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 24 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 531 360 289
Rank change year-on-year -171 -71 +71
Contract jobs citing PHP 100 161 336
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.22% 0.55% 0.77%
As % of the Programming Languages category 0.78% 1.60% 2.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 75 100 263
10th Percentile £332 £295 £263
25th Percentile £413 £350 £313
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £430 £415
Median % change year-on-year +4.65% +3.74% -2.47%
75th Percentile £553 £510 £525
90th Percentile £635 £585 £585
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £435 £413
% change year-on-year +3.45% +5.45% +3.13%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 2 10
10th Percentile - £33.43 £22.50
25th Percentile - £33.69 £28.44
Median hourly rate - £34.75 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year - -44.40% -21.88%
75th Percentile - £35.56 £72.34
90th Percentile - £35.68 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £35.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year - -22.22% -7.66%

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 12,852 10,048 12,818
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.66% 34.02% 29.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,516 6,802 9,113
10th Percentile £352 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £418 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 556 244 481
10th Percentile £41.76 £22.49 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £34.73 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -1.54%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £78.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% -

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 24 April 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 13 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 24 April 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 -148 81 £450 +3.45% 95
UK excluding London -101 54 £450 +3.45% 91
Work from Home -73 34 £475 +9.20% 86
London -100 26 £450 +6.51% 13
North of England -59 23 £450 -5.76% 25
Yorkshire -42 19 £450 -5.76% 16
South West -26 12 £545 +53.74% 8
South East -60 12 £419 +15.52% 31
Scotland +11 4 £475 +13.91% 3
North West -37 4 £358 - 6
Midlands -72 2 £600 +37.93% 12
East of England -40 1 - - 8
West Midlands -69 1 £550 +26.44% 7

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 8 (8.00%) WordPress
2 6 (6.00%) Apache
3 5 (5.00%) CMS
4 4 (4.00%) Moodle
4 4 (4.00%) SharePoint
5 3 (3.00%) Drupal
6 2 (2.00%) nginx
Applications
1 10 (10.00%) Microsoft Office
2 4 (4.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (4.00%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (1.00%) Adobe Illustrator
3 1 (1.00%) Photoshop
Business Applications
1 6 (6.00%) Magento
2 2 (2.00%) Shopify
3 1 (1.00%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 32 (32.00%) AWS
2 22 (22.00%) Azure
3 10 (10.00%) GCP
4 9 (9.00%) GitHub
5 8 (8.00%) SaaS
6 6 (6.00%) Azure DevOps
6 6 (6.00%) GitHub Actions
6 6 (6.00%) Serverless
7 5 (5.00%) Azure Functions
8 3 (3.00%) Azure API Management
8 3 (3.00%) Azure Monitor
8 3 (3.00%) Entra ID
8 3 (3.00%) Stripe
9 2 (2.00%) Apple Pay
9 2 (2.00%) Azure AKS
9 2 (2.00%) Google Pay
10 1 (1.00%) Amazon ECS
10 1 (1.00%) AWS Fargate
10 1 (1.00%) Cloudflare
10 1 (1.00%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 4 (4.00%) BGP
1 4 (4.00%) Cisco ASA
1 4 (4.00%) Cisco IOS
1 4 (4.00%) MPLS
1 4 (4.00%) Network Security
1 4 (4.00%) TACACS
1 4 (4.00%) VPN
2 2 (2.00%) Firewall
2 2 (2.00%) FTP
2 2 (2.00%) SSL
3 1 (1.00%) HTTP
3 1 (1.00%) Internet
3 1 (1.00%) Intranet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (28.00%) MySQL
2 12 (12.00%) Relational Database
2 12 (12.00%) SQL Server
3 11 (11.00%) PostgreSQL
4 7 (7.00%) Redis
5 6 (6.00%) Elasticsearch
6 5 (5.00%) Oracle Database
7 4 (4.00%) RDBMS
7 4 (4.00%) SQLPlus
8 2 (2.00%) ImageNet
9 1 (1.00%) Amazon Athena
9 1 (1.00%) Amazon Aurora
9 1 (1.00%) Apache Cassandra
9 1 (1.00%) DynamoDB
9 1 (1.00%) MariaDB
9 1 (1.00%) Metadata
9 1 (1.00%) MongoDB
9 1 (1.00%) Neo4j
Development Applications
1 14 (14.00%) Jenkins
2 10 (10.00%) Git
3 9 (9.00%) JIRA
4 8 (8.00%) GitLab
5 6 (6.00%) Cucumber
5 6 (6.00%) Postman
5 6 (6.00%) REST Assured
5 6 (6.00%) Selenium
5 6 (6.00%) TestRail
6 4 (4.00%) Toad
7 2 (2.00%) JUnit
8 1 (1.00%) Bitbucket
8 1 (1.00%) Codeception
8 1 (1.00%) PHPUnit
8 1 (1.00%) Vite
General
1 26 (26.00%) Social Skills
2 14 (14.00%) Public Sector
3 11 (11.00%) Analytical Skills
4 9 (9.00%) Finance
5 3 (3.00%) Billing
6 2 (2.00%) Organisational Skills
6 2 (2.00%) Retail
6 2 (2.00%) Telecoms
7 1 (1.00%) Advertising
7 1 (1.00%) Banking
7 1 (1.00%) Documentation Skills
7 1 (1.00%) iGaming
7 1 (1.00%) Legal
7 1 (1.00%) Manufacturing
7 1 (1.00%) Marketing
7 1 (1.00%) Military
Job Titles
1 44 (44.00%) Developer
2 24 (24.00%) PHP Developer
3 13 (13.00%) Senior
4 9 (9.00%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 8 (8.00%) Architect
6 6 (6.00%) Automation Engineer
6 6 (6.00%) DevOps Engineer
7 5 (5.00%) Security Engineer
7 5 (5.00%) Software Developer
7 5 (5.00%) Software Engineer
7 5 (5.00%) Technical Architect
7 5 (5.00%) Test Automation Engineer
7 5 (5.00%) Test Engineer
8 4 (4.00%) Delphi Software Engineer
8 4 (4.00%) Lead
8 4 (4.00%) Moodle Developer
8 4 (4.00%) Oracle Developer
8 4 (4.00%) Senior Developer
8 4 (4.00%) Senior DevOps
8 4 (4.00%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 28 (28.00%) REST
2 22 (22.00%) .NET
3 14 (14.00%) CSS
4 11 (11.00%) HTML
5 10 (10.00%) OpenID
6 9 (9.00%) LDAP
6 9 (9.00%) OAuth
7 8 (8.00%) Laravel
8 7 (7.00%) GraphQL
9 6 (6.00%) RabbitMQ
9 6 (6.00%) SOAP
9 6 (6.00%) Vue
10 5 (5.00%) .NET Core
10 5 (5.00%) LAMP
10 5 (5.00%) Node.js
10 5 (5.00%) SailPoint
10 5 (5.00%) VML
10 5 (5.00%) Web Services
10 5 (5.00%) WebSockets
11 4 (4.00%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 7 (7.00%) Linux Command Line
2 5 (5.00%) Client/Server
3 4 (4.00%) PKI
4 3 (3.00%) Legacy Code
4 3 (3.00%) NHS
4 3 (3.00%) Onboarding
5 2 (2.00%) Distributed Systems
5 2 (2.00%) FMCG
5 2 (2.00%) Greenfield Project
5 2 (2.00%) PACS
5 2 (2.00%) Product Ownership
5 2 (2.00%) TM Forum
6 1 (1.00%) AI Agents
6 1 (1.00%) Analytical Mindset
6 1 (1.00%) e-Learning
6 1 (1.00%) IoT
6 1 (1.00%) Legacy Applications
6 1 (1.00%) Replication
6 1 (1.00%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 24 (24.00%) Linux
2 10 (10.00%) Unix
3 6 (6.00%) Windows
4 4 (4.00%) Ubuntu
5 2 (2.00%) Windows Server
6 1 (1.00%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 23 (23.00%) CI/CD
2 22 (22.00%) Agile
3 21 (21.00%) DevOps
3 21 (21.00%) Problem-Solving
4 16 (16.00%) Migration
5 13 (13.00%) Microservices
5 13 (13.00%) Roadmaps
6 12 (12.00%) Containerisation
6 12 (12.00%) Refactoring
6 12 (12.00%) TDD
7 11 (11.00%) Code Quality
8 10 (10.00%) Mentoring
8 10 (10.00%) Stakeholder Engagement
9 9 (9.00%) Deployment Automation
9 9 (9.00%) ETL
9 9 (9.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 9 (9.00%) Test Automation
10 8 (8.00%) Critical Thinking
10 8 (8.00%) Observability
10 8 (8.00%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 38 (38.00%) JavaScript
2 29 (29.00%) Python
3 23 (23.00%) SQL
4 15 (15.00%) C#
4 15 (15.00%) Java
5 9 (9.00%) Bash
6 8 (8.00%) Perl
7 7 (7.00%) PowerShell
8 5 (5.00%) Delphi
9 4 (4.00%) Go
9 4 (4.00%) PL/SQL
9 4 (4.00%) TypeScript
10 3 (3.00%) Shell Script
11 1 (1.00%) Korn
11 1 (1.00%) Kotlin
11 1 (1.00%) Scala
Qualifications
1 18 (18.00%) Security Cleared
2 16 (16.00%) SC Cleared
3 5 (5.00%) Degree
4 4 (4.00%) APMG
4 4 (4.00%) CompTIA Security+
4 4 (4.00%) DV Cleared
4 4 (4.00%) GIAC
4 4 (4.00%) SSCP
5 3 (3.00%) AWS Certification
5 3 (3.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (3.00%) GSEC
6 2 (2.00%) AWS Certified Developer
7 1 (1.00%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
7 1 (1.00%) Azure Certification
7 1 (1.00%) BPSS Clearance
7 1 (1.00%) CSSLP
7 1 (1.00%) GWAPT
7 1 (1.00%) PMI Certification
7 1 (1.00%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (11.00%) QA
2 4 (4.00%) Cyber Essentials
2 4 (4.00%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
2 4 (4.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 4 (4.00%) NIST
3 3 (3.00%) Data Quality
4 2 (2.00%) Accessibility
4 2 (2.00%) GDPR
5 1 (1.00%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 1 (1.00%) HL7
5 1 (1.00%) HMG Security Policy Framework
5 1 (1.00%) PCI DSS
5 1 (1.00%) WCAG
System Software
1 19 (19.00%) Docker
2 7 (7.00%) Varnish
3 5 (5.00%) Active Directory
4 4 (4.00%) VMware ESXi
4 4 (4.00%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (2.00%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (2.00%) Xen
Systems Management
1 12 (12.00%) Kubernetes
2 7 (7.00%) Terraform
3 4 (4.00%) Ansible
3 4 (4.00%) Grafana
3 4 (4.00%) vCenter Server
4 3 (3.00%) SCOM
5 1 (1.00%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 13 (13.00%) Microsoft
2 6 (6.00%) Adobe
2 6 (6.00%) Google
3 5 (5.00%) Oracle
3 5 (5.00%) ServiceNow
4 4 (4.00%) Cisco
4 4 (4.00%) VMware
5 2 (2.00%) Apple
5 2 (2.00%) GoCardless
5 2 (2.00%) Percona
6 1 (1.00%) Dynatrace
6 1 (1.00%) OpenAI
6 1 (1.00%) Salesforce
6 1 (1.00%) SAP
6 1 (1.00%) Sitecore
6 1 (1.00%) Virgin Media
6 1 (1.00%) WooCommerce
6 1 (1.00%) Zend