Software Engineering Job Trends

Software Engineering
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Software Engineering skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 9 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 19 10
Rank change year-on-year +5 -9 +7
Permanent jobs citing Software Engineering 6,439 4,203 12,395
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 7.01% 9.50% 11.75%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 9.62% 10.25% 14.22%
Number of salaries quoted 4,766 2,451 7,924
10th Percentile £46,789 £43,750 £40,000
25th Percentile £55,875 £55,000 £47,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £74,500 £61,000
Median % change year-on-year -6.04% +22.13% -12.86%
75th Percentile £91,250 £102,500 £82,512
90th Percentile £100,000 £130,000 £110,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £65,000 £65,000 £57,500
% change year-on-year - +13.04% -4.17%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Software Engineering falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 66,949 41,023 87,141
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 72.83% 92.72% 82.59%
Number of salaries quoted 45,661 21,815 61,905
10th Percentile £30,000 £29,000 £29,500
25th Percentile £41,250 £40,000 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £57,500 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +4.35% +4.55% -9.54%
75th Percentile £78,750 £77,500 £72,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £100,000 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £50,055 £50,000
% change year-on-year +4.89% +0.11% -9.09%

Software Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Software Engineering relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Software Engineering job vacancy trend in the UK

Software Engineering
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Software Engineering.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Software Engineering

Software Engineering
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Software Engineering over the 6 months to 9 June 2026.

Salary histogram for Software Engineering in the UK

Software Engineering
Top 18 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Software Engineering within the UK over the 6 months to 9 June 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
England +6 5,819 £70,000 -6.67% 1,608
UK excluding London +5 4,247 £65,000 - 1,192
London +2 1,894 £95,000 -5.00% 560
Work from Home +2 1,864 £72,500 -3.16% 815
North of England 0 1,178 £67,500 - 293
South East +36 1,166 £65,000 - 377
North West +10 691 £70,000 +3.70% 170
South West +2 671 £65,000 +8.33% 194
East of England +30 466 £70,000 +16.67% 160
Midlands +6 395 £65,000 - 103
Yorkshire +2 335 £65,000 -4.76% 60
Scotland -10 230 £65,000 +4.00% 39
West Midlands -7 206 £67,500 - 61
East Midlands +12 188 £55,000 -15.38% 42
North East 0 152 £67,500 +22.73% 63
Wales +5 107 £50,810 -25.28% 21
Northern Ireland -11 35 £90,000 -30.77% 31
Isle of Man - 3 £35,000 -

Software Engineering
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 45 (0.70%) Apache Spark
2 37 (0.57%) Apache
3 28 (0.43%) Apache Airflow
4 25 (0.39%) SharePoint
5 23 (0.36%) Confluence
6 19 (0.30%) CMS
7 16 (0.25%) SharePoint Server
8 10 (0.16%) WordPress
9 9 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
10 8 (0.12%) FactoryTalk
10 8 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
11 7 (0.11%) SAS
11 7 (0.11%) Sitecore CMS
12 6 (0.093%) Jupyter
13 4 (0.062%) Apache Solr
13 4 (0.062%) Ethereum
13 4 (0.062%) GeoServer
13 4 (0.062%) Headless CMS
13 4 (0.062%) nginx
14 3 (0.047%) ArcGIS
Applications
1 19 (0.30%) Chatbot
2 18 (0.28%) Microsoft Excel
3 15 (0.23%) CATIA
3 15 (0.23%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 12 (0.19%) Simulink
5 7 (0.11%) MS Visio
6 5 (0.078%) Microsoft Office
7 4 (0.062%) CANalyzer
7 4 (0.062%) EngageOne
7 4 (0.062%) Windchill
8 3 (0.047%) AutoCAD
8 3 (0.047%) Blender
8 3 (0.047%) EPLAN
8 3 (0.047%) Maya
8 3 (0.047%) Stateflow
9 2 (0.031%) Lightworks
9 2 (0.031%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.016%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.016%) Microsoft Project
10 1 (0.016%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 11 (0.17%) Magento
2 5 (0.078%) Visualfiles
3 3 (0.047%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.047%) SAP S/4HANA
4 2 (0.031%) Distributed Ledger
4 2 (0.031%) Payment Gateway
4 2 (0.031%) ResourceLink
4 2 (0.031%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.016%) Oracle Applications
5 1 (0.016%) Oracle EBS
5 1 (0.016%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 1,269 (19.71%) AWS
2 779 (12.10%) Azure
3 453 (7.04%) GCP
4 416 (6.46%) SaaS
5 194 (3.01%) Serverless
6 176 (2.73%) GitHub
7 97 (1.51%) AWS Lambda
8 95 (1.48%) Azure DevOps
9 86 (1.34%) Amazon EKS
10 79 (1.23%) Anthropic Claude
11 77 (1.20%) Amazon S3
12 76 (1.18%) AWS CloudFormation
13 61 (0.95%) GitHub Actions
14 43 (0.67%) Amazon EC2
15 41 (0.64%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 41 (0.64%) Datadog
16 40 (0.62%) Figma
17 37 (0.57%) GitHub Copilot
17 37 (0.57%) Power Platform
18 30 (0.47%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 156 (2.42%) Broadband
2 55 (0.85%) Wireless
3 36 (0.56%) HTTP
4 33 (0.51%) Ethernet
4 33 (0.51%) Network Security
5 24 (0.37%) TCP/IP
6 23 (0.36%) Bluetooth
6 23 (0.36%) RS-232
7 21 (0.33%) Modbus
8 18 (0.28%) Multicast
9 13 (0.20%) LTE
10 12 (0.19%) Wi-Fi
11 11 (0.17%) Firewall
11 11 (0.17%) MQTT
11 11 (0.17%) Profibus
11 11 (0.17%) ZigBee
12 10 (0.16%) VoIP
13 8 (0.12%) AMQP
13 8 (0.12%) RS-485
14 7 (0.11%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 188 (2.92%) PostgreSQL
2 151 (2.35%) SQL Server
3 129 (2.00%) NoSQL
4 124 (1.93%) MongoDB
5 94 (1.46%) MySQL
6 60 (0.93%) Elasticsearch
7 51 (0.79%) Relational Database
8 46 (0.71%) Big Data
9 40 (0.62%) DynamoDB
10 34 (0.53%) BigQuery
10 34 (0.53%) Data Warehouse
11 31 (0.48%) Amazon RDS
12 24 (0.37%) Power BI
13 22 (0.34%) Redis
14 19 (0.30%) Azure SQL Database
15 18 (0.28%) Geospatial Data
16 17 (0.26%) GIS
17 15 (0.23%) Neo4j
18 12 (0.19%) Hadoop
19 10 (0.16%) Data Lake
Development Applications
1 263 (4.08%) Git
2 99 (1.54%) JIRA
3 89 (1.38%) GitLab
4 88 (1.37%) Jenkins
5 71 (1.10%) Claude Code
5 71 (1.10%) TeamCity
6 44 (0.68%) Rational DOORS
7 40 (0.62%) CircleCI
8 21 (0.33%) Visual Studio
8 21 (0.33%) Visual Studio Code
9 16 (0.25%) Cucumber
10 14 (0.22%) Bitbucket
10 14 (0.22%) Storybook
10 14 (0.22%) Subversion
11 13 (0.20%) Postman
12 11 (0.17%) Cypress.io
12 11 (0.17%) MLflow
12 11 (0.17%) SonarQube
13 8 (0.12%) Maven
13 8 (0.12%) Yeoman
General
1 895 (13.90%) Finance
2 591 (9.18%) Social Skills
3 281 (4.36%) Banking
4 210 (3.26%) Manufacturing
5 195 (3.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 177 (2.75%) Analytical Skills
6 177 (2.75%) Electronics
7 171 (2.66%) Public Sector
8 157 (2.44%) Retail
9 135 (2.10%) Aerospace
10 125 (1.94%) Law
11 90 (1.40%) Front Office
12 86 (1.34%) Games
13 81 (1.26%) Automotive
14 64 (0.99%) Legal
15 60 (0.93%) Aviation
16 59 (0.92%) Financial Institution
17 49 (0.76%) Telecoms
18 48 (0.75%) Back Office
19 39 (0.61%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 4,143 (64.34%) Software Engineer
2 1,684 (26.15%) Senior
3 1,251 (19.43%) Senior Software Engineer
4 757 (11.76%) Developer
5 740 (11.49%) Lead
6 555 (8.62%) Embedded Engineer
7 511 (7.94%) Embedded Software Engineer
8 402 (6.24%) Lead Software Engineer
9 364 (5.65%) Principal Engineer
10 313 (4.86%) C++ Software Engineer
11 283 (4.40%) Principal Software Engineer
12 282 (4.38%) Python Engineer
13 281 (4.36%) Full-Stack Engineer
14 273 (4.24%) C# Software Engineer
15 228 (3.54%) Full-Stack Software Engineer
16 225 (3.49%) Python Software Engineer
17 222 (3.45%) Java Engineer
18 218 (3.39%) Software Developer
19 214 (3.32%) Engineering Manager
20 200 (3.11%) Software Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 657 (10.20%) .NET
2 562 (8.73%) React
3 352 (5.47%) Node.js
4 242 (3.76%) REST
5 207 (3.21%) RESTful
6 168 (2.61%) Spring
7 147 (2.28%) AngularJS
8 141 (2.19%) Kafka
8 141 (2.19%) Vue
9 133 (2.07%) Spring Boot
10 106 (1.65%) HTML
11 104 (1.62%) CSS
12 95 (1.48%) .NET Core
13 79 (1.23%) gRPC
14 78 (1.21%) Next.js
15 74 (1.15%) Django
16 73 (1.13%) GraphQL
17 67 (1.04%) .NET Framework
18 64 (0.99%) WPF
19 63 (0.98%) Redux
Miscellaneous
1 484 (7.52%) Cloud Native
2 286 (4.44%) Distributed Systems
3 249 (3.87%) Product Ownership
4 227 (3.53%) Algorithms
5 161 (2.50%) Robotics
6 139 (2.16%) Embedded Systems
7 106 (1.65%) AI Agents
8 87 (1.35%) IoT
9 86 (1.34%) Legacy Systems
10 84 (1.30%) Data Structures
10 84 (1.30%) Public Cloud
11 83 (1.29%) Video\Live Streaming
12 79 (1.23%) Greenfield Project
13 78 (1.21%) Mobile App
14 76 (1.18%) Fixed Income
15 67 (1.04%) Onboarding
16 58 (0.90%) Distributed Architecture
17 53 (0.82%) Over-the-Top Content
18 52 (0.81%) Hedge funds
19 48 (0.75%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 340 (5.28%) Linux
2 67 (1.04%) Windows
3 63 (0.98%) Embedded Linux
4 45 (0.70%) Android
5 23 (0.36%) FreeRTOS
6 16 (0.25%) Apple iOS
7 12 (0.19%) CentOS
8 10 (0.16%) Robot Operating System
9 9 (0.14%) Windows Server
10 6 (0.093%) Debian
10 6 (0.093%) Ubuntu
10 6 (0.093%) Unix
11 5 (0.078%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
12 2 (0.031%) Mac OS
12 2 (0.031%) SafeRTOS
12 2 (0.031%) ThreadX
12 2 (0.031%) Windows 10
12 2 (0.031%) Windows Server 2019
12 2 (0.031%) zOS
13 1 (0.016%) VxWorks
Processes & Methodologies
1 989 (15.36%) CI/CD
2 966 (15.00%) Agile
3 865 (13.43%) Full-Stack Development
4 857 (13.31%) AI
5 702 (10.90%) DevOps
6 607 (9.43%) Problem-Solving
7 606 (9.41%) Mentoring
8 573 (8.90%) Microservices
9 503 (7.81%) Continuous Improvement
10 500 (7.77%) Test Automation
11 420 (6.52%) Computer Science
11 420 (6.52%) Technical Leadership
12 381 (5.92%) Roadmaps
13 374 (5.81%) Containerisation
14 345 (5.36%) SDLC
15 340 (5.28%) Machine Learning
16 322 (5.00%) Infrastructure as Code
17 295 (4.58%) Fintech
18 274 (4.26%) Clean Code
19 260 (4.04%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 1,348 (20.93%) Python
2 847 (13.15%) Java
3 803 (12.47%) C#
4 709 (11.01%) C++
5 560 (8.70%) TypeScript
6 556 (8.63%) JavaScript
7 476 (7.39%) SQL
8 280 (4.35%) C
9 268 (4.16%) Go
10 174 (2.70%) Rust
11 96 (1.49%) PHP
12 84 (1.30%) Scala
13 64 (0.99%) Embedded C
14 58 (0.90%) Bash
15 42 (0.65%) Kotlin
15 42 (0.65%) Ruby
16 38 (0.59%) MATLAB
17 22 (0.34%) PowerShell
18 19 (0.30%) Embedded C++
19 18 (0.28%) COBOL
Qualifications
1 568 (8.82%) Degree
2 524 (8.14%) Security Cleared
3 332 (5.16%) SC Cleared
4 247 (3.84%) Computer Science Degree
5 194 (3.01%) DV Cleared
6 92 (1.43%) Master's Degree
7 70 (1.09%) BPSS Clearance
8 49 (0.76%) PhD
9 41 (0.64%) AWS Certification
10 32 (0.50%) DBS Check
11 27 (0.42%) Chartered Engineer
12 22 (0.34%) Azure Certification
12 22 (0.34%) Microsoft Certification
13 18 (0.28%) HNC
14 17 (0.26%) HND
15 11 (0.17%) Microsoft Certified Professional
16 8 (0.12%) ISTQB
17 7 (0.11%) PMI Certification
18 6 (0.093%) CEH
18 6 (0.093%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 198 (3.08%) QA
2 68 (1.06%) Accessibility
3 48 (0.75%) GDPR
4 40 (0.62%) Data Quality
5 30 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 27 (0.42%) SOC 2
7 25 (0.39%) GRC
8 23 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 15288
9 16 (0.25%) IEC 61508
9 16 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 12207
9 16 (0.25%) MISRA
9 16 (0.25%) PCI DSS
10 15 (0.23%) MISRA C
10 15 (0.23%) NIST
11 12 (0.19%) SLA
12 8 (0.12%) IEC 61131
13 7 (0.11%) ISO 9001
14 6 (0.093%) Cyber Essentials
14 6 (0.093%) NCSC
14 6 (0.093%) WCAG
System Software
1 424 (6.58%) Docker
2 168 (2.61%) Firmware
3 56 (0.87%) Embedded Firmware
4 18 (0.28%) Hyper-V
4 18 (0.28%) VMware Infrastructure
5 14 (0.22%) KVM
6 8 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
7 4 (0.062%) Active Directory
8 3 (0.047%) QEMU
9 2 (0.031%) Time Sharing Option
10 1 (0.016%) Virtual Desktop
10 1 (0.016%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 433 (6.72%) Kubernetes
2 333 (5.17%) Terraform
3 117 (1.82%) Grafana
4 67 (1.04%) Prometheus
5 53 (0.82%) Ansible
6 13 (0.20%) Cilium
7 12 (0.19%) Functional Safety
7 12 (0.19%) Progress Chef
7 12 (0.19%) Single Sign-On
8 11 (0.17%) Kibana
9 9 (0.14%) Nagios
10 7 (0.11%) Argo
10 7 (0.11%) logstash
10 7 (0.11%) Puppet
11 6 (0.093%) Podman
12 5 (0.078%) Microsoft Intune
13 4 (0.062%) HP Fortify
14 3 (0.047%) Packer
14 3 (0.047%) SCCM
14 3 (0.047%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 214 (3.32%) Microsoft
2 82 (1.27%) Google
3 67 (1.04%) Salesforce
4 48 (0.75%) Oracle
5 45 (0.70%) Typelevel
6 42 (0.65%) Siemens
7 35 (0.54%) Adobe
8 33 (0.51%) Databricks
9 32 (0.50%) OpenAI
10 28 (0.43%) Cisco
11 26 (0.40%) Rockwell
12 21 (0.33%) Palantir
13 20 (0.31%) VMware
14 18 (0.28%) Foundry
14 18 (0.28%) Splunk
15 17 (0.26%) IBM
16 16 (0.25%) Allen-Bradley
17 15 (0.23%) SAP
18 12 (0.19%) Red Hat
19 11 (0.17%) Atlassian