Technical Debt Contracts

Technical Debt
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Technical Debt skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Technical Debt over the 6 months leading up to 25 August 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Aug 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 455 470 524
Rank change year-on-year +15 +54 -14
DemandTrendContract jobs citing Technical Debt 99 91 119
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.30% 0.23% 0.23%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.33% 0.27% 0.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 72 58 82
10th Percentile £390 £418 £390
25th Percentile £450 £482 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £545 £534 £531
Median % change year-on-year +1.97% +0.61% -7.61%
75th Percentile £678 £686 £701
90th Percentile £749 £755 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £520 £494 £517
% change year-on-year +5.26% -4.36% -6.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £67.50 - £52.50
Median hourly rate £70.00 £24.18 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +189.50% -56.04% +111.54%
75th Percentile £72.50 - £57.50
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 - £55.00
% change year-on-year - - +120.00%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Technical Debt falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

DemandTrendContract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 29,658 33,150 45,592
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.46% 85.33% 89.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,443 20,993 31,214
10th Percentile £300 £310 £320
25th Percentile £402 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £545
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -3.67% -0.91%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,760 1,699 1,531
10th Percentile £14.20 £13.87 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.30 £18.13 £18.93
Median hourly rate £25.15 £40.94 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -38.57% -3.67% +54.55%
75th Percentile £47.50 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.63 £42.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year -46.75% +6.25% +77.78%

Technical Debt
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Technical Debt as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Technical Debt in the UK

Technical Debt
Daily Rate Trend

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

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Technical Debt

Technical Debt
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Technical Debt over the 6 months to 25 August 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Technical Debt in the UK

Technical Debt
Hourly Rate Trend

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

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Technical Debt

Technical Debt
Top 15 DemandTrendContract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Technical Debt within the UK over the 6 months to 25 August 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
DemandTrendContract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +17 85 £552 +0.36% 147
London +42 49 £625 +13.64% 60
UK excluding London -3 40 £520 +5.26% 115
Work from Home +35 38 £525 +6.28% 84
North of England -17 11 £506 +2.38% 38
North West -8 9 £500 +1.11% 30
Midlands -14 8 £515 +15.73% 9
South East +27 7 £600 +17.07% 22
Scotland -6 7 £450 -7.60% 9
East Midlands -12 7 £515 +21.18% 1
South West +27 6 £600 -20.00% 13
East of England +5 1 £675 - 17
Yorkshire -9 1 £550 - 8
West Midlands -10 1 - - 8
North East - 1 - -

Technical Debt
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 13 (13.13%) Confluence
2 1 (1.01%) Apache Spark
2 1 (1.01%) GeoServer
2 1 (1.01%) SharePoint
Applications
1 3 (3.03%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (2.02%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (1.01%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (1.01%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 6 (6.06%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (1.01%) IBM Planning Analytics
2 1 (1.01%) SAP CO
2 1 (1.01%) SAP ERP
2 1 (1.01%) SAP FI
2 1 (1.01%) SAP FI/CO
2 1 (1.01%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (1.01%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 40 (40.40%) AWS
2 28 (28.28%) Azure
3 12 (12.12%) GCP
4 8 (8.08%) Power Platform
5 5 (5.05%) SaaS
6 4 (4.04%) AWS Lambda
6 4 (4.04%) Azure Data Factory
6 4 (4.04%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 4 (4.04%) Serverless
7 3 (3.03%) Dynamics 365
7 3 (3.03%) Entra ID
7 3 (3.03%) GitHub
8 2 (2.02%) Amazon S3
8 2 (2.02%) Amazon SQS
8 2 (2.02%) AWS CloudFormation
8 2 (2.02%) Heroku
8 2 (2.02%) IaaS
8 2 (2.02%) iPaaS
8 2 (2.02%) Microsoft 365
8 2 (2.02%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 4 (4.04%) DNS
1 4 (4.04%) NetScaler
2 3 (3.03%) TCP/IP
3 2 (2.02%) BGP
3 2 (2.02%) DHCP
3 2 (2.02%) Firewall
3 2 (2.02%) Intrusion Detection
3 2 (2.02%) OSPF
3 2 (2.02%) VLAN
4 1 (1.01%) Ethernet
4 1 (1.01%) Internet
4 1 (1.01%) SSH
4 1 (1.01%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (7.07%) BigQuery
1 7 (7.07%) Data Warehouse
2 6 (6.06%) Power BI
2 6 (6.06%) SQL Server
3 5 (5.05%) Data Lake
3 5 (5.05%) MongoDB
3 5 (5.05%) NoSQL
3 5 (5.05%) PostgreSQL
4 3 (3.03%) Big Data
4 3 (3.03%) Relational Database
5 2 (2.02%) Amazon Aurora
5 2 (2.02%) GIS
5 2 (2.02%) Hadoop
5 2 (2.02%) Parquet
6 1 (1.01%) Apache Hive
6 1 (1.01%) Flink
6 1 (1.01%) OLAP
6 1 (1.01%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 20 (20.20%) JIRA
2 4 (4.04%) Git
2 4 (4.04%) Jenkins
3 2 (2.02%) GitLab
4 1 (1.01%) Spinnaker
4 1 (1.01%) Subversion
4 1 (1.01%) Visual Studio
General
1 37 (37.37%) Social Skills
2 36 (36.36%) Finance
3 16 (16.16%) Analytical Skills
4 10 (10.10%) Banking
5 7 (7.07%) Retail
6 6 (6.06%) Public Sector
7 5 (5.05%) Influencing Skills
8 4 (4.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 4 (4.04%) Law
9 3 (3.03%) Manufacturing
9 3 (3.03%) Marketing
9 3 (3.03%) Military
10 2 (2.02%) Telecoms
11 1 (1.01%) Organisational Skills
11 1 (1.01%) Pharmaceutical
11 1 (1.01%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 32 (32.32%) Architect
2 17 (17.17%) Solutions Architect
3 13 (13.13%) Developer
4 8 (8.08%) Senior
5 7 (7.07%) Analyst
5 7 (7.07%) Data Engineer
5 7 (7.07%) Lead
6 6 (6.06%) Enterprise Architect
7 5 (5.05%) Security Architect
8 4 (4.04%) Azure Data Engineer
8 4 (4.04%) Azure Engineer
8 4 (4.04%) Business Analyst
8 4 (4.04%) Senior Architect
8 4 (4.04%) Server Engineer
9 3 (3.03%) Consultant
9 3 (3.03%) Full-Stack Developer
9 3 (3.03%) Linux Engineer
9 3 (3.03%) Product Manager
9 3 (3.03%) Senior Solutions Architect
9 3 (3.03%) Technical Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (15.15%) AngularJS
2 14 (14.14%) .NET
2 14 (14.14%) React
3 12 (12.12%) REST
4 6 (6.06%) Kafka
5 4 (4.04%) CSS
5 4 (4.04%) HTML
6 3 (3.03%) .NET Framework
6 3 (3.03%) Angular 2
6 3 (3.03%) ASP.NET
6 3 (3.03%) JSON
6 3 (3.03%) Lightning Web Components
7 2 (2.02%) Apache Avro
7 2 (2.02%) AWS CDK
7 2 (2.02%) Flask
7 2 (2.02%) PostGIS
7 2 (2.02%) Spring
7 2 (2.02%) Spring Boot
7 2 (2.02%) SQLAlchemy
8 1 (1.01%) Visualforce
Miscellaneous
1 14 (14.14%) Product Ownership
2 10 (10.10%) Cloud Native
3 9 (9.09%) Legacy Systems
4 6 (6.06%) Data Centre
5 3 (3.03%) PKI
6 2 (2.02%) Data Fabric
6 2 (2.02%) Data Structures
6 2 (2.02%) Legacy Applications
6 2 (2.02%) Management Information System
6 2 (2.02%) Onboarding
6 2 (2.02%) Public Cloud
6 2 (2.02%) Self-Motivation
7 1 (1.01%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (1.01%) Digital Signage
7 1 (1.01%) Distributed Systems
7 1 (1.01%) Greenfield Project
7 1 (1.01%) Hybrid Cloud
7 1 (1.01%) IoT
7 1 (1.01%) Legacy Code
7 1 (1.01%) Reinsurance
Operating Systems
1 14 (14.14%) Windows
2 11 (11.11%) Linux
3 10 (10.10%) Windows Server
4 5 (5.05%) Amazon Linux
5 3 (3.03%) Windows 10
5 3 (3.03%) Windows Server 2012
6 1 (1.01%) Apple iOS
6 1 (1.01%) Mac OS
6 1 (1.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (1.01%) Unix
6 1 (1.01%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 44 (44.44%) Agile
2 25 (25.25%) CI/CD
2 25 (25.25%) Problem-Solving
2 25 (25.25%) Roadmaps
3 21 (21.21%) DevOps
4 20 (20.20%) Microservices
4 20 (20.20%) Scrum
5 18 (18.18%) Enterprise Architecture
6 17 (17.17%) Architectural Patterns
6 17 (17.17%) ETL
6 17 (17.17%) Stakeholder Management
7 14 (14.14%) Data Transformation
8 13 (13.13%) Decision-Making
9 12 (12.12%) Analytics
9 12 (12.12%) Design Patterns
9 12 (12.12%) Project Management
10 10 (10.10%) Data Integration
10 10 (10.10%) High Availability
10 10 (10.10%) SDLC
10 10 (10.10%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 24 (24.24%) Python
2 19 (19.19%) Java
3 18 (18.18%) SQL
4 10 (10.10%) TypeScript
5 7 (7.07%) JavaScript
6 5 (5.05%) C#
7 4 (4.04%) PowerShell
8 3 (3.03%) Apex Code
8 3 (3.03%) C++
9 2 (2.02%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 2 (2.02%) VB
10 1 (1.01%) PHP
10 1 (1.01%) Scala
10 1 (1.01%) T-SQL
10 1 (1.01%) VBA
Qualifications
1 19 (19.19%) Security Cleared
2 11 (11.11%) SC Cleared
3 6 (6.06%) Degree
4 5 (5.05%) BPSS Clearance
4 5 (5.05%) Cisco Certification
5 3 (3.03%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (2.02%) (ISC)2 CCSP
6 2 (2.02%) Azure Certification
6 2 (2.02%) CASP
6 2 (2.02%) CCNP
6 2 (2.02%) CCSP
6 2 (2.02%) CISSP
6 2 (2.02%) CREST Certified
6 2 (2.02%) CSSLP
6 2 (2.02%) GIAC
7 1 (1.01%) AWS Certification
7 1 (1.01%) CCNA
7 1 (1.01%) DV Cleared
7 1 (1.01%) Master's Degree
7 1 (1.01%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (7.07%) QA
2 6 (6.06%) Data Quality
3 5 (5.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 4 (4.04%) GDPR
4 4 (4.04%) HMG Security Policy Framework
4 4 (4.04%) NIST
5 2 (2.02%) Government Security Classifications
5 2 (2.02%) NCSC
6 1 (1.01%) Accessibility
6 1 (1.01%) PCI DSS
6 1 (1.01%) SLA
6 1 (1.01%) SOC 1
6 1 (1.01%) WCAG
System Software
1 8 (8.08%) Active Directory
2 5 (5.05%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (4.04%) Virtual Desktop
3 4 (4.04%) XenDesktop
4 3 (3.03%) Docker
4 3 (3.03%) VMware ESXi
5 1 (1.01%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 9 (9.09%) Terraform
2 7 (7.07%) Kubernetes
3 3 (3.03%) Microsoft Intune
3 3 (3.03%) SCCM
4 2 (2.02%) Grafana
4 2 (2.02%) SELinux
4 2 (2.02%) Single Sign-On
5 1 (1.01%) Ansible
5 1 (1.01%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 18 (18.18%) Microsoft
2 13 (13.13%) ServiceNow
3 9 (9.09%) VMware
4 7 (7.07%) Google
4 7 (7.07%) Salesforce
5 6 (6.06%) SAP
6 5 (5.05%) Red Hat
7 4 (4.04%) Citrix
7 4 (4.04%) Databricks
8 3 (3.03%) Ivanti
9 2 (2.02%) BiZZdesign
9 2 (2.02%) Cisco
9 2 (2.02%) Fortinet
9 2 (2.02%) Juniper
9 2 (2.02%) MuleSoft
9 2 (2.02%) Oracle
9 2 (2.02%) Palo Alto
10 1 (1.01%) SnapLogic
10 1 (1.01%) Spotify
10 1 (1.01%) Tanium