Software Engineer Contract Job Trends in the City of London

Software Engineer
Central London > City of London

The median Software Engineer daily rate in the City of London is £625, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 6 May 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
6 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 93 85 92
Rank change year-on-year -8 +7 +13
Contract jobs requiring a Software Engineer 37 38 32
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 1.61% 2.16% 1.47%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.70% 2.32% 1.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 24 19 15
10th Percentile £441 £515 £428
25th Percentile £513 £563 £491
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £625 £625 £550
Median % change year-on-year - +13.64% -8.33%
75th Percentile £750 £800 £694
90th Percentile - £855 £815
Central London median daily rate £625 £625 £500
% change year-on-year - +25.00% -16.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £55.81 - -
Median hourly rate £57.77 - -
75th Percentile £67.36 - -
90th Percentile £71.94 - -
Central London median hourly rate £57.77 - -

All Contract IT Job Roles
City of London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the City of London. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the City of London with a recognized job title 2,179 1,635 2,066
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 94.74% 93.06% 95.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,456 1,029 1,469
10th Percentile £355 £350 £350
25th Percentile £450 £463 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £563
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +2.22% -6.25%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
Central London median daily rate £550 £573 £550
% change year-on-year -3.93% +4.09% -6.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 26 13 15
10th Percentile £17.99 £22.00 £15.62
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.66 £20.22
Median hourly rate £29.78 £31.00 £23.00
Median % change year-on-year -3.93% +34.78% -34.29%
75th Percentile £52.41 £48.75 £27.25
90th Percentile £62.36 £92.75 £40.00
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £29.07 £25.00
% change year-on-year -10.18% +16.28% -28.57%

Software Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Software Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London.

Software Engineer job vacancy trend in the City of London

Software Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Software Engineer job vacancies in the City of London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Software Engineer job vacancies in the City of London

Software Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the City of London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Software Engineer in the City of London over the 6 months to 6 May 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Software Engineer in the City of London

Software Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Software Engineer job vacancies in the City of London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Software Engineer job vacancies in the City of London

Software Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in the City of London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Software Engineer in the City of London over the 6 months to 6 May 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Software Engineer in the City of London

Software Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the City of London

For the 6 months to 6 May 2026, Software Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the City of London region featuring Software Engineer in the job title.

1 37 (100.00%) Software Engineering
2 11 (29.73%) AI
3 10 (27.03%) SQL
4 8 (21.62%) AWS
4 8 (21.62%) CI/CD
4 8 (21.62%) DevOps
5 7 (18.92%) .NET
5 7 (18.92%) Full-Stack Development
5 7 (18.92%) Java
5 7 (18.92%) Python
6 6 (16.22%) Docker
6 6 (16.22%) Generative AI
6 6 (16.22%) Machine Learning
6 6 (16.22%) Microservices
7 5 (13.51%) Agile
7 5 (13.51%) Azure
7 5 (13.51%) Kafka
7 5 (13.51%) LLM
7 5 (13.51%) React
7 5 (13.51%) SC Cleared
7 5 (13.51%) Security Cleared
7 5 (13.51%) User Experience
8 4 (10.81%) Data Engineering
8 4 (10.81%) Data Science
8 4 (10.81%) Kubernetes
8 4 (10.81%) Relational Database
8 4 (10.81%) REST
8 4 (10.81%) Spring
8 4 (10.81%) Spring Boot
8 4 (10.81%) TypeScript

Software Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the City of London 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 1 (2.70%) Smallworld
Business Applications
1 1 (2.70%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
Cloud Services
1 8 (21.62%) AWS
2 5 (13.51%) Azure
3 3 (8.11%) Anthropic Claude
3 3 (8.11%) GCP
4 2 (5.41%) GitHub
4 2 (5.41%) Serverless
5 1 (2.70%) Amazon SageMaker
5 1 (2.70%) AWS Control Tower
5 1 (2.70%) AWS Lambda
5 1 (2.70%) Azure DevOps
5 1 (2.70%) Cloud Run
5 1 (2.70%) Collibra
5 1 (2.70%) Figma
5 1 (2.70%) GitHub Actions
5 1 (2.70%) Google Gemini
5 1 (2.70%) Power Platform
5 1 (2.70%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 1 (2.70%) HTTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (10.81%) Relational Database
2 2 (5.41%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.70%) Apache Cassandra
3 1 (2.70%) BigQuery
3 1 (2.70%) Data Hub
3 1 (2.70%) MongoDB
3 1 (2.70%) NoSQL
3 1 (2.70%) Pinecone
3 1 (2.70%) SQL Server
3 1 (2.70%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 2 (5.41%) Jenkins
1 2 (5.41%) JUnit
1 2 (5.41%) Mockito
2 1 (2.70%) Cypress.io
2 1 (2.70%) Git
2 1 (2.70%) GitLab
2 1 (2.70%) Gradle
2 1 (2.70%) Liquibase
General
1 9 (24.32%) Finance
2 5 (13.51%) Banking
2 5 (13.51%) Manufacturing
3 1 (2.70%) Financial Institution
3 1 (2.70%) Pharmaceutical
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (18.92%) .NET
2 5 (13.51%) Kafka
2 5 (13.51%) React
3 4 (10.81%) REST
3 4 (10.81%) Spring
3 4 (10.81%) Spring Boot
4 3 (8.11%) AngularJS
5 2 (5.41%) HTML
5 2 (5.41%) LangGraph
5 2 (5.41%) RESTful
6 1 (2.70%) GraphQL
6 1 (2.70%) gRPC
6 1 (2.70%) HTML5
6 1 (2.70%) Material-UI
6 1 (2.70%) Next.js
6 1 (2.70%) Node.js
6 1 (2.70%) Playwright
6 1 (2.70%) Swagger
6 1 (2.70%) Vert.x
6 1 (2.70%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 7 (18.92%) Distributed Systems
2 6 (16.22%) Life Science
3 3 (8.11%) AI Agents
3 3 (8.11%) Cloud Native
4 1 (2.70%) Autonomous Agent
4 1 (2.70%) Device Driver
4 1 (2.70%) Enterprise Software
4 1 (2.70%) Genomics
4 1 (2.70%) Product Ownership
4 1 (2.70%) Robotics
4 1 (2.70%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 3 (8.11%) Linux
2 2 (5.41%) Embedded Linux
3 1 (2.70%) Unix
3 1 (2.70%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 37 (100.00%) Software Engineering
2 11 (29.73%) AI
3 8 (21.62%) CI/CD
3 8 (21.62%) DevOps
4 7 (18.92%) Full-Stack Development
5 6 (16.22%) Generative AI
5 6 (16.22%) Machine Learning
5 6 (16.22%) Microservices
6 5 (13.51%) Agile
6 5 (13.51%) LLM
6 5 (13.51%) User Experience
7 4 (10.81%) Data Engineering
7 4 (10.81%) Data Science
8 3 (8.11%) AI Transformation
8 3 (8.11%) Analytics
8 3 (8.11%) Data Pipeline
8 3 (8.11%) Event-Driven
8 3 (8.11%) Platform Engineering
9 2 (5.41%) Clean Code
9 2 (5.41%) MLOps
Programming Languages
1 10 (27.03%) SQL
2 7 (18.92%) Java
2 7 (18.92%) Python
3 4 (10.81%) TypeScript
4 3 (8.11%) C#
5 2 (5.41%) COBOL
5 2 (5.41%) Go
5 2 (5.41%) JavaScript
6 1 (2.70%) C++
Qualifications
1 5 (13.51%) SC Cleared
1 5 (13.51%) Security Cleared
2 2 (5.41%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (2.70%) Data Quality
1 1 (2.70%) NIST
System Software
1 6 (16.22%) Docker
Systems Management
1 4 (10.81%) Kubernetes
2 1 (2.70%) Terraform
Vendors
1 1 (2.70%) Google
1 1 (2.70%) Microsoft
1 1 (2.70%) OpenAI
1 1 (2.70%) Oracle