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 4 July 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,564 7,152 8,249
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.53% 22.67% 18.99%
As % of the General category 33.95% 35.91% 33.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,936 4,708 5,537
10th Percentile £356 £350 £350
25th Percentile £447 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £717
90th Percentile £800 £820 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £492 £500
% change year-on-year +1.63% -1.60% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 243 141 254
10th Percentile £15.00 £16.00 £13.23
25th Percentile £19.14 £22.90 £15.80
Median hourly rate £35.00 £32.50 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% +16.07% -7.83%
75th Percentile £57.00 £65.00 £38.12
90th Percentile £87.40 £76.25 £57.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.13 £28.50 £32.12
% change year-on-year +51.33% -11.26% -28.63%

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 28,167 19,915 24,791
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 54.57% 63.13% 57.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,875 12,519 15,502
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.73% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £626 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £470 £490
% change year-on-year +6.38% -4.08% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,947 987 1,949
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.50 £12.82
25th Percentile £18.09 £16.39 £15.62
Median hourly rate £32.00 £27.22 £31.80
Median % change year-on-year +17.56% -14.40% +4.13%
75th Percentile £60.00 £52.00 £53.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.06 £68.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.95 £23.00 £30.91
% change year-on-year +38.91% -25.60% +19.12%

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 4 July 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 4 July 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 4 July 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 8,369 £550 - 5,679
London 0 5,028 £575 -4.17% 3,132
UK excluding London +1 3,814 £500 +1.63% 3,235
Work from Home -1 2,778 £550 -4.35% 2,453
North of England +2 1,285 £500 +7.53% 852
South East 0 711 £500 -4.76% 1,008
North West +4 668 £475 +5.56% 456
Midlands +1 652 £500 +11.11% 463
Yorkshire 0 573 £525 +7.69% 295
Scotland 0 487 £475 -1.61% 190
West Midlands +1 480 £500 +1.63% 264
South West -4 379 £525 -4.55% 354
East of England +5 202 £520 -9.57% 258
East Midlands 0 165 £500 +17.65% 198
Wales +6 89 £525 +12.90% 73
Northern Ireland -1 57 £475 +11.76% 83
North East -20 45 £500 +13.64% 111
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
1 334 (3.49%) Confluence
2 233 (2.44%) SharePoint
3 86 (0.90%) Apache Spark
4 73 (0.76%) Apache Airflow
5 58 (0.61%) Apache
6 53 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
7 33 (0.35%) SAS
8 29 (0.30%) CMS
9 20 (0.21%) Oracle Workflow
10 19 (0.20%) CICS
11 18 (0.19%) IIS
12 13 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 12 (0.13%) Camunda
14 11 (0.12%) Ethereum
14 11 (0.12%) Jupyter
15 8 (0.084%) Appian
16 7 (0.073%) WebSphere
17 6 (0.063%) Hyperledger
18 5 (0.052%) WebLogic
19 4 (0.042%) JBoss
Applications
1 516 (5.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 223 (2.33%) Microsoft Office
3 171 (1.79%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 150 (1.57%) Microsoft Project
5 117 (1.22%) MS Visio
6 68 (0.71%) Spreadsheet
7 36 (0.38%) Chatbot
8 5 (0.052%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 5 (0.052%) Sketch
8 5 (0.052%) Trello
9 4 (0.042%) Adobe Illustrator
9 4 (0.042%) Adobe XD
9 4 (0.042%) Notion
9 4 (0.042%) Oracle Smart View
9 4 (0.042%) Photoshop
10 2 (0.021%) Adobe Premiere
10 2 (0.021%) AutoCAD
10 2 (0.021%) Final Cut Pro
10 2 (0.021%) InVision
11 1 (0.010%) UserZoom
Business Applications
1 433 (4.53%) SAP S/4HANA
2 111 (1.16%) NetSuite
3 107 (1.12%) Oracle Payables
4 88 (0.92%) Oracle Receivables
5 79 (0.83%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 77 (0.81%) Oracle ERP
7 63 (0.66%) SAP FI
8 49 (0.51%) Dynamics CRM
8 49 (0.51%) Oracle EBS
9 48 (0.50%) Oracle General Ledger
10 43 (0.45%) SAP CO
11 41 (0.43%) SAP FI/CO
12 38 (0.40%) Aladdin
12 38 (0.40%) Oracle Financials
13 28 (0.29%) SAP ERP
14 27 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
14 27 (0.28%) Workday HCM
15 26 (0.27%) SAP BRIM
16 25 (0.26%) Oracle EBS R12
17 24 (0.25%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,497 (15.65%) Azure
2 1,075 (11.24%) AWS
3 638 (6.67%) Power Platform
4 487 (5.09%) GCP
5 326 (3.41%) Azure DevOps
6 312 (3.26%) SaaS
7 285 (2.98%) Microsoft 365
8 255 (2.67%) GitHub
9 220 (2.30%) Dynamics 365
10 202 (2.11%) Snowflake
11 180 (1.88%) Entra ID
12 141 (1.47%) Serverless
13 123 (1.29%) Amazon S3
14 118 (1.23%) OCI
15 109 (1.14%) Power Automate
16 105 (1.10%) Azure Data Factory
17 100 (1.05%) Microsoft Copilot
18 97 (1.01%) dbt
19 95 (0.99%) GitHub Actions
20 88 (0.92%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 183 (1.91%) Firewall
2 146 (1.53%) Network Security
3 82 (0.86%) DNS
4 75 (0.78%) VPN
5 72 (0.75%) WAN
6 61 (0.64%) TCP/IP
7 45 (0.47%) BGP
7 45 (0.47%) SSL
8 39 (0.41%) LAN
9 35 (0.37%) HTTP
10 33 (0.35%) DHCP
10 33 (0.35%) Multicast
11 32 (0.33%) SD-WAN
12 31 (0.32%) OSPF
13 26 (0.27%) Internet
14 24 (0.25%) MPLS
15 21 (0.22%) Cisco ASA
16 18 (0.19%) Wireless
17 17 (0.18%) VLAN
17 17 (0.18%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 540 (5.65%) Power BI
2 264 (2.76%) SQL Server
3 249 (2.60%) Data Warehouse
4 204 (2.13%) Metadata
5 181 (1.89%) Relational Database
6 177 (1.85%) PostgreSQL
7 151 (1.58%) Tableau
8 142 (1.48%) Data Lake
9 88 (0.92%) NoSQL
10 87 (0.91%) Oracle Reports
11 76 (0.79%) Oracle Database
12 71 (0.74%) Big Data
13 70 (0.73%) MongoDB
14 69 (0.72%) BigQuery
15 64 (0.67%) Snowflake Schema
16 48 (0.50%) Power Query
16 48 (0.50%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 45 (0.47%) Azure SQL Database
18 44 (0.46%) Delta Lake
19 42 (0.44%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 679 (7.10%) JIRA
2 251 (2.62%) Git
3 176 (1.84%) Jenkins
4 97 (1.01%) GitLab
5 55 (0.58%) JUnit
6 49 (0.51%) Cucumber
7 46 (0.48%) Selenium
8 30 (0.31%) Sonatype Nexus
9 28 (0.29%) Postman
10 26 (0.27%) ERwin
10 26 (0.27%) Visual Studio
11 24 (0.25%) REST Assured
12 23 (0.24%) SonarQube
13 22 (0.23%) Maven
13 22 (0.23%) MLflow
14 19 (0.20%) Oracle Forms
14 19 (0.20%) Zephyr
15 17 (0.18%) Hudson
15 17 (0.18%) TeamCity
16 15 (0.16%) Gradle
General
1 2,796 (29.23%) Social Skills
2 1,756 (18.36%) Banking
3 1,280 (13.38%) Analytical Skills
4 545 (5.70%) Public Sector
5 477 (4.99%) Legal
6 374 (3.91%) Investment Banking
7 360 (3.76%) Financial Institution
8 340 (3.55%) Front Office
9 307 (3.21%) Organisational Skills
10 305 (3.19%) Retail
11 248 (2.59%) Influencing Skills
12 236 (2.47%) Documentation Skills
13 178 (1.86%) Manufacturing
14 167 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 161 (1.68%) Local Government
16 156 (1.63%) Billing
17 154 (1.61%) General Ledger
18 140 (1.46%) Marketing
19 131 (1.37%) Law
20 129 (1.35%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,409 (14.73%) Analyst
2 1,015 (10.61%) Senior
3 1,005 (10.51%) Lead
4 961 (10.05%) Developer
5 895 (9.36%) Architect
6 729 (7.62%) Business Analyst
7 701 (7.33%) Project Manager
8 652 (6.82%) Consultant
9 350 (3.66%) Solutions Architect
10 315 (3.29%) Data Engineer
11 225 (2.35%) Financial Analyst
12 223 (2.33%) Senior Manager
13 202 (2.11%) Data Analyst
14 199 (2.08%) Java Developer
15 196 (2.05%) Accountant
16 188 (1.97%) Finance Manager
17 186 (1.94%) Programme Manager
18 176 (1.84%) Software Engineer
19 173 (1.81%) IT Manager
20 172 (1.80%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 298 (3.12%) REST
2 269 (2.81%) .NET
3 265 (2.77%) React
4 261 (2.73%) Kafka
5 200 (2.09%) Middleware
5 200 (2.09%) Oracle Fusion
6 177 (1.85%) Spring
7 165 (1.73%) Spring Boot
8 135 (1.41%) RESTful
9 116 (1.21%) Redux
10 114 (1.19%) PySpark
11 111 (1.16%) Node.js
12 93 (0.97%) JSON
13 91 (0.95%) AngularJS
14 87 (0.91%) OAuth
15 73 (0.76%) XML
16 65 (0.68%) SOAP
17 64 (0.67%) CSS
18 63 (0.66%) OpenID
19 62 (0.65%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 447 (4.67%) Onboarding
2 412 (4.31%) Product Ownership
3 402 (4.20%) Cloud Native
4 260 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
5 216 (2.26%) Management Information System
6 215 (2.25%) Data Structures
7 177 (1.85%) Data Protection Act
8 170 (1.78%) Derivative
8 170 (1.78%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 168 (1.76%) Fixed Income
10 165 (1.73%) Data Centre
11 164 (1.71%) Distributed Systems
12 146 (1.53%) Virtual Team
13 131 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
14 128 (1.34%) AI Agents
15 124 (1.30%) Equities
16 116 (1.21%) Public Cloud
17 109 (1.14%) Analytical Mindset
18 108 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
19 93 (0.97%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 324 (3.39%) Windows
2 275 (2.88%) Linux
3 153 (1.60%) Unix
4 72 (0.75%) Windows Server
5 39 (0.41%) zOS
6 38 (0.40%) Solaris
7 36 (0.38%) Windows 10
8 35 (0.37%) Apple iOS
8 35 (0.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 29 (0.30%) Android
10 25 (0.26%) Mac OS
11 19 (0.20%) AIX
12 9 (0.094%) VMS
13 7 (0.073%) Oracle Linux
13 7 (0.073%) Ubuntu
14 5 (0.052%) HPUX
14 5 (0.052%) SUSE
14 5 (0.052%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.042%) MVS
16 3 (0.031%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,070 (21.64%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,929 (20.17%) Agile
3 1,310 (13.70%) Migration
4 1,276 (13.34%) Problem-Solving
5 1,110 (11.61%) Continuous Improvement
6 1,079 (11.28%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 1,052 (11.00%) AI
8 1,010 (10.56%) DevOps
9 990 (10.35%) CI/CD
10 982 (10.27%) ERP
11 949 (9.92%) Analytics
12 854 (8.93%) Decision-Making
13 797 (8.33%) Validation
14 789 (8.25%) Roadmaps
15 785 (8.21%) Data Modelling
16 768 (8.03%) Project Management
17 752 (7.86%) User Acceptance Testing
18 685 (7.16%) Change Management
19 675 (7.06%) Business Intelligence
20 617 (6.45%) Risk Management
Programming Languages
1 1,273 (13.31%) SQL
2 1,169 (12.22%) Python
3 638 (6.67%) Java
4 382 (3.99%) C#
5 260 (2.72%) TypeScript
6 258 (2.70%) JavaScript
7 217 (2.27%) PowerShell
8 93 (0.97%) Bash
9 86 (0.90%) C++
10 82 (0.86%) PL/SQL
11 80 (0.84%) Go
12 75 (0.78%) T-SQL
13 64 (0.67%) Shell Script
14 59 (0.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 50 (0.52%) VBA
16 49 (0.51%) Scala
17 39 (0.41%) Bicep
18 35 (0.37%) Apex Code
19 30 (0.31%) Kotlin
20 29 (0.30%) Rust
Qualifications
1 738 (7.72%) Degree
2 725 (7.58%) Security Cleared
3 518 (5.42%) SC Cleared
4 225 (2.35%) PMP
5 216 (2.26%) ACCA
6 202 (2.11%) PMI Certification
7 194 (2.03%) CIMA
8 179 (1.87%) BPSS Clearance
9 158 (1.65%) CISSP
10 130 (1.36%) Computer Science Degree
11 103 (1.08%) DV Cleared
12 93 (0.97%) CISM
13 91 (0.95%) Azure Certification
14 85 (0.89%) Master's Degree
15 74 (0.77%) Cisco Certification
16 56 (0.59%) AWS Certification
17 47 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
18 42 (0.44%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
19 38 (0.40%) (ISC)2 CCSP
20 32 (0.33%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 595 (6.22%) Data Quality
2 420 (4.39%) QA
3 335 (3.50%) PMO
4 302 (3.16%) GDPR
5 163 (1.70%) NIST
6 130 (1.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 112 (1.17%) IFRS
7 112 (1.17%) SLA
8 106 (1.11%) GRC
9 98 (1.02%) Accessibility
10 97 (1.01%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 64 (0.67%) GAAP
11 64 (0.67%) ISO 20022
12 61 (0.64%) PCI DSS
13 40 (0.42%) SEPA
14 38 (0.40%) Solvency II
15 37 (0.39%) NCSC
16 30 (0.31%) PSD2
16 30 (0.31%) SOC 2
17 29 (0.30%) COBIT
System Software
1 277 (2.90%) Docker
2 198 (2.07%) Active Directory
3 58 (0.61%) VMware Infrastructure
4 31 (0.32%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.28%) vSphere
6 22 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
7 20 (0.21%) RACF
8 16 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.14%) VMware NSX
10 12 (0.13%) NFS
11 10 (0.10%) Hyper-V
12 6 (0.063%) GPFS
12 6 (0.063%) KVM
13 5 (0.052%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.052%) Oracle RAC
14 3 (0.031%) GridGain
14 3 (0.031%) IAG
14 3 (0.031%) SRDF
15 2 (0.021%) ACF2
15 2 (0.021%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 436 (4.56%) Kubernetes
2 306 (3.20%) Terraform
3 156 (1.63%) Ansible
4 89 (0.93%) Grafana
5 74 (0.77%) Prometheus
6 67 (0.70%) Microsoft Intune
7 50 (0.52%) SCCM
8 48 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
9 25 (0.26%) Control-M
9 25 (0.26%) FortiGate
10 18 (0.19%) Progress Chef
10 18 (0.19%) vRealize
11 17 (0.18%) OMEGAMON
12 16 (0.17%) Argo
12 16 (0.17%) HP ALM
13 15 (0.16%) Jamf Pro
14 14 (0.15%) Nessus
15 13 (0.14%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 13 (0.14%) Puppet
16 11 (0.12%) CASB
Vendors
1 1,214 (12.69%) Microsoft
2 825 (8.63%) SAP
3 789 (8.25%) Oracle
4 349 (3.65%) ServiceNow
5 291 (3.04%) Databricks
6 218 (2.28%) Salesforce
7 212 (2.22%) Google
8 136 (1.42%) Workday
9 132 (1.38%) IBM
10 117 (1.22%) Cisco
11 116 (1.21%) Splunk
11 116 (1.21%) VMware
12 94 (0.98%) CyberArk
13 87 (0.91%) Ariba
14 66 (0.69%) Sage
15 65 (0.68%) OpenAI
16 63 (0.66%) Citrix
17 57 (0.60%) Informatica
18 56 (0.59%) Bloomberg
19 50 (0.52%) Murex