Senior Developer Contract Job Trends

Senior Developer
UK

The median Senior Developer daily rate in the UK is £550, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 7 November 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 188 127 178
Rank change year-on-year -61 +51 -67
Contract jobs requiring a Senior Developer 564 721 691
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.61% 1.96% 1.48%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.77% 2.11% 1.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 401 482 503
10th Percentile £400 £391 £425
25th Percentile £450 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% -5.88%
75th Percentile £675 £685 £720
90th Percentile £800 £811 £850
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 3 6
10th Percentile - £40.29 £52.50
25th Percentile - £48.22 £56.25
Median hourly rate - £61.43 £58.75
Median % change year-on-year - +4.56% -21.67%
75th Percentile - £74.47 £70.94
90th Percentile - £82.29 £75.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £60.00 £52.50
% change year-on-year - +14.29% -30.00%

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 31,779 34,114 43,832
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.90% 92.88% 93.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,168 20,586 29,825
10th Percentile £278 £300 £298
25th Percentile £402 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,814 1,278 1,528
10th Percentile £14.06 £15.09 £14.98
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.20 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £37.00 £44.75
Median % change year-on-year -32.03% -17.32% +54.84%
75th Percentile £51.19 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.65 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £36.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -30.14% -19.10% +85.42%

Senior Developer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Senior Developer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Senior Developer job vacancy trend in the UK

Senior Developer
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Senior Developer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Senior Developer job vacancies in the UK

Senior Developer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Senior Developer over the 6 months to 7 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Senior Developer in the UK

Senior Developer
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Senior Developer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Senior Developer job vacancies in the UK

Senior Developer
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 Senior Developer within the UK over the 6 months to 7 November 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 -49 505 £550 - 714
London -50 289 £650 +8.79% 324
UK excluding London -21 214 £500 - 562
Work from Home -20 212 £565 -1.74% 447
North of England -20 64 £550 +10.00% 152
South West +33 57 £475 -9.52% 37
South East +5 45 £500 -4.76% 234
Yorkshire -10 36 £625 +20.77% 29
North West -30 24 £505 +1.00% 114
Midlands -25 21 £510 +2.00% 56
East of England -9 15 £535 +38.06% 20
Scotland -17 12 £481 -3.75% 21
West Midlands -38 12 £525 +5.00% 29
East Midlands -14 9 £505 +10.68% 27
North East -6 8 £544 +27.94% 10
Wales +3 4 £254 -51.67% 18
Northern Ireland -7 1 £450 -18.18% 13

Senior Developer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 7 November 2025, Senior Developer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Senior Developer in the job title.

1 242 (42.91%) Agile
2 196 (34.75%) Java
3 181 (32.09%) SQL
4 174 (30.85%) Azure
5 168 (29.79%) AWS
6 159 (28.19%) DevOps
6 159 (28.19%) Microservices
7 152 (26.95%) CI/CD
8 140 (24.82%) Problem-Solving
9 124 (21.99%) Python
10 119 (21.10%) Kafka
11 111 (19.68%) Docker
12 106 (18.79%) JavaScript
13 105 (18.62%) C#
14 99 (17.55%) Kubernetes
15 97 (17.20%) Spring
16 92 (16.31%) Security Cleared
17 87 (15.43%) .NET
18 86 (15.25%) RESTful
19 83 (14.72%) Scrum
20 80 (14.18%) React
21 79 (14.01%) TDD
22 74 (13.12%) SC Cleared
23 72 (12.77%) Spring Boot
24 71 (12.59%) PostgreSQL
24 71 (12.59%) Software Engineering
25 70 (12.41%) Full-Stack Development
25 70 (12.41%) Git
26 69 (12.23%) Azure DevOps
27 65 (11.52%) TypeScript

Senior Developer Skill Set
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 16 (2.84%) Confluence
2 10 (1.77%) CMS
3 6 (1.06%) SharePoint
4 4 (0.71%) Jupyter
5 2 (0.35%) Alfresco
5 2 (0.35%) Anypoint
5 2 (0.35%) Apache Spark
5 2 (0.35%) Camunda
6 1 (0.18%) Apache
6 1 (0.18%) Headless CMS
6 1 (0.18%) SAS
6 1 (0.18%) Smallworld
Applications
1 9 (1.60%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.18%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 4 (0.71%) Dynamics CRM
1 4 (0.71%) Endur
2 2 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
2 2 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.18%) Oracle BPM
3 1 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.18%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.18%) SAP FI
3 1 (0.18%) SAP Travel Management
Cloud Services
1 174 (30.85%) Azure
2 168 (29.79%) AWS
3 69 (12.23%) Azure DevOps
4 51 (9.04%) GitHub
5 40 (7.09%) GCP
6 37 (6.56%) Serverless
7 36 (6.38%) Power Platform
8 22 (3.90%) AWS Lambda
9 20 (3.55%) Amazon S3
10 18 (3.19%) GitHub Actions
10 18 (3.19%) Power Automate
10 18 (3.19%) PowerApps
11 15 (2.66%) Amazon EC2
11 15 (2.66%) SaaS
12 14 (2.48%) Azure Service Bus
12 14 (2.48%) Dynamics 365
13 13 (2.30%) AWS CloudFormation
14 12 (2.13%) Amazon ECS
14 12 (2.13%) Amazon SQS
14 12 (2.13%) Azure Logic Apps
Communications & Networking
1 4 (0.71%) Kerberos
1 4 (0.71%) SAN
1 4 (0.71%) TCP/IP
2 3 (0.53%) SSL
3 2 (0.35%) HTTP
3 2 (0.35%) VPN
4 1 (0.18%) BGP
4 1 (0.18%) Ethernet
4 1 (0.18%) Ethernet VPN
4 1 (0.18%) Firewall
4 1 (0.18%) Internet
4 1 (0.18%) MPLS
4 1 (0.18%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 71 (12.59%) PostgreSQL
2 63 (11.17%) Relational Database
3 55 (9.75%) MongoDB
4 46 (8.16%) SQL Server
5 32 (5.67%) NoSQL
6 21 (3.72%) DB2
6 21 (3.72%) Power BI
7 20 (3.55%) Apache Cassandra
8 17 (3.01%) Redis
9 16 (2.84%) DynamoDB
10 15 (2.66%) MySQL
11 12 (2.13%) Amazon RDS
11 12 (2.13%) Data Lake
12 11 (1.95%) Azure SQL Database
12 11 (1.95%) RDBMS
13 8 (1.42%) SQL Server Integration Services
14 6 (1.06%) Data Warehouse
14 6 (1.06%) KDB
15 5 (0.89%) Big Data
15 5 (0.89%) HBase
Development Applications
1 70 (12.41%) Git
2 53 (9.40%) JUnit
3 41 (7.27%) Jenkins
4 31 (5.50%) JIRA
5 29 (5.14%) GitLab
6 27 (4.79%) Mockito
7 25 (4.43%) Oracle APEX
8 14 (2.48%) Gradle
9 13 (2.30%) Maven
10 12 (2.13%) SpecFlow
11 9 (1.60%) Cucumber
11 9 (1.60%) Postman
12 8 (1.42%) Artifactory
13 6 (1.06%) Bitbucket
13 6 (1.06%) Mocha
13 6 (1.06%) Sonatype Nexus
14 5 (0.89%) Cypress.io
14 5 (0.89%) Liquibase
14 5 (0.89%) TeamCity
15 4 (0.71%) Team Foundation Server
General
1 175 (31.03%) Finance
2 160 (28.37%) Social Skills
3 95 (16.84%) Banking
4 65 (11.52%) Analytical Skills
5 58 (10.28%) Public Sector
6 50 (8.87%) Investment Banking
7 29 (5.14%) Front Office
8 12 (2.13%) Marketing
9 10 (1.77%) Manufacturing
10 6 (1.06%) Back Office
10 6 (1.06%) Electronics
10 6 (1.06%) Telecoms
11 5 (0.89%) Military
12 4 (0.71%) Financial Institution
12 4 (0.71%) Presentation Skills
13 3 (0.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 2 (0.35%) Automotive
14 2 (0.35%) Documentation Skills
14 2 (0.35%) Health Technology
14 2 (0.35%) Law
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 119 (21.10%) Kafka
2 97 (17.20%) Spring
3 87 (15.43%) .NET
4 86 (15.25%) RESTful
5 80 (14.18%) React
6 72 (12.77%) Spring Boot
7 60 (10.64%) REST
8 50 (8.87%) Node.js
9 48 (8.51%) AngularJS
10 40 (7.09%) HTML
11 33 (5.85%) Web Services
12 32 (5.67%) CSS
13 29 (5.14%) .NET Core
14 23 (4.08%) JSON
14 23 (4.08%) RabbitMQ
15 22 (3.90%) .NET Framework
16 21 (3.72%) Playwright
17 19 (3.37%) Jest
17 19 (3.37%) JMS
18 15 (2.66%) ActiveMQ
Miscellaneous
1 38 (6.74%) Cloud Native
2 34 (6.03%) Distributed Systems
3 32 (5.67%) Derivative
4 27 (4.79%) Equities
5 25 (4.43%) Product Ownership
6 24 (4.26%) Data Structures
7 21 (3.72%) Greenfield Project
7 21 (3.72%) Market Risk
8 19 (3.37%) Management Information System
9 18 (3.19%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 17 (3.01%) Fixed Income
11 16 (2.84%) Algorithms
12 10 (1.77%) Legacy Systems
13 9 (1.60%) Mobile App
14 6 (1.06%) Enterprise Software
14 6 (1.06%) Linux Command Line
15 5 (0.89%) Hedge funds
16 4 (0.71%) Data Fabric
16 4 (0.71%) Equity Derivative
16 4 (0.71%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 64 (11.35%) Linux
2 29 (5.14%) Unix
3 17 (3.01%) Android
4 14 (2.48%) Apple iOS
4 14 (2.48%) Mac OS X
5 7 (1.24%) Windows
6 4 (0.71%) Debian
6 4 (0.71%) Ubuntu
6 4 (0.71%) Windows Server
6 4 (0.71%) Windows Server 2016
7 2 (0.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.18%) CentOS
8 1 (0.18%) Mac OS
8 1 (0.18%) tvOS
8 1 (0.18%) watchOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 242 (42.91%) Agile
2 159 (28.19%) DevOps
2 159 (28.19%) Microservices
3 152 (26.95%) CI/CD
4 140 (24.82%) Problem-Solving
5 83 (14.72%) Scrum
6 79 (14.01%) TDD
7 71 (12.59%) Software Engineering
8 70 (12.41%) Full-Stack Development
9 63 (11.17%) Analytics
10 62 (10.99%) Containerisation
10 62 (10.99%) Mentoring
11 55 (9.75%) Test Automation
12 53 (9.40%) Open Source
13 49 (8.69%) Clean Code
14 46 (8.16%) SDLC
15 44 (7.80%) Event-Driven
15 44 (7.80%) Performance Tuning
16 41 (7.27%) Risk Management
17 40 (7.09%) Unit Testing
Programming Languages
1 196 (34.75%) Java
2 181 (32.09%) SQL
3 124 (21.99%) Python
4 106 (18.79%) JavaScript
5 105 (18.62%) C#
6 65 (11.52%) TypeScript
7 33 (5.85%) PL/SQL
8 21 (3.72%) Go
9 19 (3.37%) Shell Script
10 18 (3.19%) C++
11 16 (2.84%) Kotlin
11 16 (2.84%) Ruby
12 12 (2.13%) PowerShell
13 9 (1.60%) PHP
14 8 (1.42%) Bash
15 6 (1.06%) Apex Code
16 5 (0.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 5 (0.89%) Swift
17 4 (0.71%) ABAP
17 4 (0.71%) Objective-C
Qualifications
1 92 (16.31%) Security Cleared
2 74 (13.12%) SC Cleared
3 48 (8.51%) Degree
4 27 (4.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 13 (2.30%) BPSS Clearance
6 7 (1.24%) AWS Certification
7 6 (1.06%) Master's Degree
8 5 (0.89%) OCP
8 5 (0.89%) Oracle Certification
9 4 (0.71%) Numerate Degree
10 3 (0.53%) AWS Certified Developer
10 3 (0.53%) DBS Check
10 3 (0.53%) DV Cleared
10 3 (0.53%) MCP
10 3 (0.53%) Microsoft Certification
11 2 (0.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 2 (0.35%) Azure Certification
12 1 (0.18%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
12 1 (0.18%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 28 (4.96%) Accessibility
2 25 (4.43%) QA
3 13 (2.30%) Data Quality
4 11 (1.95%) WCAG
5 4 (0.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 3 (0.53%) EU AI Act
6 3 (0.53%) NIST
7 1 (0.18%) GDPR
7 1 (0.18%) HL7
7 1 (0.18%) HMG Security Policy Framework
7 1 (0.18%) ISO 22301
7 1 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 20000
System Software
1 111 (19.68%) Docker
2 5 (0.89%) zsh
3 2 (0.35%) Active Directory
4 1 (0.18%) GridGain
4 1 (0.18%) Lustre
4 1 (0.18%) Postfix
4 1 (0.18%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 99 (17.55%) Kubernetes
2 40 (7.09%) Terraform
3 14 (2.48%) Grafana
4 8 (1.42%) Ansible
5 5 (0.89%) Prometheus
6 4 (0.71%) Single Sign-On
7 3 (0.53%) Kibana
8 1 (0.18%) Argo
8 1 (0.18%) CloudHub
8 1 (0.18%) Packer
8 1 (0.18%) Rundeck
Vendors
1 45 (7.98%) Oracle
2 38 (6.74%) Microsoft
3 22 (3.90%) Sybase
4 21 (3.72%) Databricks
5 18 (3.19%) Google
6 13 (2.30%) Salesforce
6 13 (2.30%) ServiceNow
7 11 (1.95%) Atlassian
8 10 (1.77%) SAP
9 6 (1.06%) Dataiku
9 6 (1.06%) Red Hat
9 6 (1.06%) Virgin Media
10 5 (0.89%) Apple
11 4 (0.71%) CA Agile Central
11 4 (0.71%) IFS
11 4 (0.71%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
11 4 (0.71%) VMware
12 3 (0.53%) Foundry
12 3 (0.53%) HP
12 3 (0.53%) Remedy