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

6 months to
15 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 96 70 72
Rank change year-on-year -26 +2 +53
Contract jobs citing Computer Science 1,188 964 1,245
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.75% 3.24% 2.80%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.19% 3.59% 3.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 742 571 781
10th Percentile £175 £305 £315
25th Percentile £304 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £485 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.57% -4.55% -6.06%
75th Percentile £650 £676 £675
90th Percentile £762 £823 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £400 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -20.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 75 28 85
10th Percentile £26.75 £26.80 £23.00
25th Percentile £55.00 £30.78 £42.50
Median hourly rate £81.50 £42.75 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +90.64% -22.27% +4.76%
75th Percentile £88.00 £64.31 £66.25
90th Percentile - £82.46 £74.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £82.00 £37.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +118.67% -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 37,209 26,860 38,491
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.05% 90.36% 86.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,562 17,174 25,055
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 £610 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £745 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,222 913 2,330
10th Percentile £14.91 £15.29 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.69% - -7.14%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.50 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £31.88 £31.50
% change year-on-year -13.74% +1.21% -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 15 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 15 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 15 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 -18 1,051 £475 -10.42% 805
UK excluding London -7 617 £400 -20.00% 599
London -32 458 £550 -8.33% 336
Work from Home -18 280 £510 -9.33% 320
South East +10 194 £355 -29.00% 203
North of England +19 190 £367 -32.21% 118
Yorkshire +13 98 £516 +3.25% 42
Midlands -34 89 £475 +31.40% 83
North West +9 88 £325 -41.02% 60
West Midlands -49 64 £475 +143.59% 46
South West -24 58 £500 -9.09% 67
East of England -30 43 £403 -38.08% 73
Scotland +2 36 £610 +16.19% 48
East Midlands -17 25 £447 +23.65% 37
Wales -19 15 £160 -44.35% 17
North East -11 5 £207 -64.09% 16
Northern Ireland -3 4 £369 -38.54% 8

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 70 (5.89%) Confluence
2 44 (3.70%) Apache Spark
3 34 (2.86%) SharePoint
4 19 (1.60%) Microsoft Exchange
5 18 (1.52%) Apache
6 14 (1.18%) Apache Airflow
7 6 (0.51%) Jupyter
8 5 (0.42%) Smallworld
9 4 (0.34%) GeoServer
9 4 (0.34%) IIS
9 4 (0.34%) OpenStack
9 4 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 4 (0.34%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 3 (0.25%) Ethereum
10 3 (0.25%) Hyperledger
11 2 (0.17%) CMS
11 2 (0.17%) nginx
11 2 (0.17%) Skype for Business
11 2 (0.17%) WebSphere
Applications
1 36 (3.03%) Microsoft Office
2 20 (1.68%) Microsoft Excel
3 17 (1.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 11 (0.93%) MS Visio
5 5 (0.42%) Chatbot
5 5 (0.42%) Simulink
6 2 (0.17%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.17%) Trello
7 1 (0.084%) Oracle Smart View
Business Applications
1 23 (1.94%) SAP S/4HANA
2 8 (0.67%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.42%) Payment Gateway
4 4 (0.34%) Aladdin
4 4 (0.34%) SAP ERP
5 3 (0.25%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
6 2 (0.17%) Oracle General Ledger
6 2 (0.17%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 2 (0.17%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
6 2 (0.17%) SAP BPC
6 2 (0.17%) SAP FS
6 2 (0.17%) Workday HCM
7 1 (0.084%) FLEXCUBE
7 1 (0.084%) Maximo
7 1 (0.084%) Misys Equation
7 1 (0.084%) SAP CO
7 1 (0.084%) SAP PM
7 1 (0.084%) SAP Travel Management
7 1 (0.084%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 332 (27.95%) Azure
2 214 (18.01%) AWS
3 124 (10.44%) GCP
4 72 (6.06%) GitHub
5 70 (5.89%) Power Platform
6 53 (4.46%) Microsoft 365
7 48 (4.04%) SaaS
8 47 (3.96%) Azure DevOps
9 45 (3.79%) Serverless
10 42 (3.54%) Entra ID
11 31 (2.61%) GitHub Actions
12 23 (1.94%) Snowflake
13 22 (1.85%) Azure Data Factory
13 22 (1.85%) IaaS
14 19 (1.60%) Cloud Computing
15 18 (1.52%) AWS CloudFormation
15 18 (1.52%) Azure Machine Learning
16 17 (1.43%) Power Automate
16 17 (1.43%) PowerApps
17 15 (1.26%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 50 (4.21%) Firewall
2 33 (2.78%) DNS
3 28 (2.36%) TCP/IP
4 22 (1.85%) Network Security
5 17 (1.43%) HTTP
6 16 (1.35%) WAN
7 15 (1.26%) BGP
8 14 (1.18%) LAN
9 13 (1.09%) SSH
9 13 (1.09%) VLAN
9 13 (1.09%) Wireless
10 11 (0.93%) DHCP
10 11 (0.93%) VPN
11 10 (0.84%) IPv4
11 10 (0.84%) OSPF
11 10 (0.84%) Skype
12 9 (0.76%) Cisco IOS
13 8 (0.67%) VoIP
14 7 (0.59%) HTTPS
14 7 (0.59%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 80 (6.73%) PostgreSQL
2 55 (4.63%) NoSQL
3 53 (4.46%) Power BI
4 45 (3.79%) Data Warehouse
4 45 (3.79%) Relational Database
5 44 (3.70%) SQL Server
6 41 (3.45%) Big Data
7 35 (2.95%) MySQL
8 26 (2.19%) Tableau
9 23 (1.94%) Hadoop
10 20 (1.68%) Metadata
11 18 (1.52%) MongoDB
12 17 (1.43%) Data Lake
12 17 (1.43%) Elasticsearch
13 11 (0.93%) Redis
13 11 (0.93%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 10 (0.84%) Amazon RDS
15 8 (0.67%) Snowflake Schema
16 7 (0.59%) KDB
16 7 (0.59%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 101 (8.50%) Git
2 92 (7.74%) JIRA
3 66 (5.56%) Jenkins
4 58 (4.88%) GitLab
5 28 (2.36%) Rational DOORS
6 12 (1.01%) Postman
7 11 (0.93%) Liquibase
7 11 (0.93%) MLflow
7 11 (0.93%) Selenium
8 9 (0.76%) Jaeger
9 8 (0.67%) Bitbucket
9 8 (0.67%) CircleCI
9 8 (0.67%) Gradle
10 7 (0.59%) JUnit
11 6 (0.51%) Cypress.io
12 5 (0.42%) Cucumber
12 5 (0.42%) PyCharm
12 5 (0.42%) Visual Studio
13 4 (0.34%) Hardhat
13 4 (0.34%) TeamCity
General
1 521 (43.86%) Social Skills
2 294 (24.75%) Finance
3 257 (21.63%) Analytical Skills
4 115 (9.68%) Banking
5 77 (6.48%) Public Sector
6 47 (3.96%) Marketing
7 45 (3.79%) Aerospace
7 45 (3.79%) Documentation Skills
8 40 (3.37%) Legal
9 37 (3.11%) Presentation Skills
10 36 (3.03%) Influencing Skills
11 33 (2.78%) Financial Institution
11 33 (2.78%) Telecoms
12 31 (2.61%) Front Office
13 27 (2.27%) Electronics
13 27 (2.27%) Organisational Skills
14 23 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 23 (1.94%) Manufacturing
15 22 (1.85%) Investment Banking
16 17 (1.43%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 169 (14.23%) Developer
2 117 (9.85%) Architect
3 96 (8.08%) Lead
4 92 (7.74%) Analyst
5 84 (7.07%) Senior
6 46 (3.87%) Software Engineer
7 45 (3.79%) Solutions Architect
8 41 (3.45%) Data Scientist
9 38 (3.20%) Delivery Manager
10 35 (2.95%) Product Manager
11 32 (2.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 30 (2.53%) Python Developer
13 28 (2.36%) Business Analyst
13 28 (2.36%) Product Delivery Manager
14 27 (2.27%) Technical Support
15 26 (2.19%) Consultant
16 23 (1.94%) Java Developer
17 22 (1.85%) Security Engineer
17 22 (1.85%) Systems Delivery Manager
17 22 (1.85%) Systems Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 104 (8.75%) REST
2 61 (5.13%) RESTful
3 59 (4.97%) React
4 54 (4.55%) .NET
5 44 (3.70%) Kafka
6 42 (3.54%) Middleware
7 40 (3.37%) PyTorch
8 39 (3.28%) TensorFlow
9 38 (3.20%) Elastic Stack
10 34 (2.86%) HTML
10 34 (2.86%) OAuth
11 33 (2.78%) Spring
12 32 (2.69%) JSON
13 31 (2.61%) XML
14 29 (2.44%) Node.js
14 29 (2.44%) Spring Boot
15 27 (2.27%) CSS
15 27 (2.27%) SOAP
16 23 (1.94%) LangChain
17 22 (1.85%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 121 (10.19%) Management Information System
2 98 (8.25%) Algorithms
3 96 (8.08%) Cloud Native
4 81 (6.82%) Product Ownership
5 67 (5.64%) Data Structures
6 57 (4.80%) Distributed Systems
6 57 (4.80%) Onboarding
7 34 (2.86%) Equities
8 31 (2.61%) Virtual Team
9 26 (2.19%) Data Protection Act
9 26 (2.19%) Derivative
10 24 (2.02%) AI Agents
10 24 (2.02%) Distributed Computing
11 23 (1.94%) Data Centre
11 23 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
12 22 (1.85%) Analytical Mindset
12 22 (1.85%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 21 (1.77%) Public Cloud
13 21 (1.77%) Security Posture
14 19 (1.60%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 153 (12.88%) Linux
2 129 (10.86%) Windows
3 55 (4.63%) Unix
4 24 (2.02%) Android
5 21 (1.77%) Windows Server
6 18 (1.52%) Mac OS
7 12 (1.01%) Apple iOS
8 10 (0.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 7 (0.59%) Windows 10
10 5 (0.42%) VMS
11 3 (0.25%) Debian
11 3 (0.25%) Ubuntu
12 2 (0.17%) Robot Operating System
12 2 (0.17%) Rocky
13 1 (0.084%) Embedded Linux
13 1 (0.084%) Kali Linux
13 1 (0.084%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 379 (31.90%) Problem-Solving
2 329 (27.69%) Agile
3 249 (20.96%) AI
4 240 (20.20%) DevOps
5 239 (20.12%) CI/CD
6 193 (16.25%) Software Engineering
7 157 (13.22%) Microservices
8 153 (12.88%) Continuous Improvement
9 144 (12.12%) Analytics
9 144 (12.12%) Machine Learning
10 137 (11.53%) Containerisation
11 134 (11.28%) Cybersecurity
12 124 (10.44%) Stakeholder Management
13 121 (10.19%) Data Science
14 114 (9.60%) Data Governance
14 114 (9.60%) Data Modelling
15 111 (9.34%) Decision-Making
15 111 (9.34%) Mathematics
16 105 (8.84%) Stakeholder Engagement
17 93 (7.83%) ITIL
Programming Languages
1 361 (30.39%) Python
2 212 (17.85%) SQL
3 142 (11.95%) Java
4 91 (7.66%) JavaScript
5 63 (5.30%) PowerShell
6 59 (4.97%) TypeScript
7 49 (4.12%) C#
8 42 (3.54%) Go
9 40 (3.37%) Bash
10 37 (3.11%) C++
11 21 (1.77%) R
12 18 (1.52%) Perl
13 16 (1.35%) Shell Script
14 14 (1.18%) Rust
15 10 (0.84%) Kotlin
16 8 (0.67%) Bicep
16 8 (0.67%) Scala
17 7 (0.59%) Ruby
18 6 (0.51%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 6 (0.51%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 971 (81.73%) Degree
2 603 (50.76%) Computer Science Degree
3 221 (18.60%) Master's Degree
4 202 (17.00%) Security Cleared
5 121 (10.19%) SC Cleared
6 76 (6.40%) CISSP
7 57 (4.80%) DBS Check
8 56 (4.71%) PhD
9 52 (4.38%) CISM
10 44 (3.70%) Azure Certification
11 36 (3.03%) TOGAF Certification
12 33 (2.78%) PMI Certification
13 31 (2.61%) Microsoft Certification
14 29 (2.44%) AWS Certification
14 29 (2.44%) Cisco Certification
14 29 (2.44%) DV Cleared
15 28 (2.36%) PMP
16 26 (2.19%) BPSS Clearance
17 23 (1.94%) CompTIA Security+
18 18 (1.52%) CompTIA CySA+
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 70 (5.89%) QA
2 60 (5.05%) GDPR
3 57 (4.80%) Data Quality
4 47 (3.96%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 45 (3.79%) NIST
6 22 (1.85%) PCI DSS
7 15 (1.26%) Accessibility
8 11 (0.93%) GRC
9 10 (0.84%) NCSC
10 9 (0.76%) HIPAA
10 9 (0.76%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 8 (0.67%) Actionable Recommendations
11 8 (0.67%) DO-254
11 8 (0.67%) NIST 800
12 6 (0.51%) Cyber Essentials
12 6 (0.51%) PSD2
13 5 (0.42%) COBIT
13 5 (0.42%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 4 (0.34%) Government Security Classifications
14 4 (0.34%) SLA
System Software
1 159 (13.38%) Docker
2 60 (5.05%) Active Directory
3 20 (1.68%) VMware Infrastructure
4 13 (1.09%) Firmware
5 6 (0.51%) VMware NSX
6 3 (0.25%) Hyper-V
6 3 (0.25%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
7 2 (0.17%) KVM
7 2 (0.17%) Microsoft Virtual Server
7 2 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
7 2 (0.17%) vSphere
8 1 (0.084%) BitLocker
8 1 (0.084%) HDFS
8 1 (0.084%) PowerHA
8 1 (0.084%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 167 (14.06%) Kubernetes
2 92 (7.74%) Terraform
3 60 (5.05%) Ansible
4 50 (4.21%) Grafana
5 41 (3.45%) Prometheus
6 21 (1.77%) Microsoft Intune
7 16 (1.35%) Puppet
7 16 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
8 13 (1.09%) Kibana
9 9 (0.76%) Kiali
10 8 (0.67%) Argo
10 8 (0.67%) SCCM
11 5 (0.42%) Progress Chef
12 4 (0.34%) SCOM
13 3 (0.25%) Control-M
13 3 (0.25%) Foglight
13 3 (0.25%) Kubeflow
13 3 (0.25%) PowerCLI
13 3 (0.25%) vCenter Server
13 3 (0.25%) WSUS
Vendors
1 187 (15.74%) Microsoft
2 72 (6.06%) Splunk
3 63 (5.30%) Google
4 58 (4.88%) Oracle
5 51 (4.29%) Databricks
6 50 (4.21%) SAP
7 41 (3.45%) IBM
8 27 (2.27%) ServiceNow
9 25 (2.10%) BiZZdesign
9 25 (2.10%) Cisco
10 22 (1.85%) Informatica
10 22 (1.85%) VMware
11 21 (1.77%) Salesforce
12 18 (1.52%) Palo Alto
13 17 (1.43%) Red Hat
14 15 (1.26%) Okta
15 13 (1.09%) CheckPoint
16 12 (1.01%) Foundry
16 12 (1.01%) OpenAI
16 12 (1.01%) Software AG