Java Engineer Contract Job Trends

Java Engineer
UK

The median Java Engineer daily rate in the UK is £533, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 26 April 2026.

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

6 months to
26 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 330 351 389
Rank change year-on-year +21 +38 +66
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 318 183 200
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.68% 0.62% 0.46%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.74% 0.67% 0.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 196 119 139
10th Percentile £375 £380 £413
25th Percentile £443 £473 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £533 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -11.25% +4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £625 £825 £750
90th Percentile £673 £875 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £523 £480 £500
% change year-on-year +8.85% -4.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 9 7
10th Percentile - £53.00 £67.00
25th Percentile £52.50 £61.25 £67.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year - -7.14% +6.87%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £72.50
90th Percentile £71.50 £73.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year - -7.14% +6.87%

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 43,137 27,188 40,489
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.31% 92.59% 92.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,662 17,796 26,412
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £407 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £517 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.29% -1.52% -2.78%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +2.63% -3.13% -1.93%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,772 1,030 2,642
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.20 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.48 £18.51 £16.30
Median hourly rate £42.85 £29.24 £35.68
Median % change year-on-year +46.55% -18.05% -20.71%
75th Percentile £65.67 £62.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £78.52 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £28.75 £37.50
% change year-on-year +56.52% -23.33% -11.76%

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 26 April 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 26 April 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 26 April 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 +1 275 £525 -22.22% 67
UK excluding London +12 160 £523 +8.85% 38
London -50 133 £550 -26.67% 44
Work from Home -16 83 £488 -35.00% 46
North of England -27 53 £500 -4.76% 11
South West -15 28 £488 -6.02% 5
South East -47 28 £488 -25.00% 17
Midlands -34 26 £469 -10.67% 2
North West -18 25 £501 - 9
West Midlands -35 25 £469 -10.67% 1
Scotland +22 21 £600 +28.69% 1
Yorkshire -45 18 £523 -18.04%
North East -8 11 £425 +8.97% 2
East of England -36 3 £535 -10.83%
Wales - 2 £388 -
East Midlands - 1 - - 1

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

For the 6 months to 26 April 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.

1 318 (100.00%) Java
2 155 (48.74%) Software Engineering
3 127 (39.94%) Spring
4 114 (35.85%) Spring Boot
5 88 (27.67%) AWS
5 88 (27.67%) Kubernetes
6 86 (27.04%) Microservices
7 82 (25.79%) CI/CD
8 71 (22.33%) Agile
9 63 (19.81%) Docker
10 60 (18.87%) Security Cleared
11 55 (17.30%) Kafka
12 54 (16.98%) Full-Stack Development
12 54 (16.98%) SC Cleared
13 53 (16.67%) DevOps
14 48 (15.09%) Azure
15 45 (14.15%) SQL
16 43 (13.52%) TDD
17 39 (12.26%) Containerisation
18 36 (11.32%) Python
19 34 (10.69%) React
20 33 (10.38%) Event-Driven
20 33 (10.38%) Problem-Solving
20 33 (10.38%) Test Automation
21 31 (9.75%) Jenkins
21 31 (9.75%) PostgreSQL
21 31 (9.75%) QA
22 28 (8.81%) Gradle
23 27 (8.49%) Git
24 25 (7.86%) MongoDB

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 (2.52%) Apache Spark
2 5 (1.57%) Apache
3 3 (0.94%) Oracle SOA Suite
3 3 (0.94%) WebLogic
4 2 (0.63%) Confluence
4 2 (0.63%) JBoss
4 2 (0.63%) MQSeries
5 1 (0.31%) Adobe Experience Manager
5 1 (0.31%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.31%) Camunda
5 1 (0.31%) Ethereum
5 1 (0.31%) Hyperledger
5 1 (0.31%) nginx
5 1 (0.31%) Tomcat
Applications
1 1 (0.31%) Notion
Business Applications
1 2 (0.63%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 88 (27.67%) AWS
2 48 (15.09%) Azure
3 21 (6.60%) Serverless
4 20 (6.29%) AWS Lambda
5 17 (5.35%) GitHub
6 16 (5.03%) Amazon S3
6 16 (5.03%) GCP
7 14 (4.40%) Amazon ECS
8 12 (3.77%) OpenShift
9 9 (2.83%) GitHub Actions
10 8 (2.52%) Amazon EC2
10 8 (2.52%) AWS CloudFormation
11 6 (1.89%) AWS Step Functions
12 4 (1.26%) AWS CodePipeline
12 4 (1.26%) Azure Service Bus
13 3 (0.94%) Amazon EKS
13 3 (0.94%) Amazon Kinesis
13 3 (0.94%) AWS Fargate
13 3 (0.94%) Cloud Computing
13 3 (0.94%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.26%) HTTP
2 3 (0.94%) MQTT
3 1 (0.31%) FTP
3 1 (0.31%) HTTPS
3 1 (0.31%) Kerberos
3 1 (0.31%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (9.75%) PostgreSQL
2 25 (7.86%) MongoDB
3 11 (3.46%) SQL Server
4 10 (3.14%) Big Data
4 10 (3.14%) DynamoDB
5 8 (2.52%) Amazon RDS
5 8 (2.52%) MySQL
5 8 (2.52%) Relational Database
6 7 (2.20%) NoSQL
7 6 (1.89%) Apache Cassandra
8 4 (1.26%) Elasticsearch
9 3 (0.94%) Hadoop
9 3 (0.94%) HBase
10 2 (0.63%) Oracle Database
10 2 (0.63%) Redis
10 2 (0.63%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 1 (0.31%) Azure SQL Database
11 1 (0.31%) BigQuery
11 1 (0.31%) Bigtable
11 1 (0.31%) Flink
Development Applications
1 31 (9.75%) Jenkins
2 28 (8.81%) Gradle
3 27 (8.49%) Git
4 22 (6.92%) GitLab
4 22 (6.92%) JUnit
5 17 (5.35%) IntelliJ
6 13 (4.09%) Maven
7 11 (3.46%) SonarQube
8 9 (2.83%) Cucumber
9 7 (2.20%) JIRA
9 7 (2.20%) Selenium
10 6 (1.89%) Mockito
11 5 (1.57%) Artifactory
12 4 (1.26%) Postman
12 4 (1.26%) Sonatype Nexus
13 3 (0.94%) Eclipse
13 3 (0.94%) Gatling
13 3 (0.94%) Liquibase
14 2 (0.63%) WebDriver
14 2 (0.63%) XCUITest
General
1 58 (18.24%) Finance
2 31 (9.75%) Social Skills
3 23 (7.23%) Banking
4 18 (5.66%) Front Office
5 16 (5.03%) Public Sector
6 9 (2.83%) Law
7 7 (2.20%) Analytical Skills
8 5 (1.57%) Financial Institution
8 5 (1.57%) Investment Banking
9 3 (0.94%) Back Office
9 3 (0.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 2 (0.63%) Automotive
10 2 (0.63%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (0.63%) Retail
11 1 (0.31%) Aerospace
11 1 (0.31%) French Language
11 1 (0.31%) Health Technology
11 1 (0.31%) Legal
11 1 (0.31%) Military
11 1 (0.31%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 127 (39.94%) Spring
2 114 (35.85%) Spring Boot
3 55 (17.30%) Kafka
4 34 (10.69%) React
5 25 (7.86%) RESTful
6 22 (6.92%) REST
7 18 (5.66%) GraphQL
8 17 (5.35%) Node.js
9 16 (5.03%) Middleware
10 15 (4.72%) AngularJS
10 15 (4.72%) Swagger
11 13 (4.09%) OpenTelemetry
12 11 (3.46%) Quarkus
13 10 (3.14%) OpenAPI
14 9 (2.83%) Hibernate
14 9 (2.83%) Redux
15 7 (2.20%) FIX Protocol
15 7 (2.20%) JSON
16 6 (1.89%) SOAP
17 5 (1.57%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 42 (13.21%) Cloud Native
2 23 (7.23%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (3.46%) Data Protection Act
4 9 (2.83%) Fixed Income
5 8 (2.52%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 6 (1.89%) Greenfield Project
6 6 (1.89%) Legacy Applications
7 5 (1.57%) Public Cloud
8 4 (1.26%) Legacy Systems
8 4 (1.26%) Onboarding
8 4 (1.26%) Product Ownership
9 3 (0.94%) Derivative
9 3 (0.94%) Mobile App
9 3 (0.94%) TWAP
9 3 (0.94%) Virtual Team
9 3 (0.94%) VWAP
10 2 (0.63%) Algorithms
10 2 (0.63%) Data Structures
10 2 (0.63%) Equity Derivative
10 2 (0.63%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 18 (5.66%) Linux
2 7 (2.20%) Unix
3 1 (0.31%) Android
3 1 (0.31%) Apple iOS
3 1 (0.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.31%) Solaris
3 1 (0.31%) SUSE
3 1 (0.31%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
3 1 (0.31%) VMS
3 1 (0.31%) Windows
3 1 (0.31%) Windows Server
3 1 (0.31%) Windows Server 2008
3 1 (0.31%) Windows Server 2016
3 1 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 155 (48.74%) Software Engineering
2 86 (27.04%) Microservices
3 82 (25.79%) CI/CD
4 71 (22.33%) Agile
5 54 (16.98%) Full-Stack Development
6 53 (16.67%) DevOps
7 43 (13.52%) TDD
8 39 (12.26%) Containerisation
9 33 (10.38%) Event-Driven
9 33 (10.38%) Problem-Solving
9 33 (10.38%) Test Automation
10 24 (7.55%) Scrum
11 22 (6.92%) Unit Testing
12 21 (6.60%) Clean Code
13 20 (6.29%) Code Quality
13 20 (6.29%) Migration
14 18 (5.66%) Software Testing
15 17 (5.35%) SDLC
16 16 (5.03%) Front End Development
16 16 (5.03%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 318 (100.00%) Java
2 45 (14.15%) SQL
3 36 (11.32%) Python
4 21 (6.60%) TypeScript
5 16 (5.03%) Kotlin
6 13 (4.09%) Go
6 13 (4.09%) JavaScript
7 11 (3.46%) Ada
8 5 (1.57%) C++
8 5 (1.57%) PL/SQL
8 5 (1.57%) Scala
9 3 (0.94%) C#
10 1 (0.31%) Groovy
10 1 (0.31%) Korn
10 1 (0.31%) Rust
10 1 (0.31%) Shell Script
10 1 (0.31%) Solidity
10 1 (0.31%) Swift
Qualifications
1 60 (18.87%) Security Cleared
2 54 (16.98%) SC Cleared
3 10 (3.14%) Degree
4 4 (1.26%) BPSS Clearance
4 4 (1.26%) Computer Science Degree
4 4 (1.26%) DV Cleared
5 3 (0.94%) Master's Degree
5 3 (0.94%) OCP
5 3 (0.94%) Oracle Certification
6 1 (0.31%) AWS Certification
6 1 (0.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 1 (0.31%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 31 (9.75%) QA
2 11 (3.46%) Def Stans
2 11 (3.46%) IEC 61508
3 5 (1.57%) Accessibility
4 4 (1.26%) GDPR
4 4 (1.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 3 (0.94%) ISO 20022
6 2 (0.63%) Data Quality
6 2 (0.63%) ISO 15022
7 1 (0.31%) SEPA
7 1 (0.31%) WCAG
System Software
1 63 (19.81%) Docker
2 1 (0.31%) Oracle RAC
2 1 (0.31%) Tivoli Workload Scheduler
2 1 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
2 1 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 88 (27.67%) Kubernetes
2 22 (6.92%) Terraform
3 17 (5.35%) Grafana
4 10 (3.14%) Argo
5 6 (1.89%) Ansible
6 3 (0.94%) HAProxy
7 2 (0.63%) Prometheus
7 2 (0.63%) Puppet
8 1 (0.31%) Kibana
8 1 (0.31%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.31%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 11 (3.46%) Google
1 11 (3.46%) Microsoft
2 10 (3.14%) Oracle
3 9 (2.83%) Red Hat
4 6 (1.89%) Splunk
4 6 (1.89%) Spotify
5 5 (1.57%) IBM
6 3 (0.94%) Databricks
6 3 (0.94%) Dynatrace
6 3 (0.94%) ServiceNow
6 3 (0.94%) Solace
7 2 (0.63%) Checkmarx
7 2 (0.63%) Confluent
7 2 (0.63%) MKS
7 2 (0.63%) New Relic
7 2 (0.63%) webMethods
8 1 (0.31%) Ab Initio
8 1 (0.31%) Netlify
8 1 (0.31%) Teradata
8 1 (0.31%) VMware