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

6 months to
11 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,070 6,593 8,166
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.18% 22.45% 18.71%
As % of the General category 33.69% 35.38% 32.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,648 4,303 5,468
10th Percentile £355 £350 £350
25th Percentile £440 £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 £503
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.49% -4.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 211 125 267
10th Percentile £14.82 £17.79 £12.78
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.22 £15.17
Median hourly rate £35.00 £38.11 £27.00
Median % change year-on-year -8.16% +41.15% -10.00%
75th Percentile £54.11 £65.25 £38.12
90th Percentile £85.00 £81.50 £58.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.53 £30.79 £28.00
% change year-on-year +15.39% +9.96% -42.86%

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 26,921 18,634 24,968
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 53.96% 63.44% 57.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,272 11,755 15,666
10th Percentile £313 £280 £275
25th Percentile £413 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £507 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.08% -3.43% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £769
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +4.21% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,790 862 2,008
10th Percentile £13.95 £13.46 £12.78
25th Percentile £17.87 £16.73 £15.50
Median hourly rate £31.50 £27.70 £30.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.72% -7.67% -6.25%
75th Percentile £60.60 £53.95 £52.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £74.88 £67.41
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.98 £24.34 £28.42
% change year-on-year +27.29% -14.36% +3.35%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 7,990 £550 -3.85% 4,118
London 0 4,808 £575 -4.17% 2,081
UK excluding London +1 3,635 £500 +2.04% 2,734
Work from Home -2 2,567 £546 -5.12% 1,923
North of England +2 1,251 £492 +5.81% 706
North West +5 664 £465 +3.33% 391
South East -1 655 £500 -4.31% 893
Midlands -1 624 £500 +7.53% 370
Yorkshire 0 540 £525 +10.53% 243
Scotland 0 453 £500 +4.17% 133
West Midlands +1 443 £509 +1.65% 229
South West -2 369 £525 - 329
East of England +3 193 £513 -10.87% 194
East Midlands -1 176 £468 +7.71% 141
Wales +9 87 £500 +13.96% 83
Northern Ireland -1 52 £513 +22.75% 69
North East -13 48 £500 +13.96% 80
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 (3.58%) Confluence
2 218 (2.40%) SharePoint
3 82 (0.90%) Apache Spark
4 63 (0.69%) Apache Airflow
5 55 (0.61%) Apache
6 52 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
7 31 (0.34%) SAS
8 26 (0.29%) CMS
9 21 (0.23%) Oracle Workflow
10 19 (0.21%) CICS
11 15 (0.17%) IIS
12 13 (0.14%) 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%) HCL Notes
15 6 (0.066%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 6 (0.066%) TPMS
Applications
1 503 (5.55%) Microsoft Excel
2 215 (2.37%) Microsoft Office
3 172 (1.90%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 155 (1.71%) Microsoft Project
5 120 (1.32%) MS Visio
6 56 (0.62%) Spreadsheet
7 33 (0.36%) 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
1 409 (4.51%) SAP S/4HANA
2 107 (1.18%) NetSuite
2 107 (1.18%) Oracle Payables
3 88 (0.97%) Oracle Receivables
4 83 (0.92%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 71 (0.78%) Oracle ERP
6 58 (0.64%) SAP FI
7 49 (0.54%) Oracle EBS
8 46 (0.51%) SAP CO
9 44 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
9 44 (0.49%) SAP FI/CO
10 43 (0.47%) Oracle General Ledger
11 37 (0.41%) Oracle Financials
12 36 (0.40%) Aladdin
13 34 (0.37%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
14 26 (0.29%) Oracle Assets
14 26 (0.29%) Unit4 Business World
15 25 (0.28%) SAP ERP
16 23 (0.25%) Oracle Cash Management
17 22 (0.24%) Oracle EBS R12
Cloud Services
1 1,410 (15.55%) Azure
2 1,015 (11.19%) AWS
3 612 (6.75%) Power Platform
4 434 (4.79%) GCP
5 305 (3.36%) Azure DevOps
5 305 (3.36%) SaaS
6 280 (3.09%) Microsoft 365
7 235 (2.59%) GitHub
8 219 (2.41%) Dynamics 365
9 179 (1.97%) Snowflake
10 161 (1.78%) Entra ID
11 141 (1.55%) Serverless
12 124 (1.37%) OCI
13 116 (1.28%) Amazon S3
14 112 (1.23%) Power Automate
15 98 (1.08%) Azure Data Factory
16 90 (0.99%) GitHub Actions
16 90 (0.99%) OpenShift
17 85 (0.94%) dbt
17 85 (0.94%) Microsoft Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 169 (1.86%) Firewall
2 129 (1.42%) Network Security
3 77 (0.85%) WAN
4 76 (0.84%) DNS
5 66 (0.73%) 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 (0.39%) SSL
11 29 (0.32%) DHCP
11 29 (0.32%) Multicast
12 28 (0.31%) OSPF
13 25 (0.28%) 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
1 520 (5.73%) Power BI
2 239 (2.64%) SQL Server
3 228 (2.51%) Data Warehouse
4 176 (1.94%) Metadata
5 170 (1.87%) PostgreSQL
6 164 (1.81%) Relational Database
7 148 (1.63%) Tableau
8 134 (1.48%) 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 (0.72%) MongoDB
14 64 (0.71%) BigQuery
15 55 (0.61%) Snowflake Schema
16 47 (0.52%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 46 (0.51%) Azure SQL Database
18 44 (0.49%) Power Query
19 42 (0.46%) Delta Lake
20 37 (0.41%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 676 (7.45%) JIRA
2 221 (2.44%) Git
3 161 (1.78%) 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 26 (0.29%) MLflow
12 23 (0.25%) SonarQube
13 21 (0.23%) REST Assured
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 2,645 (29.16%) Social Skills
2 1,665 (18.36%) Banking
3 1,175 (12.95%) Analytical Skills
4 504 (5.56%) Public Sector
5 424 (4.67%) Legal
6 358 (3.95%) Investment Banking
7 337 (3.72%) Financial Institution
8 314 (3.46%) Front Office
9 289 (3.19%) Retail
10 276 (3.04%) Organisational Skills
11 231 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
12 221 (2.44%) Influencing Skills
13 164 (1.81%) Manufacturing
14 153 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 141 (1.55%) Local Government
16 140 (1.54%) General Ledger
17 139 (1.53%) Law
18 133 (1.47%) Marketing
19 132 (1.46%) Billing
20 125 (1.38%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,343 (14.81%) Analyst
2 988 (10.89%) Senior
3 944 (10.41%) Lead
4 921 (10.15%) Developer
5 821 (9.05%) Architect
6 712 (7.85%) Project Manager
7 708 (7.81%) Business Analyst
8 592 (6.53%) Consultant
9 346 (3.81%) Solutions Architect
10 299 (3.30%) Data Engineer
11 218 (2.40%) Financial Analyst
12 217 (2.39%) Senior Manager
13 201 (2.22%) Finance Manager
14 185 (2.04%) Data Analyst
15 183 (2.02%) Java Developer
16 182 (2.01%) Accountant
17 174 (1.92%) Senior Developer
18 170 (1.87%) Programme Manager
19 166 (1.83%) Software Engineer
20 151 (1.66%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 272 (3.00%) REST
2 254 (2.80%) Kafka
3 253 (2.79%) .NET
4 243 (2.68%) React
5 194 (2.14%) Oracle Fusion
6 186 (2.05%) Middleware
7 164 (1.81%) Spring
8 158 (1.74%) Spring Boot
9 136 (1.50%) RESTful
10 105 (1.16%) PySpark
11 103 (1.14%) Redux
12 102 (1.12%) Node.js
13 95 (1.05%) AngularJS
14 85 (0.94%) OAuth
15 83 (0.92%) JSON
16 76 (0.84%) XML
17 66 (0.73%) CSS
18 62 (0.68%) OpenID
19 61 (0.67%) HTML
20 60 (0.66%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 401 (4.42%) Onboarding
2 384 (4.23%) Product Ownership
3 363 (4.00%) Cloud Native
4 259 (2.86%) Legacy Systems
5 205 (2.26%) Management Information System
6 195 (2.15%) Data Structures
7 168 (1.85%) Data Protection Act
7 168 (1.85%) Derivative
8 164 (1.81%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 160 (1.76%) Data Centre
10 157 (1.73%) Fixed Income
11 148 (1.63%) Distributed Systems
12 125 (1.38%) Virtual Team
13 122 (1.35%) Equities
14 120 (1.32%) Greenfield Project
15 112 (1.23%) Public Cloud
16 99 (1.09%) Analytical Mindset
16 99 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
17 95 (1.05%) AI Agents
18 76 (0.84%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 308 (3.40%) Windows
2 273 (3.01%) Linux
3 148 (1.63%) Unix
4 70 (0.77%) Windows Server
5 38 (0.42%) Solaris
5 38 (0.42%) Windows 10
6 32 (0.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 31 (0.34%) zOS
8 30 (0.33%) Apple iOS
9 26 (0.29%) Android
10 19 (0.21%) AIX
10 19 (0.21%) Mac OS
11 7 (0.077%) Oracle Linux
11 7 (0.077%) VMS
11 7 (0.077%) Windows Server 2012
12 6 (0.066%) Windows Server 2019
13 5 (0.055%) HPUX
13 5 (0.055%) SUSE
13 5 (0.055%) Ubuntu
14 4 (0.044%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,871 (20.63%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,835 (20.23%) Agile
3 1,255 (13.84%) Migration
4 1,211 (13.35%) Problem-Solving
5 1,011 (11.15%) Continuous Improvement
6 982 (10.83%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 963 (10.62%) ERP
8 951 (10.49%) DevOps
9 935 (10.31%) AI
10 920 (10.14%) CI/CD
11 875 (9.65%) Analytics
12 784 (8.64%) Project Management
13 760 (8.38%) Decision-Making
14 753 (8.30%) Data Modelling
15 739 (8.15%) Validation
16 728 (8.03%) Roadmaps
17 706 (7.78%) User Acceptance Testing
18 668 (7.36%) Business Intelligence
19 645 (7.11%) Change Management
20 581 (6.41%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 1,229 (13.55%) SQL
2 1,097 (12.09%) Python
3 623 (6.87%) Java
4 383 (4.22%) C#
5 249 (2.75%) JavaScript
6 234 (2.58%) TypeScript
7 196 (2.16%) PowerShell
8 106 (1.17%) C++
9 84 (0.93%) Bash
10 76 (0.84%) Go
10 76 (0.84%) PL/SQL
11 67 (0.74%) T-SQL
12 57 (0.63%) Shell Script
13 56 (0.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 44 (0.49%) 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
1 741 (8.17%) Degree
2 678 (7.48%) Security Cleared
3 486 (5.36%) SC Cleared
4 228 (2.51%) ACCA
5 214 (2.36%) PMP
6 206 (2.27%) CIMA
7 190 (2.09%) PMI Certification
8 164 (1.81%) BPSS Clearance
9 144 (1.59%) CISSP
10 137 (1.51%) Computer Science Degree
11 90 (0.99%) CISM
12 85 (0.94%) Master's Degree
13 81 (0.89%) DV Cleared
14 75 (0.83%) Azure Certification
15 68 (0.75%) Cisco Certification
16 47 (0.52%) AWS Certification
17 45 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
18 37 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 33 (0.36%) ISTQB
20 32 (0.35%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 551 (6.07%) Data Quality
2 417 (4.60%) QA
3 321 (3.54%) PMO
4 291 (3.21%) GDPR
5 163 (1.80%) NIST
6 131 (1.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 114 (1.26%) IFRS
8 108 (1.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 104 (1.15%) GRC
9 104 (1.15%) SLA
10 87 (0.96%) Accessibility
11 65 (0.72%) PCI DSS
12 63 (0.69%) ISO 20022
13 61 (0.67%) GAAP
14 37 (0.41%) SEPA
15 34 (0.37%) NCSC
15 34 (0.37%) PSD2
16 29 (0.32%) IFRS 17
17 28 (0.31%) SOC 2
18 27 (0.30%) Solvency II
System Software
1 280 (3.09%) Docker
2 173 (1.91%) Active Directory
3 54 (0.60%) VMware Infrastructure
4 30 (0.33%) vSphere
5 27 (0.30%) Virtual Machines
6 25 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
7 15 (0.17%) 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
1 409 (4.51%) Kubernetes
2 268 (2.95%) Terraform
3 144 (1.59%) Ansible
4 94 (1.04%) Grafana
5 77 (0.85%) Prometheus
6 66 (0.73%) Microsoft Intune
7 49 (0.54%) SCCM
8 42 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
9 31 (0.34%) FortiGate
10 22 (0.24%) Control-M
11 18 (0.20%) vRealize
12 17 (0.19%) Argo
13 16 (0.18%) Progress Chef
14 15 (0.17%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 14 (0.15%) Nessus
16 13 (0.14%) AirWatch
16 13 (0.14%) HP ALM
16 13 (0.14%) Puppet
17 11 (0.12%) CASB
18 9 (0.099%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 1,144 (12.61%) Microsoft
2 793 (8.74%) SAP
3 755 (8.32%) Oracle
4 305 (3.36%) ServiceNow
5 267 (2.94%) Databricks
6 208 (2.29%) Salesforce
7 198 (2.18%) Google
8 127 (1.40%) Workday
9 117 (1.29%) Cisco
10 114 (1.26%) Splunk
11 108 (1.19%) VMware
12 103 (1.14%) IBM
13 91 (1.00%) CyberArk
14 83 (0.92%) Ariba
15 67 (0.74%) Sage
16 63 (0.69%) Citrix
17 62 (0.68%) OpenAI
18 51 (0.56%) Palo Alto
19 49 (0.54%) Bloomberg
19 49 (0.54%) IFS