Java Engineer Contract Job Trends

Java Engineer
UK

The median Java Engineer daily rate in the UK is £550, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 20 March 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 348 375 430
Rank change year-on-year +27 +55 -2
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 289 147 155
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.66% 0.50% 0.35%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.72% 0.54% 0.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 183 103 99
10th Percentile £373 £325 £400
25th Percentile £423 £461 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year - - -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £813 £681
90th Percentile £700 £875 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £470 £485
% change year-on-year +6.38% -3.09% -15.65%
Number of hourly rates quoted 43 9 4
10th Percentile - £37.95 £61.38
25th Percentile £52.50 £57.50 £65.31
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year - -7.14% +6.70%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.75 £72.50
90th Percentile £74.00 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £65.00 £66.25
% change year-on-year -3.85% -1.89% +0.98%

All Contract IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 39,980 27,191 41,155
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.91% 92.93% 92.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,004 17,726 26,995
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £410 £406 £407
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £521 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.03% -0.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £475 £487
% change year-on-year +1.05% -2.46% -2.60%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,473 892 2,490
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.22 £12.86
25th Percentile £19.25 £21.01 £16.25
Median hourly rate £36.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +10.77% - -23.53%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £59.99
90th Percentile £76.25 £77.10 £71.30
UK excluding London median hourly rate £36.00 £32.00 £32.50
% change year-on-year +12.50% -1.54% -19.92%

Java Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Java Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Java Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Java Engineer
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Java Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Java Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Java Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Java Engineer over the 6 months to 20 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Java Engineer in the UK

Java Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Java Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Java Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Java Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Java Engineer over the 6 months to 20 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Java Engineer in the UK

Java Engineer
Top 16 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Java Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 20 March 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 +16 247 £525 -12.50% 59
UK excluding London +28 154 £500 +6.38% 37
London -33 116 £550 -8.33% 31
Work from Home +1 78 £494 -36.29% 35
North of England -34 48 £523 +14.21% 17
Midlands -36 28 £469 -10.67% 2
West Midlands -37 27 £469 -10.67% 1
North West -11 26 £478 - 7
Scotland +26 25 £600 +26.32% 3
South East -34 25 £370 -43.08% 10
South West -15 24 £488 -12.56% 5
Yorkshire -51 13 £523 -0.48% 7
North East -5 10 £575 +47.44% 3
Wales -8 2 £388 +96.20%
East of England -19 2 £500 +11.11%
East Midlands - 1 - - 1

Java Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 20 March 2026, Java Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Java Engineer in the job title.

1 289 (100.00%) Java
2 147 (50.87%) Software Engineering
3 119 (41.18%) Spring
4 108 (37.37%) Spring Boot
5 93 (32.18%) AWS
6 87 (30.10%) CI/CD
7 86 (29.76%) Microservices
8 85 (29.41%) Kubernetes
9 75 (25.95%) Agile
10 52 (17.99%) DevOps
10 52 (17.99%) Docker
10 52 (17.99%) Kafka
11 50 (17.30%) Azure
12 48 (16.61%) Full-Stack Development
13 45 (15.57%) Security Cleared
13 45 (15.57%) TDD
14 41 (14.19%) SC Cleared
14 41 (14.19%) SQL
15 37 (12.80%) Containerisation
15 37 (12.80%) Python
16 34 (11.76%) Jenkins
16 34 (11.76%) React
16 34 (11.76%) Test Automation
17 33 (11.42%) QA
18 32 (11.07%) Problem-Solving
19 30 (10.38%) PostgreSQL
20 29 (10.03%) Git
20 29 (10.03%) GitLab
20 29 (10.03%) Gradle
21 26 (9.00%) Event-Driven

Java Engineer Skill Set
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 8 (2.77%) Apache
2 7 (2.42%) Apache Spark
3 3 (1.04%) JBoss
3 3 (1.04%) WebLogic
4 2 (0.69%) Apache Airflow
4 2 (0.69%) Confluence
4 2 (0.69%) Oracle SOA Suite
5 1 (0.35%) Adobe Experience Manager
5 1 (0.35%) Camunda
5 1 (0.35%) Ethereum
5 1 (0.35%) Hyperledger
Applications
1 1 (0.35%) Notion
Business Applications
1 2 (0.69%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 93 (32.18%) AWS
2 50 (17.30%) Azure
3 17 (5.88%) AWS Lambda
3 17 (5.88%) Serverless
4 16 (5.54%) Amazon S3
4 16 (5.54%) GCP
4 16 (5.54%) GitHub
5 13 (4.50%) Amazon ECS
6 11 (3.81%) Amazon EC2
7 10 (3.46%) OpenShift
8 9 (3.11%) GitHub Actions
9 8 (2.77%) AWS CloudFormation
10 7 (2.42%) AWS Step Functions
11 6 (2.08%) Amazon EKS
11 6 (2.08%) Amazon Kinesis
12 5 (1.73%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 4 (1.38%) AWS CodePipeline
13 4 (1.38%) Cloud Computing
13 4 (1.38%) Snowflake
14 3 (1.04%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.04%) MQTT
2 2 (0.69%) HTTP
3 1 (0.35%) FTP
3 1 (0.35%) HTTPS
3 1 (0.35%) Kerberos
3 1 (0.35%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 30 (10.38%) PostgreSQL
2 25 (8.65%) MongoDB
3 11 (3.81%) Amazon RDS
4 10 (3.46%) MySQL
5 9 (3.11%) Apache Cassandra
5 9 (3.11%) Big Data
5 9 (3.11%) NoSQL
5 9 (3.11%) SQL Server
6 8 (2.77%) DynamoDB
7 6 (2.08%) Hadoop
8 4 (1.38%) Relational Database
9 3 (1.04%) BigQuery
9 3 (1.04%) Elasticsearch
9 3 (1.04%) HBase
10 2 (0.69%) Amazon Athena
10 2 (0.69%) Apache Arrow
10 2 (0.69%) Apache Ignite
10 2 (0.69%) Data Lake
10 2 (0.69%) Dremio
10 2 (0.69%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 34 (11.76%) Jenkins
2 29 (10.03%) Git
2 29 (10.03%) GitLab
2 29 (10.03%) Gradle
3 26 (9.00%) JUnit
4 17 (5.88%) IntelliJ
5 14 (4.84%) Cucumber
6 12 (4.15%) Maven
7 8 (2.77%) Selenium
8 7 (2.42%) JIRA
8 7 (2.42%) Mockito
9 6 (2.08%) SonarQube
9 6 (2.08%) Sonatype Nexus
10 4 (1.38%) Artifactory
10 4 (1.38%) Eclipse
10 4 (1.38%) JMeter
10 4 (1.38%) Postman
11 3 (1.04%) Gatling
11 3 (1.04%) Liquibase
12 2 (0.69%) XCUITest
General
1 62 (21.45%) Finance
2 37 (12.80%) Social Skills
3 24 (8.30%) Banking
4 17 (5.88%) Front Office
5 16 (5.54%) Public Sector
6 7 (2.42%) Analytical Skills
6 7 (2.42%) Investment Banking
7 5 (1.73%) Financial Institution
7 5 (1.73%) Law
8 3 (1.04%) Back Office
8 3 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
9 2 (0.69%) Retail
10 1 (0.35%) Aerospace
10 1 (0.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (0.35%) Military
10 1 (0.35%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 119 (41.18%) Spring
2 108 (37.37%) Spring Boot
3 52 (17.99%) Kafka
4 34 (11.76%) React
5 26 (9.00%) RESTful
6 20 (6.92%) Node.js
7 18 (6.23%) REST
8 17 (5.88%) GraphQL
9 16 (5.54%) Middleware
10 14 (4.84%) Swagger
11 12 (4.15%) OpenTelemetry
12 11 (3.81%) AngularJS
12 11 (3.81%) Hibernate
13 9 (3.11%) OpenAPI
13 9 (3.11%) Redux
14 7 (2.42%) JSON
14 7 (2.42%) Playwright
15 6 (2.08%) AWS CDK
15 6 (2.08%) HTML
16 5 (1.73%) Quarkus
Miscellaneous
1 36 (12.46%) Cloud Native
2 25 (8.65%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (3.81%) Data Protection Act
3 11 (3.81%) Fixed Income
4 8 (2.77%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 7 (2.42%) Onboarding
6 6 (2.08%) Derivative
7 5 (1.73%) Legacy Applications
7 5 (1.73%) Legacy Systems
7 5 (1.73%) Product Ownership
7 5 (1.73%) Public Cloud
7 5 (1.73%) Virtual Team
8 4 (1.38%) Greenfield Project
8 4 (1.38%) Mobile App
9 3 (1.04%) Distributed Architecture
9 3 (1.04%) Equities
9 3 (1.04%) Hedge funds
9 3 (1.04%) Pricing Data
10 2 (0.69%) Distributed Computing
10 2 (0.69%) Exotic Derivative
Operating Systems
1 20 (6.92%) Linux
2 9 (3.11%) Unix
3 1 (0.35%) SUSE
3 1 (0.35%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
3 1 (0.35%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 147 (50.87%) Software Engineering
2 87 (30.10%) CI/CD
3 86 (29.76%) Microservices
4 75 (25.95%) Agile
5 52 (17.99%) DevOps
6 48 (16.61%) Full-Stack Development
7 45 (15.57%) TDD
8 37 (12.80%) Containerisation
9 34 (11.76%) Test Automation
10 32 (11.07%) Problem-Solving
11 26 (9.00%) Event-Driven
12 22 (7.61%) Scrum
13 20 (6.92%) Mentoring
13 20 (6.92%) Migration
14 19 (6.57%) Clean Code
15 18 (6.23%) Software Testing
16 17 (5.88%) Code Quality
16 17 (5.88%) Observability
17 16 (5.54%) Infrastructure as Code
17 16 (5.54%) Unit Testing
Programming Languages
1 289 (100.00%) Java
2 41 (14.19%) SQL
3 37 (12.80%) Python
4 24 (8.30%) TypeScript
5 17 (5.88%) Kotlin
6 16 (5.54%) JavaScript
7 13 (4.50%) Go
8 10 (3.46%) Ada
9 5 (1.73%) PL/SQL
9 5 (1.73%) Scala
10 4 (1.38%) C++
11 3 (1.04%) C#
12 2 (0.69%) Shell Script
13 1 (0.35%) Rust
13 1 (0.35%) Solidity
Qualifications
1 45 (15.57%) Security Cleared
2 41 (14.19%) SC Cleared
3 10 (3.46%) Degree
4 5 (1.73%) BPSS Clearance
4 5 (1.73%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (1.04%) OCP
5 3 (1.04%) Oracle Certification
6 2 (0.69%) DV Cleared
6 2 (0.69%) Master's Degree
7 1 (0.35%) AWS Certification
7 1 (0.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.35%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 33 (11.42%) QA
2 10 (3.46%) Def Stans
2 10 (3.46%) IEC 61508
3 6 (2.08%) Accessibility
4 3 (1.04%) GDPR
4 3 (1.04%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 2 (0.69%) Data Quality
5 2 (0.69%) ISO 15022
5 2 (0.69%) ISO 20022
5 2 (0.69%) WCAG
System Software
1 52 (17.99%) Docker
Systems Management
1 85 (29.41%) Kubernetes
2 25 (8.65%) Terraform
3 18 (6.23%) Grafana
4 6 (2.08%) Ansible
4 6 (2.08%) Argo
5 3 (1.04%) Puppet
6 2 (0.69%) HAProxy
6 2 (0.69%) Progress Chef
7 1 (0.35%) Kibana
7 1 (0.35%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 10 (3.46%) Microsoft
2 9 (3.11%) Google
2 9 (3.11%) Oracle
3 7 (2.42%) Splunk
4 5 (1.73%) Red Hat
5 4 (1.38%) Databricks
6 3 (1.04%) IBM
6 3 (1.04%) Solace
6 3 (1.04%) Spotify
6 3 (1.04%) webMethods
7 2 (0.69%) Dynatrace
7 2 (0.69%) New Relic
7 2 (0.69%) ServiceNow
7 2 (0.69%) VMware
8 1 (0.35%) Ab Initio
8 1 (0.35%) Actian
8 1 (0.35%) Adobe
8 1 (0.35%) Calypso
8 1 (0.35%) SAP
8 1 (0.35%) Teradata