Research on UK developers and UK hiring.

There are 26.2 developers on GitHub per 10,000 people in the UK (181,672 developers).

9% of UK developers active on GitHub since January 2025 are building AI projects, against 13.5% in China (n=105,838 UK developers).

33% of UK developers building AI name a specific model provider in their projects, against 39% in China (n=9,542).

Python is the main language of 25.3% of UK developers on GitHub (China 29.6%; n=139,576).

Exeter developers are 5.9x as likely as the UK average to code mainly in R (11% vs 1.9%; n=418 developers in Exeter).

TypeScript is 19.1% of the programming-language repositories UK developers worked on in 2026, against 6.8% of those left untouched since 2021–22 (+12.3 points; n=152,194 repositories; markup, shell and unlabelled repositories not counted).

Where GitHub reports the flag (about a third of profiles), 14.8% of UK developers say they are available for hire, against 7.9% in China (n=65,169).

Where GitHub reports a last-activity date (about two in five profiles), 53.8% of UK developers were active in the last 12 months, against 50.1% in China (n=70,367).

17.6% of UK developers who give an employer on GitHub name a university or research institute; 3.7% name a big tech company (n=67,965).

65% of China's developers on GitHub who name a city are in just four cities (n=167,800).

1.7% of UK employers' non-tech job adverts ask for or involve AI skills or tools (averaged across employers; n=6,634 employers).

23,212 roles are live this week on the careers pages of the 6,424 UK employers we track that have live roles (counting at most 50 per employer; not a UK-wide vacancy total).

UK employers added 3,164 roles and removed 3,503 in the last 30 days (net -339; n=970 employers; at most 50 each way counted per employer).

At the median UK employer, a job advert stays live for 16.8 days before it comes down (n=557 employers).

3.3% of UK employers' new adverts since 2026-09-02 re-advertised a role they had taken down for more than two weeks (averaged across employers; n=1,317 employers).

Only 34.3% of UK employers' job adverts state a salary; 19.1% just say "competitive" (n=6,957 employers).

The median UK employer advertises a salary midpoint of £30,820 (n=2,684 employers).

16.2% of UK employers' job adverts explicitly offer hybrid or remote work (10.6% hybrid, 5.6% remote; n=6,957 employers). Of the adverts that state a working pattern at all, 73.7% are hybrid or remote.

0.4% of UK employers advertise a four-day week on their careers pages; 4.9% offer private medical (n=74,233 employers).

1.7% of UK employers' entry-level adverts ask for two or more years' experience (n=741 employers).

17.7% of UK employers' job adverts lean masculine in their wording (avg 4.8 masculine vs 9.1 feminine-coded words; n=6,957 employers).

0.4% of UK employers offer visa sponsorship on at least one advert, while 3.6% explicitly rule it out (n=6,957 employers).

68.4% of UK employers' adverts that state a basis are permanent; 9.8% are apprenticeships (n=2,903 employers).

Only 5.5% of UK employers' live roles are entry-level (n=6,426 employers).

10.5% of UK employers include a diversity or equal-opportunities statement on their careers pages (n=74,233 employers).