Java Engineer Contract Job Trends

Java Engineer
UK

The median Java Engineer daily rate in the UK is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 12 October 2026.

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

6 months to
12 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 378 366 314
Rank change year-on-year -12 -52 +152
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 333 194 255
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.61% 0.59% 0.68%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.66% 0.65% 0.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 216 150 181
10th Percentile £346 £363 £450
25th Percentile £425 £508 £520
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £715
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% -16.08% +19.17%
75th Percentile £600 £825 £850
90th Percentile £658 £850 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £513 £519
% change year-on-year +2.44% -1.20% +4.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 8 28
10th Percentile - £40.25 £65.13
25th Percentile £70.00 £44.00 -
Median hourly rate £75.00 £75.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year - +7.14% +12.00%
75th Percentile £77.00 £87.50 -
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £75.00 £59.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +27.12% -15.71% +12.00%

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 50,217 29,909 35,127
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.02% 90.83% 93.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,441 18,891 21,218
10th Percentile £325 £275 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £412
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £736 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4,086 1,644 1,451
10th Percentile £14.31 £13.75 £15.00
25th Percentile £19.34 £17.30 £20.30
Median hourly rate £41.71 £25.15 £41.27
Median % change year-on-year +65.84% -39.05% -8.30%
75th Percentile £67.50 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.18 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.71 £25.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +66.84% -41.18% -4.49%

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 12 October 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 12 October 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 12 October 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 -6 307 £525 -16.00% 409
UK excluding London +19 167 £525 +2.44% 260
London -78 145 £500 -33.33% 242
Work from Home -67 100 £485 -35.33% 166
North of England -5 71 £500 -13.04% 70
Midlands +7 53 £565 +7.62% 18
West Midlands -3 47 £575 +9.00% 13
North West -4 46 £550 +80.33% 47
South East -51 20 £500 +38.89% 17
East of England -6 18 £600 - 4
Yorkshire -18 15 £470 +47.52% 12
North East -33 10 £640 +11.30% 11
East Midlands -9 6 £400 +26.98% 5
South West -28 6 £484 -12.05% 29
Scotland -32 4 £550 +12.82% 90
Wales - 4 - - 4
Northern Ireland - 3 £275 - 28

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

For the 6 months to 12 October 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.

1 333 (100.00%) Java
2 174 (52.25%) Software Engineering
3 162 (48.65%) Spring
4 155 (46.55%) CI/CD
5 148 (44.44%) Spring Boot
6 131 (39.34%) Agile
7 126 (37.84%) AWS
8 121 (36.34%) Microservices
9 119 (35.74%) Kubernetes
10 82 (24.62%) DevOps
11 81 (24.32%) Docker
12 78 (23.42%) Kafka
13 77 (23.12%) Security Cleared
14 76 (22.82%) Test Automation
15 75 (22.52%) SQL
16 70 (21.02%) SC Cleared
17 69 (20.72%) REST
18 62 (18.62%) Event-Driven
19 52 (15.62%) TDD
20 49 (14.71%) Azure
21 47 (14.11%) AI
21 47 (14.11%) Git
22 45 (13.51%) Containerisation
23 44 (13.21%) GitLab
24 43 (12.91%) Event-Driven Architecture
24 43 (12.91%) JUnit
24 43 (12.91%) Problem-Solving
25 42 (12.61%) QA
26 41 (12.31%) Scrum
27 40 (12.01%) Observability

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 10 (3.00%) Apache
2 7 (2.10%) WebLogic
3 5 (1.50%) Apache Spark
4 4 (1.20%) Apache Airflow
5 3 (0.90%) Confluence
6 2 (0.60%) Ethereum
6 2 (0.60%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 1 (0.30%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.30%) Camunda
7 1 (0.30%) MQSeries
7 1 (0.30%) WebSphere
Applications
1 3 (0.90%) Trello
Business Applications
1 2 (0.60%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 126 (37.84%) AWS
2 49 (14.71%) Azure
3 35 (10.51%) GCP
4 28 (8.41%) GitHub
5 20 (6.01%) GitHub Actions
6 17 (5.11%) Serverless
7 16 (4.80%) AWS Lambda
8 13 (3.90%) OpenShift
9 9 (2.70%) Amazon ECS
9 9 (2.70%) Amazon SQS
9 9 (2.70%) AWS CloudFormation
10 8 (2.40%) Amazon EKS
11 7 (2.10%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 6 (1.80%) Amazon S3
12 6 (1.80%) GitHub Copilot
12 6 (1.80%) Power Platform
13 5 (1.50%) Amazon OpenSearch
13 5 (1.50%) Azure DevOps
13 5 (1.50%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 4 (1.20%) AWS Fargate
Communications & Networking
1 11 (3.30%) Firewall
1 11 (3.30%) VPN
2 5 (1.50%) HTTP
3 4 (1.20%) Internet
4 1 (0.30%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 38 (11.41%) PostgreSQL
2 27 (8.11%) Relational Database
3 21 (6.31%) NoSQL
4 19 (5.71%) MongoDB
5 18 (5.41%) MySQL
6 10 (3.00%) SQL Server
7 9 (2.70%) DynamoDB
8 8 (2.40%) Couchbase
8 8 (2.40%) Elasticsearch
9 7 (2.10%) Redis
10 6 (1.80%) Apache Cassandra
10 6 (1.80%) Flink
10 6 (1.80%) Power BI
11 3 (0.90%) BusinessObjects
11 3 (0.90%) Data Lake
11 3 (0.90%) Oracle Database
11 3 (0.90%) Pentaho
12 2 (0.60%) Big Data
12 2 (0.60%) Snowflake Schema
12 2 (0.60%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 47 (14.11%) Git
2 44 (13.21%) GitLab
3 43 (12.91%) JUnit
4 29 (8.71%) Maven
5 22 (6.61%) Mockito
6 19 (5.71%) Gradle
6 19 (5.71%) Jenkins
7 12 (3.60%) SonarQube
8 10 (3.00%) Cucumber
9 8 (2.40%) JIRA
9 8 (2.40%) Selenium
10 6 (1.80%) Bitbucket
11 5 (1.50%) Liquibase
11 5 (1.50%) TeamCity
12 4 (1.20%) Gatling
13 3 (0.90%) Claude Code
13 3 (0.90%) Cypress.io
13 3 (0.90%) Flyway
13 3 (0.90%) REST Assured
14 2 (0.60%) Katalon Studio
General
1 84 (25.23%) Finance
2 66 (19.82%) Social Skills
3 58 (17.42%) Banking
4 18 (5.41%) Public Sector
5 13 (3.90%) Manufacturing
6 12 (3.60%) Retail
7 9 (2.70%) Analytical Skills
8 8 (2.40%) Front Office
9 6 (1.80%) Financial Institution
9 6 (1.80%) Military
10 4 (1.20%) iGaming
10 4 (1.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 4 (1.20%) Investment Banking
10 4 (1.20%) Law
10 4 (1.20%) Retail Banking
11 3 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
12 2 (0.60%) Automotive
12 2 (0.60%) Corporate Banking
13 1 (0.30%) Aviation
13 1 (0.30%) International Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 162 (48.65%) Spring
2 148 (44.44%) Spring Boot
3 78 (23.42%) Kafka
4 69 (20.72%) REST
5 33 (9.91%) RESTful
6 30 (9.01%) React
7 21 (6.31%) AngularJS
7 21 (6.31%) Terraform
8 20 (6.01%) OpenAPI
9 18 (5.41%) JPA
10 14 (4.20%) RabbitMQ
11 12 (3.60%) OAuth
12 11 (3.30%) JSON
12 11 (3.30%) Swagger
13 10 (3.00%) GraphQL
14 9 (2.70%) Hibernate
14 9 (2.70%) HTML
14 9 (2.70%) Quarkus
15 8 (2.40%) CSS
15 8 (2.40%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 79 (23.72%) Cloud Native
2 64 (19.22%) Distributed Systems
3 13 (3.90%) Enterprise Software
4 12 (3.60%) Product Ownership
5 11 (3.30%) Greenfield Project
6 10 (3.00%) Legacy Systems
7 9 (2.70%) AI Agents
8 8 (2.40%) Onboarding
9 6 (1.80%) Data Structures
9 6 (1.80%) Linux Command Line
9 6 (1.80%) Virtual Team
10 5 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
10 5 (1.50%) Legacy Applications
11 4 (1.20%) Client/Server
11 4 (1.20%) Low-Code
11 4 (1.20%) Public Cloud
11 4 (1.20%) SWIFT Messaging Network
12 3 (0.90%) Algorithms
12 3 (0.90%) Mobile App
12 3 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 19 (5.71%) Linux
2 12 (3.60%) Unix
3 2 (0.60%) Android
3 2 (0.60%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 174 (52.25%) Software Engineering
2 155 (46.55%) CI/CD
3 131 (39.34%) Agile
4 121 (36.34%) Microservices
5 82 (24.62%) DevOps
6 76 (22.82%) Test Automation
7 62 (18.62%) Event-Driven
8 52 (15.62%) TDD
9 47 (14.11%) AI
10 45 (13.51%) Containerisation
11 43 (12.91%) Event-Driven Architecture
11 43 (12.91%) Problem-Solving
12 41 (12.31%) Scrum
13 40 (12.01%) Observability
14 39 (11.71%) SDLC
15 38 (11.41%) Clean Code
16 37 (11.11%) Full-Stack Development
17 31 (9.31%) Front End Development
18 30 (9.01%) Continuous Improvement
19 29 (8.71%) Unit Testing
Programming Languages
1 333 (100.00%) Java
2 75 (22.52%) SQL
3 40 (12.01%) Python
4 30 (9.01%) JavaScript
4 30 (9.01%) Kotlin
5 27 (8.11%) TypeScript
6 19 (5.71%) Shell Script
7 5 (1.50%) C#
8 4 (1.20%) Bash
8 4 (1.20%) Groovy
8 4 (1.20%) PowerShell
8 4 (1.20%) Ruby
9 3 (0.90%) Go
9 3 (0.90%) PL/SQL
9 3 (0.90%) Scala
10 2 (0.60%) C++
10 2 (0.60%) Solidity
10 2 (0.60%) Swift
11 1 (0.30%) Korn
11 1 (0.30%) Perl
Qualifications
1 77 (23.12%) Security Cleared
2 70 (21.02%) SC Cleared
3 29 (8.71%) BPSS Clearance
4 14 (4.20%) Degree
5 10 (3.00%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (0.60%) DV Cleared
6 2 (0.60%) Master's Degree
7 1 (0.30%) AWS Certification
7 1 (0.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.30%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 42 (12.61%) QA
2 8 (2.40%) ISO 20022
3 4 (1.20%) Accessibility
3 4 (1.20%) GDPR
3 4 (1.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
3 4 (1.20%) SEPA
4 3 (0.90%) Data Quality
4 3 (0.90%) ISO 15022
4 3 (0.90%) SLA
4 3 (0.90%) WCAG
5 1 (0.30%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.30%) PSD2
System Software
1 81 (24.32%) Docker
Systems Management
1 119 (35.74%) Kubernetes
2 12 (3.60%) Argo
2 12 (3.60%) Kibana
3 8 (2.40%) Prometheus
4 6 (1.80%) Grafana
5 3 (0.90%) Ansible
6 2 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
7 1 (0.30%) Docker Swarm
7 1 (0.30%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 33 (9.91%) Oracle
2 9 (2.70%) Microsoft
2 9 (2.70%) Red Hat
3 7 (2.10%) SAP
4 6 (1.80%) Databricks
4 6 (1.80%) Splunk
5 5 (1.50%) Google
6 4 (1.20%) Confluent
6 4 (1.20%) Dynatrace
7 3 (0.90%) Cloudera
7 3 (0.90%) FIS
7 3 (0.90%) IBM
8 2 (0.60%) OpenAI
8 2 (0.60%) ServiceNow
9 1 (0.30%) Ariba
9 1 (0.30%) Checkmarx
9 1 (0.30%) Concur
9 1 (0.30%) MKS
9 1 (0.30%) Okta
9 1 (0.30%) Spotify