Java Engineer Contract Job Trends

Java Engineer
UK

The median Java Engineer daily rate in the UK is £575, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 15 December 2025.

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

6 months to
15 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 399 387 488
Rank change year-on-year -12 +101 -147
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 190 168 123
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.52% 0.49% 0.28%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.57% 0.53% 0.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 142 126 92
10th Percentile £360 £442 £397
25th Percentile £464 £521 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £675 £595
Median % change year-on-year -14.81% +13.45% -0.83%
75th Percentile £738 £850 £725
90th Percentile £825 £888 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £550 £475
% change year-on-year -14.55% +15.79% -17.39%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 8 2
10th Percentile £40.75 £37.68 £60.13
25th Percentile £46.50 £52.75 £62.19
Median hourly rate £55.00 £63.75 £68.75
Median % change year-on-year -13.73% -7.27% +4.79%
75th Percentile £67.81 £68.75 £74.69
90th Percentile £87.50 £69.13 £76.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £68.75
% change year-on-year -15.38% -5.45% +4.79%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 33,152 31,803 41,481
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.96% 92.76% 93.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,996 19,553 27,898
10th Percentile £290 £300 £290
25th Percentile £404 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £644
90th Percentile £724 £738 £740
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,961 1,029 1,466
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.49 £15.16
25th Percentile £17.98 £21.05 £19.14
Median hourly rate £25.25 £34.00 £44.75
Median % change year-on-year -25.74% -24.02% +46.72%
75th Percentile £57.50 £63.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £71.50 £72.90 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -22.62% -27.78% +80.00%

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 15 December 2025.

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 15 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Java Engineer in the UK

Java Engineer
Top 14 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 15 December 2025. 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 -30 161 £575 -17.86% 129
London -36 110 £625 -18.03% 35
Work from Home +27 85 £625 -21.88% 90
UK excluding London -12 69 £470 -14.55% 113
Scotland +18 20 £600 +84.62% 7
North of England -30 20 £475 -13.64% 34
Midlands -26 16 £460 -34.29% 17
West Midlands -17 15 £460 -40.65% 8
South East +4 11 £360 -37.39% 33
North West -17 10 £400 -27.27% 23
Yorkshire -40 5 £350 -32.04% 9
North East - 5 £575 - 3
South West -20 2 £550 -2.44% 11
East Midlands -17 1 £313 -45.65% 8

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

For the 6 months to 15 December 2025, 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.

1 190 (100.00%) Java
2 98 (51.58%) AWS
3 95 (50.00%) Software Engineering
4 81 (42.63%) CI/CD
5 79 (41.58%) Agile
6 74 (38.95%) Spring
7 62 (32.63%) Microservices
7 62 (32.63%) Spring Boot
8 52 (27.37%) Python
9 51 (26.84%) Kubernetes
10 46 (24.21%) TypeScript
11 45 (23.68%) Azure
12 42 (22.11%) DevOps
13 41 (21.58%) JavaScript
14 36 (18.95%) Docker
15 32 (16.84%) Kafka
16 30 (15.79%) Apache
16 30 (15.79%) Investment Management
16 30 (15.79%) QA
16 30 (15.79%) SQL
17 28 (14.74%) TDD
17 28 (14.74%) Test Automation
18 27 (14.21%) Apache Airflow
18 27 (14.21%) Data Lake
18 27 (14.21%) gRPC
18 27 (14.21%) Snowflake
19 26 (13.68%) Amazon Athena
19 26 (13.68%) Apache Arrow
19 26 (13.68%) Apache Iceberg
19 26 (13.68%) Apache Ignite

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 30 (15.79%) Apache
2 27 (14.21%) Apache Airflow
3 4 (2.11%) Apache Spark
3 4 (2.11%) JBoss
3 4 (2.11%) WebLogic
4 2 (1.05%) Confluence
5 1 (0.53%) Luigi
5 1 (0.53%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 1 (0.53%) MS Visio
Cloud Services
1 98 (51.58%) AWS
2 45 (23.68%) Azure
3 27 (14.21%) Snowflake
4 26 (13.68%) dbt
5 17 (8.95%) GitHub
6 15 (7.89%) GCP
7 10 (5.26%) GitHub Actions
8 9 (4.74%) Amazon EC2
8 9 (4.74%) OpenShift
8 9 (4.74%) Serverless
9 8 (4.21%) Amazon ECS
9 8 (4.21%) AWS Lambda
10 7 (3.68%) Amazon Kinesis
10 7 (3.68%) Amazon S3
10 7 (3.68%) Cloud Computing
11 6 (3.16%) AWS CloudFormation
11 6 (3.16%) AWS Step Functions
12 4 (2.11%) Amazon EKS
13 3 (1.58%) AWS CodePipeline
13 3 (1.58%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.05%) AMQP
2 1 (0.53%) Broadband
2 1 (0.53%) FTP
2 1 (0.53%) SSL
2 1 (0.53%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (14.21%) Data Lake
2 26 (13.68%) Amazon Athena
2 26 (13.68%) Apache Arrow
2 26 (13.68%) Apache Iceberg
2 26 (13.68%) Apache Ignite
2 26 (13.68%) Dremio
3 18 (9.47%) MongoDB
4 17 (8.95%) PostgreSQL
5 13 (6.84%) MySQL
6 12 (6.32%) Apache Cassandra
7 8 (4.21%) Hadoop
7 8 (4.21%) NoSQL
8 7 (3.68%) Relational Database
9 6 (3.16%) Amazon RDS
9 6 (3.16%) Big Data
10 4 (2.11%) RDBMS
11 3 (1.58%) BigQuery
11 3 (1.58%) HBase
11 3 (1.58%) SQL Server
12 2 (1.05%) InfluxDB
Development Applications
1 25 (13.16%) Git
2 23 (12.11%) Jenkins
3 21 (11.05%) JUnit
4 17 (8.95%) GitLab
5 16 (8.42%) Cucumber
6 14 (7.37%) Gradle
7 12 (6.32%) IntelliJ
8 8 (4.21%) Selenium
9 7 (3.68%) JMeter
9 7 (3.68%) Sonatype Nexus
10 6 (3.16%) Maven
11 5 (2.63%) JIRA
12 4 (2.11%) Bitbucket
12 4 (2.11%) Eclipse
12 4 (2.11%) Postman
13 3 (1.58%) Artifactory
13 3 (1.58%) Cypress.io
13 3 (1.58%) Mockito
14 2 (1.05%) Gatling
14 2 (1.05%) TestNG
General
1 72 (37.89%) Finance
2 41 (21.58%) Banking
3 36 (18.95%) Social Skills
4 34 (17.89%) Front Office
5 30 (15.79%) Investment Banking
6 7 (3.68%) Public Sector
7 6 (3.16%) Analytical Skills
8 4 (2.11%) Influencing Skills
9 3 (1.58%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (1.05%) Back Office
11 1 (0.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 1 (0.53%) Law
11 1 (0.53%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 74 (38.95%) Spring
2 62 (32.63%) Spring Boot
3 32 (16.84%) Kafka
4 27 (14.21%) gRPC
5 26 (13.68%) NumPy
5 26 (13.68%) Pandas
5 26 (13.68%) Protocol Buffers
5 26 (13.68%) SciPy
6 23 (12.11%) RESTful
7 17 (8.95%) React
8 16 (8.42%) AngularJS
9 15 (7.89%) REST
10 12 (6.32%) Hibernate
10 12 (6.32%) Node.js
11 9 (4.74%) HTML
11 9 (4.74%) JSON
12 7 (3.68%) GraphQL
13 6 (3.16%) OAuth
14 5 (2.63%) HTML5
14 5 (2.63%) JPA
Miscellaneous
1 31 (16.32%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 30 (15.79%) Fixed Income
3 28 (14.74%) Derivative
3 28 (14.74%) Equities
4 26 (13.68%) Hedge funds
4 26 (13.68%) Pricing Data
5 21 (11.05%) Distributed Systems
6 17 (8.95%) Cloud Native
7 8 (4.21%) Onboarding
8 7 (3.68%) Product Ownership
8 7 (3.68%) Public Cloud
8 7 (3.68%) Virtual Team
9 4 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
10 3 (1.58%) Legacy Systems
10 3 (1.58%) Mobile App
11 2 (1.05%) Algorithms
11 2 (1.05%) Blockchain
11 2 (1.05%) Data Centre
11 2 (1.05%) Data Structures
11 2 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 17 (8.95%) Linux
2 11 (5.79%) Unix
3 5 (2.63%) Windows
4 2 (1.05%) CentOS
4 2 (1.05%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 95 (50.00%) Software Engineering
2 81 (42.63%) CI/CD
3 79 (41.58%) Agile
4 62 (32.63%) Microservices
5 42 (22.11%) DevOps
6 30 (15.79%) Investment Management
7 28 (14.74%) TDD
7 28 (14.74%) Test Automation
8 26 (13.68%) Asset Management
9 25 (13.16%) Full-Stack Development
10 24 (12.63%) Problem-Solving
11 23 (12.11%) Containerisation
12 20 (10.53%) Infrastructure as Code
13 19 (10.00%) Observability
14 17 (8.95%) Clean Code
15 16 (8.42%) API Development
16 15 (7.89%) Event-Driven
16 15 (7.89%) Fintech
17 14 (7.37%) SDLC
18 12 (6.32%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 190 (100.00%) Java
2 52 (27.37%) Python
3 46 (24.21%) TypeScript
4 41 (21.58%) JavaScript
5 30 (15.79%) SQL
6 12 (6.32%) Kotlin
7 8 (4.21%) C++
7 8 (4.21%) Go
8 6 (3.16%) Scala
9 3 (1.58%) C
9 3 (1.58%) C#
10 2 (1.05%) Bash
10 2 (1.05%) DAML
10 2 (1.05%) PL/SQL
10 2 (1.05%) Rust
10 2 (1.05%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.53%) Groovy
11 1 (0.53%) Perl
11 1 (0.53%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 23 (12.11%) Security Cleared
2 21 (11.05%) SC Cleared
3 8 (4.21%) Degree
4 6 (3.16%) Computer Science Degree
5 4 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
6 3 (1.58%) OCP
6 3 (1.58%) Oracle Certification
7 2 (1.05%) DV Cleared
7 2 (1.05%) Master's Degree
8 1 (0.53%) ISTQB
8 1 (0.53%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 30 (15.79%) QA
2 9 (4.74%) Accessibility
3 3 (1.58%) Data Quality
4 1 (0.53%) ISO 15022
4 1 (0.53%) ISO 20022
4 1 (0.53%) WCAG
System Software
1 36 (18.95%) Docker
Systems Management
1 51 (26.84%) Kubernetes
2 21 (11.05%) Terraform
3 14 (7.37%) Ansible
4 13 (6.84%) Grafana
5 5 (2.63%) Puppet
6 4 (2.11%) Progress Chef
7 2 (1.05%) Argo
8 1 (0.53%) Kibana
8 1 (0.53%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 9 (4.74%) Google
2 8 (4.21%) Oracle
3 7 (3.68%) Microsoft
4 5 (2.63%) Databricks
5 4 (2.11%) Splunk
5 4 (2.11%) VMware
5 4 (2.11%) webMethods
6 2 (1.05%) Dynatrace
6 2 (1.05%) IBM
6 2 (1.05%) Red Hat
6 2 (1.05%) Solace
6 2 (1.05%) TIBCO
7 1 (0.53%) Calypso
7 1 (0.53%) Cisco
7 1 (0.53%) Confluent
7 1 (0.53%) Guidewire
7 1 (0.53%) Informatica
7 1 (0.53%) Okta
7 1 (0.53%) Virgin Media
7 1 (0.53%) Zoomdata