Java Engineer Contract Job Trends

Java Engineer
UK

The median Java Engineer daily rate in the UK is £542, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 6 April 2026.

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

6 months to
6 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 350 357 430
Rank change year-on-year +7 +73 +25
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 298 175 173
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.66% 0.60% 0.39%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.71% 0.65% 0.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 185 118 116
10th Percentile £374 £364 £413
25th Percentile £425 £463 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £542 £585 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.44% +6.36% -8.33%
75th Percentile £625 £825 £710
90th Percentile £691 £875 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £470 £500
% change year-on-year +6.38% -6.00% -13.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 8 3
10th Percentile - £60.13 -
25th Percentile £52.50 £64.06 £67.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £66.25 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -1.89% -5.36% +6.87%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.75 £72.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.88 -
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 41,708 27,129 40,710
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.22% 92.77% 92.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,972 17,847 26,649
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £406 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -3.31%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +2.63% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,626 961 2,538
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.99 £12.86
25th Percentile £19.91 £20.24 £16.25
Median hourly rate £40.00 £31.76 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year +25.94% -3.95% -26.52%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.25 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.53 £30.93 £34.21
% change year-on-year +34.26% -9.59% -19.25%

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 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 6 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 6 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 -13 257 £525 -12.50% 71
UK excluding London -4 158 £500 +6.38% 39
London -49 120 £550 -10.20% 39
Work from Home -13 79 £478 -36.33% 36
North of England -34 51 £500 +9.29% 17
Midlands -41 28 £469 -10.67% 3
West Midlands -30 27 £469 -10.67% 1
South West -10 26 £488 -12.56% 7
South East -36 26 £425 -34.62% 8
North West -22 24 £478 - 8
Scotland +21 23 £600 +28.69% 4
Yorkshire -40 18 £523 -0.48% 6
North East -5 10 £439 +12.50% 3
Wales -11 2 £388 +96.20%
East of England -31 2 £500 +6.95%
East Midlands - 1 - - 2

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

For the 6 months to 6 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.

1 298 (100.00%) Java
2 150 (50.34%) Software Engineering
3 120 (40.27%) Spring
4 109 (36.58%) Spring Boot
5 86 (28.86%) AWS
6 85 (28.52%) Microservices
7 82 (27.52%) Kubernetes
8 81 (27.18%) CI/CD
9 73 (24.50%) Agile
10 53 (17.79%) DevOps
10 53 (17.79%) Full-Stack Development
10 53 (17.79%) Kafka
11 52 (17.45%) Docker
12 50 (16.78%) Security Cleared
13 46 (15.44%) Azure
13 46 (15.44%) SC Cleared
14 42 (14.09%) TDD
15 39 (13.09%) SQL
16 38 (12.75%) Python
17 35 (11.74%) Containerisation
17 35 (11.74%) React
18 33 (11.07%) Test Automation
19 31 (10.40%) Jenkins
19 31 (10.40%) QA
20 30 (10.07%) PostgreSQL
21 29 (9.73%) Event-Driven
21 29 (9.73%) Problem-Solving
22 28 (9.40%) Git
22 28 (9.40%) Gradle
23 26 (8.72%) Scrum

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 (2.68%) Apache
1 8 (2.68%) Apache Spark
2 4 (1.34%) WebLogic
3 3 (1.01%) Apache Airflow
3 3 (1.01%) JBoss
3 3 (1.01%) Oracle SOA Suite
4 2 (0.67%) Confluence
5 1 (0.34%) Adobe Experience Manager
5 1 (0.34%) Camunda
5 1 (0.34%) Ethereum
5 1 (0.34%) Hyperledger
5 1 (0.34%) nginx
5 1 (0.34%) Tomcat
Applications
1 1 (0.34%) Notion
Business Applications
1 2 (0.67%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 86 (28.86%) AWS
2 46 (15.44%) Azure
3 19 (6.38%) AWS Lambda
3 19 (6.38%) Serverless
4 17 (5.70%) GitHub
5 16 (5.37%) GCP
6 15 (5.03%) Amazon S3
7 13 (4.36%) Amazon ECS
7 13 (4.36%) OpenShift
8 10 (3.36%) GitHub Actions
9 9 (3.02%) Amazon EC2
10 8 (2.68%) AWS CloudFormation
11 7 (2.35%) AWS Step Functions
12 4 (1.34%) Amazon Kinesis
12 4 (1.34%) AWS CodePipeline
12 4 (1.34%) Cloud Computing
13 3 (1.01%) Amazon EKS
13 3 (1.01%) AWS Fargate
13 3 (1.01%) Azure Service Bus
13 3 (1.01%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.01%) HTTP
1 3 (1.01%) MQTT
2 1 (0.34%) FTP
2 1 (0.34%) HTTPS
2 1 (0.34%) Kerberos
2 1 (0.34%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 30 (10.07%) PostgreSQL
2 24 (8.05%) MongoDB
3 10 (3.36%) Big Data
4 9 (3.02%) Amazon RDS
4 9 (3.02%) DynamoDB
4 9 (3.02%) MySQL
4 9 (3.02%) SQL Server
5 7 (2.35%) Apache Cassandra
5 7 (2.35%) NoSQL
5 7 (2.35%) Relational Database
6 4 (1.34%) Elasticsearch
6 4 (1.34%) Hadoop
7 3 (1.01%) HBase
8 2 (0.67%) Apache Arrow
8 2 (0.67%) Apache Iceberg
8 2 (0.67%) Apache Ignite
8 2 (0.67%) BigQuery
8 2 (0.67%) Data Lake
8 2 (0.67%) Dremio
8 2 (0.67%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 31 (10.40%) Jenkins
2 28 (9.40%) Git
2 28 (9.40%) Gradle
3 25 (8.39%) GitLab
3 25 (8.39%) JUnit
4 17 (5.70%) IntelliJ
5 13 (4.36%) Maven
6 11 (3.69%) Cucumber
7 10 (3.36%) SonarQube
8 8 (2.68%) Selenium
9 7 (2.35%) JIRA
9 7 (2.35%) Mockito
10 6 (2.01%) Sonatype Nexus
11 4 (1.34%) Artifactory
11 4 (1.34%) Eclipse
11 4 (1.34%) Postman
12 3 (1.01%) JMeter
12 3 (1.01%) Liquibase
13 2 (0.67%) Gatling
14 1 (0.34%) CircleCI
General
1 63 (21.14%) Finance
2 33 (11.07%) Social Skills
3 26 (8.72%) Banking
4 16 (5.37%) Front Office
4 16 (5.37%) Public Sector
5 7 (2.35%) Investment Banking
5 7 (2.35%) Law
6 6 (2.01%) Analytical Skills
7 5 (1.68%) Financial Institution
8 3 (1.01%) Back Office
8 3 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
9 2 (0.67%) Retail
10 1 (0.34%) Aerospace
10 1 (0.34%) French Language
10 1 (0.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (0.34%) Legal
10 1 (0.34%) Military
10 1 (0.34%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 120 (40.27%) Spring
2 109 (36.58%) Spring Boot
3 53 (17.79%) Kafka
4 35 (11.74%) React
5 25 (8.39%) RESTful
6 19 (6.38%) Node.js
7 18 (6.04%) REST
8 17 (5.70%) GraphQL
9 16 (5.37%) AngularJS
9 16 (5.37%) Middleware
10 15 (5.03%) Swagger
11 13 (4.36%) OpenTelemetry
12 11 (3.69%) Hibernate
12 11 (3.69%) Quarkus
13 10 (3.36%) OpenAPI
14 9 (3.02%) Redux
15 7 (2.35%) JSON
16 6 (2.01%) AWS CDK
16 6 (2.01%) HTML
17 5 (1.68%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 39 (13.09%) Cloud Native
2 22 (7.38%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (3.69%) Data Protection Act
3 11 (3.69%) Fixed Income
4 10 (3.36%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 6 (2.01%) Legacy Applications
5 6 (2.01%) Onboarding
6 5 (1.68%) Derivative
6 5 (1.68%) Legacy Systems
6 5 (1.68%) Product Ownership
6 5 (1.68%) Public Cloud
7 4 (1.34%) Greenfield Project
8 3 (1.01%) Hedge funds
8 3 (1.01%) Mobile App
8 3 (1.01%) Pricing Data
8 3 (1.01%) Virtual Team
9 2 (0.67%) Algorithms
9 2 (0.67%) Data Structures
9 2 (0.67%) Equities
9 2 (0.67%) Equity Derivative
Operating Systems
1 21 (7.05%) Linux
2 9 (3.02%) Unix
3 1 (0.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.34%) Solaris
3 1 (0.34%) SUSE
3 1 (0.34%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
3 1 (0.34%) VMS
3 1 (0.34%) Windows
3 1 (0.34%) Windows Server
3 1 (0.34%) Windows Server 2008
3 1 (0.34%) Windows Server 2016
3 1 (0.34%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 150 (50.34%) Software Engineering
2 85 (28.52%) Microservices
3 81 (27.18%) CI/CD
4 73 (24.50%) Agile
5 53 (17.79%) DevOps
5 53 (17.79%) Full-Stack Development
6 42 (14.09%) TDD
7 35 (11.74%) Containerisation
8 33 (11.07%) Test Automation
9 29 (9.73%) Event-Driven
9 29 (9.73%) Problem-Solving
10 26 (8.72%) Scrum
11 20 (6.71%) Migration
11 20 (6.71%) Unit Testing
12 18 (6.04%) Clean Code
12 18 (6.04%) Code Quality
13 17 (5.70%) Mentoring
13 17 (5.70%) Software Testing
14 16 (5.37%) Front End Development
15 15 (5.03%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 298 (100.00%) Java
2 39 (13.09%) SQL
3 38 (12.75%) Python
4 24 (8.05%) TypeScript
5 16 (5.37%) JavaScript
6 15 (5.03%) Kotlin
7 13 (4.36%) Go
8 11 (3.69%) Ada
9 5 (1.68%) C++
9 5 (1.68%) PL/SQL
9 5 (1.68%) Scala
10 2 (0.67%) C#
10 2 (0.67%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.34%) Rust
11 1 (0.34%) Solidity
Qualifications
1 50 (16.78%) Security Cleared
2 46 (15.44%) SC Cleared
3 12 (4.03%) Degree
4 6 (2.01%) Computer Science Degree
5 5 (1.68%) BPSS Clearance
6 3 (1.01%) Master's Degree
6 3 (1.01%) OCP
6 3 (1.01%) Oracle Certification
7 2 (0.67%) DV Cleared
8 1 (0.34%) AWS Certification
8 1 (0.34%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.34%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 31 (10.40%) QA
2 11 (3.69%) Def Stans
2 11 (3.69%) IEC 61508
3 5 (1.68%) Accessibility
4 3 (1.01%) GDPR
4 3 (1.01%) ISO 20022
4 3 (1.01%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 2 (0.67%) Data Quality
5 2 (0.67%) ISO 15022
5 2 (0.67%) WCAG
6 1 (0.34%) SEPA
System Software
1 52 (17.45%) Docker
2 1 (0.34%) Oracle RAC
2 1 (0.34%) Tivoli Workload Scheduler
2 1 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
2 1 (0.34%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 82 (27.52%) Kubernetes
2 23 (7.72%) Terraform
3 18 (6.04%) Grafana
4 10 (3.36%) Argo
5 6 (2.01%) Ansible
6 3 (1.01%) Puppet
7 2 (0.67%) HAProxy
7 2 (0.67%) Progress Chef
7 2 (0.67%) Prometheus
8 1 (0.34%) Kibana
8 1 (0.34%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.34%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 11 (3.69%) Google
1 11 (3.69%) Microsoft
2 10 (3.36%) Oracle
3 9 (3.02%) Red Hat
4 6 (2.01%) Splunk
5 5 (1.68%) IBM
6 4 (1.34%) Spotify
7 3 (1.01%) Databricks
7 3 (1.01%) Solace
7 3 (1.01%) VMware
7 3 (1.01%) webMethods
8 2 (0.67%) Dynatrace
8 2 (0.67%) New Relic
8 2 (0.67%) ServiceNow
9 1 (0.34%) Ab Initio
9 1 (0.34%) Actian
9 1 (0.34%) Sonatype
9 1 (0.34%) Teradata
9 1 (0.34%) Veracode
9 1 (0.34%) Virgin Media