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 6 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 101 67 73
Rank change year-on-year -34 +6 +49
Contract jobs citing Computer Science 1,099 995 1,238
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.43% 3.40% 2.82%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.85% 3.76% 3.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 670 579 768
10th Percentile £177 £261 £315
25th Percentile £325 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £672 £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 82 31 89
10th Percentile £26.75 £27.00 £22.33
25th Percentile £56.31 £30.78 £41.25
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 £65.00
90th Percentile - £82.25 £74.00
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 38,628 26,479 37,892
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.41% 90.55% 86.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,477 17,189 24,572
10th Percentile £314 £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 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £487 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.10% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,295 988 2,354
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.00 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.00 £19.99 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.91 £31.58 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.71% -2.83% -13.33%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.73 £70.27
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.55 £30.00 £32.12
% change year-on-year +18.50% -6.59% -13.90%

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 6 April 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 6 April 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 6 April 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 -35 965 £500 -4.76% 826
UK excluding London -38 544 £400 -20.00% 618
London -38 447 £550 -8.33% 330
Work from Home -32 256 £525 -6.67% 306
South East -11 173 £400 -20.00% 227
North of England -20 152 £394 -27.22% 115
Midlands -54 83 £475 +90.00% 84
Yorkshire -5 80 £525 +26.81% 35
North West -20 69 £352 -40.39% 59
West Midlands -46 65 £475 +143.59% 51
South West -28 49 £477 -9.14% 56
East of England -29 42 £340 -47.69% 91
Scotland 0 36 £610 +19.02% 34
East Midlands -31 18 £339 -4.92% 33
Wales -21 15 £160 -44.35% 19
Northern Ireland -4 5 £369 -38.54% 9
North East -16 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 53 (4.82%) Confluence
2 42 (3.82%) Apache Spark
3 25 (2.27%) SharePoint
4 18 (1.64%) Apache
5 16 (1.46%) Apache Airflow
5 16 (1.46%) Microsoft Exchange
6 6 (0.55%) Jupyter
7 4 (0.36%) OpenStack
7 4 (0.36%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 3 (0.27%) Adobe Experience Manager
8 3 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
8 3 (0.27%) SAS
9 2 (0.18%) CMS
9 2 (0.18%) IIS
9 2 (0.18%) nginx
9 2 (0.18%) Oracle Workflow
9 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
10 1 (0.091%) Apache Solr
10 1 (0.091%) Oracle Service Bus
10 1 (0.091%) Tomcat
Applications
1 32 (2.91%) Microsoft Office
2 18 (1.64%) Microsoft Excel
3 16 (1.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 12 (1.09%) MS Visio
5 6 (0.55%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.36%) Simulink
7 3 (0.27%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.18%) Trello
9 1 (0.091%) Navisworks
9 1 (0.091%) Revit
Business Applications
1 23 (2.09%) SAP S/4HANA
2 9 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.45%) Aladdin
3 5 (0.45%) Payment Gateway
4 4 (0.36%) SAP ERP
5 3 (0.27%) Oracle Payables
5 3 (0.27%) Oracle Receivables
6 2 (0.18%) NetSuite
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%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.091%) FLEXCUBE
7 1 (0.091%) Maximo
7 1 (0.091%) Misys Equation
7 1 (0.091%) SAP PM
7 1 (0.091%) SAP SM
7 1 (0.091%) Teamcenter
7 1 (0.091%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 313 (28.48%) Azure
2 201 (18.29%) AWS
3 107 (9.74%) GCP
4 69 (6.28%) Power Platform
5 60 (5.46%) GitHub
6 53 (4.82%) SaaS
7 51 (4.64%) Microsoft 365
8 44 (4.00%) Azure DevOps
9 37 (3.37%) Entra ID
9 37 (3.37%) Serverless
10 25 (2.27%) Snowflake
11 24 (2.18%) GitHub Actions
12 23 (2.09%) IaaS
13 21 (1.91%) AWS CloudFormation
14 20 (1.82%) Azure Data Factory
15 18 (1.64%) Azure Machine Learning
15 18 (1.64%) Cloud Computing
15 18 (1.64%) Power Automate
15 18 (1.64%) PowerApps
16 16 (1.46%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 50 (4.55%) Firewall
2 32 (2.91%) DNS
3 29 (2.64%) TCP/IP
4 18 (1.64%) BGP
4 18 (1.64%) Network Security
4 18 (1.64%) WAN
5 15 (1.36%) HTTP
5 15 (1.36%) LAN
6 13 (1.18%) VLAN
7 12 (1.09%) OSPF
8 11 (1.00%) VPN
8 11 (1.00%) Wireless
9 10 (0.91%) IPv4
10 9 (0.82%) Cisco IOS
10 9 (0.82%) HTTPS
11 8 (0.73%) DHCP
11 8 (0.73%) Skype
11 8 (0.73%) SSH
12 7 (0.64%) SAN
12 7 (0.64%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 70 (6.37%) PostgreSQL
2 53 (4.82%) Relational Database
3 50 (4.55%) Power BI
4 45 (4.09%) SQL Server
5 43 (3.91%) Data Warehouse
5 43 (3.91%) NoSQL
6 38 (3.46%) Big Data
7 34 (3.09%) MySQL
8 24 (2.18%) Tableau
9 22 (2.00%) Hadoop
10 20 (1.82%) Metadata
10 20 (1.82%) MongoDB
11 16 (1.46%) Data Lake
12 15 (1.36%) Elasticsearch
13 12 (1.09%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 11 (1.00%) Amazon RDS
14 11 (1.00%) Redis
15 10 (0.91%) Snowflake Schema
16 8 (0.73%) Star Schema
17 7 (0.64%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 88 (8.01%) Git
2 76 (6.92%) JIRA
3 57 (5.19%) Jenkins
4 46 (4.19%) GitLab
5 28 (2.55%) Rational DOORS
6 13 (1.18%) Selenium
7 12 (1.09%) MLflow
7 12 (1.09%) Postman
8 9 (0.82%) Jaeger
9 8 (0.73%) Gradle
10 7 (0.64%) Bitbucket
10 7 (0.64%) CircleCI
10 7 (0.64%) Cypress.io
10 7 (0.64%) JUnit
11 6 (0.55%) Liquibase
12 5 (0.45%) Artifactory
12 5 (0.45%) Maven
12 5 (0.45%) PyCharm
12 5 (0.45%) Visual Studio
13 4 (0.36%) Subversion
General
1 469 (42.68%) Social Skills
2 277 (25.20%) Finance
3 242 (22.02%) Analytical Skills
4 108 (9.83%) Banking
5 71 (6.46%) Public Sector
6 51 (4.64%) Aerospace
7 47 (4.28%) Documentation Skills
8 46 (4.19%) Marketing
9 36 (3.28%) Legal
10 35 (3.18%) Influencing Skills
10 35 (3.18%) Presentation Skills
10 35 (3.18%) Telecoms
11 28 (2.55%) Front Office
12 27 (2.46%) Electronics
12 27 (2.46%) Financial Institution
13 24 (2.18%) Manufacturing
14 23 (2.09%) Investment Banking
14 23 (2.09%) Organisational Skills
15 22 (2.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 18 (1.64%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 142 (12.92%) Developer
2 109 (9.92%) Architect
3 96 (8.74%) Lead
4 87 (7.92%) Analyst
5 80 (7.28%) Senior
6 42 (3.82%) Software Engineer
7 39 (3.55%) Solutions Architect
8 38 (3.46%) Data Scientist
8 38 (3.46%) Delivery Manager
9 35 (3.18%) Product Manager
10 31 (2.82%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 29 (2.64%) Python Developer
12 28 (2.55%) Product Delivery Manager
12 28 (2.55%) Technical Support
13 26 (2.37%) Data Engineer
14 25 (2.27%) Business Analyst
14 25 (2.27%) Consultant
15 23 (2.09%) Java Developer
16 22 (2.00%) Systems Delivery Manager
16 22 (2.00%) Systems Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 99 (9.01%) REST
2 57 (5.19%) .NET
3 56 (5.10%) RESTful
4 50 (4.55%) React
5 44 (4.00%) Kafka
6 40 (3.64%) Middleware
7 37 (3.37%) PyTorch
8 34 (3.09%) Spring Boot
8 34 (3.09%) TensorFlow
9 33 (3.00%) Elastic Stack
10 32 (2.91%) JSON
11 31 (2.82%) XML
12 30 (2.73%) Spring
13 26 (2.37%) OAuth
13 26 (2.37%) SOAP
14 23 (2.09%) HTML
15 22 (2.00%) Pandas
16 21 (1.91%) LangChain
17 19 (1.73%) Node.js
18 17 (1.55%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 111 (10.10%) Management Information System
2 93 (8.46%) Algorithms
3 81 (7.37%) Cloud Native
3 81 (7.37%) Product Ownership
4 63 (5.73%) Data Structures
5 61 (5.55%) Onboarding
6 55 (5.00%) Distributed Systems
7 34 (3.09%) Virtual Team
8 31 (2.82%) Equities
9 25 (2.27%) Data Protection Act
10 23 (2.09%) AI Agents
10 23 (2.09%) Derivative
11 22 (2.00%) Enterprise Software
12 21 (1.91%) Data Centre
12 21 (1.91%) Distributed Computing
12 21 (1.91%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 20 (1.82%) Taxonomies
14 19 (1.73%) Analytical Mindset
15 18 (1.64%) Self-Motivation
16 17 (1.55%) Cyberattack
Operating Systems
1 147 (13.38%) Linux
2 120 (10.92%) Windows
3 43 (3.91%) Unix
4 24 (2.18%) Android
5 22 (2.00%) Mac OS
6 17 (1.55%) Windows Server
7 12 (1.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 11 (1.00%) Windows 10
9 10 (0.91%) Apple iOS
10 5 (0.45%) Ubuntu
10 5 (0.45%) VMS
11 4 (0.36%) Debian
12 3 (0.27%) Rocky
13 2 (0.18%) Robot Operating System
14 1 (0.091%) CentOS
14 1 (0.091%) Embedded Linux
14 1 (0.091%) Kali Linux
14 1 (0.091%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 350 (31.85%) Problem-Solving
2 303 (27.57%) Agile
3 253 (23.02%) AI
4 225 (20.47%) CI/CD
5 219 (19.93%) DevOps
6 189 (17.20%) Software Engineering
7 157 (14.29%) Continuous Improvement
8 138 (12.56%) Microservices
9 133 (12.10%) Machine Learning
10 131 (11.92%) Analytics
11 126 (11.46%) Cybersecurity
12 121 (11.01%) Stakeholder Management
13 118 (10.74%) Containerisation
14 115 (10.46%) Data Science
15 110 (10.01%) Data Modelling
16 109 (9.92%) Mathematics
17 102 (9.28%) Data Governance
18 99 (9.01%) Decision-Making
19 96 (8.74%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 92 (8.37%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 332 (30.21%) Python
2 208 (18.93%) SQL
3 136 (12.37%) Java
4 73 (6.64%) JavaScript
5 57 (5.19%) C#
6 55 (5.00%) PowerShell
7 44 (4.00%) TypeScript
8 41 (3.73%) Bash
9 38 (3.46%) C++
10 30 (2.73%) Go
11 22 (2.00%) R
12 16 (1.46%) Perl
13 14 (1.27%) Rust
14 12 (1.09%) Shell Script
15 11 (1.00%) Kotlin
16 8 (0.73%) C
16 8 (0.73%) Scala
17 7 (0.64%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 5 (0.45%) Bicep
18 5 (0.45%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 922 (83.89%) Degree
2 562 (51.14%) Computer Science Degree
3 200 (18.20%) Security Cleared
4 191 (17.38%) Master's Degree
5 115 (10.46%) SC Cleared
6 66 (6.01%) CISSP
7 51 (4.64%) PhD
8 43 (3.91%) CISM
9 38 (3.46%) Azure Certification
10 32 (2.91%) PMI Certification
11 29 (2.64%) AWS Certification
12 28 (2.55%) DV Cleared
12 28 (2.55%) Microsoft Certification
12 28 (2.55%) TOGAF Certification
13 27 (2.46%) DBS Check
13 27 (2.46%) PMP
14 26 (2.37%) CompTIA Security+
15 24 (2.18%) Cisco Certification
16 23 (2.09%) BPSS Clearance
17 18 (1.64%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 67 (6.10%) QA
2 52 (4.73%) Data Quality
3 49 (4.46%) NIST
4 47 (4.28%) GDPR
5 46 (4.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 20 (1.82%) PCI DSS
7 17 (1.55%) Accessibility
8 11 (1.00%) GRC
8 11 (1.00%) NCSC
8 11 (1.00%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 10 (0.91%) NIST 800
10 7 (0.64%) Actionable Recommendations
10 7 (0.64%) DO-254
10 7 (0.64%) PSD2
10 7 (0.64%) SLA
11 6 (0.55%) COBIT
12 5 (0.45%) Government Security Classifications
12 5 (0.45%) HIPAA
12 5 (0.45%) ISO 20022
12 5 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 20000
System Software
1 133 (12.10%) Docker
2 60 (5.46%) Active Directory
3 20 (1.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 13 (1.18%) Firmware
5 6 (0.55%) Hyper-V
5 6 (0.55%) VMware NSX
6 3 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.18%) BitLocker
7 2 (0.18%) Ceph
7 2 (0.18%) KVM
7 2 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.18%) vSphere
8 1 (0.091%) HDFS
8 1 (0.091%) PowerHA
8 1 (0.091%) Squid
8 1 (0.091%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 142 (12.92%) Kubernetes
2 86 (7.83%) Terraform
3 57 (5.19%) Ansible
4 46 (4.19%) Grafana
5 39 (3.55%) Prometheus
6 23 (2.09%) Microsoft Intune
7 14 (1.27%) Puppet
7 14 (1.27%) Single Sign-On
8 11 (1.00%) Kibana
9 9 (0.82%) Kiali
10 7 (0.64%) SCCM
11 5 (0.45%) Progress Chef
12 4 (0.36%) Control-M
12 4 (0.36%) Kubeflow
12 4 (0.36%) SCOM
13 3 (0.27%) Foglight
13 3 (0.27%) HP ALM
13 3 (0.27%) Jamf Pro
13 3 (0.27%) vCenter Server
14 2 (0.18%) logstash
Vendors
1 184 (16.74%) Microsoft
2 62 (5.64%) Splunk
3 58 (5.28%) Oracle
4 50 (4.55%) Google
5 47 (4.28%) Databricks
5 47 (4.28%) SAP
6 34 (3.09%) IBM
7 29 (2.64%) ServiceNow
8 24 (2.18%) VMware
9 22 (2.00%) Cisco
10 20 (1.82%) BiZZdesign
11 18 (1.64%) Salesforce
12 17 (1.55%) Informatica
13 16 (1.46%) Okta
13 16 (1.46%) Palo Alto
14 14 (1.27%) Foundry
15 13 (1.18%) CheckPoint
16 12 (1.09%) MuleSoft
16 12 (1.09%) Software AG
17 11 (1.00%) OpenAI