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

6 months to
9 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 71 73
Rank change year-on-year -22 +2 +53
Contract jobs citing Computer Science 1,134 971 1,243
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.69% 3.26% 2.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.12% 3.61% 3.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 703 568 774
10th Percentile £177 £305 £313
25th Percentile £313 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £495 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -5.71% -2.37% -8.86%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £661
90th Percentile £773 £823 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £400 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -20.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 70 27 85
10th Percentile £26.75 £26.73 £23.00
25th Percentile £33.50 £30.78 £42.50
Median hourly rate £68.25 £42.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +60.59% -22.73% +4.76%
75th Percentile £85.50 £62.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £88.00 £82.25 £74.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.44 £37.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +85.17% -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 36,399 26,862 38,734
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.19% 90.27% 86.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,113 17,118 25,178
10th Percentile £313 £306 £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 £612 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £743 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £491 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -1.80% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,154 913 2,346
10th Percentile £14.64 £15.52 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £29.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.77% - -7.14%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.52 £57.50
90th Percentile £74.26 £76.25 £71.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.77 £31.76 £31.50
% change year-on-year -18.86% +0.83% -10.00%

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 9 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 9 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 9 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 -22 1,000 £475 -9.95% 924
UK excluding London -15 586 £400 -20.00% 689
London -33 438 £553 -7.83% 223
Work from Home -20 268 £523 -7.11% 384
North of England +27 185 £371 -30.87% 136
South East +5 171 £400 -20.00% 228
Yorkshire +13 95 £525 +5.00% 57
North West +11 86 £330 -40.11% 62
Midlands -41 85 £475 +33.43% 102
South West -13 62 £500 -9.09% 79
West Midlands -39 62 £498 +155.13% 58
East of England -42 40 £475 -24.00% 84
Scotland -3 36 £610 +16.19% 47
East Midlands -23 23 £447 +25.56% 44
Wales -16 15 £160 -44.35% 26
North East -10 5 £207 -64.09% 19
Northern Ireland -5 4 £369 -34.44% 3

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 67 (5.91%) Confluence
2 41 (3.62%) Apache Spark
3 34 (3.00%) SharePoint
4 19 (1.68%) Microsoft Exchange
5 18 (1.59%) Apache
6 14 (1.23%) Apache Airflow
7 6 (0.53%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.44%) Smallworld
9 4 (0.35%) GeoServer
9 4 (0.35%) IIS
9 4 (0.35%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 4 (0.35%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 3 (0.26%) Ethereum
10 3 (0.26%) Hyperledger
10 3 (0.26%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.18%) CMS
11 2 (0.18%) SAS
11 2 (0.18%) Skype for Business
11 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
Applications
1 35 (3.09%) Microsoft Office
2 19 (1.68%) Microsoft Excel
3 16 (1.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 9 (0.79%) MS Visio
5 5 (0.44%) Chatbot
5 5 (0.44%) Simulink
6 2 (0.18%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.18%) Trello
7 1 (0.088%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 21 (1.85%) SAP S/4HANA
2 8 (0.71%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.44%) Payment Gateway
4 4 (0.35%) Aladdin
4 4 (0.35%) SAP ERP
5 3 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.18%) Oracle ERP
6 2 (0.18%) Oracle General Ledger
6 2 (0.18%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 2 (0.18%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
6 2 (0.18%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.18%) SAP FS
6 2 (0.18%) Workday HCM
7 1 (0.088%) FLEXCUBE
7 1 (0.088%) IBM Planning Analytics
7 1 (0.088%) Maximo
7 1 (0.088%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.088%) SAP CO
7 1 (0.088%) SAP PM
7 1 (0.088%) SAP SM
Cloud Services
1 315 (27.78%) Azure
2 204 (17.99%) AWS
3 117 (10.32%) GCP
4 69 (6.08%) GitHub
5 65 (5.73%) Power Platform
6 53 (4.67%) Microsoft 365
7 47 (4.14%) SaaS
8 45 (3.97%) Azure DevOps
8 45 (3.97%) Serverless
9 40 (3.53%) Entra ID
10 30 (2.65%) GitHub Actions
11 22 (1.94%) IaaS
12 21 (1.85%) Azure Data Factory
12 21 (1.85%) Snowflake
13 17 (1.50%) AWS CloudFormation
13 17 (1.50%) Azure Machine Learning
13 17 (1.50%) Cloud Computing
14 15 (1.32%) Amazon S3
14 15 (1.32%) Power Automate
14 15 (1.32%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 49 (4.32%) Firewall
2 32 (2.82%) DNS
3 27 (2.38%) TCP/IP
4 23 (2.03%) Network Security
5 17 (1.50%) HTTP
6 15 (1.32%) WAN
7 14 (1.23%) LAN
8 13 (1.15%) BGP
8 13 (1.15%) SSH
8 13 (1.15%) VLAN
8 13 (1.15%) Wireless
9 11 (0.97%) DHCP
10 10 (0.88%) Skype
10 10 (0.88%) VPN
11 9 (0.79%) Cisco IOS
11 9 (0.79%) OSPF
12 8 (0.71%) IPv4
12 8 (0.71%) VoIP
13 7 (0.62%) HTTPS
13 7 (0.62%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 81 (7.14%) PostgreSQL
2 53 (4.67%) NoSQL
3 48 (4.23%) Power BI
4 45 (3.97%) Relational Database
5 44 (3.88%) Data Warehouse
6 43 (3.79%) SQL Server
7 36 (3.17%) Big Data
7 36 (3.17%) MySQL
8 24 (2.12%) Tableau
9 21 (1.85%) Hadoop
10 18 (1.59%) Elasticsearch
10 18 (1.59%) Metadata
10 18 (1.59%) MongoDB
11 16 (1.41%) Data Lake
12 11 (0.97%) Redis
13 10 (0.88%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 9 (0.79%) Amazon RDS
14 9 (0.79%) Snowflake Schema
15 8 (0.71%) RDBMS
16 7 (0.62%) Tick Data
Development Applications
1 94 (8.29%) Git
2 89 (7.85%) JIRA
3 64 (5.64%) Jenkins
4 57 (5.03%) GitLab
5 20 (1.76%) Rational DOORS
6 13 (1.15%) Postman
7 12 (1.06%) Liquibase
8 11 (0.97%) Selenium
9 10 (0.88%) MLflow
10 9 (0.79%) Jaeger
11 8 (0.71%) Bitbucket
11 8 (0.71%) CircleCI
11 8 (0.71%) Gradle
12 7 (0.62%) JUnit
13 6 (0.53%) Cypress.io
14 5 (0.44%) Cucumber
14 5 (0.44%) PyCharm
14 5 (0.44%) Visual Studio
15 4 (0.35%) Artifactory
15 4 (0.35%) Hardhat
General
1 515 (45.41%) Social Skills
2 289 (25.49%) Finance
3 243 (21.43%) Analytical Skills
4 116 (10.23%) Banking
5 77 (6.79%) Public Sector
6 44 (3.88%) Marketing
7 42 (3.70%) Documentation Skills
8 37 (3.26%) Influencing Skills
9 36 (3.17%) Legal
10 35 (3.09%) Aerospace
11 34 (3.00%) Presentation Skills
12 33 (2.91%) Financial Institution
12 33 (2.91%) Organisational Skills
13 28 (2.47%) Front Office
14 26 (2.29%) Electronics
14 26 (2.29%) Telecoms
15 23 (2.03%) Manufacturing
16 21 (1.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 21 (1.85%) Investment Banking
17 16 (1.41%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 167 (14.73%) Developer
2 112 (9.88%) Architect
3 91 (8.02%) Lead
4 86 (7.58%) Analyst
5 85 (7.50%) Senior
6 46 (4.06%) Software Engineer
7 43 (3.79%) Solutions Architect
8 38 (3.35%) Data Scientist
9 31 (2.73%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 31 (2.73%) Delivery Manager
10 28 (2.47%) Python Developer
10 28 (2.47%) Technical Support
11 26 (2.29%) Business Analyst
11 26 (2.29%) Product Manager
12 24 (2.12%) Consultant
13 23 (2.03%) Java Developer
14 22 (1.94%) Cloud Engineer
15 21 (1.85%) Security Engineer
15 21 (1.85%) Site Reliability Engineer
16 20 (1.76%) Security Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 103 (9.08%) REST
2 61 (5.38%) RESTful
3 58 (5.11%) React
4 51 (4.50%) .NET
5 45 (3.97%) Kafka
6 40 (3.53%) Middleware
7 37 (3.26%) Elastic Stack
8 36 (3.17%) PyTorch
9 35 (3.09%) TensorFlow
10 34 (3.00%) HTML
10 34 (3.00%) OAuth
11 32 (2.82%) JSON
12 31 (2.73%) Spring
12 31 (2.73%) XML
13 29 (2.56%) Node.js
13 29 (2.56%) Spring Boot
14 27 (2.38%) CSS
14 27 (2.38%) SOAP
15 24 (2.12%) LangChain
16 22 (1.94%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 126 (11.11%) Management Information System
2 91 (8.02%) Cloud Native
3 89 (7.85%) Algorithms
4 73 (6.44%) Product Ownership
5 59 (5.20%) Data Structures
6 56 (4.94%) Distributed Systems
7 50 (4.41%) Onboarding
8 33 (2.91%) Equities
9 30 (2.65%) Virtual Team
10 28 (2.47%) Data Protection Act
10 28 (2.47%) Security Posture
11 24 (2.12%) AI Agents
11 24 (2.12%) Derivative
12 23 (2.03%) Enterprise Software
13 22 (1.94%) Analytical Mindset
13 22 (1.94%) Distributed Computing
14 21 (1.85%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 21 (1.85%) Public Cloud
15 20 (1.76%) Data Centre
16 18 (1.59%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 153 (13.49%) Linux
2 128 (11.29%) Windows
3 58 (5.11%) Unix
4 25 (2.20%) Android
5 21 (1.85%) Windows Server
6 18 (1.59%) Mac OS
7 13 (1.15%) Apple iOS
8 10 (0.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 7 (0.62%) Windows 10
10 5 (0.44%) VMS
11 3 (0.26%) Debian
11 3 (0.26%) Ubuntu
12 2 (0.18%) Robot Operating System
12 2 (0.18%) Rocky
13 1 (0.088%) Embedded Linux
13 1 (0.088%) Kali Linux
13 1 (0.088%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 371 (32.72%) Problem-Solving
2 313 (27.60%) Agile
3 238 (20.99%) AI
4 237 (20.90%) DevOps
5 229 (20.19%) CI/CD
6 185 (16.31%) Software Engineering
7 155 (13.67%) Microservices
8 138 (12.17%) Continuous Improvement
9 136 (11.99%) Analytics
9 136 (11.99%) Machine Learning
10 134 (11.82%) Containerisation
11 131 (11.55%) Cybersecurity
12 121 (10.67%) Stakeholder Management
13 115 (10.14%) Data Science
14 111 (9.79%) Data Modelling
15 107 (9.44%) Decision-Making
15 107 (9.44%) Mathematics
16 103 (9.08%) Data Governance
17 97 (8.55%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 90 (7.94%) ITIL
Programming Languages
1 348 (30.69%) Python
2 200 (17.64%) SQL
3 137 (12.08%) Java
4 92 (8.11%) JavaScript
5 63 (5.56%) PowerShell
6 58 (5.11%) TypeScript
7 48 (4.23%) C#
8 43 (3.79%) Go
9 41 (3.62%) Bash
10 37 (3.26%) C++
11 19 (1.68%) Perl
11 19 (1.68%) R
12 16 (1.41%) Shell Script
13 14 (1.23%) Rust
14 11 (0.97%) Kotlin
15 8 (0.71%) Bicep
16 7 (0.62%) Ruby
16 7 (0.62%) Scala
17 6 (0.53%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 6 (0.53%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 937 (82.63%) Degree
2 589 (51.94%) Computer Science Degree
3 223 (19.66%) Master's Degree
4 192 (16.93%) Security Cleared
5 121 (10.67%) SC Cleared
6 74 (6.53%) CISSP
7 55 (4.85%) PhD
8 53 (4.67%) CISM
9 51 (4.50%) DBS Check
10 40 (3.53%) Azure Certification
11 36 (3.17%) TOGAF Certification
12 33 (2.91%) BPSS Clearance
13 31 (2.73%) Microsoft Certification
14 30 (2.65%) PMI Certification
15 29 (2.56%) Cisco Certification
16 27 (2.38%) DV Cleared
17 25 (2.20%) AWS Certification
17 25 (2.20%) PMP
18 22 (1.94%) CompTIA Security+
19 18 (1.59%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 70 (6.17%) QA
2 56 (4.94%) GDPR
3 53 (4.67%) Data Quality
4 50 (4.41%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 40 (3.53%) NIST
6 22 (1.94%) PCI DSS
7 18 (1.59%) GRC
8 16 (1.41%) Accessibility
9 10 (0.88%) Def Stans
9 10 (0.88%) NCSC
10 9 (0.79%) HIPAA
11 8 (0.71%) Actionable Recommendations
11 8 (0.71%) DO-254
11 8 (0.71%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 6 (0.53%) Cyber Essentials
12 6 (0.53%) NIST 800
12 6 (0.53%) PSD2
13 5 (0.44%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 4 (0.35%) COBIT
14 4 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 20000
System Software
1 155 (13.67%) Docker
2 60 (5.29%) Active Directory
3 20 (1.76%) VMware Infrastructure
4 13 (1.15%) Firmware
5 6 (0.53%) VMware NSX
6 3 (0.26%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.26%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.18%) HDFS
7 2 (0.18%) KVM
7 2 (0.18%) Microsoft Virtual Server
7 2 (0.18%) Virtual Servers
7 2 (0.18%) vSphere
8 1 (0.088%) BitLocker
8 1 (0.088%) PowerHA
8 1 (0.088%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 162 (14.29%) Kubernetes
2 90 (7.94%) Terraform
3 59 (5.20%) Ansible
4 47 (4.14%) Grafana
5 38 (3.35%) Prometheus
6 21 (1.85%) Microsoft Intune
7 17 (1.50%) Puppet
8 14 (1.23%) Kibana
8 14 (1.23%) Single Sign-On
9 9 (0.79%) Kiali
10 8 (0.71%) Argo
10 8 (0.71%) SCCM
11 5 (0.44%) Progress Chef
12 4 (0.35%) SCOM
13 3 (0.26%) Kubeflow
13 3 (0.26%) PowerCLI
13 3 (0.26%) vCenter Server
13 3 (0.26%) WSUS
14 2 (0.18%) Knative
14 2 (0.18%) vRealize Orchestrator
Vendors
1 179 (15.78%) Microsoft
2 73 (6.44%) Splunk
3 60 (5.29%) Oracle
4 57 (5.03%) Google
5 48 (4.23%) SAP
6 45 (3.97%) Databricks
7 34 (3.00%) IBM
8 26 (2.29%) ServiceNow
9 25 (2.20%) BiZZdesign
10 24 (2.12%) Cisco
11 22 (1.94%) Informatica
11 22 (1.94%) VMware
12 21 (1.85%) Salesforce
13 17 (1.50%) Palo Alto
13 17 (1.50%) Red Hat
14 13 (1.15%) CheckPoint
14 13 (1.15%) Okta
15 12 (1.06%) Foundry
15 12 (1.06%) OpenAI
15 12 (1.06%) Software AG