94 £525 +26.81% 35
Midlands -48 85 £475 +67.25% 84
North West -9 80 £336 -43.06% 59
West Midlands -40 65 £475 +143.59% 51
South West -28 50 £477 -9.14% 56
East of England -26 44 £280 -56.92% 91
Scotland +4 36 £610 +22.00% 34
East Midlands -30 20 £230 -35.39% 33
Wales -20 15 £160 -44.35% 19
Northern Ireland -1 5 £369 -38.54% 9
North East -14 4 £216 -57.95% 21

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 64 (5.62%) Confluence
2 43 (3.78%) Apache Spark
3 28 (2.46%) SharePoint
4 19 (1.67%) Apache
5 17 (1.49%) Microsoft Exchange
6 16 (1.40%) Apache Airflow
7 6 (0.53%) Jupyter
8 4 (0.35%) OpenStack
8 4 (0.35%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 3 (0.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 3 (0.26%) IIS
9 3 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
9 3 (0.26%) SAS
10 2 (0.18%) CMS
10 2 (0.18%) nginx
10 2 (0.18%) Oracle Workflow
10 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
11 1 (0.088%) Apache Solr
11 1 (0.088%) Oracle Service Bus
11 1 (0.088%) Tomcat
Applications
1 32 (2.81%) Microsoft Office
2 19 (1.67%) Microsoft Excel
3 18 (1.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 12 (1.05%) MS Visio
5 6 (0.53%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.35%) Simulink
7 3 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.18%) Trello
Business Applications
1 22 (1.93%) SAP S/4HANA
2 9 (0.79%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.44%) Payment Gateway
4 4 (0.35%) Aladdin
4 4 (0.35%) SAP ERP
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle ERP
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle General Ledger
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle Payables
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle Receivables
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
5 2 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
6 1 (0.088%) FLEXCUBE
6 1 (0.088%) Maximo
6 1 (0.088%) Misys Equation
6 1 (0.088%) Oracle FAH
6 1 (0.088%) Oracle HRMS
6 1 (0.088%) SAP PM
6 1 (0.088%) SAP SM
6 1 (0.088%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 319 (28.01%) Azure
2 206 (18.09%) AWS
3 117 (10.27%) GCP
4 68 (5.97%) Power Platform
5 59 (5.18%) GitHub
6 51 (4.48%) Microsoft 365
6 51 (4.48%) SaaS
7 44 (3.86%) Serverless
8 43 (3.78%) Azure DevOps
9 37 (3.25%) Entra ID
10 25 (2.19%) GitHub Actions
11 24 (2.11%) Snowflake
12 23 (2.02%) IaaS
13 20 (1.76%) Azure Data Factory
14 19 (1.67%) AWS CloudFormation
14 19 (1.67%) Azure Machine Learning
14 19 (1.67%) Cloud Computing
15 17 (1.49%) Power Automate
15 17 (1.49%) PowerApps
16 16 (1.40%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 49 (4.30%) Firewall
2 33 (2.90%) DNS
3 29 (2.55%) TCP/IP
4 19 (1.67%) Network Security
5 18 (1.58%) BGP
5 18 (1.58%) WAN
6 16 (1.40%) HTTP
7 15 (1.32%) LAN
8 14 (1.23%) VLAN
9 12 (1.05%) OSPF
9 12 (1.05%) VPN
10 11 (0.97%) SSH
10 11 (0.97%) Wireless
11 10 (0.88%) IPv4
12 9 (0.79%) Cisco IOS
12 9 (0.79%) DHCP
12 9 (0.79%) HTTPS
13 8 (0.70%) Skype
14 7 (0.61%) SAN
14 7 (0.61%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 76 (6.67%) PostgreSQL
2 54 (4.74%) Relational Database
3 50 (4.39%) NoSQL
4 48 (4.21%) Power BI
5 45 (3.95%) SQL Server
6 43 (3.78%) Data Warehouse
7 39 (3.42%) Big Data
8 35 (3.07%) MySQL
9 24 (2.11%) Tableau
10 23 (2.02%) Hadoop
11 20 (1.76%) Metadata
11 20 (1.76%) MongoDB
12 16 (1.40%) Data Lake
12 16 (1.40%) Elasticsearch
13 12 (1.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 10 (0.88%) Amazon RDS
14 10 (0.88%) Redis
14 10 (0.88%) Snowflake Schema
15 8 (0.70%) Star Schema
16 7 (0.61%) KDB
Development Applications
1 92 (8.08%) Git
2 87 (7.64%) JIRA
3 65 (5.71%) Jenkins
4 54 (4.74%) GitLab
5 28 (2.46%) Rational DOORS
6 12 (1.05%) MLflow
6 12 (1.05%) Postman
7 11 (0.97%) Selenium
8 10 (0.88%) Liquibase
9 9 (0.79%) Jaeger
10 8 (0.70%) Bitbucket
10 8 (0.70%) Gradle
11 7 (0.61%) CircleCI
12 6 (0.53%) Cypress.io
12 6 (0.53%) JUnit
13 5 (0.44%) Artifactory
13 5 (0.44%) Cucumber
13 5 (0.44%) Maven
13 5 (0.44%) PyCharm
13 5 (0.44%) Visual Studio
General
1 482 (42.32%) Social Skills
2 285 (25.02%) Finance
3 243 (21.33%) Analytical Skills
4 112 (9.83%) Banking
5 72 (6.32%) Public Sector
6 50 (4.39%) Aerospace
7 46 (4.04%) Documentation Skills
7 46 (4.04%) Marketing
8 36 (3.16%) Influencing Skills
8 36 (3.16%) Legal
8 36 (3.16%) Presentation Skills
9 35 (3.07%) Telecoms
10 32 (2.81%) Financial Institution
11 28 (2.46%) Front Office
12 27 (2.37%) Electronics
13 23 (2.02%) Manufacturing
13 23 (2.02%) Organisational Skills
14 21 (1.84%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 21 (1.84%) Investment Banking
15 18 (1.58%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 146 (12.82%) Developer
2 110 (9.66%) Architect
3 100 (8.78%) Lead
4 91 (7.99%) Analyst
5 81 (7.11%) Senior
6 47 (4.13%) Software Engineer
7 42 (3.69%) Solutions Architect
8 39 (3.42%) Data Scientist
9 38 (3.34%) Delivery Manager
10 35 (3.07%) Product Manager
11 32 (2.81%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 29 (2.55%) Python Developer
12 29 (2.55%) Technical Support
13 28 (2.46%) Product Delivery Manager
14 27 (2.37%) Business Analyst
15 25 (2.19%) Consultant
16 24 (2.11%) Data Engineer
16 24 (2.11%) Java Developer
17 23 (2.02%) Cloud Engineer
18 22 (1.93%) Project Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 106 (9.31%) REST
2 61 (5.36%) RESTful
3 54 (4.74%) .NET
4 51 (4.48%) React
5 44 (3.86%) Kafka
6 40 (3.51%) Middleware
7 37 (3.25%) Elastic Stack
7 37 (3.25%) PyTorch
8 34 (2.99%) TensorFlow
9 33 (2.90%) Spring Boot
10 32 (2.81%) JSON
11 31 (2.72%) XML
12 29 (2.55%) Spring
13 28 (2.46%) OAuth
14 25 (2.19%) SOAP
15 24 (2.11%) HTML
16 22 (1.93%) LangChain
16 22 (1.93%) Pandas
17 19 (1.67%) Node.js
18 17 (1.49%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 115 (10.10%) Management Information System
2 92 (8.08%) Algorithms
3 87 (7.64%) Cloud Native
4 82 (7.20%) Product Ownership
5 65 (5.71%) Data Structures
6 59 (5.18%) Onboarding
7 58 (5.09%) Distributed Systems
8 34 (2.99%) Virtual Team
9 32 (2.81%) Equities
10 25 (2.19%) Data Protection Act
11 24 (2.11%) AI Agents
12 23 (2.02%) Derivative
13 22 (1.93%) Data Centre
13 22 (1.93%) Distributed Computing
13 22 (1.93%) Enterprise Software
14 21 (1.84%) Analytical Mindset
15 20 (1.76%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 20 (1.76%) Public Cloud
16 19 (1.67%) Taxonomies
17 17 (1.49%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 155 (13.61%) Linux
2 123 (10.80%) Windows
3 48 (4.21%) Unix
4 24 (2.11%) Android
5 21 (1.84%) Mac OS
6 19 (1.67%) Windows Server
7 12 (1.05%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 10 (0.88%) Apple iOS
9 9 (0.79%) Windows 10
10 5 (0.44%) Ubuntu
10 5 (0.44%) VMS
11 4 (0.35%) Debian
12 3 (0.26%) Rocky
13 2 (0.18%) Robot Operating System
14 1 (0.088%) CentOS
14 1 (0.088%) Embedded Linux
14 1 (0.088%) Kali Linux
14 1 (0.088%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 357 (31.34%) Problem-Solving
2 310 (27.22%) Agile
3 254 (22.30%) AI
4 231 (20.28%) CI/CD
5 227 (19.93%) DevOps
6 199 (17.47%) Software Engineering
7 157 (13.78%) Continuous Improvement
8 145 (12.73%) Microservices
9 137 (12.03%) Machine Learning
10 132 (11.59%) Analytics
10 132 (11.59%) Cybersecurity
11 126 (11.06%) Containerisation
12 122 (10.71%) Stakeholder Management
13 118 (10.36%) Data Science
14 111 (9.75%) Data Modelling
15 108 (9.48%) Mathematics
16 104 (9.13%) Decision-Making
17 103 (9.04%) Data Governance
18 102 (8.96%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 93 (8.17%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 342 (30.03%) Python
2 207 (18.17%) SQL
3 135 (11.85%) Java
4 74 (6.50%) JavaScript
5 57 (5.00%) PowerShell
6 54 (4.74%) C#
7 46 (4.04%) TypeScript
8 41 (3.60%) Bash
9 40 (3.51%) Go
10 39 (3.42%) C++
11 22 (1.93%) R
12 17 (1.49%) Perl
13 14 (1.23%) Rust
14 12 (1.05%) Shell Script
15 11 (0.97%) Kotlin
16 8 (0.70%) C
16 8 (0.70%) Scala
17 7 (0.61%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 5 (0.44%) Bicep
18 5 (0.44%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 946 (83.06%) Degree
2 578 (50.75%) Computer Science Degree
3 206 (18.09%) Master's Degree
4 200 (17.56%) Security Cleared
5 115 (10.10%) SC Cleared
6 72 (6.32%) CISSP
7 56 (4.92%) PhD
8 49 (4.30%) CISM
9 40 (3.51%) Azure Certification
9 40 (3.51%) DBS Check
10 32 (2.81%) PMI Certification
11 31 (2.72%) TOGAF Certification
12 29 (2.55%) DV Cleared
13 28 (2.46%) AWS Certification
13 28 (2.46%) Microsoft Certification
14 27 (2.37%) PMP
15 26 (2.28%) CompTIA Security+
16 24 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
16 24 (2.11%) Cisco Certification
17 18 (1.58%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 67 (5.88%) QA
2 53 (4.65%) Data Quality
3 51 (4.48%) GDPR
4 49 (4.30%) NIST
5 46 (4.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 21 (1.84%) PCI DSS
7 15 (1.32%) Accessibility
8 11 (0.97%) GRC
8 11 (0.97%) NCSC
8 11 (0.97%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 9 (0.79%) NIST 800
10 7 (0.61%) Actionable Recommendations
10 7 (0.61%) DO-254
10 7 (0.61%) PSD2
10 7 (0.61%) SLA
11 6 (0.53%) COBIT
12 5 (0.44%) Government Security Classifications
12 5 (0.44%) HIPAA
12 5 (0.44%) ISO 20022
12 5 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 20000
System Software
1 143 (12.55%) Docker
2 60 (5.27%) Active Directory
3 21 (1.84%) VMware Infrastructure
4 13 (1.14%) Firmware
5 6 (0.53%) Hyper-V
5 6 (0.53%) VMware NSX
6 3 (0.26%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.18%) Ceph
7 2 (0.18%) KVM
7 2 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.18%) Virtual Machines
7 2 (0.18%) vSphere
8 1 (0.088%) BitLocker
8 1 (0.088%) HDFS
8 1 (0.088%) PowerHA
8 1 (0.088%) Squid
Systems Management
1 152 (13.35%) Kubernetes
2 92 (8.08%) Terraform
3 64 (5.62%) Ansible
4 51 (4.48%) Grafana
5 44 (3.86%) Prometheus
6 23 (2.02%) Microsoft Intune
7 15 (1.32%) Puppet
8 14 (1.23%) Single Sign-On
9 12 (1.05%) Kibana
10 9 (0.79%) Kiali
11 6 (0.53%) SCCM
12 5 (0.44%) Progress Chef
13 4 (0.35%) Control-M
13 4 (0.35%) Kubeflow
13 4 (0.35%) SCOM
14 3 (0.26%) Foglight
14 3 (0.26%) HP ALM
14 3 (0.26%) PowerCLI
14 3 (0.26%) vCenter Server
15 2 (0.18%) logstash
Vendors
1 186 (16.33%) Microsoft
2 69 (6.06%) Splunk
3 58 (5.09%) Oracle
4 56 (4.92%) Google
5 47 (4.13%) Databricks
6 46 (4.04%) SAP
7 37 (3.25%) IBM
8 29 (2.55%) ServiceNow
9 24 (2.11%) BiZZdesign
9 24 (2.11%) VMware
10 23 (2.02%) Cisco
11 19 (1.67%) Informatica
12 18 (1.58%) Salesforce
13 17 (1.49%) Palo Alto
14 15 (1.32%) Okta
15 14 (1.23%) Foundry
16 12 (1.05%) CheckPoint
16 12 (1.05%) MuleSoft
16 12 (1.05%) OpenAI
16 12 (1.05%) Software AG