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

6 months to
31 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 100 69 74
Rank change year-on-year -31 +5 +48
Contract jobs citing Computer Science 1,134 974 1,230
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.55% 3.35% 2.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.97% 3.70% 3.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 697 571 762
10th Percentile £175 £282 £316
25th Percentile £313 £401 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -6.38%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £650
90th Percentile £775 £800 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £400 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -20.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 82 31 87
10th Percentile £26.75 £27.00 £22.73
25th Percentile £55.19 £30.78 £41.88
Median hourly rate £82.50 £43.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +91.86% -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 38,122 26,294 38,266
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.61% 90.44% 86.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,155 17,082 24,859
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 £485 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.51% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,251 966 2,351
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.00 £12.84
25th Percentile £18.87 £20.24 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.50 £31.88 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.36% -1.91% -10.48%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.72 £70.66
UK excluding London median hourly rate £33.00 £31.50 £31.50
% change year-on-year +4.76% - -12.50%

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 31 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 31 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 31 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 -27 996 £489 -7.87% 826
UK excluding London -17 574 £400 -20.00% 618
London -33 449 £550 -8.33% 330
Work from Home -22 270 £525 -6.67% 306
South East -9 176 £400 -20.00% 227
North of England +5 175 £377 -30.31% 115
Yorkshire +2 92 £525 +26.81% 35
Midlands -44 84 £475 +67.25% 84
North West -1 80 £336 -43.06% 59
West Midlands -43 64 £475 +143.59% 51
South West -30 50 £477 -9.14% 56
East of England -30 44 £280 -56.92% 91
Scotland 0 36 £610 +22.00% 34
East Midlands -31 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 60 (5.29%) Confluence
2 42 (3.70%) Apache Spark
3 27 (2.38%) SharePoint
4 18 (1.59%) Apache
5 17 (1.50%) Microsoft Exchange
6 16 (1.41%) 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 (2.82%) Microsoft Office
2 19 (1.68%) Microsoft Excel
3 17 (1.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 12 (1.06%) 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 23 (2.03%) 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%) NetSuite
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
1 318 (28.04%) Azure
2 206 (18.17%) AWS
3 115 (10.14%) GCP
4 68 (6.00%) Power Platform
5 57 (5.03%) GitHub
6 52 (4.59%) SaaS
7 50 (4.41%) Microsoft 365
8 43 (3.79%) Azure DevOps
8 43 (3.79%) Serverless
9 37 (3.26%) Entra ID
10 24 (2.12%) Snowflake
11 23 (2.03%) GitHub Actions
11 23 (2.03%) IaaS
12 20 (1.76%) Azure Data Factory
13 19 (1.68%) AWS CloudFormation
13 19 (1.68%) Azure Machine Learning
13 19 (1.68%) Cloud Computing
14 17 (1.50%) Power Automate
14 17 (1.50%) PowerApps
15 16 (1.41%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 49 (4.32%) Firewall
2 33 (2.91%) DNS
3 29 (2.56%) TCP/IP
4 19 (1.68%) Network Security
5 18 (1.59%) BGP
5 18 (1.59%) WAN
6 16 (1.41%) HTTP
7 15 (1.32%) LAN
8 14 (1.23%) VLAN
9 12 (1.06%) OSPF
9 12 (1.06%) 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 (0.71%) Skype
14 7 (0.62%) SAN
14 7 (0.62%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 75 (6.61%) PostgreSQL
2 53 (4.67%) Relational Database
3 48 (4.23%) Power BI
4 47 (4.14%) NoSQL
5 45 (3.97%) SQL Server
6 43 (3.79%) Data Warehouse
7 38 (3.35%) Big Data
8 35 (3.09%) MySQL
9 24 (2.12%) Tableau
10 22 (1.94%) Hadoop
11 21 (1.85%) MongoDB
12 20 (1.76%) Metadata
13 16 (1.41%) Elasticsearch
14 15 (1.32%) Data Lake
15 12 (1.06%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 10 (0.88%) Amazon RDS
16 10 (0.88%) Redis
16 10 (0.88%) Snowflake Schema
17 8 (0.71%) Star Schema
18 7 (0.62%) KDB
Development Applications
1 90 (7.94%) Git
2 84 (7.41%) JIRA
3 62 (5.47%) Jenkins
4 51 (4.50%) GitLab
5 28 (2.47%) Rational DOORS
6 12 (1.06%) MLflow
6 12 (1.06%) Postman
7 11 (0.97%) Selenium
8 9 (0.79%) Jaeger
8 9 (0.79%) Liquibase
9 8 (0.71%) Bitbucket
9 8 (0.71%) Gradle
10 7 (0.62%) CircleCI
11 6 (0.53%) Cypress.io
11 6 (0.53%) JUnit
12 5 (0.44%) Artifactory
12 5 (0.44%) Cucumber
12 5 (0.44%) Maven
12 5 (0.44%) PyCharm
12 5 (0.44%) Visual Studio
General
1 481 (42.42%) Social Skills
2 284 (25.04%) Finance
3 243 (21.43%) Analytical Skills
4 111 (9.79%) Banking
5 72 (6.35%) Public Sector
6 50 (4.41%) Aerospace
7 48 (4.23%) Documentation Skills
8 46 (4.06%) Marketing
9 37 (3.26%) Legal
10 36 (3.17%) Influencing Skills
10 36 (3.17%) Presentation Skills
11 35 (3.09%) Telecoms
12 31 (2.73%) Financial Institution
13 27 (2.38%) Electronics
13 27 (2.38%) Front Office
14 23 (2.03%) Manufacturing
14 23 (2.03%) Organisational Skills
15 22 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 21 (1.85%) Investment Banking
17 19 (1.68%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 141 (12.43%) Developer
2 109 (9.61%) Architect
3 100 (8.82%) Lead
4 91 (8.02%) Analyst
5 79 (6.97%) Senior
6 46 (4.06%) Software Engineer
7 42 (3.70%) Solutions Architect
8 39 (3.44%) Data Scientist
9 38 (3.35%) Delivery Manager
10 35 (3.09%) Product Manager
11 32 (2.82%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 29 (2.56%) Python Developer
12 29 (2.56%) Technical Support
13 28 (2.47%) Product Delivery Manager
14 27 (2.38%) Business Analyst
15 25 (2.20%) Consultant
15 25 (2.20%) Data Engineer
16 23 (2.03%) Java Developer
17 22 (1.94%) Project Manager
17 22 (1.94%) Systems Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 103 (9.08%) REST
2 60 (5.29%) RESTful
3 55 (4.85%) .NET
4 50 (4.41%) React
5 43 (3.79%) Kafka
6 40 (3.53%) Middleware
7 37 (3.26%) PyTorch
8 36 (3.17%) Elastic Stack
9 34 (3.00%) TensorFlow
10 33 (2.91%) Spring Boot
11 31 (2.73%) JSON
11 31 (2.73%) XML
12 29 (2.56%) Spring
13 26 (2.29%) OAuth
14 25 (2.20%) SOAP
15 23 (2.03%) HTML
16 22 (1.94%) LangChain
17 21 (1.85%) Pandas
18 19 (1.68%) Node.js
19 17 (1.50%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 113 (9.96%) Management Information System
2 90 (7.94%) Algorithms
3 87 (7.67%) Cloud Native
4 82 (7.23%) Product Ownership
5 63 (5.56%) Data Structures
6 60 (5.29%) Onboarding
7 58 (5.11%) Distributed Systems
8 34 (3.00%) Virtual Team
9 31 (2.73%) Equities
10 25 (2.20%) Data Protection Act
11 24 (2.12%) AI Agents
12 23 (2.03%) Derivative
13 22 (1.94%) Data Centre
13 22 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
14 21 (1.85%) Analytical Mindset
14 21 (1.85%) Distributed Computing
15 20 (1.76%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 20 (1.76%) Taxonomies
16 19 (1.68%) Public Cloud
17 17 (1.50%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 154 (13.58%) Linux
2 124 (10.93%) Windows
3 48 (4.23%) Unix
4 24 (2.12%) Android
5 21 (1.85%) Mac OS
6 19 (1.68%) Windows Server
7 12 (1.06%) 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
1 353 (31.13%) Problem-Solving
2 306 (26.98%) Agile
3 254 (22.40%) AI
4 229 (20.19%) CI/CD
5 225 (19.84%) DevOps
6 197 (17.37%) Software Engineering
7 157 (13.84%) Continuous Improvement
8 142 (12.52%) Microservices
9 137 (12.08%) Machine Learning
10 132 (11.64%) Analytics
11 130 (11.46%) Cybersecurity
12 125 (11.02%) Containerisation
13 122 (10.76%) Stakeholder Management
14 117 (10.32%) Data Science
15 111 (9.79%) Data Modelling
16 110 (9.70%) Mathematics
17 104 (9.17%) Data Governance
18 103 (9.08%) Decision-Making
19 101 (8.91%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 93 (8.20%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 339 (29.89%) Python
2 207 (18.25%) SQL
3 134 (11.82%) Java
4 73 (6.44%) JavaScript
5 57 (5.03%) PowerShell
6 55 (4.85%) C#
7 46 (4.06%) TypeScript
8 41 (3.62%) Bash
9 38 (3.35%) C++
10 37 (3.26%) Go
11 22 (1.94%) R
12 17 (1.50%) Perl
13 14 (1.23%) Rust
14 12 (1.06%) Shell Script
15 11 (0.97%) Kotlin
16 8 (0.71%) C
16 8 (0.71%) Scala
17 7 (0.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 5 (0.44%) Bicep
18 5 (0.44%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 942 (83.07%) Degree
2 574 (50.62%) Computer Science Degree
3 203 (17.90%) Master's Degree
4 200 (17.64%) Security Cleared
5 115 (10.14%) SC Cleared
6 71 (6.26%) CISSP
7 55 (4.85%) PhD
8 48 (4.23%) CISM
9 40 (3.53%) DBS Check
10 39 (3.44%) Azure Certification
11 32 (2.82%) PMI Certification
12 30 (2.65%) TOGAF Certification
13 29 (2.56%) AWS Certification
13 29 (2.56%) DV Cleared
14 27 (2.38%) Microsoft Certification
14 27 (2.38%) PMP
15 26 (2.29%) CompTIA Security+
16 24 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
16 24 (2.12%) Cisco Certification
17 18 (1.59%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 67 (5.91%) QA
2 53 (4.67%) Data Quality
3 51 (4.50%) GDPR
4 49 (4.32%) NIST
5 46 (4.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 21 (1.85%) PCI DSS
7 15 (1.32%) Accessibility
8 12 (1.06%) GRC
9 11 (0.97%) NCSC
9 11 (0.97%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 9 (0.79%) NIST 800
11 7 (0.62%) Actionable Recommendations
11 7 (0.62%) DO-254
11 7 (0.62%) PSD2
11 7 (0.62%) SLA
12 6 (0.53%) COBIT
13 5 (0.44%) Government Security Classifications
13 5 (0.44%) HIPAA
13 5 (0.44%) ISO 20022
13 5 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 20000
System Software
1 139 (12.26%) Docker
2 59 (5.20%) Active Directory
3 21 (1.85%) VMware Infrastructure
4 13 (1.15%) 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%) vSphere
8 1 (0.088%) BitLocker
8 1 (0.088%) HDFS
8 1 (0.088%) PowerHA
8 1 (0.088%) Squid
8 1 (0.088%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 148 (13.05%) Kubernetes
2 91 (8.02%) Terraform
3 63 (5.56%) Ansible
4 50 (4.41%) Grafana
5 43 (3.79%) Prometheus
6 23 (2.03%) Microsoft Intune
7 15 (1.32%) Puppet
8 14 (1.23%) Single Sign-On
9 12 (1.06%) 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%) vRealize
Vendors
1 185 (16.31%) Microsoft
2 68 (6.00%) Splunk
3 58 (5.11%) Oracle
4 54 (4.76%) Google
5 47 (4.14%) Databricks
5 47 (4.14%) SAP
6 37 (3.26%) IBM
7 29 (2.56%) ServiceNow
8 24 (2.12%) VMware
9 23 (2.03%) BiZZdesign
9 23 (2.03%) Cisco
10 19 (1.68%) Informatica
11 18 (1.59%) Salesforce
12 17 (1.50%) Palo Alto
13 16 (1.41%) Okta
14 14 (1.23%) Foundry
15 12 (1.06%) CheckPoint
15 12 (1.06%) MuleSoft
15 12 (1.06%) Software AG
16 11 (0.97%) CyberArk