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 6 January 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 0
Contract jobs citing Finance 7,295 6,856 8,257
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 19.77% 21.30% 19.41%
As % of the General category 32.72% 34.65% 32.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,673 4,281 5,658
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £425 £461 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -
75th Percentile £662 £700 £688
90th Percentile £775 £813 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £500 £518
% change year-on-year -1.60% -3.47% -0.77%
Number of hourly rates quoted 175 100 95
10th Percentile £15.54 £18.20 £12.90
25th Percentile £18.26 £22.50 £18.13
Median hourly rate £23.75 £30.30 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year -21.60% +10.16% +10.00%
75th Percentile £40.00 £65.69 £50.00
90th Percentile £67.67 £78.50 £63.55
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.00 £29.00 £26.83
% change year-on-year -24.14% +8.11% -16.17%

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 22,294 19,786 25,181
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 60.41% 61.47% 59.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,016 11,791 16,573
10th Percentile £284 £285 £275
25th Percentile £400 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £543
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -3.31% -1.27%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £727 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -2.56% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,375 671 1,110
10th Percentile £13.84 £15.48 £14.16
25th Percentile £16.53 £19.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £23.58 £27.50 £32.32
Median % change year-on-year -14.27% -14.91% +29.28%
75th Percentile £46.00 £53.75 £58.36
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £70.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.00 £26.42 £30.00
% change year-on-year -16.72% -11.94% +33.33%

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 6 January 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 6 January 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 6 January 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 6,398 £531 -9.96% 3,463
London -1 3,952 £575 -4.17% 1,406
UK excluding London -2 2,826 £492 -1.60% 2,594
Work from Home -2 2,023 £550 -6.94% 1,621
North of England +1 886 £475 -5.00% 584
South East -2 527 £508 -3.33% 926
Midlands -4 489 £475 -9.52% 359
North West +1 433 £450 -8.16% 297
Yorkshire 0 411 £490 -4.90% 211
Scotland 0 385 £500 +11.11% 109
West Midlands -6 306 £525 -4.55% 201
South West -2 284 £525 - 305
East Midlands +1 184 £420 +1.45% 155
East of England -2 167 £541 +3.10% 260
Wales +20 75 £400 -3.03% 75
Northern Ireland -1 58 £500 +53.85% 39
North East -7 42 £488 +2.63% 87
Channel Islands +2 2 - -

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
1 287 (3.93%) Confluence
2 194 (2.66%) SharePoint
3 68 (0.93%) Apache Airflow
4 66 (0.90%) Apache Spark
5 62 (0.85%) Apache
6 54 (0.74%) Microsoft Exchange
7 34 (0.47%) CMS
8 31 (0.42%) SAS
9 24 (0.33%) Oracle Workflow
10 22 (0.30%) IIS
11 17 (0.23%) HCL Notes
11 17 (0.23%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 13 (0.18%) Mattermost
12 13 (0.18%) Skype for Business
13 12 (0.16%) Appian
13 12 (0.16%) CICS
13 12 (0.16%) WebSphere
14 11 (0.15%) Ethereum
14 11 (0.15%) JBoss
14 11 (0.15%) TPMS
Applications
1 505 (6.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 285 (3.91%) Microsoft Office
3 208 (2.85%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 163 (2.23%) Microsoft Project
5 126 (1.73%) MS Visio
6 32 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
7 24 (0.33%) Chatbot
8 22 (0.30%) Sketch
9 20 (0.27%) Trello
10 14 (0.19%) Adobe Creative Suite
11 11 (0.15%) InVision
11 11 (0.15%) Oracle Smart View
12 7 (0.096%) Adobe XD
13 6 (0.082%) Photoshop
14 5 (0.069%) Adobe Captivate
14 5 (0.069%) Adobe Illustrator
14 5 (0.069%) Notion
15 3 (0.041%) Camtasia
15 3 (0.041%) Snagit
16 2 (0.027%) Zeplin
Business Applications
1 279 (3.82%) SAP S/4HANA
2 121 (1.66%) Oracle Payables
3 103 (1.41%) Oracle EBS
4 88 (1.21%) Oracle Receivables
5 83 (1.14%) Oracle General Ledger
6 71 (0.97%) NetSuite
7 69 (0.95%) SAP FI
8 62 (0.85%) Dynamics CRM
9 58 (0.80%) SAP CO
10 57 (0.78%) Oracle Assets
11 56 (0.77%) Oracle EBS R12
12 55 (0.75%) Oracle Cash Management
13 52 (0.71%) Oracle ERP
13 52 (0.71%) Oracle Financials
13 52 (0.71%) SAP FI/CO
14 44 (0.60%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
15 37 (0.51%) Workday HCM
16 31 (0.42%) SAP ERP
17 30 (0.41%) Endur
17 30 (0.41%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
Cloud Services
1 1,062 (14.56%) Azure
2 884 (12.12%) AWS
3 556 (7.62%) Power Platform
4 355 (4.87%) GCP
5 228 (3.13%) Microsoft 365
6 218 (2.99%) SaaS
7 211 (2.89%) Dynamics 365
8 208 (2.85%) Azure DevOps
9 188 (2.58%) GitHub
10 139 (1.91%) Serverless
11 138 (1.89%) OCI
12 136 (1.86%) Snowflake
13 112 (1.54%) Entra ID
14 105 (1.44%) GitHub Actions
15 84 (1.15%) Amazon S3
16 83 (1.14%) Power Automate
17 76 (1.04%) PowerApps
18 74 (1.01%) Figma
19 73 (1.00%) AWS CloudFormation
20 64 (0.88%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 120 (1.64%) Firewall
2 61 (0.84%) Network Security
3 50 (0.69%) WAN
4 49 (0.67%) DNS
5 39 (0.53%) TCP/IP
5 39 (0.53%) VPN
6 32 (0.44%) LAN
7 31 (0.42%) SSL
7 31 (0.42%) Wireless
8 30 (0.41%) HTTP
9 29 (0.40%) SD-WAN
10 27 (0.37%) Skype
11 24 (0.33%) SSH
12 23 (0.32%) DHCP
13 18 (0.25%) Kerberos
14 16 (0.22%) BGP
14 16 (0.22%) Internet
14 16 (0.22%) OSPF
15 15 (0.21%) Cisco IOS
16 13 (0.18%) Unified Communications
Database & Business Intelligence
1 488 (6.69%) Power BI
2 195 (2.67%) Data Warehouse
3 193 (2.65%) SQL Server
4 168 (2.30%) PostgreSQL
5 131 (1.80%) Tableau
6 129 (1.77%) NoSQL
7 128 (1.75%) Relational Database
8 122 (1.67%) Data Lake
9 103 (1.41%) Metadata
10 94 (1.29%) Oracle Reports
11 87 (1.19%) MongoDB
12 73 (1.00%) Oracle Database
13 70 (0.96%) Big Data
14 49 (0.67%) BigQuery
14 49 (0.67%) Power Query
15 46 (0.63%) Hadoop
16 44 (0.60%) Amazon Athena
17 41 (0.56%) Amazon RDS
18 40 (0.55%) DB2
18 40 (0.55%) Redis
Development Applications
1 540 (7.40%) JIRA
2 259 (3.55%) Jenkins
3 209 (2.86%) Git
4 149 (2.04%) GitLab
5 81 (1.11%) JUnit
6 54 (0.74%) Cucumber
6 54 (0.74%) Selenium
7 53 (0.73%) Bitbucket
8 45 (0.62%) Sonatype Nexus
9 38 (0.52%) Postman
10 30 (0.41%) Liquibase
10 30 (0.41%) Visual Studio
11 25 (0.34%) Cypress.io
12 23 (0.32%) SonarQube
13 21 (0.29%) Gradle
13 21 (0.29%) REST Assured
14 20 (0.27%) JMeter
14 20 (0.27%) Maven
14 20 (0.27%) webpack
15 18 (0.25%) MLflow
General
1 2,509 (34.39%) Social Skills
2 1,546 (21.19%) Banking
3 1,001 (13.72%) Analytical Skills
4 584 (8.01%) Public Sector
5 348 (4.77%) Financial Institution
6 325 (4.46%) Marketing
7 315 (4.32%) Manufacturing
8 303 (4.15%) Investment Banking
9 288 (3.95%) Telecoms
10 285 (3.91%) Front Office
11 258 (3.54%) Legal
12 208 (2.85%) Organisational Skills
13 198 (2.71%) Documentation Skills
14 197 (2.70%) Electronics
15 150 (2.06%) Influencing Skills
16 142 (1.95%) Retail
17 138 (1.89%) Presentation Skills
18 125 (1.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
19 120 (1.64%) General Ledger
20 108 (1.48%) Billing
Job Titles
1 1,206 (16.53%) Analyst
2 845 (11.58%) Developer
3 718 (9.84%) Senior
4 601 (8.24%) Business Analyst
5 577 (7.91%) Consultant
6 575 (7.88%) Project Manager
7 534 (7.32%) Architect
8 482 (6.61%) Lead
9 212 (2.91%) Solutions Architect
10 202 (2.77%) Data Analyst
11 160 (2.19%) Financial Analyst
12 156 (2.14%) Senior Developer
13 153 (2.10%) Data Engineer
14 151 (2.07%) Software Engineer
15 149 (2.04%) Java Developer
16 144 (1.97%) Programme Manager
17 115 (1.58%) Oracle Consultant
18 114 (1.56%) Senior Manager
19 113 (1.55%) Senior Analyst
20 111 (1.52%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 272 (3.73%) REST
2 234 (3.21%) Kafka
3 219 (3.00%) .NET
4 172 (2.36%) React
5 168 (2.30%) RESTful
6 155 (2.12%) Oracle Fusion
7 148 (2.03%) Spring
8 119 (1.63%) Spring Boot
9 106 (1.45%) AngularJS
10 101 (1.38%) Pandas
11 98 (1.34%) HTML
12 95 (1.30%) Middleware
13 91 (1.25%) XML
14 89 (1.22%) CSS
15 88 (1.21%) NumPy
16 87 (1.19%) Node.js
17 80 (1.10%) SOAP
18 76 (1.04%) JSON
19 75 (1.03%) OAuth
20 73 (1.00%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 318 (4.36%) Onboarding
2 281 (3.85%) Product Ownership
3 207 (2.84%) Cloud Native
4 188 (2.58%) Derivative
5 173 (2.37%) Management Information System
6 163 (2.23%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 153 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
8 138 (1.89%) Equities
9 135 (1.85%) Data Centre
10 132 (1.81%) Distributed Systems
11 125 (1.71%) Fixed Income
12 124 (1.70%) Analytical Mindset
12 124 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
13 120 (1.64%) Data Structures
14 108 (1.48%) Greenfield Project
15 103 (1.41%) Hedge funds
16 100 (1.37%) Public Cloud
17 82 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
18 72 (0.99%) Virtual Team
19 69 (0.95%) Credit Risk
Operating Systems
1 373 (5.11%) Linux
2 333 (4.56%) Windows
3 161 (2.21%) Unix
4 66 (0.90%) Android
4 66 (0.90%) Windows 10
5 63 (0.86%) Mac OS
6 59 (0.81%) Windows Server
7 36 (0.49%) Apple iOS
8 19 (0.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 8 (0.11%) zOS
10 7 (0.096%) CentOS
10 7 (0.096%) VMS
11 5 (0.069%) Solaris
12 4 (0.055%) AIX
12 4 (0.055%) Windows Server 2016
13 3 (0.041%) Ubuntu
13 3 (0.041%) Windows Server 2019
14 2 (0.027%) Windows 7
14 2 (0.027%) Windows 8
14 2 (0.027%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,703 (23.34%) Agile
2 1,290 (17.68%) Stakeholder Management
3 1,203 (16.49%) Problem-Solving
4 825 (11.31%) Migration
5 782 (10.72%) Stakeholder Engagement
6 771 (10.57%) Business Intelligence
7 765 (10.49%) DevOps
8 740 (10.14%) CI/CD
9 706 (9.68%) Analytics
10 703 (9.64%) Project Management
11 622 (8.53%) ERP
12 606 (8.31%) Continuous Improvement
13 511 (7.00%) Decision-Making
14 510 (6.99%) Risk Management
15 506 (6.94%) Change Management
16 485 (6.65%) Roadmaps
17 478 (6.55%) AI
18 462 (6.33%) Data Modelling
19 451 (6.18%) Project Delivery
20 437 (5.99%) User Acceptance Testing
Programming Languages
1 1,076 (14.75%) SQL
2 980 (13.43%) Python
3 529 (7.25%) Java
4 322 (4.41%) C#
5 226 (3.10%) JavaScript
6 195 (2.67%) PowerShell
7 159 (2.18%) TypeScript
8 155 (2.12%) C++
9 89 (1.22%) PL/SQL
10 80 (1.10%) Go
11 77 (1.06%) Bash
12 61 (0.84%) Shell Script
13 56 (0.77%) VBA
14 46 (0.63%) R
15 43 (0.59%) Kotlin
16 41 (0.56%) Groovy
17 35 (0.48%) T-SQL
18 34 (0.47%) Perl
19 33 (0.45%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 31 (0.42%) Rust
Qualifications
1 782 (10.72%) Degree
2 548 (7.51%) Security Cleared
3 397 (5.44%) SC Cleared
4 183 (2.51%) PMI Certification
5 182 (2.49%) Computer Science Degree
6 170 (2.33%) PMP
7 166 (2.28%) Master's Degree
8 144 (1.97%) ACCA
9 121 (1.66%) CIMA
10 103 (1.41%) CISSP
11 100 (1.37%) AWS Certification
12 95 (1.30%) BPSS Clearance
13 66 (0.90%) Azure Certification
14 63 (0.86%) CISM
14 63 (0.86%) DV Cleared
15 44 (0.60%) ITIL Certification
16 43 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
17 35 (0.48%) CBAP
18 32 (0.44%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 27 (0.37%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 385 (5.28%) QA
2 320 (4.39%) Data Quality
3 273 (3.74%) PMO
4 249 (3.41%) GDPR
5 119 (1.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 117 (1.60%) NIST
7 108 (1.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 104 (1.43%) Accessibility
9 99 (1.36%) SLA
10 78 (1.07%) PCI DSS
11 70 (0.96%) IFRS
12 48 (0.66%) GRC
13 42 (0.58%) ISO 20022
14 40 (0.55%) PSD2
15 39 (0.53%) MiFID
16 31 (0.42%) Basel III
16 31 (0.42%) COBIT
17 27 (0.37%) SEPA
18 24 (0.33%) EMIR
18 24 (0.33%) NCSC
System Software
1 325 (4.46%) Docker
2 194 (2.66%) Active Directory
3 51 (0.70%) VMware Infrastructure
4 34 (0.47%) Virtual Desktop
5 16 (0.22%) vSphere
6 11 (0.15%) Hyper-V
7 9 (0.12%) HDFS
7 9 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
8 8 (0.11%) GPFS
8 8 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
8 8 (0.11%) VMware ESXi
9 7 (0.096%) Firmware
9 7 (0.096%) NFS
10 5 (0.069%) Tivoli Directory Server
10 5 (0.069%) VMware NSX
11 4 (0.055%) BitLocker
11 4 (0.055%) ISA Server
11 4 (0.055%) Time Sharing Option
12 3 (0.041%) RACF
13 2 (0.027%) ACF2
Systems Management
1 372 (5.10%) Kubernetes
2 280 (3.84%) Terraform
3 189 (2.59%) Ansible
4 92 (1.26%) Grafana
5 80 (1.10%) Prometheus
6 63 (0.86%) SCCM
7 55 (0.75%) Microsoft Intune
8 34 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
9 25 (0.34%) Progress Chef
10 22 (0.30%) SCOM
11 21 (0.29%) HP SiteScope
12 19 (0.26%) Argo
13 17 (0.23%) FortiGate
13 17 (0.23%) Jamf Pro
13 17 (0.23%) Kibana
14 16 (0.22%) ITRS Geneos
15 15 (0.21%) Control-M
16 14 (0.19%) Puppet
16 14 (0.19%) vRealize
17 10 (0.14%) Nessus
Vendors
1 1,017 (13.94%) Microsoft
2 785 (10.76%) SAP
3 713 (9.77%) Oracle
4 263 (3.61%) ServiceNow
5 174 (2.39%) Salesforce
6 165 (2.26%) Splunk
7 162 (2.22%) Google
8 156 (2.14%) Databricks
9 139 (1.91%) Workday
10 132 (1.81%) Cisco
11 96 (1.32%) VMware
12 87 (1.19%) IBM
13 73 (1.00%) Citrix
14 65 (0.89%) Ariba
15 59 (0.81%) CyberArk
16 55 (0.75%) Bloomberg
17 53 (0.73%) HP
18 52 (0.71%) Adobe
19 48 (0.66%) Apple
20 46 (0.63%) Dell