Java Engineer Contract Job Trends

Java Engineer
UK

The median Java Engineer daily rate in the UK is £550, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 15 January 2026.

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

6 months to
15 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 401 399 476
Rank change year-on-year -2 +77 -114
Contract jobs requiring a Java Engineer 179 135 104
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 0.42% 0.25%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.53% 0.46% 0.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 127 96 73
10th Percentile £359 £337 £384
25th Percentile £430 £500 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -
75th Percentile £633 £850 £725
90th Percentile £825 £888 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £484 £475
% change year-on-year -3.05% +1.84% -18.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 6 2
10th Percentile £43.15 £37.13 £60.13
25th Percentile £52.50 £43.25 £62.19
Median hourly rate £55.00 £61.25 £68.75
Median % change year-on-year -10.20% -10.91% +4.79%
75th Percentile £57.50 £64.69 £74.69
90th Percentile £75.25 £66.88 £76.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £63.75 £68.75
% change year-on-year -13.73% -7.27% +4.79%

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 33,883 29,520 39,341
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.34% 92.72% 93.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,433 18,105 26,194
10th Percentile £300 £288 £280
25th Percentile £405 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,985 889 1,660
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.50 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.24 £21.05 £18.93
Median hourly rate £26.30 £32.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -19.08% -23.53% +21.43%
75th Percentile £60.00 £62.24 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.75 £76.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.29 £45.00
% change year-on-year -19.62% -30.47% +55.17%

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 January 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 January 2026.

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 January 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 -19 150 £543 -13.12% 111
London -25 93 £595 -9.85% 36
UK excluding London -25 74 £469 -3.05% 96
Work from Home +15 66 £600 -25.00% 66
North of England -19 27 £475 -7.77% 17
Scotland +18 18 £600 +27.66% 10
North West -7 17 £400 - 8
Midlands -23 15 £450 -34.55% 8
West Midlands -21 14 £460 -33.09% 6
South East -5 13 £370 -35.65% 29
Yorkshire -45 5 £350 -32.04% 4
North East - 5 £575 - 5
South West -32 1 £425 -24.61% 17
East Midlands - 1 £313 - 2

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

For the 6 months to 15 January 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.

1 179 (100.00%) Java
2 86 (48.04%) Spring
3 85 (47.49%) Software Engineering
4 83 (46.37%) AWS
5 78 (43.58%) CI/CD
6 71 (39.66%) Spring Boot
7 67 (37.43%) Agile
8 64 (35.75%) Microservices
9 62 (34.64%) Kubernetes
10 43 (24.02%) Azure
11 39 (21.79%) DevOps
12 38 (21.23%) Docker
13 32 (17.88%) Kafka
13 32 (17.88%) Python
14 31 (17.32%) TDD
15 30 (16.76%) SQL
16 28 (15.64%) JavaScript
17 27 (15.08%) Containerisation
17 27 (15.08%) QA
17 27 (15.08%) TypeScript
18 26 (14.53%) GitLab
19 25 (13.97%) Problem-Solving
19 25 (13.97%) RESTful
19 25 (13.97%) Test Automation
20 23 (12.85%) Full-Stack Development
20 23 (12.85%) Jenkins
21 22 (12.29%) Security Cleared
22 21 (11.73%) Apache
22 21 (11.73%) JUnit
22 21 (11.73%) MongoDB

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 21 (11.73%) Apache
2 18 (10.06%) Apache Airflow
3 4 (2.23%) Apache Spark
3 4 (2.23%) JBoss
3 4 (2.23%) WebLogic
4 2 (1.12%) Confluence
5 1 (0.56%) Adobe Experience Manager
5 1 (0.56%) Luigi
5 1 (0.56%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 1 (0.56%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (1.12%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 83 (46.37%) AWS
2 43 (24.02%) Azure
3 18 (10.06%) Snowflake
4 17 (9.50%) dbt
5 15 (8.38%) GCP
6 13 (7.26%) GitHub
7 10 (5.59%) Amazon ECS
7 10 (5.59%) AWS Lambda
7 10 (5.59%) Serverless
8 9 (5.03%) Amazon S3
9 8 (4.47%) Amazon EC2
9 8 (4.47%) AWS CloudFormation
10 7 (3.91%) Cloud Computing
10 7 (3.91%) GitHub Actions
10 7 (3.91%) OpenShift
11 5 (2.79%) Amazon EKS
11 5 (2.79%) Amazon Kinesis
11 5 (2.79%) AWS Step Functions
12 4 (2.23%) Azure Monitor
13 3 (1.68%) AWS CodePipeline
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.56%) Broadband
1 1 (0.56%) FTP
1 1 (0.56%) SSL
1 1 (0.56%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (11.73%) MongoDB
2 20 (11.17%) PostgreSQL
3 18 (10.06%) Data Lake
4 17 (9.50%) Amazon Athena
4 17 (9.50%) Apache Arrow
4 17 (9.50%) Apache Iceberg
4 17 (9.50%) Apache Ignite
4 17 (9.50%) Dremio
5 13 (7.26%) MySQL
6 10 (5.59%) Apache Cassandra
7 8 (4.47%) NoSQL
8 7 (3.91%) Hadoop
9 6 (3.35%) Amazon RDS
9 6 (3.35%) Big Data
10 5 (2.79%) Relational Database
11 4 (2.23%) SQL Server
12 3 (1.68%) BigQuery
12 3 (1.68%) HBase
13 2 (1.12%) DynamoDB
13 2 (1.12%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 26 (14.53%) GitLab
2 23 (12.85%) Jenkins
3 21 (11.73%) JUnit
4 20 (11.17%) Gradle
5 19 (10.61%) Git
6 16 (8.94%) Cucumber
6 16 (8.94%) IntelliJ
7 10 (5.59%) Selenium
8 7 (3.91%) JMeter
8 7 (3.91%) Sonatype Nexus
9 6 (3.35%) Maven
10 4 (2.23%) Eclipse
10 4 (2.23%) Postman
11 3 (1.68%) Artifactory
11 3 (1.68%) Cypress.io
11 3 (1.68%) JIRA
11 3 (1.68%) Mockito
12 2 (1.12%) Gatling
12 2 (1.12%) SonarQube
12 2 (1.12%) TestNG
General
1 53 (29.61%) Finance
2 38 (21.23%) Social Skills
3 30 (16.76%) Banking
4 21 (11.73%) Front Office
5 19 (10.61%) Investment Banking
6 7 (3.91%) Public Sector
7 4 (2.23%) Influencing Skills
8 3 (1.68%) Analytical Skills
9 2 (1.12%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (0.56%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 86 (48.04%) Spring
2 71 (39.66%) Spring Boot
3 32 (17.88%) Kafka
4 25 (13.97%) RESTful
5 18 (10.06%) gRPC
6 17 (9.50%) NumPy
6 17 (9.50%) Pandas
6 17 (9.50%) Protocol Buffers
6 17 (9.50%) SciPy
7 13 (7.26%) AngularJS
8 12 (6.70%) Hibernate
8 12 (6.70%) OpenTelemetry
8 12 (6.70%) React
8 12 (6.70%) REST
9 10 (5.59%) HTML
10 9 (5.03%) JSON
11 8 (4.47%) Node.js
11 8 (4.47%) Swagger
12 6 (3.35%) HTML5
12 6 (3.35%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 20 (11.17%) Cloud Native
1 20 (11.17%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 19 (10.61%) Derivative
3 18 (10.06%) Distributed Systems
3 18 (10.06%) Equities
4 17 (9.50%) Fixed Income
4 17 (9.50%) Hedge funds
4 17 (9.50%) Pricing Data
5 7 (3.91%) Onboarding
5 7 (3.91%) Product Ownership
6 6 (3.35%) Virtual Team
7 5 (2.79%) Public Cloud
8 4 (2.23%) Data Protection Act
9 3 (1.68%) Legacy Applications
9 3 (1.68%) Legacy Systems
10 2 (1.12%) Data Structures
10 2 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
11 1 (0.56%) Algorithms
11 1 (0.56%) Mobile App
11 1 (0.56%) TWAP
Operating Systems
1 14 (7.82%) Linux
2 12 (6.70%) Unix
3 3 (1.68%) Windows
4 1 (0.56%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 85 (47.49%) Software Engineering
2 78 (43.58%) CI/CD
3 67 (37.43%) Agile
4 64 (35.75%) Microservices
5 39 (21.79%) DevOps
6 31 (17.32%) TDD
7 27 (15.08%) Containerisation
8 25 (13.97%) Problem-Solving
8 25 (13.97%) Test Automation
9 23 (12.85%) Full-Stack Development
10 20 (11.17%) Event-Driven
10 20 (11.17%) Observability
11 18 (10.06%) Infrastructure as Code
12 17 (9.50%) Asset Management
12 17 (9.50%) Clean Code
12 17 (9.50%) Investment Management
13 15 (8.38%) API Development
13 15 (8.38%) Software Testing
14 14 (7.82%) Fintech
15 12 (6.70%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 179 (100.00%) Java
2 32 (17.88%) Python
3 30 (16.76%) SQL
4 28 (15.64%) JavaScript
5 27 (15.08%) TypeScript
6 16 (8.94%) Kotlin
7 6 (3.35%) Scala
8 5 (2.79%) C++
9 3 (1.68%) Go
10 2 (1.12%) Bash
10 2 (1.12%) PL/SQL
10 2 (1.12%) Rust
10 2 (1.12%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.56%) C
11 1 (0.56%) C#
11 1 (0.56%) Groovy
11 1 (0.56%) Perl
11 1 (0.56%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 22 (12.29%) Security Cleared
2 21 (11.73%) SC Cleared
3 6 (3.35%) Degree
4 5 (2.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (1.68%) BPSS Clearance
5 3 (1.68%) OCP
5 3 (1.68%) Oracle Certification
6 1 (0.56%) DV Cleared
6 1 (0.56%) ISTQB
6 1 (0.56%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (15.08%) QA
2 9 (5.03%) Accessibility
3 3 (1.68%) Data Quality
4 2 (1.12%) WCAG
5 1 (0.56%) GDPR
5 1 (0.56%) ISO 15022
5 1 (0.56%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 38 (21.23%) Docker
Systems Management
1 62 (34.64%) Kubernetes
2 20 (11.17%) Terraform
3 17 (9.50%) Grafana
4 12 (6.70%) Ansible
5 5 (2.79%) Puppet
6 4 (2.23%) Progress Chef
7 3 (1.68%) Argo
8 2 (1.12%) Prometheus
9 1 (0.56%) Kibana
Vendors
1 9 (5.03%) Google
2 7 (3.91%) Oracle
3 6 (3.35%) Microsoft
4 4 (2.23%) Databricks
4 4 (2.23%) VMware
4 4 (2.23%) webMethods
5 3 (1.68%) Dynatrace
5 3 (1.68%) Splunk
6 2 (1.12%) IBM
6 2 (1.12%) New Relic
6 2 (1.12%) Red Hat
6 2 (1.12%) Solace
7 1 (0.56%) Adobe
7 1 (0.56%) Calypso
7 1 (0.56%) Cisco
7 1 (0.56%) Confluent
7 1 (0.56%) Okta
7 1 (0.56%) TIBCO
7 1 (0.56%) Virgin Media
7 1 (0.56%) Zoomdata