The UK .NET Market in 2025 – Still Strong, But Changing Fast

If you’d asked us a few years ago whether .NET would still be such a big deal in 2025, we might’ve hesitated. But here we are – and not only is .NET still alive and well, it’s quietly powering a massive chunk of the UK tech scene.

From fintechs in London to healthtech suppliers working with the NHS, .NET is everywhere. But the kind of .NET roles we’re seeing now aren’t quite the same as the ones we saw even two years ago.

The demand has shifted. It’s no longer about finding someone who can just write C# and move on. Now it’s about engineers who understand cloud-native development, can navigate complex legacy systems and help modernise them, and who get how .NET fits into broader engineering teams using all sorts of stacks.

A lot of companies in the UK are in this awkward in-between phase. They’ve got older monoliths still running mission-critical workloads, but they’re also under pressure to modernise – think Azure migrations, containerisation, and microservices. That means .NET engineers who’ve stayed up to date (hello, .NET 8) are in a great spot right now.

But here’s where things get tricky: the market looks quiet, but it isn’t.

We’ve seen a slowdown in permanent hiring, especially outside of London – no surprise there, given the cautious spending across tech in general. But that doesn’t mean companies aren’t hiring .NET talent. They’re just being more selective, and looking for people who can bring long-term value, not just short-term output.

Contract roles, on the other hand, have picked up in specific niches – especially where older systems need stabilising, integrating, or slowly refactoring without breaking the whole thing. If you’ve got experience balancing old and new, and you can speak both the language of legacy and modern architecture, you’re gold.

For hiring managers, the challenge right now isn’t just finding .NET engineers – it’s finding ones who’ve grown with the ecosystem. Those who stuck to Web Forms and never touched cloud infrastructure are getting filtered out. But those who’ve kept learning, and can work across product, platform, and architecture – they’re getting snapped up quickly.

And for .NET engineers? Don’t undersell the value of your legacy knowledge, especially if you can pair it with experience in Azure, containers, and CI/CD. You’re probably more valuable than you think.

We’re still placing a lot of .NET talent across the UK – but the shape of the demand has definitely changed. If you’re hiring, or looking, and want to talk through what the market really looks like right now (beyond the job boards), give us a shout.