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

6 months to
2 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 3 2 2
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing Finance 9,539 7,017 8,241
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 18.54% 22.66% 18.99%
As % of the General category 34.01% 35.88% 33.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,925 4,615 5,526
10th Percentile £356 £350 £355
25th Percentile £446 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £690 £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 244 138 262
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% -8.96%
75th Percentile £55.13 £65.00 £38.12
90th Percentile £87.10 £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 28,045 19,559 24,774
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 54.50% 63.16% 57.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 16,821 12,304 15,501
10th Percentile £313 £281 £275
25th Percentile £413 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.40% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £473 £490
% change year-on-year +5.82% -3.57% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,932 963 1,967
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.47 £12.79
25th Percentile £18.25 £16.46 £15.62
Median hourly rate £32.00 £27.35 £31.71
Median % change year-on-year +17.00% -13.75% +3.97%
75th Percentile £60.00 £53.00 £53.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £72.25 £68.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.78 £23.00 £30.37
% change year-on-year +38.16% -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 2 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 2 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 2 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 8,352 £550 - 5,771
London 0 5,005 £575 -4.17% 3,198
UK excluding London +1 3,816 £500 +2.04% 3,280
Work from Home -1 2,764 £550 -4.35% 2,517
North of England +2 1,298 £500 +7.53% 862
South East -1 705 £500 -4.76% 1,012
North West +4 675 £475 +5.56% 468
Midlands 0 652 £500 +11.11% 469
Yorkshire 0 578 £525 +7.69% 294
Scotland 0 483 £475 -1.61% 195
West Midlands +1 481 £500 +2.15% 274
South West -3 382 £525 - 359
East of England +6 200 £513 -10.87% 263
East Midlands 0 164 £488 +14.71% 194
Wales +5 89 £525 +12.90% 75
Northern Ireland -1 56 £475 +11.76% 92
North East -17 46 £500 +13.96% 110
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
1 339 (3.55%) Confluence
2 234 (2.45%) SharePoint
3 87 (0.91%) 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 (0.094%) Appian
15 7 (0.073%) WebSphere
16 6 (0.063%) Hyperledger
17 5 (0.052%) WebLogic
18 4 (0.042%) JBoss
Applications
1 514 (5.39%) Microsoft Excel
2 225 (2.36%) Microsoft Office
3 172 (1.80%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 151 (1.58%) Microsoft Project
5 120 (1.26%) 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
1 428 (4.49%) SAP S/4HANA
2 113 (1.18%) NetSuite
3 109 (1.14%) Oracle Payables
4 89 (0.93%) Oracle Receivables
5 81 (0.85%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 77 (0.81%) Oracle ERP
7 65 (0.68%) SAP FI
8 49 (0.51%) Oracle EBS
9 48 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
9 48 (0.50%) Oracle General Ledger
10 45 (0.47%) SAP CO
11 43 (0.45%) SAP FI/CO
12 38 (0.40%) Aladdin
12 38 (0.40%) Oracle Financials
13 28 (0.29%) SAP ERP
14 27 (0.28%) Oracle Assets
14 27 (0.28%) Workday HCM
15 26 (0.27%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
15 26 (0.27%) SAP BRIM
16 25 (0.26%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 1,497 (15.69%) Azure
2 1,078 (11.30%) AWS
3 638 (6.69%) Power Platform
4 482 (5.05%) GCP
5 324 (3.40%) Azure DevOps
6 314 (3.29%) SaaS
7 284 (2.98%) Microsoft 365
8 251 (2.63%) GitHub
9 219 (2.30%) Dynamics 365
10 202 (2.12%) Snowflake
11 178 (1.87%) Entra ID
12 143 (1.50%) Serverless
13 124 (1.30%) Amazon S3
14 122 (1.28%) OCI
15 110 (1.15%) Power Automate
16 106 (1.11%) Azure Data Factory
17 101 (1.06%) Microsoft Copilot
18 97 (1.02%) dbt
19 92 (0.96%) GitHub Actions
20 87 (0.91%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 180 (1.89%) Firewall
2 145 (1.52%) Network Security
3 79 (0.83%) DNS
4 72 (0.75%) WAN
5 70 (0.73%) VPN
6 60 (0.63%) TCP/IP
7 44 (0.46%) BGP
8 43 (0.45%) SSL
9 39 (0.41%) LAN
10 35 (0.37%) HTTP
11 32 (0.34%) Multicast
12 31 (0.32%) OSPF
12 31 (0.32%) SD-WAN
13 30 (0.31%) DHCP
14 25 (0.26%) Internet
15 24 (0.25%) MPLS
16 21 (0.22%) Cisco ASA
17 17 (0.18%) Wireless
18 16 (0.17%) SAN
18 16 (0.17%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 542 (5.68%) Power BI
2 263 (2.76%) SQL Server
3 248 (2.60%) Data Warehouse
4 202 (2.12%) Metadata
5 179 (1.88%) Relational Database
6 176 (1.85%) PostgreSQL
7 149 (1.56%) Tableau
8 142 (1.49%) Data Lake
9 89 (0.93%) NoSQL
10 85 (0.89%) Oracle Reports
11 77 (0.81%) Oracle Database
12 71 (0.74%) Big Data
13 69 (0.72%) BigQuery
13 69 (0.72%) MongoDB
14 63 (0.66%) Snowflake Schema
15 49 (0.51%) 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
1 683 (7.16%) JIRA
2 251 (2.63%) Git
3 174 (1.82%) Jenkins
4 99 (1.04%) GitLab
5 56 (0.59%) JUnit
6 48 (0.50%) Cucumber
7 44 (0.46%) Selenium
8 30 (0.31%) Sonatype Nexus
9 28 (0.29%) Postman
10 27 (0.28%) Visual Studio
11 26 (0.27%) ERwin
12 24 (0.25%) REST Assured
13 23 (0.24%) MLflow
13 23 (0.24%) SonarQube
14 22 (0.23%) Maven
15 19 (0.20%) Oracle Forms
15 19 (0.20%) Zephyr
16 17 (0.18%) Hudson
16 17 (0.18%) TeamCity
17 15 (0.16%) Gradle
General
1 2,794 (29.29%) Social Skills
2 1,755 (18.40%) Banking
3 1,272 (13.33%) Analytical Skills
4 549 (5.76%) Public Sector
5 472 (4.95%) Legal
6 377 (3.95%) Investment Banking
7 361 (3.78%) Financial Institution
8 339 (3.55%) Front Office
9 307 (3.22%) Organisational Skills
10 306 (3.21%) Retail
11 248 (2.60%) Influencing Skills
12 238 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
13 175 (1.83%) Manufacturing
14 167 (1.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 158 (1.66%) Local Government
16 157 (1.65%) General Ledger
17 154 (1.61%) Billing
18 139 (1.46%) Marketing
19 131 (1.37%) Law
20 129 (1.35%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,404 (14.72%) Analyst
2 1,015 (10.64%) Senior
3 1,006 (10.55%) Lead
4 953 (9.99%) Developer
5 892 (9.35%) Architect
6 729 (7.64%) Business Analyst
7 709 (7.43%) Project Manager
8 648 (6.79%) Consultant
9 351 (3.68%) Solutions Architect
10 315 (3.30%) Data Engineer
11 226 (2.37%) Financial Analyst
12 222 (2.33%) Senior Manager
13 200 (2.10%) Accountant
13 200 (2.10%) Data Analyst
14 195 (2.04%) Java Developer
15 189 (1.98%) Finance Manager
16 183 (1.92%) Programme Manager
17 175 (1.83%) Software Engineer
18 173 (1.81%) Senior Developer
19 171 (1.79%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 298 (3.12%) REST
2 270 (2.83%) .NET
3 265 (2.78%) React
4 264 (2.77%) Kafka
5 197 (2.07%) Middleware
5 197 (2.07%) Oracle Fusion
6 175 (1.83%) Spring
7 164 (1.72%) Spring Boot
8 134 (1.40%) RESTful
9 116 (1.22%) Redux
10 114 (1.20%) PySpark
11 112 (1.17%) Node.js
12 92 (0.96%) AngularJS
12 92 (0.96%) JSON
13 87 (0.91%) OAuth
14 74 (0.78%) XML
15 64 (0.67%) CSS
16 62 (0.65%) GraphQL
16 62 (0.65%) OpenID
17 61 (0.64%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 438 (4.59%) Onboarding
2 407 (4.27%) Product Ownership
3 401 (4.20%) Cloud Native
4 260 (2.73%) Legacy Systems
5 217 (2.27%) Management Information System
6 215 (2.25%) Data Structures
7 173 (1.81%) Data Protection Act
8 169 (1.77%) Derivative
9 168 (1.76%) Fixed Income
9 168 (1.76%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 166 (1.74%) Data Centre
11 164 (1.72%) Distributed Systems
12 145 (1.52%) Virtual Team
13 131 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
14 127 (1.33%) AI Agents
15 123 (1.29%) Equities
16 114 (1.20%) Public Cloud
17 107 (1.12%) Analytical Mindset
18 106 (1.11%) Self-Motivation
19 93 (0.97%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 317 (3.32%) Windows
2 275 (2.88%) Linux
3 151 (1.58%) Unix
4 71 (0.74%) 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 2,065 (21.65%) Stakeholder Management
2 1,925 (20.18%) Agile
3 1,320 (13.84%) Migration
4 1,271 (13.32%) Problem-Solving
5 1,102 (11.55%) Continuous Improvement
6 1,074 (11.26%) Stakeholder Engagement
7 1,040 (10.90%) AI
8 1,010 (10.59%) DevOps
9 989 (10.37%) ERP
10 984 (10.32%) CI/CD
11 945 (9.91%) Analytics
12 848 (8.89%) Decision-Making
13 791 (8.29%) Validation
14 786 (8.24%) Data Modelling
15 780 (8.18%) Project Management
15 780 (8.18%) Roadmaps
16 747 (7.83%) User Acceptance Testing
17 686 (7.19%) Change Management
18 676 (7.09%) Business Intelligence
19 615 (6.45%) Risk Management
Programming Languages
1 1,273 (13.35%) SQL
2 1,167 (12.23%) Python
3 634 (6.65%) Java
4 383 (4.02%) C#
5 260 (2.73%) TypeScript
6 259 (2.72%) JavaScript
7 217 (2.27%) PowerShell
8 92 (0.96%) Bash
9 88 (0.92%) C++
10 82 (0.86%) PL/SQL
11 80 (0.84%) Go
12 74 (0.78%) T-SQL
13 62 (0.65%) 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 31 (0.32%) Rust
20 30 (0.31%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 740 (7.76%) Degree
2 723 (7.58%) Security Cleared
3 515 (5.40%) SC Cleared
4 225 (2.36%) PMP
5 224 (2.35%) ACCA
6 202 (2.12%) CIMA
7 200 (2.10%) PMI Certification
8 183 (1.92%) BPSS Clearance
9 157 (1.65%) CISSP
10 132 (1.38%) Computer Science Degree
11 101 (1.06%) DV Cleared
12 93 (0.97%) CISM
13 88 (0.92%) Azure Certification
14 86 (0.90%) Master's Degree
15 74 (0.78%) Cisco Certification
16 55 (0.58%) AWS Certification
17 47 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
18 41 (0.43%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
19 38 (0.40%) (ISC)2 CCSP
20 32 (0.34%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 591 (6.20%) Data Quality
2 417 (4.37%) QA
3 332 (3.48%) PMO
4 303 (3.18%) GDPR
5 163 (1.71%) NIST
6 130 (1.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 115 (1.21%) IFRS
8 112 (1.17%) SLA
9 107 (1.12%) GRC
10 99 (1.04%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 94 (0.99%) Accessibility
12 65 (0.68%) GAAP
12 65 (0.68%) ISO 20022
13 62 (0.65%) PCI DSS
14 40 (0.42%) SEPA
15 37 (0.39%) Solvency II
16 36 (0.38%) NCSC
17 31 (0.32%) PSD2
18 30 (0.31%) SOC 2
19 29 (0.30%) COBIT
System Software
1 279 (2.92%) Docker
2 194 (2.03%) Active Directory
3 55 (0.58%) VMware Infrastructure
4 31 (0.32%) Virtual Machines
5 26 (0.27%) vSphere
6 22 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
7 20 (0.21%) RACF
8 15 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
9 12 (0.13%) NFS
10 11 (0.12%) VMware NSX
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%) Firmware
14 3 (0.031%) GridGain
14 3 (0.031%) IAG
14 3 (0.031%) SRDF
15 2 (0.021%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 437 (4.58%) Kubernetes
2 304 (3.19%) Terraform
3 157 (1.65%) Ansible
4 90 (0.94%) Grafana
5 75 (0.79%) Prometheus
6 66 (0.69%) Microsoft Intune
7 50 (0.52%) SCCM
8 47 (0.49%) 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 1,214 (12.73%) Microsoft
2 826 (8.66%) SAP
3 788 (8.26%) Oracle
4 347 (3.64%) ServiceNow
5 291 (3.05%) Databricks
6 214 (2.24%) Google
7 213 (2.23%) Salesforce
8 140 (1.47%) Workday
9 133 (1.39%) IBM
10 116 (1.22%) Cisco
10 116 (1.22%) Splunk
11 111 (1.16%) VMware
12 93 (0.97%) CyberArk
13 87 (0.91%) Ariba
14 67 (0.70%) OpenAI
14 67 (0.70%) Sage
15 59 (0.62%) Citrix
16 56 (0.59%) Bloomberg
16 56 (0.59%) Informatica
17 50 (0.52%) Murex