PHP Contract Job Trends

PHP
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring PHP skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 26 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 573 380 313
Rank change year-on-year -193 -67 +40
Contract jobs citing PHP 80 152 311
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.16% 0.50% 0.72%
As % of the Programming Languages category 0.58% 1.48% 2.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 54 95 239
10th Percentile £315 £297 £263
25th Percentile £425 £344 £316
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £400 £400
Median % change year-on-year +28.13% - -11.11%
75th Percentile £538 £501 £500
90th Percentile £630 £600 £555
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £425 £413
% change year-on-year +23.53% +3.03% -1.79%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 5 10
10th Percentile - - £22.50
25th Percentile - £33.25 £27.96
Median hourly rate - £34.50 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year - -34.29% -10.26%
75th Percentile - £35.75 £72.34
90th Percentile - - £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year - - -27.08%

All Programming Languages
UK

PHP 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 13,723 10,253 13,229
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.97% 33.90% 30.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,926 6,935 9,287
10th Percentile £360 £350 £350
25th Percentile £419 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £626 £650
90th Percentile £720 £751 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £475 £490
% change year-on-year +3.16% -3.06% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 550 242 547
10th Percentile £34.91 £25.81 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.94 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.32% -12.10% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.55 £82.66 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £61.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +5.69% -5.38% +4.00%

PHP
Job Vacancy Trend

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

PHP job vacancy trend in the UK

PHP
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

PHP
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing PHP over the 6 months to 26 June 2026.

Daily rate histogram for PHP in the UK

PHP
Hourly Rate Trend

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

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

PHP
Top 12 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing PHP within the UK over the 6 months to 26 June 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 -183 67 £525 +31.25% 118
UK excluding London -136 38 £525 +23.53% 123
London -99 25 £450 +20.00% 17
Work from Home -103 23 £488 +12.07% 50
South West -16 20 £525 +1.94% 24
North of England -73 8 £425 +18.72% 31
Yorkshire -45 7 £425 +18.72% 14
South East -68 5 £275 -52.17% 28
Scotland - 3 £463 - 8
Midlands -77 2 £600 +37.93% 14
North West -51 1 - - 13
West Midlands -68 1 £550 +26.44% 6

PHP
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 9 (11.25%) WordPress
2 6 (7.50%) Apache
3 5 (6.25%) Moodle
4 4 (5.00%) CMS
5 2 (2.50%) Drupal
5 2 (2.50%) nginx
Applications
1 2 (2.50%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.25%) Adobe Illustrator
2 1 (1.25%) Photoshop
2 1 (1.25%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 5 (6.25%) Magento
2 1 (1.25%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (1.25%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 17 (21.25%) AWS
2 9 (11.25%) Azure
3 8 (10.00%) GCP
4 4 (5.00%) GitHub
5 2 (2.50%) GitHub Copilot
5 2 (2.50%) Power Platform
5 2 (2.50%) Stripe
6 1 (1.25%) Algolia
6 1 (1.25%) Amazon OpenSearch
6 1 (1.25%) Apple Pay
6 1 (1.25%) Azure Machine Learning
6 1 (1.25%) Cloudflare
6 1 (1.25%) Google Pay
6 1 (1.25%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 4 (5.00%) BGP
1 4 (5.00%) Cisco ASA
1 4 (5.00%) Cisco IOS
1 4 (5.00%) MPLS
1 4 (5.00%) Network Security
1 4 (5.00%) TACACS
1 4 (5.00%) VPN
2 2 (2.50%) Firewall
2 2 (2.50%) FTP
3 1 (1.25%) HTTP
3 1 (1.25%) Intranet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (30.00%) MySQL
2 12 (15.00%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (12.50%) MongoDB
4 8 (10.00%) NoSQL
5 7 (8.75%) Redis
6 6 (7.50%) BigQuery
6 6 (7.50%) Relational Database
7 5 (6.25%) Elasticsearch
8 2 (2.50%) Amazon Athena
8 2 (2.50%) Apache Cassandra
8 2 (2.50%) Neo4j
8 2 (2.50%) SQL Server
9 1 (1.25%) MariaDB
9 1 (1.25%) Metadata
9 1 (1.25%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 7 (8.75%) Git
2 3 (3.75%) JIRA
3 2 (2.50%) GitLab
3 2 (2.50%) Jenkins
3 2 (2.50%) JUnit
4 1 (1.25%) Bitbucket
4 1 (1.25%) Codeception
4 1 (1.25%) PHPUnit
4 1 (1.25%) Vite
General
1 13 (16.25%) Finance
1 13 (16.25%) Social Skills
2 7 (8.75%) Public Sector
3 5 (6.25%) Advertising
4 4 (5.00%) Analytical Skills
4 4 (5.00%) Marketing
5 2 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
5 2 (2.50%) Spanish Language
6 1 (1.25%) iGaming
6 1 (1.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 1 (1.25%) Legal
6 1 (1.25%) Manufacturing
6 1 (1.25%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 36 (45.00%) Developer
2 16 (20.00%) PHP Developer
3 11 (13.75%) PHP Software Engineer
3 11 (13.75%) Senior
3 11 (13.75%) Software Engineer
4 5 (6.25%) Full-Stack Developer
4 5 (6.25%) Moodle Developer
4 5 (6.25%) Security Engineer
5 4 (5.00%) Architect
5 4 (5.00%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 4 (5.00%) MySQL Developer
5 4 (5.00%) PHP MySQL Developer
5 4 (5.00%) Senior Developer
5 4 (5.00%) Technical Architect
5 4 (5.00%) WordPress Developer
6 3 (3.75%) Infrastructure Security Engineer
6 3 (3.75%) Software Developer
6 3 (3.75%) Web Developer
7 2 (2.50%) DevOps Engineer
7 2 (2.50%) Product Owner
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (15.00%) Laravel
2 11 (13.75%) RabbitMQ
3 10 (12.50%) CSS
4 8 (10.00%) HTML
4 8 (10.00%) REST
4 8 (10.00%) Vue
5 7 (8.75%) Kafka
6 5 (6.25%) Node.js
6 5 (6.25%) OAuth
7 4 (5.00%) .NET
7 4 (5.00%) LAMP
7 4 (5.00%) LDAP
7 4 (5.00%) React
7 4 (5.00%) VML
8 3 (3.75%) Middleware
8 3 (3.75%) Symfony
8 3 (3.75%) Twig
9 2 (2.50%) JPA
9 2 (2.50%) jQuery
9 2 (2.50%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 9 (11.25%) Distributed Systems
2 4 (5.00%) Client/Server
2 4 (5.00%) PKI
3 3 (3.75%) AI Agents
4 2 (2.50%) Cloud Native
4 2 (2.50%) Legacy Systems
4 2 (2.50%) Linux Command Line
4 2 (2.50%) Onboarding
4 2 (2.50%) Product Ownership
5 1 (1.25%) e-Learning
5 1 (1.25%) FMCG
Operating Systems
1 16 (20.00%) Linux
2 4 (5.00%) Ubuntu
3 2 (2.50%) Unix
3 2 (2.50%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 18 (22.50%) Microservices
1 18 (22.50%) Problem-Solving
2 13 (16.25%) Software Engineering
3 11 (13.75%) Code Quality
4 10 (12.50%) Containerisation
4 10 (12.50%) DevOps
5 9 (11.25%) Agile
5 9 (11.25%) Mentoring
5 9 (11.25%) Observability
6 8 (10.00%) Fintech
6 8 (10.00%) Full-Stack Development
6 8 (10.00%) Migration
6 8 (10.00%) Wealth Management
7 7 (8.75%) Technical Leadership
8 6 (7.50%) AI
8 6 (7.50%) CI/CD
8 6 (7.50%) Design Patterns
8 6 (7.50%) Event-Driven
8 6 (7.50%) Event-Driven Architecture
8 6 (7.50%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 17 (21.25%) JavaScript
2 12 (15.00%) Python
3 10 (12.50%) Go
4 6 (7.50%) Java
5 5 (6.25%) C#
5 5 (6.25%) SQL
6 4 (5.00%) Perl
6 4 (5.00%) TypeScript
7 3 (3.75%) Kotlin
8 2 (2.50%) Scala
9 1 (1.25%) Bash
9 1 (1.25%) Korn
9 1 (1.25%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 12 (15.00%) Security Cleared
2 11 (13.75%) SC Cleared
3 4 (5.00%) APMG
3 4 (5.00%) CompTIA Security+
3 4 (5.00%) DV Cleared
3 4 (5.00%) GIAC
3 4 (5.00%) SSCP
4 3 (3.75%) GSEC
5 2 (2.50%) AWS Certification
5 2 (2.50%) AWS Certified Developer
5 2 (2.50%) Degree
6 1 (1.25%) Azure Certification
6 1 (1.25%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (1.25%) CSSLP
6 1 (1.25%) GWAPT
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (12.50%) QA
2 4 (5.00%) Accessibility
2 4 (5.00%) Cyber Essentials
2 4 (5.00%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
2 4 (5.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 4 (5.00%) NIST
3 1 (1.25%) GDPR
3 1 (1.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
3 1 (1.25%) PCI DSS
3 1 (1.25%) WCAG
System Software
1 15 (18.75%) Docker
2 5 (6.25%) Varnish
3 4 (5.00%) VMware ESXi
3 4 (5.00%) VMware Infrastructure
4 1 (1.25%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 11 (13.75%) Kubernetes
2 4 (5.00%) Terraform
2 4 (5.00%) vCenter Server
3 3 (3.75%) SCOM
4 2 (2.50%) Ansible
5 1 (1.25%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 7 (8.75%) Google
2 5 (6.25%) Adobe
3 4 (5.00%) Cisco
3 4 (5.00%) VMware
4 3 (3.75%) Microsoft
5 2 (2.50%) Dynatrace
5 2 (2.50%) OpenAI
6 1 (1.25%) Apple
6 1 (1.25%) GoCardless
6 1 (1.25%) HubSpot
6 1 (1.25%) Oracle
6 1 (1.25%) Percona
6 1 (1.25%) WooCommerce