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 21 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 50 38 65
Rank change year-on-year -12 +27 -26
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 95 104 71
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 3.95% 5.57% 3.35%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.55% 5.92% 3.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 66 63 41
10th Percentile £454 £415 £488
25th Percentile £513 £563 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £660 £650
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% +1.54% -
75th Percentile £734 £800 £763
90th Percentile £813 £838 £875
Central London median daily rate £575 £660 £650
% change year-on-year -12.88% +1.54% -
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 2,086 1,756 1,937
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 86.66% 94.00% 91.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,411 1,133 1,324
10th Percentile £368 £338 £363
25th Percentile £456 £434 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £680 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £565
% change year-on-year - -2.65% -5.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 21 19
10th Percentile £17.60 £17.08 £19.88
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.66 £21.25
Median hourly rate £20.25 £31.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -34.68% -22.50% +14.29%
75th Percentile £42.56 £56.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £60.25 £63.75 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £23.16 £32.50 £30.41
% change year-on-year -28.74% +6.89% -13.13%

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 21 July 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 21 July 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 (3.16%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (2.11%) Apache Spark
2 2 (2.11%) SharePoint
3 1 (1.05%) Apache
3 1 (1.05%) Camunda
3 1 (1.05%) Ethereum
3 1 (1.05%) Hyperledger
3 1 (1.05%) Jupyter
Applications
1 2 (2.11%) Chatbot
2 1 (1.05%) Maya
Business Applications
1 5 (5.26%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (2.11%) Orchestrade
3 1 (1.05%) Aladdin
3 1 (1.05%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (1.05%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (1.05%) R3 Corda
3 1 (1.05%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 30 (31.58%) AWS
2 26 (27.37%) Azure
3 21 (22.11%) GitHub
4 11 (11.58%) GCP
5 6 (6.32%) Anthropic Claude
5 6 (6.32%) Azure DevOps
6 5 (5.26%) GitHub Copilot
6 5 (5.26%) PaaS
6 5 (5.26%) Power Platform
6 5 (5.26%) Snowflake
7 4 (4.21%) Azure AKS
7 4 (4.21%) dbt
7 4 (4.21%) GitHub Actions
8 3 (3.16%) Azure Cosmos DB
8 3 (3.16%) Entra ID
9 2 (2.11%) Amazon SageMaker
9 2 (2.11%) Azure Stack
9 2 (2.11%) Power Automate
9 2 (2.11%) PowerApps
9 2 (2.11%) Serverless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (8.42%) NoSQL
2 6 (6.32%) Relational Database
3 5 (5.26%) PostgreSQL
4 4 (4.21%) Pinecone
4 4 (4.21%) SQL Server
5 3 (3.16%) MongoDB
5 3 (3.16%) Power BI
5 3 (3.16%) Weaviate
6 2 (2.11%) Data Warehouse
6 2 (2.11%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (1.05%) Amazon Aurora
7 1 (1.05%) Apache Cassandra
7 1 (1.05%) BigQuery
7 1 (1.05%) Data Hub
7 1 (1.05%) Db2
7 1 (1.05%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 13 (13.68%) Git
2 3 (3.16%) CircleCI
2 3 (3.16%) Cypress.io
2 3 (3.16%) Gradle
2 3 (3.16%) Jenkins
2 3 (3.16%) JUnit
2 3 (3.16%) Mockito
3 2 (2.11%) Claude Code
3 2 (2.11%) Liquibase
3 2 (2.11%) Mocha
3 2 (2.11%) webpack
4 1 (1.05%) Cucumber
4 1 (1.05%) GitLab
4 1 (1.05%) JIRA
4 1 (1.05%) MLflow
4 1 (1.05%) REST Assured
4 1 (1.05%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
4 1 (1.05%) Visual Studio
4 1 (1.05%) XCTest
4 1 (1.05%) XCUITest
General
1 33 (34.74%) Finance
2 26 (27.37%) Social Skills
3 13 (13.68%) Banking
4 11 (11.58%) Analytical Skills
5 6 (6.32%) Influencing Skills
5 6 (6.32%) Public Sector
6 4 (4.21%) Front Office
6 4 (4.21%) Investment Banking
7 3 (3.16%) Advertising
7 3 (3.16%) Back Office
7 3 (3.16%) Retail
8 2 (2.11%) Legal
8 2 (2.11%) Presentation Skills
9 1 (1.05%) Aerospace
9 1 (1.05%) Corporate Banking
9 1 (1.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 1 (1.05%) Marketing
9 1 (1.05%) Military
9 1 (1.05%) Retail Banking
9 1 (1.05%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 30 (31.58%) Software Engineer
2 19 (20.00%) Developer
3 17 (17.89%) Senior
4 9 (9.47%) Architect
5 7 (7.37%) Data Engineer
5 7 (7.37%) Lead
5 7 (7.37%) Senior Software Engineer
5 7 (7.37%) Technical Architect
6 6 (6.32%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 6 (6.32%) Senior Developer
7 5 (5.26%) Full-Stack Engineer
8 4 (4.21%) C# Developer
8 4 (4.21%) Engineering Specialist
8 4 (4.21%) Python Engineer
8 4 (4.21%) Senior C# Developer
9 3 (3.16%) Java Engineer
9 3 (3.16%) Platform Engineer
9 3 (3.16%) Python Software Engineer
9 3 (3.16%) Software Asset Manager
9 3 (3.16%) Software Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 16 (16.84%) React
2 14 (14.74%) Spring
3 13 (13.68%) REST
4 11 (11.58%) Spring Boot
5 10 (10.53%) .NET
5 10 (10.53%) Kafka
6 6 (6.32%) AngularJS
6 6 (6.32%) GraphQL
7 5 (5.26%) LangChain
7 5 (5.26%) Node.js
7 5 (5.26%) Playwright
8 4 (4.21%) Jest
8 4 (4.21%) LangGraph
8 4 (4.21%) RESTful
8 4 (4.21%) Web Services
9 3 (3.16%) HTML
9 3 (3.16%) LlamaIndex
9 3 (3.16%) PyTorch
9 3 (3.16%) React Native
9 3 (3.16%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 22 (23.16%) Cloud Native
2 20 (21.05%) Distributed Systems
3 7 (7.37%) AI Agents
3 7 (7.37%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 5 (5.26%) Product Ownership
5 3 (3.16%) Enterprise Software
5 3 (3.16%) Fixed Income
5 3 (3.16%) Onboarding
5 3 (3.16%) Self-Motivation
6 2 (2.11%) Derivative
6 2 (2.11%) Distributed Applications
6 2 (2.11%) Distributed Architecture
6 2 (2.11%) Equities
6 2 (2.11%) Mobile App
7 1 (1.05%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (1.05%) Autonomous Agent
7 1 (1.05%) Distributed Computing
7 1 (1.05%) Genomics
7 1 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
7 1 (1.05%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 3 (3.16%) Apple iOS
1 3 (3.16%) Linux
2 2 (2.11%) Android
2 2 (2.11%) Embedded Linux
3 1 (1.05%) Unix
3 1 (1.05%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 48 (50.53%) CI/CD
2 31 (32.63%) AI
3 30 (31.58%) Agile
4 27 (28.42%) DevOps
5 25 (26.32%) Microservices
6 21 (22.11%) Containerisation
7 20 (21.05%) Observability
8 18 (18.95%) Test Automation
9 17 (17.89%) Full-Stack Development
10 15 (15.79%) Machine Learning
11 14 (14.74%) LLM
11 14 (14.74%) Platform Engineering
12 13 (13.68%) Data Engineering
12 13 (13.68%) TDD
13 11 (11.58%) Event-Driven
13 11 (11.58%) Generative AI
13 11 (11.58%) Problem-Solving
14 10 (10.53%) Analytics
14 10 (10.53%) Infrastructure as Code
15 8 (8.42%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 28 (29.47%) SQL
2 26 (27.37%) Java
2 26 (27.37%) Python
3 19 (20.00%) TypeScript
4 14 (14.74%) C#
5 9 (9.47%) JavaScript
6 5 (5.26%) Ruby
7 4 (4.21%) C++
7 4 (4.21%) Go
8 2 (2.11%) Kotlin
9 1 (1.05%) DAML
9 1 (1.05%) Korn
9 1 (1.05%) Rust
9 1 (1.05%) Scala
9 1 (1.05%) Shell Script
9 1 (1.05%) Solidity
9 1 (1.05%) Swift
Qualifications
1 19 (20.00%) Security Cleared
2 18 (18.95%) SC Cleared
3 6 (6.32%) Degree
4 2 (2.11%) Computer Science Degree
4 2 (2.11%) DV Cleared
5 1 (1.05%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (4.21%) Data Quality
1 4 (4.21%) GDPR
2 3 (3.16%) Accessibility
3 2 (2.11%) EMIR
3 2 (2.11%) MiFID
4 1 (1.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.05%) NIST
4 1 (1.05%) QA
4 1 (1.05%) WCAG
System Software
1 20 (21.05%) Docker
2 2 (2.11%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 19 (20.00%) Kubernetes
2 3 (3.16%) Terraform
3 2 (2.11%) Grafana
4 1 (1.05%) Kubeflow
4 1 (1.05%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 8 (8.42%) Microsoft
2 7 (7.37%) Oracle
3 5 (5.26%) IBM
4 3 (3.16%) Google
5 1 (1.05%) Apple
5 1 (1.05%) Databricks
5 1 (1.05%) Dynatrace
5 1 (1.05%) MuleSoft
5 1 (1.05%) OpenAI
5 1 (1.05%) Pega
5 1 (1.05%) Remedy
5 1 (1.05%) Salesforce
5 1 (1.05%) Sybase