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

6 months to
3 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,530 7,077 8,259
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.50% 22.63% 19.00%
As % of the General category 33.92% 35.84% 33.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,918 4,655 5,542
10th Percentile £356 £350 £355
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 £719
90th Percentile £800 £820 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £500
% change year-on-year +2.04% -2.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 243 140 258
10th Percentile £15.00 £16.00 £13.16
25th Percentile £19.03 £23.89 £15.80
Median hourly rate £35.00 £32.70 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.05% +16.77% -8.96%
75th Percentile £55.75 £65.00 £38.12
90th Percentile £87.40 £76.38 £58.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.30 £28.53 £32.12
% change year-on-year +48.29% -11.18% -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 28,093 19,745 24,813
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 54.53% 63.14% 57.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,844 12,414 15,535
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.60% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £626 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £472 £490
% change year-on-year +5.88% -3.62% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,944 978 1,954
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.50 £12.81
25th Percentile £18.14 £16.50 £15.62
Median hourly rate £32.00 £27.31 £31.76
Median % change year-on-year +17.19% -14.01% +4.11%
75th Percentile £60.00 £52.00 £53.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.49 £68.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.56 £23.00 £30.60
% change year-on-year +37.20% -24.83% +21.78%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 8,343 £550 - 5,679
London 0 5,009 £575 -4.17% 3,132
UK excluding London +1 3,803 £500 +2.04% 3,235
Work from Home -1 2,768 £550 -4.35% 2,453
North of England +2 1,287 £500 +7.53% 852
South East -1 704 £500 -4.76% 1,008
North West +3 669 £475 +5.56% 456
Midlands 0 650 £500 +11.11% 463
Yorkshire 0 574 £525 +7.69% 295
Scotland 0 484 £475 -1.61% 190
West Midlands +1 479 £500 +2.15% 264
South West -3 381 £525 - 354
East of England +6 200 £513 -10.87% 258
East Midlands 0 164 £488 +14.71% 198
Wales +4 89 £525 +12.90% 73
Northern Ireland -1 56 £475 +11.76% 83
North East -22 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
1 337 (3.54%) Confluence
2 230 (2.41%) SharePoint
3 87 (0.91%) Apache Spark
4 73 (0.77%) Apache Airflow
5 59 (0.62%) Apache
6 53 (0.56%) 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
1 515 (5.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 224 (2.35%) Microsoft Office
3 172 (1.80%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 150 (1.57%) Microsoft Project
5 117 (1.23%) 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%) Notion
9 4 (0.042%) Oracle Smart View
9 4 (0.042%) Photoshop
10 3 (0.031%) Adobe XD
11 2 (0.021%) Adobe Premiere
11 2 (0.021%) AutoCAD
11 2 (0.021%) Final Cut Pro
11 2 (0.021%) InVision
12 1 (0.010%) UserZoom
Business Applications
1 432 (4.53%) SAP S/4HANA
2 113 (1.19%) NetSuite
3 107 (1.12%) Oracle Payables
4 88 (0.92%) Oracle Receivables
5 78 (0.82%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 77 (0.81%) Oracle ERP
7 63 (0.66%) SAP FI
8 49 (0.51%) Oracle EBS
9 48 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
10 47 (0.49%) Oracle General Ledger
11 43 (0.45%) SAP CO
12 41 (0.43%) SAP FI/CO
13 38 (0.40%) Aladdin
13 38 (0.40%) Oracle Financials
14 28 (0.29%) SAP ERP
15 27 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
15 27 (0.28%) Workday HCM
16 26 (0.27%) SAP BRIM
17 24 (0.25%) Oracle EBS R12
17 24 (0.25%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
Cloud Services
1 1,491 (15.65%) Azure
2 1,075 (11.28%) AWS
3 636 (6.67%) Power Platform
4 482 (5.06%) GCP
5 323 (3.39%) Azure DevOps
6 310 (3.25%) SaaS
7 283 (2.97%) Microsoft 365
8 253 (2.65%) GitHub
9 218 (2.29%) Dynamics 365
10 202 (2.12%) Snowflake
11 177 (1.86%) Entra ID
12 141 (1.48%) Serverless
13 123 (1.29%) Amazon S3
14 119 (1.25%) OCI
15 108 (1.13%) Power Automate
16 105 (1.10%) Azure Data Factory
17 99 (1.04%) Microsoft Copilot
18 97 (1.02%) dbt
19 94 (0.99%) GitHub Actions
20 87 (0.91%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 180 (1.89%) Firewall
2 145 (1.52%) Network Security
3 81 (0.85%) DNS
4 72 (0.76%) VPN
5 71 (0.75%) WAN
6 60 (0.63%) TCP/IP
7 44 (0.46%) BGP
8 43 (0.45%) SSL
9 38 (0.40%) LAN
10 35 (0.37%) HTTP
11 32 (0.34%) DHCP
11 32 (0.34%) Multicast
12 31 (0.33%) OSPF
12 31 (0.33%) SD-WAN
13 25 (0.26%) Internet
14 24 (0.25%) MPLS
15 21 (0.22%) Cisco ASA
16 17 (0.18%) VSAN
16 17 (0.18%) Wireless
17 16 (0.17%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 540 (5.67%) Power BI
2 262 (2.75%) SQL Server
3 248 (2.60%) Data Warehouse
4 202 (2.12%) Metadata
5 179 (1.88%) Relational Database
6 178 (1.87%) PostgreSQL
7 149 (1.56%) Tableau
8 141 (1.48%) Data Lake
9 88 (0.92%) NoSQL
10 85 (0.89%) Oracle Reports
11 76 (0.80%) Oracle Database
12 71 (0.75%) 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 46 (0.48%) Azure SQL Database
18 44 (0.46%) Delta Lake
19 41 (0.43%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 681 (7.15%) JIRA
2 250 (2.62%) Git
3 175 (1.84%) Jenkins
4 98 (1.03%) GitLab
5 56 (0.59%) JUnit
6 49 (0.51%) Cucumber
7 45 (0.47%) 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 2,783 (29.20%) Social Skills
2 1,752 (18.38%) Banking
3 1,271 (13.34%) Analytical Skills
4 545 (5.72%) Public Sector
5 475 (4.98%) Legal
6 375 (3.93%) Investment Banking
7 362 (3.80%) Financial Institution
8 341 (3.58%) Front Office
9 308 (3.23%) Organisational Skills
10 306 (3.21%) Retail
11 248 (2.60%) Influencing Skills
12 234 (2.46%) Documentation Skills
13 175 (1.84%) Manufacturing
14 167 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 159 (1.67%) Local Government
16 154 (1.62%) Billing
16 154 (1.62%) General Ledger
17 140 (1.47%) Marketing
18 130 (1.36%) Law
19 129 (1.35%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,402 (14.71%) Analyst
2 1,016 (10.66%) Senior
3 1,003 (10.52%) Lead
4 956 (10.03%) Developer
5 892 (9.36%) Architect
6 727 (7.63%) Business Analyst
7 705 (7.40%) Project Manager
8 647 (6.79%) Consultant
9 351 (3.68%) Solutions Architect
10 314 (3.29%) Data Engineer
11 226 (2.37%) Financial Analyst
12 225 (2.36%) Senior Manager
13 201 (2.11%) Data Analyst
14 198 (2.08%) Accountant
15 195 (2.05%) Java Developer
16 188 (1.97%) Finance Manager
17 185 (1.94%) Programme Manager
18 175 (1.84%) Software Engineer
19 173 (1.82%) IT Manager
19 173 (1.82%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 297 (3.12%) REST
2 269 (2.82%) .NET
3 266 (2.79%) React
4 262 (2.75%) Kafka
5 199 (2.09%) Middleware
6 197 (2.07%) Oracle Fusion
7 174 (1.83%) Spring
8 162 (1.70%) Spring Boot
9 135 (1.42%) RESTful
10 116 (1.22%) Redux
11 114 (1.20%) PySpark
12 112 (1.18%) Node.js
13 92 (0.97%) JSON
14 91 (0.95%) AngularJS
15 86 (0.90%) OAuth
16 73 (0.77%) XML
17 64 (0.67%) CSS
18 63 (0.66%) SOAP
19 62 (0.65%) GraphQL
19 62 (0.65%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 441 (4.63%) Onboarding
2 407 (4.27%) Product Ownership
3 401 (4.21%) Cloud Native
4 258 (2.71%) Legacy Systems
5 216 (2.27%) Management Information System
6 215 (2.26%) Data Structures
7 174 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
8 172 (1.80%) Derivative
9 169 (1.77%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 168 (1.76%) Fixed Income
11 164 (1.72%) Data Centre
12 163 (1.71%) Distributed Systems
13 146 (1.53%) Virtual Team
14 131 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
15 128 (1.34%) AI Agents
16 124 (1.30%) Equities
17 115 (1.21%) Public Cloud
18 108 (1.13%) Analytical Mindset
19 106 (1.11%) Self-Motivation
20 93 (0.98%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 320 (3.36%) Windows
2 273 (2.86%) Linux
3 152 (1.59%) Unix
4 72 (0.76%) Windows Server
5 39 (0.41%) zOS
6 38 (0.40%) Solaris
7 35 (0.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 35 (0.37%) Windows 10
8 34 (0.36%) Apple iOS
9 29 (0.30%) Android
10 22 (0.23%) 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 2,064 (21.66%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,921 (20.16%) Agile
3 1,310 (13.75%) Migration
4 1,267 (13.29%) Problem-Solving
5 1,104 (11.58%) Continuous Improvement
6 1,071 (11.24%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 1,045 (10.97%) AI
8 1,005 (10.55%) DevOps
9 982 (10.30%) CI/CD
10 981 (10.29%) ERP
11 944 (9.91%) Analytics
12 851 (8.93%) Decision-Making
13 794 (8.33%) Validation
14 783 (8.22%) Data Modelling
15 782 (8.21%) Roadmaps
16 774 (8.12%) Project Management
17 747 (7.84%) User Acceptance Testing
18 682 (7.16%) Change Management
19 674 (7.07%) Business Intelligence
20 619 (6.50%) Risk Management
Programming Languages
1 1,268 (13.31%) SQL
2 1,165 (12.22%) Python
3 634 (6.65%) Java
4 383 (4.02%) C#
5 260 (2.73%) TypeScript
6 258 (2.71%) JavaScript
7 215 (2.26%) PowerShell
8 91 (0.95%) Bash
9 87 (0.91%) C++
10 82 (0.86%) PL/SQL
11 80 (0.84%) Go
12 75 (0.79%) T-SQL
13 63 (0.66%) Shell Script
14 59 (0.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 48 (0.50%) Scala
16 47 (0.49%) VBA
17 38 (0.40%) Bicep
18 34 (0.36%) Apex Code
19 30 (0.31%) Kotlin
19 30 (0.31%) Rust
Qualifications
1 740 (7.76%) Degree
2 719 (7.54%) Security Cleared
3 513 (5.38%) SC Cleared
4 225 (2.36%) PMP
5 217 (2.28%) ACCA
6 200 (2.10%) PMI Certification
7 194 (2.04%) CIMA
8 181 (1.90%) BPSS Clearance
9 158 (1.66%) CISSP
10 132 (1.39%) Computer Science Degree
11 102 (1.07%) DV Cleared
12 93 (0.98%) CISM
13 88 (0.92%) Azure Certification
14 84 (0.88%) Master's Degree
15 74 (0.78%) Cisco Certification
16 55 (0.58%) AWS Certification
17 47 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
18 42 (0.44%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
19 38 (0.40%) (ISC)2 CCSP
20 32 (0.34%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 590 (6.19%) Data Quality
2 417 (4.38%) QA
3 332 (3.48%) PMO
4 302 (3.17%) GDPR
5 163 (1.71%) NIST
6 130 (1.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 113 (1.19%) IFRS
7 113 (1.19%) SLA
8 107 (1.12%) GRC
9 97 (1.02%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 96 (1.01%) Accessibility
11 64 (0.67%) GAAP
11 64 (0.67%) ISO 20022
12 61 (0.64%) PCI DSS
13 40 (0.42%) SEPA
14 37 (0.39%) Solvency II
15 36 (0.38%) NCSC
16 30 (0.31%) PSD2
16 30 (0.31%) SOC 2
17 29 (0.30%) COBIT
System Software
1 276 (2.90%) Docker
2 196 (2.06%) Active Directory
3 57 (0.60%) VMware Infrastructure
4 31 (0.33%) 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
1 433 (4.54%) Kubernetes
2 303 (3.18%) Terraform
3 156 (1.64%) Ansible
4 89 (0.93%) Grafana
5 74 (0.78%) Prometheus
6 66 (0.69%) Microsoft Intune
7 50 (0.52%) SCCM
8 46 (0.48%) 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 14 (0.15%) Nessus
14 13 (0.14%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 13 (0.14%) Jamf Pro
14 13 (0.14%) Puppet
15 11 (0.12%) CASB
Vendors
1 1,209 (12.69%) Microsoft
2 824 (8.65%) SAP
3 782 (8.21%) Oracle
4 347 (3.64%) ServiceNow
5 290 (3.04%) Databricks
6 214 (2.25%) Salesforce
7 212 (2.22%) Google
8 137 (1.44%) Workday
9 131 (1.37%) IBM
10 116 (1.22%) Cisco
11 115 (1.21%) Splunk
11 115 (1.21%) VMware
12 94 (0.99%) CyberArk
13 87 (0.91%) Ariba
14 66 (0.69%) Sage
15 65 (0.68%) OpenAI
16 62 (0.65%) Citrix
17 56 (0.59%) Bloomberg
17 56 (0.59%) Informatica
18 50 (0.52%) Murex