Java Engineer Contract Job Trends

Java Engineer
UK

The median Java Engineer daily rate in the UK is £575, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 6 December 2025.

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

6 months to
6 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 402 365 480
Rank change year-on-year -37 +115 -138
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 194 189 122
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.53% 0.53% 0.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.59% 0.57% 0.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 149 139 95
10th Percentile £359 £450 £398
25th Percentile £455 £523 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £675 £600
Median % change year-on-year -14.81% +12.50% -
75th Percentile £825 £850 £725
90th Percentile - £888 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £550 £475
% change year-on-year -14.73% +15.79% -18.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 10 2
10th Percentile £40.00 £38.23 £60.13
25th Percentile £43.00 £63.44 £62.19
Median hourly rate £55.00 £68.75 £68.75
Median % change year-on-year -20.00% - +4.79%
75th Percentile £85.63 £70.00 £74.69
90th Percentile £87.50 - £76.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.00 £70.00 £68.75
% change year-on-year -31.43% +1.82% +4.79%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 33,145 33,385 42,274
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.93% 92.77% 93.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,040 20,359 28,495
10th Percentile £285 £300 £294
25th Percentile £402 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £645
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -4.04% -1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,927 1,147 1,515
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.36 £15.16
25th Percentile £17.88 £20.75 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £43.90
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -20.27% +39.88%
75th Percentile £57.25 £63.93 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -22.62% -26.97% +78.00%

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 6 December 2025.

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 6 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Java Engineer in the UK

Java Engineer
Top 14 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 6 December 2025. 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 -35 162 £575 -18.73% 72
London -24 117 £619 -20.16% 36
Work from Home +16 91 £688 -14.06% 36
UK excluding London -24 65 £469 -14.73% 56
Scotland +21 22 £600 +70.21% 7
Midlands -23 16 £460 -27.84% 1
West Midlands -12 15 £460 -40.65% 1
North of England -40 14 £488 -11.36% 16
South East +5 11 £360 -37.39% 23
Yorkshire -34 5 £350 -32.04% 1
North East - 5 £575 - 3
North West -24 4 £353 -35.91% 12
South West -20 2 £550 -2.44% 7
East Midlands -16 1 £313 -41.86%

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

For the 6 months to 6 December 2025, 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.

1 194 (100.00%) Java
2 107 (55.15%) AWS
3 98 (50.52%) Software Engineering
4 87 (44.85%) Agile
5 83 (42.78%) CI/CD
6 71 (36.60%) Spring
7 66 (34.02%) Microservices
8 56 (28.87%) Python
9 54 (27.84%) Spring Boot
9 54 (27.84%) TypeScript
10 49 (25.26%) JavaScript
11 44 (22.68%) Azure
12 43 (22.16%) Kubernetes
13 42 (21.65%) DevOps
14 34 (17.53%) Docker
14 34 (17.53%) Investment Management
15 32 (16.49%) Apache
15 32 (16.49%) Kafka
16 31 (15.98%) Apache Airflow
16 31 (15.98%) QA
17 30 (15.46%) Amazon Athena
17 30 (15.46%) Apache Arrow
17 30 (15.46%) Apache Iceberg
17 30 (15.46%) Asset Management
17 30 (15.46%) Data Lake
17 30 (15.46%) dbt
17 30 (15.46%) Dremio
17 30 (15.46%) NumPy
17 30 (15.46%) Pandas
17 30 (15.46%) SciPy

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 32 (16.49%) Apache
2 31 (15.98%) Apache Airflow
3 4 (2.06%) JBoss
3 4 (2.06%) WebLogic
4 2 (1.03%) Apache Spark
4 2 (1.03%) Confluence
5 1 (0.52%) Luigi
Applications
1 1 (0.52%) MS Visio
Cloud Services
1 107 (55.15%) AWS
2 44 (22.68%) Azure
3 30 (15.46%) dbt
4 29 (14.95%) Snowflake
5 18 (9.28%) GitHub
6 17 (8.76%) GCP
7 10 (5.15%) Amazon EC2
7 10 (5.15%) GitHub Actions
8 9 (4.64%) Amazon ECS
8 9 (4.64%) OpenShift
8 9 (4.64%) Serverless
9 8 (4.12%) Amazon Kinesis
9 8 (4.12%) AWS Lambda
10 7 (3.61%) Amazon S3
10 7 (3.61%) AWS Step Functions
10 7 (3.61%) Cloud Computing
11 6 (3.09%) AWS CloudFormation
12 5 (2.58%) Amazon EKS
13 3 (1.55%) AWS CodePipeline
13 3 (1.55%) BlazeMeter
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.03%) AMQP
2 1 (0.52%) Broadband
2 1 (0.52%) FTP
2 1 (0.52%) SSL
2 1 (0.52%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 30 (15.46%) Amazon Athena
1 30 (15.46%) Apache Arrow
1 30 (15.46%) Apache Iceberg
1 30 (15.46%) Data Lake
1 30 (15.46%) Dremio
2 28 (14.43%) Apache Ignite
3 20 (10.31%) MongoDB
4 18 (9.28%) PostgreSQL
5 15 (7.73%) MySQL
6 13 (6.70%) Apache Cassandra
7 10 (5.15%) NoSQL
8 8 (4.12%) Hadoop
9 7 (3.61%) Amazon RDS
9 7 (3.61%) Relational Database
10 6 (3.09%) Big Data
11 4 (2.06%) RDBMS
12 3 (1.55%) BigQuery
12 3 (1.55%) HBase
12 3 (1.55%) SQL Server
13 2 (1.03%) HPCC
Development Applications
1 27 (13.92%) Git
2 23 (11.86%) Jenkins
2 23 (11.86%) JUnit
3 16 (8.25%) Cucumber
4 11 (5.67%) GitLab
5 10 (5.15%) Gradle
6 8 (4.12%) Selenium
7 7 (3.61%) IntelliJ
7 7 (3.61%) JMeter
7 7 (3.61%) Maven
7 7 (3.61%) Sonatype Nexus
8 5 (2.58%) JIRA
9 4 (2.06%) Bitbucket
9 4 (2.06%) Eclipse
9 4 (2.06%) Mockito
9 4 (2.06%) Postman
10 3 (1.55%) Artifactory
10 3 (1.55%) Cypress.io
11 2 (1.03%) Gatling
11 2 (1.03%) PyCharm
General
1 79 (40.72%) Finance
2 42 (21.65%) Banking
3 38 (19.59%) Front Office
4 37 (19.07%) Social Skills
5 33 (17.01%) Investment Banking
6 7 (3.61%) Public Sector
7 6 (3.09%) Analytical Skills
8 4 (2.06%) Documentation Skills
8 4 (2.06%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (1.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 2 (1.03%) Back Office
11 1 (0.52%) Law
11 1 (0.52%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 71 (36.60%) Spring
2 54 (27.84%) Spring Boot
3 32 (16.49%) Kafka
4 30 (15.46%) NumPy
4 30 (15.46%) Pandas
4 30 (15.46%) SciPy
5 29 (14.95%) gRPC
6 28 (14.43%) Protocol Buffers
7 24 (12.37%) RESTful
8 22 (11.34%) AngularJS
8 22 (11.34%) React
9 17 (8.76%) Node.js
10 16 (8.25%) REST
11 12 (6.19%) Hibernate
12 10 (5.15%) HTML
13 8 (4.12%) GraphQL
13 8 (4.12%) JSON
14 7 (3.61%) OAuth
15 6 (3.09%) CSS
15 6 (3.09%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 35 (18.04%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 34 (17.53%) Fixed Income
3 32 (16.49%) Equities
4 30 (15.46%) Derivative
5 28 (14.43%) Hedge funds
5 28 (14.43%) Pricing Data
6 22 (11.34%) Distributed Systems
7 18 (9.28%) Cloud Native
8 9 (4.64%) Onboarding
9 8 (4.12%) Product Ownership
10 7 (3.61%) Virtual Team
11 6 (3.09%) Mobile App
11 6 (3.09%) Public Cloud
12 4 (2.06%) Algorithms
12 4 (2.06%) Data Protection Act
13 3 (1.55%) Legacy Systems
14 2 (1.03%) Blockchain
14 2 (1.03%) Data Centre
14 2 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
14 2 (1.03%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 16 (8.25%) Linux
2 11 (5.67%) Unix
3 6 (3.09%) Windows
4 2 (1.03%) CentOS
4 2 (1.03%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 98 (50.52%) Software Engineering
2 87 (44.85%) Agile
3 83 (42.78%) CI/CD
4 66 (34.02%) Microservices
5 42 (21.65%) DevOps
6 34 (17.53%) Investment Management
7 30 (15.46%) Asset Management
8 29 (14.95%) Test Automation
9 28 (14.43%) Full-Stack Development
10 27 (13.92%) TDD
11 25 (12.89%) Problem-Solving
12 23 (11.86%) Containerisation
13 20 (10.31%) Infrastructure as Code
14 19 (9.79%) Observability
15 18 (9.28%) Clean Code
15 18 (9.28%) Fintech
16 17 (8.76%) SDLC
17 16 (8.25%) API Development
18 14 (7.22%) Event-Driven
19 13 (6.70%) BDD
Programming Languages
1 194 (100.00%) Java
2 56 (28.87%) Python
3 54 (27.84%) TypeScript
4 49 (25.26%) JavaScript
5 29 (14.95%) SQL
6 8 (4.12%) C++
6 8 (4.12%) Go
6 8 (4.12%) Kotlin
7 6 (3.09%) Scala
8 4 (2.06%) C
9 3 (1.55%) C#
9 3 (1.55%) Ruby
10 2 (1.03%) Bash
10 2 (1.03%) DAML
10 2 (1.03%) Groovy
10 2 (1.03%) PHP
10 2 (1.03%) PL/SQL
10 2 (1.03%) Rust
10 2 (1.03%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.52%) Perl
Qualifications
1 23 (11.86%) Security Cleared
2 21 (10.82%) SC Cleared
3 8 (4.12%) Degree
4 6 (3.09%) Computer Science Degree
5 5 (2.58%) BPSS Clearance
6 3 (1.55%) OCP
6 3 (1.55%) Oracle Certification
7 2 (1.03%) DV Cleared
7 2 (1.03%) Master's Degree
8 1 (0.52%) ISTQB
8 1 (0.52%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 31 (15.98%) QA
2 7 (3.61%) Accessibility
3 2 (1.03%) Data Quality
4 1 (0.52%) WCAG
System Software
1 34 (17.53%) Docker
Systems Management
1 43 (22.16%) Kubernetes
2 20 (10.31%) Terraform
3 14 (7.22%) Ansible
4 9 (4.64%) Grafana
5 5 (2.58%) Puppet
6 4 (2.06%) Progress Chef
7 2 (1.03%) Argo
8 1 (0.52%) Kibana
8 1 (0.52%) Prometheus
8 1 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 9 (4.64%) Google
2 7 (3.61%) Oracle
3 6 (3.09%) Microsoft
4 5 (2.58%) Splunk
5 4 (2.06%) Dynatrace
5 4 (2.06%) VMware
5 4 (2.06%) webMethods
6 3 (1.55%) Databricks
7 2 (1.03%) Red Hat
7 2 (1.03%) Solace
7 2 (1.03%) TIBCO
8 1 (0.52%) Calypso
8 1 (0.52%) Cisco
8 1 (0.52%) ForgeRock
8 1 (0.52%) Guidewire
8 1 (0.52%) IBM
8 1 (0.52%) Informatica
8 1 (0.52%) ServiceNow
8 1 (0.52%) Virgin Media
8 1 (0.52%) Zoomdata