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 1 February 2026.

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

6 months to
1 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 389 393 475
Rank change year-on-year +4 +82 -112
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 211 137 122
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.55% 0.44% 0.27%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.60% 0.47% 0.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 137 95 84
10th Percentile £354 £335 £380
25th Percentile £400 £478 £444
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £542 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -9.75% +4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £625 £813 £691
90th Percentile £750 £888 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £480 £475
% change year-on-year -2.19% +1.05% -18.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 29 9 2
10th Percentile £48.90 £37.95 £59.63
25th Percentile £52.50 £57.50 £60.94
Median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £66.25
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% -1.89% +0.98%
75th Percentile £65.00 £68.75 £70.94
90th Percentile £88.00 - £71.88
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year -15.38% +4.00% -4.73%

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 35,259 29,175 41,799
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.50% 92.88% 93.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,247 17,830 27,664
10th Percentile £300 £298 £275
25th Percentile £405 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £719 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £479 £495
% change year-on-year -0.73% -3.33% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,103 856 2,215
10th Percentile £14.39 £15.92 £13.25
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.25 £17.00
Median hourly rate £29.60 £32.66 £36.05
Median % change year-on-year -9.36% -9.40% +2.99%
75th Percentile £61.18 £62.50 £62.00
90th Percentile £70.57 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £31.64 £37.34
% change year-on-year -13.08% -15.27% +22.95%

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 February 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 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Java Engineer in the UK

Java Engineer
Top 15 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 February 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 -3 177 £523 -12.92% 80
UK excluding London +3 100 £470 -2.19% 65
London -29 97 £570 -5.00% 37
Work from Home +14 71 £550 -29.03% 39
North of England -32 33 £478 -9.05% 8
Scotland +24 22 £600 +26.32% 11
North West -7 21 £438 - 3
Midlands -36 17 £442 -15.90% 6
South East -3 16 £365 -43.85% 17
West Midlands -25 15 £451 -14.14% 5
South West -27 11 £384 -31.88% 23
North East - 7 £575 - 4
Yorkshire -51 5 £523 -0.48% 2
East Midlands - 2 £313 - 1
Wales -2 1 £400 +102.53%

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

For the 6 months to 1 February 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.

1 211 (100.00%) Java
2 103 (48.82%) Spring
3 96 (45.50%) Software Engineering
4 87 (41.23%) Spring Boot
5 86 (40.76%) CI/CD
6 82 (38.86%) AWS
7 79 (37.44%) Microservices
8 71 (33.65%) Kubernetes
9 63 (29.86%) Agile
10 44 (20.85%) Docker
11 41 (19.43%) Azure
11 41 (19.43%) DevOps
12 36 (17.06%) TDD
13 34 (16.11%) Kafka
13 34 (16.11%) SQL
14 33 (15.64%) Containerisation
15 32 (15.17%) Full-Stack Development
16 29 (13.74%) Problem-Solving
17 28 (13.27%) Jenkins
17 28 (13.27%) Test Automation
18 27 (12.80%) Python
19 26 (12.32%) Git
19 26 (12.32%) GitLab
19 26 (12.32%) RESTful
20 25 (11.85%) Gradle
20 25 (11.85%) QA
21 24 (11.37%) Event-Driven
21 24 (11.37%) JUnit
22 23 (10.90%) PostgreSQL
22 23 (10.90%) Terraform

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 13 (6.16%) Apache
2 10 (4.74%) Apache Airflow
3 5 (2.37%) Apache Spark
4 4 (1.90%) JBoss
4 4 (1.90%) WebLogic
5 3 (1.42%) Confluence
6 1 (0.47%) Adobe Experience Manager
6 1 (0.47%) Camunda
6 1 (0.47%) Ethereum
6 1 (0.47%) Hyperledger
6 1 (0.47%) Luigi
6 1 (0.47%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 1 (0.47%) MS Visio
1 1 (0.47%) Notion
Business Applications
1 2 (0.95%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 82 (38.86%) AWS
2 41 (19.43%) Azure
3 17 (8.06%) AWS Lambda
3 17 (8.06%) Serverless
4 16 (7.58%) GCP
4 16 (7.58%) GitHub
5 15 (7.11%) Amazon S3
6 14 (6.64%) Amazon EC2
7 13 (6.16%) Amazon ECS
8 11 (5.21%) Snowflake
9 9 (4.27%) AWS CloudFormation
9 9 (4.27%) AWS Step Functions
9 9 (4.27%) dbt
9 9 (4.27%) OpenShift
10 8 (3.79%) Amazon Kinesis
10 8 (3.79%) Cloud Computing
10 8 (3.79%) GitHub Actions
11 5 (2.37%) Amazon EKS
12 4 (1.90%) Azure Monitor
12 4 (1.90%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 2 (0.95%) HTTP
2 1 (0.47%) FTP
2 1 (0.47%) Kerberos
2 1 (0.47%) SSL
2 1 (0.47%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 23 (10.90%) PostgreSQL
2 22 (10.43%) MongoDB
3 15 (7.11%) MySQL
4 13 (6.16%) Amazon RDS
5 11 (5.21%) Apache Cassandra
6 10 (4.74%) NoSQL
7 9 (4.27%) Amazon Athena
7 9 (4.27%) Apache Arrow
7 9 (4.27%) Apache Iceberg
7 9 (4.27%) Apache Ignite
7 9 (4.27%) Data Lake
7 9 (4.27%) Dremio
7 9 (4.27%) Hadoop
8 8 (3.79%) Big Data
9 6 (2.84%) DynamoDB
10 5 (2.37%) Relational Database
11 4 (1.90%) SQL Server
12 3 (1.42%) BigQuery
12 3 (1.42%) HBase
13 2 (0.95%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 28 (13.27%) Jenkins
2 26 (12.32%) Git
2 26 (12.32%) GitLab
3 25 (11.85%) Gradle
4 24 (11.37%) JUnit
5 16 (7.58%) Cucumber
5 16 (7.58%) IntelliJ
6 11 (5.21%) Maven
7 9 (4.27%) Selenium
8 7 (3.32%) JMeter
8 7 (3.32%) Sonatype Nexus
9 6 (2.84%) JIRA
10 5 (2.37%) Eclipse
10 5 (2.37%) Mockito
11 4 (1.90%) Postman
12 3 (1.42%) Artifactory
12 3 (1.42%) Cypress.io
13 2 (0.95%) Gatling
13 2 (0.95%) SonarQube
14 1 (0.47%) REST Assured
General
1 53 (25.12%) Finance
2 41 (19.43%) Social Skills
3 25 (11.85%) Banking
4 15 (7.11%) Front Office
5 13 (6.16%) Investment Banking
6 11 (5.21%) Public Sector
7 4 (1.90%) Analytical Skills
7 4 (1.90%) Influencing Skills
8 2 (0.95%) Financial Institution
9 1 (0.47%) Law
9 1 (0.47%) Military
9 1 (0.47%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 103 (48.82%) Spring
2 87 (41.23%) Spring Boot
3 34 (16.11%) Kafka
4 26 (12.32%) RESTful
5 16 (7.58%) REST
6 15 (7.11%) React
7 13 (6.16%) Hibernate
8 12 (5.69%) OpenTelemetry
9 11 (5.21%) AngularJS
9 11 (5.21%) gRPC
9 11 (5.21%) Swagger
10 10 (4.74%) Middleware
11 9 (4.27%) NumPy
11 9 (4.27%) Pandas
11 9 (4.27%) Protocol Buffers
11 9 (4.27%) SciPy
12 8 (3.79%) GraphQL
12 8 (3.79%) HTML
12 8 (3.79%) Node.js
13 7 (3.32%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 26 (12.32%) Cloud Native
2 25 (11.85%) Distributed Systems
3 14 (6.64%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 12 (5.69%) Derivative
5 10 (4.74%) Equities
5 10 (4.74%) Fixed Income
5 10 (4.74%) Hedge funds
6 9 (4.27%) Pricing Data
7 8 (3.79%) Onboarding
7 8 (3.79%) Virtual Team
8 6 (2.84%) Data Protection Act
9 5 (2.37%) Product Ownership
10 4 (1.90%) Legacy Systems
11 3 (1.42%) Data Structures
11 3 (1.42%) Greenfield Project
11 3 (1.42%) Legacy Applications
11 3 (1.42%) Public Cloud
12 2 (0.95%) Algorithms
12 2 (0.95%) Distributed Computing
13 1 (0.47%) VWAP
Operating Systems
1 18 (8.53%) Linux
2 8 (3.79%) Unix
3 1 (0.47%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 96 (45.50%) Software Engineering
2 86 (40.76%) CI/CD
3 79 (37.44%) Microservices
4 63 (29.86%) Agile
5 41 (19.43%) DevOps
6 36 (17.06%) TDD
7 33 (15.64%) Containerisation
8 32 (15.17%) Full-Stack Development
9 29 (13.74%) Problem-Solving
10 28 (13.27%) Test Automation
11 24 (11.37%) Event-Driven
12 19 (9.00%) Clean Code
12 19 (9.00%) Observability
12 19 (9.00%) Software Testing
13 18 (8.53%) Fintech
14 16 (7.58%) Infrastructure as Code
15 15 (7.11%) API Development
15 15 (7.11%) BDD
15 15 (7.11%) Migration
16 14 (6.64%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 211 (100.00%) Java
2 34 (16.11%) SQL
3 27 (12.80%) Python
4 20 (9.48%) TypeScript
5 19 (9.00%) JavaScript
6 15 (7.11%) Kotlin
7 6 (2.84%) Scala
8 5 (2.37%) C++
8 5 (2.37%) Go
9 4 (1.90%) Ada
10 2 (0.95%) Bash
10 2 (0.95%) C#
10 2 (0.95%) PL/SQL
10 2 (0.95%) Rust
10 2 (0.95%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.47%) Ruby
11 1 (0.47%) Solidity
Qualifications
1 22 (10.43%) Security Cleared
2 21 (9.95%) SC Cleared
3 7 (3.32%) Degree
4 6 (2.84%) Computer Science Degree
5 4 (1.90%) BPSS Clearance
6 3 (1.42%) OCP
6 3 (1.42%) Oracle Certification
7 2 (0.95%) Master's Degree
8 1 (0.47%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 25 (11.85%) QA
2 7 (3.32%) Accessibility
3 4 (1.90%) Def Stans
3 4 (1.90%) IEC 61508
4 3 (1.42%) Data Quality
5 2 (0.95%) WCAG
6 1 (0.47%) GDPR
6 1 (0.47%) ISO 15022
6 1 (0.47%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 44 (20.85%) Docker
Systems Management
1 71 (33.65%) Kubernetes
2 23 (10.90%) Terraform
3 17 (8.06%) Grafana
4 10 (4.74%) Ansible
5 5 (2.37%) Puppet
6 4 (1.90%) Progress Chef
7 3 (1.42%) Argo
8 2 (0.95%) Prometheus
9 1 (0.47%) Kibana
Vendors
1 9 (4.27%) Google
1 9 (4.27%) Oracle
2 5 (2.37%) Databricks
2 5 (2.37%) Microsoft
3 4 (1.90%) Splunk
3 4 (1.90%) VMware
3 4 (1.90%) webMethods
4 3 (1.42%) IBM
5 2 (0.95%) Dynatrace
5 2 (0.95%) New Relic
5 2 (0.95%) Red Hat
5 2 (0.95%) Solace
6 1 (0.47%) Actian
6 1 (0.47%) Confluent
6 1 (0.47%) Netlify
6 1 (0.47%) Okta
6 1 (0.47%) SnapLogic
6 1 (0.47%) Teradata
6 1 (0.47%) Virgin Media
6 1 (0.47%) Zoomdata