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

6 months to
16 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,194 6,688 8,139
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.31% 22.58% 18.68%
As % of the General category 33.89% 35.57% 32.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,722 4,367 5,444
10th Percentile £356 £350 £350
25th Percentile £442 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £694 £713
90th Percentile £800 £825 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £500
% change year-on-year +2.15% -2.10% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 227 128 268
10th Percentile £14.82 £17.79 £12.79
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.92 £15.17
Median hourly rate £35.00 £39.06 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.38% +42.02% -5.14%
75th Percentile £54.00 £65.25 £38.12
90th Percentile £85.00 £80.75 £58.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.30 £30.79 £29.41
% change year-on-year +37.38% +4.68% -39.53%

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 27,130 18,804 24,846
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 54.04% 63.47% 57.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,392 11,853 15,564
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £503 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.29% -4.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £767
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £473 £488
% change year-on-year +5.82% -3.08% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,817 890 2,005
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.46 £12.78
25th Percentile £18.22 £16.93 £15.50
Median hourly rate £32.00 £27.97 £30.83
Median % change year-on-year +14.41% -9.26% +0.93%
75th Percentile £60.46 £53.95 £52.50
90th Percentile £80.02 £75.00 £67.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.46 £24.42 £29.50
% change year-on-year +28.83% -17.22% +10.28%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 8,098 £550 -2.65% 5,428
London 0 4,861 £575 -4.17% 3,092
UK excluding London 0 3,694 £500 +2.15% 3,056
Work from Home -1 2,614 £550 -4.35% 2,238
North of England +2 1,269 £493 +6.43% 800
South East -1 672 £500 -4.31% 932
North West +5 669 £465 +3.33% 446
Midlands 0 637 £500 +8.70% 463
Yorkshire 0 551 £525 +10.53% 269
West Midlands +1 460 £514 +2.80% 279
Scotland 0 458 £500 +4.11% 168
South West -2 374 £525 - 341
East of England 0 196 £513 -8.89% 215
East Midlands -1 172 £469 +8.44% 181
Wales +9 88 £525 +19.66% 84
Northern Ireland -1 54 £525 +23.53% 102
North East -16 50 £500 +13.64% 94
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
1 328 (3.57%) Confluence
2 221 (2.40%) SharePoint
3 81 (0.88%) Apache Spark
4 64 (0.70%) Apache Airflow
5 54 (0.59%) Apache
6 53 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
7 32 (0.35%) SAS
8 26 (0.28%) CMS
9 21 (0.23%) Oracle Workflow
10 19 (0.21%) CICS
11 16 (0.17%) IIS
12 13 (0.14%) Appian
13 12 (0.13%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 12 (0.13%) Camunda
14 11 (0.12%) Ethereum
15 10 (0.11%) Jupyter
15 10 (0.11%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.065%) HCL Notes
16 6 (0.065%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 6 (0.065%) TPMS
Applications
1 508 (5.53%) Microsoft Excel
2 220 (2.39%) Microsoft Office
3 174 (1.89%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 155 (1.69%) Microsoft Project
5 119 (1.29%) MS Visio
6 57 (0.62%) Spreadsheet
7 34 (0.37%) Chatbot
8 8 (0.087%) Sketch
9 7 (0.076%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 6 (0.065%) Adobe XD
10 6 (0.065%) InVision
11 5 (0.054%) Trello
12 4 (0.044%) Notion
12 4 (0.044%) Oracle Smart View
13 2 (0.022%) Adobe Illustrator
13 2 (0.022%) AutoCAD
13 2 (0.022%) Photoshop
14 1 (0.011%) MicroStation
14 1 (0.011%) UXPin
14 1 (0.011%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 412 (4.48%) SAP S/4HANA
2 110 (1.20%) Oracle Payables
3 106 (1.15%) NetSuite
4 89 (0.97%) Oracle Receivables
5 85 (0.92%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 73 (0.79%) Oracle ERP
7 60 (0.65%) SAP FI
8 48 (0.52%) Oracle EBS
9 47 (0.51%) Dynamics CRM
9 47 (0.51%) SAP CO
10 45 (0.49%) SAP FI/CO
11 43 (0.47%) Oracle General Ledger
12 38 (0.41%) Aladdin
13 35 (0.38%) Oracle Financials
14 34 (0.37%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
15 28 (0.30%) Unit4 Business World
16 26 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
16 26 (0.28%) SAP ERP
17 25 (0.27%) SAP BRIM
18 23 (0.25%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,444 (15.71%) Azure
2 1,026 (11.16%) AWS
3 625 (6.80%) Power Platform
4 444 (4.83%) GCP
5 314 (3.42%) Azure DevOps
6 307 (3.34%) SaaS
7 283 (3.08%) Microsoft 365
8 234 (2.55%) GitHub
9 216 (2.35%) Dynamics 365
10 182 (1.98%) Snowflake
11 162 (1.76%) Entra ID
12 144 (1.57%) Serverless
13 128 (1.39%) OCI
14 117 (1.27%) Amazon S3
15 111 (1.21%) Power Automate
16 103 (1.12%) Azure Data Factory
17 89 (0.97%) GitHub Actions
17 89 (0.97%) OpenShift
18 88 (0.96%) Microsoft Copilot
19 87 (0.95%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 169 (1.84%) Firewall
2 134 (1.46%) Network Security
3 78 (0.85%) WAN
4 76 (0.83%) DNS
5 68 (0.74%) VPN
6 60 (0.65%) TCP/IP
7 41 (0.45%) BGP
8 38 (0.41%) SD-WAN
9 37 (0.40%) LAN
10 36 (0.39%) HTTP
11 35 (0.38%) SSL
12 30 (0.33%) DHCP
12 30 (0.33%) Multicast
13 29 (0.32%) OSPF
14 24 (0.26%) MPLS
15 21 (0.23%) Cisco ASA
15 21 (0.23%) Internet
16 19 (0.21%) VSAN
17 17 (0.18%) VLAN
18 16 (0.17%) DMZ
Database & Business Intelligence
1 533 (5.80%) Power BI
2 245 (2.66%) SQL Server
3 233 (2.53%) Data Warehouse
4 181 (1.97%) Metadata
5 171 (1.86%) PostgreSQL
6 169 (1.84%) Relational Database
7 149 (1.62%) Tableau
8 140 (1.52%) Data Lake
9 92 (1.00%) NoSQL
10 85 (0.92%) Oracle Reports
11 72 (0.78%) Big Data
12 69 (0.75%) Oracle Database
13 66 (0.72%) MongoDB
14 63 (0.69%) BigQuery
15 55 (0.60%) Snowflake Schema
16 48 (0.52%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 45 (0.49%) Power Query
18 44 (0.48%) Azure SQL Database
19 43 (0.47%) Delta Lake
20 37 (0.40%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 679 (7.39%) JIRA
2 225 (2.45%) Git
3 164 (1.78%) Jenkins
4 95 (1.03%) GitLab
5 53 (0.58%) JUnit
6 45 (0.49%) Cucumber
7 35 (0.38%) Selenium
8 30 (0.33%) Sonatype Nexus
8 30 (0.33%) Visual Studio
9 28 (0.30%) MLflow
10 27 (0.29%) Postman
11 23 (0.25%) SonarQube
12 21 (0.23%) REST Assured
13 19 (0.21%) Maven
13 19 (0.21%) Zephyr
14 18 (0.20%) ERwin
14 18 (0.20%) Oracle Forms
15 16 (0.17%) Hudson
16 15 (0.16%) TeamCity
17 13 (0.14%) Bitbucket
General
1 2,680 (29.15%) Social Skills
2 1,679 (18.26%) Banking
3 1,185 (12.89%) Analytical Skills
4 515 (5.60%) Public Sector
5 440 (4.79%) Legal
6 361 (3.93%) Investment Banking
7 350 (3.81%) Financial Institution
8 317 (3.45%) Front Office
9 292 (3.18%) Organisational Skills
10 289 (3.14%) Retail
11 232 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
12 223 (2.43%) Influencing Skills
13 163 (1.77%) Manufacturing
14 160 (1.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 145 (1.58%) Local Government
16 144 (1.57%) General Ledger
17 137 (1.49%) Law
18 135 (1.47%) Billing
19 133 (1.45%) Marketing
20 130 (1.41%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,362 (14.81%) Analyst
2 1,004 (10.92%) Senior
3 956 (10.40%) Lead
4 928 (10.09%) Developer
5 848 (9.22%) Architect
6 711 (7.73%) Project Manager
7 706 (7.68%) Business Analyst
8 607 (6.60%) Consultant
9 352 (3.83%) Solutions Architect
10 304 (3.31%) Data Engineer
11 225 (2.45%) Financial Analyst
12 222 (2.41%) Senior Manager
13 197 (2.14%) Finance Manager
14 192 (2.09%) Java Developer
15 189 (2.06%) Accountant
16 188 (2.04%) Data Analyst
17 175 (1.90%) Senior Developer
18 172 (1.87%) Programme Manager
19 168 (1.83%) Software Engineer
20 160 (1.74%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 274 (2.98%) REST
2 258 (2.81%) .NET
3 257 (2.80%) Kafka
4 251 (2.73%) React
5 200 (2.18%) Oracle Fusion
6 187 (2.03%) Middleware
7 165 (1.79%) Spring
8 160 (1.74%) Spring Boot
9 138 (1.50%) RESTful
10 110 (1.20%) Redux
11 108 (1.17%) PySpark
12 102 (1.11%) Node.js
13 93 (1.01%) AngularJS
14 86 (0.94%) OAuth
15 85 (0.92%) JSON
16 76 (0.83%) XML
17 64 (0.70%) CSS
18 61 (0.66%) OpenID
19 59 (0.64%) HTML
19 59 (0.64%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 412 (4.48%) Onboarding
2 386 (4.20%) Product Ownership
3 376 (4.09%) Cloud Native
4 259 (2.82%) Legacy Systems
5 210 (2.28%) Management Information System
6 202 (2.20%) Data Structures
7 169 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
8 168 (1.83%) Derivative
9 162 (1.76%) Fixed Income
9 162 (1.76%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 158 (1.72%) Data Centre
11 154 (1.68%) Distributed Systems
12 135 (1.47%) Virtual Team
13 125 (1.36%) Equities
14 123 (1.34%) Greenfield Project
15 111 (1.21%) Public Cloud
16 104 (1.13%) AI Agents
17 100 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
18 94 (1.02%) Analytical Mindset
19 80 (0.87%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 314 (3.42%) Windows
2 272 (2.96%) Linux
3 148 (1.61%) Unix
4 71 (0.77%) Windows Server
5 38 (0.41%) Solaris
5 38 (0.41%) Windows 10
6 33 (0.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 31 (0.34%) Apple iOS
7 31 (0.34%) zOS
8 27 (0.29%) Android
9 21 (0.23%) Mac OS
10 19 (0.21%) AIX
11 7 (0.076%) Oracle Linux
11 7 (0.076%) VMS
12 6 (0.065%) Ubuntu
12 6 (0.065%) Windows Server 2012
13 5 (0.054%) HPUX
13 5 (0.054%) SUSE
13 5 (0.054%) Windows Server 2019
14 4 (0.044%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,921 (20.89%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,856 (20.19%) Agile
3 1,276 (13.88%) Migration
4 1,224 (13.31%) Problem-Solving
5 1,040 (11.31%) Continuous Improvement
6 999 (10.87%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 971 (10.56%) DevOps
8 970 (10.55%) ERP
9 964 (10.49%) AI
10 933 (10.15%) CI/CD
11 888 (9.66%) Analytics
12 789 (8.58%) Project Management
13 788 (8.57%) Decision-Making
14 761 (8.28%) Data Modelling
15 755 (8.21%) Validation
16 748 (8.14%) Roadmaps
17 715 (7.78%) User Acceptance Testing
18 675 (7.34%) Business Intelligence
19 657 (7.15%) Change Management
20 594 (6.46%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 1,238 (13.47%) SQL
2 1,115 (12.13%) Python
3 626 (6.81%) Java
4 383 (4.17%) C#
5 249 (2.71%) JavaScript
6 239 (2.60%) TypeScript
7 201 (2.19%) PowerShell
8 100 (1.09%) C++
9 82 (0.89%) Bash
10 81 (0.88%) PL/SQL
11 73 (0.79%) Go
12 71 (0.77%) T-SQL
13 57 (0.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 54 (0.59%) Shell Script
15 43 (0.47%) Scala
16 41 (0.45%) VBA
17 31 (0.34%) Apex Code
18 30 (0.33%) Bicep
18 30 (0.33%) Rust
19 29 (0.32%) R
Qualifications
1 743 (8.08%) Degree
2 682 (7.42%) Security Cleared
3 491 (5.34%) SC Cleared
4 232 (2.52%) ACCA
5 221 (2.40%) PMP
6 208 (2.26%) CIMA
7 197 (2.14%) PMI Certification
8 181 (1.97%) BPSS Clearance
9 150 (1.63%) CISSP
10 135 (1.47%) Computer Science Degree
11 92 (1.00%) CISM
12 89 (0.97%) Master's Degree
13 87 (0.95%) DV Cleared
14 81 (0.88%) Azure Certification
15 70 (0.76%) Cisco Certification
16 49 (0.53%) AWS Certification
17 46 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
18 38 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 35 (0.38%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
20 32 (0.35%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 562 (6.11%) Data Quality
2 418 (4.55%) QA
3 326 (3.55%) PMO
4 301 (3.27%) GDPR
5 167 (1.82%) NIST
6 135 (1.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 115 (1.25%) IFRS
8 109 (1.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 108 (1.17%) SLA
10 107 (1.16%) GRC
11 88 (0.96%) Accessibility
12 67 (0.73%) PCI DSS
13 64 (0.70%) GAAP
14 63 (0.69%) ISO 20022
15 37 (0.40%) SEPA
16 35 (0.38%) NCSC
17 34 (0.37%) Solvency II
18 33 (0.36%) PSD2
19 30 (0.33%) IFRS 17
20 29 (0.32%) SOC 2
System Software
1 280 (3.05%) Docker
2 179 (1.95%) Active Directory
3 54 (0.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 29 (0.32%) vSphere
5 27 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
6 25 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
7 15 (0.16%) 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 (0.065%) GPFS
12 6 (0.065%) KVM
13 5 (0.054%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.054%) Oracle RAC
14 4 (0.044%) Firmware
15 3 (0.033%) GridGain
15 3 (0.033%) SRDF
16 2 (0.022%) Ceph
16 2 (0.022%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 414 (4.50%) Kubernetes
2 273 (2.97%) Terraform
3 144 (1.57%) Ansible
4 92 (1.00%) Grafana
5 78 (0.85%) Prometheus
6 65 (0.71%) Microsoft Intune
7 50 (0.54%) SCCM
8 43 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
9 32 (0.35%) FortiGate
10 25 (0.27%) Control-M
11 18 (0.20%) Progress Chef
11 18 (0.20%) vRealize
12 16 (0.17%) 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%) Puppet
15 12 (0.13%) Jamf Pro
16 11 (0.12%) CASB
Vendors
1 1,161 (12.63%) Microsoft
2 808 (8.79%) SAP
3 768 (8.35%) Oracle
4 309 (3.36%) ServiceNow
5 275 (2.99%) Databricks
6 213 (2.32%) Salesforce
7 205 (2.23%) Google
8 126 (1.37%) Workday
9 119 (1.29%) Cisco
10 113 (1.23%) Splunk
11 111 (1.21%) VMware
12 105 (1.14%) IBM
13 91 (0.99%) CyberArk
14 83 (0.90%) Ariba
15 70 (0.76%) OpenAI
16 67 (0.73%) Sage
17 64 (0.70%) Citrix
18 52 (0.57%) Palo Alto
19 51 (0.55%) Bloomberg
20 48 (0.52%) Informatica