Finance Contract Job Trends

Financial
UK

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Finance in contract job vacancies. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Finance over the 6 months leading up to 3 March 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 7,922 6,367 8,339
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.99% 21.32% 18.71%
As % of the General category 32.70% 34.18% 31.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,035 4,056 5,654
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £450 £462
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -2.13%
75th Percentile £663 £700 £688
90th Percentile £788 £825 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 191 106 195
10th Percentile £14.50 £18.20 £12.54
25th Percentile £17.69 £22.33 £14.50
Median hourly rate £23.58 £35.00 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -32.64% +40.00% -2.76%
75th Percentile £41.25 £65.00 £38.44
90th Percentile £70.00 £81.60 £58.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.00 £33.00 £24.00
% change year-on-year -33.33% +37.50% -31.43%

All General Skills
UK

Finance falls under the General Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring general skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for general skills 24,224 18,626 26,155
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 58.07% 62.38% 58.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 15,159 11,511 16,788
10th Percentile £300 £287 £263
25th Percentile £405 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £650 £650
90th Percentile £738 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £478 £493
% change year-on-year -0.52% -3.05% -1.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,476 622 1,752
10th Percentile £13.60 £15.60 £13.00
25th Percentile £16.67 £20.27 £15.37
Median hourly rate £23.79 £30.00 £25.71
Median % change year-on-year -20.71% +16.69% -19.43%
75th Percentile £54.25 £58.75 £51.25
90th Percentile £74.26 £75.00 £65.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.27 £27.39 £25.00
% change year-on-year -18.70% +9.54% -6.17%

Finance
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Finance job vacancy trend in the UK

Finance
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

Finance
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Finance over the 6 months to 3 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Finance in the UK

Finance
Hourly Rate Trend

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

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

Finance
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Finance over the 6 months to 3 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Finance in the UK

Finance
Top 18 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Finance within the UK over the 6 months to 3 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 -1 6,978 £537 -9.75% 4,791
London 0 4,250 £575 -8.00% 1,796
UK excluding London 0 3,126 £500 - 3,643
Work from Home -1 2,257 £538 -9.05% 1,912
North of England +3 1,016 £475 -0.47% 838
Midlands -1 575 £480 -4.00% 523
South East -2 562 £500 -4.76% 1,156
North West +4 514 £450 -5.26% 425
Yorkshire 0 455 £500 -2.44% 320
Scotland 0 380 £475 - 180
West Midlands 0 370 £500 -7.41% 258
South West -5 313 £508 -3.19% 416
East Midlands 0 201 £450 +5.88% 256
East of England -1 187 £525 -1.18% 404
Wales +34 107 £413 +3.13% 131
Northern Ireland -1 49 £525 +61.54% 76
North East -7 47 £488 +6.56% 106
Channel Islands +3 1 - -

Finance
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
1 322 (4.06%) Confluence
2 204 (2.58%) SharePoint
3 79 (1.00%) Apache Spark
4 61 (0.77%) Microsoft Exchange
5 47 (0.59%) Apache
6 41 (0.52%) Apache Airflow
7 32 (0.40%) SAS
8 25 (0.32%) CMS
9 21 (0.27%) Oracle Workflow
10 18 (0.23%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 17 (0.21%) Appian
11 17 (0.21%) CICS
11 17 (0.21%) Ethereum
12 14 (0.18%) Hyperledger
13 12 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 12 (0.15%) Camunda
13 12 (0.15%) HCL Notes
13 12 (0.15%) TPMS
14 10 (0.13%) Mendix
15 8 (0.10%) nginx
Applications
1 519 (6.55%) Microsoft Excel
2 282 (3.56%) Microsoft Office
3 196 (2.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 179 (2.26%) Microsoft Project
5 140 (1.77%) MS Visio
6 41 (0.52%) Spreadsheet
7 37 (0.47%) Chatbot
8 15 (0.19%) Trello
9 14 (0.18%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 12 (0.15%) Sketch
11 11 (0.14%) Oracle Smart View
12 8 (0.10%) InVision
13 7 (0.088%) Adobe XD
14 5 (0.063%) Notion
14 5 (0.063%) Photoshop
15 4 (0.050%) Adobe Captivate
15 4 (0.050%) Adobe Illustrator
16 2 (0.025%) Adobe After Effects
16 2 (0.025%) InDesign
16 2 (0.025%) UXPin
Business Applications
1 330 (4.17%) SAP S/4HANA
2 114 (1.44%) Oracle Payables
3 96 (1.21%) Oracle Receivables
4 74 (0.93%) Oracle EBS
5 72 (0.91%) NetSuite
6 71 (0.90%) SAP FI
7 67 (0.85%) Oracle General Ledger
8 66 (0.83%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
9 59 (0.74%) SAP CO
10 57 (0.72%) Dynamics CRM
11 53 (0.67%) SAP FI/CO
12 44 (0.56%) Oracle Assets
13 42 (0.53%) Oracle ERP
14 40 (0.50%) Oracle Cash Management
14 40 (0.50%) Oracle EBS R12
15 37 (0.47%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
16 35 (0.44%) Oracle Financials
17 34 (0.43%) Workday HCM
18 27 (0.34%) Remedy ITSM
19 23 (0.29%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 1,195 (15.08%) Azure
2 968 (12.22%) AWS
3 540 (6.82%) Power Platform
4 394 (4.97%) GCP
5 276 (3.48%) Microsoft 365
6 264 (3.33%) SaaS
7 248 (3.13%) Azure DevOps
8 218 (2.75%) Dynamics 365
9 203 (2.56%) GitHub
10 152 (1.92%) OCI
11 151 (1.91%) Serverless
12 129 (1.63%) Snowflake
13 118 (1.49%) Entra ID
14 101 (1.27%) Amazon S3
15 89 (1.12%) Power Automate
16 84 (1.06%) GitHub Actions
17 81 (1.02%) AWS Lambda
18 77 (0.97%) Azure Data Factory
18 77 (0.97%) OpenShift
19 73 (0.92%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 156 (1.97%) Firewall
2 94 (1.19%) Network Security
3 71 (0.90%) WAN
4 52 (0.66%) DNS
5 44 (0.56%) LAN
6 43 (0.54%) VPN
7 40 (0.50%) SD-WAN
8 37 (0.47%) TCP/IP
9 35 (0.44%) Wireless
10 27 (0.34%) BGP
11 25 (0.32%) OSPF
11 25 (0.32%) SSL
12 24 (0.30%) Skype
13 23 (0.29%) HTTP
14 22 (0.28%) Multicast
15 20 (0.25%) Internet
16 19 (0.24%) DHCP
17 17 (0.21%) SSH
18 16 (0.20%) Cisco IOS
18 16 (0.20%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 481 (6.07%) Power BI
2 205 (2.59%) Data Warehouse
3 194 (2.45%) SQL Server
4 192 (2.42%) PostgreSQL
5 139 (1.75%) Tableau
6 134 (1.69%) Metadata
7 121 (1.53%) NoSQL
8 119 (1.50%) Relational Database
9 114 (1.44%) Data Lake
10 95 (1.20%) Oracle Reports
11 78 (0.98%) Big Data
12 73 (0.92%) MongoDB
13 66 (0.83%) Oracle Database
14 57 (0.72%) BigQuery
15 45 (0.57%) Amazon RDS
16 44 (0.56%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 39 (0.49%) Azure SQL Database
18 37 (0.47%) MySQL
19 36 (0.45%) Hadoop
20 35 (0.44%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 639 (8.07%) JIRA
2 244 (3.08%) Jenkins
3 213 (2.69%) Git
4 155 (1.96%) GitLab
5 68 (0.86%) JUnit
6 63 (0.80%) Cucumber
7 48 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
8 43 (0.54%) Selenium
9 35 (0.44%) Bitbucket
9 35 (0.44%) Postman
10 31 (0.39%) Visual Studio
11 24 (0.30%) Gradle
11 24 (0.30%) MLflow
12 23 (0.29%) Maven
13 20 (0.25%) REST Assured
14 18 (0.23%) Liquibase
15 16 (0.20%) SonarQube
15 16 (0.20%) SpecFlow
16 15 (0.19%) ERwin
17 14 (0.18%) Oracle Forms
General
1 2,645 (33.39%) Social Skills
2 1,548 (19.54%) Banking
3 1,022 (12.90%) Analytical Skills
4 627 (7.91%) Public Sector
5 352 (4.44%) Financial Institution
6 296 (3.74%) Legal
7 288 (3.64%) Front Office
8 286 (3.61%) Marketing
9 272 (3.43%) Investment Banking
10 263 (3.32%) Manufacturing
11 245 (3.09%) Organisational Skills
12 243 (3.07%) Telecoms
13 224 (2.83%) Documentation Skills
14 180 (2.27%) Influencing Skills
15 170 (2.15%) Retail
16 147 (1.86%) Electronics
17 130 (1.64%) General Ledger
18 126 (1.59%) Presentation Skills
19 121 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
20 112 (1.41%) Billing
Job Titles
1 1,262 (15.93%) Analyst
2 868 (10.96%) Developer
3 808 (10.20%) Senior
4 684 (8.63%) Lead
5 671 (8.47%) Business Analyst
6 663 (8.37%) Architect
7 624 (7.88%) Project Manager
8 588 (7.42%) Consultant
9 278 (3.51%) Solutions Architect
10 194 (2.45%) Data Engineer
11 193 (2.44%) Data Analyst
12 179 (2.26%) Programme Manager
13 171 (2.16%) Financial Analyst
14 163 (2.06%) Senior Manager
15 147 (1.86%) Software Engineer
16 144 (1.82%) Java Developer
17 139 (1.75%) Finance Manager
18 131 (1.65%) Senior Developer
19 130 (1.64%) Senior Analyst
20 121 (1.53%) Delivery Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 274 (3.46%) REST
2 271 (3.42%) Kafka
3 211 (2.66%) React
4 203 (2.56%) .NET
5 162 (2.04%) Oracle Fusion
6 146 (1.84%) Middleware
7 145 (1.83%) RESTful
8 141 (1.78%) Spring
9 120 (1.51%) Spring Boot
10 119 (1.50%) Node.js
11 111 (1.40%) AngularJS
12 90 (1.14%) PySpark
13 89 (1.12%) HTML
14 86 (1.09%) XML
15 83 (1.05%) CSS
16 79 (1.00%) JSON
16 79 (1.00%) Pandas
17 75 (0.95%) SOAP
18 70 (0.88%) OAuth
19 68 (0.86%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 343 (4.33%) Onboarding
2 306 (3.86%) Product Ownership
3 247 (3.12%) Cloud Native
4 194 (2.45%) Legacy Systems
5 175 (2.21%) Management Information System
6 172 (2.17%) Derivative
7 153 (1.93%) Data Centre
8 145 (1.83%) Distributed Systems
8 145 (1.83%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 144 (1.82%) Fixed Income
10 142 (1.79%) Data Protection Act
11 137 (1.73%) Data Structures
12 125 (1.58%) Equities
13 111 (1.40%) Public Cloud
14 108 (1.36%) Analytical Mindset
15 92 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
16 88 (1.11%) Virtual Team
17 87 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
18 72 (0.91%) Hedge funds
19 64 (0.81%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 322 (4.06%) Linux
2 287 (3.62%) Windows
3 148 (1.87%) Unix
4 62 (0.78%) Windows 10
5 58 (0.73%) Android
6 56 (0.71%) Windows Server
7 52 (0.66%) Mac OS
8 28 (0.35%) Apple iOS
9 19 (0.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
10 16 (0.20%) zOS
11 10 (0.13%) AIX
11 10 (0.13%) Solaris
12 7 (0.088%) VMS
13 5 (0.063%) Windows Server 2016
13 5 (0.063%) Windows Server 2019
14 4 (0.050%) Windows Server 2012
15 3 (0.038%) CentOS
15 3 (0.038%) Ubuntu
16 1 (0.013%) Kali Linux
16 1 (0.013%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,745 (22.03%) Agile
2 1,528 (19.29%) Stakeholder Management
3 1,226 (15.48%) Problem-Solving
4 1,003 (12.66%) Migration
5 867 (10.94%) Stakeholder Engagement
6 860 (10.86%) DevOps
7 800 (10.10%) CI/CD
8 774 (9.77%) Analytics
9 759 (9.58%) Project Management
10 757 (9.56%) Continuous Improvement
11 752 (9.49%) Business Intelligence
12 724 (9.14%) ERP
13 638 (8.05%) AI
14 598 (7.55%) Decision-Making
15 596 (7.52%) Roadmaps
16 573 (7.23%) Data Modelling
17 558 (7.04%) Change Management
18 534 (6.74%) Risk Management
19 530 (6.69%) Validation
20 522 (6.59%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 1,131 (14.28%) SQL
2 1,010 (12.75%) Python
3 562 (7.09%) Java
4 300 (3.79%) C#
5 248 (3.13%) JavaScript
6 203 (2.56%) TypeScript
7 186 (2.35%) PowerShell
8 129 (1.63%) C++
9 88 (1.11%) Go
10 76 (0.96%) PL/SQL
11 75 (0.95%) Bash
12 52 (0.66%) VBA
13 48 (0.61%) T-SQL
14 42 (0.53%) Shell Script
15 41 (0.52%) R
16 39 (0.49%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 38 (0.48%) Kotlin
17 38 (0.48%) Scala
18 30 (0.38%) Rust
19 28 (0.35%) Perl
Qualifications
1 799 (10.09%) Degree
2 649 (8.19%) Security Cleared
3 473 (5.97%) SC Cleared
4 184 (2.32%) PMP
5 183 (2.31%) PMI Certification
6 170 (2.15%) Computer Science Degree
7 163 (2.06%) ACCA
7 163 (2.06%) Master's Degree
8 153 (1.93%) CIMA
9 129 (1.63%) BPSS Clearance
10 103 (1.30%) CISSP
11 78 (0.98%) AWS Certification
12 72 (0.91%) DV Cleared
13 71 (0.90%) CISM
14 67 (0.85%) Azure Certification
15 41 (0.52%) ITIL Certification
16 37 (0.47%) TOGAF Certification
17 35 (0.44%) Microsoft Certification
18 34 (0.43%) ISTQB
19 30 (0.38%) CBAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 399 (5.04%) QA
2 393 (4.96%) Data Quality
3 317 (4.00%) PMO
4 269 (3.40%) GDPR
5 142 (1.79%) NIST
6 131 (1.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 113 (1.43%) SLA
8 108 (1.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 83 (1.05%) IFRS
10 80 (1.01%) Accessibility
11 78 (0.98%) PCI DSS
12 68 (0.86%) GRC
13 58 (0.73%) ISO 20022
14 46 (0.58%) PSD2
15 40 (0.50%) GAAP
16 38 (0.48%) SEPA
17 37 (0.47%) MiFID
17 37 (0.47%) NCSC
18 33 (0.42%) COBIT
19 31 (0.39%) Basel III
System Software
1 335 (4.23%) Docker
2 167 (2.11%) Active Directory
3 59 (0.74%) VMware Infrastructure
4 32 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
5 30 (0.38%) vSphere
6 13 (0.16%) Virtual Machines
7 12 (0.15%) VMware ESXi
8 10 (0.13%) GPFS
8 10 (0.13%) NFS
8 10 (0.13%) VMware NSX
9 8 (0.10%) Hyper-V
9 8 (0.10%) Virtual Servers
10 7 (0.088%) HDFS
11 4 (0.050%) Firmware
11 4 (0.050%) ISA Server
12 3 (0.038%) KVM
12 3 (0.038%) RACF
12 3 (0.038%) SRDF
12 3 (0.038%) Time Sharing Option
13 2 (0.025%) BitLocker
Systems Management
1 410 (5.18%) Kubernetes
2 251 (3.17%) Terraform
3 153 (1.93%) Ansible
4 94 (1.19%) Grafana
5 86 (1.09%) Prometheus
6 58 (0.73%) Microsoft Intune
7 53 (0.67%) SCCM
8 39 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
9 27 (0.34%) FortiGate
10 21 (0.27%) Progress Chef
11 18 (0.23%) Control-M
12 17 (0.21%) Argo
13 16 (0.20%) vRealize
14 13 (0.16%) AirWatch
14 13 (0.16%) Kibana
15 12 (0.15%) HP ALM
15 12 (0.15%) ITRS Geneos
15 12 (0.15%) vCenter Server
16 11 (0.14%) Nessus
16 11 (0.14%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,033 (13.04%) Microsoft
2 805 (10.16%) SAP
3 692 (8.74%) Oracle
4 314 (3.96%) ServiceNow
5 195 (2.46%) Salesforce
6 182 (2.30%) Databricks
7 173 (2.18%) Google
8 162 (2.04%) Cisco
9 148 (1.87%) Splunk
10 146 (1.84%) Workday
11 118 (1.49%) VMware
12 103 (1.30%) IBM
13 76 (0.96%) Citrix
14 73 (0.92%) CyberArk
15 67 (0.85%) Ariba
16 59 (0.74%) Sage
17 57 (0.72%) HP
18 52 (0.66%) Dell
19 51 (0.64%) Bloomberg
19 51 (0.64%) OpenAI