Mainframe Job Trends in the South East

Mainframes
England > South East

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Mainframe in permanent job vacancies in the South East. Included is a benchmarking guide to the salaries offered in vacancies that cited Mainframe over the 6 months leading up to 8 January 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 271 - 255
Rank change year-on-year - - +150
Permanent jobs citing Mainframe 3 0 28
As % of all permanent jobs in the South East 0.029% - 0.33%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 0.095% - 1.06%
Number of salaries quoted 3 0 27
10th Percentile £67,500 - £28,480
25th Percentile £71,250 - £35,200
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 - £55,000
75th Percentile £98,125 - £57,500
90th Percentile £107,500 - £66,220
England median annual salary £65,000 £50,000 £73,000
% change year-on-year +30.00% -31.51% -8.33%

All Generic Skills
South East

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 the South East.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 3,148 3,204 2,633
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the South East 30.26% 35.09% 31.32%
Number of salaries quoted 1,600 1,382 1,788
10th Percentile £26,733 £32,750 £30,000
25th Percentile £32,500 £42,500 £39,085
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £45,000 £56,509 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -20.37% +2.74% -
75th Percentile £65,000 £70,000 £67,500
90th Percentile £77,500 £85,000 £81,800
England median annual salary £55,000 £60,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -7.69%

Mainframe
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

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

Mainframe job vacancy trend in the South East

Mainframe
Salary Trend in the South East

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Mainframe.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Mainframe

Mainframe
Salary Histogram in the South East

Salary distribution for jobs citing Mainframe in the South East over the 6 months to 8 January 2026.

Salary histogram for Mainframe in the South East

Mainframe
Job Locations in the South East

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Mainframe within the South East region over the 6 months to 8 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
Buckinghamshire - 2 £88,750 -
Thames Valley - 2 £88,750 -
Hampshire - 1 £80,000 - 1
Mainframe
England

Mainframe
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East 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 (66.67%) Apache Spark
2 1 (33.33%) SAS
Cloud Services
1 1 (33.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
1 1 (33.33%) Amazon EMR
1 1 (33.33%) AWS
1 1 (33.33%) AWS Lambda
1 1 (33.33%) AWS Step Functions
1 1 (33.33%) Serverless
1 1 (33.33%) Virtual Private Cloud
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (33.33%) DB2
1 1 (33.33%) DynamoDB
1 1 (33.33%) Hadoop
1 1 (33.33%) MariaDB
1 1 (33.33%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 1 (33.33%) Cucumber
1 1 (33.33%) Gradle
1 1 (33.33%) Jenkins
General
1 3 (100.00%) Finance
2 1 (33.33%) Analytical Skills
2 1 (33.33%) Banking
2 1 (33.33%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 1 (33.33%) Applications Manager
1 1 (33.33%) Applications Support
1 1 (33.33%) Applications Support Manager
1 1 (33.33%) Data Engineer
1 1 (33.33%) Service Manager
1 1 (33.33%) Support Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (33.33%) Drools
1 1 (33.33%) RESTful
1 1 (33.33%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 1 (33.33%) Cloud Native
1 1 (33.33%) Data Structures
1 1 (33.33%) IBM Mainframe
1 1 (33.33%) Public Cloud
1 1 (33.33%) Team-Oriented Environment
Operating Systems
1 1 (33.33%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1 (33.33%) Agile
1 1 (33.33%) BDD
1 1 (33.33%) Computer Science
1 1 (33.33%) Continuous Delivery
1 1 (33.33%) Data Analysis
1 1 (33.33%) Data Engineering
1 1 (33.33%) Data Modelling
1 1 (33.33%) DevOps
1 1 (33.33%) ETL
1 1 (33.33%) Incident Management
1 1 (33.33%) MapReduce
1 1 (33.33%) Microservices
1 1 (33.33%) Performance Tuning
1 1 (33.33%) Problem Management
1 1 (33.33%) Root Cause Analysis
1 1 (33.33%) Service Delivery
1 1 (33.33%) Service Management
1 1 (33.33%) Stakeholder Management
1 1 (33.33%) TDD
1 1 (33.33%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 2 (66.67%) Python
2 1 (33.33%) Java
2 1 (33.33%) SQL
Qualifications
1 1 (33.33%) Computer Science Degree
1 1 (33.33%) Degree
1 1 (33.33%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (33.33%) Data Quality
Systems Management
1 1 (33.33%) Ansible
1 1 (33.33%) Kubernetes
1 1 (33.33%) Prometheus
1 1 (33.33%) Terraform
Vendors
1 1 (33.33%) IBM
1 1 (33.33%) Oracle