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 15 October 2026.

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

6 months to
15 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 385 370 319
Rank change year-on-year -15 -51 +161
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 337 195 257
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 218 152 183
10th Percentile £357 £363 £450
25th Percentile £425 £505 £520
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £713
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% -15.79% +18.75%
75th Percentile £600 £825 £850
90th Percentile £660 £848 £888
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £519 £500
% change year-on-year +1.20% +3.75% +1.01%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 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 50,841 30,184 35,017
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.94% 90.90% 93.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,834 19,073 21,148
10th Percentile £325 £275 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £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 4,158 1,652 1,437
10th Percentile £14.31 £13.80 £15.09
25th Percentile £19.33 £17.30 £20.50
Median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £41.27
Median % change year-on-year +65.23% -39.05% -8.30%
75th Percentile £67.50 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.30 £68.52 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.06 £25.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +64.24% -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 15 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 15 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 15 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 -5 311 £525 -16.00% 51
UK excluding London +26 172 £525 +1.20% 36
London -74 144 £525 -30.00% 17
Work from Home -83 101 £485 -35.33% 35
North of England -7 75 £500 -13.04% 18
Midlands -1 55 £555 +5.71% 6
West Midlands 0 49 £565 +7.11% 6
North West -4 49 £554 +81.48% 12
South East -52 20 £500 +38.89% 4
East of England -10 18 £600 -
Yorkshire -27 16 £470 +47.52% 2
North East -30 10 £640 +11.30% 4
East Midlands -8 6 £400 +26.98%
South West -34 6 £484 -12.05% 7
Scotland -34 4 £550 +10.00% 1
Wales - 4 - -
Northern Ireland - 3 £275 -

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

For the 6 months to 15 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.

1 337 (100.00%) Java
2 179 (53.12%) Software Engineering
3 163 (48.37%) Spring
4 156 (46.29%) CI/CD
5 149 (44.21%) Spring Boot
6 132 (39.17%) Agile
7 128 (37.98%) AWS
8 124 (36.80%) Microservices
9 121 (35.91%) Kubernetes
10 83 (24.63%) DevOps
11 82 (24.33%) Docker
12 79 (23.44%) Kafka
13 78 (23.15%) Test Automation
14 77 (22.85%) Security Cleared
14 77 (22.85%) SQL
15 70 (20.77%) REST
15 70 (20.77%) SC Cleared
16 64 (18.99%) Event-Driven
17 54 (16.02%) TDD
18 49 (14.54%) Azure
19 48 (14.24%) Git
20 47 (13.95%) AI
21 45 (13.35%) Containerisation
21 45 (13.35%) GitLab
22 44 (13.06%) Event-Driven Architecture
22 44 (13.06%) JUnit
23 43 (12.76%) Problem-Solving
23 43 (12.76%) Scrum
24 42 (12.46%) Observability
24 42 (12.46%) QA

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 (2.97%) Apache
2 7 (2.08%) WebLogic
3 5 (1.48%) Apache Spark
4 4 (1.19%) Apache Airflow
5 3 (0.89%) Confluence
6 2 (0.59%) Ethereum
6 2 (0.59%) Oracle SOA Suite
6 2 (0.59%) WebSphere
7 1 (0.30%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.30%) Camunda
7 1 (0.30%) MQSeries
7 1 (0.30%) Tomcat
Applications
1 3 (0.89%) Trello
Business Applications
1 2 (0.59%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 128 (37.98%) AWS
2 49 (14.54%) Azure
3 35 (10.39%) GCP
4 28 (8.31%) GitHub
5 20 (5.93%) GitHub Actions
6 17 (5.04%) Serverless
7 16 (4.75%) AWS Lambda
8 13 (3.86%) OpenShift
9 10 (2.97%) AWS CloudFormation
10 9 (2.67%) Amazon ECS
10 9 (2.67%) Amazon SQS
11 8 (2.37%) Amazon EKS
12 7 (2.08%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 6 (1.78%) Amazon S3
13 6 (1.78%) GitHub Copilot
13 6 (1.78%) Power Platform
14 5 (1.48%) Amazon OpenSearch
14 5 (1.48%) Azure DevOps
14 5 (1.48%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 4 (1.19%) AWS Fargate
Communications & Networking
1 11 (3.26%) Firewall
1 11 (3.26%) VPN
2 5 (1.48%) HTTP
3 4 (1.19%) Internet
4 1 (0.30%) DNS
4 1 (0.30%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 38 (11.28%) PostgreSQL
2 27 (8.01%) Relational Database
3 23 (6.82%) NoSQL
4 19 (5.64%) MongoDB
5 18 (5.34%) MySQL
6 10 (2.97%) SQL Server
7 9 (2.67%) DynamoDB
8 8 (2.37%) Couchbase
8 8 (2.37%) Elasticsearch
9 7 (2.08%) Redis
10 6 (1.78%) Apache Cassandra
10 6 (1.78%) Flink
10 6 (1.78%) Power BI
11 3 (0.89%) BusinessObjects
11 3 (0.89%) Data Lake
11 3 (0.89%) Oracle Database
11 3 (0.89%) Pentaho
12 2 (0.59%) Big Data
12 2 (0.59%) Snowflake Schema
12 2 (0.59%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 48 (14.24%) Git
2 45 (13.35%) GitLab
3 44 (13.06%) JUnit
4 31 (9.20%) Maven
5 23 (6.82%) Mockito
6 20 (5.93%) Gradle
6 20 (5.93%) Jenkins
7 12 (3.56%) SonarQube
8 10 (2.97%) Cucumber
9 8 (2.37%) JIRA
9 8 (2.37%) Selenium
10 6 (1.78%) Bitbucket
11 5 (1.48%) Liquibase
11 5 (1.48%) TeamCity
12 4 (1.19%) Gatling
13 3 (0.89%) Claude Code
13 3 (0.89%) Cypress.io
13 3 (0.89%) Flyway
13 3 (0.89%) REST Assured
14 2 (0.59%) Katalon Studio
General
1 85 (25.22%) Finance
2 70 (20.77%) Social Skills
3 59 (17.51%) Banking
4 18 (5.34%) Public Sector
5 13 (3.86%) Manufacturing
6 12 (3.56%) Retail
7 10 (2.97%) Analytical Skills
8 8 (2.37%) Front Office
9 6 (1.78%) Financial Institution
9 6 (1.78%) Military
10 4 (1.19%) iGaming
10 4 (1.19%) Investment Banking
10 4 (1.19%) Law
10 4 (1.19%) Retail Banking
11 3 (0.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 3 (0.89%) Presentation Skills
12 2 (0.59%) Automotive
12 2 (0.59%) Corporate Banking
13 1 (0.30%) International Banking
13 1 (0.30%) Legal
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 163 (48.37%) Spring
2 149 (44.21%) Spring Boot
3 79 (23.44%) Kafka
4 70 (20.77%) REST
5 34 (10.09%) RESTful
6 32 (9.50%) React
7 22 (6.53%) AngularJS
8 21 (6.23%) OpenAPI
8 21 (6.23%) Terraform
9 19 (5.64%) JPA
10 14 (4.15%) RabbitMQ
11 12 (3.56%) OAuth
11 12 (3.56%) Swagger
12 11 (3.26%) GraphQL
12 11 (3.26%) JSON
13 9 (2.67%) Hibernate
13 9 (2.67%) HTML
13 9 (2.67%) Node.js
13 9 (2.67%) Quarkus
14 8 (2.37%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 78 (23.15%) Cloud Native
2 64 (18.99%) Distributed Systems
3 14 (4.15%) Enterprise Software
4 12 (3.56%) Greenfield Project
4 12 (3.56%) Product Ownership
5 10 (2.97%) AI Agents
5 10 (2.97%) Legacy Systems
6 8 (2.37%) Onboarding
7 7 (2.08%) Virtual Team
8 6 (1.78%) Data Structures
8 6 (1.78%) Linux Command Line
9 5 (1.48%) Data Protection Act
9 5 (1.48%) Legacy Applications
10 4 (1.19%) Client/Server
10 4 (1.19%) Low-Code
10 4 (1.19%) Public Cloud
10 4 (1.19%) SWIFT Messaging Network
11 3 (0.89%) Algorithms
11 3 (0.89%) Fixed Income
11 3 (0.89%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 20 (5.93%) Linux
2 12 (3.56%) Unix
3 2 (0.59%) Android
3 2 (0.59%) Apple iOS
4 1 (0.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 179 (53.12%) Software Engineering
2 156 (46.29%) CI/CD
3 132 (39.17%) Agile
4 124 (36.80%) Microservices
5 83 (24.63%) DevOps
6 78 (23.15%) Test Automation
7 64 (18.99%) Event-Driven
8 54 (16.02%) TDD
9 47 (13.95%) AI
10 45 (13.35%) Containerisation
11 44 (13.06%) Event-Driven Architecture
12 43 (12.76%) Problem-Solving
12 43 (12.76%) Scrum
13 42 (12.46%) Observability
14 39 (11.57%) Full-Stack Development
15 38 (11.28%) Clean Code
15 38 (11.28%) SDLC
16 34 (10.09%) Front End Development
17 31 (9.20%) Continuous Improvement
18 30 (8.90%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 337 (100.00%) Java
2 77 (22.85%) SQL
3 40 (11.87%) Python
4 32 (9.50%) JavaScript
5 31 (9.20%) Kotlin
5 31 (9.20%) TypeScript
6 20 (5.93%) Shell Script
7 5 (1.48%) Bash
7 5 (1.48%) C#
8 4 (1.19%) Groovy
8 4 (1.19%) PowerShell
8 4 (1.19%) Ruby
9 3 (0.89%) Go
9 3 (0.89%) PL/SQL
9 3 (0.89%) Scala
10 2 (0.59%) C++
10 2 (0.59%) Solidity
10 2 (0.59%) Swift
11 1 (0.30%) Perl
11 1 (0.30%) Rust
Qualifications
1 77 (22.85%) Security Cleared
2 70 (20.77%) SC Cleared
3 29 (8.61%) BPSS Clearance
4 14 (4.15%) Degree
5 10 (2.97%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (0.59%) DV Cleared
6 2 (0.59%) 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 (12.46%) QA
2 8 (2.37%) ISO 20022
3 5 (1.48%) Accessibility
4 4 (1.19%) GDPR
4 4 (1.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
4 4 (1.19%) SEPA
5 3 (0.89%) Data Quality
5 3 (0.89%) ISO 15022
5 3 (0.89%) SLA
5 3 (0.89%) WCAG
6 1 (0.30%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.30%) PSD2
System Software
1 82 (24.33%) Docker
Systems Management
1 121 (35.91%) Kubernetes
2 13 (3.86%) Kibana
3 12 (3.56%) Argo
4 9 (2.67%) Prometheus
5 7 (2.08%) Grafana
6 3 (0.89%) Ansible
7 2 (0.59%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.30%) Docker Swarm
8 1 (0.30%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 33 (9.79%) Oracle
2 10 (2.97%) Red Hat
3 9 (2.67%) Microsoft
4 7 (2.08%) SAP
5 6 (1.78%) Databricks
5 6 (1.78%) Splunk
6 5 (1.48%) Google
7 4 (1.19%) Confluent
7 4 (1.19%) Dynatrace
7 4 (1.19%) FIS
8 3 (0.89%) Cloudera
8 3 (0.89%) IBM
9 2 (0.59%) OpenAI
9 2 (0.59%) ServiceNow
10 1 (0.30%) Ariba
10 1 (0.30%) Checkmarx
10 1 (0.30%) Concur
10 1 (0.30%) MKS
10 1 (0.30%) Okta