Java Contracts

Java
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Java skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Java over the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 26 26 16
Rank change year-on-year 0 -10 -4
Contract jobs citing Java 2,143 2,631 5,418
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 7.32% 6.04% 9.08%
As % of the Programming Languages category 21.51% 20.48% 25.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,422 1,960 4,045
10th Percentile £369 £400 £433
25th Percentile £447 £460 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% +2.39%
75th Percentile £700 £700 £738
90th Percentile £838 £850 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £506 £540
% change year-on-year -5.14% -6.30% +2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 31 62 106
10th Percentile £33.91 £41.04 £40.48
25th Percentile £42.25 £51.25 £53.75
Median hourly rate £55.00 £63.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -13.73% -1.92% +8.33%
75th Percentile £68.75 £70.94 £73.08
90th Percentile £78.47 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £61.25 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -5.77% - +15.04%

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 9,965 12,846 20,898
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 34.04% 29.49% 35.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,755 9,122 15,089
10th Percentile £360 £350 £400
25th Percentile £419 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -
75th Percentile £638 £650 £675
90th Percentile £768 £762 £777
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% +3.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 245 487 471
10th Percentile £22.49 £31.70 £26.25
25th Percentile £33.91 £46.25 £50.00
Median hourly rate £62.50 £60.50 £60.70
Median % change year-on-year +3.31% -0.33% +21.40%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.00 £78.75 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +2.40% - +26.21%

Java
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Java as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Java in the UK

Java
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Java.

Daily rate trend for Java in the UK

Java
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Java over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Java in the UK

Java
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Java.

Hourly rate trend for Java in the UK

Java
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Java over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Java in the UK

Java
Top 17 Contract 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 1 May 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 +2 1,717 £575 - 6,199
London -2 1,169 £630 +4.78% 2,154
Work from Home +5 802 £550 -7.41% 3,577
UK excluding London +6 764 £480 -5.14% 4,815
Scotland +4 235 £450 -6.05% 292
North of England -1 193 £490 -3.92% 1,160
South East 0 119 £507 -11.78% 1,286
North West +5 118 £475 -4.04% 611
Midlands +26 82 £455 -9.00% 853
South West +24 71 £614 +7.91% 552
Yorkshire -18 49 £525 - 404
West Midlands +14 48 £500 -4.76% 467
East Midlands +18 34 £397 -12.13% 329
East of England -5 34 £490 - 655
North East +15 27 £390 -22.08% 147
Northern Ireland +6 27 £410 -25.45% 87
Wales -2 8 £453 -4.63% 117

Java
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 141 (6.58%) Apache
2 107 (4.99%) Apache Spark
3 102 (4.76%) Apache Airflow
4 101 (4.71%) Confluence
5 21 (0.98%) JBoss
6 20 (0.93%) Camunda
6 20 (0.93%) Tomcat
7 18 (0.84%) WebLogic
8 17 (0.79%) NetWeaver
9 15 (0.70%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 14 (0.65%) Oracle Coherence
10 14 (0.65%) WebSphere
11 13 (0.61%) CMS
12 10 (0.47%) GemFire
13 9 (0.42%) Oracle Workflow
13 9 (0.42%) SharePoint
14 8 (0.37%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 7 (0.33%) nginx
15 7 (0.33%) SAP EP
16 6 (0.28%) IIS
Applications
1 12 (0.56%) Microsoft Excel
2 10 (0.47%) MS Visio
3 8 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 5 (0.23%) EngageOne
5 3 (0.14%) Maya
5 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.14%) NUKE
5 3 (0.14%) Trello
6 1 (0.047%) CATIA
6 1 (0.047%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 13 (0.61%) Oracle EBS
2 9 (0.42%) Endur
3 7 (0.33%) FLEXCUBE
3 7 (0.33%) SAP CRM
4 6 (0.28%) Oracle BPM
4 6 (0.28%) Oracle Payables
5 5 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 5 (0.23%) SAP Hybris
5 5 (0.23%) Shopify
6 4 (0.19%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.14%) BASE24
7 3 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
7 3 (0.14%) Exstream
7 3 (0.14%) NetSuite
7 3 (0.14%) Oracle Applications
7 3 (0.14%) Oracle EBS R12
7 3 (0.14%) SAP S/4HANA
7 3 (0.14%) Unica
8 2 (0.093%) NEC Housing
8 2 (0.093%) Oracle Assets
Cloud Services
1 795 (37.10%) AWS
2 390 (18.20%) Azure
3 198 (9.24%) GCP
4 150 (7.00%) Serverless
5 110 (5.13%) AWS Lambda
6 99 (4.62%) OpenShift
7 98 (4.57%) Azure DevOps
8 96 (4.48%) dbt
9 94 (4.39%) GitHub
10 74 (3.45%) Amazon ECS
11 71 (3.31%) Amazon S3
12 70 (3.27%) Amazon EC2
13 66 (3.08%) Snowflake
14 57 (2.66%) Cloud Computing
15 49 (2.29%) Amazon EKS
16 41 (1.91%) Amazon SQS
17 40 (1.87%) AWS CloudFormation
18 39 (1.82%) PaaS
19 32 (1.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 30 (1.40%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 62 (2.89%) HTTP
2 26 (1.21%) DNS
3 21 (0.98%) DHCP
3 21 (0.98%) TCP/IP
4 20 (0.93%) Wireshark
5 19 (0.89%) ATM
5 19 (0.89%) VPN
6 16 (0.75%) Ethernet
6 16 (0.75%) Frame Relay
6 16 (0.75%) GPRS
6 16 (0.75%) GSM
6 16 (0.75%) LAN
6 16 (0.75%) LTE
6 16 (0.75%) MPLS
6 16 (0.75%) SAN
6 16 (0.75%) SDH
6 16 (0.75%) UMTS
6 16 (0.75%) WAN
7 15 (0.70%) HTTPS
8 14 (0.65%) Network Security
Database & Business Intelligence
1 244 (11.39%) PostgreSQL
2 210 (9.80%) MongoDB
3 201 (9.38%) Relational Database
4 128 (5.97%) NoSQL
5 117 (5.46%) MySQL
6 95 (4.43%) Amazon Athena
7 88 (4.11%) Apache Iceberg
7 88 (4.11%) Dremio
8 79 (3.69%) Apache Arrow
9 70 (3.27%) Big Data
10 67 (3.13%) DB2
11 63 (2.94%) SQL Server
12 60 (2.80%) Apache Ignite
13 53 (2.47%) Amazon RDS
14 52 (2.43%) Data Lake
15 47 (2.19%) Oracle Database
16 39 (1.82%) RDBMS
17 38 (1.77%) Hadoop
18 37 (1.73%) Apache Cassandra
19 34 (1.59%) Redis
Development Applications
1 336 (15.68%) Jenkins
2 286 (13.35%) Git
3 209 (9.75%) JIRA
4 204 (9.52%) JUnit
5 145 (6.77%) GitLab
6 135 (6.30%) Selenium
7 108 (5.04%) Maven
8 100 (4.67%) Cucumber
9 80 (3.73%) Gradle
10 69 (3.22%) Mockito
11 51 (2.38%) Bitbucket
12 49 (2.29%) Artifactory
13 48 (2.24%) REST Assured
14 46 (2.15%) SonarQube
15 37 (1.73%) Cypress.io
15 37 (1.73%) JMeter
15 37 (1.73%) Subversion
16 36 (1.68%) Liquibase
16 36 (1.68%) Postman
17 32 (1.49%) TeamCity
General
1 612 (28.56%) Finance
2 504 (23.52%) Social Skills
3 404 (18.85%) Banking
4 274 (12.79%) Analytical Skills
5 229 (10.69%) Investment Banking
6 228 (10.64%) Public Sector
7 220 (10.27%) Front Office
8 61 (2.85%) Telecoms
9 45 (2.10%) Financial Institution
10 41 (1.91%) Marketing
11 33 (1.54%) Presentation Skills
12 31 (1.45%) Manufacturing
13 27 (1.26%) Organisational Skills
14 26 (1.21%) Electronics
14 26 (1.21%) Retail
15 20 (0.93%) Back Office
16 18 (0.84%) Military
17 17 (0.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 15 (0.70%) Law
19 12 (0.56%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,030 (48.06%) Developer
2 593 (27.67%) Java Developer
3 297 (13.86%) Senior
4 200 (9.33%) Software Engineer
5 180 (8.40%) Java Engineer
6 179 (8.35%) Architect
7 171 (7.98%) Lead
8 165 (7.70%) Senior Developer
9 125 (5.83%) Full-Stack Developer
10 116 (5.41%) AWS Engineer
11 115 (5.37%) Senior Java Developer
12 100 (4.67%) Java Software Engineer
13 99 (4.62%) DevOps Engineer
14 92 (4.29%) Data Engineer
15 85 (3.97%) Python Engineer
16 71 (3.31%) SC Cleared Java Developer
17 67 (3.13%) AWS Developer
17 67 (3.13%) Test Engineer
18 62 (2.89%) Lead Developer
18 62 (2.89%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 494 (23.05%) Spring
2 391 (18.25%) Spring Boot
3 351 (16.38%) Kafka
4 271 (12.65%) React
5 182 (8.49%) REST
6 166 (7.75%) AngularJS
7 160 (7.47%) RESTful
8 139 (6.49%) HTML
9 135 (6.30%) .NET
10 124 (5.79%) Node.js
11 110 (5.13%) CSS
12 98 (4.57%) Web Services
13 87 (4.06%) SOAP
14 86 (4.01%) PySpark
14 86 (4.01%) Swagger
15 77 (3.59%) J2EE
15 77 (3.59%) OpenAPI
16 76 (3.55%) XML
17 72 (3.36%) Hibernate
18 62 (2.89%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 135 (6.30%) Equities
2 124 (5.79%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 106 (4.95%) Derivative
4 96 (4.48%) Data Structures
5 94 (4.39%) Distributed Systems
6 77 (3.59%) Fixed Income
7 72 (3.36%) Algorithms
8 65 (3.03%) Cloud Native
9 64 (2.99%) Hedge funds
10 62 (2.89%) Enterprise Software
11 52 (2.43%) Product Ownership
12 48 (2.24%) Onboarding
13 47 (2.19%) Public Cloud
14 41 (1.91%) Self-Motivation
15 38 (1.77%) Management Information System
16 32 (1.49%) Distributed Computing
17 28 (1.31%) Data Protection Act
17 28 (1.31%) Virtual Team
18 25 (1.17%) PKI
19 24 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 358 (16.71%) Linux
2 110 (5.13%) Unix
3 93 (4.34%) Windows
4 52 (2.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 34 (1.59%) Android
6 30 (1.40%) Windows Server
7 9 (0.42%) Apple iOS
8 8 (0.37%) Windows Server 2019
9 6 (0.28%) AIX
9 6 (0.28%) Windows Server 2016
10 5 (0.23%) MVS
11 4 (0.19%) Mac OS X
11 4 (0.19%) Solaris
12 3 (0.14%) zOS
13 2 (0.093%) FreeRTOS
13 2 (0.093%) Windows Server 2012
14 1 (0.047%) Embedded Linux
14 1 (0.047%) Mac OS
14 1 (0.047%) Oracle Linux
14 1 (0.047%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 807 (37.66%) Agile
2 625 (29.16%) CI/CD
3 569 (26.55%) DevOps
4 493 (23.01%) Microservices
5 483 (22.54%) Software Engineering
6 400 (18.67%) Problem-Solving
7 332 (15.49%) Test Automation
8 291 (13.58%) TDD
9 235 (10.97%) Full-Stack Development
10 230 (10.73%) Containerisation
11 189 (8.82%) SDLC
12 183 (8.54%) Continuous Integration
13 166 (7.75%) Computer Science
14 164 (7.65%) Scrum
15 157 (7.33%) Mentoring
16 125 (5.83%) Migration
17 122 (5.69%) Design Patterns
18 121 (5.65%) Open Source
19 119 (5.55%) Event-Driven
20 117 (5.46%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 725 (33.83%) Python
2 599 (27.95%) SQL
3 445 (20.77%) JavaScript
4 258 (12.04%) TypeScript
5 182 (8.49%) C#
6 134 (6.25%) C++
7 116 (5.41%) Shell Script
8 109 (5.09%) Go
9 81 (3.78%) Kotlin
10 79 (3.69%) Bash
11 75 (3.50%) PowerShell
12 69 (3.22%) Scala
13 66 (3.08%) C
14 57 (2.66%) PL/SQL
15 43 (2.01%) Ruby
16 28 (1.31%) Perl
17 26 (1.21%) PHP
18 25 (1.17%) Groovy
19 24 (1.12%) ABAP
20 23 (1.07%) Rust
Qualifications
1 409 (19.09%) Security Cleared
2 343 (16.01%) SC Cleared
3 189 (8.82%) Degree
4 98 (4.57%) Computer Science Degree
5 62 (2.89%) DV Cleared
6 43 (2.01%) AWS Certification
7 42 (1.96%) Master's Degree
8 34 (1.59%) ISTQB
9 30 (1.40%) BPSS Clearance
10 25 (1.17%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
11 23 (1.07%) ISEB
12 19 (0.89%) AWS Certified Developer
13 18 (0.84%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 18 (0.84%) Azure Certification
13 18 (0.84%) Cisco Certification
13 18 (0.84%) Numerate Degree
14 16 (0.75%) CCNP
15 14 (0.65%) PhD
16 9 (0.42%) CISSP
16 9 (0.42%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 157 (7.33%) QA
2 34 (1.59%) Accessibility
3 25 (1.17%) GDPR
4 18 (0.84%) Data Quality
5 17 (0.79%) PCI DSS
5 17 (0.79%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 15 (0.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 11 (0.51%) Disclosure Scotland
8 10 (0.47%) Def Stans
8 10 (0.47%) IEC 61508
9 9 (0.42%) HIPAA
9 9 (0.42%) SLA
10 8 (0.37%) NIST
10 8 (0.37%) WCAG
11 7 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
12 3 (0.14%) NCSC
12 3 (0.14%) PMO
12 3 (0.14%) SEPA
13 2 (0.093%) Software Quality Assurance
14 1 (0.047%) SOC 2
System Software
1 436 (20.35%) Docker
2 34 (1.59%) Active Directory
3 21 (0.98%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.75%) Hyper-V
5 8 (0.37%) GridGain
6 6 (0.28%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 6 (0.28%) Firmware
6 6 (0.28%) OpenAM
6 6 (0.28%) OpenDJ
6 6 (0.28%) OpenIDM
7 5 (0.23%) Postfix
8 4 (0.19%) HDFS
8 4 (0.19%) Lustre
8 4 (0.19%) Platform Symphony
8 4 (0.19%) Virtual Machines
9 3 (0.14%) FreeRADIUS
9 3 (0.14%) iptables
9 3 (0.14%) LXC
9 3 (0.14%) RACF
9 3 (0.14%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 462 (21.56%) Kubernetes
2 263 (12.27%) Terraform
3 122 (5.69%) Ansible
4 60 (2.80%) Grafana
5 44 (2.05%) Prometheus
6 36 (1.68%) Puppet
7 34 (1.59%) Single Sign-On
8 23 (1.07%) Progress Chef
9 21 (0.98%) Kibana
10 20 (0.93%) Istio
11 14 (0.65%) Podman
12 12 (0.56%) Packer
13 10 (0.47%) Docker Swarm
14 9 (0.42%) Control-M
15 8 (0.37%) Argo
16 6 (0.28%) Perfmon
17 5 (0.23%) CloudHub
17 5 (0.23%) ITRS Geneos
18 4 (0.19%) Karpenter
18 4 (0.19%) logstash
Vendors
1 242 (11.29%) Oracle
2 147 (6.86%) Microsoft
3 84 (3.92%) SAP
4 71 (3.31%) Google
5 61 (2.85%) Sybase
6 44 (2.05%) Splunk
7 37 (1.73%) IBM
7 37 (1.73%) Red Hat
8 36 (1.68%) ServiceNow
9 32 (1.49%) Virgin Media
10 29 (1.35%) VMware
11 28 (1.31%) Salesforce
12 26 (1.21%) Databricks
13 24 (1.12%) ForgeRock
14 23 (1.07%) Atlassian
15 21 (0.98%) Dynatrace
15 21 (0.98%) MuleSoft
16 20 (0.93%) Cisco
16 20 (0.93%) Cloudera
17 19 (0.89%) TIBCO