Retail Contract Job Trends

Retailing
UK

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Retail in contract job vacancies. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Retail over the 6 months leading up to 18 August 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 120 90
Rank change year-on-year +32 -30 +12
Contract jobs citing Retail 1,591 754 959
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.97% 2.29% 2.48%
As % of the General category 5.40% 3.61% 4.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 928 395 534
10th Percentile £314 £300 £300
25th Percentile £454 £413 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £513 £500
Median % change year-on-year +7.32% +2.50% -5.66%
75th Percentile £663 £635 £625
90th Percentile £738 £725 £703
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £500 £500
% change year-on-year +5.00% - -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 45 57
10th Percentile £12.76 £14.50 £12.15
25th Percentile £13.51 £15.25 £12.50
Median hourly rate £17.12 £16.30 £16.30
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% - -17.72%
75th Percentile £22.50 £25.15 £21.37
90th Percentile £43.75 £35.90 £22.58
UK excluding London median hourly rate £14.50 £15.96 £16.00
% change year-on-year -9.15% -0.25% -19.23%

All General Skills
UK

Retail falls under the General Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring general skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for general skills 29,482 20,875 22,222
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 55.05% 63.50% 57.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,469 12,963 13,968
10th Percentile £313 £275 £290
25th Percentile £415 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £626 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,257 1,147 1,334
10th Percentile £13.99 £13.25 £14.06
25th Percentile £17.25 £16.25 £16.88
Median hourly rate £31.56 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +25.47% -34.02% +38.62%
75th Percentile £57.50 £50.25 £58.65
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.06 £70.23
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.50 £22.14 £38.12
% change year-on-year +46.79% -41.92% +52.48%

Retail
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Retail job vacancy trend in the UK

Retail
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

Retail
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Retail over the 6 months to 18 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Retail in the UK

Retail
Hourly Rate Trend

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

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

Retail
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Retail over the 6 months to 18 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Retail in the UK

Retail
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 Retail within the UK over the 6 months to 18 August 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 +29 1,459 £550 +4.76% 1,306
London +45 833 £563 +2.27% 385
UK excluding London +21 644 £525 +5.00% 1,120
Work from Home +4 344 £525 +5.00% 424
North of England -25 188 £550 +10.00% 310
South East +5 177 £525 -4.55% 328
Midlands +22 138 £550 +27.76% 232
North West +3 118 £550 +10.00% 165
East Midlands +13 78 £500 +17.86% 108
East of England +15 69 £550 +4.76% 103
West Midlands -5 59 £606 +38.57% 124
Yorkshire -45 53 £500 -4.76% 103
South West -34 42 £375 +5.63% 94
Scotland +1 24 £301 -42.63% 51
North East -28 17 £525 +18.64% 45
Wales -16 4 - - 31
Northern Ireland +6 3 £203 -63.18% 8

Retail
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 46 (2.89%) Confluence
2 18 (1.13%) CMS
3 12 (0.75%) Adobe Experience Manager
3 12 (0.75%) Apache Airflow
4 9 (0.57%) SharePoint
5 6 (0.38%) SAS
6 4 (0.25%) WebSphere
7 3 (0.19%) Anypoint
8 2 (0.13%) Apache Spark
8 2 (0.13%) CICS
8 2 (0.13%) Mule
9 1 (0.063%) Apache
9 1 (0.063%) Mendix
9 1 (0.063%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.063%) SharePoint Server
Applications
1 55 (3.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 38 (2.39%) Microsoft Office
3 24 (1.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 16 (1.01%) Adobe Creative Suite
5 15 (0.94%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.57%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.57%) Photoshop
7 8 (0.50%) Adobe Illustrator
8 7 (0.44%) MS Visio
8 7 (0.44%) Spreadsheet
9 6 (0.38%) InDesign
10 4 (0.25%) CPLEX
10 4 (0.25%) Notion
11 1 (0.063%) PlantUML
11 1 (0.063%) UserZoom
Business Applications
1 46 (2.89%) SAP S/4HANA
2 28 (1.76%) Shopify
3 12 (0.75%) SAP Retail
4 11 (0.69%) Dynamics CRM
5 10 (0.63%) SAP CRM
6 9 (0.57%) Oracle Retail
7 8 (0.50%) Magento
8 6 (0.38%) Salesforce CRM
9 5 (0.31%) NetSuite
9 5 (0.31%) Oracle EBS
9 5 (0.31%) Payment Gateway
9 5 (0.31%) SAP MDG
10 4 (0.25%) SAP SD
11 3 (0.19%) OpenText VIM for SAP
11 3 (0.19%) Oracle Payables
11 3 (0.19%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.19%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.19%) SAP IBP
11 3 (0.19%) SAP MM
11 3 (0.19%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 189 (11.88%) Azure
2 144 (9.05%) AWS
3 74 (4.65%) Power Platform
4 68 (4.27%) GCP
5 54 (3.39%) Snowflake
6 43 (2.70%) GitHub
7 33 (2.07%) Azure DevOps
8 32 (2.01%) Entra ID
9 27 (1.70%) GitHub Actions
10 25 (1.57%) Dynamics 365
11 23 (1.45%) Salesforce Commerce Cloud
12 21 (1.32%) Figma
13 19 (1.19%) SaaS
14 16 (1.01%) Azure Data Factory
15 15 (0.94%) Microsoft 365
16 14 (0.88%) Azure Synapse Analytics
17 12 (0.75%) dbt
18 11 (0.69%) Salesforce Service Cloud
18 11 (0.69%) Serverless
19 10 (0.63%) OCI
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.32%) WAN
2 19 (1.19%) Firewall
3 16 (1.01%) ATM
3 16 (1.01%) VPN
3 16 (1.01%) Wireless
4 14 (0.88%) Network Security
5 13 (0.82%) LAN
6 11 (0.69%) Wi-Fi
7 8 (0.50%) BGP
7 8 (0.50%) IPsec
7 8 (0.50%) OSPF
7 8 (0.50%) SD-WAN
8 7 (0.44%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
8 7 (0.44%) Structured Cabling
8 7 (0.44%) VLAN
9 6 (0.38%) Cisco Firepower
9 6 (0.38%) VSAN
10 5 (0.31%) Cisco ASA
10 5 (0.31%) Cisco Nexus
10 5 (0.31%) RFID
Database & Business Intelligence
1 73 (4.59%) Power BI
2 38 (2.39%) Data Warehouse
3 29 (1.82%) BigQuery
4 25 (1.57%) Data Lake
5 20 (1.26%) NoSQL
6 19 (1.19%) Metadata
7 17 (1.07%) MongoDB
8 15 (0.94%) Tableau
9 14 (0.88%) MySQL
9 14 (0.88%) SQL Server
10 12 (0.75%) Amazon Redshift
10 12 (0.75%) Power Query
10 12 (0.75%) Relational Database
11 11 (0.69%) PostgreSQL
12 10 (0.63%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 8 (0.50%) Couchbase
13 8 (0.50%) Redis
14 7 (0.44%) SAP HANA
14 7 (0.44%) Star Schema
15 6 (0.38%) SQL Server Analysis Services
Development Applications
1 75 (4.71%) JIRA
2 28 (1.76%) Git
3 19 (1.19%) Jenkins
4 8 (0.50%) Subversion
5 7 (0.44%) Claude Code
6 5 (0.31%) GitLab
6 5 (0.31%) JMeter
7 4 (0.25%) Cypress.io
7 4 (0.25%) Eclipse
7 4 (0.25%) Hudson
8 3 (0.19%) Maven
8 3 (0.19%) MLflow
9 2 (0.13%) git-flow
9 2 (0.13%) Oracle Forms
9 2 (0.13%) Postman
9 2 (0.13%) Selenium
9 2 (0.13%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.13%) Visual Studio
9 2 (0.13%) webpack
10 1 (0.063%) Toad
General
1 440 (27.66%) Social Skills
2 376 (23.63%) Finance
3 164 (10.31%) Analytical Skills
4 128 (8.05%) Banking
5 106 (6.66%) Marketing
6 97 (6.10%) Manufacturing
7 65 (4.09%) Organisational Skills
7 65 (4.09%) Retail Banking
8 48 (3.02%) Investment Banking
9 45 (2.83%) Corporate Banking
10 35 (2.20%) Public Sector
11 32 (2.01%) Influencing Skills
12 30 (1.89%) Telecoms
13 29 (1.82%) Legal
14 28 (1.76%) Advertising
15 23 (1.45%) French Language
16 22 (1.38%) Presentation Skills
17 21 (1.32%) Documentation Skills
18 18 (1.13%) Spanish Language
19 15 (0.94%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 257 (16.15%) Architect
2 238 (14.96%) Analyst
3 184 (11.57%) Senior
4 141 (8.86%) Solutions Architect
5 139 (8.74%) Business Analyst
6 127 (7.98%) Project Manager
7 112 (7.04%) Lead
8 85 (5.34%) Developer
9 50 (3.14%) Consultant
10 49 (3.08%) Senior Manager
11 47 (2.95%) Product Manager
12 46 (2.89%) Data Analyst
12 46 (2.89%) Designer
13 40 (2.51%) Service Manager
14 38 (2.39%) Enterprise Architect
14 38 (2.39%) Supply Chain Architect
15 37 (2.33%) Data Architect
15 37 (2.33%) Senior Developer
16 35 (2.20%) Programme Manager
17 34 (2.14%) Transition Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 68 (4.27%) REST
2 41 (2.58%) React
3 33 (2.07%) Kafka
4 29 (1.82%) Middleware
4 29 (1.82%) Node.js
5 28 (1.76%) Spring
6 21 (1.32%) Spring Boot
6 21 (1.32%) VML
7 20 (1.26%) Django
7 20 (1.26%) RESTful
8 19 (1.19%) MACH
9 18 (1.13%) SOAP
10 15 (0.94%) HTML
11 14 (0.88%) Next.js
11 14 (0.88%) OAuth
12 13 (0.82%) CSS
13 12 (0.75%) Jakarta EE
14 10 (0.63%) .NET
14 10 (0.63%) Lightning Web Components
15 9 (0.57%) SAP Fiori
Miscellaneous
1 86 (5.41%) Product Ownership
2 67 (4.21%) FMCG
3 59 (3.71%) EPoS
4 55 (3.46%) Onboarding
5 47 (2.95%) Cloud Native
6 33 (2.07%) Legacy Systems
7 31 (1.95%) Driving Licence
8 30 (1.89%) Data Centre
9 27 (1.70%) Mobile App
10 26 (1.63%) Greenfield Project
11 23 (1.45%) Data Structures
11 23 (1.45%) Marketing Technology
12 22 (1.38%) Mainframe
13 21 (1.32%) Operational Technology
13 21 (1.32%) Self-Motivation
14 19 (1.19%) Smartphone
15 18 (1.13%) AI Agents
15 18 (1.13%) Management Information System
16 16 (1.01%) IoT
17 15 (0.94%) Distributed Systems
Operating Systems
1 57 (3.58%) Windows
2 22 (1.38%) Linux
3 11 (0.69%) Android
3 11 (0.69%) Unix
4 8 (0.50%) Apple iOS
5 7 (0.44%) Mac OS
6 6 (0.38%) Ubuntu
7 5 (0.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 5 (0.31%) Windows 10
7 5 (0.31%) Windows Server
8 4 (0.25%) zOS
9 2 (0.13%) Debian
10 1 (0.063%) SUSE
10 1 (0.063%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
10 1 (0.063%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 394 (24.76%) Stakeholder Management
2 376 (23.63%) Agile
3 238 (14.96%) E-Commerce
4 201 (12.63%) Problem-Solving
5 187 (11.75%) Migration
6 177 (11.13%) Roadmaps
7 171 (10.75%) Analytics
8 168 (10.56%) AI
9 163 (10.25%) Logistics
10 139 (8.74%) Customer Experience
11 138 (8.67%) Stakeholder Engagement
12 130 (8.17%) Decision-Making
13 127 (7.98%) Continuous Improvement
14 121 (7.61%) CI/CD
15 120 (7.54%) Project Management
16 115 (7.23%) CRM
17 110 (6.91%) ERP
18 107 (6.73%) User Acceptance Testing
19 106 (6.66%) DevOps
19 106 (6.66%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 141 (8.86%) SQL
2 107 (6.73%) Python
3 53 (3.33%) Java
4 32 (2.01%) TypeScript
5 30 (1.89%) JavaScript
6 12 (0.75%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 10 (0.63%) C#
7 10 (0.63%) PowerShell
8 9 (0.57%) ABAP
8 9 (0.57%) Apex Code
8 9 (0.57%) SOQL
9 8 (0.50%) Bash
10 7 (0.44%) R
10 7 (0.44%) SOSL
11 6 (0.38%) Bicep
11 6 (0.38%) PL/SQL
11 6 (0.38%) Scala
12 5 (0.31%) Groovy
13 4 (0.25%) Shell Script
14 3 (0.19%) Korn
Qualifications
1 63 (3.96%) Degree
2 44 (2.77%) Security Cleared
3 22 (1.38%) PMP
3 22 (1.38%) SC Cleared
4 13 (0.82%) DBS Check
5 12 (0.75%) PMI Certification
6 9 (0.57%) BPSS Clearance
7 7 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
8 6 (0.38%) Cisco Certification
8 6 (0.38%) CISSP
9 5 (0.31%) CCNP
9 5 (0.31%) CCSE
9 5 (0.31%) CCSM
9 5 (0.31%) CISM
9 5 (0.31%) Computer Science Degree
9 5 (0.31%) CSPO
9 5 (0.31%) Six Sigma Green Belt
10 4 (0.25%) Azure Certification
10 4 (0.25%) City & Guilds
11 3 (0.19%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 78 (4.90%) QA
2 76 (4.78%) Data Quality
3 42 (2.64%) GDPR
4 27 (1.70%) PMO
5 22 (1.38%) Accessibility
6 16 (1.01%) PCI DSS
7 15 (0.94%) SLA
8 8 (0.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 6 (0.38%) NIST
10 5 (0.31%) WCAG
11 4 (0.25%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 3 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
12 3 (0.19%) GAAP
12 3 (0.19%) GRC
12 3 (0.19%) IFRS
12 3 (0.19%) PSD2
13 2 (0.13%) ISO 8583
13 2 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 1 (0.063%) Basel III
14 1 (0.063%) GxP
System Software
1 38 (2.39%) Docker
2 33 (2.07%) Active Directory
3 13 (0.82%) Virtual Desktop
4 8 (0.50%) VMware Infrastructure
5 7 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
6 5 (0.31%) Firmware
6 5 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
7 3 (0.19%) VMware NSX
8 1 (0.063%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 53 (3.33%) Terraform
2 40 (2.51%) Kubernetes
3 11 (0.69%) Ansible
4 9 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
4 9 (0.57%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
5 8 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
6 6 (0.38%) FortiGate
7 4 (0.25%) SCCM
8 3 (0.19%) Bosun
9 2 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 2 (0.13%) AirWatch
9 2 (0.13%) CA Single Sign-On
9 2 (0.13%) CloudHub
9 2 (0.13%) Jamf Pro
9 2 (0.13%) logstash
9 2 (0.13%) MOM
9 2 (0.13%) PingFederate
9 2 (0.13%) vCenter Server
10 1 (0.063%) vMotion
10 1 (0.063%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 138 (8.67%) Microsoft
2 118 (7.42%) SAP
3 76 (4.78%) Salesforce
4 75 (4.71%) Databricks
5 74 (4.65%) Oracle
6 45 (2.83%) Google
7 38 (2.39%) Adobe
8 24 (1.51%) Zscaler
9 20 (1.26%) MuleSoft
10 18 (1.13%) Workday
11 17 (1.07%) ServiceNow
12 16 (1.01%) Cisco
13 14 (0.88%) IFS
14 13 (0.82%) Fortinet
14 13 (0.82%) Palo Alto
14 13 (0.82%) VMware
15 11 (0.69%) Apple
15 11 (0.69%) Braze
15 11 (0.69%) IBM
15 11 (0.69%) Informatica