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 26 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 76 78
Rank change year-on-year -10 +2 +54
Contract jobs citing Computer Science 1,105 970 1,199
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.93% 3.10% 2.71%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.35% 3.48% 3.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 725 562 781
10th Percentile £175 £351 £315
25th Percentile £313 £450 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -13.64% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £663
90th Percentile £775 £833 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £400 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -20.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 36 21 62
10th Percentile £26.38 £30.78 £26.18
25th Percentile £26.75 £33.75 £41.56
Median hourly rate £33.50 £43.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.09% -21.82% +4.76%
75th Percentile £59.06 £53.75 £66.83
90th Percentile £74.38 £71.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £33.50 £37.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year -10.67% -31.82% +4.76%

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 32,948 27,851 38,703
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.34% 89.03% 87.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,870 16,883 25,489
10th Percentile £305 £306 £300
25th Percentile £408 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £643
90th Percentile £723 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,006 881 1,954
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.69
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £17.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £36.02
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -9.78% +12.89%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.50 £62.47
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.71 £30.45 £37.50
% change year-on-year -18.85% -18.80% +41.24%

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 26 January 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 26 January 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 26 January 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 -10 981 £475 -13.64% 1,404
UK excluding London +9 549 £400 -20.00% 1,252
London -30 457 £536 -6.87% 325
Work from Home -14 271 £466 -19.00% 717
North of England +49 191 £375 -28.57% 196
South East +20 134 £321 -35.75% 459
Yorkshire +34 103 £475 -7.32% 68
Midlands -23 96 £500 +21.21% 140
North West +25 86 £350 -33.33% 87
West Midlands -22 67 £525 +5.00% 62
South West +8 56 £520 -20.91% 153
Scotland -3 39 £588 +23.79% 59
East of England -31 32 £455 -12.33% 194
East Midlands -15 29 £447 +25.56% 75
Wales -10 13 £160 -44.83% 59
Northern Ireland -7 4 - - 29
North East -16 3 £216 -57.95% 43

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 65 (5.88%) Confluence
2 40 (3.62%) SharePoint
3 31 (2.81%) Apache Spark
4 20 (1.81%) Microsoft Exchange
5 12 (1.09%) Apache Airflow
6 11 (1.00%) Apache
7 7 (0.63%) Jupyter
7 7 (0.63%) nginx
8 5 (0.45%) Skype for Business
8 5 (0.45%) Smallworld
9 4 (0.36%) GeoServer
9 4 (0.36%) IIS
9 4 (0.36%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 4 (0.36%) SAS
10 3 (0.27%) Ethereum
10 3 (0.27%) Hyperledger
10 3 (0.27%) Luigi
11 2 (0.18%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 2 (0.18%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
Applications
1 41 (3.71%) Microsoft Office
2 24 (2.17%) Microsoft Excel
3 12 (1.09%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 10 (0.90%) MS Visio
5 6 (0.54%) Simulink
6 5 (0.45%) Chatbot
7 1 (0.090%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.090%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 22 (1.99%) SAP S/4HANA
2 11 (1.00%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.36%) SAP ERP
4 3 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
4 3 (0.27%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.18%) Maximo
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle ERP
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle General Ledger
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
5 2 (0.18%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.18%) SAP CX
5 2 (0.18%) SAP FS
5 2 (0.18%) SAP Travel Management
5 2 (0.18%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.090%) Aladdin
6 1 (0.090%) ION Anvil
6 1 (0.090%) Oracle HRMS
6 1 (0.090%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 283 (25.61%) Azure
2 200 (18.10%) AWS
3 117 (10.59%) GCP
4 72 (6.52%) GitHub
5 71 (6.43%) Power Platform
6 59 (5.34%) Serverless
7 55 (4.98%) Microsoft 365
8 44 (3.98%) SaaS
9 42 (3.80%) Azure DevOps
10 33 (2.99%) GitHub Actions
11 28 (2.53%) Entra ID
12 21 (1.90%) IaaS
13 20 (1.81%) Azure Data Factory
13 20 (1.81%) Cloud Computing
13 20 (1.81%) Power Automate
13 20 (1.81%) PowerApps
14 17 (1.54%) Azure Machine Learning
14 17 (1.54%) Snowflake
15 16 (1.45%) AWS Lambda
16 15 (1.36%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 45 (4.07%) Firewall
2 34 (3.08%) DNS
3 24 (2.17%) Network Security
4 21 (1.90%) HTTP
5 20 (1.81%) TCP/IP
6 14 (1.27%) DHCP
6 14 (1.27%) SSH
7 13 (1.18%) Skype
8 12 (1.09%) Wireless
9 11 (1.00%) BGP
9 11 (1.00%) LAN
9 11 (1.00%) WAN
10 10 (0.90%) VoIP
10 10 (0.90%) VPN
11 9 (0.81%) Cisco IOS
11 9 (0.81%) Internet
11 9 (0.81%) VLAN
12 8 (0.72%) OSPF
13 7 (0.63%) IPv4
13 7 (0.63%) Unified Communications
Database & Business Intelligence
1 63 (5.70%) PostgreSQL
2 60 (5.43%) NoSQL
3 54 (4.89%) Relational Database
4 51 (4.62%) Power BI
5 42 (3.80%) Data Warehouse
6 37 (3.35%) MySQL
6 37 (3.35%) SQL Server
7 29 (2.62%) Big Data
8 26 (2.35%) Tableau
9 19 (1.72%) Elasticsearch
10 13 (1.18%) MongoDB
11 12 (1.09%) Metadata
12 11 (1.00%) Hadoop
12 11 (1.00%) Redis
13 9 (0.81%) Data Lake
14 8 (0.72%) Apache Cassandra
14 8 (0.72%) RDBMS
14 8 (0.72%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 7 (0.63%) Amazon RDS
15 7 (0.63%) OLAP
Development Applications
1 95 (8.60%) JIRA
2 87 (7.87%) Git
3 71 (6.43%) Jenkins
4 60 (5.43%) GitLab
5 22 (1.99%) Liquibase
6 18 (1.63%) Postman
7 13 (1.18%) Selenium
8 10 (0.90%) JUnit
9 9 (0.81%) CircleCI
10 8 (0.72%) Bitbucket
10 8 (0.72%) Jaeger
10 8 (0.72%) MLflow
10 8 (0.72%) Visual Studio
11 7 (0.63%) Cypress.io
12 6 (0.54%) Appium
12 6 (0.54%) Artifactory
12 6 (0.54%) SonarQube
12 6 (0.54%) XCUITest
13 5 (0.45%) Charles Proxy
13 5 (0.45%) PyCharm
General
1 512 (46.33%) Social Skills
2 287 (25.97%) Finance
3 258 (23.35%) Analytical Skills
4 112 (10.14%) Banking
5 71 (6.43%) Public Sector
6 40 (3.62%) Financial Institution
7 39 (3.53%) Marketing
8 35 (3.17%) Documentation Skills
8 35 (3.17%) Organisational Skills
9 34 (3.08%) Legal
10 32 (2.90%) Telecoms
11 31 (2.81%) Presentation Skills
12 29 (2.62%) Front Office
13 28 (2.53%) Influencing Skills
14 26 (2.35%) Electronics
15 23 (2.08%) Investment Banking
15 23 (2.08%) Manufacturing
16 14 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 14 (1.27%) Military
17 12 (1.09%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 197 (17.83%) Developer
2 97 (8.78%) Analyst
3 89 (8.05%) Architect
4 81 (7.33%) Lead
5 80 (7.24%) Senior
6 52 (4.71%) Software Engineer
7 40 (3.62%) Solutions Architect
8 30 (2.71%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 29 (2.62%) Technical Support
10 28 (2.53%) Data Scientist
11 27 (2.44%) Python Developer
12 26 (2.35%) IT Support
13 25 (2.26%) Senior Developer
14 24 (2.17%) Business Analyst
15 23 (2.08%) Consultant
15 23 (2.08%) Site Reliability Engineer
16 22 (1.99%) Site Engineer
17 21 (1.90%) Data Engineer
17 21 (1.90%) Java Developer
18 20 (1.81%) Machine Learning Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 112 (10.14%) REST
2 76 (6.88%) RESTful
3 57 (5.16%) .NET
4 50 (4.52%) HTML
5 46 (4.16%) Elastic Stack
6 43 (3.89%) React
7 40 (3.62%) OAuth
8 39 (3.53%) JSON
9 37 (3.35%) Middleware
10 35 (3.17%) XML
11 34 (3.08%) CSS
12 33 (2.99%) SOAP
13 32 (2.90%) Kafka
14 30 (2.71%) PyTorch
14 30 (2.71%) TensorFlow
15 29 (2.62%) Node.js
16 27 (2.44%) LangChain
17 22 (1.99%) Spring
18 20 (1.81%) Spring Boot
19 19 (1.72%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 127 (11.49%) Management Information System
2 90 (8.14%) Cloud Native
3 82 (7.42%) Algorithms
4 52 (4.71%) Distributed Systems
5 48 (4.34%) Product Ownership
6 45 (4.07%) Data Structures
7 31 (2.81%) Data Protection Act
8 30 (2.71%) Onboarding
8 30 (2.71%) Public Cloud
9 28 (2.53%) Equities
10 26 (2.35%) Security Posture
11 23 (2.08%) Derivative
12 22 (1.99%) Mobile App
12 22 (1.99%) Virtual Team
13 21 (1.90%) Enterprise Software
14 20 (1.81%) AI Agents
14 20 (1.81%) Data Centre
15 19 (1.72%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 18 (1.63%) Analytical Mindset
16 18 (1.63%) Distributed Computing
Operating Systems
1 165 (14.93%) Linux
2 125 (11.31%) Windows
3 64 (5.79%) Unix
4 28 (2.53%) Android
5 22 (1.99%) Windows Server
6 20 (1.81%) Mac OS
7 19 (1.72%) Apple iOS
8 10 (0.90%) Windows 10
9 6 (0.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
10 3 (0.27%) VMS
11 2 (0.18%) Debian
11 2 (0.18%) Robot Operating System
11 2 (0.18%) Ubuntu
12 1 (0.090%) Kali Linux
12 1 (0.090%) Rocky
12 1 (0.090%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 378 (34.21%) Problem-Solving
2 304 (27.51%) Agile
3 238 (21.54%) DevOps
4 218 (19.73%) CI/CD
5 199 (18.01%) AI
6 184 (16.65%) Software Engineering
7 148 (13.39%) Microservices
8 140 (12.67%) Containerisation
9 130 (11.76%) Cybersecurity
10 117 (10.59%) Machine Learning
11 116 (10.50%) Analytics
12 114 (10.32%) Stakeholder Management
13 109 (9.86%) Continuous Improvement
14 108 (9.77%) Data Modelling
15 103 (9.32%) Data Science
16 99 (8.96%) Mathematics
17 91 (8.24%) Decision-Making
18 84 (7.60%) ITIL
19 83 (7.51%) Change Management
19 83 (7.51%) Risk Management
Programming Languages
1 360 (32.58%) Python
2 196 (17.74%) SQL
3 146 (13.21%) Java
4 108 (9.77%) JavaScript
5 60 (5.43%) PowerShell
6 59 (5.34%) TypeScript
7 53 (4.80%) C#
8 51 (4.62%) Go
9 49 (4.43%) Bash
10 46 (4.16%) C++
11 24 (2.17%) Perl
12 17 (1.54%) R
13 16 (1.45%) Kotlin
14 13 (1.18%) Rust
14 13 (1.18%) Shell Script
15 11 (1.00%) Ruby
16 10 (0.90%) MATLAB
17 9 (0.81%) C
17 9 (0.81%) Swift
18 8 (0.72%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 912 (82.53%) Degree
2 611 (55.29%) Computer Science Degree
3 223 (20.18%) Master's Degree
4 136 (12.31%) Security Cleared
5 98 (8.87%) SC Cleared
6 71 (6.43%) CISSP
7 50 (4.52%) DBS Check
7 50 (4.52%) PhD
8 49 (4.43%) CISM
9 37 (3.35%) Azure Certification
10 33 (2.99%) Microsoft Certification
11 31 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
12 30 (2.71%) Cisco Certification
12 30 (2.71%) TOGAF Certification
13 28 (2.53%) AWS Certification
14 27 (2.44%) PMI Certification
15 25 (2.26%) DV Cleared
16 20 (1.81%) CompTIA Security+
16 20 (1.81%) PMP
17 19 (1.72%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 70 (6.33%) QA
2 59 (5.34%) GDPR
3 47 (4.25%) Data Quality
4 43 (3.89%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 33 (2.99%) NIST
6 18 (1.63%) PCI DSS
7 17 (1.54%) GRC
8 15 (1.36%) Accessibility
9 11 (1.00%) Def Stans
10 9 (0.81%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 8 (0.72%) HIPAA
12 7 (0.63%) Cyber Essentials
13 6 (0.54%) DO-254
13 6 (0.54%) PSD2
13 6 (0.54%) SLA
14 4 (0.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
15 3 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 3 (0.27%) ISO 19650
15 3 (0.27%) NCSC
15 3 (0.27%) PMO
System Software
1 163 (14.75%) Docker
2 53 (4.80%) Active Directory
3 23 (2.08%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.90%) Firmware
5 6 (0.54%) VMware NSX
6 5 (0.45%) Microsoft Virtual Server
6 5 (0.45%) Virtual Servers
7 4 (0.36%) Hyper-V
8 2 (0.18%) KVM
8 2 (0.18%) Virtual Machines
8 2 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
9 1 (0.090%) BitLocker
9 1 (0.090%) HDFS
9 1 (0.090%) PowerHA
9 1 (0.090%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 156 (14.12%) Kubernetes
2 94 (8.51%) Terraform
3 67 (6.06%) Ansible
4 53 (4.80%) Grafana
5 41 (3.71%) Prometheus
6 22 (1.99%) Puppet
7 15 (1.36%) Kibana
7 15 (1.36%) Microsoft Intune
8 14 (1.27%) SCCM
9 12 (1.09%) Single Sign-On
10 8 (0.72%) Kiali
11 7 (0.63%) Argo
12 6 (0.54%) Progress Chef
12 6 (0.54%) WSUS
13 5 (0.45%) CSIRT
13 5 (0.45%) QRadar
14 4 (0.36%) SCOM
15 3 (0.27%) Control-M
16 2 (0.18%) FortiGate
16 2 (0.18%) Knative
Vendors
1 185 (16.74%) Microsoft
2 91 (8.24%) Splunk
3 60 (5.43%) Google
4 54 (4.89%) Oracle
5 51 (4.62%) SAP
6 36 (3.26%) Databricks
7 30 (2.71%) Cisco
8 29 (2.62%) Salesforce
9 26 (2.35%) VMware
10 25 (2.26%) ServiceNow
11 21 (1.90%) BiZZdesign
12 20 (1.81%) IBM
13 16 (1.45%) Informatica
14 14 (1.27%) OpenAI
14 14 (1.27%) Red Hat
15 13 (1.18%) MuleSoft
15 13 (1.18%) Palo Alto
16 11 (1.00%) Fortinet
16 11 (1.00%) Foundry
17 10 (0.90%) Atlassian