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

6 months to
13 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 86 71 79
Rank change year-on-year -15 +8 +55
Contract jobs citing Computer Science 1,097 991 1,174
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.00% 3.16% 2.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.41% 3.56% 3.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 712 575 782
10th Percentile £175 £350 £325
25th Percentile £312 £450 £441
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -13.64% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £650 £686 £675
90th Percentile £773 £845 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £400 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -20.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 35 23 42
10th Percentile £26.60 £28.36 £35.50
25th Percentile £33.50 £33.75 £49.44
Median hourly rate £35.00 £43.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.60% -25.22% +5.99%
75th Percentile £65.00 £53.75 £67.88
90th Percentile £86.98 £68.95 £77.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £33.50 £36.38 £57.50
% change year-on-year -7.90% -36.74% +9.52%

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 32,128 27,808 37,611
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.80% 88.68% 87.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,262 16,883 24,972
10th Percentile £304 £306 £304
25th Percentile £406 £413 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £720 £743 £740
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,977 884 1,589
10th Percentile £14.52 £15.62 £14.17
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.30 £18.16
Median hourly rate £25.15 £31.69 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -20.64% -21.75% +15.71%
75th Percentile £56.00 £61.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.39 £74.66 £76.62
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.00 £43.75
% change year-on-year -20.58% -31.43% +51.38%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 -9 978 £475 -17.39% 1,155
UK excluding London +6 545 £400 -20.00% 983
London -37 455 £553 -5.87% 292
Work from Home -12 276 £469 -18.43% 618
North of England +42 183 £360 -31.43% 158
South East +28 133 £302 -39.60% 377
Midlands -20 99 £492 -1.60% 103
Yorkshire +28 98 £475 -5.00% 59
North West +19 83 £350 -33.33% 69
West Midlands -21 67 £525 +2.44% 44
South West +7 59 £500 -24.81% 105
Scotland +2 40 £500 +5.26% 43
East Midlands -5 32 £447 +25.56% 57
East of England -37 32 £403 -26.82% 157
Wales -7 11 £160 -43.86% 40
Northern Ireland -6 4 - - 23
North East -10 3 £216 -57.95% 33

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 55 (5.01%) Confluence
2 40 (3.65%) SharePoint
3 30 (2.73%) Apache Spark
4 20 (1.82%) Microsoft Exchange
5 14 (1.28%) Apache
6 12 (1.09%) Apache Airflow
7 7 (0.64%) Jupyter
7 7 (0.64%) nginx
8 6 (0.55%) IIS
9 5 (0.46%) Skype for Business
9 5 (0.46%) Smallworld
10 4 (0.36%) GeoServer
10 4 (0.36%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 4 (0.36%) SAS
11 3 (0.27%) Ethereum
11 3 (0.27%) Hyperledger
11 3 (0.27%) Luigi
11 3 (0.27%) Tomcat
12 2 (0.18%) OpenStack
12 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
Applications
1 44 (4.01%) Microsoft Office
2 22 (2.01%) Microsoft Excel
3 8 (0.73%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 5 (0.46%) Chatbot
4 5 (0.46%) MS Visio
4 5 (0.46%) Simulink
5 1 (0.091%) Microsoft Project
5 1 (0.091%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 23 (2.10%) SAP S/4HANA
2 11 (1.00%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.36%) SAP ERP
4 3 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 3 (0.27%) Oracle General Ledger
4 3 (0.27%) Workday HCM
5 2 (0.18%) Maximo
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle EBS R12
5 2 (0.18%) Oracle ERP
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
5 2 (0.18%) SAP BPC
5 2 (0.18%) SAP CX
5 2 (0.18%) SAP FS
5 2 (0.18%) SAP PLM
5 2 (0.18%) SAP Travel Management
6 1 (0.091%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 265 (24.16%) Azure
2 204 (18.60%) AWS
3 113 (10.30%) GCP
4 69 (6.29%) GitHub
5 68 (6.20%) Power Platform
6 64 (5.83%) Serverless
7 46 (4.19%) Microsoft 365
8 41 (3.74%) SaaS
9 37 (3.37%) Azure DevOps
10 30 (2.73%) GitHub Actions
11 24 (2.19%) Entra ID
12 20 (1.82%) Azure Data Factory
12 20 (1.82%) Cloud Computing
13 19 (1.73%) Power Automate
13 19 (1.73%) PowerApps
13 19 (1.73%) Snowflake
14 18 (1.64%) AWS Lambda
14 18 (1.64%) IaaS
15 16 (1.46%) Azure Machine Learning
16 15 (1.37%) Azure Logic Apps
Communications & Networking
1 43 (3.92%) Firewall
2 33 (3.01%) DNS
3 21 (1.91%) HTTP
4 18 (1.64%) Network Security
5 17 (1.55%) DHCP
5 17 (1.55%) TCP/IP
6 15 (1.37%) SSH
6 15 (1.37%) Wireless
7 14 (1.28%) VPN
8 13 (1.19%) Skype
9 11 (1.00%) VoIP
10 9 (0.82%) BGP
10 9 (0.82%) Cisco IOS
10 9 (0.82%) Internet
11 8 (0.73%) LAN
11 8 (0.73%) WAN
12 7 (0.64%) IPv4
12 7 (0.64%) Unified Communications
12 7 (0.64%) VLAN
13 6 (0.55%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 63 (5.74%) NoSQL
2 61 (5.56%) PostgreSQL
3 59 (5.38%) Relational Database
4 48 (4.38%) Power BI
5 41 (3.74%) Data Warehouse
6 38 (3.46%) SQL Server
7 34 (3.10%) MySQL
8 29 (2.64%) Big Data
9 26 (2.37%) Tableau
10 16 (1.46%) Elasticsearch
11 14 (1.28%) MongoDB
12 10 (0.91%) Hadoop
12 10 (0.91%) RDBMS
12 10 (0.91%) Redis
13 9 (0.82%) Metadata
14 8 (0.73%) Amazon RDS
14 8 (0.73%) Apache Cassandra
14 8 (0.73%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 7 (0.64%) Data Lake
15 7 (0.64%) Pinecone
Development Applications
1 92 (8.39%) JIRA
2 89 (8.11%) Git
3 74 (6.75%) Jenkins
4 64 (5.83%) GitLab
5 25 (2.28%) Liquibase
6 17 (1.55%) Postman
7 14 (1.28%) Selenium
8 10 (0.91%) Artifactory
8 10 (0.91%) JUnit
8 10 (0.91%) Visual Studio
9 9 (0.82%) Cypress.io
10 8 (0.73%) Bitbucket
10 8 (0.73%) CircleCI
11 7 (0.64%) Jaeger
11 7 (0.64%) MLflow
11 7 (0.64%) SonarQube
12 6 (0.55%) Appium
12 6 (0.55%) Cucumber
12 6 (0.55%) TeamCity
13 5 (0.46%) Gradle
General
1 505 (46.03%) Social Skills
2 284 (25.89%) Finance
3 254 (23.15%) Analytical Skills
4 124 (11.30%) Banking
5 66 (6.02%) Public Sector
6 40 (3.65%) Financial Institution
6 40 (3.65%) Marketing
7 33 (3.01%) Documentation Skills
8 31 (2.83%) Influencing Skills
8 31 (2.83%) Legal
8 31 (2.83%) Organisational Skills
9 30 (2.73%) Front Office
10 29 (2.64%) Telecoms
11 27 (2.46%) Investment Banking
11 27 (2.46%) Presentation Skills
12 25 (2.28%) Manufacturing
13 24 (2.19%) Electronics
14 14 (1.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 12 (1.09%) Military
16 11 (1.00%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 199 (18.14%) Developer
2 95 (8.66%) Analyst
3 92 (8.39%) Architect
4 85 (7.75%) Senior
5 73 (6.65%) Lead
6 56 (5.10%) Software Engineer
7 38 (3.46%) Solutions Architect
8 31 (2.83%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 30 (2.73%) Data Scientist
10 29 (2.64%) Senior Developer
11 27 (2.46%) Business Analyst
12 25 (2.28%) IT Support
12 25 (2.28%) Java Developer
13 24 (2.19%) Consultant
13 24 (2.19%) Python Developer
13 24 (2.19%) Technical Support
14 22 (2.01%) Python Engineer
15 21 (1.91%) AWS Engineer
15 21 (1.91%) Data Engineer
15 21 (1.91%) Site Reliability Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 122 (11.12%) REST
2 76 (6.93%) RESTful
3 58 (5.29%) .NET
4 51 (4.65%) HTML
5 47 (4.28%) Elastic Stack
6 43 (3.92%) Middleware
6 43 (3.92%) React
7 40 (3.65%) JSON
7 40 (3.65%) XML
8 39 (3.56%) Kafka
9 38 (3.46%) CSS
9 38 (3.46%) OAuth
10 36 (3.28%) SOAP
11 31 (2.83%) Node.js
11 31 (2.83%) TensorFlow
12 30 (2.73%) PyTorch
13 28 (2.55%) LangChain
14 25 (2.28%) Spring
15 21 (1.91%) AngularJS
15 21 (1.91%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 117 (10.67%) Management Information System
2 87 (7.93%) Algorithms
3 84 (7.66%) Cloud Native
4 55 (5.01%) Distributed Systems
5 50 (4.56%) Data Structures
5 50 (4.56%) Product Ownership
6 34 (3.10%) Public Cloud
7 28 (2.55%) Data Protection Act
8 27 (2.46%) Equities
9 25 (2.28%) Security Posture
10 23 (2.10%) Derivative
11 22 (2.01%) Mobile App
12 21 (1.91%) Data Centre
12 21 (1.91%) Enterprise Software
12 21 (1.91%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 20 (1.82%) Onboarding
13 20 (1.82%) Virtual Team
14 19 (1.73%) AI Agents
15 18 (1.64%) Analytical Mindset
15 18 (1.64%) Distributed Computing
Operating Systems
1 166 (15.13%) Linux
2 119 (10.85%) Windows
3 62 (5.65%) Unix
4 28 (2.55%) Android
5 24 (2.19%) Windows Server
6 21 (1.91%) Mac OS
7 17 (1.55%) Apple iOS
8 7 (0.64%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 7 (0.64%) Windows 10
9 2 (0.18%) Debian
9 2 (0.18%) Robot Operating System
9 2 (0.18%) Ubuntu
9 2 (0.18%) VMS
10 1 (0.091%) Kali Linux
10 1 (0.091%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 368 (33.55%) Problem-Solving
2 312 (28.44%) Agile
3 235 (21.42%) DevOps
4 213 (19.42%) CI/CD
5 184 (16.77%) AI
6 180 (16.41%) Software Engineering
7 144 (13.13%) Microservices
8 132 (12.03%) Containerisation
9 118 (10.76%) Machine Learning
10 113 (10.30%) Cybersecurity
11 112 (10.21%) Analytics
12 106 (9.66%) Stakeholder Management
13 104 (9.48%) Data Modelling
14 103 (9.39%) Continuous Improvement
14 103 (9.39%) Data Science
15 102 (9.30%) Mathematics
16 94 (8.57%) Decision-Making
17 86 (7.84%) Change Management
18 83 (7.57%) ITIL
18 83 (7.57%) Risk Management
Programming Languages
1 363 (33.09%) Python
2 195 (17.78%) SQL
3 152 (13.86%) Java
4 114 (10.39%) JavaScript
5 62 (5.65%) PowerShell
6 61 (5.56%) TypeScript
7 57 (5.20%) C#
8 49 (4.47%) Go
9 48 (4.38%) Bash
10 47 (4.28%) C++
11 24 (2.19%) Perl
12 18 (1.64%) R
13 16 (1.46%) Kotlin
14 12 (1.09%) Rust
15 11 (1.00%) Ruby
16 10 (0.91%) Shell Script
17 9 (0.82%) C
17 9 (0.82%) MATLAB
18 8 (0.73%) Apex Code
18 8 (0.73%) Swift
Qualifications
1 899 (81.95%) Degree
2 599 (54.60%) Computer Science Degree
3 229 (20.88%) Master's Degree
4 131 (11.94%) Security Cleared
5 94 (8.57%) SC Cleared
6 58 (5.29%) CISSP
7 51 (4.65%) DBS Check
7 51 (4.65%) PhD
8 37 (3.37%) CISM
9 35 (3.19%) Azure Certification
10 32 (2.92%) AWS Certification
10 32 (2.92%) Microsoft Certification
11 28 (2.55%) PMI Certification
12 27 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
12 27 (2.46%) Cisco Certification
13 25 (2.28%) DV Cleared
14 22 (2.01%) PMP
14 22 (2.01%) TOGAF Certification
15 19 (1.73%) ITIL Certification
16 17 (1.55%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 72 (6.56%) QA
2 64 (5.83%) GDPR
3 53 (4.83%) Data Quality
4 41 (3.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 25 (2.28%) NIST
6 16 (1.46%) Accessibility
7 15 (1.37%) GRC
8 13 (1.19%) PCI DSS
9 11 (1.00%) Def Stans
10 9 (0.82%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 8 (0.73%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 8 (0.73%) Cyber Essentials
11 8 (0.73%) SLA
12 5 (0.46%) DO-254
12 5 (0.46%) HIPAA
13 4 (0.36%) PSD2
14 3 (0.27%) Basel III
14 3 (0.27%) COBIT
14 3 (0.27%) ISO 19650
14 3 (0.27%) NCSC
System Software
1 156 (14.22%) Docker
2 42 (3.83%) Active Directory
3 23 (2.10%) VMware Infrastructure
4 9 (0.82%) Firmware
5 6 (0.55%) VMware NSX
6 5 (0.46%) Hyper-V
6 5 (0.46%) Microsoft Virtual Server
6 5 (0.46%) Virtual Servers
7 3 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
8 2 (0.18%) KVM
8 2 (0.18%) Virtual Machines
9 1 (0.091%) HDFS
9 1 (0.091%) PowerHA
9 1 (0.091%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 145 (13.22%) Kubernetes
2 93 (8.48%) Terraform
3 70 (6.38%) Ansible
4 55 (5.01%) Grafana
5 42 (3.83%) Prometheus
6 21 (1.91%) Puppet
7 14 (1.28%) Kibana
8 13 (1.19%) SCCM
9 11 (1.00%) Single Sign-On
10 7 (0.64%) Argo
10 7 (0.64%) Kiali
10 7 (0.64%) Microsoft Intune
11 6 (0.55%) CSIRT
11 6 (0.55%) QRadar
11 6 (0.55%) WSUS
12 5 (0.46%) Progress Chef
12 5 (0.46%) SCOM
13 3 (0.27%) Control-M
13 3 (0.27%) HP ALM
14 2 (0.18%) Knative
Vendors
1 175 (15.95%) Microsoft
2 89 (8.11%) Splunk
3 58 (5.29%) Google
4 51 (4.65%) Oracle
4 51 (4.65%) SAP
5 35 (3.19%) Databricks
6 33 (3.01%) Cisco
7 31 (2.83%) Salesforce
8 26 (2.37%) ServiceNow
8 26 (2.37%) VMware
9 20 (1.82%) IBM
10 17 (1.55%) Red Hat
11 15 (1.37%) Informatica
12 13 (1.19%) BiZZdesign
12 13 (1.19%) OpenAI
12 13 (1.19%) Palo Alto
13 12 (1.09%) MuleSoft
14 11 (1.00%) Foundry
15 10 (0.91%) Fortinet
16 9 (0.82%) Atlassian