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 10 January 2026.

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

6 months to
10 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 414 402 478
Rank change year-on-year -12 +76 -126
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 175 130 114
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 0.41% 0.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.52% 0.44% 0.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 124 93 82
10th Percentile £357 £330 £383
25th Percentile £438 £513 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £595
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +0.84% -0.83%
75th Percentile £638 £850 £700
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 18 6 2
10th Percentile £43.15 £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 £60.31 £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 33,434 29,568 39,993
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.32% 92.68% 93.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,144 18,103 26,697
10th Percentile £300 £291 £280
25th Percentile £405 £409 £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 -0.89% -4.15% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,959 890 1,643
10th Percentile £14.37 £15.62 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.22 £18.95
Median hourly rate £26.50 £32.50 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.46% -26.97% +35.79%
75th Percentile £59.38 £62.24 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.00 £73.75 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.76 £45.00
% change year-on-year -20.81% -29.42% +66.64%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 -19 147 £543 -17.73% 110
London -15 91 £600 -11.11% 40
UK excluding London -17 71 £469 -2.04% 84
Work from Home +17 68 £600 -25.00% 69
North of England -20 26 £475 -7.77% 18
Scotland +17 17 £600 +50.94% 5
North West -13 16 £400 - 10
Midlands -27 16 £460 -45.88% 7
West Midlands -22 15 £460 -45.88% 6
South East -14 12 £365 -36.52% 32
Yorkshire -47 5 £350 -32.04% 5
North East - 5 £575 - 3
East Midlands - 1 £313 - 1

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

For the 6 months to 10 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.

1 175 (100.00%) Java
2 85 (48.57%) Software Engineering
3 81 (46.29%) AWS
4 79 (45.14%) Spring
5 74 (42.29%) CI/CD
6 67 (38.29%) Agile
6 67 (38.29%) Spring Boot
7 62 (35.43%) Microservices
8 58 (33.14%) Kubernetes
9 42 (24.00%) Azure
10 37 (21.14%) DevOps
11 36 (20.57%) Docker
12 34 (19.43%) Python
13 30 (17.14%) Kafka
13 30 (17.14%) TDD
14 29 (16.57%) SQL
14 29 (16.57%) TypeScript
15 28 (16.00%) JavaScript
16 26 (14.86%) QA
17 25 (14.29%) Problem-Solving
17 25 (14.29%) Test Automation
18 24 (13.71%) Containerisation
19 23 (13.14%) GitLab
19 23 (13.14%) RESTful
20 22 (12.57%) Apache
20 22 (12.57%) Full-Stack Development
20 22 (12.57%) Security Cleared
21 21 (12.00%) Jenkins
21 21 (12.00%) SC Cleared
22 20 (11.43%) Git

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 22 (12.57%) Apache
2 19 (10.86%) Apache Airflow
3 4 (2.29%) Apache Spark
3 4 (2.29%) JBoss
3 4 (2.29%) WebLogic
4 2 (1.14%) 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 (1.14%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 81 (46.29%) AWS
2 42 (24.00%) Azure
3 19 (10.86%) Snowflake
4 18 (10.29%) dbt
5 15 (8.57%) GCP
6 14 (8.00%) GitHub
7 9 (5.14%) Amazon EC2
7 9 (5.14%) Amazon ECS
7 9 (5.14%) Serverless
8 8 (4.57%) AWS Lambda
9 7 (4.00%) Amazon S3
9 7 (4.00%) Cloud Computing
9 7 (4.00%) GitHub Actions
9 7 (4.00%) OpenShift
10 6 (3.43%) Amazon Kinesis
10 6 (3.43%) AWS CloudFormation
10 6 (3.43%) AWS Step Functions
11 5 (2.86%) Amazon EKS
12 4 (2.29%) Azure Monitor
13 3 (1.71%) 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 (10.86%) Data Lake
1 19 (10.86%) MongoDB
2 18 (10.29%) Amazon Athena
2 18 (10.29%) Apache Arrow
2 18 (10.29%) Apache Iceberg
2 18 (10.29%) Apache Ignite
2 18 (10.29%) Dremio
2 18 (10.29%) PostgreSQL
3 13 (7.43%) MySQL
4 11 (6.29%) Apache Cassandra
5 8 (4.57%) Hadoop
5 8 (4.57%) NoSQL
6 7 (4.00%) Amazon RDS
7 6 (3.43%) Big Data
8 5 (2.86%) Relational Database
9 4 (2.29%) SQL Server
10 3 (1.71%) BigQuery
10 3 (1.71%) HBase
11 2 (1.14%) DynamoDB
11 2 (1.14%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 23 (13.14%) GitLab
2 21 (12.00%) Jenkins
3 20 (11.43%) Git
3 20 (11.43%) JUnit
4 19 (10.86%) Gradle
5 15 (8.57%) Cucumber
5 15 (8.57%) IntelliJ
6 9 (5.14%) Selenium
7 7 (4.00%) JMeter
7 7 (4.00%) Sonatype Nexus
8 4 (2.29%) Eclipse
8 4 (2.29%) Maven
8 4 (2.29%) Postman
9 3 (1.71%) Artifactory
9 3 (1.71%) Cypress.io
9 3 (1.71%) JIRA
9 3 (1.71%) Mockito
10 2 (1.14%) Bitbucket
10 2 (1.14%) Gatling
10 2 (1.14%) SonarQube
General
1 55 (31.43%) Finance
2 36 (20.57%) Social Skills
3 31 (17.71%) Banking
4 22 (12.57%) Front Office
5 20 (11.43%) Investment Banking
6 7 (4.00%) Public Sector
7 4 (2.29%) Influencing Skills
8 3 (1.71%) Analytical Skills
9 2 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (0.57%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 79 (45.14%) Spring
2 67 (38.29%) Spring Boot
3 30 (17.14%) Kafka
4 23 (13.14%) RESTful
5 19 (10.86%) gRPC
6 18 (10.29%) NumPy
6 18 (10.29%) Pandas
6 18 (10.29%) Protocol Buffers
6 18 (10.29%) SciPy
7 14 (8.00%) AngularJS
8 13 (7.43%) REST
9 12 (6.86%) Hibernate
9 12 (6.86%) React
10 11 (6.29%) OpenTelemetry
11 9 (5.14%) HTML
11 9 (5.14%) JSON
12 8 (4.57%) Node.js
12 8 (4.57%) Swagger
13 6 (3.43%) OAuth
14 5 (2.86%) HTML5
Miscellaneous
1 21 (12.00%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 20 (11.43%) Derivative
3 19 (10.86%) Distributed Systems
3 19 (10.86%) Equities
4 18 (10.29%) Cloud Native
4 18 (10.29%) Fixed Income
4 18 (10.29%) Hedge funds
4 18 (10.29%) Pricing Data
5 8 (4.57%) Onboarding
6 7 (4.00%) Product Ownership
6 7 (4.00%) Virtual Team
7 5 (2.86%) Public Cloud
8 4 (2.29%) Data Protection Act
9 3 (1.71%) Legacy Applications
9 3 (1.71%) Legacy Systems
10 2 (1.14%) Data Structures
10 2 (1.14%) Greenfield Project
11 1 (0.57%) Algorithms
11 1 (0.57%) TWAP
11 1 (0.57%) VWAP
Operating Systems
1 14 (8.00%) Linux
2 12 (6.86%) Unix
3 3 (1.71%) Windows
4 1 (0.57%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 85 (48.57%) Software Engineering
2 74 (42.29%) CI/CD
3 67 (38.29%) Agile
4 62 (35.43%) Microservices
5 37 (21.14%) DevOps
6 30 (17.14%) TDD
7 25 (14.29%) Problem-Solving
7 25 (14.29%) Test Automation
8 24 (13.71%) Containerisation
9 22 (12.57%) Full-Stack Development
10 20 (11.43%) Observability
11 18 (10.29%) Asset Management
11 18 (10.29%) Event-Driven
11 18 (10.29%) Infrastructure as Code
11 18 (10.29%) Investment Management
12 16 (9.14%) Clean Code
13 15 (8.57%) API Development
13 15 (8.57%) Fintech
14 13 (7.43%) Scrum
15 12 (6.86%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 175 (100.00%) Java
2 34 (19.43%) Python
3 29 (16.57%) SQL
3 29 (16.57%) TypeScript
4 28 (16.00%) JavaScript
5 15 (8.57%) Kotlin
6 6 (3.43%) Scala
7 5 (2.86%) C++
8 3 (1.71%) Go
9 2 (1.14%) Bash
9 2 (1.14%) PL/SQL
9 2 (1.14%) Rust
9 2 (1.14%) 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 (12.57%) Security Cleared
2 21 (12.00%) SC Cleared
3 6 (3.43%) Degree
4 5 (2.86%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (1.71%) BPSS Clearance
5 3 (1.71%) OCP
5 3 (1.71%) 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 (14.86%) QA
2 9 (5.14%) Accessibility
3 3 (1.71%) Data Quality
4 2 (1.14%) WCAG
5 1 (0.57%) GDPR
5 1 (0.57%) ISO 15022
5 1 (0.57%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 36 (20.57%) Docker
Systems Management
1 58 (33.14%) Kubernetes
2 19 (10.86%) Terraform
3 16 (9.14%) Grafana
4 12 (6.86%) Ansible
5 5 (2.86%) Puppet
6 4 (2.29%) Progress Chef
7 3 (1.71%) Argo
8 2 (1.14%) Prometheus
9 1 (0.57%) Kibana
Vendors
1 9 (5.14%) Google
2 6 (3.43%) Microsoft
2 6 (3.43%) Oracle
3 4 (2.29%) Databricks
3 4 (2.29%) VMware
3 4 (2.29%) webMethods
4 3 (1.71%) Dynatrace
4 3 (1.71%) Splunk
5 2 (1.14%) IBM
5 2 (1.14%) New Relic
5 2 (1.14%) Red Hat
5 2 (1.14%) 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