Java Engineer Contract Job Trends

Java Engineer
UK

The median Java Engineer daily rate in the UK is £530, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 13 July 2026.

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

6 months to
13 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 340 333 306
Rank change year-on-year -7 -27 +166
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 363 224 320
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.69% 0.69% 0.75%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.74% 0.75% 0.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 224 163 223
10th Percentile £381 £400 £423
25th Percentile £450 £480 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -11.67% - -4.00%
75th Percentile £613 £825 £850
90th Percentile £669 £875 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £523 £500 £500
% change year-on-year +4.50% - +0.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 49 8 29
10th Percentile £61.25 £40.25 £66.25
25th Percentile £65.00 £59.38 -
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% -3.57% +7.28%
75th Percentile - £72.50 -
90th Percentile £77.00 £83.75 £70.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.50 £70.00
% change year-on-year +3.70% -3.57% +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 48,729 30,023 39,779
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.49% 91.87% 93.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,502 19,148 25,568
10th Percentile £325 £287 £288
25th Percentile £419 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £495
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.04% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,285 1,392 2,719
10th Percentile £15.90 £13.75 £13.00
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.41 £17.00
Median hourly rate £43.69 £26.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +64.87% -33.75% -5.88%
75th Percentile £67.84 £56.25 £63.20
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.75 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% +6.67%

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 13 July 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 13 July 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Java Engineer in the UK

Java Engineer
Top 17 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 13 July 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 -20 319 £525 -22.22% 103
UK excluding London +18 173 £523 +4.50% 55
London -56 163 £550 -26.67% 77
Work from Home -54 116 £525 -30.00% 54
North of England -26 60 £523 +14.21% 11
South East -50 34 £500 -23.08% 14
South West -7 32 £484 -10.00% 16
North West -35 25 £540 - 7
North East -17 18 £478 +22.44%
Yorkshire -35 18 £511 -2.62% 4
Midlands -38 18 £477 -9.24% 3
West Midlands -54 16 £483 -8.00% 2
Scotland -10 15 £600 +25.65% 6
East of England -14 13 £538 -10.42% 1
Wales - 6 £388 -
East Midlands -14 2 £400 +26.98% 1
Northern Ireland -1 1 - - 4

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

For the 6 months to 13 July 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.

1 363 (100.00%) Java
2 198 (54.55%) Software Engineering
3 143 (39.39%) Spring
4 130 (35.81%) Spring Boot
5 115 (31.68%) CI/CD
6 108 (29.75%) AWS
7 107 (29.48%) Microservices
8 104 (28.65%) Agile
9 98 (27.00%) Kubernetes
10 83 (22.87%) Docker
10 83 (22.87%) Security Cleared
11 76 (20.94%) Kafka
12 75 (20.66%) SC Cleared
13 69 (19.01%) DevOps
14 62 (17.08%) SQL
15 59 (16.25%) Full-Stack Development
16 50 (13.77%) Azure
16 50 (13.77%) Test Automation
17 48 (13.22%) Containerisation
18 46 (12.67%) React
19 44 (12.12%) TDD
20 42 (11.57%) Event-Driven
21 41 (11.29%) Python
22 40 (11.02%) PostgreSQL
23 38 (10.47%) Problem-Solving
24 36 (9.92%) QA
25 35 (9.64%) Jenkins
25 35 (9.64%) JUnit
26 33 (9.09%) TypeScript
27 32 (8.82%) 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 7 (1.93%) Apache Spark
2 5 (1.38%) Apache
3 3 (0.83%) Confluence
3 3 (0.83%) Oracle SOA Suite
3 3 (0.83%) WebLogic
4 2 (0.55%) MQSeries
5 1 (0.28%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.28%) Apache Pulsar
5 1 (0.28%) Camunda
5 1 (0.28%) Ethereum
5 1 (0.28%) Hyperledger
5 1 (0.28%) nginx
5 1 (0.28%) Tomcat
5 1 (0.28%) WebSphere
Applications
1 1 (0.28%) Notion
1 1 (0.28%) Trello
Business Applications
1 2 (0.55%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 108 (29.75%) AWS
2 50 (13.77%) Azure
3 30 (8.26%) GCP
4 29 (7.99%) GitHub
5 23 (6.34%) GitHub Actions
6 21 (5.79%) OpenShift
7 16 (4.41%) Serverless
8 15 (4.13%) AWS Lambda
9 11 (3.03%) Amazon S3
10 8 (2.20%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 7 (1.93%) Amazon EC2
11 7 (1.93%) Amazon ECS
12 6 (1.65%) AWS Step Functions
12 6 (1.65%) Cloud Run
13 5 (1.38%) Azure DevOps
14 4 (1.10%) AWS Fargate
15 3 (0.83%) Amazon EKS
15 3 (0.83%) Amazon Kinesis
15 3 (0.83%) Power Platform
15 3 (0.83%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 7 (1.93%) Firewall
1 7 (1.93%) VPN
2 6 (1.65%) HTTP
3 4 (1.10%) Internet
4 3 (0.83%) MQTT
5 1 (0.28%) DNS
5 1 (0.28%) HTTPS
5 1 (0.28%) Kerberos
5 1 (0.28%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 40 (11.02%) PostgreSQL
2 19 (5.23%) MongoDB
2 19 (5.23%) Relational Database
3 14 (3.86%) MySQL
3 14 (3.86%) SQL Server
4 13 (3.58%) NoSQL
5 11 (3.03%) DynamoDB
6 10 (2.75%) Apache Cassandra
7 9 (2.48%) Elasticsearch
8 8 (2.20%) Big Data
9 7 (1.93%) Amazon RDS
10 6 (1.65%) Couchbase
11 4 (1.10%) Redis
11 4 (1.10%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 3 (0.83%) Data Lake
12 3 (0.83%) Flink
12 3 (0.83%) Hadoop
12 3 (0.83%) Power BI
13 2 (0.55%) HBase
13 2 (0.55%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 35 (9.64%) Jenkins
1 35 (9.64%) JUnit
2 32 (8.82%) Git
3 18 (4.96%) SonarQube
4 17 (4.68%) Gradle
5 14 (3.86%) GitLab
5 14 (3.86%) Maven
6 12 (3.31%) Mockito
7 10 (2.75%) JIRA
8 8 (2.20%) Liquibase
9 7 (1.93%) Selenium
10 5 (1.38%) Cucumber
11 4 (1.10%) IntelliJ
12 3 (0.83%) Bitbucket
12 3 (0.83%) Flyway
12 3 (0.83%) XCUITest
13 2 (0.55%) Artifactory
13 2 (0.55%) Gatling
13 2 (0.55%) Katalon Studio
13 2 (0.55%) Postman
General
1 87 (23.97%) Finance
2 50 (13.77%) Banking
3 34 (9.37%) Social Skills
4 22 (6.06%) Public Sector
5 20 (5.51%) Front Office
6 11 (3.03%) Financial Institution
6 11 (3.03%) Law
7 9 (2.48%) Manufacturing
7 9 (2.48%) Retail
8 8 (2.20%) Analytical Skills
9 5 (1.38%) Investment Banking
9 5 (1.38%) Military
10 3 (0.83%) Automotive
10 3 (0.83%) Back Office
10 3 (0.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 3 (0.83%) Retail Banking
11 2 (0.55%) Aerospace
11 2 (0.55%) Corporate Banking
12 1 (0.28%) French Language
12 1 (0.28%) International Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 143 (39.39%) Spring
2 130 (35.81%) Spring Boot
3 76 (20.94%) Kafka
4 46 (12.67%) React
5 32 (8.82%) REST
6 28 (7.71%) RESTful
7 25 (6.89%) AngularJS
8 18 (4.96%) Node.js
8 18 (4.96%) Quarkus
9 17 (4.68%) Middleware
10 16 (4.41%) GraphQL
11 12 (3.31%) Hibernate
11 12 (3.31%) OpenAPI
11 12 (3.31%) Swagger
12 9 (2.48%) Redux
13 8 (2.20%) CSS
13 8 (2.20%) Next.js
13 8 (2.20%) Web Services
14 7 (1.93%) HTML
14 7 (1.93%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 63 (17.36%) Cloud Native
2 46 (12.67%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (3.03%) Greenfield Project
4 10 (2.75%) Data Protection Act
5 9 (2.48%) Fixed Income
6 8 (2.20%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 7 (1.93%) Legacy Systems
8 5 (1.38%) Legacy Applications
8 5 (1.38%) Onboarding
8 5 (1.38%) SWIFT Messaging Network
9 4 (1.10%) Data Structures
9 4 (1.10%) Low-Code
9 4 (1.10%) Public Cloud
9 4 (1.10%) TWAP
9 4 (1.10%) Virtual Team
9 4 (1.10%) VWAP
10 3 (0.83%) Algorithms
10 3 (0.83%) Distributed Architecture
10 3 (0.83%) Mobile App
10 3 (0.83%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 21 (5.79%) Linux
2 8 (2.20%) Unix
3 2 (0.55%) Android
3 2 (0.55%) Apple iOS
4 1 (0.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 1 (0.28%) Solaris
4 1 (0.28%) SUSE
4 1 (0.28%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
4 1 (0.28%) Windows
4 1 (0.28%) Windows Server
4 1 (0.28%) Windows Server 2008
4 1 (0.28%) Windows Server 2016
4 1 (0.28%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 198 (54.55%) Software Engineering
2 115 (31.68%) CI/CD
3 107 (29.48%) Microservices
4 104 (28.65%) Agile
5 69 (19.01%) DevOps
6 59 (16.25%) Full-Stack Development
7 50 (13.77%) Test Automation
8 48 (13.22%) Containerisation
9 44 (12.12%) TDD
10 42 (11.57%) Event-Driven
11 38 (10.47%) Problem-Solving
12 32 (8.82%) Scrum
13 30 (8.26%) Event-Driven Architecture
13 30 (8.26%) SDLC
14 29 (7.99%) Migration
14 29 (7.99%) Unit Testing
15 25 (6.89%) Clean Code
16 24 (6.61%) AI
16 24 (6.61%) Code Quality
16 24 (6.61%) Front End Development
Programming Languages
1 363 (100.00%) Java
2 62 (17.08%) SQL
3 41 (11.29%) Python
4 33 (9.09%) TypeScript
5 22 (6.06%) JavaScript
6 16 (4.41%) Kotlin
7 11 (3.03%) Ada
7 11 (3.03%) Go
8 7 (1.93%) PL/SQL
8 7 (1.93%) Shell Script
9 4 (1.10%) C#
9 4 (1.10%) Groovy
10 3 (0.83%) C++
10 3 (0.83%) Scala
11 2 (0.55%) Swift
12 1 (0.28%) Korn
12 1 (0.28%) Rust
12 1 (0.28%) Solidity
Qualifications
1 83 (22.87%) Security Cleared
2 75 (20.66%) SC Cleared
3 12 (3.31%) Degree
4 6 (1.65%) BPSS Clearance
5 5 (1.38%) Computer Science Degree
6 4 (1.10%) DV Cleared
6 4 (1.10%) Master's Degree
7 2 (0.55%) AWS Certification
7 2 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.28%) Numerate Degree
8 1 (0.28%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 36 (9.92%) QA
2 11 (3.03%) Def Stans
2 11 (3.03%) IEC 61508
3 8 (2.20%) ISO 20022
4 7 (1.93%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 6 (1.65%) GDPR
6 5 (1.38%) SEPA
7 2 (0.55%) Accessibility
7 2 (0.55%) Data Quality
7 2 (0.55%) ISO 15022
8 1 (0.28%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.28%) PSD2
System Software
1 83 (22.87%) Docker
2 1 (0.28%) Oracle RAC
2 1 (0.28%) Tivoli Workload Scheduler
2 1 (0.28%) VMware ESXi
2 1 (0.28%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 98 (27.00%) Kubernetes
2 20 (5.51%) Terraform
3 16 (4.41%) Argo
4 4 (1.10%) Ansible
5 3 (0.83%) Grafana
5 3 (0.83%) HAProxy
6 2 (0.55%) Kibana
6 2 (0.55%) Prometheus
7 1 (0.28%) Docker Swarm
7 1 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
7 1 (0.28%) Single Sign-On
7 1 (0.28%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 22 (6.06%) Oracle
2 16 (4.41%) Red Hat
3 12 (3.31%) Google
3 12 (3.31%) Microsoft
4 6 (1.65%) Splunk
4 6 (1.65%) Spotify
5 5 (1.38%) IBM
6 4 (1.10%) SAP
7 3 (0.83%) Checkmarx
7 3 (0.83%) ServiceNow
8 2 (0.55%) Confluent
8 2 (0.55%) Dynatrace
8 2 (0.55%) MKS
8 2 (0.55%) Solace
9 1 (0.28%) Concur
9 1 (0.28%) Databricks
9 1 (0.28%) Netlify
9 1 (0.28%) Okta
9 1 (0.28%) Sonatype
9 1 (0.28%) Veracode