Senior Developer Contract Job Trends

Senior Developer
UK

The median Senior Developer daily rate in the UK is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 21 April 2026.

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

6 months to
21 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 168 156 148
Rank change year-on-year -12 -8 -25
Contract jobs requiring a Senior Developer 738 519 691
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.59% 1.76% 1.59%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.73% 1.90% 1.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 487 380 490
10th Percentile £409 £409 £410
25th Percentile £456 £490 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £650 £736 £725
90th Percentile £850 £838 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £538 £500
% change year-on-year -6.98% +7.50% -13.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 1 14
10th Percentile - - £40.00
25th Percentile £85.00 - £54.85
Median hourly rate £90.00 £77.19 £58.20
Median % change year-on-year +16.60% +32.62% -6.88%
75th Percentile £95.00 - £70.12
90th Percentile - - £79.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £77.19 £58.91
% change year-on-year - +31.04% -5.75%

All Contract IT Job Roles
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 42,695 27,272 40,291
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.26% 92.61% 92.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,420 17,879 26,298
10th Percentile £313 £300 £275
25th Percentile £413 £406 £409
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.91% -1.90% -2.78%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £748
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £475 £493
% change year-on-year +2.63% -3.65% -1.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,730 998 2,613
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.50 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.35 £19.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £42.00 £30.45 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +37.93% -13.00% -22.22%
75th Percentile £65.60 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.33 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.61 £29.80 £36.50
% change year-on-year +46.34% -18.36% -15.12%

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 21 April 2026.

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 21 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 -16 623 £550 -8.33% 247
London -12 387 £625 -3.85% 89
UK excluding London -28 249 £500 -6.98% 199
Work from Home -6 212 £600 - 130
North of England -33 73 £525 -12.50% 59
South West +14 52 £475 -20.83% 15
Midlands -43 42 £500 -9.09% 30
South East -44 41 £560 +8.84% 50
Yorkshire -40 38 £575 -4.17% 10
North West -38 36 £500 -16.67% 41
West Midlands -43 34 £485 -11.82% 23
East of England -27 20 £500 -23.08% 20
Scotland -18 17 £475 +11.76% 22
East Midlands -30 7 £525 +0.96% 7
Northern Ireland +2 5 £638 +27.50% 2
Wales -8 2 £638 +6.25% 7
North East -16 1 £450 -23.73% 10

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

For the 6 months to 21 April 2026, 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.

1 232 (31.44%) Java
2 215 (29.13%) AWS
3 197 (26.69%) Agile
4 177 (23.98%) CI/CD
5 164 (22.22%) Python
6 158 (21.41%) Security Cleared
7 151 (20.46%) SC Cleared
8 148 (20.05%) Azure
8 148 (20.05%) Microservices
9 143 (19.38%) SQL
10 136 (18.43%) DevOps
11 121 (16.40%) Docker
11 121 (16.40%) JavaScript
12 115 (15.58%) Kubernetes
13 105 (14.23%) Kafka
14 95 (12.87%) Spring
15 90 (12.20%) React
16 86 (11.65%) Spring Boot
17 83 (11.25%) Containerisation
17 83 (11.25%) Problem-Solving
18 75 (10.16%) .NET
19 74 (10.03%) Git
20 73 (9.89%) Software Engineering
20 73 (9.89%) Test Automation
21 72 (9.76%) TDD
22 67 (9.08%) Full-Stack Development
23 65 (8.81%) TypeScript
24 63 (8.54%) RESTful
25 62 (8.40%) C#
25 62 (8.40%) Scrum

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 11 (1.49%) Confluence
2 6 (0.81%) nginx
3 5 (0.68%) Apache
3 5 (0.68%) Apache Spark
3 5 (0.68%) CMS
3 5 (0.68%) SharePoint
4 4 (0.54%) Ethereum
4 4 (0.54%) Headless CMS
4 4 (0.54%) Hyperledger
5 3 (0.41%) Apache Airflow
5 3 (0.41%) IIS
5 3 (0.41%) Mendix
5 3 (0.41%) Oracle SOA Suite
5 3 (0.41%) Oracle Workflow
5 3 (0.41%) Tomcat
6 2 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
6 2 (0.27%) SAS
6 2 (0.27%) WebLogic
6 2 (0.27%) WordPress
7 1 (0.14%) LiveCycle
Applications
1 11 (1.49%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 13 (1.76%) Teamcenter
2 5 (0.68%) Endur
3 2 (0.27%) Dynamics CRM
3 2 (0.27%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.14%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.14%) FLEXCUBE
4 1 (0.14%) IBM Planning Analytics
4 1 (0.14%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.14%) Oracle Cash Management
4 1 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.14%) Oracle General Ledger
4 1 (0.14%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.14%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.14%) Oracle Retail
4 1 (0.14%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.14%) SAP BRIM
4 1 (0.14%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.14%) SimCorp Dimension
Cloud Services
1 215 (29.13%) AWS
2 148 (20.05%) Azure
3 60 (8.13%) Azure DevOps
4 49 (6.64%) GitHub
5 41 (5.56%) Serverless
6 34 (4.61%) Power Platform
7 27 (3.66%) GCP
8 26 (3.52%) Amazon SQS
9 25 (3.39%) GitHub Actions
10 24 (3.25%) AWS Lambda
11 21 (2.85%) Power Automate
12 20 (2.71%) Amazon EC2
13 17 (2.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 17 (2.30%) Amazon S3
14 16 (2.17%) Azure Service Bus
14 16 (2.17%) PowerApps
15 14 (1.90%) Amazon ECS
16 13 (1.76%) Amazon EKS
17 12 (1.63%) Copilot Studio
17 12 (1.63%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 8 (1.08%) HTTP
2 4 (0.54%) Reverse Proxy
3 3 (0.41%) Multicast
4 2 (0.27%) Ethernet
4 2 (0.27%) Firewall
4 2 (0.27%) NFC
4 2 (0.27%) RTP
4 2 (0.27%) SSL
4 2 (0.27%) VPN
5 1 (0.14%) DNS
5 1 (0.14%) FTP
5 1 (0.14%) Kerberos
5 1 (0.14%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 53 (7.18%) PostgreSQL
2 38 (5.15%) MongoDB
3 36 (4.88%) SQL Server
4 33 (4.47%) NoSQL
5 32 (4.34%) Apache Cassandra
5 32 (4.34%) Relational Database
6 28 (3.79%) Power BI
7 22 (2.98%) DynamoDB
8 17 (2.30%) MySQL
9 16 (2.17%) Data Hub
10 14 (1.90%) Amazon RDS
11 13 (1.76%) Data Warehouse
12 7 (0.95%) DB2
12 7 (0.95%) Oracle BI EE
13 6 (0.81%) Amazon Aurora
14 5 (0.68%) Big Data
14 5 (0.68%) KDB
14 5 (0.68%) RDBMS
15 4 (0.54%) Oracle Database
16 3 (0.41%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 74 (10.03%) Git
2 34 (4.61%) Jenkins
3 32 (4.34%) Oracle APEX
4 27 (3.66%) JUnit
5 21 (2.85%) JIRA
6 20 (2.71%) Maven
7 19 (2.57%) GitLab
8 17 (2.30%) Mockito
9 13 (1.76%) SonarQube
10 10 (1.36%) Gradle
11 6 (0.81%) Cypress.io
12 5 (0.68%) Bitbucket
13 4 (0.54%) Sonatype Nexus
14 3 (0.41%) Cucumber
14 3 (0.41%) webpack
15 2 (0.27%) Artifactory
15 2 (0.27%) DbUnit
15 2 (0.27%) jMock
15 2 (0.27%) SpecFlow
15 2 (0.27%) TeamCity
General
1 127 (17.21%) Social Skills
2 124 (16.80%) Finance
3 117 (15.85%) Public Sector
4 96 (13.01%) Banking
5 37 (5.01%) Investment Banking
6 36 (4.88%) Analytical Skills
7 28 (3.79%) Front Office
8 15 (2.03%) Financial Institution
9 6 (0.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 6 (0.81%) Retail
10 5 (0.68%) Telecoms
11 4 (0.54%) Organisational Skills
12 3 (0.41%) Games
12 3 (0.41%) Health Technology
12 3 (0.41%) Law
12 3 (0.41%) Legal
12 3 (0.41%) Military
12 3 (0.41%) Pharmaceutical
12 3 (0.41%) Police
12 3 (0.41%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 105 (14.23%) Kafka
2 95 (12.87%) Spring
3 90 (12.20%) React
4 86 (11.65%) Spring Boot
5 75 (10.16%) .NET
6 63 (8.54%) RESTful
7 57 (7.72%) REST
8 56 (7.59%) Node.js
9 51 (6.91%) AngularJS
10 45 (6.10%) HTML
11 42 (5.69%) CSS
12 29 (3.93%) gRPC
13 27 (3.66%) Web Services
14 25 (3.39%) Redux
15 17 (2.30%) .NET Core
15 17 (2.30%) Django
16 15 (2.03%) .NET Framework
16 15 (2.03%) SOAP
17 14 (1.90%) HTML5
17 14 (1.90%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 55 (7.45%) Distributed Systems
2 50 (6.78%) Cloud Native
3 24 (3.25%) Product Ownership
4 23 (3.12%) Derivative
5 20 (2.71%) Equities
5 20 (2.71%) Fixed Income
6 19 (2.57%) Greenfield Project
7 15 (2.03%) Algorithms
8 13 (1.76%) Market Risk
9 12 (1.63%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 12 (1.63%) Management Information System
10 11 (1.49%) Mobile App
11 9 (1.22%) Onboarding
12 8 (1.08%) Equity Derivative
12 8 (1.08%) Legacy Systems
13 6 (0.81%) AI Agents
13 6 (0.81%) Data Structures
14 4 (0.54%) Legacy Applications
14 4 (0.54%) NHS
15 3 (0.41%) Credit Risk
Operating Systems
1 40 (5.42%) Linux
2 24 (3.25%) Unix
3 18 (2.44%) Windows
4 14 (1.90%) Android
5 9 (1.22%) Mac OS
6 6 (0.81%) Apple iOS
7 5 (0.68%) Mac OS X
8 2 (0.27%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.14%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 197 (26.69%) Agile
2 177 (23.98%) CI/CD
3 148 (20.05%) Microservices
4 136 (18.43%) DevOps
5 83 (11.25%) Containerisation
5 83 (11.25%) Problem-Solving
6 73 (9.89%) Software Engineering
6 73 (9.89%) Test Automation
7 72 (9.76%) TDD
8 67 (9.08%) Full-Stack Development
9 62 (8.40%) Scrum
10 59 (7.99%) Code Quality
11 49 (6.64%) Analytics
12 44 (5.96%) Infrastructure as Code
12 44 (5.96%) Mentoring
12 44 (5.96%) Validation
13 43 (5.83%) Open Source
14 42 (5.69%) SDLC
15 41 (5.56%) Data Modelling
15 41 (5.56%) Front End Development
Programming Languages
1 232 (31.44%) Java
2 164 (22.22%) Python
3 143 (19.38%) SQL
4 121 (16.40%) JavaScript
5 65 (8.81%) TypeScript
6 62 (8.40%) C#
7 46 (6.23%) Go
8 36 (4.88%) PL/SQL
9 28 (3.79%) Kotlin
10 26 (3.52%) Ruby
11 15 (2.03%) C++
12 9 (1.22%) PowerShell
13 8 (1.08%) Shell Script
14 7 (0.95%) Bash
15 6 (0.81%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 5 (0.68%) PHP
17 4 (0.54%) Apex Code
17 4 (0.54%) VBA
18 3 (0.41%) R
18 3 (0.41%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 158 (21.41%) Security Cleared
2 151 (20.46%) SC Cleared
3 24 (3.25%) BPSS Clearance
4 21 (2.85%) Degree
5 9 (1.22%) Computer Science Degree
6 6 (0.81%) DV Cleared
6 6 (0.81%) Numerate Degree
7 4 (0.54%) AWS Certification
8 3 (0.41%) AWS Certified Developer
9 2 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 2 (0.27%) OCP
9 2 (0.27%) Oracle Certification
10 1 (0.14%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 1 (0.14%) Azure Certification
10 1 (0.14%) CISSP
10 1 (0.14%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 30 (4.07%) Accessibility
2 26 (3.52%) QA
3 17 (2.30%) WCAG
4 10 (1.36%) Data Quality
5 2 (0.27%) GDPR
5 2 (0.27%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.14%) HMG Security Policy Framework
6 1 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 121 (16.40%) Docker
2 2 (0.27%) Active Directory
2 2 (0.27%) GridGain
2 2 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
2 2 (0.27%) Postfix
3 1 (0.14%) OpenAM
3 1 (0.14%) OpenDJ
3 1 (0.14%) OpenIDM
3 1 (0.14%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 115 (15.58%) Kubernetes
2 46 (6.23%) Terraform
3 21 (2.85%) Grafana
4 15 (2.03%) Ansible
5 14 (1.90%) Prometheus
6 8 (1.08%) Single Sign-On
7 1 (0.14%) Argo
7 1 (0.14%) CloudHub
7 1 (0.14%) Control-M
7 1 (0.14%) HAProxy
7 1 (0.14%) Kibana
7 1 (0.14%) SELinux
7 1 (0.14%) Sysdig
7 1 (0.14%) systemd
Vendors
1 57 (7.72%) Oracle
2 40 (5.42%) Microsoft
3 20 (2.71%) ServiceNow
4 15 (2.03%) Google
5 13 (1.76%) Salesforce
6 10 (1.36%) Databricks
7 9 (1.22%) SAP
7 9 (1.22%) Sybase
8 7 (0.95%) Avaloq
9 6 (0.81%) Guidewire
10 4 (0.54%) Atlassian
10 4 (0.54%) ForgeRock
10 4 (0.54%) Jaspersoft
10 4 (0.54%) Pega
11 3 (0.41%) Apple
11 3 (0.41%) Cognizant
11 3 (0.41%) New Relic
11 3 (0.41%) Okta
11 3 (0.41%) Splunk
12 2 (0.27%) GoCardless