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 4 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 44 40 66
Rank change year-on-year -4 +26 -27
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 98 103 64
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.11% 5.50% 3.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.71% 5.84% 3.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 71 61 38
10th Percentile £453 £413 £486
25th Percentile £513 £563 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £675 £650
Median % change year-on-year -11.11% +3.85% -0.65%
75th Percentile £734 £800 £763
90th Percentile £850 £838 £883
Central London median daily rate £575 £669 £650
% change year-on-year -14.02% +2.88% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 1 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £55.81 £26.25 -
Median hourly rate £57.77 £27.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +110.05% - -
75th Percentile £67.36 £28.75 -
90th Percentile £71.94 - -
Central London median hourly rate £57.77 £27.50 -
% change year-on-year +110.05% - -

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 2,080 1,763 1,888
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 87.28% 94.13% 91.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,414 1,157 1,281
10th Percentile £377 £331 £375
25th Percentile £456 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £768 £792
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 21 17
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.08 £15.20
25th Percentile £18.46 £24.66 £20.22
Median hourly rate £19.50 £28.50 £27.00
Median % change year-on-year -31.58% +5.56% -13.60%
75th Percentile £41.69 £56.75 £78.75
90th Percentile £61.31 £63.75 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £23.08 £30.04 £27.00
% change year-on-year -23.16% +11.24% -22.86%

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 4 August 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 4 August 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 3 (3.06%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (2.04%) Apache Spark
2 2 (2.04%) SharePoint
3 1 (1.02%) Apache
3 1 (1.02%) Camunda
3 1 (1.02%) Ethereum
3 1 (1.02%) Hyperledger
3 1 (1.02%) Jupyter
Applications
1 2 (2.04%) Chatbot
2 1 (1.02%) Maya
Business Applications
1 5 (5.10%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (2.04%) Orchestrade
3 1 (1.02%) Aladdin
3 1 (1.02%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (1.02%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (1.02%) R3 Corda
3 1 (1.02%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 30 (30.61%) AWS
2 29 (29.59%) Azure
3 21 (21.43%) GitHub
4 11 (11.22%) GCP
5 7 (7.14%) Azure DevOps
6 6 (6.12%) Anthropic Claude
6 6 (6.12%) Power Platform
7 5 (5.10%) GitHub Copilot
7 5 (5.10%) PaaS
7 5 (5.10%) Snowflake
8 4 (4.08%) Azure AKS
8 4 (4.08%) dbt
8 4 (4.08%) GitHub Actions
9 3 (3.06%) Azure Cosmos DB
9 3 (3.06%) Azure Data Factory
9 3 (3.06%) Entra ID
10 2 (2.04%) Amazon SageMaker
10 2 (2.04%) Azure Stack
10 2 (2.04%) PowerApps
10 2 (2.04%) Serverless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (8.16%) NoSQL
2 6 (6.12%) Relational Database
3 5 (5.10%) PostgreSQL
4 4 (4.08%) Pinecone
4 4 (4.08%) Power BI
4 4 (4.08%) SQL Server
5 3 (3.06%) MongoDB
5 3 (3.06%) Weaviate
6 2 (2.04%) Data Warehouse
6 2 (2.04%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (1.02%) Amazon Aurora
7 1 (1.02%) Apache Cassandra
7 1 (1.02%) BigQuery
7 1 (1.02%) Data Hub
7 1 (1.02%) Data Lake
7 1 (1.02%) Db2
7 1 (1.02%) Delta Lake
7 1 (1.02%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 13 (13.27%) Git
2 3 (3.06%) CircleCI
2 3 (3.06%) Cypress.io
2 3 (3.06%) Gradle
2 3 (3.06%) Jenkins
2 3 (3.06%) JUnit
2 3 (3.06%) Mockito
3 2 (2.04%) Claude Code
3 2 (2.04%) Liquibase
3 2 (2.04%) Mocha
3 2 (2.04%) webpack
4 1 (1.02%) Cucumber
4 1 (1.02%) GitLab
4 1 (1.02%) JIRA
4 1 (1.02%) MLflow
4 1 (1.02%) REST Assured
4 1 (1.02%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
4 1 (1.02%) Visual Studio
4 1 (1.02%) XCTest
4 1 (1.02%) XCUITest
General
1 34 (34.69%) Finance
2 28 (28.57%) Social Skills
3 12 (12.24%) Banking
4 11 (11.22%) Analytical Skills
5 6 (6.12%) Influencing Skills
5 6 (6.12%) Public Sector
6 5 (5.10%) Front Office
7 4 (4.08%) Investment Banking
8 3 (3.06%) Advertising
8 3 (3.06%) Back Office
8 3 (3.06%) Legal
8 3 (3.06%) Retail
9 2 (2.04%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (1.02%) Corporate Banking
10 1 (1.02%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (1.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (1.02%) Military
10 1 (1.02%) Pharmaceutical
10 1 (1.02%) Retail Banking
10 1 (1.02%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 31 (31.63%) Software Engineer
2 19 (19.39%) Developer
3 17 (17.35%) Senior
4 9 (9.18%) Data Engineer
5 8 (8.16%) Architect
6 7 (7.14%) Senior Software Engineer
6 7 (7.14%) Technical Architect
7 6 (6.12%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 6 (6.12%) Senior Developer
8 5 (5.10%) Full-Stack Engineer
8 5 (5.10%) Lead
9 4 (4.08%) C# Developer
9 4 (4.08%) Engineering Specialist
9 4 (4.08%) Python Engineer
9 4 (4.08%) Senior C# Developer
10 3 (3.06%) Java Engineer
10 3 (3.06%) Platform Engineer
10 3 (3.06%) Python Software Engineer
10 3 (3.06%) Software Asset Manager
10 3 (3.06%) Software Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (17.35%) React
2 14 (14.29%) Spring
3 12 (12.24%) .NET
3 12 (12.24%) REST
4 11 (11.22%) Kafka
4 11 (11.22%) Spring Boot
5 7 (7.14%) AngularJS
6 6 (6.12%) Node.js
7 5 (5.10%) GraphQL
7 5 (5.10%) LangChain
7 5 (5.10%) Playwright
8 4 (4.08%) Jest
8 4 (4.08%) LangGraph
8 4 (4.08%) RESTful
8 4 (4.08%) Web Services
9 3 (3.06%) .NET Core
9 3 (3.06%) HTML
9 3 (3.06%) Next.js
9 3 (3.06%) PyTorch
9 3 (3.06%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 23 (23.47%) Cloud Native
2 20 (20.41%) Distributed Systems
3 7 (7.14%) AI Agents
3 7 (7.14%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 5 (5.10%) Product Ownership
5 3 (3.06%) Enterprise Software
5 3 (3.06%) Fixed Income
5 3 (3.06%) Onboarding
5 3 (3.06%) Self-Motivation
6 2 (2.04%) Derivative
6 2 (2.04%) Distributed Applications
6 2 (2.04%) Distributed Architecture
6 2 (2.04%) Equities
7 1 (1.02%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (1.02%) Autonomous Agent
7 1 (1.02%) Blockchain
7 1 (1.02%) Distributed Computing
7 1 (1.02%) Genomics
7 1 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
7 1 (1.02%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 3 (3.06%) Apple iOS
1 3 (3.06%) Linux
2 2 (2.04%) Android
2 2 (2.04%) Embedded Linux
3 1 (1.02%) Unix
3 1 (1.02%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 50 (51.02%) CI/CD
2 34 (34.69%) AI
3 31 (31.63%) Agile
4 28 (28.57%) DevOps
5 25 (25.51%) Microservices
6 21 (21.43%) Containerisation
7 19 (19.39%) Observability
7 19 (19.39%) Test Automation
8 18 (18.37%) Full-Stack Development
9 17 (17.35%) Machine Learning
10 16 (16.33%) LLM
11 15 (15.31%) Data Engineering
12 14 (14.29%) Platform Engineering
13 13 (13.27%) Problem-Solving
13 13 (13.27%) TDD
14 12 (12.24%) Event-Driven
15 11 (11.22%) Analytics
15 11 (11.22%) Generative AI
15 11 (11.22%) Infrastructure as Code
16 10 (10.20%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 29 (29.59%) Python
1 29 (29.59%) SQL
2 26 (26.53%) Java
3 19 (19.39%) TypeScript
4 17 (17.35%) C#
5 9 (9.18%) JavaScript
6 5 (5.10%) Ruby
7 4 (4.08%) C++
7 4 (4.08%) Go
8 3 (3.06%) Korn
8 3 (3.06%) Kotlin
9 2 (2.04%) Scala
10 1 (1.02%) Bicep
10 1 (1.02%) DAML
10 1 (1.02%) PowerShell
10 1 (1.02%) Rust
10 1 (1.02%) Shell Script
10 1 (1.02%) Solidity
10 1 (1.02%) Swift
10 1 (1.02%) VBA
Qualifications
1 18 (18.37%) Security Cleared
2 17 (17.35%) SC Cleared
3 6 (6.12%) Degree
4 2 (2.04%) Computer Science Degree
4 2 (2.04%) DV Cleared
5 1 (1.02%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (5.10%) Data Quality
2 4 (4.08%) GDPR
3 3 (3.06%) Accessibility
4 2 (2.04%) EMIR
4 2 (2.04%) MiFID
4 2 (2.04%) QA
5 1 (1.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 1 (1.02%) NIST
5 1 (1.02%) WCAG
System Software
1 20 (20.41%) Docker
2 2 (2.04%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 19 (19.39%) Kubernetes
2 4 (4.08%) Terraform
3 2 (2.04%) Grafana
4 1 (1.02%) Kubeflow
4 1 (1.02%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 8 (8.16%) Microsoft
2 7 (7.14%) Oracle
3 5 (5.10%) IBM
4 3 (3.06%) Databricks
4 3 (3.06%) Google
5 1 (1.02%) Apple
5 1 (1.02%) Dynatrace
5 1 (1.02%) MuleSoft
5 1 (1.02%) OpenAI
5 1 (1.02%) Pega
5 1 (1.02%) Remedy
5 1 (1.02%) Salesforce
5 1 (1.02%) Sybase