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

6 months to
1 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,496 6,969 8,188
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.48% 22.66% 18.97%
As % of the General category 33.92% 35.84% 33.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,910 4,573 5,486
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 £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 241 138 262
10th Percentile £15.00 £16.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £19.03 £24.33 £15.54
Median hourly rate £35.00 £33.45 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.65% +19.45% -7.83%
75th Percentile £54.50 £65.00 £38.12
90th Percentile £88.00 £76.63 £57.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.30 £28.55 £30.83
% change year-on-year +48.16% -7.38% -31.50%

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 27,992 19,445 24,647
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 54.46% 63.23% 57.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,814 12,226 15,403
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £401 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £517 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.34% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £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 1,924 958 1,974
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.46 £12.79
25th Percentile £18.23 £16.50 £15.62
Median hourly rate £32.00 £27.39 £31.61
Median % change year-on-year +16.84% -13.34% +4.48%
75th Percentile £60.00 £53.25 £53.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.50 £68.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.53 £23.00 £30.37
% change year-on-year +37.08% -24.27% +20.88%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 8,320 £550 - 5,824
London 0 4,983 £575 -4.17% 3,248
UK excluding London +1 3,803 £500 +2.04% 3,372
Work from Home -1 2,748 £550 -4.35% 2,544
North of England +1 1,298 £500 +7.53% 848
South East -1 698 £500 -5.88% 1,017
North West +4 679 £473 +5.11% 454
Midlands 0 657 £500 +11.11% 487
Yorkshire 0 574 £525 +7.69% 296
West Midlands +1 485 £500 +1.63% 277
Scotland 0 479 £483 +0.47% 199
South West -3 381 £525 - 334
East of England +5 197 £513 -10.87% 256
East Midlands 0 165 £475 +11.76% 209
Wales +7 87 £530 +13.98% 182
Northern Ireland -1 56 £475 +8.57% 94
North East -16 46 £500 +13.96% 107
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
1 342 (3.60%) Confluence
2 233 (2.45%) SharePoint
3 87 (0.92%) Apache Spark
4 73 (0.77%) Apache Airflow
5 59 (0.62%) Apache
6 52 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
7 33 (0.35%) SAS
8 28 (0.29%) CMS
9 20 (0.21%) Oracle Workflow
10 19 (0.20%) CICS
11 17 (0.18%) IIS
12 12 (0.13%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 12 (0.13%) Camunda
13 11 (0.12%) Ethereum
13 11 (0.12%) Jupyter
14 9 (0.095%) Appian
15 7 (0.074%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.063%) Hyperledger
17 5 (0.053%) WebLogic
18 4 (0.042%) JBoss
Applications
1 518 (5.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 225 (2.37%) Microsoft Office
3 173 (1.82%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 152 (1.60%) Microsoft Project
5 120 (1.26%) MS Visio
6 68 (0.72%) Spreadsheet
7 36 (0.38%) Chatbot
8 5 (0.053%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 5 (0.053%) Sketch
8 5 (0.053%) 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 (0.032%) 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 (0.011%) UserZoom
Business Applications
1 426 (4.49%) SAP S/4HANA
2 114 (1.20%) NetSuite
3 108 (1.14%) Oracle Payables
4 87 (0.92%) Oracle Receivables
5 80 (0.84%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 77 (0.81%) Oracle ERP
7 64 (0.67%) SAP FI
8 49 (0.52%) Oracle EBS
9 48 (0.51%) Dynamics CRM
10 46 (0.48%) Oracle General Ledger
11 44 (0.46%) SAP CO
12 42 (0.44%) SAP FI/CO
13 38 (0.40%) Aladdin
14 37 (0.39%) Oracle Financials
15 28 (0.29%) SAP ERP
16 27 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
17 26 (0.27%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
17 26 (0.27%) SAP BRIM
18 25 (0.26%) Unit4 Business World
18 25 (0.26%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,501 (15.81%) Azure
2 1,076 (11.33%) AWS
3 638 (6.72%) Power Platform
4 481 (5.07%) GCP
5 325 (3.42%) Azure DevOps
6 315 (3.32%) SaaS
7 286 (3.01%) Microsoft 365
8 251 (2.64%) GitHub
9 219 (2.31%) Dynamics 365
10 201 (2.12%) Snowflake
11 177 (1.86%) Entra ID
12 144 (1.52%) Serverless
13 123 (1.30%) Amazon S3
14 121 (1.27%) OCI
15 110 (1.16%) Power Automate
16 106 (1.12%) Azure Data Factory
17 101 (1.06%) Microsoft Copilot
18 98 (1.03%) dbt
19 90 (0.95%) GitHub Actions
20 87 (0.92%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 180 (1.90%) Firewall
2 145 (1.53%) Network Security
3 79 (0.83%) DNS
4 73 (0.77%) WAN
5 70 (0.74%) VPN
6 60 (0.63%) TCP/IP
7 44 (0.46%) BGP
8 38 (0.40%) LAN
8 38 (0.40%) SSL
9 35 (0.37%) HTTP
10 33 (0.35%) SD-WAN
11 32 (0.34%) Multicast
12 31 (0.33%) OSPF
13 30 (0.32%) DHCP
14 25 (0.26%) Internet
15 24 (0.25%) MPLS
16 21 (0.22%) Cisco ASA
17 16 (0.17%) DMZ
17 16 (0.17%) SAN
17 16 (0.17%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 540 (5.69%) Power BI
2 262 (2.76%) SQL Server
3 248 (2.61%) Data Warehouse
4 201 (2.12%) Metadata
5 180 (1.90%) Relational Database
6 176 (1.85%) PostgreSQL
7 150 (1.58%) Tableau
8 145 (1.53%) Data Lake
9 91 (0.96%) NoSQL
10 83 (0.87%) Oracle Reports
11 76 (0.80%) Oracle Database
12 72 (0.76%) Big Data
13 70 (0.74%) MongoDB
14 69 (0.73%) BigQuery
15 63 (0.66%) Snowflake Schema
16 49 (0.52%) Power Query
16 49 (0.52%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 45 (0.47%) Azure SQL Database
17 45 (0.47%) Delta Lake
18 41 (0.43%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 687 (7.23%) JIRA
2 249 (2.62%) Git
3 173 (1.82%) Jenkins
4 99 (1.04%) GitLab
5 56 (0.59%) JUnit
6 45 (0.47%) Cucumber
7 41 (0.43%) Selenium
8 30 (0.32%) Sonatype Nexus
9 28 (0.29%) Postman
9 28 (0.29%) Visual Studio
10 25 (0.26%) ERwin
11 24 (0.25%) REST Assured
12 23 (0.24%) MLflow
12 23 (0.24%) SonarQube
13 22 (0.23%) Maven
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 2,782 (29.30%) Social Skills
2 1,751 (18.44%) Banking
3 1,254 (13.21%) Analytical Skills
4 535 (5.63%) Public Sector
5 464 (4.89%) Legal
6 377 (3.97%) Investment Banking
7 363 (3.82%) Financial Institution
8 338 (3.56%) Front Office
9 306 (3.22%) Organisational Skills
10 304 (3.20%) Retail
11 244 (2.57%) Influencing Skills
12 232 (2.44%) Documentation Skills
13 176 (1.85%) Manufacturing
14 167 (1.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 155 (1.63%) General Ledger
16 154 (1.62%) Local Government
17 151 (1.59%) Billing
18 137 (1.44%) Marketing
19 131 (1.38%) Law
20 128 (1.35%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,393 (14.67%) Analyst
2 1,020 (10.74%) Senior
3 1,000 (10.53%) Lead
4 959 (10.10%) Developer
5 893 (9.40%) Architect
6 714 (7.52%) Business Analyst
7 710 (7.48%) Project Manager
8 645 (6.79%) Consultant
9 352 (3.71%) Solutions Architect
10 314 (3.31%) Data Engineer
11 224 (2.36%) Financial Analyst
12 223 (2.35%) Senior Manager
13 199 (2.10%) Data Analyst
14 197 (2.07%) Accountant
15 195 (2.05%) Java Developer
16 191 (2.01%) Finance Manager
17 181 (1.91%) Programme Manager
18 176 (1.85%) Senior Developer
19 174 (1.83%) Software Engineer
20 169 (1.78%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 295 (3.11%) REST
2 272 (2.86%) .NET
3 266 (2.80%) Kafka
4 265 (2.79%) React
5 199 (2.10%) Oracle Fusion
6 193 (2.03%) Middleware
7 176 (1.85%) Spring
8 165 (1.74%) Spring Boot
9 133 (1.40%) RESTful
10 117 (1.23%) Redux
11 114 (1.20%) PySpark
12 110 (1.16%) Node.js
13 94 (0.99%) JSON
14 92 (0.97%) AngularJS
15 88 (0.93%) OAuth
16 74 (0.78%) XML
17 65 (0.68%) CSS
18 63 (0.66%) OpenID
19 62 (0.65%) GraphQL
20 60 (0.63%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 436 (4.59%) Onboarding
2 404 (4.25%) Product Ownership
3 401 (4.22%) Cloud Native
4 258 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
5 217 (2.29%) Management Information System
6 214 (2.25%) Data Structures
7 169 (1.78%) Data Protection Act
8 168 (1.77%) Derivative
8 168 (1.77%) Fixed Income
9 166 (1.75%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 165 (1.74%) Distributed Systems
11 164 (1.73%) Data Centre
12 143 (1.51%) Virtual Team
13 130 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
14 127 (1.34%) AI Agents
15 124 (1.31%) Equities
16 115 (1.21%) Public Cloud
17 104 (1.10%) Analytical Mindset
17 104 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
18 90 (0.95%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 318 (3.35%) Windows
2 273 (2.87%) Linux
3 152 (1.60%) Unix
4 70 (0.74%) Windows Server
5 38 (0.40%) Solaris
6 37 (0.39%) Windows 10
7 35 (0.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 35 (0.37%) zOS
8 34 (0.36%) Apple iOS
9 29 (0.31%) Android
10 22 (0.23%) Mac OS
11 19 (0.20%) AIX
12 9 (0.095%) VMS
13 7 (0.074%) Oracle Linux
13 7 (0.074%) Ubuntu
14 5 (0.053%) HPUX
14 5 (0.053%) SUSE
14 5 (0.053%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.042%) MVS
16 3 (0.032%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,049 (21.58%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,913 (20.15%) Agile
3 1,311 (13.81%) Migration
4 1,268 (13.35%) Problem-Solving
5 1,094 (11.52%) Continuous Improvement
6 1,060 (11.16%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 1,035 (10.90%) AI
8 1,009 (10.63%) DevOps
9 985 (10.37%) CI/CD
10 980 (10.32%) ERP
11 936 (9.86%) Analytics
12 841 (8.86%) Decision-Making
13 787 (8.29%) Validation
14 783 (8.25%) Data Modelling
15 782 (8.24%) Project Management
16 780 (8.21%) Roadmaps
17 741 (7.80%) User Acceptance Testing
18 675 (7.11%) Change Management
19 671 (7.07%) Business Intelligence
20 612 (6.44%) Risk Management
Programming Languages
1 1,273 (13.41%) SQL
2 1,161 (12.23%) Python
3 632 (6.66%) Java
4 383 (4.03%) C#
5 259 (2.73%) JavaScript
5 259 (2.73%) TypeScript
6 216 (2.27%) PowerShell
7 92 (0.97%) Bash
8 90 (0.95%) C++
9 81 (0.85%) PL/SQL
10 80 (0.84%) Go
11 73 (0.77%) T-SQL
12 60 (0.63%) Shell Script
13 57 (0.60%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 48 (0.51%) Scala
15 47 (0.49%) VBA
16 38 (0.40%) Bicep
17 34 (0.36%) Apex Code
18 31 (0.33%) Rust
19 30 (0.32%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 738 (7.77%) Degree
2 715 (7.53%) Security Cleared
3 512 (5.39%) SC Cleared
4 225 (2.37%) PMP
5 222 (2.34%) ACCA
6 200 (2.11%) CIMA
7 199 (2.10%) PMI Certification
8 182 (1.92%) BPSS Clearance
9 156 (1.64%) CISSP
10 132 (1.39%) Computer Science Degree
11 98 (1.03%) DV Cleared
12 92 (0.97%) CISM
13 88 (0.93%) Azure Certification
14 86 (0.91%) Master's Degree
15 73 (0.77%) Cisco Certification
16 53 (0.56%) AWS Certification
17 47 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
18 41 (0.43%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
19 38 (0.40%) (ISC)2 CCSP
20 33 (0.35%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 589 (6.20%) Data Quality
2 413 (4.35%) QA
3 330 (3.48%) PMO
4 303 (3.19%) GDPR
5 163 (1.72%) NIST
6 128 (1.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 113 (1.19%) IFRS
7 113 (1.19%) SLA
8 107 (1.13%) GRC
9 101 (1.06%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 93 (0.98%) Accessibility
11 65 (0.68%) ISO 20022
12 64 (0.67%) GAAP
13 62 (0.65%) PCI DSS
14 40 (0.42%) SEPA
15 37 (0.39%) Solvency II
16 35 (0.37%) NCSC
17 32 (0.34%) PSD2
18 30 (0.32%) SOC 2
19 29 (0.31%) COBIT
System Software
1 281 (2.96%) Docker
2 193 (2.03%) Active Directory
3 55 (0.58%) VMware Infrastructure
4 31 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
5 26 (0.27%) vSphere
6 23 (0.24%) Virtual Desktop
7 16 (0.17%) RACF
8 15 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
9 12 (0.13%) NFS
10 11 (0.12%) VMware NSX
11 10 (0.11%) Hyper-V
12 6 (0.063%) GPFS
12 6 (0.063%) KVM
13 5 (0.053%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.053%) Oracle RAC
14 3 (0.032%) Firmware
14 3 (0.032%) GridGain
14 3 (0.032%) IAG
14 3 (0.032%) SRDF
15 2 (0.021%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 436 (4.59%) Kubernetes
2 302 (3.18%) Terraform
3 157 (1.65%) Ansible
4 90 (0.95%) Grafana
5 75 (0.79%) Prometheus
6 67 (0.71%) Microsoft Intune
7 50 (0.53%) SCCM
8 47 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
9 27 (0.28%) FortiGate
10 25 (0.26%) Control-M
11 18 (0.19%) Progress Chef
11 18 (0.19%) vRealize
12 17 (0.18%) Argo
13 16 (0.17%) HP ALM
14 14 (0.15%) Nessus
15 13 (0.14%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 13 (0.14%) Jamf Pro
15 13 (0.14%) OMEGAMON
15 13 (0.14%) Puppet
16 11 (0.12%) CASB
Vendors
1 1,215 (12.79%) Microsoft
2 823 (8.67%) SAP
3 784 (8.26%) Oracle
4 346 (3.64%) ServiceNow
5 290 (3.05%) Databricks
6 210 (2.21%) Salesforce
7 209 (2.20%) Google
8 136 (1.43%) Workday
9 128 (1.35%) IBM
10 117 (1.23%) Cisco
11 115 (1.21%) Splunk
12 111 (1.17%) VMware
13 93 (0.98%) CyberArk
14 86 (0.91%) Ariba
15 69 (0.73%) OpenAI
16 67 (0.71%) Sage
17 61 (0.64%) Citrix
18 56 (0.59%) Informatica
19 54 (0.57%) Bloomberg
20 49 (0.52%) Murex