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 12 June 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,105 6,634 8,161
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.22% 22.54% 18.70%
As % of the General category 33.76% 35.51% 32.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,668 4,335 5,466
10th Percentile £356 £350 £350
25th Percentile £442 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £700 £713
90th Percentile £800 £825 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £500
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 211 124 268
10th Percentile £14.82 £17.79 £12.79
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.66 £15.17
Median hourly rate £35.00 £40.25 £27.00
Median % change year-on-year -13.04% +49.07% -10.00%
75th Percentile £54.36 £65.25 £38.12
90th Percentile £85.00 £81.75 £58.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.53 £32.31 £29.41
% change year-on-year +9.97% +9.85% -39.97%

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 26,971 18,680 24,970
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 53.96% 63.47% 57.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,300 11,794 15,684
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £506 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.28% -3.62% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £768
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,795 864 2,007
10th Percentile £13.97 £13.46 £12.78
25th Percentile £18.00 £16.67 £15.50
Median hourly rate £32.00 £28.00 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.29% -6.67% -6.02%
75th Percentile £61.18 £55.00 £52.50
90th Percentile £80.03 £75.00 £67.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.16 £24.42 £28.46
% change year-on-year +27.58% -14.20% +3.49%

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 12 June 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 12 June 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 12 June 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 8,021 £550 -3.51% 3,500
London 0 4,830 £575 -4.17% 1,730
UK excluding London 0 3,648 £500 +2.04% 2,409
Work from Home -2 2,573 £550 -4.35% 1,479
North of England +2 1,256 £492 +6.26% 614
North West +5 666 £465 +3.33% 335
South East -1 656 £500 -4.31% 848
Midlands 0 625 £500 +8.11% 341
Yorkshire 0 543 £525 +10.53% 219
Scotland 0 456 £500 +4.06% 91
West Midlands +1 445 £509 +1.85% 211
South West -2 370 £525 -1.18% 258
East of England +2 195 £513 -10.87% 170
East Midlands -1 175 £468 +7.77% 128
Wales +9 88 £513 +16.81% 70
Northern Ireland -1 52 £513 +20.59% 61
North East -18 48 £500 +13.96% 68
Channel Islands - 3 £450 -

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
1 325 (3.57%) Confluence
2 220 (2.42%) SharePoint
3 82 (0.90%) Apache Spark
4 64 (0.70%) Apache Airflow
5 55 (0.60%) Apache
6 53 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
7 31 (0.34%) SAS
8 26 (0.29%) CMS
9 20 (0.22%) Oracle Workflow
10 19 (0.21%) CICS
11 16 (0.18%) IIS
12 14 (0.15%) Appian
13 12 (0.13%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 12 (0.13%) Camunda
14 10 (0.11%) Ethereum
14 10 (0.11%) Jupyter
14 10 (0.11%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.066%) Hyperledger
15 6 (0.066%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 6 (0.066%) TPMS
Applications
1 502 (5.51%) Microsoft Excel
2 214 (2.35%) Microsoft Office
3 172 (1.89%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 155 (1.70%) Microsoft Project
5 119 (1.31%) MS Visio
6 55 (0.60%) Spreadsheet
7 34 (0.37%) Chatbot
8 8 (0.088%) Sketch
9 7 (0.077%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 6 (0.066%) Adobe XD
10 6 (0.066%) InVision
10 6 (0.066%) Trello
11 4 (0.044%) Notion
11 4 (0.044%) Oracle Smart View
12 2 (0.022%) Adobe Illustrator
12 2 (0.022%) AutoCAD
12 2 (0.022%) Photoshop
13 1 (0.011%) MicroStation
13 1 (0.011%) UXPin
13 1 (0.011%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 408 (4.48%) SAP S/4HANA
2 107 (1.18%) NetSuite
3 106 (1.16%) Oracle Payables
4 86 (0.94%) Oracle Receivables
5 83 (0.91%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 71 (0.78%) Oracle ERP
7 58 (0.64%) SAP FI
8 49 (0.54%) Oracle EBS
9 47 (0.52%) Dynamics CRM
10 46 (0.51%) SAP CO
11 44 (0.48%) SAP FI/CO
12 42 (0.46%) Oracle General Ledger
13 38 (0.42%) Aladdin
14 36 (0.40%) Oracle Financials
15 34 (0.37%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
16 26 (0.29%) Oracle Assets
16 26 (0.29%) Unit4 Business World
17 25 (0.27%) SAP ERP
18 23 (0.25%) Oracle Cash Management
19 22 (0.24%) Oracle EBS R12
Cloud Services
1 1,421 (15.61%) Azure
2 1,017 (11.17%) AWS
3 617 (6.78%) Power Platform
4 439 (4.82%) GCP
5 307 (3.37%) Azure DevOps
6 306 (3.36%) SaaS
7 281 (3.09%) Microsoft 365
8 234 (2.57%) GitHub
9 222 (2.44%) Dynamics 365
10 180 (1.98%) Snowflake
11 163 (1.79%) Entra ID
12 141 (1.55%) Serverless
13 123 (1.35%) OCI
14 116 (1.27%) Amazon S3
15 112 (1.23%) Power Automate
16 99 (1.09%) Azure Data Factory
17 91 (1.00%) OpenShift
18 90 (0.99%) GitHub Actions
19 87 (0.96%) Microsoft Copilot
20 85 (0.93%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 167 (1.83%) Firewall
2 129 (1.42%) Network Security
3 77 (0.85%) WAN
4 76 (0.83%) DNS
5 66 (0.72%) VPN
6 60 (0.66%) TCP/IP
7 40 (0.44%) BGP
8 37 (0.41%) LAN
8 37 (0.41%) SD-WAN
9 36 (0.40%) HTTP
10 35 (0.38%) SSL
11 29 (0.32%) DHCP
11 29 (0.32%) Multicast
12 28 (0.31%) OSPF
13 25 (0.27%) MPLS
14 21 (0.23%) Cisco ASA
15 20 (0.22%) Internet
16 19 (0.21%) VSAN
17 17 (0.19%) VLAN
18 16 (0.18%) DMZ
Database & Business Intelligence
1 523 (5.74%) Power BI
2 242 (2.66%) SQL Server
3 231 (2.54%) Data Warehouse
4 178 (1.95%) Metadata
5 169 (1.86%) PostgreSQL
6 164 (1.80%) Relational Database
7 148 (1.63%) Tableau
8 137 (1.50%) Data Lake
9 91 (1.00%) NoSQL
10 81 (0.89%) Oracle Reports
11 72 (0.79%) Big Data
12 68 (0.75%) Oracle Database
13 65 (0.71%) MongoDB
14 64 (0.70%) BigQuery
15 54 (0.59%) Snowflake Schema
16 48 (0.53%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 45 (0.49%) Azure SQL Database
17 45 (0.49%) Power Query
18 42 (0.46%) Delta Lake
19 36 (0.40%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 679 (7.46%) JIRA
2 224 (2.46%) Git
3 163 (1.79%) Jenkins
4 98 (1.08%) GitLab
5 51 (0.56%) JUnit
6 47 (0.52%) Cucumber
7 37 (0.41%) Selenium
8 31 (0.34%) Visual Studio
9 30 (0.33%) Sonatype Nexus
10 29 (0.32%) Postman
11 27 (0.30%) MLflow
12 22 (0.24%) REST Assured
13 21 (0.23%) SonarQube
14 20 (0.22%) Zephyr
15 18 (0.20%) ERwin
15 18 (0.20%) Maven
16 16 (0.18%) Hudson
16 16 (0.18%) Oracle Forms
17 14 (0.15%) Bitbucket
17 14 (0.15%) TeamCity
General
1 2,650 (29.10%) Social Skills
2 1,677 (18.42%) Banking
3 1,173 (12.88%) Analytical Skills
4 505 (5.55%) Public Sector
5 423 (4.65%) Legal
6 359 (3.94%) Investment Banking
7 341 (3.75%) Financial Institution
8 319 (3.50%) Front Office
9 288 (3.16%) Retail
10 276 (3.03%) Organisational Skills
11 233 (2.56%) Documentation Skills
12 221 (2.43%) Influencing Skills
13 163 (1.79%) Manufacturing
14 156 (1.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 142 (1.56%) General Ledger
16 140 (1.54%) Local Government
17 138 (1.52%) Law
18 134 (1.47%) Marketing
19 131 (1.44%) Billing
20 127 (1.39%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,354 (14.87%) Analyst
2 997 (10.95%) Senior
3 949 (10.42%) Lead
4 926 (10.17%) Developer
5 826 (9.07%) Architect
6 709 (7.79%) Business Analyst
7 708 (7.78%) Project Manager
8 594 (6.52%) Consultant
9 347 (3.81%) Solutions Architect
10 300 (3.29%) Data Engineer
11 220 (2.42%) Financial Analyst
12 217 (2.38%) Senior Manager
13 201 (2.21%) Finance Manager
14 188 (2.06%) Java Developer
15 186 (2.04%) Data Analyst
16 183 (2.01%) Accountant
17 179 (1.97%) Senior Developer
18 172 (1.89%) Programme Manager
19 169 (1.86%) Software Engineer
20 153 (1.68%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 276 (3.03%) REST
2 257 (2.82%) .NET
3 255 (2.80%) Kafka
4 250 (2.75%) React
5 192 (2.11%) Oracle Fusion
6 184 (2.02%) Middleware
7 165 (1.81%) Spring
8 158 (1.74%) Spring Boot
9 138 (1.52%) RESTful
10 109 (1.20%) Redux
11 105 (1.15%) PySpark
12 101 (1.11%) Node.js
13 95 (1.04%) AngularJS
14 86 (0.94%) OAuth
15 85 (0.93%) JSON
16 77 (0.85%) XML
17 66 (0.72%) CSS
18 63 (0.69%) OpenID
19 61 (0.67%) HTML
19 61 (0.67%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 405 (4.45%) Onboarding
2 384 (4.22%) Product Ownership
3 365 (4.01%) Cloud Native
4 257 (2.82%) Legacy Systems
5 207 (2.27%) Management Information System
6 197 (2.16%) Data Structures
7 169 (1.86%) Derivative
8 168 (1.85%) Data Protection Act
9 166 (1.82%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 162 (1.78%) Fixed Income
11 158 (1.74%) Data Centre
12 147 (1.61%) Distributed Systems
13 125 (1.37%) Virtual Team
14 124 (1.36%) Equities
15 122 (1.34%) Greenfield Project
16 110 (1.21%) Public Cloud
17 99 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
18 97 (1.07%) AI Agents
18 97 (1.07%) Analytical Mindset
19 77 (0.85%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 309 (3.39%) Windows
2 273 (3.00%) Linux
3 149 (1.64%) Unix
4 70 (0.77%) Windows Server
5 39 (0.43%) Windows 10
6 38 (0.42%) Solaris
7 33 (0.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 31 (0.34%) zOS
9 30 (0.33%) Apple iOS
10 26 (0.29%) Android
11 19 (0.21%) AIX
11 19 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 7 (0.077%) Oracle Linux
12 7 (0.077%) VMS
13 6 (0.066%) Ubuntu
13 6 (0.066%) Windows Server 2012
14 5 (0.055%) HPUX
14 5 (0.055%) SUSE
14 5 (0.055%) Windows Server 2019
15 4 (0.044%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,890 (20.76%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,846 (20.27%) Agile
3 1,262 (13.86%) Migration
4 1,213 (13.32%) Problem-Solving
5 1,019 (11.19%) Continuous Improvement
6 985 (10.82%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 966 (10.61%) ERP
8 955 (10.49%) DevOps
9 952 (10.46%) AI
10 922 (10.13%) CI/CD
11 882 (9.69%) Analytics
12 784 (8.61%) Project Management
13 766 (8.41%) Decision-Making
14 756 (8.30%) Data Modelling
15 742 (8.15%) Validation
16 735 (8.07%) Roadmaps
17 711 (7.81%) User Acceptance Testing
18 669 (7.35%) Business Intelligence
19 650 (7.14%) Change Management
20 580 (6.37%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 1,228 (13.49%) SQL
2 1,102 (12.10%) Python
3 624 (6.85%) Java
4 387 (4.25%) C#
5 254 (2.79%) JavaScript
6 239 (2.62%) TypeScript
7 200 (2.20%) PowerShell
8 105 (1.15%) C++
9 84 (0.92%) Bash
10 78 (0.86%) PL/SQL
11 75 (0.82%) Go
12 69 (0.76%) T-SQL
13 57 (0.63%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 57 (0.63%) Shell Script
14 43 (0.47%) Scala
15 39 (0.43%) VBA
16 30 (0.33%) Apex Code
17 29 (0.32%) R
17 29 (0.32%) Rust
18 28 (0.31%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 740 (8.13%) Degree
2 677 (7.44%) Security Cleared
3 485 (5.33%) SC Cleared
4 228 (2.50%) ACCA
5 217 (2.38%) PMP
6 206 (2.26%) CIMA
7 193 (2.12%) PMI Certification
8 165 (1.81%) BPSS Clearance
9 145 (1.59%) CISSP
10 134 (1.47%) Computer Science Degree
11 91 (1.00%) CISM
12 87 (0.96%) Master's Degree
13 81 (0.89%) DV Cleared
14 78 (0.86%) Azure Certification
15 68 (0.75%) Cisco Certification
16 48 (0.53%) AWS Certification
17 46 (0.51%) Microsoft Certification
18 37 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 33 (0.36%) ISTQB
20 32 (0.35%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 554 (6.08%) Data Quality
2 414 (4.55%) QA
3 321 (3.53%) PMO
4 295 (3.24%) GDPR
5 165 (1.81%) NIST
6 133 (1.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 115 (1.26%) IFRS
8 109 (1.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 108 (1.19%) GRC
10 105 (1.15%) SLA
11 87 (0.96%) Accessibility
12 67 (0.74%) PCI DSS
13 63 (0.69%) ISO 20022
14 61 (0.67%) GAAP
15 37 (0.41%) SEPA
16 34 (0.37%) NCSC
16 34 (0.37%) PSD2
17 31 (0.34%) Solvency II
18 30 (0.33%) IFRS 17
19 29 (0.32%) SOC 2
System Software
1 278 (3.05%) Docker
2 175 (1.92%) Active Directory
3 54 (0.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 29 (0.32%) vSphere
5 27 (0.30%) Virtual Machines
6 25 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
7 15 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.15%) VMware NSX
9 12 (0.13%) RACF
10 11 (0.12%) Hyper-V
11 10 (0.11%) NFS
12 6 (0.066%) GPFS
12 6 (0.066%) KVM
13 5 (0.055%) Microsoft App-V
14 4 (0.044%) Firmware
14 4 (0.044%) Oracle RAC
15 3 (0.033%) GridGain
15 3 (0.033%) HDFS
15 3 (0.033%) SRDF
16 2 (0.022%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 410 (4.50%) Kubernetes
2 269 (2.95%) Terraform
3 145 (1.59%) Ansible
4 93 (1.02%) Grafana
5 76 (0.83%) Prometheus
6 66 (0.72%) Microsoft Intune
7 48 (0.53%) SCCM
8 42 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
9 31 (0.34%) FortiGate
10 23 (0.25%) Control-M
11 18 (0.20%) vRealize
12 17 (0.19%) Argo
13 16 (0.18%) Progress Chef
14 14 (0.15%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 14 (0.15%) Nessus
15 13 (0.14%) AirWatch
15 13 (0.14%) HP ALM
15 13 (0.14%) Puppet
16 11 (0.12%) CASB
17 9 (0.099%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 1,149 (12.62%) Microsoft
2 794 (8.72%) SAP
3 757 (8.31%) Oracle
4 308 (3.38%) ServiceNow
5 268 (2.94%) Databricks
6 210 (2.31%) Salesforce
7 201 (2.21%) Google
8 127 (1.39%) Workday
9 118 (1.30%) Cisco
10 114 (1.25%) Splunk
11 109 (1.20%) VMware
12 103 (1.13%) IBM
13 92 (1.01%) CyberArk
14 82 (0.90%) Ariba
15 67 (0.74%) Sage
16 64 (0.70%) Citrix
17 63 (0.69%) OpenAI
18 51 (0.56%) Bloomberg
18 51 (0.56%) Palo Alto
19 49 (0.54%) IFS