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 10 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 40 37 58
Rank change year-on-year -3 +21 -4
Contract jobs citing Java 180 100 54
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 5.15% 5.52% 2.84%
As % of the Programming Languages category 24.10% 22.12% 13.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 117 67 40
10th Percentile £414 £400 £425
25th Percentile £456 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £575
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -13.04% +6.48%
75th Percentile £620 £520 £684
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 £69.75 £50.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +39.50% -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 747 452 410
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 21.36% 24.93% 21.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 526 282 260
10th Percentile £370 £313 £313
25th Percentile £418 £413 £380
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £492
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% +1.73% -1.70%
75th Percentile £575 £548 £575
90th Percentile £656 £632 £650
England median daily rate £525 £513 £550
% change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 23 5
10th Percentile £19.85 £30.25 £34.36
25th Percentile £21.25 £33.91 £35.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £50.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -9.09% +136.86%
75th Percentile £67.84 - £58.75
90th Percentile - - £68.50
England median hourly rate £65.00 £55.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +17.12% -14.62% +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 10 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 10 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 -4 104 £528 +1.44% 19
Birmingham -15 35 £461 -5.38% 29
Solihull +3 29 £475 -5.00% 1
Warwickshire -38 4 £550 - 1
Coventry - 4 £575 - 4
Herefordshire - 2 - -
Worcestershire - 1 £450 - 1
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 13 (7.22%) Confluence
2 10 (5.56%) WebLogic
3 6 (3.33%) SAS
4 2 (1.11%) OpenROAD
5 1 (0.56%) Apache
5 1 (0.56%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.56%) Apache Spark
5 1 (0.56%) NetWeaver
5 1 (0.56%) OpenStack
5 1 (0.56%) Oracle SOA Suite
5 1 (0.56%) Oracle Workflow
5 1 (0.56%) SAP EP
Applications
1 5 (2.78%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 5 (2.78%) SAP PSCD
2 1 (0.56%) SAP CRM
2 1 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.56%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 85 (47.22%) AWS
2 25 (13.89%) Azure
2 25 (13.89%) GitHub
3 21 (11.67%) Amazon S3
4 20 (11.11%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 20 (11.11%) Amazon EC2
5 13 (7.22%) Amazon ECS
5 13 (7.22%) Amazon EKS
5 13 (7.22%) Serverless
6 12 (6.67%) AWS Lambda
6 12 (6.67%) GitHub Actions
6 12 (6.67%) Power Platform
7 9 (5.00%) Amazon SQS
7 9 (5.00%) Azure DevOps
8 8 (4.44%) AWS KMS
8 8 (4.44%) Route 53
9 6 (3.33%) GitHub Copilot
10 4 (2.22%) Azure Monitor
10 4 (2.22%) GCP
11 3 (1.67%) Tricentis Tosca
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (12.22%) MongoDB
1 22 (12.22%) PostgreSQL
2 14 (7.78%) Relational Database
3 11 (6.11%) NoSQL
4 10 (5.56%) Power BI
5 9 (5.00%) Metadata
6 8 (4.44%) Amazon Aurora
6 8 (4.44%) Amazon RDS
6 8 (4.44%) DynamoDB
7 7 (3.89%) Data Warehouse
7 7 (3.89%) MySQL
7 7 (3.89%) Pentaho
8 6 (3.33%) Data Lake
9 2 (1.11%) Ingres
9 2 (1.11%) Oracle Database
9 2 (1.11%) ZAP BI
10 1 (0.56%) Amazon Athena
10 1 (0.56%) IDMS
10 1 (0.56%) SQL Server
10 1 (0.56%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 50 (27.78%) Git
2 45 (25.00%) JUnit
3 41 (22.78%) Maven
4 40 (22.22%) Jenkins
5 32 (17.78%) GitLab
6 30 (16.67%) SonarQube
7 29 (16.11%) Mockito
8 22 (12.22%) Selenium
9 19 (10.56%) JIRA
10 17 (9.44%) Gatling
11 16 (8.89%) Cucumber
12 9 (5.00%) Team Foundation Server
12 9 (5.00%) Visual Studio
13 6 (3.33%) Bitbucket Server
13 6 (3.33%) DbUnit
13 6 (3.33%) jMock
13 6 (3.33%) REST Assured
14 4 (2.22%) Serenity BDD
15 3 (1.67%) Toad
16 2 (1.11%) Cypress.io
General
1 54 (30.00%) Social Skills
2 49 (27.22%) Public Sector
3 19 (10.56%) Analytical Skills
4 9 (5.00%) Finance
5 8 (4.44%) Banking
5 8 (4.44%) Organisational Skills
6 7 (3.89%) Influencing Skills
7 2 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
7 2 (1.11%) Publishing
8 1 (0.56%) Electronics
8 1 (0.56%) Front Office
8 1 (0.56%) Investment Banking
8 1 (0.56%) Local Government
8 1 (0.56%) Military
8 1 (0.56%) Retail
Job Titles
1 63 (35.00%) Developer
2 45 (25.00%) Java Developer
3 31 (17.22%) Senior
4 28 (15.56%) Java Engineer
5 25 (13.89%) Architect
6 24 (13.33%) Lead
7 20 (11.11%) Senior Developer
8 17 (9.44%) Senior Java Developer
9 14 (7.78%) Quality Engineer
9 14 (7.78%) Scrum Master
10 8 (4.44%) Solutions Architect
11 7 (3.89%) Java Scrum Master
11 7 (3.89%) Lead Developer
11 7 (3.89%) Lead Java Developer
12 6 (3.33%) Data Architect
12 6 (3.33%) Lead Java Engineer
12 6 (3.33%) Technical Architect
13 5 (2.78%) Consultant
13 5 (2.78%) Software Engineer
13 5 (2.78%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 77 (42.78%) Spring
2 58 (32.22%) Spring Boot
3 40 (22.22%) REST
4 36 (20.00%) SOAP
5 30 (16.67%) RESTful
6 28 (15.56%) JPA
7 24 (13.33%) Playwright
8 21 (11.67%) AngularJS
9 20 (11.11%) ActiveMQ
9 20 (11.11%) Hibernate
10 19 (10.56%) Spring Cloud
10 19 (10.56%) Web Services
11 18 (10.00%) React
12 12 (6.67%) Kafka
12 12 (6.67%) OpenAPI
12 12 (6.67%) XML
13 11 (6.11%) .NET
14 10 (5.56%) Gherkin
14 10 (5.56%) JSON
14 10 (5.56%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 40 (22.22%) Cloud Native
2 22 (12.22%) Product Ownership
3 13 (7.22%) Distributed Systems
4 7 (3.89%) Linux Command Line
4 7 (3.89%) Self-Motivation
5 6 (3.33%) Autonomous Agent
5 6 (3.33%) Enterprise Software
5 6 (3.33%) Legacy Systems
6 5 (2.78%) Public Cloud
7 4 (2.22%) Private Cloud
8 3 (1.67%) Blog
8 3 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
9 2 (1.11%) Low-Code
10 1 (0.56%) Data Structures
10 1 (0.56%) Distributed Architecture
10 1 (0.56%) Greenfield Project
10 1 (0.56%) Legacy Applications
10 1 (0.56%) Legacy Code
10 1 (0.56%) Mobile App
10 1 (0.56%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 17 (9.44%) Linux
2 10 (5.56%) Unix
3 3 (1.67%) Windows
4 1 (0.56%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 98 (54.44%) Agile
2 75 (41.67%) CI/CD
3 69 (38.33%) Microservices
4 68 (37.78%) Scrum
5 59 (32.78%) Test Automation
6 53 (29.44%) DevOps
7 47 (26.11%) Continuous Improvement
8 46 (25.56%) Containerisation
9 44 (24.44%) TDD
10 39 (21.67%) Stakeholder Management
11 37 (20.56%) Technical Leadership
12 33 (18.33%) Problem-Solving
13 31 (17.22%) Test Strategy
14 27 (15.00%) Code Quality
15 26 (14.44%) Software Engineering
16 24 (13.33%) BDD
16 24 (13.33%) Sprint Planning
17 22 (12.22%) Coaching
18 21 (11.67%) Kanban
18 21 (11.67%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 39 (21.67%) SQL
2 24 (13.33%) JavaScript
3 18 (10.00%) TypeScript
4 16 (8.89%) Python
5 12 (6.67%) Shell Script
6 11 (6.11%) VB
6 11 (6.11%) VB6
7 9 (5.00%) VBA
8 8 (4.44%) PL/SQL
9 6 (3.33%) ABAP
9 6 (3.33%) C#
10 5 (2.78%) Kotlin
11 4 (2.22%) COBOL
12 3 (1.67%) Groovy
13 2 (1.11%) C
13 2 (1.11%) C++
13 2 (1.11%) R
14 1 (0.56%) Apex Code
14 1 (0.56%) VB.NET
Qualifications
1 87 (48.33%) Security Cleared
2 80 (44.44%) SC Cleared
3 53 (29.44%) BPSS Clearance
4 13 (7.22%) AWS Certification
5 5 (2.78%) ISTQB
6 3 (1.67%) Degree
6 3 (1.67%) ISEB
6 3 (1.67%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
7 2 (1.11%) Azure Certification
7 2 (1.11%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.11%) DV Cleared
8 1 (0.56%) Six Sigma Black Belt
8 1 (0.56%) Six Sigma Green Belt
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 24 (13.33%) QA
2 18 (10.00%) Accessibility
3 15 (8.33%) WCAG
4 7 (3.89%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.56%) ISO 14001
5 1 (0.56%) ISO 9001
System Software
1 57 (31.67%) Docker
2 5 (2.78%) Postfix
3 1 (0.56%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 54 (30.00%) Kubernetes
2 24 (13.33%) Grafana
3 18 (10.00%) Prometheus
4 9 (5.00%) Kibana
5 8 (4.44%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 26 (14.44%) Oracle
2 16 (8.89%) Microsoft
3 10 (5.56%) SAP
4 8 (4.44%) Jaspersoft
4 8 (4.44%) webMethods
5 7 (3.89%) Denodo
6 6 (3.33%) Atlassian
7 3 (1.67%) Dynatrace
7 3 (1.67%) Sonatype
8 2 (1.11%) Actian
8 2 (1.11%) Google
8 2 (1.11%) Splunk
9 1 (0.56%) Ariba
9 1 (0.56%) MuleSoft
9 1 (0.56%) Pega
9 1 (0.56%) Salesforce
9 1 (0.56%) Talend