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

6 months to
21 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,341 6,784 8,218
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.43% 22.68% 18.72%
As % of the General category 33.96% 35.71% 32.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,824 4,428 5,497
10th Percentile £355 £350 £353
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 £691 £714
90th Percentile £800 £825 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £500
% change year-on-year +2.41% -2.35% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 229 133 272
10th Percentile £14.82 £16.76 £12.81
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.66 £15.17
Median hourly rate £35.53 £38.11 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year -6.77% +38.58% -8.33%
75th Percentile £54.00 £65.25 £38.12
90th Percentile £85.60 £79.68 £56.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.30 £30.79 £28.00
% change year-on-year +37.38% +9.96% -41.53%

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 27,509 18,996 25,006
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 54.28% 63.51% 56.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,595 11,964 15,619
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.95% -4.71% -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 1,848 913 2,035
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.50 £12.78
25th Percentile £18.25 £16.63 £15.50
Median hourly rate £32.36 £28.00 £31.25
Median % change year-on-year +15.58% -10.40% +4.17%
75th Percentile £61.18 £53.95 £53.00
90th Percentile £80.46 £75.00 £67.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.78 £24.34 £30.00
% change year-on-year +30.56% -18.87% +15.50%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 8,210 £550 -0.90% 3,456
London 0 4,916 £575 -4.17% 1,783
UK excluding London +1 3,754 £500 +2.41% 2,489
Work from Home -1 2,692 £550 -4.35% 1,526
North of England +2 1,283 £500 +7.53% 586
South East -1 694 £500 -4.76% 841
North West +4 678 £466 +3.44% 319
Midlands 0 641 £500 +11.11% 354
Yorkshire 0 559 £525 +10.53% 206
Scotland 0 471 £500 +5.26% 119
West Midlands +1 467 £500 - 209
South West -3 379 £525 - 236
East of England +3 194 £516 -10.22% 175
East Midlands -1 167 £473 +11.83% 143
Wales +8 90 £525 +12.90% 69
Northern Ireland -1 54 £525 +23.53% 160
North East -18 47 £500 +13.64% 71
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 (3.58%) Confluence
2 223 (2.39%) SharePoint
3 88 (0.94%) Apache Spark
4 69 (0.74%) Apache Airflow
5 58 (0.62%) Apache
6 53 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
7 32 (0.34%) SAS
8 27 (0.29%) CMS
9 22 (0.24%) 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 11 (0.12%) Jupyter
14 10 (0.11%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.064%) Hyperledger
15 6 (0.064%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 6 (0.064%) TPMS
Applications
1 518 (5.55%) Microsoft Excel
2 219 (2.34%) Microsoft Office
3 172 (1.84%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 158 (1.69%) Microsoft Project
5 113 (1.21%) MS Visio
6 63 (0.67%) Spreadsheet
7 36 (0.39%) Chatbot
8 9 (0.096%) 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
1 417 (4.46%) SAP S/4HANA
2 110 (1.18%) NetSuite
2 110 (1.18%) Oracle Payables
3 88 (0.94%) Oracle Receivables
4 85 (0.91%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 73 (0.78%) Oracle ERP
6 60 (0.64%) SAP FI
7 48 (0.51%) Oracle EBS
8 46 (0.49%) SAP CO
9 45 (0.48%) Dynamics CRM
9 45 (0.48%) Oracle General Ledger
10 44 (0.47%) SAP FI/CO
11 39 (0.42%) Aladdin
12 34 (0.36%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 33 (0.35%) Oracle Financials
14 29 (0.31%) SAP ERP
15 26 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
15 26 (0.28%) Unit4 Business World
16 25 (0.27%) SAP BRIM
17 22 (0.24%) Oracle EBS R12
Cloud Services
1 1,472 (15.76%) Azure
2 1,053 (11.27%) AWS
3 630 (6.74%) Power Platform
4 462 (4.95%) GCP
5 319 (3.42%) Azure DevOps
6 312 (3.34%) SaaS
7 281 (3.01%) Microsoft 365
8 238 (2.55%) GitHub
9 216 (2.31%) Dynamics 365
10 188 (2.01%) Snowflake
11 170 (1.82%) Entra ID
12 145 (1.55%) Serverless
13 126 (1.35%) OCI
14 120 (1.28%) Amazon S3
15 110 (1.18%) Power Automate
16 104 (1.11%) Azure Data Factory
17 91 (0.97%) dbt
17 91 (0.97%) Microsoft Copilot
18 88 (0.94%) GitHub Actions
19 85 (0.91%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 172 (1.84%) Firewall
2 137 (1.47%) 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%) OSPF
14 27 (0.29%) DHCP
15 24 (0.26%) MPLS
16 22 (0.24%) Internet
17 21 (0.22%) Cisco ASA
18 19 (0.20%) VSAN
19 17 (0.18%) VLAN
20 16 (0.17%) DMZ
Database & Business Intelligence
1 538 (5.76%) Power BI
2 255 (2.73%) SQL Server
3 236 (2.53%) Data Warehouse
4 195 (2.09%) Metadata
5 175 (1.87%) PostgreSQL
6 173 (1.85%) Relational Database
7 151 (1.62%) Tableau
8 143 (1.53%) Data Lake
9 94 (1.01%) NoSQL
10 85 (0.91%) Oracle Reports
11 75 (0.80%) Big Data
12 72 (0.77%) Oracle Database
13 68 (0.73%) MongoDB
14 67 (0.72%) BigQuery
15 57 (0.61%) Snowflake Schema
16 48 (0.51%) Power Query
16 48 (0.51%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 46 (0.49%) Delta Lake
18 44 (0.47%) Azure SQL Database
19 38 (0.41%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 684 (7.32%) JIRA
2 233 (2.49%) Git
3 167 (1.79%) Jenkins
4 97 (1.04%) GitLab
5 58 (0.62%) JUnit
6 46 (0.49%) Cucumber
7 36 (0.39%) Selenium
8 31 (0.33%) Visual Studio
9 30 (0.32%) Sonatype Nexus
10 27 (0.29%) Postman
11 26 (0.28%) MLflow
12 24 (0.26%) ERwin
13 23 (0.25%) SonarQube
14 21 (0.22%) Maven
14 21 (0.22%) REST Assured
15 20 (0.21%) Zephyr
16 19 (0.20%) Oracle Forms
17 16 (0.17%) Hudson
18 15 (0.16%) Gradle
18 15 (0.16%) TeamCity
General
1 2,732 (29.25%) Social Skills
2 1,727 (18.49%) Banking
3 1,203 (12.88%) Analytical Skills
4 519 (5.56%) Public Sector
5 453 (4.85%) Legal
6 369 (3.95%) Investment Banking
7 349 (3.74%) Financial Institution
8 331 (3.54%) Front Office
9 298 (3.19%) Organisational Skills
10 295 (3.16%) Retail
11 236 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
12 234 (2.51%) Influencing Skills
13 169 (1.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 164 (1.76%) Manufacturing
15 152 (1.63%) General Ledger
16 149 (1.60%) Local Government
17 144 (1.54%) Billing
18 134 (1.43%) Law
19 133 (1.42%) Marketing
20 131 (1.40%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,367 (14.63%) Analyst
2 1,014 (10.86%) Senior
3 982 (10.51%) Lead
4 952 (10.19%) Developer
5 871 (9.32%) Architect
6 713 (7.63%) Project Manager
7 697 (7.46%) Business Analyst
8 622 (6.66%) Consultant
9 352 (3.77%) Solutions Architect
10 314 (3.36%) Data Engineer
11 224 (2.40%) Financial Analyst
12 220 (2.36%) Senior Manager
13 197 (2.11%) Finance Manager
13 197 (2.11%) Java Developer
14 195 (2.09%) Data Analyst
15 194 (2.08%) Accountant
16 178 (1.91%) Senior Developer
17 176 (1.88%) Software Engineer
18 172 (1.84%) Programme Manager
19 167 (1.79%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 287 (3.07%) REST
2 264 (2.83%) .NET
3 263 (2.82%) React
4 262 (2.80%) Kafka
5 205 (2.19%) Oracle Fusion
6 190 (2.03%) Middleware
7 175 (1.87%) Spring
8 168 (1.80%) Spring Boot
9 138 (1.48%) RESTful
10 117 (1.25%) Redux
11 112 (1.20%) PySpark
12 108 (1.16%) Node.js
13 94 (1.01%) AngularJS
14 93 (1.00%) JSON
15 88 (0.94%) OAuth
16 79 (0.85%) XML
17 65 (0.70%) CSS
18 63 (0.67%) OpenID
19 61 (0.65%) GraphQL
20 60 (0.64%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 415 (4.44%) Onboarding
2 394 (4.22%) Product Ownership
3 387 (4.14%) Cloud Native
4 256 (2.74%) Legacy Systems
5 216 (2.31%) Management Information System
6 207 (2.22%) Data Structures
7 170 (1.82%) Derivative
8 169 (1.81%) Data Protection Act
9 168 (1.80%) Fixed Income
10 165 (1.77%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 160 (1.71%) Data Centre
12 159 (1.70%) Distributed Systems
13 136 (1.46%) Virtual Team
14 130 (1.39%) Greenfield Project
15 124 (1.33%) Equities
16 112 (1.20%) Public Cloud
17 110 (1.18%) AI Agents
18 100 (1.07%) Self-Motivation
19 99 (1.06%) Analytical Mindset
20 86 (0.92%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 313 (3.35%) Windows
2 273 (2.92%) Linux
3 147 (1.57%) Unix
4 71 (0.76%) Windows Server
5 38 (0.41%) Solaris
6 36 (0.39%) Windows 10
7 35 (0.37%) zOS
8 34 (0.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 33 (0.35%) Apple iOS
10 28 (0.30%) 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
16 3 (0.032%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,966 (21.05%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,885 (20.18%) Agile
3 1,288 (13.79%) Migration
4 1,247 (13.35%) Problem-Solving
5 1,059 (11.34%) Continuous Improvement
6 1,019 (10.91%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 994 (10.64%) AI
8 983 (10.52%) DevOps
9 980 (10.49%) ERP
10 960 (10.28%) CI/CD
11 912 (9.76%) Analytics
12 807 (8.64%) Decision-Making
13 790 (8.46%) Project Management
14 773 (8.28%) Data Modelling
15 772 (8.26%) Validation
16 758 (8.11%) Roadmaps
17 729 (7.80%) User Acceptance Testing
18 678 (7.26%) Business Intelligence
19 665 (7.12%) Change Management
20 595 (6.37%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 1,255 (13.44%) SQL
2 1,144 (12.25%) Python
3 636 (6.81%) Java
4 384 (4.11%) C#
5 255 (2.73%) JavaScript
5 255 (2.73%) TypeScript
6 208 (2.23%) PowerShell
7 98 (1.05%) C++
8 85 (0.91%) Bash
9 82 (0.88%) PL/SQL
10 76 (0.81%) Go
11 73 (0.78%) T-SQL
12 57 (0.61%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 55 (0.59%) Shell Script
14 46 (0.49%) VBA
15 45 (0.48%) Scala
16 32 (0.34%) Apex Code
16 32 (0.34%) Bicep
17 31 (0.33%) Rust
18 29 (0.31%) R
Qualifications
1 743 (7.95%) Degree
2 694 (7.43%) Security Cleared
3 496 (5.31%) SC Cleared
4 229 (2.45%) ACCA
5 220 (2.36%) PMP
6 207 (2.22%) CIMA
7 192 (2.06%) PMI Certification
8 185 (1.98%) BPSS Clearance
9 154 (1.65%) CISSP
10 138 (1.48%) Computer Science Degree
11 94 (1.01%) DV Cleared
12 92 (0.98%) CISM
13 89 (0.95%) Master's Degree
14 80 (0.86%) Azure Certification
15 71 (0.76%) Cisco Certification
16 49 (0.52%) AWS Certification
17 46 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
18 39 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 37 (0.40%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
20 35 (0.37%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 574 (6.14%) Data Quality
2 415 (4.44%) QA
3 330 (3.53%) PMO
4 302 (3.23%) GDPR
5 167 (1.79%) NIST
6 130 (1.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 115 (1.23%) IFRS
8 109 (1.17%) SLA
9 106 (1.13%) GRC
9 106 (1.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 94 (1.01%) Accessibility
11 65 (0.70%) PCI DSS
12 64 (0.69%) GAAP
13 62 (0.66%) ISO 20022
14 38 (0.41%) SEPA
15 36 (0.39%) NCSC
16 35 (0.37%) PSD2
16 35 (0.37%) Solvency II
17 30 (0.32%) IFRS 17
18 29 (0.31%) SOC 2
System Software
1 281 (3.01%) Docker
2 185 (1.98%) 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 10 (0.11%) Hyper-V
9 10 (0.11%) NFS
10 6 (0.064%) GPFS
10 6 (0.064%) KVM
11 5 (0.054%) Microsoft App-V
11 5 (0.054%) Oracle RAC
12 4 (0.043%) Firmware
13 3 (0.032%) GridGain
13 3 (0.032%) SRDF
14 2 (0.021%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 2 (0.021%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 419 (4.49%) Kubernetes
2 278 (2.98%) Terraform
3 151 (1.62%) Ansible
4 88 (0.94%) Grafana
5 76 (0.81%) Prometheus
6 64 (0.69%) Microsoft Intune
7 48 (0.51%) 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
12 15 (0.16%) HP ALM
13 14 (0.15%) Active Directory Federation Services
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 1,179 (12.62%) Microsoft
2 820 (8.78%) SAP
3 780 (8.35%) Oracle
4 323 (3.46%) ServiceNow
5 283 (3.03%) Databricks
6 215 (2.30%) Salesforce
7 207 (2.22%) Google
8 133 (1.42%) Workday
9 121 (1.30%) Cisco
10 119 (1.27%) IBM
11 113 (1.21%) Splunk
12 111 (1.19%) VMware
13 94 (1.01%) CyberArk
14 84 (0.90%) Ariba
15 69 (0.74%) OpenAI
16 66 (0.71%) Sage
17 65 (0.70%) Citrix
18 53 (0.57%) Bloomberg
18 53 (0.57%) Informatica
18 53 (0.57%) Palo Alto