Mainframe Job Trends in England

Mainframes
UK > England

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Mainframe in permanent job vacancies in England. Included is a benchmarking guide to the salaries offered in vacancies that cited Mainframe over the 6 months leading up to 15 January 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 590 599 551
Rank change year-on-year +9 -48 +291
Permanent jobs citing Mainframe 12 63 132
As % of all permanent jobs in England 0.023% 0.13% 0.27%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 0.065% 0.35% 0.74%
Number of salaries quoted 10 39 106
10th Percentile £50,000 - £33,250
25th Percentile £56,750 - £47,556
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,500 £50,000 £73,000
Median % change year-on-year +41.00% -31.51% -8.33%
75th Percentile £81,875 £62,500 £95,000
90th Percentile £85,625 £90,822 £100,064
UK median annual salary £65,000 £50,000 £79,632
% change year-on-year +30.00% -37.21% +1.91%

All Generic Skills
England

Mainframe falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring generic IT skills in England.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 18,582 18,054 17,803
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in England 35.00% 37.44% 36.28%
Number of salaries quoted 9,413 8,499 13,221
10th Percentile £27,787 £34,000 £31,549
25th Percentile £36,750 £46,250 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -7.69%
75th Percentile £78,750 £85,000 £83,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £112,500 £107,500
UK median annual salary £55,000 £60,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -7.69%

Mainframe
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Mainframe relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in England.

Mainframe job vacancy trend in England

Mainframe
Salary Trend in England

Salary distribution trend for jobs in England citing Mainframe.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in England citing Mainframe

Mainframe
Salary Histogram in England

Salary distribution for jobs citing Mainframe in England over the 6 months to 15 January 2026.

Salary histogram for Mainframe in England

Mainframe
Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Mainframe within the England region over the 6 months to 15 January 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
Midlands +22 4 £52,000 +60.00% 1
London +35 3 £80,000 +60.00% 10
West Midlands +21 3 £50,000 +53.85%
South East - 3 £80,000 - 2
North of England -11 2 £78,000 -10.64% 1
Yorkshire -13 2 £78,000 -13.28% 1
East Midlands -12 1 £54,000 - 1
Mainframe
UK

Mainframe
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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 2 (16.67%) Apache Spark
2 1 (8.33%) CICS
2 1 (8.33%) SAS
2 1 (8.33%) WebSphere
Cloud Services
1 2 (16.67%) AWS
2 1 (8.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
2 1 (8.33%) Amazon EMR
2 1 (8.33%) Amazon S3
2 1 (8.33%) AWS Lambda
2 1 (8.33%) AWS Step Functions
2 1 (8.33%) Cohesity
2 1 (8.33%) Nutanix
2 1 (8.33%) Serverless
2 1 (8.33%) Virtual Private Cloud
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (33.33%) DB2
2 2 (16.67%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (8.33%) Adabas
3 1 (8.33%) DynamoDB
3 1 (8.33%) Hadoop
3 1 (8.33%) IMS/DB
3 1 (8.33%) MariaDB
Development Applications
1 1 (8.33%) Cucumber
1 1 (8.33%) Gradle
1 1 (8.33%) Jenkins
General
1 9 (75.00%) Finance
2 3 (25.00%) Banking
3 2 (16.67%) Back Office
3 2 (16.67%) Marketing
3 2 (16.67%) Retail
4 1 (8.33%) Analytical Skills
4 1 (8.33%) Dutch Language
4 1 (8.33%) Financial Institution
4 1 (8.33%) French Language
4 1 (8.33%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 3 (25.00%) Applications Manager
2 2 (16.67%) Application Development Manager
2 2 (16.67%) Applications Development Manager
2 2 (16.67%) Developer
2 2 (16.67%) Development Manager
2 2 (16.67%) IBM Mainframe Developer
2 2 (16.67%) Lead
2 2 (16.67%) Mainframe Developer
3 1 (8.33%) Administrator
3 1 (8.33%) Applications Support
3 1 (8.33%) Applications Support Manager
3 1 (8.33%) COBOL Developer
3 1 (8.33%) Data Engineer
3 1 (8.33%) Programme Manager
3 1 (8.33%) Senior
3 1 (8.33%) Senior Developer
3 1 (8.33%) Senior Mainframe Developer
3 1 (8.33%) Service Manager
3 1 (8.33%) Support Manager
3 1 (8.33%) VMware Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (8.33%) Drools
1 1 (8.33%) JSON
1 1 (8.33%) RESTful
1 1 (8.33%) Spring
1 1 (8.33%) WebSphere MQ
1 1 (8.33%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 3 (25.00%) Legacy Applications
2 2 (16.67%) Distributed Systems
2 2 (16.67%) Enterprise Software
2 2 (16.67%) IBM Mainframe
2 2 (16.67%) Public Cloud
3 1 (8.33%) Cloud Native
3 1 (8.33%) Data Structures
3 1 (8.33%) Tandem
3 1 (8.33%) Team-Oriented Environment
3 1 (8.33%) VxBlock/Vblock
Operating Systems
1 2 (16.67%) Linux
2 1 (8.33%) MVS
2 1 (8.33%) Windows
2 1 (8.33%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 4 (33.33%) Agile
1 4 (33.33%) Service Management
2 3 (25.00%) Customer Experience
2 3 (25.00%) ITSM
2 3 (25.00%) Service Delivery
3 2 (16.67%) Coaching
3 2 (16.67%) DevOps
3 2 (16.67%) ITIL
3 2 (16.67%) Logistics
3 2 (16.67%) Performance Tuning
3 2 (16.67%) PRINCE2
3 2 (16.67%) Project Delivery
3 2 (16.67%) Project Management
3 2 (16.67%) Resource Management
3 2 (16.67%) Stakeholder Management
3 2 (16.67%) Strategic Management
4 1 (8.33%) Computer Science
4 1 (8.33%) Incident Management
4 1 (8.33%) Problem Management
4 1 (8.33%) Vulnerability Assessment
Programming Languages
1 4 (33.33%) COBOL
2 2 (16.67%) Java
2 2 (16.67%) JCL
2 2 (16.67%) Python
2 2 (16.67%) SQL
3 1 (8.33%) Natural
3 1 (8.33%) PL/1
3 1 (8.33%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 1 (8.33%) Computer Science Degree
1 1 (8.33%) Degree
1 1 (8.33%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (8.33%) Data Quality
System Software
1 1 (8.33%) Time Sharing Option
1 1 (8.33%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 2 (16.67%) Ansible
1 2 (16.67%) CA Endevor
2 1 (8.33%) Kubernetes
2 1 (8.33%) Prometheus
2 1 (8.33%) Terraform
Vendors
1 3 (25.00%) IBM
2 1 (8.33%) Oracle
2 1 (8.33%) Syncsort
2 1 (8.33%) VMware