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

6 months to
19 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,311 6,757 8,209
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.42% 22.66% 18.71%
As % of the General category 33.99% 35.68% 32.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,794 4,415 5,487
10th Percentile £355 £350 £350
25th Percentile £443 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £694 £714
90th Percentile £800 £825 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £500
% change year-on-year +2.56% -2.50% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 229 132 269
10th Percentile £14.82 £16.63 £12.79
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.55 £15.17
Median hourly rate £35.00 £39.06 £27.00
Median % change year-on-year -10.38% +44.65% -3.50%
75th Percentile £54.00 £65.25 £38.12
90th Percentile £85.60 £79.84 £56.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.30 £30.79 £28.00
% change year-on-year +37.38% +9.96% -42.00%

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 27,395 18,938 25,018
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 54.21% 63.50% 57.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,527 11,957 15,649
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £769
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £470 £488
% change year-on-year +6.38% -3.59% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,837 906 2,015
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.48 £12.78
25th Percentile £18.22 £16.57 £15.50
Median hourly rate £32.00 £27.70 £30.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.52% -9.18% -0.07%
75th Percentile £61.18 £53.95 £52.50
90th Percentile £81.05 £75.00 £67.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.46 £24.34 £29.75
% change year-on-year +29.25% -18.18% +12.31%

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 19 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 19 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 19 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 8,189 £550 -2.22% 3,512
London 0 4,897 £575 -4.17% 1,800
UK excluding London +1 3,749 £500 +2.56% 2,436
Work from Home -1 2,668 £550 -4.35% 1,503
North of England +2 1,281 £495 +7.03% 608
South East 0 693 £500 -4.53% 836
North West +4 677 £465 +3.33% 329
Midlands 0 639 £500 +11.11% 374
Yorkshire 0 556 £525 +10.53% 212
Scotland 0 468 £500 +4.82% 112
West Midlands +1 463 £504 +0.75% 215
South West -3 381 £525 - 233
East of England +2 195 £513 -10.87% 174
East Midlands -1 169 £475 +11.76% 155
Wales +7 90 £525 +12.90% 72
Northern Ireland -1 54 £525 +23.53% 75
North East -17 49 £500 +13.64% 78
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
1 331 (3.55%) Confluence
2 219 (2.35%) SharePoint
3 85 (0.91%) Apache Spark
4 67 (0.72%) Apache Airflow
5 55 (0.59%) Apache
6 53 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
7 32 (0.34%) SAS
8 27 (0.29%) CMS
9 21 (0.23%) Oracle Workflow
10 19 (0.20%) CICS
11 16 (0.17%) IIS
12 12 (0.13%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 12 (0.13%) Appian
12 12 (0.13%) Camunda
12 12 (0.13%) Ethereum
13 10 (0.11%) Jupyter
13 10 (0.11%) WebSphere
14 6 (0.064%) Hyperledger
14 6 (0.064%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 6 (0.064%) TPMS
Applications
1 514 (5.52%) Microsoft Excel
2 217 (2.33%) Microsoft Office
3 171 (1.84%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 157 (1.69%) Microsoft Project
5 114 (1.22%) MS Visio
6 61 (0.66%) Spreadsheet
7 36 (0.39%) Chatbot
8 9 (0.097%) Sketch
9 8 (0.086%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 7 (0.075%) Adobe XD
11 6 (0.064%) InVision
12 5 (0.054%) Trello
13 4 (0.043%) Notion
13 4 (0.043%) Oracle Smart View
14 3 (0.032%) Adobe Illustrator
14 3 (0.032%) Photoshop
15 2 (0.021%) AutoCAD
16 1 (0.011%) Adobe Premiere
16 1 (0.011%) Final Cut Pro
16 1 (0.011%) MicroStation
Business Applications
1 414 (4.45%) SAP S/4HANA
2 109 (1.17%) NetSuite
3 108 (1.16%) Oracle Payables
4 86 (0.92%) Oracle Receivables
5 84 (0.90%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 73 (0.78%) Oracle ERP
7 59 (0.63%) SAP FI
8 48 (0.52%) Oracle EBS
9 45 (0.48%) Dynamics CRM
9 45 (0.48%) SAP CO
10 43 (0.46%) Oracle General Ledger
10 43 (0.46%) SAP FI/CO
11 38 (0.41%) Aladdin
12 34 (0.37%) Oracle Financials
12 34 (0.37%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 29 (0.31%) SAP ERP
14 28 (0.30%) Unit4 Business World
15 26 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
16 25 (0.27%) SAP BRIM
17 22 (0.24%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,462 (15.70%) Azure
2 1,050 (11.28%) AWS
3 625 (6.71%) Power Platform
4 459 (4.93%) GCP
5 314 (3.37%) Azure DevOps
6 311 (3.34%) SaaS
7 282 (3.03%) Microsoft 365
8 236 (2.53%) GitHub
9 214 (2.30%) Dynamics 365
10 184 (1.98%) Snowflake
11 167 (1.79%) Entra ID
12 143 (1.54%) Serverless
13 127 (1.36%) OCI
14 117 (1.26%) Amazon S3
15 110 (1.18%) Power Automate
16 103 (1.11%) Azure Data Factory
17 92 (0.99%) Microsoft Copilot
18 89 (0.96%) dbt
19 88 (0.95%) GitHub Actions
20 85 (0.91%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 169 (1.82%) Firewall
2 136 (1.46%) Network Security
3 78 (0.84%) WAN
4 74 (0.79%) DNS
5 68 (0.73%) VPN
6 59 (0.63%) TCP/IP
7 42 (0.45%) BGP
8 39 (0.42%) SSL
9 38 (0.41%) SD-WAN
10 37 (0.40%) LAN
11 36 (0.39%) HTTP
12 30 (0.32%) Multicast
13 29 (0.31%) DHCP
13 29 (0.31%) OSPF
14 24 (0.26%) MPLS
15 21 (0.23%) Cisco ASA
15 21 (0.23%) Internet
16 19 (0.20%) VSAN
17 17 (0.18%) VLAN
18 16 (0.17%) DMZ
Database & Business Intelligence
1 533 (5.72%) Power BI
2 251 (2.70%) SQL Server
3 233 (2.50%) Data Warehouse
4 194 (2.08%) Metadata
5 174 (1.87%) PostgreSQL
6 171 (1.84%) Relational Database
7 150 (1.61%) Tableau
8 142 (1.53%) Data Lake
9 93 (1.00%) NoSQL
10 83 (0.89%) Oracle Reports
11 75 (0.81%) Big Data
12 69 (0.74%) Oracle Database
13 67 (0.72%) MongoDB
14 65 (0.70%) BigQuery
15 56 (0.60%) Snowflake Schema
16 48 (0.52%) Power Query
16 48 (0.52%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 45 (0.48%) Delta Lake
18 44 (0.47%) Azure SQL Database
19 37 (0.40%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 676 (7.26%) JIRA
2 229 (2.46%) Git
3 165 (1.77%) Jenkins
4 96 (1.03%) GitLab
5 56 (0.60%) JUnit
6 45 (0.48%) Cucumber
7 36 (0.39%) Selenium
8 31 (0.33%) Visual Studio
9 30 (0.32%) Sonatype Nexus
10 26 (0.28%) MLflow
10 26 (0.28%) Postman
11 24 (0.26%) ERwin
12 23 (0.25%) SonarQube
13 21 (0.23%) REST Assured
14 20 (0.21%) Maven
14 20 (0.21%) Zephyr
15 18 (0.19%) Oracle Forms
16 16 (0.17%) Hudson
17 15 (0.16%) TeamCity
18 14 (0.15%) Bitbucket
General
1 2,713 (29.14%) Social Skills
2 1,711 (18.38%) Banking
3 1,194 (12.82%) Analytical Skills
4 523 (5.62%) Public Sector
5 454 (4.88%) Legal
6 366 (3.93%) Investment Banking
7 348 (3.74%) Financial Institution
8 327 (3.51%) Front Office
9 297 (3.19%) Organisational Skills
10 294 (3.16%) Retail
11 235 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
12 234 (2.51%) Influencing Skills
13 168 (1.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 167 (1.79%) Manufacturing
15 151 (1.62%) General Ledger
16 146 (1.57%) Local Government
17 142 (1.53%) Billing
18 135 (1.45%) Law
19 132 (1.42%) Marketing
20 131 (1.41%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,363 (14.64%) Analyst
2 1,013 (10.88%) Senior
3 970 (10.42%) Lead
4 947 (10.17%) Developer
5 868 (9.32%) Architect
6 715 (7.68%) Project Manager
7 697 (7.49%) Business Analyst
8 617 (6.63%) Consultant
9 355 (3.81%) Solutions Architect
10 310 (3.33%) Data Engineer
11 224 (2.41%) Financial Analyst
12 221 (2.37%) Senior Manager
13 197 (2.12%) Finance Manager
14 195 (2.09%) Java Developer
15 193 (2.07%) Data Analyst
16 192 (2.06%) Accountant
17 176 (1.89%) Senior Developer
18 175 (1.88%) Programme Manager
19 174 (1.87%) Software Engineer
20 165 (1.77%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 285 (3.06%) REST
2 262 (2.81%) .NET
3 261 (2.80%) React
4 259 (2.78%) Kafka
5 202 (2.17%) Oracle Fusion
6 190 (2.04%) Middleware
7 170 (1.83%) Spring
8 163 (1.75%) Spring Boot
9 138 (1.48%) RESTful
10 116 (1.25%) Redux
11 111 (1.19%) PySpark
12 107 (1.15%) Node.js
13 94 (1.01%) AngularJS
14 93 (1.00%) JSON
15 88 (0.95%) OAuth
16 78 (0.84%) XML
17 65 (0.70%) CSS
18 62 (0.67%) OpenID
19 61 (0.66%) GraphQL
20 59 (0.63%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 417 (4.48%) Onboarding
2 390 (4.19%) Product Ownership
3 383 (4.11%) Cloud Native
4 256 (2.75%) Legacy Systems
5 213 (2.29%) Management Information System
6 208 (2.23%) Data Structures
7 170 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
7 170 (1.83%) Derivative
8 168 (1.80%) Fixed Income
9 165 (1.77%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 160 (1.72%) Data Centre
11 158 (1.70%) Distributed Systems
12 136 (1.46%) Virtual Team
13 128 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
14 124 (1.33%) Equities
15 110 (1.18%) AI Agents
15 110 (1.18%) Public Cloud
16 99 (1.06%) Self-Motivation
17 97 (1.04%) Analytical Mindset
18 84 (0.90%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 313 (3.36%) Windows
2 273 (2.93%) Linux
3 147 (1.58%) Unix
4 72 (0.77%) Windows Server
5 38 (0.41%) Solaris
6 36 (0.39%) Windows 10
7 35 (0.38%) zOS
8 34 (0.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 31 (0.33%) Apple iOS
10 27 (0.29%) Android
11 20 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 19 (0.20%) AIX
13 7 (0.075%) Oracle Linux
13 7 (0.075%) Ubuntu
13 7 (0.075%) VMS
14 5 (0.054%) HPUX
14 5 (0.054%) SUSE
14 5 (0.054%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.043%) MVS
15 4 (0.043%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,956 (21.01%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,877 (20.16%) Agile
3 1,287 (13.82%) Migration
4 1,227 (13.18%) Problem-Solving
5 1,057 (11.35%) Continuous Improvement
6 1,015 (10.90%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 986 (10.59%) AI
8 978 (10.50%) ERP
9 976 (10.48%) DevOps
10 950 (10.20%) CI/CD
11 905 (9.72%) Analytics
12 803 (8.62%) Decision-Making
13 788 (8.46%) Project Management
14 770 (8.27%) Data Modelling
15 766 (8.23%) Validation
16 757 (8.13%) Roadmaps
17 729 (7.83%) User Acceptance Testing
18 676 (7.26%) Business Intelligence
19 662 (7.11%) Change Management
20 591 (6.35%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 1,246 (13.38%) SQL
2 1,136 (12.20%) Python
3 631 (6.78%) Java
4 385 (4.13%) C#
5 254 (2.73%) JavaScript
6 253 (2.72%) TypeScript
7 208 (2.23%) PowerShell
8 99 (1.06%) C++
9 85 (0.91%) Bash
10 81 (0.87%) PL/SQL
11 76 (0.82%) Go
12 72 (0.77%) T-SQL
13 57 (0.61%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 55 (0.59%) Shell Script
15 44 (0.47%) Scala
16 43 (0.46%) VBA
17 32 (0.34%) Apex Code
17 32 (0.34%) Bicep
18 31 (0.33%) Rust
19 29 (0.31%) R
Qualifications
1 741 (7.96%) Degree
2 694 (7.45%) Security Cleared
3 499 (5.36%) SC Cleared
4 231 (2.48%) ACCA
5 220 (2.36%) PMP
6 208 (2.23%) CIMA
7 193 (2.07%) PMI Certification
8 184 (1.98%) BPSS Clearance
9 152 (1.63%) CISSP
10 136 (1.46%) Computer Science Degree
11 92 (0.99%) CISM
11 92 (0.99%) DV Cleared
12 89 (0.96%) Master's Degree
13 80 (0.86%) Azure Certification
14 71 (0.76%) Cisco Certification
15 49 (0.53%) AWS Certification
16 46 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
17 39 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 36 (0.39%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
19 34 (0.37%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 568 (6.10%) Data Quality
2 418 (4.49%) QA
3 325 (3.49%) PMO
4 300 (3.22%) GDPR
5 168 (1.80%) NIST
6 131 (1.41%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 116 (1.25%) IFRS
8 109 (1.17%) SLA
9 107 (1.15%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 106 (1.14%) GRC
11 93 (1.00%) Accessibility
12 66 (0.71%) PCI DSS
13 64 (0.69%) GAAP
14 62 (0.67%) ISO 20022
15 38 (0.41%) SEPA
16 35 (0.38%) NCSC
16 35 (0.38%) PSD2
16 35 (0.38%) Solvency II
17 30 (0.32%) IFRS 17
18 29 (0.31%) SOC 2
System Software
1 279 (3.00%) Docker
2 185 (1.99%) Active Directory
3 53 (0.57%) VMware Infrastructure
4 29 (0.31%) Virtual Machines
4 29 (0.31%) vSphere
5 24 (0.26%) Virtual Desktop
6 16 (0.17%) RACF
7 15 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
8 14 (0.15%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.12%) Hyper-V
10 10 (0.11%) NFS
11 6 (0.064%) GPFS
11 6 (0.064%) KVM
12 5 (0.054%) Microsoft App-V
12 5 (0.054%) Oracle RAC
13 4 (0.043%) Firmware
14 3 (0.032%) GridGain
14 3 (0.032%) SRDF
15 2 (0.021%) Ceph
15 2 (0.021%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 415 (4.46%) Kubernetes
2 277 (2.97%) Terraform
3 150 (1.61%) Ansible
4 88 (0.95%) Grafana
5 76 (0.82%) Prometheus
6 64 (0.69%) Microsoft Intune
7 48 (0.52%) SCCM
8 44 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
9 32 (0.34%) FortiGate
10 26 (0.28%) Control-M
11 18 (0.19%) Progress Chef
11 18 (0.19%) vRealize
12 15 (0.16%) Argo
13 14 (0.15%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 14 (0.15%) HP ALM
13 14 (0.15%) Nessus
14 13 (0.14%) AirWatch
14 13 (0.14%) OMEGAMON
14 13 (0.14%) Puppet
15 12 (0.13%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 1,171 (12.58%) Microsoft
2 819 (8.80%) SAP
3 774 (8.31%) Oracle
4 320 (3.44%) ServiceNow
5 280 (3.01%) Databricks
6 216 (2.32%) Salesforce
7 207 (2.22%) Google
8 133 (1.43%) Workday
9 121 (1.30%) Cisco
10 117 (1.26%) IBM
11 111 (1.19%) Splunk
11 111 (1.19%) VMware
12 94 (1.01%) CyberArk
13 85 (0.91%) Ariba
14 68 (0.73%) OpenAI
15 66 (0.71%) Sage
16 65 (0.70%) Citrix
17 53 (0.57%) Bloomberg
17 53 (0.57%) Palo Alto
18 52 (0.56%) Informatica