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

6 months to
18 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,276 6,744 8,194
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.40% 22.66% 18.68%
As % of the General category 33.99% 35.67% 32.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,772 4,406 5,478
10th Percentile £355 £350 £350
25th Percentile £441 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £695 £713
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 227 133 270
10th Percentile £14.82 £17.79 £12.80
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.22 £15.17
Median hourly rate £35.00 £37.02 £27.00
Median % change year-on-year -5.46% +37.11% -3.50%
75th Percentile £54.00 £65.25 £38.12
90th Percentile £85.00 £79.68 £57.75
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 27,294 18,909 25,012
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 54.15% 63.53% 57.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,471 11,934 15,663
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £401 £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 £769
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £471 £488
% change year-on-year +6.27% -3.48% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,831 906 2,015
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.48 £12.78
25th Percentile £18.20 £16.73 £15.50
Median hourly rate £32.00 £27.70 £30.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.52% -9.18% -0.07%
75th Percentile £60.80 £53.95 £52.50
90th Percentile £80.09 £75.00 £67.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.46 £24.34 £29.50
% change year-on-year +29.25% -17.49% +11.36%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 8,151 £550 -2.22% 4,711
London 0 4,873 £575 -4.17% 2,617
UK excluding London +1 3,739 £500 +2.56% 2,964
Work from Home -1 2,648 £550 -4.35% 1,949
North of England +2 1,278 £494 +6.52% 748
South East +1 683 £500 -4.31% 895
North West +4 674 £465 +3.33% 416
Midlands 0 641 £500 +9.89% 428
Yorkshire 0 556 £525 +10.53% 254
Scotland 0 467 £500 +5.26% 164
West Midlands +1 464 £502 +0.30% 259
South West -2 380 £525 -1.18% 293
East of England +2 197 £513 -10.87% 201
East Midlands -1 170 £475 +11.76% 165
Wales +8 91 £525 +19.66% 86
Northern Ireland -1 54 £525 +23.53% 199
North East -17 49 £500 +13.64% 90
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 (3.57%) Confluence
2 219 (2.36%) SharePoint
3 85 (0.92%) 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 13 (0.14%) Appian
13 12 (0.13%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 12 (0.13%) Camunda
13 12 (0.13%) Ethereum
14 10 (0.11%) Jupyter
14 10 (0.11%) WebSphere
15 6 (0.065%) HCL Notes
15 6 (0.065%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 6 (0.065%) TPMS
Applications
1 511 (5.51%) Microsoft Excel
2 218 (2.35%) Microsoft Office
3 170 (1.83%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 157 (1.69%) Microsoft Project
5 115 (1.24%) MS Visio
6 60 (0.65%) Spreadsheet
7 36 (0.39%) Chatbot
8 9 (0.097%) Sketch
9 7 (0.075%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 7 (0.075%) Adobe XD
10 6 (0.065%) InVision
11 5 (0.054%) Trello
12 4 (0.043%) Notion
12 4 (0.043%) Oracle Smart View
13 3 (0.032%) Adobe Illustrator
13 3 (0.032%) Photoshop
14 2 (0.022%) AutoCAD
15 1 (0.011%) Adobe Premiere
15 1 (0.011%) Final Cut Pro
15 1 (0.011%) MicroStation
Business Applications
1 414 (4.46%) SAP S/4HANA
2 108 (1.16%) NetSuite
2 108 (1.16%) Oracle Payables
3 86 (0.93%) Oracle Receivables
4 84 (0.91%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 73 (0.79%) Oracle ERP
6 62 (0.67%) SAP FI
7 48 (0.52%) Oracle EBS
7 48 (0.52%) SAP CO
8 46 (0.50%) SAP FI/CO
9 45 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
10 43 (0.46%) Oracle General Ledger
11 38 (0.41%) Aladdin
12 34 (0.37%) Oracle Financials
12 34 (0.37%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
13 28 (0.30%) SAP ERP
13 28 (0.30%) Unit4 Business World
14 26 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
15 25 (0.27%) SAP BRIM
16 22 (0.24%) Oracle Cash Management
Cloud Services
1 1,456 (15.70%) Azure
2 1,040 (11.21%) AWS
3 626 (6.75%) Power Platform
4 451 (4.86%) GCP
5 315 (3.40%) Azure DevOps
6 309 (3.33%) SaaS
7 285 (3.07%) Microsoft 365
8 234 (2.52%) GitHub
9 214 (2.31%) Dynamics 365
10 183 (1.97%) Snowflake
11 165 (1.78%) Entra ID
12 144 (1.55%) Serverless
13 128 (1.38%) OCI
14 117 (1.26%) Amazon S3
15 112 (1.21%) Power Automate
16 104 (1.12%) Azure Data Factory
17 92 (0.99%) Microsoft Copilot
18 90 (0.97%) dbt
19 87 (0.94%) GitHub Actions
20 85 (0.92%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 170 (1.83%) Firewall
2 135 (1.46%) Network Security
3 78 (0.84%) WAN
4 75 (0.81%) DNS
5 68 (0.73%) VPN
6 59 (0.64%) TCP/IP
7 41 (0.44%) 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%) DHCP
12 30 (0.32%) Multicast
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
1 532 (5.74%) Power BI
2 252 (2.72%) SQL Server
3 234 (2.52%) Data Warehouse
4 188 (2.03%) Metadata
5 174 (1.88%) PostgreSQL
6 170 (1.83%) Relational Database
7 148 (1.60%) Tableau
8 141 (1.52%) Data Lake
9 93 (1.00%) NoSQL
10 83 (0.89%) Oracle Reports
11 74 (0.80%) Big Data
12 70 (0.75%) Oracle Database
13 67 (0.72%) MongoDB
14 66 (0.71%) BigQuery
15 56 (0.60%) Snowflake Schema
16 48 (0.52%) Power Query
16 48 (0.52%) SQL Server Integration Services
17 45 (0.49%) Delta Lake
18 44 (0.47%) Azure SQL Database
19 37 (0.40%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 676 (7.29%) JIRA
2 229 (2.47%) Git
3 164 (1.77%) Jenkins
4 96 (1.03%) GitLab
5 54 (0.58%) JUnit
6 45 (0.49%) Cucumber
7 36 (0.39%) Selenium
8 31 (0.33%) Visual Studio
9 30 (0.32%) Sonatype Nexus
10 27 (0.29%) MLflow
11 26 (0.28%) Postman
12 23 (0.25%) SonarQube
13 21 (0.23%) ERwin
13 21 (0.23%) REST Assured
14 20 (0.22%) Maven
14 20 (0.22%) Zephyr
15 18 (0.19%) Oracle Forms
16 16 (0.17%) Hudson
17 15 (0.16%) TeamCity
18 14 (0.15%) Bitbucket
General
1 2,702 (29.13%) Social Skills
2 1,695 (18.27%) Banking
3 1,188 (12.81%) Analytical Skills
4 521 (5.62%) Public Sector
5 451 (4.86%) Legal
6 361 (3.89%) Investment Banking
7 351 (3.78%) Financial Institution
8 321 (3.46%) Front Office
9 294 (3.17%) Organisational Skills
10 291 (3.14%) Retail
11 235 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
12 232 (2.50%) Influencing Skills
13 166 (1.79%) Manufacturing
14 164 (1.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 149 (1.61%) General Ledger
16 148 (1.60%) Local Government
17 142 (1.53%) Billing
18 135 (1.46%) Law
19 132 (1.42%) Marketing
20 131 (1.41%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,362 (14.68%) Analyst
2 1,012 (10.91%) Senior
3 962 (10.37%) Lead
4 944 (10.18%) Developer
5 858 (9.25%) Architect
6 716 (7.72%) Project Manager
7 698 (7.52%) Business Analyst
8 619 (6.67%) Consultant
9 352 (3.79%) Solutions Architect
10 310 (3.34%) Data Engineer
11 224 (2.41%) Financial Analyst
12 220 (2.37%) Senior Manager
13 197 (2.12%) Finance Manager
14 194 (2.09%) Java Developer
15 193 (2.08%) Data Analyst
16 191 (2.06%) Accountant
17 175 (1.89%) Senior Developer
18 174 (1.88%) Programme Manager
19 169 (1.82%) Software Engineer
20 163 (1.76%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 283 (3.05%) REST
2 262 (2.82%) .NET
3 259 (2.79%) Kafka
4 255 (2.75%) React
5 203 (2.19%) Oracle Fusion
6 191 (2.06%) Middleware
7 168 (1.81%) Spring
8 162 (1.75%) Spring Boot
9 139 (1.50%) RESTful
10 112 (1.21%) PySpark
10 112 (1.21%) Redux
11 103 (1.11%) Node.js
12 94 (1.01%) AngularJS
13 91 (0.98%) JSON
14 87 (0.94%) OAuth
15 78 (0.84%) XML
16 65 (0.70%) CSS
17 61 (0.66%) OpenID
18 60 (0.65%) HTML
19 59 (0.64%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 414 (4.46%) Onboarding
2 387 (4.17%) Product Ownership
3 376 (4.05%) Cloud Native
4 259 (2.79%) Legacy Systems
5 214 (2.31%) Management Information System
6 205 (2.21%) Data Structures
7 169 (1.82%) Data Protection Act
8 168 (1.81%) Derivative
9 164 (1.77%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 163 (1.76%) Fixed Income
11 160 (1.72%) Data Centre
12 157 (1.69%) Distributed Systems
13 136 (1.47%) Virtual Team
14 126 (1.36%) Greenfield Project
15 123 (1.33%) Equities
16 111 (1.20%) Public Cloud
17 109 (1.18%) AI Agents
18 100 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
19 95 (1.02%) Analytical Mindset
20 82 (0.88%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 313 (3.37%) Windows
2 272 (2.93%) Linux
3 147 (1.58%) Unix
4 72 (0.78%) 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 (0.22%) Mac OS
12 19 (0.20%) AIX
13 7 (0.075%) Oracle Linux
13 7 (0.075%) Ubuntu
13 7 (0.075%) VMS
14 6 (0.065%) Windows Server 2012
15 5 (0.054%) HPUX
15 5 (0.054%) SUSE
15 5 (0.054%) Windows Server 2019
16 4 (0.043%) MVS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,952 (21.04%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,864 (20.09%) Agile
3 1,284 (13.84%) Migration
4 1,224 (13.20%) Problem-Solving
5 1,054 (11.36%) Continuous Improvement
6 1,011 (10.90%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 979 (10.55%) ERP
8 976 (10.52%) AI
9 975 (10.51%) DevOps
10 941 (10.14%) CI/CD
11 899 (9.69%) Analytics
12 796 (8.58%) Decision-Making
13 784 (8.45%) Project Management
14 769 (8.29%) Data Modelling
15 765 (8.25%) Validation
16 751 (8.10%) Roadmaps
17 726 (7.83%) User Acceptance Testing
18 674 (7.27%) Business Intelligence
19 661 (7.13%) Change Management
20 597 (6.44%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 1,245 (13.42%) SQL
2 1,130 (12.18%) Python
3 628 (6.77%) Java
4 384 (4.14%) C#
5 251 (2.71%) JavaScript
6 246 (2.65%) TypeScript
7 205 (2.21%) PowerShell
8 98 (1.06%) C++
9 84 (0.91%) Bash
10 81 (0.87%) PL/SQL
11 73 (0.79%) Go
12 72 (0.78%) T-SQL
13 57 (0.61%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 54 (0.58%) Shell Script
15 44 (0.47%) Scala
16 43 (0.46%) VBA
17 32 (0.34%) Apex Code
18 31 (0.33%) Bicep
18 31 (0.33%) Rust
19 29 (0.31%) R
Qualifications
1 740 (7.98%) Degree
2 692 (7.46%) Security Cleared
3 499 (5.38%) SC Cleared
4 233 (2.51%) ACCA
5 221 (2.38%) PMP
6 209 (2.25%) CIMA
7 195 (2.10%) PMI Certification
8 182 (1.96%) BPSS Clearance
9 151 (1.63%) CISSP
10 134 (1.44%) Computer Science Degree
11 93 (1.00%) CISM
12 91 (0.98%) DV Cleared
13 88 (0.95%) Master's Degree
14 80 (0.86%) Azure Certification
15 71 (0.77%) Cisco Certification
16 48 (0.52%) AWS Certification
17 46 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
18 39 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 35 (0.38%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
20 34 (0.37%) ISTQB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 568 (6.12%) Data Quality
2 414 (4.46%) QA
3 326 (3.51%) PMO
4 301 (3.24%) GDPR
5 167 (1.80%) NIST
6 133 (1.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 116 (1.25%) IFRS
8 109 (1.18%) SLA
9 108 (1.16%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 107 (1.15%) GRC
11 92 (0.99%) Accessibility
12 66 (0.71%) PCI DSS
13 64 (0.69%) GAAP
14 62 (0.67%) ISO 20022
15 38 (0.41%) SEPA
16 36 (0.39%) NCSC
17 35 (0.38%) Solvency II
18 33 (0.36%) PSD2
19 30 (0.32%) IFRS 17
20 29 (0.31%) SOC 2
System Software
1 281 (3.03%) Docker
2 184 (1.98%) Active Directory
3 54 (0.58%) VMware Infrastructure
4 30 (0.32%) vSphere
5 29 (0.31%) Virtual Machines
6 25 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
7 16 (0.17%) RACF
8 15 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
9 14 (0.15%) VMware NSX
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 (0.043%) Firmware
15 3 (0.032%) GridGain
15 3 (0.032%) SRDF
16 2 (0.022%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 2 (0.022%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 416 (4.48%) Kubernetes
2 275 (2.96%) Terraform
3 148 (1.60%) Ansible
4 89 (0.96%) Grafana
5 77 (0.83%) Prometheus
6 65 (0.70%) Microsoft Intune
7 49 (0.53%) SCCM
8 43 (0.46%) 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 1,170 (12.61%) Microsoft
2 821 (8.85%) SAP
3 778 (8.39%) Oracle
4 318 (3.43%) ServiceNow
5 280 (3.02%) Databricks
6 215 (2.32%) Salesforce
7 205 (2.21%) Google
8 132 (1.42%) Workday
9 120 (1.29%) Cisco
10 115 (1.24%) IBM
11 112 (1.21%) Splunk
11 112 (1.21%) VMware
12 93 (1.00%) CyberArk
13 85 (0.92%) Ariba
14 69 (0.74%) OpenAI
15 67 (0.72%) Sage
16 65 (0.70%) Citrix
17 53 (0.57%) Bloomberg
17 53 (0.57%) Palo Alto
18 52 (0.56%) Informatica