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 9 May 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 8,659 6,487 8,132
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.14% 22.24% 18.86%
As % of the General category 33.54% 35.13% 32.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,418 4,254 5,421
10th Percentile £356 £350 £350
25th Percentile £431 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £564 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.75% -1.96% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £700 £713
90th Percentile £800 £825 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £510
% change year-on-year - -1.96% -2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 193 111 242
10th Percentile £14.82 £17.80 £12.75
25th Percentile £18.00 £22.27 £15.17
Median hourly rate £23.83 £38.11 £26.99
Median % change year-on-year -37.48% +41.23% +4.96%
75th Percentile £55.00 £68.75 £38.12
90th Percentile £85.00 £83.20 £54.59
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £48.82 £32.12
% change year-on-year -52.88% +52.00% -26.59%

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 25,814 18,467 25,035
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 54.09% 63.31% 58.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 15,819 11,773 15,784
10th Percentile £306 £294 £275
25th Percentile £406 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £763 £769
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £475 £495
% change year-on-year +0.63% -4.04% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,647 781 1,939
10th Percentile £13.86 £14.00 £12.77
25th Percentile £17.50 £17.44 £15.50
Median hourly rate £30.00 £27.50 £30.16
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -8.82% -10.24%
75th Percentile £61.18 £56.00 £52.78
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £65.35
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.74 £24.66 £28.50
% change year-on-year +12.49% -13.47% -1.72%

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 9 May 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 9 May 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 9 May 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 7,650 £539 -6.35% 4,319
London 0 4,603 £575 -8.00% 2,272
UK excluding London -1 3,472 £500 - 2,755
Work from Home -2 2,434 £528 -12.08% 1,783
North of England +3 1,161 £482 +1.39% 703
South East -2 655 £503 -2.88% 937
North West +5 624 £465 - 388
Midlands -1 596 £475 -3.06% 383
Yorkshire +1 500 £507 +1.30% 243
Scotland +1 427 £500 +4.82% 139
West Midlands 0 395 £492 -6.29% 215
South West -2 348 £520 -0.95% 284
East of England -3 202 £525 -8.70% 226
East Midlands 0 197 £463 +3.47% 166
Wales +22 94 £438 +16.67% 74
Northern Ireland -1 42 £525 +28.44% 58
North East -14 38 £488 +4.84% 77
Channel Islands - 2 £450 - 2

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
1 328 (3.79%) Confluence
2 213 (2.46%) SharePoint
3 91 (1.05%) Apache Spark
4 61 (0.70%) Apache
5 52 (0.60%) Apache Airflow
6 51 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
7 36 (0.42%) SAS
8 24 (0.28%) CMS
9 22 (0.25%) CICS
10 20 (0.23%) Oracle Workflow
11 14 (0.16%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 14 (0.16%) Appian
11 14 (0.16%) Ethereum
11 14 (0.16%) IIS
12 13 (0.15%) Camunda
13 11 (0.13%) HCL Notes
13 11 (0.13%) Hyperledger
13 11 (0.13%) Mendix
14 9 (0.10%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 9 (0.10%) TPMS
Applications
1 525 (6.06%) Microsoft Excel
2 228 (2.63%) Microsoft Office
3 177 (2.04%) Microsoft Project
4 176 (2.03%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 127 (1.47%) MS Visio
6 49 (0.57%) Spreadsheet
7 33 (0.38%) Chatbot
8 13 (0.15%) Trello
9 8 (0.092%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 8 (0.092%) Sketch
10 7 (0.081%) InVision
10 7 (0.081%) Notion
11 6 (0.069%) Adobe XD
12 4 (0.046%) Oracle Smart View
13 2 (0.023%) Adobe Illustrator
13 2 (0.023%) AutoCAD
13 2 (0.023%) Photoshop
14 1 (0.012%) Adobe After Effects
14 1 (0.012%) InDesign
14 1 (0.012%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 386 (4.46%) SAP S/4HANA
2 119 (1.37%) Oracle Payables
3 102 (1.18%) NetSuite
4 98 (1.13%) Oracle Receivables
5 86 (0.99%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 63 (0.73%) Oracle EBS
7 62 (0.72%) Oracle ERP
8 59 (0.68%) SAP FI
9 58 (0.67%) Oracle General Ledger
10 49 (0.57%) SAP CO
11 46 (0.53%) Dynamics CRM
12 45 (0.52%) SAP FI/CO
13 38 (0.44%) Oracle Assets
14 33 (0.38%) Aladdin
14 33 (0.38%) Oracle Financials
15 32 (0.37%) Oracle Cash Management
16 30 (0.35%) Oracle EBS R12
17 29 (0.33%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
18 28 (0.32%) Workday HCM
19 26 (0.30%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 1,319 (15.23%) Azure
2 987 (11.40%) AWS
3 617 (7.13%) Power Platform
4 392 (4.53%) GCP
5 305 (3.52%) Azure DevOps
6 292 (3.37%) SaaS
7 268 (3.10%) Microsoft 365
8 238 (2.75%) GitHub
9 237 (2.74%) Dynamics 365
10 152 (1.76%) Snowflake
11 144 (1.66%) Serverless
12 133 (1.54%) OCI
13 131 (1.51%) Entra ID
14 121 (1.40%) Amazon S3
15 110 (1.27%) Power Automate
16 96 (1.11%) Azure Data Factory
17 92 (1.06%) GitHub Actions
18 87 (1.00%) OpenShift
19 82 (0.95%) AWS Lambda
20 80 (0.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 162 (1.87%) Firewall
2 116 (1.34%) Network Security
3 76 (0.88%) WAN
4 69 (0.80%) DNS
5 58 (0.67%) VPN
6 51 (0.59%) TCP/IP
7 39 (0.45%) SD-WAN
8 38 (0.44%) BGP
9 37 (0.43%) LAN
10 34 (0.39%) HTTP
11 31 (0.36%) OSPF
12 29 (0.33%) SSL
13 28 (0.32%) Multicast
14 25 (0.29%) DHCP
14 25 (0.29%) MPLS
15 21 (0.24%) Internet
16 20 (0.23%) Cisco ASA
17 18 (0.21%) VSAN
18 16 (0.18%) VLAN
19 14 (0.16%) DMZ
Database & Business Intelligence
1 528 (6.10%) Power BI
2 219 (2.53%) SQL Server
3 209 (2.41%) Data Warehouse
4 169 (1.95%) PostgreSQL
5 165 (1.91%) Metadata
6 153 (1.77%) Relational Database
7 144 (1.66%) Tableau
8 127 (1.47%) Data Lake
9 88 (1.02%) NoSQL
10 87 (1.00%) Oracle Reports
11 79 (0.91%) Big Data
12 70 (0.81%) Oracle Database
13 61 (0.70%) MongoDB
14 59 (0.68%) BigQuery
15 50 (0.58%) Azure SQL Database
16 44 (0.51%) Delta Lake
16 44 (0.51%) Snowflake Schema
16 44 (0.51%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 42 (0.49%) Power Query
18 39 (0.45%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 684 (7.90%) JIRA
2 214 (2.47%) Git
3 182 (2.10%) Jenkins
4 115 (1.33%) GitLab
5 50 (0.58%) JUnit
6 47 (0.54%) Cucumber
7 37 (0.43%) Selenium
8 34 (0.39%) Sonatype Nexus
9 28 (0.32%) Visual Studio
10 25 (0.29%) MLflow
10 25 (0.29%) Postman
11 21 (0.24%) SonarQube
12 20 (0.23%) REST Assured
12 20 (0.23%) Zephyr
13 19 (0.22%) Maven
14 18 (0.21%) Hudson
15 17 (0.20%) Bitbucket
15 17 (0.20%) ERwin
15 17 (0.20%) Oracle Forms
16 14 (0.16%) TeamCity
General
1 2,585 (29.85%) Social Skills
2 1,572 (18.15%) Banking
3 1,151 (13.29%) Analytical Skills
4 542 (6.26%) Public Sector
5 360 (4.16%) Legal
6 331 (3.82%) Financial Institution
7 291 (3.36%) Investment Banking
8 275 (3.18%) Front Office
9 252 (2.91%) Retail
10 244 (2.82%) Organisational Skills
11 236 (2.73%) Documentation Skills
12 209 (2.41%) Influencing Skills
13 182 (2.10%) Manufacturing
14 165 (1.91%) Marketing
15 148 (1.71%) Telecoms
16 145 (1.67%) General Ledger
17 128 (1.48%) Local Government
18 125 (1.44%) Presentation Skills
19 122 (1.41%) Law
20 119 (1.37%) Billing
Job Titles
1 1,315 (15.19%) Analyst
2 893 (10.31%) Senior
3 878 (10.14%) Developer
4 876 (10.12%) Lead
5 784 (9.05%) Architect
6 704 (8.13%) Business Analyst
7 686 (7.92%) Project Manager
8 600 (6.93%) Consultant
9 316 (3.65%) Solutions Architect
10 282 (3.26%) Data Engineer
11 217 (2.51%) Financial Analyst
12 205 (2.37%) Senior Manager
13 191 (2.21%) Finance Manager
14 185 (2.14%) Data Analyst
14 185 (2.14%) Programme Manager
15 167 (1.93%) Accountant
16 143 (1.65%) Java Developer
17 140 (1.62%) Delivery Manager
18 137 (1.58%) Software Engineer
19 136 (1.57%) Senior Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 266 (3.07%) Kafka
2 250 (2.89%) REST
3 241 (2.78%) .NET
4 207 (2.39%) React
5 182 (2.10%) Middleware
6 156 (1.80%) Oracle Fusion
7 147 (1.70%) Spring
8 142 (1.64%) Spring Boot
9 135 (1.56%) RESTful
10 108 (1.25%) PySpark
11 106 (1.22%) Node.js
12 93 (1.07%) AngularJS
13 83 (0.96%) OAuth
14 78 (0.90%) JSON
14 78 (0.90%) Redux
15 77 (0.89%) XML
16 71 (0.82%) HTML
17 69 (0.80%) CSS
18 62 (0.72%) Pandas
19 60 (0.69%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 355 (4.10%) Onboarding
2 340 (3.93%) Product Ownership
3 309 (3.57%) Cloud Native
4 224 (2.59%) Legacy Systems
5 203 (2.34%) Management Information System
6 184 (2.12%) Data Structures
7 169 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
8 166 (1.92%) Derivative
9 150 (1.73%) Data Centre
10 143 (1.65%) Distributed Systems
11 138 (1.59%) Fixed Income
12 130 (1.50%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 110 (1.27%) Analytical Mindset
14 104 (1.20%) Virtual Team
15 102 (1.18%) Equities
16 101 (1.17%) Public Cloud
17 94 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
18 86 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
19 72 (0.83%) Mainframe
20 71 (0.82%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 276 (3.19%) Windows
2 273 (3.15%) Linux
3 139 (1.61%) Unix
4 70 (0.81%) Windows Server
5 44 (0.51%) Windows 10
6 32 (0.37%) Apple iOS
7 29 (0.33%) Solaris
7 29 (0.33%) zOS
8 26 (0.30%) Android
9 22 (0.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
10 18 (0.21%) AIX
11 17 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.092%) VMS
13 6 (0.069%) Windows Server 2012
14 5 (0.058%) Oracle Linux
14 5 (0.058%) Windows Server 2019
15 4 (0.046%) HPUX
15 4 (0.046%) MVS
15 4 (0.046%) SUSE
15 4 (0.046%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,823 (21.05%) Agile
2 1,728 (19.96%) Stakeholder Management
3 1,228 (14.18%) Problem-Solving
4 1,163 (13.43%) Migration
5 961 (11.10%) Continuous Improvement
6 949 (10.96%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 923 (10.66%) DevOps
8 909 (10.50%) ERP
9 866 (10.00%) CI/CD
10 840 (9.70%) AI
11 821 (9.48%) Analytics
12 804 (9.29%) Project Management
13 726 (8.38%) Decision-Making
14 723 (8.35%) Business Intelligence
15 696 (8.04%) Data Modelling
16 685 (7.91%) Roadmaps
17 675 (7.80%) Validation
18 658 (7.60%) User Acceptance Testing
19 598 (6.91%) Change Management
20 583 (6.73%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 1,200 (13.86%) SQL
2 1,027 (11.86%) Python
3 557 (6.43%) Java
4 338 (3.90%) C#
5 217 (2.51%) JavaScript
6 202 (2.33%) TypeScript
7 164 (1.89%) PowerShell
8 106 (1.22%) C++
9 77 (0.89%) PL/SQL
10 70 (0.81%) Bash
10 70 (0.81%) Go
11 64 (0.74%) T-SQL
12 52 (0.60%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 51 (0.59%) Shell Script
14 47 (0.54%) VBA
15 45 (0.52%) Scala
16 33 (0.38%) R
17 26 (0.30%) Bicep
17 26 (0.30%) Kotlin
18 24 (0.28%) Apex Code
Qualifications
1 739 (8.53%) Degree
2 710 (8.20%) Security Cleared
3 503 (5.81%) SC Cleared
4 213 (2.46%) PMP
5 210 (2.43%) ACCA
6 201 (2.32%) PMI Certification
7 193 (2.23%) CIMA
8 144 (1.66%) BPSS Clearance
9 141 (1.63%) Computer Science Degree
10 124 (1.43%) CISSP
11 112 (1.29%) Master's Degree
12 86 (0.99%) DV Cleared
13 85 (0.98%) CISM
14 63 (0.73%) Azure Certification
15 58 (0.67%) AWS Certification
16 51 (0.59%) Cisco Certification
17 39 (0.45%) Microsoft Certification
18 34 (0.39%) ISTQB
19 32 (0.37%) CBAP
20 30 (0.35%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 500 (5.77%) Data Quality
2 417 (4.82%) QA
3 336 (3.88%) PMO
4 294 (3.40%) GDPR
5 158 (1.82%) NIST
6 127 (1.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 103 (1.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 102 (1.18%) SLA
9 101 (1.17%) IFRS
10 87 (1.00%) GRC
11 77 (0.89%) Accessibility
12 68 (0.79%) PCI DSS
13 61 (0.70%) ISO 20022
14 52 (0.60%) GAAP
15 39 (0.45%) PSD2
16 38 (0.44%) SEPA
17 35 (0.40%) NCSC
18 29 (0.33%) MiFID
19 28 (0.32%) EMIR
20 25 (0.29%) Basel III
System Software
1 287 (3.31%) Docker
2 144 (1.66%) Active Directory
3 55 (0.64%) VMware Infrastructure
4 30 (0.35%) vSphere
5 24 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
6 19 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
7 16 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
8 12 (0.14%) Hyper-V
9 10 (0.12%) NFS
9 10 (0.12%) VMware NSX
10 9 (0.10%) GPFS
11 6 (0.069%) RACF
12 5 (0.058%) HDFS
12 5 (0.058%) Microsoft App-V
13 4 (0.046%) ACF2
13 4 (0.046%) Firmware
13 4 (0.046%) KVM
14 3 (0.035%) GridGain
14 3 (0.035%) ISA Server
14 3 (0.035%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 405 (4.68%) Kubernetes
2 247 (2.85%) Terraform
3 123 (1.42%) Ansible
4 90 (1.04%) Grafana
5 68 (0.79%) Prometheus
6 57 (0.66%) Microsoft Intune
7 46 (0.53%) SCCM
8 36 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
9 25 (0.29%) FortiGate
10 18 (0.21%) Control-M
11 16 (0.18%) Argo
11 16 (0.18%) vRealize
12 14 (0.16%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 14 (0.16%) AirWatch
13 13 (0.15%) HP ALM
13 13 (0.15%) Puppet
14 12 (0.14%) CASB
14 12 (0.14%) Progress Chef
15 11 (0.13%) Nessus
16 9 (0.10%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 1,110 (12.82%) Microsoft
2 782 (9.03%) SAP
3 721 (8.33%) Oracle
4 307 (3.55%) ServiceNow
5 237 (2.74%) Databricks
6 183 (2.11%) Salesforce
7 174 (2.01%) Google
8 136 (1.57%) Workday
9 117 (1.35%) Splunk
10 115 (1.33%) Cisco
11 101 (1.17%) VMware
12 96 (1.11%) IBM
13 78 (0.90%) CyberArk
14 74 (0.85%) Citrix
15 73 (0.84%) Ariba
16 69 (0.80%) Sage
17 57 (0.66%) Informatica
18 56 (0.65%) OpenAI
19 52 (0.60%) Palo Alto
20 50 (0.58%) IFS