One contractor, or the whole squad. Shortlisted in three days.
We are contract specialists for UK tech teams: data, AI, cloud, platform, engineering and architecture. One conversation covers it, whether it is a single seat or an eight-person build team. You get three shortlisted people per role inside three working days, from a network built over 25 years. Not a job advert. Not forty CVs.
No fee until someone starts. No retainer. No exclusivity.
The role has been open six weeks. The project has not moved.
You do not have a hiring problem. You have a delivery problem wearing a hiring problem’s coat. Every week that seat is empty, something downstream slips.
- ✕You advertised, got 90 applications, and none of them can do the job.
- ✕Your usual agency sent CVs on day nine. Two had already accepted elsewhere.
- ✕The good contractors are gone in 72 hours. Your process takes two weeks.
- ✕Nobody in the business will give you a straight answer on IR35, so the role sits in limbo.
- ✕You need five people, not one. Everyone you call fills the easy role and goes quiet on the other four.
- ✕Your permanent hire is four months away. The work is now.
One brief. Three days. Three names per seat.
One role or eight, it is the same brief and the same three days. No portal to log into. No 20-page process document. This is how it actually goes.
Tell us the brief
Fifteen minutes on a call, or three lines in an email. What needs building, by when, and what the budget looks like. If it is a team, tell us the shape and we will tell you which seats are hard. If we can’t fill it, you hear that on the call rather than losing a fortnight finding out.
We go to the network, not the job boards
Twenty-five years of contractors who have already delivered, plus their referrals. We work every seat in parallel rather than one at a time, speak to each person, check availability and rate, and confirm they want your project specifically.
Three CVs per role, inside three working days
Shortlisted, briefed, available and interested. On a multi-role build we sequence it by criticality (architect and tech lead in front, the rest of the squad behind them) so you start interviewing on day three instead of waiting on the full set. Most of our contractors are on site within two weeks of the first conversation.
One person, a squad, or the whole outcome
Most contract briefs arrive as one seat on a day rate, and quickly end up scaling as demands grow: flexibility is what contracting is all about. A fair number are really a team problem that has been sliced into a single requisition. We can engage with you to understand the outcomes you need, and use our 25 years of project experience to advise on how best to achieve them.
The single specialist
One person, one bottleneck. The staff engineer who can finally land the migration. The architect who can sign off the target state so four teams stop guessing. The data engineer unblocking six analysts. Three to six months, extended more often than not.
Buy it as: day rate.
The squad
Three to ten people who have to function as a unit: architect, tech lead, back-end and front-end engineers, data engineer, ML or generative AI specialist, QA, delivery lead. We shortlist every seat in parallel, sequence interviews so the lead lands before the team, and hold availability so the squad starts together rather than trickling in across ten weeks.
Buy it as: day rate per head, or Time & Materials.
The outcome
Less common, and we will be honest about when it fits. Where the scope is genuinely fixed and you would rather buy a deliverable than manage contractors, it can be structured as a Statement of Work with acceptance criteria and milestone billing. It only works if the arrangement is real: supplier-directed work, supplier-managed people, genuine delivery risk. A day rate with a Statement of Work wrapper around it is a sham arrangement and exposes everyone in the chain, so we will say no to that.
Buy it as: Statement of Work, where the scope stands up to it.
“What if we want five people to review, not three?”
Then you get fifteen (three against each of the five seats) inside the same three working days, plus one honest call telling you which two roles are the hard ones and what that will cost you in rate. A brief covering eight roles from architect through to generative AI is a normal week here.
The constraint has never been supply. It is how fast your side can interview: we have a wide network of trusted contractors, suppliers and consultancies, and in 25 years there is little we haven’t seen when it comes to delivering project resources.
What we place
Architect down to developer, data scientist through to generative AI. Senior individual contributors, hands-on leads, and complete delivery squads. UK-wide, remote or on site.
Data & AI
Data engineers, analytics engineering, data scientists, ML and generative AI engineers, data architects
Cloud & Platform
Platform engineers, SRE, DevOps, Kubernetes, AWS / Azure / GCP
Engineering
Tech leads, back-end, front-end and full-stack developers, mobile, QA and test automation
Architecture
Solution, enterprise, data and integration architects
Delivery & Interim
Programme and delivery managers, scrum masters, interim heads of function
Whole squads
Any combination of the above, resourced together and started on one date
Built for senior contract delivery
Our contract function is specialist by design. Here is where it is strongest, and what comes with it as standard.
Where we are strongest
- ✓CTOs, Heads of Engineering, Data and Platform, and Delivery Directors resourcing UK teams.
- ✓Senior contract capability: data, AI, cloud, platform, DevOps, architecture and engineering.
- ✓A whole workstream to resource, not just one seat, where nobody has offered to take the whole thing.
- ✓Consultancies and systems integrators who have won the work and now need the bench to deliver it.
- ✓Briefs with a budget and a start date, or one landing inside a month.
- ✓Buyers who want three good options per seat rather than forty average ones in a pile.
What comes with it as standard
- ✓UK-wide coverage. London, the regional tech hubs and fully remote briefs, resourced off the same network.
- ✓Compliance owned in house. Contracts, right-to-work, insurance verification and timesheets managed by us, including the October 2026 right-to-work extension and the April 2026 umbrella PAYE rules.
- ✓Retention, not just speed. 94% of placements are still in role at twelve months, so the project does not restart in month four.
- ✓Depth from architect to developer. Data scientist through to generative AI, single seats through to complete delivery squads.
- ✓A straight answer on scope. If a brief is junior, high-volume or genuinely a permanent hire, we say so on the first call and point you somewhere better.
What you get
Everything below is included. There is no version of this with a retainer attached.
The contract engagement
- ✓A shortlist of three per role inside three working days. One seat or eight. Briefed, available, rate-agreed and genuinely interested in your project.
- ✓A squad plan if it is a team. Which seats to fill first, which two will be hard, what the whole thing costs per week, and a start date the group can actually hit together.
- ✓A straight answer on IR35 before you commit. Including the year your company would actually become small under the new thresholds (which for most clients is 2027/28, not next April) and whether a contracted-out arrangement would stand up or is labour supply wearing a Statement of Work.
- ✓Rate benchmarking for the role, so you know whether you are about to underpay and waste a month finding out.
- ✓Contracts, right-to-work, insurance and timesheets handled. You approve hours, we invoice, they get paid.
- ✓Day rate or Time & Materials as standard. Statement of Work is available where the scope genuinely warrants it, but most briefs run on day rate and we will not push you off it.
- ✓The consultant who takes your brief runs it end to end. No handover to an account team, no portal, no new contact every quarter.
No fee until a contractor starts. If the shortlist isn’t there in three working days, we say so and you have lost nothing. If someone doesn’t work out in the first two weeks, we replace them and you don’t pay twice.
Every engagement is IR35 compliant, status determination done properly and paperwork handled. 25 years in this sector stand behind that.
When does the new small-company exemption actually apply to us?
For most UK companies, the earliest tax year affected is 2027/28, not April 2026. Roughly half the guidance online says April 2026, and it is wrong. The Companies Act thresholds did rise for financial years beginning on or after 6 April 2025, but off-payroll status is tested across two consecutive financial years and runs on filed accounts, so the exemption lands later than the threshold change. HMRC’s own guidance at ESM10006a states the earliest tax year most clients are affected is 2027/28. Around 14,000 companies are expected to move from medium to small on the new numbers.
The three tests, for financial years beginning on or after 6 April 2025, you must meet two of the three:
Turnover
Balance sheet total
Employees
Our year end is X. What year do we stop making status determinations?
Nobody publishes this as a table, so here is one. Worked on the two-consecutive-year test and the accounts filing lag. Confirm with your accountant before you change anything.
| Your financial year end | First FY under the new thresholds | Earliest tax year the exemption can apply |
|---|---|---|
| 31 December 2025 | FY beginning 1 Jan 2026 | 6 April 2028 |
| 31 March 2026 | FY beginning 1 Apr 2026 | 6 April 2028 |
| 28 February 2025 | FY beginning 1 Mar 2025 | 6 April 2027 |
| 31 July 2025 or later in 2025 | FY beginning Aug 2025 onward | 6 April 2028 |
Two-of-three test applied over two consecutive financial years. HMRC ESM10006a. Note that HMRC’s own ESM10006 page still displays the superseded £10.2m and £5.1m figures, cite ESM10006a, not ESM10006.
What else changes for contract hiring in 2026?
Umbrella PAYE, 6 April 2026. Where an umbrella company sits in the labour supply chain, PAYE and NIC liability becomes joint and several. It falls first on the agency above the umbrella, and on the end client directly where there is no agency between the client and the umbrella. If you engage umbrella workers without an agency in the chain, that liability is now yours.
Right to work, 1 October 2026. The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 extends right-to-work checks beyond employees to workers under a worker’s contract, individual sub-contractors, gig and platform workers and agency workers. Penalties are £45,000 for a first breach and £60,000 for a repeat. Every contractor on your site is in scope from that date.
Employer NI. 15% above a £5,000 secondary threshold for 2026/27, with the threshold frozen through to 2030/31. That is the number that moves an inside-IR35 rate away from an outside one.
Is the outside-IR35 market shrinking?
Yes, and it matters to what you can hire. IPSE’s January 2026 research puts 70% of engagements outside IR35, down from 80% in 2023-24, with 67% of contractors reporting lower confidence than a year earlier. Qdos found in January 2026 that a quarter of contractors name the lack of outside-IR35 opportunity as the single biggest threat to their business. Meanwhile HMRC’s CEST tool has quietly collapsed as a reference point: determinations fell from 458,894 in 2023/24 to 135,178 in 2025/26, a 71% drop, and around one in five still return indeterminate.
The commercial read: if your engagement is genuinely outside and the brief says so, you are competing for candidates in a shrinking pool that everyone wants to be in. That is worth more to you than another £50 a day on the rate.
We are recruiters, not tax advisers, and this is not tax advice. We will tell you where you appear to sit and what most clients in your position do, then your accountant confirms it.
Twenty-five years of doing exactly this
The market competes on time to shortlist. The number that decides whether your project lands is the one underneath it, whether the person is still there at the end.
Still in role at twelve months
Placements since 2013
Average time to hire, brief to start
Founding-team experience in the UK tech market
Hurren & Hope placement records, 2013 to date. Time to hire measured from brief received to agreed start date across contract and permanent placements.
“Hurren & Hope bring an integrity and honesty to recruitment that’s so important when bringing talent into an organisation. They impressed not just me but my whole team with their commitment to quality. I recommend them wholeheartedly.”
David Callow
Chief Information Officer, NHS Professionals
“Hurren & Hope are a preferred supplier for Penguin Random House and gave excellent, personable service through a challenging, complex integration. The team goes the extra mile, with a high degree of integrity.”
Stephen Hardwick
Systems Specialist, Penguin Random House
“Hurren & Hope REALLY care, about the company they’re helping and the candidate, and getting it right for both. Simply put, they’re the benchmark for how recruiters should act. I’ve gone back to them for over 15 years, across multiple industries.”
Adam Bell
People & Culture Director, Beyond One
What does a UK tech contractor cost per day in 2026?
Below are independent market medians, not our rates: six-month rolling figures to mid-2026 from ITJobsWatch’s advertised-vacancy sample, published openly rather than behind a form. We do not quote from this table. What a role actually costs on a live brief depends on IR35 status, location, duration, notice and how scarce the skill is that month, which is why the direction-of-travel column matters more than any single number.
If you want the number for your role rather than the market’s, we will benchmark it on a fifteen-minute call and tell you where your budget actually lands.
| Role | Market median — ITJobsWatch | Direction of travel | London | Outside London |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solutions Architect | £625 | +0.6% | — | — |
| Software Engineer | £575 | −4.2% | £631 | £525 |
| Cyber Security | £560 | +3.7% | — | — |
| AI Engineer | £550 | — | — | — |
| AWS | £525 | — | — | — |
| Python | £525 | — | — | — |
| Azure | £520 | — | — | — |
| DevOps | £513 | −5.3% | — | — |
| Data Engineer | £500 | flat | £525 | £469 |
| Lead Data Scientist | £725 | — | — | — |
This table is the market. It is not our quotation.
The figures above are independent published medians, restated every quarter from market data rather than from our own billing. We do not price from this table and nor should you: it is here so you can see the shape of the market before you pick up the phone.
Best value is a concept we believe in strongly. You can expect competitive rates, with our margins frequently far lower than the sector, agreed up front, shown separately on the contract and fixed for the engagement. Consultancy quality hires without the price tag.
These are third-party medians for contractor pay across advertised UK vacancies. They are not a Hurren & Hope quotation, not a bill rate, and they exclude agency margin, employer NI where an engagement is inside IR35, and any umbrella costs. Treat them as the shape of the market, not as a price list.
Sources: ITJobsWatch UK medians, six-month rolling period to mid-2026; ContractorUK contract rate report, November 2025. Highest observed UK tech contract rates in the same period: Head of Data Science / AI £1,050 and Quant Developer £1,000 per day. This is a live index, not a one-off snapshot: it is checked against the market every month and fully restated every quarter, on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October. Last reviewed .
How long does it take to hire a contractor in the UK?
Here, three shortlisted people per role inside three working days, and we have had contractors start within 24 hours: the constraint is usually your side, not ours. The gap between shortlist and agreed start is almost entirely your interview process, not sourcing. There is no independent benchmark for UK contract tech time-to-hire: every figure published, including ours, is self-reported by the agency publishing it, so treat the comparison accordingly and ask what the measurement runs from.
What does a recruitment agency charge for a contractor?
A margin on the contractor’s day rate, charged for every day worked. Almost nobody in the UK publishes a band, which is why the question keeps getting asked. Typical UK tech contract margins sit between 10% and 25% depending on volume, seniority and whether the agency carries payroll funding. We agree ours up front at a fixed figure, not a percentage, show it separately on the contract, and fix it for the engagement, so if the contractor’s rate rises at extension, our margin does not rise with it. When we say “best value” we genuinely mean it: fairness to you the client and to our contractors is vital, and we are just as transparent with our contractors about our margins.
Is the UK contract market recovering?
Partly. KPMG and the REC reported in July 2026 that temporary billings rose at their sharpest rate in over three years. IT contractor hiring returned to growth in May 2026 after 33 consecutive months of contraction, then cooled again in June. APSCo and CV-Library put UK tech vacancies at 126,861 in Q2 2026, up 4.3% year on year, but with contract hiring flat year on year and down 6.1% on the quarter. The exception is AI: AI vacancies grew 41.8% year on year and AI Engineer postings 74.4%. Practically, that means the generalist market is soft and the AI and data market is not, plan your rate accordingly.
Sources: KPMG/REC UK Report on Jobs, July 2026; ContractorUK; APSCo and CV-Library Q2 2026 labour market data. Last reviewed 27 July 2026.
The questions everyone asks
How can you shortlist in three days when everyone else takes two weeks?
Because we are not starting from scratch. Twenty-five years in this market means the shortlist is largely people we already know, have already placed, or who have been referred by someone we placed. We are making calls, not writing adverts.
We need a team, not one contractor. Does the three-day promise still hold?
Yes, and it is the same brief. Three shortlisted people per role, all seats worked in parallel. On a five-role build that is fifteen CVs in three working days. What changes on a team is the sequencing conversation rather than the timeline: we will tell you which seat to interview first, which two roles are genuinely scarce in the UK right now, and where you may need to move on rate or accept a slightly different shape to keep the start date.
Can you take the whole thing off us rather than sending contractors to manage?
Sometimes, and it is worth being straight about when. That is the Statement of Work route: we scope the deliverables, agree acceptance criteria and milestones, put the team together and manage it. For that to be a genuine contracted-out service rather than labour supply with a nicer cover sheet, HMRC looks at the commercial reality, we define the work and the resourcing, our people report to us rather than into your line management, and we carry real delivery risk with milestone billing rather than a day rate in disguise. Most briefs are not actually shaped that way, and we will tell you when yours is not.
What does it cost?
A margin on the day rate, agreed up front and fixed for the engagement. You see the contractor’s rate and our margin, no hidden spread. Nothing is payable until someone starts work.
Can you work to a Statement of Work rather than day rate?
Where it genuinely fits, yes, but most of what we do is day rate or Time & Materials, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a structure you do not need. A Statement of Work makes sense when the scope is fixed, the deliverables are definable and you want to buy an outcome rather than manage people. It does not make sense on an open-ended engineering seat, and dressing one up as the other creates a compliance problem rather than solving one.
What changes for us with umbrella companies in April 2026?
From 6 April 2026, where an umbrella company sits in the labour supply chain the PAYE and NIC liability becomes joint and several. It falls first on the agency directly above the umbrella. Critically, where there is no agency between you and the umbrella, it falls on you as the end client. If you currently engage umbrella contractors directly, that is the change worth taking to your finance team this quarter. Where we are the agency in the chain, that liability sits with us.
Do right-to-work checks apply to contractors?
From 1 October 2026, yes, considerably more of them. The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 extends the checks beyond employees to workers under a worker’s contract, individual sub-contractors, gig and platform workers and agency workers. Penalties are £45,000 for a first breach and £60,000 for a repeat. We run the checks on everyone we place and hold the evidence, so the file exists if you are ever asked for it.
Who carries the employment risk?
We do the contracts, right-to-work checks and insurance verification, and we invoice you. Where the engagement is inside IR35 we run it through a compliant umbrella. Where you are exempt under the small-company rules, the contractor’s own company determines status.
What if the contractor isn’t right?
Contracting is about hitting the ground running and enabling forward momentum. If that isn’t happening, we need to talk immediately. We are yet to remove a contractor from site, but we are prepared to do so without hesitation where deliverables are not being met.
Do you cover outside the UK?
Our contract function is UK-only. We do place permanent staff in San Francisco and New York, different conversation, same phone number.
The fastest way to fill a contract seat is a conversation.
Contract moves too quickly for forms and long briefs. Give us fifteen minutes on a call or a video meeting and we will tell you who is available, what they cost and how fast they can be on site, or tell you straight that we are not the right fit for it.
You get a contract consultant on the phone rather than a switchboard, and most requirements are qualified inside fifteen minutes.
Put a meeting in the diary
Tell us when suits and we will set up a call or a video meeting, same working day. You will be talking to the person who will actually run the search.
No lengthy brief, no newsletter and no drip campaign, just a conversation with someone who knows the market. If we are not the right partner for what you are building, we will say so on the first call.
Rates, legislation dates and market data on this page last reviewed . Reviewed quarterly.
