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

6 months to
6 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 8,926 6,492 8,101
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.07% 22.36% 18.81%
As % of the General category 33.50% 35.29% 32.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,575 4,222 5,414
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 £500
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 199 118 265
10th Percentile £14.82 £17.79 £12.77
25th Percentile £18.27 £23.23 £15.17
Median hourly rate £30.00 £40.25 £27.00
Median % change year-on-year -25.47% +49.07% -3.50%
75th Percentile £54.36 £65.19 £38.12
90th Percentile £85.00 £79.68 £59.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £33.50 £36.00 £28.00
% change year-on-year -6.94% +28.57% -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 26,645 18,395 24,713
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 53.95% 63.35% 57.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,132 11,601 15,502
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £769
UK excluding London median daily rate £494 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.95% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,765 839 1,985
10th Percentile £13.81 £13.44 £12.78
25th Percentile £17.75 £16.95 £15.50
Median hourly rate £31.16 £28.00 £30.12
Median % change year-on-year +11.27% -7.04% -7.04%
75th Percentile £60.75 £55.00 £52.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £67.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.50 £24.50 £28.46
% change year-on-year +24.49% -13.91% +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 6 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 6 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 6 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 7,884 £550 -4.35% 5,594
London 0 4,755 £575 -4.17% 3,157
UK excluding London 0 3,569 £500 +2.04% 3,152
Work from Home -2 2,517 £540 -6.09% 2,302
North of England +3 1,230 £492 +5.81% 843
South East -2 651 £500 -4.31% 939
North West +5 649 £465 +3.33% 487
Midlands -1 607 £500 +6.95% 471
Yorkshire 0 538 £525 +9.95% 278
Scotland 0 438 £500 +4.28% 180
West Midlands +1 424 £500 - 296
South West -2 368 £525 - 341
East of England +2 193 £520 -9.57% 227
East Midlands 0 178 £468 +6.86% 175
Wales +8 85 £500 +21.21% 85
Northern Ireland -1 48 £513 +20.59% 109
North East -14 44 £488 +7.73% 86
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
1 317 (3.55%) Confluence
2 215 (2.41%) SharePoint
3 81 (0.91%) Apache Spark
4 61 (0.68%) Apache Airflow
5 53 (0.59%) Apache
6 50 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
7 31 (0.35%) SAS
8 26 (0.29%) CMS
9 19 (0.21%) CICS
9 19 (0.21%) Oracle Workflow
10 16 (0.18%) IIS
11 13 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 13 (0.15%) Appian
11 13 (0.15%) Camunda
12 10 (0.11%) Ethereum
12 10 (0.11%) Jupyter
12 10 (0.11%) WebSphere
13 8 (0.090%) HCL Notes
13 8 (0.090%) Mendix
14 7 (0.078%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 504 (5.65%) Microsoft Excel
2 212 (2.38%) Microsoft Office
3 170 (1.90%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 159 (1.78%) Microsoft Project
5 120 (1.34%) MS Visio
6 54 (0.60%) Spreadsheet
7 33 (0.37%) Chatbot
8 8 (0.090%) Sketch
9 6 (0.067%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 6 (0.067%) Adobe XD
9 6 (0.067%) InVision
9 6 (0.067%) Trello
10 4 (0.045%) Notion
10 4 (0.045%) Oracle Smart View
11 2 (0.022%) Adobe Illustrator
11 2 (0.022%) AutoCAD
11 2 (0.022%) Photoshop
12 1 (0.011%) MicroStation
12 1 (0.011%) UXPin
12 1 (0.011%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 396 (4.44%) SAP S/4HANA
2 110 (1.23%) Oracle Payables
3 106 (1.19%) NetSuite
4 91 (1.02%) Oracle Receivables
5 83 (0.93%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 72 (0.81%) Oracle ERP
7 59 (0.66%) SAP FI
8 53 (0.59%) Oracle EBS
9 47 (0.53%) Oracle General Ledger
9 47 (0.53%) SAP CO
10 44 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
10 44 (0.49%) SAP FI/CO
11 36 (0.40%) Aladdin
11 36 (0.40%) Oracle Financials
12 32 (0.36%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 29 (0.32%) Oracle Assets
14 25 (0.28%) Oracle Cash Management
14 25 (0.28%) SAP ERP
15 24 (0.27%) Unit4 Business World
16 22 (0.25%) Oracle EBS R12
Cloud Services
1 1,395 (15.63%) Azure
2 1,001 (11.21%) AWS
3 609 (6.82%) Power Platform
4 431 (4.83%) GCP
5 304 (3.41%) Azure DevOps
6 298 (3.34%) SaaS
7 279 (3.13%) Microsoft 365
8 237 (2.66%) GitHub
9 218 (2.44%) Dynamics 365
10 173 (1.94%) Snowflake
11 156 (1.75%) Entra ID
12 138 (1.55%) Serverless
13 125 (1.40%) OCI
14 113 (1.27%) Power Automate
15 110 (1.23%) Amazon S3
16 96 (1.08%) Azure Data Factory
17 92 (1.03%) OpenShift
18 89 (1.00%) GitHub Actions
19 84 (0.94%) Microsoft Copilot
20 83 (0.93%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 171 (1.92%) Firewall
2 129 (1.45%) Network Security
3 76 (0.85%) WAN
4 75 (0.84%) DNS
5 66 (0.74%) VPN
6 60 (0.67%) TCP/IP
7 41 (0.46%) BGP
8 37 (0.41%) SD-WAN
9 36 (0.40%) LAN
10 35 (0.39%) HTTP
10 35 (0.39%) SSL
11 29 (0.32%) Multicast
11 29 (0.32%) OSPF
12 28 (0.31%) DHCP
13 25 (0.28%) MPLS
14 21 (0.24%) Cisco ASA
15 20 (0.22%) Internet
16 19 (0.21%) VSAN
17 18 (0.20%) VLAN
18 16 (0.18%) DMZ
Database & Business Intelligence
1 516 (5.78%) Power BI
2 236 (2.64%) SQL Server
3 226 (2.53%) Data Warehouse
4 174 (1.95%) Metadata
5 163 (1.83%) PostgreSQL
6 162 (1.81%) Relational Database
7 147 (1.65%) Tableau
8 128 (1.43%) Data Lake
9 93 (1.04%) NoSQL
10 80 (0.90%) Oracle Reports
11 73 (0.82%) Big Data
12 70 (0.78%) Oracle Database
13 62 (0.69%) MongoDB
14 61 (0.68%) BigQuery
15 54 (0.60%) Snowflake Schema
16 48 (0.54%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 46 (0.52%) Azure SQL Database
18 42 (0.47%) Power Query
19 41 (0.46%) Delta Lake
20 35 (0.39%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 672 (7.53%) JIRA
2 212 (2.38%) Git
3 160 (1.79%) Jenkins
4 98 (1.10%) GitLab
5 51 (0.57%) JUnit
6 47 (0.53%) Cucumber
7 36 (0.40%) Selenium
8 30 (0.34%) Sonatype Nexus
8 30 (0.34%) Visual Studio
9 29 (0.32%) Postman
10 25 (0.28%) MLflow
10 25 (0.28%) SonarQube
11 20 (0.22%) REST Assured
11 20 (0.22%) Zephyr
12 19 (0.21%) ERwin
13 18 (0.20%) Maven
14 16 (0.18%) Hudson
14 16 (0.18%) Oracle Forms
15 15 (0.17%) Bitbucket
15 15 (0.17%) TeamCity
General
1 2,606 (29.20%) Social Skills
2 1,638 (18.35%) Banking
3 1,164 (13.04%) Analytical Skills
4 506 (5.67%) Public Sector
5 407 (4.56%) Legal
6 341 (3.82%) Investment Banking
7 336 (3.76%) Financial Institution
8 305 (3.42%) Front Office
9 280 (3.14%) Retail
10 261 (2.92%) Organisational Skills
11 234 (2.62%) Documentation Skills
12 219 (2.45%) Influencing Skills
13 166 (1.86%) Manufacturing
14 146 (1.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 141 (1.58%) General Ledger
16 137 (1.53%) Law
16 137 (1.53%) Marketing
17 135 (1.51%) Local Government
18 128 (1.43%) Billing
19 121 (1.36%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 1,345 (15.07%) Analyst
2 970 (10.87%) Senior
3 926 (10.37%) Lead
4 898 (10.06%) Developer
5 810 (9.07%) Architect
6 712 (7.98%) Business Analyst
7 702 (7.86%) Project Manager
8 589 (6.60%) Consultant
9 338 (3.79%) Solutions Architect
10 293 (3.28%) Data Engineer
11 216 (2.42%) Financial Analyst
11 216 (2.42%) Senior Manager
12 191 (2.14%) Finance Manager
13 187 (2.10%) Data Analyst
14 179 (2.01%) Accountant
15 173 (1.94%) Programme Manager
16 167 (1.87%) Java Developer
17 163 (1.83%) Senior Developer
17 163 (1.83%) Software Engineer
18 148 (1.66%) Delivery Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 269 (3.01%) REST
2 254 (2.85%) Kafka
3 252 (2.82%) .NET
4 230 (2.58%) React
5 188 (2.11%) Middleware
6 184 (2.06%) Oracle Fusion
7 158 (1.77%) Spring
8 154 (1.73%) Spring Boot
9 137 (1.53%) RESTful
10 104 (1.17%) PySpark
11 103 (1.15%) Node.js
12 96 (1.08%) AngularJS
13 92 (1.03%) Redux
14 84 (0.94%) OAuth
15 81 (0.91%) JSON
16 74 (0.83%) XML
17 68 (0.76%) CSS
18 65 (0.73%) HTML
19 62 (0.69%) OpenID
20 59 (0.66%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 391 (4.38%) Onboarding
2 373 (4.18%) Product Ownership
3 359 (4.02%) Cloud Native
4 249 (2.79%) Legacy Systems
5 203 (2.27%) Management Information System
6 186 (2.08%) Data Structures
7 167 (1.87%) Data Protection Act
8 166 (1.86%) Derivative
9 157 (1.76%) Data Centre
10 152 (1.70%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 146 (1.64%) Fixed Income
12 145 (1.62%) Distributed Systems
13 112 (1.25%) Equities
14 110 (1.23%) Virtual Team
15 109 (1.22%) Public Cloud
16 108 (1.21%) Greenfield Project
17 100 (1.12%) Analytical Mindset
18 94 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
19 89 (1.00%) AI Agents
20 76 (0.85%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 301 (3.37%) Windows
2 267 (2.99%) Linux
3 145 (1.62%) Unix
4 71 (0.80%) Windows Server
5 41 (0.46%) Windows 10
6 37 (0.41%) Solaris
7 32 (0.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 31 (0.35%) Apple iOS
8 31 (0.35%) zOS
9 27 (0.30%) Android
10 18 (0.20%) AIX
10 18 (0.20%) Mac OS
11 7 (0.078%) VMS
11 7 (0.078%) Windows Server 2012
12 6 (0.067%) Oracle Linux
12 6 (0.067%) Windows Server 2019
13 4 (0.045%) HPUX
13 4 (0.045%) MVS
13 4 (0.045%) SUSE
14 3 (0.034%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,820 (20.39%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,815 (20.33%) Agile
3 1,231 (13.79%) Migration
4 1,207 (13.52%) Problem-Solving
5 987 (11.06%) Continuous Improvement
6 970 (10.87%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 942 (10.55%) ERP
8 937 (10.50%) DevOps
9 907 (10.16%) AI
10 906 (10.15%) CI/CD
11 855 (9.58%) Analytics
12 778 (8.72%) Project Management
13 745 (8.35%) Decision-Making
14 739 (8.28%) Data Modelling
15 724 (8.11%) Validation
16 713 (7.99%) Roadmaps
17 689 (7.72%) User Acceptance Testing
18 673 (7.54%) Business Intelligence
19 629 (7.05%) Change Management
20 575 (6.44%) Risk Management
Programming Languages
1 1,223 (13.70%) SQL
2 1,087 (12.18%) Python
3 603 (6.76%) Java
4 365 (4.09%) C#
5 238 (2.67%) JavaScript
6 219 (2.45%) TypeScript
7 192 (2.15%) PowerShell
8 106 (1.19%) C++
9 82 (0.92%) Bash
10 77 (0.86%) Go
11 72 (0.81%) PL/SQL
12 65 (0.73%) T-SQL
13 56 (0.63%) Shell Script
14 52 (0.58%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 43 (0.48%) Scala
16 39 (0.44%) VBA
17 29 (0.32%) Rust
18 28 (0.31%) Apex Code
18 28 (0.31%) R
19 27 (0.30%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 740 (8.29%) Degree
2 671 (7.52%) Security Cleared
3 481 (5.39%) SC Cleared
4 226 (2.53%) ACCA
5 211 (2.36%) PMP
6 206 (2.31%) CIMA
7 186 (2.08%) PMI Certification
8 156 (1.75%) BPSS Clearance
9 143 (1.60%) CISSP
10 134 (1.50%) Computer Science Degree
11 90 (1.01%) CISM
12 88 (0.99%) Master's Degree
13 79 (0.89%) DV Cleared
14 72 (0.81%) Azure Certification
15 66 (0.74%) Cisco Certification
16 47 (0.53%) AWS Certification
17 41 (0.46%) Microsoft Certification
18 36 (0.40%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 32 (0.36%) ISTQB
20 31 (0.35%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 538 (6.03%) Data Quality
2 410 (4.59%) QA
3 314 (3.52%) PMO
4 288 (3.23%) GDPR
5 164 (1.84%) NIST
6 133 (1.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 113 (1.27%) IFRS
8 108 (1.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 106 (1.19%) SLA
10 101 (1.13%) GRC
11 85 (0.95%) Accessibility
12 67 (0.75%) PCI DSS
13 60 (0.67%) GAAP
13 60 (0.67%) ISO 20022
14 36 (0.40%) SEPA
15 35 (0.39%) NCSC
16 34 (0.38%) PSD2
17 29 (0.32%) IFRS 17
18 28 (0.31%) SOC 2
19 27 (0.30%) EMIR
System Software
1 284 (3.18%) Docker
2 166 (1.86%) Active Directory
3 54 (0.60%) VMware Infrastructure
4 28 (0.31%) vSphere
5 25 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
5 25 (0.28%) Virtual Machines
6 15 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
7 14 (0.16%) VMware NSX
8 12 (0.13%) RACF
9 11 (0.12%) Hyper-V
10 10 (0.11%) NFS
11 6 (0.067%) GPFS
11 6 (0.067%) KVM
12 5 (0.056%) Microsoft App-V
13 4 (0.045%) Firmware
13 4 (0.045%) Oracle RAC
14 3 (0.034%) GridGain
14 3 (0.034%) HDFS
14 3 (0.034%) SRDF
15 2 (0.022%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 415 (4.65%) Kubernetes
2 263 (2.95%) Terraform
3 138 (1.55%) Ansible
4 93 (1.04%) Grafana
5 78 (0.87%) Prometheus
6 65 (0.73%) Microsoft Intune
7 46 (0.52%) SCCM
8 40 (0.45%) Single Sign-On
9 31 (0.35%) FortiGate
10 21 (0.24%) Control-M
11 17 (0.19%) vRealize
12 15 (0.17%) Active Directory Federation Services
12 15 (0.17%) Argo
12 15 (0.17%) Progress Chef
13 14 (0.16%) Nessus
13 14 (0.16%) Puppet
14 13 (0.15%) AirWatch
14 13 (0.15%) HP ALM
15 11 (0.12%) CASB
16 9 (0.10%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 1,133 (12.69%) Microsoft
2 779 (8.73%) SAP
3 742 (8.31%) Oracle
4 302 (3.38%) ServiceNow
5 260 (2.91%) Databricks
6 198 (2.22%) Salesforce
7 197 (2.21%) Google
8 124 (1.39%) Workday
9 118 (1.32%) Cisco
10 115 (1.29%) Splunk
11 106 (1.19%) VMware
12 100 (1.12%) IBM
13 85 (0.95%) CyberArk
14 82 (0.92%) Ariba
15 66 (0.74%) Sage
16 64 (0.72%) Citrix
17 61 (0.68%) OpenAI
18 51 (0.57%) Bloomberg
18 51 (0.57%) Palo Alto
19 49 (0.55%) IFS