Software Engineering Contract Job Trends in the City of London

Software Engineering
Central London > City of London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the City of London requiring Software Engineering skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 28 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 45 38 43
Rank change year-on-year -7 +5 -8
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 96 93 93
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.20% 5.26% 4.22%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.93% 5.66% 4.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 74 53 47
10th Percentile £416 £470 £440
25th Percentile £504 £538 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £597 £625 £588
Median % change year-on-year -4.48% +6.38% -6.00%
75th Percentile £675 £800 £763
90th Percentile £763 £835 £875
Central London median daily rate £597 £625 £551
% change year-on-year -4.48% +13.53% -13.65%
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 Process & Methodology Skills
City of London

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

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 1,949 1,644 1,993
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 85.22% 92.93% 90.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,329 1,046 1,406
10th Percentile £362 £363 £359
25th Percentile £450 £463 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £565
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +1.77% -5.83%
75th Percentile £675 £680 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £550
% change year-on-year -4.35% +4.55% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 12 13
10th Percentile £18.14 £22.00 £19.13
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.00 £20.22
Median hourly rate £27.50 £29.58 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.02% +18.30% -28.57%
75th Percentile £47.41 £45.00 £40.00
90th Percentile £59.72 £62.25 £48.57
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £29.07 £27.81
% change year-on-year -10.18% +4.53% -20.54%

Software Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Software Engineering relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London.

Software Engineering job vacancy trend in the City of London

Software Engineering
Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Software Engineering.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Software Engineering

Software Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram in the City of London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Software Engineering in the City of London over the 6 months to 28 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Software Engineering in the City of London

Software Engineering
Hourly Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Software Engineering.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Software Engineering

Software Engineering
Hourly Rate Histogram in the City of London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Software Engineering in the City of London over the 6 months to 28 April 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Software Engineering in the City of London

Software Engineering
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 4 (4.17%) Apache Spark
2 3 (3.13%) Apache Airflow
3 2 (2.08%) Apache
3 2 (2.08%) SharePoint
4 1 (1.04%) Camunda
4 1 (1.04%) Cloud Foundry
4 1 (1.04%) Smallworld
Applications
1 1 (1.04%) Maya
Business Applications
1 2 (2.08%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (1.04%) Aladdin
2 1 (1.04%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (1.04%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
2 1 (1.04%) Orchestrade
Cloud Services
1 32 (33.33%) AWS
2 27 (28.13%) Azure
3 16 (16.67%) GCP
4 14 (14.58%) GitHub
5 6 (6.25%) Anthropic Claude
5 6 (6.25%) Power Platform
6 5 (5.21%) Azure DevOps
6 5 (5.21%) Google Gemini
7 4 (4.17%) dbt
8 3 (3.13%) Entra ID
8 3 (3.13%) GitHub Actions
8 3 (3.13%) GitHub Copilot
8 3 (3.13%) Serverless
8 3 (3.13%) Snowflake
9 2 (2.08%) Amazon S3
9 2 (2.08%) Amazon SageMaker
9 2 (2.08%) Azure AKS
9 2 (2.08%) Microsoft 365
9 2 (2.08%) PaaS
9 2 (2.08%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.04%) HTTP
1 1 (1.04%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (7.29%) Relational Database
2 6 (6.25%) PostgreSQL
3 5 (5.21%) NoSQL
4 4 (4.17%) MongoDB
5 3 (3.13%) Power BI
6 2 (2.08%) Apache Cassandra
6 2 (2.08%) BigQuery
6 2 (2.08%) Data Warehouse
6 2 (2.08%) SQL Server
7 1 (1.04%) Amazon Redshift
7 1 (1.04%) Big Data
7 1 (1.04%) Data Hub
7 1 (1.04%) Data Lake
7 1 (1.04%) Delta Lake
7 1 (1.04%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (1.04%) Hadoop
7 1 (1.04%) Metadata
7 1 (1.04%) MySQL
7 1 (1.04%) Pinecone
7 1 (1.04%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 8 (8.33%) Git
2 6 (6.25%) GitLab
3 4 (4.17%) Cypress.io
3 4 (4.17%) Jenkins
3 4 (4.17%) JUnit
3 4 (4.17%) Mockito
4 2 (2.08%) CircleCI
4 2 (2.08%) Claude Code
4 2 (2.08%) Gradle
4 2 (2.08%) Liquibase
4 2 (2.08%) Mocha
4 2 (2.08%) webpack
5 1 (1.04%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.04%) Jaeger
5 1 (1.04%) Maven
5 1 (1.04%) Vite
General
1 29 (30.21%) Finance
2 15 (15.63%) Social Skills
3 10 (10.42%) Banking
4 7 (7.29%) Analytical Skills
5 5 (5.21%) Manufacturing
6 4 (4.17%) Public Sector
7 3 (3.13%) Pharmaceutical
8 2 (2.08%) Advertising
8 2 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 2 (2.08%) Influencing Skills
8 2 (2.08%) Investment Banking
8 2 (2.08%) Presentation Skills
8 2 (2.08%) Retail
9 1 (1.04%) Aerospace
9 1 (1.04%) Back Office
9 1 (1.04%) Financial Institution
9 1 (1.04%) Games
9 1 (1.04%) Legal
9 1 (1.04%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 38 (39.58%) Software Engineer
2 20 (20.83%) Developer
3 16 (16.67%) Senior
4 10 (10.42%) Lead
5 8 (8.33%) Architect
5 8 (8.33%) Senior Software Engineer
6 7 (7.29%) Data Engineer
7 6 (6.25%) .NET Software Engineer
8 5 (5.21%) Data Scientist
8 5 (5.21%) Full-Stack Engineer
8 5 (5.21%) Hardware Engineer
8 5 (5.21%) Integration Engineer
8 5 (5.21%) Java Engineer
8 5 (5.21%) Python Engineer
8 5 (5.21%) Senior Developer
8 5 (5.21%) Software Integration Engineer
8 5 (5.21%) Technical Architect
9 4 (4.17%) Java Developer
9 4 (4.17%) Python Developer
9 4 (4.17%) Technical Leader
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (16.67%) React
2 15 (15.63%) Spring
3 14 (14.58%) REST
4 11 (11.46%) Spring Boot
5 10 (10.42%) Kafka
6 8 (8.33%) .NET
6 8 (8.33%) Node.js
7 6 (6.25%) LangChain
7 6 (6.25%) LangGraph
7 6 (6.25%) Playwright
8 5 (5.21%) AngularJS
8 5 (5.21%) GraphQL
8 5 (5.21%) HTML
8 5 (5.21%) RESTful
9 4 (4.17%) CSS
9 4 (4.17%) OpenTelemetry
10 3 (3.13%) DOM
10 3 (3.13%) FastAPI
10 3 (3.13%) Jest
10 3 (3.13%) React Native
Miscellaneous
1 19 (19.79%) Cloud Native
2 15 (15.63%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (8.33%) AI Agents
3 8 (8.33%) Life Science
4 6 (6.25%) Product Ownership
5 3 (3.13%) Mobile App
6 2 (2.08%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 2 (2.08%) Legacy Systems
7 1 (1.04%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (1.04%) Autonomous Agent
7 1 (1.04%) Derivative
7 1 (1.04%) Distributed Computing
7 1 (1.04%) Genomics
7 1 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
7 1 (1.04%) Media Streaming
7 1 (1.04%) NHS
7 1 (1.04%) Onboarding
7 1 (1.04%) Robotics
7 1 (1.04%) Security Posture
7 1 (1.04%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 3 (3.13%) Linux
2 2 (2.08%) Embedded Linux
2 2 (2.08%) Windows
3 1 (1.04%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 37 (38.54%) CI/CD
2 32 (33.33%) AI
3 25 (26.04%) Agile
3 25 (26.04%) DevOps
4 22 (22.92%) Microservices
5 18 (18.75%) Full-Stack Development
6 16 (16.67%) Observability
7 15 (15.63%) Containerisation
7 15 (15.63%) Data Science
7 15 (15.63%) Generative AI
8 14 (14.58%) Machine Learning
8 14 (14.58%) Problem-Solving
9 13 (13.54%) Test Automation
10 12 (12.50%) Data Engineering
11 10 (10.42%) Infrastructure as Code
11 10 (10.42%) Platform Engineering
11 10 (10.42%) TDD
12 9 (9.38%) Analytics
12 9 (9.38%) LLM
12 9 (9.38%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 27 (28.13%) Java
1 27 (28.13%) Python
2 24 (25.00%) SQL
3 14 (14.58%) TypeScript
4 10 (10.42%) C#
5 7 (7.29%) JavaScript
6 4 (4.17%) C++
6 4 (4.17%) Go
7 3 (3.13%) Ruby
8 2 (2.08%) COBOL
9 1 (1.04%) R
Qualifications
1 16 (16.67%) SC Cleared
1 16 (16.67%) Security Cleared
2 10 (10.42%) Degree
3 3 (3.13%) Computer Science Degree
4 2 (2.08%) AWS Certification
4 2 (2.08%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 1 (1.04%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (4.17%) Data Quality
2 3 (3.13%) GDPR
3 2 (2.08%) EMIR
3 2 (2.08%) MiFID
4 1 (1.04%) Accessibility
4 1 (1.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.04%) NIST
4 1 (1.04%) WCAG
System Software
1 20 (20.83%) Docker
2 2 (2.08%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 16 (16.67%) Kubernetes
2 6 (6.25%) Terraform
3 3 (3.13%) Grafana
4 2 (2.08%) Prometheus
5 1 (1.04%) Argo
5 1 (1.04%) Istio
Vendors
1 11 (11.46%) Microsoft
2 8 (8.33%) Google
3 5 (5.21%) Oracle
4 2 (2.08%) Databricks
4 2 (2.08%) IBM
5 1 (1.04%) Dynatrace
5 1 (1.04%) MuleSoft
5 1 (1.04%) OpenAI
5 1 (1.04%) Pega
5 1 (1.04%) Salesforce
5 1 (1.04%) Splunk