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 8 June 2026.

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

6 months to
8 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 160 160 137
Rank change year-on-year 0 -23 -2
Contract jobs requiring a Senior Developer 802 520 750
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.62% 1.78% 1.73%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.75% 1.92% 1.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 507 367 546
10th Percentile £406 £400 £409
25th Percentile £475 £475 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +4.55% -12.00%
75th Percentile £700 £725 £725
90th Percentile £894 £825 £863
UK excluding London median daily rate £514 £525 £475
% change year-on-year -2.14% +10.53% -13.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 1 14
10th Percentile £37.25 - £36.50
25th Percentile £44.93 - £43.71
Median hourly rate £45.56 £77.19 £58.91
Median % change year-on-year -40.98% +31.04% -5.75%
75th Percentile £46.18 - £72.50
90th Percentile £95.00 - £82.85
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.56 £77.19 £58.91
% change year-on-year -40.98% +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 45,699 27,029 40,373
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.33% 92.35% 92.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,837 17,405 26,000
10th Percentile £325 £287 £280
25th Percentile £413 £402 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +5.26% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,047 1,117 2,898
10th Percentile £15.11 £14.00 £12.86
25th Percentile £20.75 £17.87 £16.30
Median hourly rate £44.50 £28.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +58.93% -25.33% -16.67%
75th Percentile £67.50 £58.69 £61.60
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.23 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.39% -36.94% -5.88%

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 8 June 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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Senior Developer over the 6 months to 8 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Senior Developer 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 8 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 -7 677 £575 -4.17% 216
London +12 440 £625 -3.85% 86
UK excluding London -22 250 £514 -2.14% 173
Work from Home -38 207 £560 -6.67% 124
North of England -10 98 £525 - 41
Yorkshire -15 52 £575 +9.52% 5
North West -17 44 £494 -1.25% 23
Midlands -31 42 £513 -6.82% 15
South East -51 40 £560 +8.74% 50
West Midlands -41 34 £513 -6.82% 10
South West -21 30 £475 -20.83% 18
Scotland -23 20 £411 -3.24% 23
East of England -17 17 £500 -23.08% 16
East Midlands -21 7 £525 +28.05% 5
Northern Ireland +4 4 £650 +30.00% 3
North East -25 4 £750 +100.00% 13
Wales -15 2 £525 +61.54% 9

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

For the 6 months to 8 June 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.

1 254 (31.67%) Java
2 217 (27.06%) AWS
3 211 (26.31%) CI/CD
4 198 (24.69%) Agile
5 175 (21.82%) Python
6 164 (20.45%) Azure
7 152 (18.95%) Microservices
8 143 (17.83%) SQL
9 123 (15.34%) DevOps
9 123 (15.34%) JavaScript
9 123 (15.34%) Security Cleared
10 121 (15.09%) Docker
11 119 (14.84%) React
12 114 (14.21%) SC Cleared
13 109 (13.59%) Kubernetes
14 107 (13.34%) C#
15 98 (12.22%) .NET
15 98 (12.22%) Spring
15 98 (12.22%) TypeScript
16 91 (11.35%) Kafka
17 88 (10.97%) Full-Stack Development
18 86 (10.72%) Containerisation
18 86 (10.72%) Git
18 86 (10.72%) Spring Boot
19 82 (10.22%) RESTful
19 82 (10.22%) Software Engineering
20 81 (10.10%) TDD
21 79 (9.85%) Test Automation
22 77 (9.60%) REST
23 70 (8.73%) Problem-Solving

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 10 (1.25%) Apache Spark
2 8 (1.00%) Apache
2 8 (1.00%) Confluence
3 7 (0.87%) Ethereum
3 7 (0.87%) Hyperledger
4 6 (0.75%) CMS
5 5 (0.62%) Mendix
5 5 (0.62%) nginx
6 4 (0.50%) Headless CMS
6 4 (0.50%) Oracle Workflow
7 3 (0.37%) Apache Airflow
7 3 (0.37%) IIS
7 3 (0.37%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 3 (0.37%) Tomcat
8 2 (0.25%) Cloud Foundry
8 2 (0.25%) Moodle
8 2 (0.25%) SAS
8 2 (0.25%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.25%) WebLogic
9 1 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
Applications
1 9 (1.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.12%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 17 (2.12%) Teamcenter
2 5 (0.62%) Endur
3 4 (0.50%) R3 Corda
4 3 (0.37%) Aladdin
4 3 (0.37%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 3 (0.37%) Quorum
4 3 (0.37%) Ripple
4 3 (0.37%) Shopify
4 3 (0.37%) SimCorp Dimension
5 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
5 1 (0.12%) NetSuite
5 1 (0.12%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.12%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.12%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.12%) Oracle General Ledger
5 1 (0.12%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.12%) Orchestrade
5 1 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.12%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 217 (27.06%) AWS
2 164 (20.45%) Azure
3 61 (7.61%) GitHub
4 46 (5.74%) Serverless
5 43 (5.36%) Power Platform
6 39 (4.86%) Azure DevOps
7 36 (4.49%) GCP
8 35 (4.36%) GitHub Actions
9 27 (3.37%) Amazon SQS
9 27 (3.37%) Power Automate
10 25 (3.12%) AWS Lambda
11 21 (2.62%) PowerApps
12 20 (2.49%) Amazon S3
12 20 (2.49%) Azure Service Bus
13 19 (2.37%) Amazon EC2
14 17 (2.12%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 16 (2.00%) Dynamics 365
16 15 (1.87%) Amazon ECS
17 14 (1.75%) Copilot Studio
18 13 (1.62%) Microsoft Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 8 (1.00%) HTTP
2 6 (0.75%) Multicast
3 3 (0.37%) Reverse Proxy
4 2 (0.25%) Ethernet
4 2 (0.25%) NFC
4 2 (0.25%) RTP
5 1 (0.12%) CTI
5 1 (0.12%) DNS
5 1 (0.12%) Firewall
5 1 (0.12%) MQTT
5 1 (0.12%) SSL
5 1 (0.12%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 59 (7.36%) PostgreSQL
2 48 (5.99%) SQL Server
3 42 (5.24%) Relational Database
4 36 (4.49%) Power BI
5 35 (4.36%) MongoDB
6 30 (3.74%) NoSQL
7 22 (2.74%) Apache Cassandra
8 21 (2.62%) DynamoDB
9 18 (2.24%) MySQL
10 15 (1.87%) Amazon RDS
10 15 (1.87%) Data Warehouse
11 10 (1.25%) KDB
12 8 (1.00%) Azure SQL Database
13 7 (0.87%) Amazon Aurora
13 7 (0.87%) Kdb+
13 7 (0.87%) Oracle BI EE
14 6 (0.75%) Data Lake
14 6 (0.75%) Oracle Database
14 6 (0.75%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 5 (0.62%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 86 (10.72%) Git
2 41 (5.11%) Jenkins
3 25 (3.12%) Maven
4 24 (2.99%) GitLab
5 23 (2.87%) JUnit
6 21 (2.62%) JIRA
7 20 (2.49%) Mockito
8 18 (2.24%) SonarQube
9 13 (1.62%) Gradle
10 5 (0.62%) Snyk
10 5 (0.62%) Xcode
11 4 (0.50%) Bitbucket
11 4 (0.50%) git-flow
11 4 (0.50%) XCTest
11 4 (0.50%) XCUITest
12 3 (0.37%) Atlassian Bamboo
12 3 (0.37%) Cucumber
12 3 (0.37%) jMock
12 3 (0.37%) Team Foundation Server
12 3 (0.37%) TeamCity
General
1 163 (20.32%) Finance
2 117 (14.59%) Banking
2 117 (14.59%) Public Sector
3 115 (14.34%) Social Skills
4 52 (6.48%) Investment Banking
5 47 (5.86%) Front Office
6 43 (5.36%) Analytical Skills
7 22 (2.74%) Financial Institution
8 18 (2.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 14 (1.75%) Retail
10 10 (1.25%) Military
11 8 (1.00%) Legal
12 7 (0.87%) Manufacturing
13 6 (0.75%) Law
14 5 (0.62%) Telecoms
15 4 (0.50%) Documentation Skills
15 4 (0.50%) Games
15 4 (0.50%) Health Technology
16 3 (0.37%) Organisational Skills
16 3 (0.37%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 119 (14.84%) React
2 98 (12.22%) .NET
2 98 (12.22%) Spring
3 91 (11.35%) Kafka
4 86 (10.72%) Spring Boot
5 82 (10.22%) RESTful
6 77 (9.60%) REST
7 58 (7.23%) AngularJS
8 55 (6.86%) Node.js
9 51 (6.36%) HTML
10 46 (5.74%) CSS
11 43 (5.36%) Redux
12 30 (3.74%) Web Services
13 25 (3.12%) Django
14 23 (2.87%) .NET Core
14 23 (2.87%) SOAP
15 20 (2.49%) gRPC
15 20 (2.49%) OAuth
16 18 (2.24%) RabbitMQ
17 16 (2.00%) .NET Framework
Miscellaneous
1 62 (7.73%) Distributed Systems
2 57 (7.11%) Cloud Native
3 36 (4.49%) Greenfield Project
4 35 (4.36%) Product Ownership
5 34 (4.24%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 31 (3.87%) Fixed Income
7 30 (3.74%) Equities
8 19 (2.37%) Derivative
8 19 (2.37%) Mobile App
9 16 (2.00%) Algorithms
10 10 (1.25%) Onboarding
11 8 (1.00%) AI Agents
11 8 (1.00%) Management Information System
12 7 (0.87%) Data Structures
12 7 (0.87%) Equity Derivative
12 7 (0.87%) Legacy Systems
12 7 (0.87%) Market Risk
13 5 (0.62%) Blockchain
13 5 (0.62%) CMDB
13 5 (0.62%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 45 (5.61%) Linux
2 28 (3.49%) Unix
3 17 (2.12%) Windows
4 12 (1.50%) Apple iOS
5 10 (1.25%) Android
6 9 (1.12%) Mac OS
7 5 (0.62%) Mac OS X
8 2 (0.25%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.12%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 211 (26.31%) CI/CD
2 198 (24.69%) Agile
3 152 (18.95%) Microservices
4 123 (15.34%) DevOps
5 88 (10.97%) Full-Stack Development
6 86 (10.72%) Containerisation
7 82 (10.22%) Software Engineering
8 81 (10.10%) TDD
9 79 (9.85%) Test Automation
10 70 (8.73%) Problem-Solving
11 64 (7.98%) Data Modelling
12 60 (7.48%) Event-Driven
13 58 (7.23%) Code Quality
14 57 (7.11%) Mentoring
15 56 (6.98%) Scrum
16 51 (6.36%) Business Intelligence
16 51 (6.36%) Front End Development
17 50 (6.23%) AI
18 49 (6.11%) Analytics
18 49 (6.11%) Design Patterns
Programming Languages
1 254 (31.67%) Java
2 175 (21.82%) Python
3 143 (17.83%) SQL
4 123 (15.34%) JavaScript
5 107 (13.34%) C#
6 98 (12.22%) TypeScript
7 33 (4.11%) Go
8 25 (3.12%) Ruby
9 23 (2.87%) C++
9 23 (2.87%) Kotlin
10 11 (1.37%) Apex Code
11 10 (1.25%) Swift
12 9 (1.12%) PL/SQL
12 9 (1.12%) PowerShell
12 9 (1.12%) Shell Script
13 7 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 6 (0.75%) Bash
15 5 (0.62%) R
15 5 (0.62%) SOQL
15 5 (0.62%) SOSL
Qualifications
1 123 (15.34%) Security Cleared
2 114 (14.21%) SC Cleared
3 28 (3.49%) Degree
4 21 (2.62%) BPSS Clearance
5 12 (1.50%) Computer Science Degree
6 7 (0.87%) DV Cleared
7 5 (0.62%) AWS Certification
8 4 (0.50%) AWS Certified Developer
8 4 (0.50%) Numerate Degree
9 3 (0.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 3 (0.37%) Microsoft Certification
10 2 (0.25%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.25%) Master's Degree
11 1 (0.12%) Azure Certification
11 1 (0.12%) CISSP
11 1 (0.12%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 30 (3.74%) Accessibility
1 30 (3.74%) QA
2 18 (2.24%) WCAG
3 12 (1.50%) Data Quality
4 2 (0.25%) GDPR
4 2 (0.25%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.12%) Basel III
5 1 (0.12%) HMG Security Policy Framework
5 1 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 1 (0.12%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 1 (0.12%) Solvency II
System Software
1 121 (15.09%) Docker
2 3 (0.37%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.25%) GridGain
3 2 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
3 2 (0.25%) Postfix
4 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 109 (13.59%) Kubernetes
2 52 (6.48%) Terraform
3 23 (2.87%) Grafana
4 17 (2.12%) Prometheus
5 14 (1.75%) Ansible
6 8 (1.00%) Single Sign-On
7 4 (0.50%) Argo
8 2 (0.25%) Consul
8 2 (0.25%) Zipkin
9 1 (0.12%) HAProxy
9 1 (0.12%) SELinux
9 1 (0.12%) Sysdig
9 1 (0.12%) systemd
Vendors
1 54 (6.73%) Microsoft
2 32 (3.99%) Oracle
3 20 (2.49%) Salesforce
4 18 (2.24%) ServiceNow
5 12 (1.50%) Avaloq
6 11 (1.37%) Databricks
7 10 (1.25%) Google
8 9 (1.12%) SAP
9 6 (0.75%) Guidewire
9 6 (0.75%) Jaspersoft
9 6 (0.75%) Sybase
10 4 (0.50%) ForgeRock
10 4 (0.50%) Okta
10 4 (0.50%) Pega
10 4 (0.50%) Solace
11 3 (0.37%) Atlassian
11 3 (0.37%) Cognizant
11 3 (0.37%) New Relic
11 3 (0.37%) SimCorp
11 3 (0.37%) Splunk