Java Contract Job Trends in the West Midlands

Java
England > West Midlands

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the West Midlands requiring Java skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 4 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 38 38 54
Rank change year-on-year 0 +16 +1
Contract jobs citing Java 172 100 56
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 5.02% 5.69% 2.96%
As % of the Programming Languages category 23.18% 22.62% 13.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 114 67 42
10th Percentile £413 £400 £425
25th Percentile £455 £463 £503
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.75% -9.09% +1.85%
75th Percentile £618 £520 £675
90th Percentile £664 £571 £765
England median daily rate £525 £525 £600
% change year-on-year - -12.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 19 1
Median hourly rate - £50.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year - -9.09% +197.30%
England median hourly rate £69.50 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +39.00% -28.57% +7.69%

All Programming Languages
West Midlands

Java falls under the Programming Languages category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring coding skills in the West Midlands.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 742 442 402
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 21.66% 25.16% 21.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 527 275 260
10th Percentile £368 £306 £313
25th Percentile £415 £413 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £573 £543 £575
90th Percentile £656 £625 £648
England median daily rate £525 £514 £550
% change year-on-year +2.24% -6.64% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 23 6
10th Percentile - £30.25 £32.15
25th Percentile £21.25 £33.91 £34.20
Median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% +11.11% +93.80%
75th Percentile £67.84 - £57.81
90th Percentile - - £66.88
England median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +3.17%

Java
Job Vacancy Trend in the West Midlands

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Java relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands.

Java job vacancy trend in the West Midlands

Java
Daily Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Java.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Java

Java
Daily Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Java in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 4 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Java in the West Midlands

Java
Hourly Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Java.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Java

Java
Contract Job Locations in the West Midlands

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Java within the West Midlands region over the 6 months to 4 September 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
Shropshire -5 103 £525 +0.96% 14
Birmingham -14 33 £460 -5.64% 74
Solihull -1 24 £475 -5.00% 2
Warwickshire -36 4 £550 - 4
Coventry - 4 £575 - 4
Herefordshire - 2 - -
Worcestershire - 1 £450 -
Java
England

Java
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the West Midlands 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 (5.81%) Confluence
1 10 (5.81%) WebLogic
2 6 (3.49%) SAS
3 2 (1.16%) OpenROAD
4 1 (0.58%) Apache
4 1 (0.58%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.58%) Apache Spark
4 1 (0.58%) NetWeaver
4 1 (0.58%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.58%) Oracle SOA Suite
4 1 (0.58%) Oracle Workflow
4 1 (0.58%) SAP EP
Applications
1 5 (2.91%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 5 (2.91%) SAP PSCD
2 1 (0.58%) SAP CRM
2 1 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.58%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 79 (45.93%) AWS
2 25 (14.53%) Azure
3 23 (13.37%) GitHub
4 19 (11.05%) Amazon S3
5 18 (10.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 18 (10.47%) Amazon EC2
6 12 (6.98%) Power Platform
7 11 (6.40%) Amazon ECS
7 11 (6.40%) Amazon EKS
7 11 (6.40%) Serverless
8 10 (5.81%) AWS Lambda
8 10 (5.81%) GitHub Actions
9 9 (5.23%) Amazon SQS
9 9 (5.23%) Azure DevOps
10 8 (4.65%) AWS KMS
10 8 (4.65%) Route 53
11 6 (3.49%) GitHub Copilot
12 4 (2.33%) Azure Monitor
12 4 (2.33%) GCP
13 3 (1.74%) Tricentis Tosca
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (12.21%) MongoDB
2 19 (11.05%) PostgreSQL
3 11 (6.40%) NoSQL
3 11 (6.40%) Relational Database
4 10 (5.81%) Power BI
5 9 (5.23%) Metadata
6 8 (4.65%) Amazon Aurora
6 8 (4.65%) Amazon RDS
6 8 (4.65%) DynamoDB
7 7 (4.07%) Data Warehouse
7 7 (4.07%) MySQL
7 7 (4.07%) Pentaho
8 6 (3.49%) Data Lake
9 2 (1.16%) Ingres
9 2 (1.16%) Oracle Database
9 2 (1.16%) ZAP BI
10 1 (0.58%) Amazon Athena
10 1 (0.58%) IDMS
10 1 (0.58%) SQL Server
10 1 (0.58%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 47 (27.33%) Git
2 42 (24.42%) JUnit
3 38 (22.09%) Maven
4 35 (20.35%) Jenkins
5 32 (18.60%) GitLab
6 28 (16.28%) SonarQube
7 27 (15.70%) Mockito
8 22 (12.79%) Selenium
9 17 (9.88%) Gatling
10 16 (9.30%) Cucumber
10 16 (9.30%) JIRA
11 9 (5.23%) Team Foundation Server
11 9 (5.23%) Visual Studio
12 6 (3.49%) Bitbucket Server
12 6 (3.49%) DbUnit
12 6 (3.49%) jMock
12 6 (3.49%) REST Assured
13 4 (2.33%) Serenity BDD
14 3 (1.74%) Toad
15 2 (1.16%) Cypress.io
General
1 49 (28.49%) Social Skills
2 46 (26.74%) Public Sector
3 16 (9.30%) Analytical Skills
4 9 (5.23%) Finance
5 8 (4.65%) Banking
6 7 (4.07%) Influencing Skills
7 6 (3.49%) Organisational Skills
8 2 (1.16%) Presentation Skills
8 2 (1.16%) Publishing
9 1 (0.58%) Electronics
9 1 (0.58%) Front Office
9 1 (0.58%) Investment Banking
9 1 (0.58%) Local Government
9 1 (0.58%) Military
9 1 (0.58%) Retail
Job Titles
1 60 (34.88%) Developer
2 42 (24.42%) Java Developer
3 28 (16.28%) Senior
4 26 (15.12%) Java Engineer
5 24 (13.95%) Architect
6 21 (12.21%) Lead
7 19 (11.05%) Senior Developer
8 16 (9.30%) Senior Java Developer
9 14 (8.14%) Quality Engineer
10 12 (6.98%) Scrum Master
11 8 (4.65%) Solutions Architect
12 6 (3.49%) Data Architect
12 6 (3.49%) Lead Developer
12 6 (3.49%) Lead Java Developer
12 6 (3.49%) Lead Java Engineer
13 5 (2.91%) Consultant
13 5 (2.91%) Java Scrum Master
13 5 (2.91%) SAP PI Consultant
13 5 (2.91%) Technical Architect
13 5 (2.91%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 72 (41.86%) Spring
2 53 (30.81%) Spring Boot
3 36 (20.93%) REST
4 34 (19.77%) SOAP
5 25 (14.53%) JPA
5 25 (14.53%) RESTful
6 24 (13.95%) Playwright
7 18 (10.47%) ActiveMQ
7 18 (10.47%) AngularJS
7 18 (10.47%) React
8 17 (9.88%) Hibernate
8 17 (9.88%) Spring Cloud
8 17 (9.88%) Web Services
9 12 (6.98%) Kafka
9 12 (6.98%) OpenAPI
9 12 (6.98%) XML
10 11 (6.40%) .NET
11 10 (5.81%) Gherkin
11 10 (5.81%) JSON
11 10 (5.81%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 36 (20.93%) Cloud Native
2 20 (11.63%) Product Ownership
3 13 (7.56%) Distributed Systems
4 7 (4.07%) Linux Command Line
5 6 (3.49%) Autonomous Agent
5 6 (3.49%) Enterprise Software
5 6 (3.49%) Legacy Systems
6 5 (2.91%) Public Cloud
6 5 (2.91%) Self-Motivation
7 4 (2.33%) Private Cloud
8 3 (1.74%) Blog
8 3 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
9 2 (1.16%) Low-Code
10 1 (0.58%) Data Structures
10 1 (0.58%) Distributed Architecture
10 1 (0.58%) Greenfield Project
10 1 (0.58%) Legacy Applications
10 1 (0.58%) Legacy Code
10 1 (0.58%) Mobile App
10 1 (0.58%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 17 (9.88%) Linux
2 10 (5.81%) Unix
3 3 (1.74%) Windows
4 1 (0.58%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 92 (53.49%) Agile
2 70 (40.70%) CI/CD
3 63 (36.63%) Microservices
3 63 (36.63%) Scrum
4 54 (31.40%) Test Automation
5 51 (29.65%) DevOps
6 42 (24.42%) Continuous Improvement
7 40 (23.26%) Containerisation
8 39 (22.67%) TDD
9 36 (20.93%) Stakeholder Management
10 35 (20.35%) Technical Leadership
11 29 (16.86%) Problem-Solving
11 29 (16.86%) Test Strategy
12 24 (13.95%) BDD
13 22 (12.79%) Coaching
13 22 (12.79%) Code Quality
14 21 (12.21%) Software Engineering
14 21 (12.21%) Software Testing
15 20 (11.63%) Migration
16 19 (11.05%) Sprint Planning
Programming Languages
1 39 (22.67%) SQL
2 24 (13.95%) JavaScript
3 16 (9.30%) Python
4 14 (8.14%) TypeScript
5 12 (6.98%) Shell Script
6 11 (6.40%) VB
6 11 (6.40%) VB6
7 9 (5.23%) VBA
8 8 (4.65%) PL/SQL
9 6 (3.49%) ABAP
9 6 (3.49%) C#
10 4 (2.33%) COBOL
10 4 (2.33%) Kotlin
11 3 (1.74%) Groovy
12 2 (1.16%) C
12 2 (1.16%) C++
12 2 (1.16%) R
13 1 (0.58%) Apex Code
13 1 (0.58%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 82 (47.67%) Security Cleared
2 75 (43.60%) SC Cleared
3 52 (30.23%) BPSS Clearance
4 11 (6.40%) AWS Certification
5 5 (2.91%) ISTQB
6 3 (1.74%) Degree
6 3 (1.74%) ISEB
6 3 (1.74%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
7 2 (1.16%) Azure Certification
7 2 (1.16%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.16%) DV Cleared
8 1 (0.58%) Six Sigma Black Belt
8 1 (0.58%) Six Sigma Green Belt
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 22 (12.79%) QA
2 18 (10.47%) Accessibility
3 15 (8.72%) WCAG
4 7 (4.07%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.58%) ISO 14001
5 1 (0.58%) ISO 9001
System Software
1 52 (30.23%) Docker
2 5 (2.91%) Postfix
3 1 (0.58%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 54 (31.40%) Kubernetes
2 22 (12.79%) Grafana
3 16 (9.30%) Prometheus
4 9 (5.23%) Kibana
5 8 (4.65%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 26 (15.12%) Oracle
2 16 (9.30%) Microsoft
3 10 (5.81%) SAP
4 8 (4.65%) Jaspersoft
4 8 (4.65%) webMethods
5 7 (4.07%) Denodo
6 6 (3.49%) Atlassian
7 3 (1.74%) Dynatrace
7 3 (1.74%) Sonatype
8 2 (1.16%) Actian
8 2 (1.16%) Google
8 2 (1.16%) Splunk
9 1 (0.58%) Ariba
9 1 (0.58%) MuleSoft
9 1 (0.58%) Pega
9 1 (0.58%) Salesforce
9 1 (0.58%) Talend