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 12 January 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 402 393 492
Rank change year-on-year -9 +99 -143
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 174 131 107
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 0.42% 0.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.53% 0.45% 0.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 122 93 76
10th Percentile £357 £330 £381
25th Percentile £433 £501 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -
75th Percentile £635 £850 £706
90th Percentile £825 £888 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £479 £475
% change year-on-year -2.04% +0.79% -18.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 6 2
10th Percentile £43.60 £37.13 £60.13
25th Percentile £52.50 £43.25 £62.19
Median hourly rate £55.00 £61.25 £68.75
Median % change year-on-year -10.20% -10.91% +4.79%
75th Percentile £59.38 £64.69 £74.69
90th Percentile £87.50 £66.88 £76.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £63.75 £68.75
% change year-on-year -13.73% -7.27% +4.79%

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 33,096 29,209 40,038
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.31% 92.69% 93.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,909 17,885 26,705
10th Percentile £300 £291 £280
25th Percentile £406 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £479 £500
% change year-on-year -0.73% -4.30% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,948 878 1,679
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.52 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.05 £18.93
Median hourly rate £26.50 £32.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.46% -23.53% +28.79%
75th Percentile £60.00 £62.24 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £30.88 £45.00
% change year-on-year -18.54% -31.39% +66.65%

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 12 January 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 12 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Java Engineer in the UK

Java Engineer
Top 13 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 12 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 -34 146 £543 -17.73% 131
London -17 90 £600 -11.11% 40
UK excluding London -6 72 £469 -2.04% 111
Work from Home +5 66 £600 -25.00% 90
North of England -25 27 £475 -7.77% 21
Scotland +17 17 £600 +50.94% 7
North West -14 17 £400 - 11
Midlands -29 16 £460 -45.88% 10
West Midlands -20 15 £460 -45.88% 8
South East -6 12 £365 -36.52% 36
Yorkshire -37 5 £350 -32.04% 6
North East - 5 £575 - 4
East Midlands - 1 £313 - 2

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

For the 6 months to 12 January 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.

1 174 (100.00%) Java
2 85 (48.85%) Software Engineering
3 80 (45.98%) AWS
3 80 (45.98%) Spring
4 74 (42.53%) CI/CD
5 67 (38.51%) Spring Boot
6 65 (37.36%) Agile
7 61 (35.06%) Microservices
8 59 (33.91%) Kubernetes
9 42 (24.14%) Azure
10 37 (21.26%) DevOps
11 36 (20.69%) Docker
12 32 (18.39%) Python
13 30 (17.24%) Kafka
14 29 (16.67%) SQL
14 29 (16.67%) TDD
15 27 (15.52%) JavaScript
15 27 (15.52%) TypeScript
16 26 (14.94%) QA
17 25 (14.37%) Problem-Solving
18 24 (13.79%) Containerisation
18 24 (13.79%) GitLab
18 24 (13.79%) Test Automation
19 23 (13.22%) RESTful
20 22 (12.64%) Security Cleared
21 21 (12.07%) Apache
21 21 (12.07%) Full-Stack Development
21 21 (12.07%) Jenkins
21 21 (12.07%) SC Cleared
22 20 (11.49%) Gradle

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 21 (12.07%) Apache
2 18 (10.34%) Apache Airflow
3 4 (2.30%) Apache Spark
3 4 (2.30%) JBoss
3 4 (2.30%) WebLogic
4 2 (1.15%) Confluence
5 1 (0.57%) Adobe Experience Manager
5 1 (0.57%) Luigi
5 1 (0.57%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 1 (0.57%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (1.15%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 80 (45.98%) AWS
2 42 (24.14%) Azure
3 18 (10.34%) Snowflake
4 17 (9.77%) dbt
5 15 (8.62%) GCP
6 13 (7.47%) GitHub
7 9 (5.17%) Amazon EC2
7 9 (5.17%) Amazon ECS
8 8 (4.60%) AWS Lambda
8 8 (4.60%) Serverless
9 7 (4.02%) Amazon S3
9 7 (4.02%) Cloud Computing
9 7 (4.02%) GitHub Actions
9 7 (4.02%) OpenShift
10 6 (3.45%) Amazon Kinesis
10 6 (3.45%) AWS CloudFormation
10 6 (3.45%) AWS Step Functions
11 5 (2.87%) Amazon EKS
12 4 (2.30%) Azure Monitor
13 3 (1.72%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.57%) Broadband
1 1 (0.57%) FTP
1 1 (0.57%) SSL
1 1 (0.57%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (10.92%) MongoDB
2 18 (10.34%) Data Lake
2 18 (10.34%) PostgreSQL
3 17 (9.77%) Amazon Athena
3 17 (9.77%) Apache Arrow
3 17 (9.77%) Apache Iceberg
3 17 (9.77%) Apache Ignite
3 17 (9.77%) Dremio
4 13 (7.47%) MySQL
5 11 (6.32%) Apache Cassandra
6 8 (4.60%) Hadoop
6 8 (4.60%) NoSQL
7 7 (4.02%) Amazon RDS
8 6 (3.45%) Big Data
9 5 (2.87%) Relational Database
10 4 (2.30%) SQL Server
11 3 (1.72%) BigQuery
11 3 (1.72%) HBase
12 2 (1.15%) DynamoDB
12 2 (1.15%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 24 (13.79%) GitLab
2 21 (12.07%) Jenkins
3 20 (11.49%) Gradle
3 20 (11.49%) JUnit
4 19 (10.92%) Git
5 16 (9.20%) IntelliJ
6 15 (8.62%) Cucumber
7 9 (5.17%) Selenium
8 7 (4.02%) JMeter
8 7 (4.02%) Sonatype Nexus
9 4 (2.30%) Eclipse
9 4 (2.30%) Maven
9 4 (2.30%) Postman
10 3 (1.72%) Artifactory
10 3 (1.72%) Cypress.io
10 3 (1.72%) JIRA
10 3 (1.72%) Mockito
11 2 (1.15%) Gatling
11 2 (1.15%) SonarQube
11 2 (1.15%) TestNG
General
1 54 (31.03%) Finance
2 36 (20.69%) Social Skills
3 30 (17.24%) Banking
4 21 (12.07%) Front Office
5 19 (10.92%) Investment Banking
6 7 (4.02%) Public Sector
7 4 (2.30%) Influencing Skills
8 3 (1.72%) Analytical Skills
9 2 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (0.57%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 80 (45.98%) Spring
2 67 (38.51%) Spring Boot
3 30 (17.24%) Kafka
4 23 (13.22%) RESTful
5 18 (10.34%) gRPC
6 17 (9.77%) NumPy
6 17 (9.77%) Pandas
6 17 (9.77%) Protocol Buffers
6 17 (9.77%) SciPy
7 13 (7.47%) AngularJS
8 12 (6.90%) Hibernate
8 12 (6.90%) OpenTelemetry
8 12 (6.90%) REST
9 11 (6.32%) React
10 9 (5.17%) JSON
11 8 (4.60%) HTML
11 8 (4.60%) Node.js
11 8 (4.60%) Swagger
12 6 (3.45%) OAuth
13 5 (2.87%) HTML5
Miscellaneous
1 20 (11.49%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 19 (10.92%) Derivative
2 19 (10.92%) Distributed Systems
3 18 (10.34%) Cloud Native
3 18 (10.34%) Equities
4 17 (9.77%) Fixed Income
4 17 (9.77%) Hedge funds
4 17 (9.77%) Pricing Data
5 8 (4.60%) Onboarding
6 7 (4.02%) Product Ownership
6 7 (4.02%) Virtual Team
7 5 (2.87%) Public Cloud
8 4 (2.30%) Data Protection Act
9 3 (1.72%) Legacy Applications
9 3 (1.72%) Legacy Systems
10 2 (1.15%) Data Structures
10 2 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
11 1 (0.57%) Algorithms
11 1 (0.57%) Mobile App
11 1 (0.57%) TWAP
Operating Systems
1 14 (8.05%) Linux
2 12 (6.90%) Unix
3 3 (1.72%) Windows
4 1 (0.57%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 85 (48.85%) Software Engineering
2 74 (42.53%) CI/CD
3 65 (37.36%) Agile
4 61 (35.06%) Microservices
5 37 (21.26%) DevOps
6 29 (16.67%) TDD
7 25 (14.37%) Problem-Solving
8 24 (13.79%) Containerisation
8 24 (13.79%) Test Automation
9 21 (12.07%) Full-Stack Development
10 20 (11.49%) Observability
11 18 (10.34%) Event-Driven
11 18 (10.34%) Infrastructure as Code
12 17 (9.77%) Asset Management
12 17 (9.77%) Investment Management
13 16 (9.20%) Clean Code
14 15 (8.62%) API Development
14 15 (8.62%) Fintech
15 12 (6.90%) Scrum
15 12 (6.90%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 174 (100.00%) Java
2 32 (18.39%) Python
3 29 (16.67%) SQL
4 27 (15.52%) JavaScript
4 27 (15.52%) TypeScript
5 16 (9.20%) Kotlin
6 6 (3.45%) Scala
7 5 (2.87%) C++
8 3 (1.72%) Go
9 2 (1.15%) Bash
9 2 (1.15%) PL/SQL
9 2 (1.15%) Rust
9 2 (1.15%) Shell Script
10 1 (0.57%) C
10 1 (0.57%) C#
10 1 (0.57%) Groovy
10 1 (0.57%) Perl
10 1 (0.57%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 22 (12.64%) Security Cleared
2 21 (12.07%) SC Cleared
3 6 (3.45%) Degree
4 5 (2.87%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (1.72%) BPSS Clearance
5 3 (1.72%) OCP
5 3 (1.72%) Oracle Certification
6 1 (0.57%) DV Cleared
6 1 (0.57%) ISTQB
6 1 (0.57%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (14.94%) QA
2 9 (5.17%) Accessibility
3 3 (1.72%) Data Quality
4 2 (1.15%) WCAG
5 1 (0.57%) GDPR
5 1 (0.57%) ISO 15022
5 1 (0.57%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 36 (20.69%) Docker
Systems Management
1 59 (33.91%) Kubernetes
2 19 (10.92%) Terraform
3 17 (9.77%) Grafana
4 12 (6.90%) Ansible
5 5 (2.87%) Puppet
6 4 (2.30%) Progress Chef
7 3 (1.72%) Argo
8 2 (1.15%) Prometheus
9 1 (0.57%) Kibana
Vendors
1 9 (5.17%) Google
2 6 (3.45%) Microsoft
2 6 (3.45%) Oracle
3 4 (2.30%) Databricks
3 4 (2.30%) VMware
3 4 (2.30%) webMethods
4 3 (1.72%) Dynatrace
4 3 (1.72%) Splunk
5 2 (1.15%) IBM
5 2 (1.15%) New Relic
5 2 (1.15%) Red Hat
5 2 (1.15%) Solace
6 1 (0.57%) Adobe
6 1 (0.57%) Calypso
6 1 (0.57%) Cisco
6 1 (0.57%) Confluent
6 1 (0.57%) Okta
6 1 (0.57%) TIBCO
6 1 (0.57%) Virgin Media
6 1 (0.57%) Zoomdata