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 9 June 2026.

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

6 months to
9 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 326 331 343
Rank change year-on-year +5 +12 +139
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 353 197 265
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.71% 0.67% 0.61%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.77% 0.73% 0.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 211 135 177
10th Percentile £382 £380 £413
25th Percentile £453 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £586 £588
Median % change year-on-year -9.56% -0.26% -6.00%
75th Percentile £616 £825 £850
90th Percentile £670 £875 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £523 £473 £500
% change year-on-year +10.58% -5.50% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 10 24
10th Percentile £52.50 £55.25 £67.50
25th Percentile £61.25 £62.19 -
Median hourly rate £66.25 £66.25 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year - -5.36% +6.87%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 -
90th Percentile £76.00 £72.25 £71.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £66.25 £70.00
% change year-on-year -1.89% -5.36% +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 45,859 27,036 40,213
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.31% 92.35% 92.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,926 17,399 25,887
10th Percentile £325 £287 £280
25th Percentile £413 £402 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,063 1,119 2,897
10th Percentile £15.15 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.75 £17.84 £16.30
Median hourly rate £43.61 £28.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +55.73% -25.33% -16.67%
75th Percentile £67.50 £58.47 £61.75
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% -5.88%

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 9 June 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 9 June 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 9 June 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 -10 308 £525 -22.22% 52
UK excluding London +1 165 £523 +10.58% 43
London -42 160 £550 -26.67% 26
Work from Home -38 104 £525 -30.00% 31
North of England -20 62 £523 +14.21% 11
South West -6 32 £484 -6.75% 6
North West -11 32 £528 - 5
South East -37 30 £500 -23.08% 9
Yorkshire -43 17 £523 -0.48% 4
Scotland -1 16 £600 +27.66% 7
Midlands -52 15 £600 +14.29% 3
North East -12 14 £478 +22.44% 2
West Midlands -49 14 £600 +14.29% 3
East of England -29 8 £505 -15.83% 2
Wales - 4 £388 - 1
Northern Ireland -4 1 - - 4
East Midlands -29 1 - -

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

For the 6 months to 9 June 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.

1 353 (100.00%) Java
2 186 (52.69%) Software Engineering
3 144 (40.79%) Spring
4 133 (37.68%) Spring Boot
5 102 (28.90%) AWS
6 100 (28.33%) Kubernetes
7 98 (27.76%) CI/CD
8 97 (27.48%) Microservices
9 91 (25.78%) Agile
10 79 (22.38%) Docker
11 73 (20.68%) Kafka
12 72 (20.40%) Security Cleared
13 64 (18.13%) SC Cleared
14 60 (17.00%) DevOps
15 57 (16.15%) Full-Stack Development
16 56 (15.86%) SQL
17 49 (13.88%) Azure
18 47 (13.31%) TDD
19 46 (13.03%) React
20 45 (12.75%) Containerisation
21 40 (11.33%) Python
21 40 (11.33%) Test Automation
22 39 (11.05%) PostgreSQL
23 37 (10.48%) Event-Driven
24 35 (9.92%) Problem-Solving
25 34 (9.63%) Jenkins
26 32 (9.07%) QA
26 32 (9.07%) TypeScript
27 30 (8.50%) Gradle
27 30 (8.50%) REST

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 (2.83%) Apache Spark
2 4 (1.13%) Apache
2 4 (1.13%) Confluence
2 4 (1.13%) Oracle SOA Suite
3 2 (0.57%) MQSeries
4 1 (0.28%) Adobe Experience Manager
4 1 (0.28%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.28%) Apache Pulsar
4 1 (0.28%) Camunda
4 1 (0.28%) Ethereum
4 1 (0.28%) Hyperledger
4 1 (0.28%) nginx
4 1 (0.28%) Tomcat
4 1 (0.28%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (0.28%) Notion
Business Applications
1 2 (0.57%) Payment Gateway
1 2 (0.57%) Shopify
2 1 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 102 (28.90%) AWS
2 49 (13.88%) Azure
3 23 (6.52%) GCP
3 23 (6.52%) GitHub
4 18 (5.10%) Serverless
5 17 (4.82%) AWS Lambda
5 17 (4.82%) GitHub Actions
6 16 (4.53%) OpenShift
7 12 (3.40%) Amazon S3
8 9 (2.55%) Amazon ECS
9 7 (1.98%) Amazon EC2
10 6 (1.70%) AWS Step Functions
11 5 (1.42%) Azure DevOps
11 5 (1.42%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 4 (1.13%) Amazon SQS
12 4 (1.13%) AWS Fargate
12 4 (1.13%) Azure Service Bus
12 4 (1.13%) Cloud Run
13 3 (0.85%) Amazon Kinesis
13 3 (0.85%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.42%) HTTP
2 4 (1.13%) Firewall
2 4 (1.13%) VPN
3 3 (0.85%) MQTT
4 2 (0.57%) Internet
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 39 (11.05%) PostgreSQL
2 19 (5.38%) MongoDB
3 14 (3.97%) Relational Database
3 14 (3.97%) SQL Server
4 12 (3.40%) DynamoDB
4 12 (3.40%) MySQL
5 11 (3.12%) Apache Cassandra
5 11 (3.12%) NoSQL
6 10 (2.83%) Big Data
7 8 (2.27%) Amazon RDS
7 8 (2.27%) Elasticsearch
8 4 (1.13%) Couchbase
8 4 (1.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 3 (0.85%) Data Lake
9 3 (0.85%) Hadoop
9 3 (0.85%) Power BI
10 2 (0.57%) HBase
10 2 (0.57%) Oracle Database
10 2 (0.57%) Redis
10 2 (0.57%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 34 (9.63%) Jenkins
2 30 (8.50%) Gradle
3 29 (8.22%) Git
4 28 (7.93%) JUnit
5 26 (7.37%) GitLab
6 15 (4.25%) IntelliJ
7 13 (3.68%) SonarQube
8 12 (3.40%) Maven
8 12 (3.40%) Mockito
9 10 (2.83%) JIRA
10 8 (2.27%) Liquibase
11 7 (1.98%) Selenium
12 4 (1.13%) Cucumber
13 3 (0.85%) Flyway
13 3 (0.85%) XCUITest
14 2 (0.57%) Appium
14 2 (0.57%) Artifactory
14 2 (0.57%) Bitbucket
14 2 (0.57%) Gatling
14 2 (0.57%) WebDriver
General
1 79 (22.38%) Finance
2 43 (12.18%) Banking
3 31 (8.78%) Social Skills
4 20 (5.67%) Front Office
4 20 (5.67%) Public Sector
5 11 (3.12%) Law
6 10 (2.83%) Financial Institution
7 8 (2.27%) Analytical Skills
8 7 (1.98%) Retail
9 6 (1.70%) Investment Banking
10 4 (1.13%) Manufacturing
11 3 (0.85%) Automotive
11 3 (0.85%) Back Office
11 3 (0.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 3 (0.85%) Military
12 2 (0.57%) Corporate Banking
12 2 (0.57%) Retail Banking
13 1 (0.28%) French Language
13 1 (0.28%) Health Technology
13 1 (0.28%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 144 (40.79%) Spring
2 133 (37.68%) Spring Boot
3 73 (20.68%) Kafka
4 46 (13.03%) React
5 30 (8.50%) REST
6 25 (7.08%) RESTful
7 19 (5.38%) AngularJS
7 19 (5.38%) GraphQL
8 18 (5.10%) Middleware
8 18 (5.10%) Node.js
9 15 (4.25%) OpenAPI
9 15 (4.25%) Swagger
10 13 (3.68%) OpenTelemetry
10 13 (3.68%) Quarkus
11 12 (3.40%) Hibernate
12 9 (2.55%) Redux
13 8 (2.27%) Next.js
14 7 (1.98%) FIX Protocol
14 7 (1.98%) Micronaut
14 7 (1.98%) Spring MVC
Miscellaneous
1 57 (16.15%) Cloud Native
2 35 (9.92%) Distributed Systems
3 10 (2.83%) Data Protection Act
3 10 (2.83%) Greenfield Project
4 9 (2.55%) Fixed Income
5 8 (2.27%) Legacy Applications
6 7 (1.98%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 7 (1.98%) Public Cloud
7 5 (1.42%) SWIFT Messaging Network
8 4 (1.13%) Legacy Systems
8 4 (1.13%) Low-Code
8 4 (1.13%) TWAP
8 4 (1.13%) VWAP
9 3 (0.85%) Clustering
9 3 (0.85%) Mobile App
9 3 (0.85%) Onboarding
9 3 (0.85%) Product Ownership
9 3 (0.85%) Virtual Team
10 2 (0.57%) Derivative
10 2 (0.57%) Exotic Derivative
Operating Systems
1 22 (6.23%) Linux
2 11 (3.12%) Unix
3 2 (0.57%) Android
3 2 (0.57%) 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%) VMS
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
1 186 (52.69%) Software Engineering
2 98 (27.76%) CI/CD
3 97 (27.48%) Microservices
4 91 (25.78%) Agile
5 60 (17.00%) DevOps
6 57 (16.15%) Full-Stack Development
7 47 (13.31%) TDD
8 45 (12.75%) Containerisation
9 40 (11.33%) Test Automation
10 37 (10.48%) Event-Driven
11 35 (9.92%) Problem-Solving
12 27 (7.65%) Migration
12 27 (7.65%) Scrum
13 24 (6.80%) Observability
14 23 (6.52%) Clean Code
14 23 (6.52%) SDLC
15 22 (6.23%) Code Quality
15 22 (6.23%) Event-Driven Architecture
16 21 (5.95%) AI
16 21 (5.95%) Unit Testing
Programming Languages
1 353 (100.00%) Java
2 56 (15.86%) SQL
3 40 (11.33%) Python
4 32 (9.07%) TypeScript
5 22 (6.23%) JavaScript
5 22 (6.23%) Kotlin
6 11 (3.12%) Ada
6 11 (3.12%) Go
7 7 (1.98%) PL/SQL
8 5 (1.42%) Shell Script
9 3 (0.85%) C#
9 3 (0.85%) C++
9 3 (0.85%) Scala
10 2 (0.57%) Groovy
10 2 (0.57%) Swift
11 1 (0.28%) Korn
11 1 (0.28%) Rust
11 1 (0.28%) Solidity
Qualifications
1 72 (20.40%) Security Cleared
2 64 (18.13%) SC Cleared
3 12 (3.40%) Degree
4 6 (1.70%) Computer Science Degree
5 5 (1.42%) BPSS Clearance
5 5 (1.42%) DV Cleared
6 4 (1.13%) Master's Degree
7 1 (0.28%) AWS Certification
7 1 (0.28%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.28%) Numerate Degree
7 1 (0.28%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 32 (9.07%) QA
2 11 (3.12%) Def Stans
2 11 (3.12%) IEC 61508
3 9 (2.55%) ISO 20022
4 7 (1.98%) GDPR
4 7 (1.98%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 6 (1.70%) Accessibility
6 5 (1.42%) SEPA
7 3 (0.85%) Data Quality
7 3 (0.85%) ISO 15022
8 1 (0.28%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.28%) PSD2
8 1 (0.28%) WCAG
System Software
1 79 (22.38%) 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
1 100 (28.33%) Kubernetes
2 22 (6.23%) Terraform
3 16 (4.53%) Grafana
4 12 (3.40%) Argo
5 6 (1.70%) Ansible
6 3 (0.85%) HAProxy
7 2 (0.57%) Kibana
7 2 (0.57%) Prometheus
8 1 (0.28%) Docker Swarm
8 1 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
8 1 (0.28%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.28%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 19 (5.38%) Oracle
2 13 (3.68%) Google
3 11 (3.12%) Microsoft
3 11 (3.12%) Red Hat
4 7 (1.98%) Splunk
5 6 (1.70%) IBM
5 6 (1.70%) Spotify
6 4 (1.13%) Dynatrace
6 4 (1.13%) SAP
7 3 (0.85%) Databricks
7 3 (0.85%) ServiceNow
8 2 (0.57%) Checkmarx
8 2 (0.57%) Confluent
8 2 (0.57%) MKS
8 2 (0.57%) New Relic
8 2 (0.57%) Solace
9 1 (0.28%) Ab Initio
9 1 (0.28%) Adobe
9 1 (0.28%) Teradata
9 1 (0.28%) VMware