Java Contract Job Trends

Java
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Java skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 13 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 34 23 25
Rank change year-on-year -11 +2 0
Contract jobs citing Java 2,940 2,476 2,763
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 5.41% 7.52% 7.17%
As % of the Programming Languages category 20.80% 22.92% 22.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,907 1,670 1,954
10th Percentile £368 £338 £393
25th Percentile £427 £413 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £519 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.16% -9.74% -0.86%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £750
90th Percentile £738 £800 £875
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £469 £500
% change year-on-year +6.61% -6.20% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 101 71 53
10th Percentile £35.00 £31.25 £49.25
25th Percentile £62.50 £41.25 £60.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £50.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +30.00% -28.57% +7.69%
75th Percentile £73.00 £55.00 -
90th Percentile £77.00 £84.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +30.00% -28.57% +7.69%

All Programming Languages
UK

Java falls under the Programming Languages category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring coding skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 14,132 10,803 12,309
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.00% 32.82% 31.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,166 7,151 8,379
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.90% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 538 295 347
10th Percentile £27.75 £29.00 £27.00
25th Percentile £48.16 £36.69 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £79.50 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +2.36% -2.31% -

Java
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Java relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Java job vacancy trend in the UK

Java
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Java.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Java

Java
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Java over the 6 months to 13 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Java in the UK

Java
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Java.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Java

Java
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Java over the 6 months to 13 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Java in the UK

Java
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 within the UK over the 6 months to 13 September 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 -11 2,434 £525 - 2,269
London -10 1,310 £550 -6.78% 1,554
UK excluding London -16 1,268 £500 +6.61% 1,063
Work from Home -13 827 £500 -6.28% 3,219
North of England -4 519 £500 +10.01% 261
North West -18 221 £525 +25.00% 154
Yorkshire +3 220 £500 - 67
Midlands -16 210 £500 +16.28% 111
West Midlands +2 189 £513 +2.50% 81
South East -41 180 £511 +12.98% 182
Scotland -15 163 £425 -10.53% 199
South West +18 127 £548 -0.36% 150
North East -1 83 £450 -7.69% 40
East of England -8 76 £506 +2.37% 67
Wales -9 18 £425 -9.33% 28
East Midlands -53 18 £335 -6.94% 30
Northern Ireland +6 17 £375 -16.20% 70

Java
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 94 (3.20%) Apache Spark
2 90 (3.06%) Confluence
3 63 (2.14%) Apache
4 55 (1.87%) Apache Airflow
5 35 (1.19%) WebLogic
6 31 (1.05%) SharePoint
7 26 (0.88%) Camunda
8 22 (0.75%) Tomcat
9 20 (0.68%) nginx
10 16 (0.54%) WebSphere
11 15 (0.51%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 12 (0.41%) Anypoint
13 11 (0.37%) Mule
14 10 (0.34%) CMS
15 9 (0.31%) Documentum
15 9 (0.31%) Ethereum
16 8 (0.27%) NetWeaver
16 8 (0.27%) SAS
17 6 (0.20%) JBoss
17 6 (0.20%) SAP EP
Applications
1 11 (0.37%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (0.24%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.14%) Trello
4 3 (0.10%) Chatbot
5 2 (0.068%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 2 (0.068%) Windchill
6 1 (0.034%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.034%) Weka
Business Applications
1 16 (0.54%) Payment Gateway
2 11 (0.37%) Oracle EBS
3 7 (0.24%) Distributed Ledger
3 7 (0.24%) Temenos T24
4 6 (0.20%) Front Arena
4 6 (0.20%) R3 Corda
4 6 (0.20%) SAP CRM
4 6 (0.20%) SAP PSCD
4 6 (0.20%) SAP S/4HANA
4 6 (0.20%) Summit
5 5 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
6 4 (0.14%) Maximo
6 4 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
6 4 (0.14%) Quorum
6 4 (0.14%) Ripple
6 4 (0.14%) SAP ERP
7 3 (0.10%) Finacle
7 3 (0.10%) Teamcenter
8 2 (0.068%) Dynamics CRM
8 2 (0.068%) SAP FI-CA
Cloud Services
1 1,168 (39.73%) AWS
2 686 (23.33%) Azure
3 448 (15.24%) GCP
4 335 (11.39%) GitHub
5 177 (6.02%) GitHub Actions
6 138 (4.69%) Serverless
7 131 (4.46%) Azure DevOps
8 119 (4.05%) Amazon S3
9 116 (3.95%) OpenShift
10 111 (3.78%) AWS Lambda
11 84 (2.86%) Amazon EKS
12 82 (2.79%) Amazon ECS
13 78 (2.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 75 (2.55%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 73 (2.48%) Amazon EC2
16 62 (2.11%) GitHub Copilot
17 56 (1.90%) Snowflake
18 55 (1.87%) AWS CloudFormation
19 54 (1.84%) Amazon SQS
20 52 (1.77%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 39 (1.33%) Firewall
1 39 (1.33%) HTTP
2 17 (0.58%) VPN
3 14 (0.48%) FIX Connectivity
4 11 (0.37%) Network Security
4 11 (0.37%) SSL
4 11 (0.37%) TCP/IP
4 11 (0.37%) Wi-Fi
5 10 (0.34%) DNS
5 10 (0.34%) HTTPS
5 10 (0.34%) Multicast
6 9 (0.31%) Internet
7 6 (0.20%) SSH
7 6 (0.20%) Wireshark
8 5 (0.17%) RTP
9 4 (0.14%) Asterisk PBX
9 4 (0.14%) MQTT
9 4 (0.14%) OpenVPN
9 4 (0.14%) Reverse Proxy
9 4 (0.14%) RTCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 314 (10.68%) PostgreSQL
2 218 (7.41%) Relational Database
3 179 (6.09%) MongoDB
3 179 (6.09%) NoSQL
4 105 (3.57%) MySQL
4 105 (3.57%) SQL Server
5 71 (2.41%) Amazon RDS
6 65 (2.21%) Metadata
7 57 (1.94%) Big Data
8 50 (1.70%) Data Warehouse
8 50 (1.70%) DynamoDB
8 50 (1.70%) Redis
9 47 (1.60%) BigQuery
10 46 (1.56%) Elasticsearch
11 41 (1.39%) Flink
12 40 (1.36%) Amazon Aurora
13 38 (1.29%) Power BI
14 35 (1.19%) Data Lake
15 34 (1.16%) Oracle Database
16 33 (1.12%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 477 (16.22%) Jenkins
2 450 (15.31%) Git
3 264 (8.98%) GitLab
4 199 (6.77%) JUnit
5 183 (6.22%) Maven
6 162 (5.51%) JIRA
7 156 (5.31%) Selenium
8 143 (4.86%) Gradle
9 127 (4.32%) SonarQube
10 124 (4.22%) Cucumber
11 107 (3.64%) Mockito
12 87 (2.96%) REST Assured
13 62 (2.11%) Gatling
14 61 (2.07%) Postman
15 50 (1.70%) JMeter
16 49 (1.67%) Bitbucket
17 33 (1.12%) WebDriver
18 32 (1.09%) Cypress.io
19 28 (0.95%) Sonatype Nexus
20 22 (0.75%) Liquibase
General
1 652 (22.18%) Finance
2 635 (21.60%) Social Skills
3 432 (14.69%) Banking
4 357 (12.14%) Public Sector
5 262 (8.91%) Analytical Skills
6 146 (4.97%) Front Office
7 139 (4.73%) Investment Banking
8 50 (1.70%) Retail
9 43 (1.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 32 (1.09%) Military
11 31 (1.05%) Influencing Skills
12 29 (0.99%) Law
13 24 (0.82%) Back Office
13 24 (0.82%) Financial Institution
14 23 (0.78%) Manufacturing
15 19 (0.65%) Organisational Skills
15 19 (0.65%) Presentation Skills
16 17 (0.58%) Publishing
17 15 (0.51%) Aerospace
17 15 (0.51%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 1,217 (41.39%) Developer
2 835 (28.40%) Java Developer
3 571 (19.42%) Senior
4 330 (11.22%) Java Engineer
5 324 (11.02%) Software Engineer
6 268 (9.12%) Senior Developer
7 262 (8.91%) Architect
8 228 (7.76%) Lead
9 201 (6.84%) Senior Java Developer
10 152 (5.17%) Java Software Engineer
11 121 (4.12%) Full-Stack Developer
12 114 (3.88%) Data Engineer
13 103 (3.50%) Software Developer
14 95 (3.23%) Solutions Architect
15 90 (3.06%) Backend Developer
16 87 (2.96%) Senior Java Engineer
17 82 (2.79%) DevOps Engineer
17 82 (2.79%) Test Engineer
18 74 (2.52%) Lead Developer
19 73 (2.48%) Java Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 894 (30.41%) Spring
2 812 (27.62%) Spring Boot
3 527 (17.93%) REST
4 470 (15.99%) Kafka
5 385 (13.10%) React
6 343 (11.67%) RESTful
7 339 (11.53%) Terraform
8 238 (8.10%) Node.js
9 194 (6.60%) AngularJS
10 152 (5.17%) HTML
11 138 (4.69%) OAuth
12 130 (4.42%) .NET
13 127 (4.32%) JSON
14 116 (3.95%) Playwright
15 115 (3.91%) CSS
15 115 (3.91%) SOAP
16 101 (3.44%) XML
17 100 (3.40%) Redux
17 100 (3.40%) Web Services
18 94 (3.20%) JPA
Miscellaneous
1 506 (17.21%) Cloud Native
2 361 (12.28%) Distributed Systems
3 190 (6.46%) Product Ownership
4 137 (4.66%) Enterprise Software
5 96 (3.27%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 84 (2.86%) Algorithms
7 80 (2.72%) Equities
8 77 (2.62%) Fixed Income
9 75 (2.55%) Greenfield Project
10 70 (2.38%) Derivative
11 69 (2.35%) Data Structures
12 66 (2.24%) AI Agents
12 66 (2.24%) Onboarding
13 60 (2.04%) Data Protection Act
14 59 (2.01%) Legacy Systems
15 56 (1.90%) Management Information System
16 47 (1.60%) Self-Motivation
17 45 (1.53%) Mobile App
18 32 (1.09%) SWIFT Messaging Network
18 32 (1.09%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 244 (8.30%) Linux
2 135 (4.59%) Unix
3 70 (2.38%) Windows
4 62 (2.11%) Android
5 38 (1.29%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 27 (0.92%) Apple iOS
7 18 (0.61%) Windows Server
8 10 (0.34%) AIX
9 8 (0.27%) Solaris
9 8 (0.27%) VMS
10 7 (0.24%) Amazon Linux
11 6 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
12 5 (0.17%) Mac OS X
13 4 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 3 (0.10%) Ubuntu
14 3 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
15 2 (0.068%) Mac OS
15 2 (0.068%) zOS
16 1 (0.034%) CentOS
16 1 (0.034%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,311 (44.59%) CI/CD
2 1,087 (36.97%) Agile
3 937 (31.87%) Microservices
4 827 (28.13%) DevOps
5 781 (26.56%) Software Engineering
6 663 (22.55%) Test Automation
7 493 (16.77%) Containerisation
8 447 (15.20%) Problem-Solving
9 422 (14.35%) Event-Driven
10 383 (13.03%) Scrum
11 374 (12.72%) TDD
12 355 (12.07%) Continuous Improvement
13 353 (12.01%) AI
14 326 (11.09%) Observability
15 322 (10.95%) Full-Stack Development
16 313 (10.65%) Infrastructure as Code
17 292 (9.93%) SDLC
18 275 (9.35%) Event-Driven Architecture
19 244 (8.30%) Technical Leadership
20 237 (8.06%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 823 (27.99%) Python
2 662 (22.52%) SQL
3 464 (15.78%) JavaScript
4 306 (10.41%) TypeScript
5 192 (6.53%) C#
6 154 (5.24%) Kotlin
7 106 (3.61%) Go
8 105 (3.57%) Bash
9 98 (3.33%) PowerShell
10 95 (3.23%) Scala
11 90 (3.06%) C++
12 79 (2.69%) PL/SQL
13 73 (2.48%) Shell Script
14 43 (1.46%) Groovy
15 40 (1.36%) Ruby
16 30 (1.02%) Perl
17 28 (0.95%) Rust
18 19 (0.65%) C
19 17 (0.58%) BeanShell
20 14 (0.48%) Korn
Qualifications
1 801 (27.24%) Security Cleared
2 681 (23.16%) SC Cleared
3 172 (5.85%) BPSS Clearance
4 169 (5.75%) Degree
5 88 (2.99%) Computer Science Degree
6 72 (2.45%) DV Cleared
7 64 (2.18%) AWS Certification
8 36 (1.22%) Azure Certification
9 32 (1.09%) CISSP
10 29 (0.99%) ISTQB
11 23 (0.78%) Master's Degree
12 13 (0.44%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 12 (0.41%) CISM
14 10 (0.34%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 9 (0.31%) DBS Check
15 9 (0.31%) ISEB
16 6 (0.20%) PhD
17 5 (0.17%) Cisco Certification
17 5 (0.17%) Microsoft Certification
18 4 (0.14%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 276 (9.39%) QA
2 133 (4.52%) Accessibility
3 72 (2.45%) Data Quality
4 46 (1.56%) GDPR
5 40 (1.36%) ISO 20022
6 39 (1.33%) WCAG
7 20 (0.68%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 18 (0.61%) PCI DSS
9 16 (0.54%) SEPA
10 15 (0.51%) NIST
11 9 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
12 8 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
13 7 (0.24%) HIPAA
13 7 (0.24%) ISO 15022
13 7 (0.24%) MiFID
13 7 (0.24%) SLA
14 6 (0.20%) PSD2
15 5 (0.17%) NCSC
16 3 (0.10%) Actionable Recommendations
16 3 (0.10%) Def Stans
System Software
1 672 (22.86%) Docker
2 42 (1.43%) Active Directory
3 25 (0.85%) VMware Infrastructure
4 8 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
5 5 (0.17%) Firmware
5 5 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
5 5 (0.17%) Postfix
5 5 (0.17%) Virtual Machines
6 4 (0.14%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 3 (0.10%) GridGain
8 2 (0.068%) Apache Flume
8 2 (0.068%) HDFS
8 2 (0.068%) RACF
9 1 (0.034%) Ceph
9 1 (0.034%) GPFS
9 1 (0.034%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.034%) NFS
9 1 (0.034%) Samba
9 1 (0.034%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 1 (0.034%) Tivoli Workload Scheduler
Systems Management
1 829 (28.20%) Kubernetes
2 142 (4.83%) Grafana
3 123 (4.18%) Ansible
4 111 (3.78%) Prometheus
5 52 (1.77%) Argo
6 44 (1.50%) Kibana
7 38 (1.29%) Single Sign-On
8 22 (0.75%) Control-M
9 20 (0.68%) Progress Chef
10 12 (0.41%) Istio
11 10 (0.34%) HAProxy
11 10 (0.34%) Puppet
12 7 (0.24%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 6 (0.20%) HP Fortify
14 5 (0.17%) ITRS Geneos
14 5 (0.17%) Kustomize
15 4 (0.14%) CA Single Sign-On
15 4 (0.14%) PingFederate
15 4 (0.14%) SELinux
16 3 (0.10%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 298 (10.14%) Oracle
2 170 (5.78%) Microsoft
3 157 (5.34%) Google
4 86 (2.93%) IBM
5 68 (2.31%) Splunk
6 66 (2.24%) Red Hat
7 56 (1.90%) SAP
8 48 (1.63%) ServiceNow
9 46 (1.56%) Databricks
10 44 (1.50%) Dynatrace
11 38 (1.29%) Salesforce
12 35 (1.19%) MuleSoft
13 31 (1.05%) OpenAI
13 31 (1.05%) VMware
14 30 (1.02%) Okta
15 28 (0.95%) Sybase
16 19 (0.65%) ForgeRock
17 18 (0.61%) New Relic
18 17 (0.58%) AppDynamics
18 17 (0.58%) Solace