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

6 months to
11 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 52 39 63
Rank change year-on-year -13 +24 -23
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 98 101 64
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.12% 5.40% 3.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.70% 5.74% 3.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 73 60 39
10th Percentile £453 £413 £486
25th Percentile £513 £563 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £669 £650
Median % change year-on-year -10.28% +2.88% -
75th Percentile £734 £800 £763
90th Percentile £850 £838 £905
Central London median daily rate £575 £661 £650
% change year-on-year -13.04% +1.73% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £65.00 £26.25 -
Median hourly rate £70.00 £27.50 -
Median % change year-on-year +154.55% - -
75th Percentile £75.00 £28.75 -
90th Percentile - - -
Central London median hourly rate £70.00 £27.50 -
% change year-on-year +154.55% - -

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 2,083 1,761 1,906
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 87.48% 94.17% 91.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,422 1,154 1,282
10th Percentile £375 £326 £375
25th Percentile £456 £425 £475
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 £764 £792
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 21 17
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.08 £15.20
25th Percentile £18.18 £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 £32.05 £56.75 £78.75
90th Percentile £57.49 £63.75 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £23.16 £30.04 £27.00
% change year-on-year -22.89% +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 11 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
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 31 (31.63%) Azure
2 29 (29.59%) AWS
3 24 (24.49%) GitHub
4 14 (14.29%) GCP
5 8 (8.16%) Azure DevOps
6 7 (7.14%) Anthropic Claude
7 6 (6.12%) GitHub Copilot
7 6 (6.12%) Power Platform
8 5 (5.10%) GitHub Actions
8 5 (5.10%) PaaS
8 5 (5.10%) Snowflake
9 4 (4.08%) Azure AKS
9 4 (4.08%) dbt
10 3 (3.06%) Azure Cosmos DB
10 3 (3.06%) Azure Data Factory
10 3 (3.06%) Entra ID
11 2 (2.04%) Azure Stack
11 2 (2.04%) Power Automate
11 2 (2.04%) PowerApps
11 2 (2.04%) Serverless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (8.16%) NoSQL
2 5 (5.10%) PostgreSQL
2 5 (5.10%) Relational Database
3 4 (4.08%) Pinecone
3 4 (4.08%) Power BI
3 4 (4.08%) SQL Server
4 3 (3.06%) MongoDB
4 3 (3.06%) Weaviate
5 2 (2.04%) Data Warehouse
5 2 (2.04%) Elasticsearch
6 1 (1.02%) Amazon Aurora
6 1 (1.02%) Apache Cassandra
6 1 (1.02%) Data Lake
6 1 (1.02%) Db2
6 1 (1.02%) Delta Lake
6 1 (1.02%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 15 (15.31%) Git
2 4 (4.08%) Jenkins
3 3 (3.06%) CircleCI
3 3 (3.06%) Claude Code
3 3 (3.06%) Cypress.io
3 3 (3.06%) Gradle
3 3 (3.06%) JUnit
3 3 (3.06%) Mockito
4 2 (2.04%) Liquibase
4 2 (2.04%) Mocha
4 2 (2.04%) webpack
5 1 (1.02%) CocoaPods
5 1 (1.02%) Cucumber
5 1 (1.02%) GitLab
5 1 (1.02%) JIRA
5 1 (1.02%) MLflow
5 1 (1.02%) REST Assured
5 1 (1.02%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
5 1 (1.02%) Visual Studio
5 1 (1.02%) XCUITest
General
1 34 (34.69%) Finance
2 30 (30.61%) Social Skills
3 11 (11.22%) Analytical Skills
3 11 (11.22%) Banking
4 6 (6.12%) Front Office
4 6 (6.12%) Influencing Skills
4 6 (6.12%) Public Sector
5 4 (4.08%) Investment Banking
6 3 (3.06%) Advertising
6 3 (3.06%) Back Office
6 3 (3.06%) Legal
6 3 (3.06%) Retail
7 2 (2.04%) Pharmaceutical
7 2 (2.04%) Presentation Skills
8 1 (1.02%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (1.02%) Financial Institution
8 1 (1.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 1 (1.02%) Military
8 1 (1.02%) Publishing
8 1 (1.02%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 27 (27.55%) Software Engineer
2 21 (21.43%) Developer
3 14 (14.29%) Senior
4 9 (9.18%) Data Engineer
5 8 (8.16%) Architect
6 7 (7.14%) Technical Architect
7 6 (6.12%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 6 (6.12%) Senior Developer
8 5 (5.10%) C# Developer
8 5 (5.10%) Full-Stack Engineer
8 5 (5.10%) Lead
9 4 (4.08%) Engineering Specialist
9 4 (4.08%) Platform Engineer
9 4 (4.08%) Python Engineer
9 4 (4.08%) Senior C# Developer
9 4 (4.08%) Senior Software Engineer
10 3 (3.06%) Full-Stack Developer
10 3 (3.06%) Full-Stack 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%) Spring Boot
5 9 (9.18%) Kafka
6 6 (6.12%) AngularJS
6 6 (6.12%) Node.js
7 5 (5.10%) GraphQL
7 5 (5.10%) LangChain
7 5 (5.10%) Playwright
7 5 (5.10%) RESTful
8 4 (4.08%) FastAPI
8 4 (4.08%) Jest
8 4 (4.08%) LangGraph
8 4 (4.08%) Web Services
9 3 (3.06%) CrewAI
9 3 (3.06%) HTML
9 3 (3.06%) LlamaIndex
9 3 (3.06%) Next.js
Miscellaneous
1 24 (24.49%) Cloud Native
2 17 (17.35%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (8.16%) AI Agents
3 8 (8.16%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 5 (5.10%) Product Ownership
5 4 (4.08%) Fixed Income
6 3 (3.06%) Derivative
6 3 (3.06%) Enterprise Software
6 3 (3.06%) Onboarding
6 3 (3.06%) Self-Motivation
7 2 (2.04%) Distributed Applications
7 2 (2.04%) Distributed Architecture
7 2 (2.04%) Equities
7 2 (2.04%) Genomics
7 2 (2.04%) Life Science
8 1 (1.02%) Clustering
8 1 (1.02%) CMDB
8 1 (1.02%) Hedge funds
8 1 (1.02%) Market Risk
8 1 (1.02%) NHS
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 52 (53.06%) CI/CD
2 34 (34.69%) AI
3 31 (31.63%) Agile
3 31 (31.63%) DevOps
4 25 (25.51%) Microservices
5 23 (23.47%) Containerisation
6 20 (20.41%) Observability
7 19 (19.39%) Test Automation
8 18 (18.37%) LLM
9 17 (17.35%) Machine Learning
10 16 (16.33%) Full-Stack Development
11 15 (15.31%) Data Engineering
12 14 (14.29%) Platform Engineering
12 14 (14.29%) Problem-Solving
13 13 (13.27%) Infrastructure as Code
14 12 (12.24%) Analytics
14 12 (12.24%) TDD
15 11 (11.22%) Event-Driven
15 11 (11.22%) Generative AI
16 10 (10.20%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 30 (30.61%) Python
2 27 (27.55%) SQL
3 25 (25.51%) Java
4 20 (20.41%) TypeScript
5 19 (19.39%) C#
6 10 (10.20%) JavaScript
7 5 (5.10%) Ruby
8 4 (4.08%) C++
8 4 (4.08%) Go
9 3 (3.06%) Korn
9 3 (3.06%) Kotlin
10 2 (2.04%) Scala
11 1 (1.02%) Bicep
11 1 (1.02%) DAML
11 1 (1.02%) PowerShell
11 1 (1.02%) Rust
11 1 (1.02%) Shell Script
11 1 (1.02%) Solidity
11 1 (1.02%) Swift
11 1 (1.02%) VBA
Qualifications
1 19 (19.39%) Security Cleared
2 17 (17.35%) SC Cleared
3 7 (7.14%) Degree
4 3 (3.06%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (2.04%) DV Cleared
6 1 (1.02%) AWS Certification
6 1 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (4.08%) Data Quality
1 4 (4.08%) GDPR
2 3 (3.06%) Accessibility
3 2 (2.04%) EMIR
3 2 (2.04%) MiFID
3 2 (2.04%) QA
4 1 (1.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.02%) WCAG
System Software
1 22 (22.45%) Docker
2 2 (2.04%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 20 (20.41%) Kubernetes
2 7 (7.14%) Terraform
3 3 (3.06%) Grafana
4 2 (2.04%) Prometheus
5 1 (1.02%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 9 (9.18%) Microsoft
2 7 (7.14%) Oracle
3 6 (6.12%) Google
4 5 (5.10%) IBM
5 3 (3.06%) Databricks
6 2 (2.04%) OpenAI
7 1 (1.02%) Apple
7 1 (1.02%) Dynatrace
7 1 (1.02%) MuleSoft
7 1 (1.02%) Pega
7 1 (1.02%) Remedy
7 1 (1.02%) Salesforce
7 1 (1.02%) Sybase