Derivative Contract Job Trends

Derivatives
UK

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Derivative in contract job vacancies. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Derivative over the 6 months leading up to 31 January 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 367 211 256
Rank change year-on-year -156 +45 -4
Contract jobs citing Derivative 230 394 424
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.59% 1.25% 0.95%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 1.74% 3.85% 3.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 168 307 396
10th Percentile £513 £500 £550
25th Percentile £594 £638 £612
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £725 £725 £700
Median % change year-on-year - +3.57% -3.45%
75th Percentile £988 £888 £800
90th Percentile £1,000 £938 £865
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £325 £513
% change year-on-year +61.54% -36.59% -26.79%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 0
Median hourly rate - £77.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - -

All Generic Skills
UK

Derivative falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring generic IT skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 13,195 10,232 13,771
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 34.06% 32.54% 30.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,334 6,079 8,979
10th Percentile £275 £263 £253
25th Percentile £405 £407 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.87% -2.82%
75th Percentile £625 £656 £650
90th Percentile £738 £769 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 624 312 773
10th Percentile £15.00 £19.25 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.27 £23.60 £17.25
Median hourly rate £28.50 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.56% - +56.18%
75th Percentile £63.03 £65.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £80.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £32.50 £35.65
% change year-on-year -15.38% -8.84% +70.33%

Derivative
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Derivative relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Derivative job vacancy trend in the UK

Derivative
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Derivative.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Derivative

Derivative
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Derivative over the 6 months to 31 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Derivative in the UK

Derivative
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Derivative.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Derivative

Derivative
Top 11 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Derivative within the UK over the 6 months to 31 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 -152 223 £733 +1.03% 30
London -90 214 £750 +3.45% 29
Work from Home -137 67 £763 +5.17% 13
UK excluding London -72 11 £525 +61.54% 7
Northern Ireland -14 3 £320 -1.54%
North of England -50 3 £525 -12.50% 2
Yorkshire - 3 £525 -
East of England - 3 £681 -
Scotland +4 2 £470 +16.34%
Midlands - 2 £525 -
West Midlands - 2 £525 -

Derivative
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 11 (4.78%) Apache
1 11 (4.78%) Apache Airflow
2 9 (3.91%) Apache Spark
3 6 (2.61%) Confluence
4 2 (0.87%) HCL Notes
4 2 (0.87%) SharePoint
4 2 (0.87%) WebSphere
5 1 (0.43%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 26 (11.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (1.74%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 3 (1.30%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.87%) Microsoft Project
4 2 (0.87%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 6 (2.61%) Aladdin
2 5 (2.17%) Temenos T24
3 3 (1.30%) Summit
4 2 (0.87%) Algo Collateral
4 2 (0.87%) Bloomberg TOMS
4 2 (0.87%) Oracle General Ledger
4 2 (0.87%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
5 1 (0.43%) Fidessa
5 1 (0.43%) FLEXCUBE
5 1 (0.43%) ION MarketView
5 1 (0.43%) Loan IQ
5 1 (0.43%) Oracle FAH
5 1 (0.43%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.43%) thinkFolio
Cloud Services
1 45 (19.57%) AWS
2 23 (10.00%) Azure
3 14 (6.09%) Snowflake
4 12 (5.22%) Power Platform
5 11 (4.78%) dbt
6 6 (2.61%) GCP
6 6 (2.61%) Serverless
7 5 (2.17%) Amazon S3
7 5 (2.17%) AWS Lambda
7 5 (2.17%) Azure DevOps
7 5 (2.17%) SaaS
8 3 (1.30%) Amazon ECS
9 2 (0.87%) npm
9 2 (0.87%) OpenShift
9 2 (0.87%) Power Automate
9 2 (0.87%) PowerApps
9 2 (0.87%) Yarn
10 1 (0.43%) AWS CloudFormation
10 1 (0.43%) Collibra
10 1 (0.43%) OCI
Communications & Networking
1 8 (3.48%) FIX Connectivity
2 4 (1.74%) Multicast
3 1 (0.43%) RTMP
3 1 (0.43%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (8.26%) PostgreSQL
2 15 (6.52%) SQL Server
3 12 (5.22%) Data Lake
3 12 (5.22%) Power BI
4 11 (4.78%) Amazon Athena
4 11 (4.78%) Apache Arrow
4 11 (4.78%) Apache Iceberg
4 11 (4.78%) Apache Ignite
4 11 (4.78%) Dremio
5 8 (3.48%) Redis
6 5 (2.17%) Relational Database
7 4 (1.74%) Big Data
7 4 (1.74%) KDB
7 4 (1.74%) NoSQL
7 4 (1.74%) Tableau
8 3 (1.30%) Amazon RDS
8 3 (1.30%) Metadata
9 2 (0.87%) Data Mart
9 2 (0.87%) MongoDB
9 2 (0.87%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 17 (7.39%) Git
2 10 (4.35%) JIRA
3 9 (3.91%) Jenkins
4 6 (2.61%) Octopus Deploy
4 6 (2.61%) Visual Studio
5 5 (2.17%) Maven
6 4 (1.74%) GitLab
6 4 (1.74%) IntelliJ
7 3 (1.30%) Bitbucket
7 3 (1.30%) Gradle
8 2 (0.87%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.87%) Eclipse
8 2 (0.87%) webpack
9 1 (0.43%) Crucible
9 1 (0.43%) NUnit
9 1 (0.43%) REST Assured
9 1 (0.43%) TeamCity
General
1 171 (74.35%) Finance
2 127 (55.22%) Banking
3 93 (40.43%) Front Office
4 85 (36.96%) Investment Banking
5 70 (30.43%) Social Skills
6 34 (14.78%) Analytical Skills
7 25 (10.87%) Financial Institution
8 8 (3.48%) Back Office
9 4 (1.74%) Organisational Skills
10 3 (1.30%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.30%) Legal
10 3 (1.30%) Spanish Language
10 3 (1.30%) Telecoms
11 2 (0.87%) General Ledger
11 2 (0.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 2 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.43%) Japanese Language
12 1 (0.43%) Law
12 1 (0.43%) Retail
Job Titles
1 106 (46.09%) Developer
2 57 (24.78%) Senior
3 43 (18.70%) Analyst
4 38 (16.52%) Java Developer
5 31 (13.48%) Business Analyst
5 31 (13.48%) Senior Developer
6 21 (9.13%) Senior Java Developer
7 18 (7.83%) Analytics Developer
7 18 (7.83%) AWS Developer
7 18 (7.83%) Kafka Developer
7 18 (7.83%) PostgreSQL Developer
8 15 (6.52%) Quantitative Developer
9 14 (6.09%) C# Developer
9 14 (6.09%) Java Engineer
10 12 (5.22%) C++ Developer
10 12 (5.22%) Java Software Engineer
10 12 (5.22%) Python Engineer
10 12 (5.22%) Software Engineer
11 11 (4.78%) AWS Engineer
11 11 (4.78%) AWS Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (10.00%) Kafka
2 18 (7.83%) FIX Protocol
3 15 (6.52%) NumPy
3 15 (6.52%) Pandas
3 15 (6.52%) React
4 14 (6.09%) SciPy
5 13 (5.65%) RESTful
6 12 (5.22%) .NET
6 12 (5.22%) Protocol Buffers
7 11 (4.78%) gRPC
8 10 (4.35%) HTML
9 9 (3.91%) Dask
10 8 (3.48%) REST
11 7 (3.04%) Spring
12 6 (2.61%) CSS
12 6 (2.61%) WebSockets
13 5 (2.17%) HTML5
13 5 (2.17%) XML
14 3 (1.30%) Redux
14 3 (1.30%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 83 (36.09%) Equities
2 55 (23.91%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 53 (23.04%) Fixed Income
4 35 (15.22%) Equity Derivative
5 25 (10.87%) Market Risk
6 20 (8.70%) Algorithms
6 20 (8.70%) Hedge funds
7 19 (8.26%) Management Information System
8 17 (7.39%) Distributed Systems
9 11 (4.78%) Cloud Native
9 11 (4.78%) Credit Risk
9 11 (4.78%) Data Protection Act
9 11 (4.78%) Pricing Data
9 11 (4.78%) TWAP
9 11 (4.78%) VWAP
10 10 (4.35%) Distributed Computing
11 9 (3.91%) Interest Rate Derivative
11 9 (3.91%) Onboarding
11 9 (3.91%) Product Ownership
12 7 (3.04%) Analytical Mindset
Operating Systems
1 15 (6.52%) Linux
2 11 (4.78%) Unix
3 7 (3.04%) Windows
4 3 (1.30%) Debian
4 3 (1.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (1.30%) Ubuntu
4 3 (1.30%) VMS
5 1 (0.43%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 68 (29.57%) Agile
1 68 (29.57%) Risk Management
2 42 (18.26%) Mathematics
3 40 (17.39%) Analytics
3 40 (17.39%) Problem-Solving
4 35 (15.22%) TDD
5 34 (14.78%) CI/CD
6 28 (12.17%) Low Latency
7 25 (10.87%) Stakeholder Management
8 24 (10.43%) Design Patterns
8 24 (10.43%) DevOps
9 23 (10.00%) Computer Science
9 23 (10.00%) Data Pipeline
9 23 (10.00%) Electronic Trading
9 23 (10.00%) Software Engineering
10 20 (8.70%) Multithreading
10 20 (8.70%) Physics
10 20 (8.70%) Quantitative Finance
10 20 (8.70%) Validation
11 18 (7.83%) Asset Management
Programming Languages
1 93 (40.43%) Python
2 68 (29.57%) SQL
3 64 (27.83%) Java
4 38 (16.52%) C++
5 32 (13.91%) C#
6 21 (9.13%) JavaScript
7 19 (8.26%) TypeScript
8 6 (2.61%) VBA
9 4 (1.74%) Shell Script
10 3 (1.30%) PowerShell
11 2 (0.87%) Perl
11 2 (0.87%) Rust
11 2 (0.87%) Scala
12 1 (0.43%) PL/SQL
12 1 (0.43%) R
12 1 (0.43%) VC++
Qualifications
1 44 (19.13%) Degree
2 17 (7.39%) Master's Degree
3 15 (6.52%) Numerate Degree
4 11 (4.78%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (4.35%) PhD
6 3 (1.30%) PMI Certification
6 3 (1.30%) PMP
7 2 (0.87%) ISTQB
8 1 (0.43%) CBAP
8 1 (0.43%) FFIEC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (5.65%) QA
2 12 (5.22%) EMIR
3 8 (3.48%) IFRS
4 7 (3.04%) Data Quality
4 7 (3.04%) MiFID
5 4 (1.74%) IFRS 9
5 4 (1.74%) SLA
6 3 (1.30%) Basel III
6 3 (1.30%) IAS 32
6 3 (1.30%) IAS 39
7 2 (0.87%) GAAP
7 2 (0.87%) PMO
8 1 (0.43%) Accessibility
8 1 (0.43%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.43%) FINRA
8 1 (0.43%) IFRS 17
8 1 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.43%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 8 (3.48%) Docker
2 3 (1.30%) QEMU
Systems Management
1 8 (3.48%) Kubernetes
2 7 (3.04%) Ansible
3 3 (1.30%) Grafana
3 3 (1.30%) Podman
3 3 (1.30%) Thomson Reuters DACS
4 2 (0.87%) ITRS Geneos
4 2 (0.87%) Prometheus
4 2 (0.87%) Terraform
5 1 (0.43%) Control-M
Vendors
1 17 (7.39%) Murex
2 16 (6.96%) Bloomberg
2 16 (6.96%) Oracle
3 9 (3.91%) Microsoft
4 6 (2.61%) ION Trading
4 6 (2.61%) Tradeweb
5 5 (2.17%) jBASE
5 5 (2.17%) Sophis
5 5 (2.17%) Temenos
6 4 (1.74%) Calypso
6 4 (1.74%) Charles River
7 3 (1.30%) Databricks
7 3 (1.30%) IBM
7 3 (1.30%) NVIDIA
7 3 (1.30%) NYFIX
7 3 (1.30%) Refinitiv
8 2 (0.87%) Apple
8 2 (0.87%) Google
8 2 (0.87%) Lotus
8 2 (0.87%) SmartStream