PHP Developer Contracts

PHP Developer
UK

The median PHP Developer daily rate in the UK is £400, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 482 481 599
Rank change year-on-year -1 +118 -43
Contract jobs requiring a PHP Developer 38 101 119
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.13% 0.23% 0.20%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.14% 0.25% 0.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 25 84 98
10th Percentile £300 £263 £310
25th Percentile £350 £300 £325
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £400 £350 £400
Median % change year-on-year +14.29% -12.50% -5.88%
75th Percentile £456 £456 £475
90th Percentile £560 £525 £529
UK excluding London median daily rate £375 £350 £375
% change year-on-year +7.14% -6.67% -11.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 0
Median hourly rate - £55.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £55.00 -

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 27,084 40,415 56,464
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.52% 92.78% 94.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,692 26,309 39,470
10th Percentile £300 £275 £313
25th Percentile £406 £410 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -2.78% +2.86%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £492 £500
% change year-on-year -3.46% -1.60% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,035 2,664 1,570
10th Percentile £14.07 £12.86 £14.29
25th Percentile £18.50 £16.30 £19.50
Median hourly rate £29.00 £36.42 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.37% -19.07% +91.49%
75th Percentile £62.50 £60.75 £65.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.00 £39.55 £42.50
% change year-on-year -29.20% -6.94% +117.95%

PHP Developer
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured PHP Developer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for PHP Developer in the UK

PHP Developer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for PHP Developer in the UK

PHP Developer
Daily Rate Histogram

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

Daily rate histogram for PHP Developer in the UK

PHP Developer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

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

Hourly rate trend for PHP Developer in the UK

PHP Developer
Top 13 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing PHP Developer 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 +9 26 £400 +14.29% 114
Work from Home +19 21 £375 -6.25% 105
UK excluding London +30 18 £375 +7.14% 91
London +15 10 £440 +10.00% 34
South East +46 5 £359 -10.31% 19
Midlands +19 5 £400 +14.29% 10
East Midlands +8 4 £400 +14.29% 5
South West +42 3 £355 +1.29% 17
Scotland +11 2 £417 +85.33% 2
North of England +3 2 £363 +9.85% 37
Yorkshire +2 2 £363 +11.54% 11
West Midlands +13 1 £250 -33.33% 4
Wales -6 1 £288 -47.25% 3

PHP Developer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 1 May 2025, PHP Developer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring PHP Developer in the job title.

1 38 (100.00%) PHP
2 16 (42.11%) Symfony
3 13 (34.21%) AWS
3 13 (34.21%) MySQL
4 12 (31.58%) Laravel
5 11 (28.95%) Finance
6 10 (26.32%) JavaScript
6 10 (26.32%) OO
6 10 (26.32%) Fintech
7 9 (23.68%) Git
8 8 (21.05%) SQL
8 8 (21.05%) Agile
9 7 (18.42%) Docker
9 7 (18.42%) Social Skills
9 7 (18.42%) Design Patterns
10 6 (15.79%) OO PHP
11 5 (13.16%) REST
11 5 (13.16%) Problem-Solving
11 5 (13.16%) Terraform
11 5 (13.16%) React
11 5 (13.16%) MVC
11 5 (13.16%) HTML
11 5 (13.16%) CSS
12 4 (10.53%) OOP
12 4 (10.53%) Migration
12 4 (10.53%) E-Commerce
12 4 (10.53%) Unit Testing
12 4 (10.53%) Azure
12 4 (10.53%) Yii
12 4 (10.53%) TypeScript

PHP Developer Skill Set
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 3 (7.89%) Apache
2 2 (5.26%) CMS
2 2 (5.26%) Tomcat
3 1 (2.63%) Confluence
3 1 (2.63%) Joomla!
3 1 (2.63%) WordPress
Cloud Services
1 13 (34.21%) AWS
2 4 (10.53%) Azure
3 3 (7.89%) Amazon ECS
4 2 (5.26%) Amazon S3
4 2 (5.26%) Amazon SQS
4 2 (5.26%) Cloudflare
5 1 (2.63%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 1 (2.63%) Amazon Lightsail
5 1 (2.63%) AWS Fargate
5 1 (2.63%) Serverless
5 1 (2.63%) Sumo Logic
Communications & Networking
1 2 (5.26%) DNS
1 2 (5.26%) SMTP
1 2 (5.26%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 13 (34.21%) MySQL
2 3 (7.89%) MongoDB
2 3 (7.89%) NoSQL
3 1 (2.63%) Apache Cassandra
3 1 (2.63%) GIS
3 1 (2.63%) MariaDB
3 1 (2.63%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.63%) Redis
3 1 (2.63%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 9 (23.68%) Git
2 3 (7.89%) Bitbucket
2 3 (7.89%) PHPUnit
2 3 (7.89%) Subversion
3 2 (5.26%) Codeception
4 1 (2.63%) Jenkins
4 1 (2.63%) JIRA
General
1 11 (28.95%) Finance
2 7 (18.42%) Social Skills
3 3 (7.89%) Retail
4 2 (5.26%) Banking
4 2 (5.26%) Investment Banking
4 2 (5.26%) Public Sector
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (42.11%) Symfony
2 12 (31.58%) Laravel
3 5 (13.16%) CSS
3 5 (13.16%) HTML
3 5 (13.16%) React
3 5 (13.16%) REST
4 4 (10.53%) Yii
5 3 (7.89%) CSS3
5 3 (7.89%) HTML5
5 3 (7.89%) Phalcon
5 3 (7.89%) Vue
5 3 (7.89%) Web Services
6 2 (5.26%) LAMP
6 2 (5.26%) RESTful
7 1 (2.63%) .NET
7 1 (2.63%) ActiveMQ
7 1 (2.63%) CakePHP
7 1 (2.63%) jQuery
7 1 (2.63%) Swagger
7 1 (2.63%) WAMP
Miscellaneous
1 1 (2.63%) Onboarding
1 1 (2.63%) PropTech
1 1 (2.63%) W3C
Operating Systems
1 3 (7.89%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (26.32%) Fintech
1 10 (26.32%) OO
2 8 (21.05%) Agile
3 7 (18.42%) Design Patterns
4 6 (15.79%) OO PHP
5 5 (13.16%) MVC
5 5 (13.16%) Problem-Solving
6 4 (10.53%) E-Commerce
6 4 (10.53%) Front End Development
6 4 (10.53%) Migration
6 4 (10.53%) OOP
6 4 (10.53%) Unit Testing
7 3 (7.89%) API Development
7 3 (7.89%) Containerisation
7 3 (7.89%) Full-Stack Development
7 3 (7.89%) Infrastructure as Code
7 3 (7.89%) Process Improvement
7 3 (7.89%) SDLC
7 3 (7.89%) Systems Analysis
7 3 (7.89%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 38 (100.00%) PHP
2 10 (26.32%) JavaScript
3 8 (21.05%) SQL
4 4 (10.53%) TypeScript
5 2 (5.26%) C#
5 2 (5.26%) Java
5 2 (5.26%) Python
6 1 (2.63%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1 (2.63%) SC Cleared
1 1 (2.63%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (5.26%) Accessibility
System Software
1 7 (18.42%) Docker
Systems Management
1 5 (13.16%) Terraform
2 3 (7.89%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 3 (7.89%) Zend
2 2 (5.26%) F5
2 2 (5.26%) Oracle
3 1 (2.63%) Microsoft
3 1 (2.63%) Virgin Media