Java Engineer Contract Job Trends

Java Engineer
UK

The median Java Engineer daily rate in the UK is £536, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2026.

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

6 months to
1 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 325 350 378
Rank change year-on-year +25 +28 +74
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 328 180 206
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.69% 0.62% 0.47%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.75% 0.66% 0.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 198 118 140
10th Percentile £375 £380 £417
25th Percentile £450 £471 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £536 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -10.67% +4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £625 £825 £750
90th Percentile £672 £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 52 9 11
10th Percentile £52.50 £53.00 -
25th Percentile £53.44 £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 £71.25
90th Percentile £74.50 £73.50 £72.50
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 43,629 27,082 40,416
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.33% 92.55% 92.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,928 17,690 26,310
10th Percentile £315 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £406 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.91% -1.90% -2.78%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £492
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.46% -1.60%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,807 1,034 2,664
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.15 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.50 £18.50 £16.30
Median hourly rate £44.00 £29.00 £36.42
Median % change year-on-year +51.72% -20.37% -19.07%
75th Percentile £66.00 £62.50 £60.75
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.46 £28.00 £39.55
% change year-on-year +62.36% -29.20% -6.94%

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 1 May 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 1 May 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 1 May 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 +7 281 £525 -23.64% 69
UK excluding London +2 162 £523 +8.85% 37
London -27 138 £550 -26.67% 44
Work from Home -20 90 £513 -31.67% 33
North of England -21 57 £511 -2.62% 11
South East -38 29 £469 -27.88% 17
South West -15 28 £488 -6.02% 6
North West -21 28 £528 - 9
Midlands -55 24 £469 -10.67% 2
West Midlands -42 23 £469 -10.67% 1
Scotland +9 21 £600 +28.69% 1
Yorkshire -38 17 £523 -18.04% 1
North East -7 13 £425 +8.97% 1
East of England -30 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 1 May 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.

1 328 (100.00%) Java
2 159 (48.48%) Software Engineering
3 129 (39.33%) Spring
4 118 (35.98%) Spring Boot
5 94 (28.66%) Kubernetes
6 90 (27.44%) AWS
7 86 (26.22%) Microservices
8 85 (25.91%) CI/CD
9 76 (23.17%) Agile
10 63 (19.21%) Docker
10 63 (19.21%) Security Cleared
11 57 (17.38%) Kafka
11 57 (17.38%) SC Cleared
12 56 (17.07%) Full-Stack Development
13 54 (16.46%) DevOps
14 48 (14.63%) Azure
15 46 (14.02%) SQL
16 43 (13.11%) TDD
17 41 (12.50%) Containerisation
18 38 (11.59%) React
18 38 (11.59%) Test Automation
19 37 (11.28%) Python
20 35 (10.67%) Event-Driven
21 34 (10.37%) QA
22 33 (10.06%) PostgreSQL
23 31 (9.45%) Jenkins
24 30 (9.15%) Problem-Solving
25 29 (8.84%) Gradle
26 26 (7.93%) RESTful
27 25 (7.62%) 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 (2.44%) Apache Spark
2 3 (0.91%) Apache
2 3 (0.91%) Oracle SOA Suite
3 2 (0.61%) Confluence
3 2 (0.61%) MQSeries
4 1 (0.30%) Adobe Experience Manager
4 1 (0.30%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.30%) Camunda
4 1 (0.30%) Ethereum
4 1 (0.30%) Hyperledger
4 1 (0.30%) nginx
4 1 (0.30%) Tomcat
4 1 (0.30%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (0.30%) Notion
Business Applications
1 2 (0.61%) Shopify
2 1 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 90 (27.44%) AWS
2 48 (14.63%) Azure
3 22 (6.71%) Serverless
4 21 (6.40%) AWS Lambda
5 17 (5.18%) GitHub
6 16 (4.88%) GCP
7 15 (4.57%) Amazon S3
7 15 (4.57%) OpenShift
8 14 (4.27%) Amazon ECS
9 10 (3.05%) GitHub Actions
10 9 (2.74%) Amazon EC2
11 8 (2.44%) AWS CloudFormation
12 6 (1.83%) AWS Step Functions
13 4 (1.22%) Azure Service Bus
14 3 (0.91%) Amazon EKS
14 3 (0.91%) Amazon Kinesis
14 3 (0.91%) Amazon SQS
14 3 (0.91%) AWS CodePipeline
14 3 (0.91%) AWS Fargate
14 3 (0.91%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.52%) HTTP
2 3 (0.91%) MQTT
3 1 (0.30%) DNS
3 1 (0.30%) HTTPS
3 1 (0.30%) Internet
3 1 (0.30%) Kerberos
3 1 (0.30%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 33 (10.06%) PostgreSQL
2 22 (6.71%) MongoDB
3 13 (3.96%) SQL Server
4 11 (3.35%) DynamoDB
5 9 (2.74%) Big Data
5 9 (2.74%) Relational Database
6 8 (2.44%) Amazon RDS
6 8 (2.44%) MySQL
7 7 (2.13%) NoSQL
8 6 (1.83%) Apache Cassandra
9 4 (1.22%) Elasticsearch
10 3 (0.91%) Hadoop
10 3 (0.91%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 2 (0.61%) HBase
11 2 (0.61%) Oracle Database
11 2 (0.61%) Redis
12 1 (0.30%) Azure SQL Database
12 1 (0.30%) BigQuery
12 1 (0.30%) Bigtable
12 1 (0.30%) Flink
Development Applications
1 31 (9.45%) Jenkins
2 29 (8.84%) Gradle
3 24 (7.32%) Git
4 23 (7.01%) GitLab
5 21 (6.40%) JUnit
6 15 (4.57%) IntelliJ
7 14 (4.27%) SonarQube
8 13 (3.96%) Maven
9 8 (2.44%) Cucumber
9 8 (2.44%) Mockito
10 7 (2.13%) JIRA
11 5 (1.52%) Selenium
12 4 (1.22%) Artifactory
12 4 (1.22%) Liquibase
12 4 (1.22%) Postman
13 3 (0.91%) Sonatype Nexus
14 2 (0.61%) Gatling
14 2 (0.61%) TeamCity
14 2 (0.61%) WebDriver
14 2 (0.61%) XCUITest
General
1 62 (18.90%) Finance
2 30 (9.15%) Social Skills
3 27 (8.23%) Banking
4 20 (6.10%) Front Office
5 18 (5.49%) Public Sector
6 9 (2.74%) Law
7 7 (2.13%) Analytical Skills
8 6 (1.83%) Financial Institution
8 6 (1.83%) Investment Banking
9 3 (0.91%) Back Office
9 3 (0.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 3 (0.91%) Retail
10 2 (0.61%) Automotive
11 1 (0.30%) Aerospace
11 1 (0.30%) Corporate Banking
11 1 (0.30%) French Language
11 1 (0.30%) Health Technology
11 1 (0.30%) Legal
11 1 (0.30%) Military
11 1 (0.30%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 129 (39.33%) Spring
2 118 (35.98%) Spring Boot
3 57 (17.38%) Kafka
4 38 (11.59%) React
5 26 (7.93%) RESTful
6 21 (6.40%) REST
7 18 (5.49%) AngularJS
7 18 (5.49%) GraphQL
7 18 (5.49%) Node.js
8 17 (5.18%) Middleware
9 16 (4.88%) Swagger
10 14 (4.27%) Quarkus
11 13 (3.96%) OpenTelemetry
12 11 (3.35%) OpenAPI
13 9 (2.74%) Redux
14 8 (2.44%) FIX Protocol
15 7 (2.13%) AWS CDK
15 7 (2.13%) Hibernate
16 6 (1.83%) Next.js
17 5 (1.52%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 47 (14.33%) Cloud Native
2 24 (7.32%) Distributed Systems
3 10 (3.05%) Data Protection Act
4 9 (2.74%) Fixed Income
5 8 (2.44%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 7 (2.13%) Greenfield Project
7 6 (1.83%) Legacy Applications
8 5 (1.52%) Public Cloud
9 4 (1.22%) Onboarding
9 4 (1.22%) Product Ownership
9 4 (1.22%) TWAP
9 4 (1.22%) VWAP
10 3 (0.91%) Derivative
10 3 (0.91%) Legacy Systems
10 3 (0.91%) Mobile App
10 3 (0.91%) Virtual Team
11 2 (0.61%) Algorithms
11 2 (0.61%) Data Structures
11 2 (0.61%) Exotic Derivative
11 2 (0.61%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Operating Systems
1 19 (5.79%) Linux
2 6 (1.83%) Unix
3 1 (0.30%) Android
3 1 (0.30%) Apple iOS
3 1 (0.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (0.30%) Solaris
3 1 (0.30%) SUSE
3 1 (0.30%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
3 1 (0.30%) VMS
3 1 (0.30%) Windows
3 1 (0.30%) Windows Server
3 1 (0.30%) Windows Server 2008
3 1 (0.30%) Windows Server 2016
3 1 (0.30%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 159 (48.48%) Software Engineering
2 86 (26.22%) Microservices
3 85 (25.91%) CI/CD
4 76 (23.17%) Agile
5 56 (17.07%) Full-Stack Development
6 54 (16.46%) DevOps
7 43 (13.11%) TDD
8 41 (12.50%) Containerisation
9 38 (11.59%) Test Automation
10 35 (10.67%) Event-Driven
11 30 (9.15%) Problem-Solving
12 25 (7.62%) Scrum
12 25 (7.62%) Unit Testing
13 22 (6.71%) Clean Code
14 20 (6.10%) Code Quality
14 20 (6.10%) Front End Development
15 19 (5.79%) Migration
15 19 (5.79%) SDLC
16 18 (5.49%) High Availability
16 18 (5.49%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 328 (100.00%) Java
2 46 (14.02%) SQL
3 37 (11.28%) Python
4 24 (7.32%) TypeScript
5 17 (5.18%) Kotlin
6 15 (4.57%) JavaScript
7 13 (3.96%) Go
8 11 (3.35%) Ada
9 5 (1.52%) C++
9 5 (1.52%) PL/SQL
10 3 (0.91%) C#
10 3 (0.91%) Scala
11 2 (0.61%) Shell Script
12 1 (0.30%) Groovy
12 1 (0.30%) Korn
12 1 (0.30%) Rust
12 1 (0.30%) Solidity
12 1 (0.30%) Swift
Qualifications
1 63 (19.21%) Security Cleared
2 57 (17.38%) SC Cleared
3 10 (3.05%) Degree
4 4 (1.22%) BPSS Clearance
4 4 (1.22%) Computer Science Degree
4 4 (1.22%) DV Cleared
5 3 (0.91%) Master's Degree
6 2 (0.61%) OCP
6 2 (0.61%) Oracle Certification
7 1 (0.30%) AWS Certification
7 1 (0.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.30%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 34 (10.37%) QA
2 11 (3.35%) Def Stans
2 11 (3.35%) IEC 61508
3 7 (2.13%) GDPR
3 7 (2.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
4 5 (1.52%) Accessibility
5 4 (1.22%) ISO 20022
6 3 (0.91%) Data Quality
7 2 (0.61%) ISO 15022
7 2 (0.61%) SEPA
8 1 (0.30%) WCAG
System Software
1 63 (19.21%) Docker
2 1 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
2 1 (0.30%) Tivoli Workload Scheduler
2 1 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
2 1 (0.30%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 94 (28.66%) Kubernetes
2 23 (7.01%) Terraform
3 16 (4.88%) Grafana
4 13 (3.96%) Argo
5 6 (1.83%) Ansible
6 3 (0.91%) HAProxy
7 2 (0.61%) Prometheus
8 1 (0.30%) Kibana
8 1 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.30%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 12 (3.66%) Red Hat
2 11 (3.35%) Google
2 11 (3.35%) Microsoft
3 10 (3.05%) Oracle
4 6 (1.83%) Splunk
4 6 (1.83%) Spotify
5 5 (1.52%) IBM
6 3 (0.91%) Databricks
6 3 (0.91%) Dynatrace
6 3 (0.91%) SAP
6 3 (0.91%) ServiceNow
6 3 (0.91%) Solace
7 2 (0.61%) Checkmarx
7 2 (0.61%) Confluent
7 2 (0.61%) MKS
7 2 (0.61%) New Relic
8 1 (0.30%) Actian
8 1 (0.30%) Netlify
8 1 (0.30%) Sonatype
8 1 (0.30%) Veracode