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 14 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 48 46 64
Rank change year-on-year -2 +18 -15
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 102 85 68
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.71% 4.92% 3.21%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.19% 5.22% 3.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 66 56 41
10th Percentile £431 £413 £463
25th Percentile £469 £525 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £656 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.57% +9.38% -11.11%
75th Percentile £738 £747 £750
90th Percentile £856 £838 £925
Central London median daily rate £575 £656 £600
% change year-on-year -12.38% +9.38% -12.73%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 0
Median hourly rate - £27.50 -
Central London median hourly rate - £27.50 -

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 1,967 1,629 1,950
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 90.81% 94.27% 92.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,367 1,111 1,208
10th Percentile £367 £325 £366
25th Percentile £456 £424 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £685 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -2.13%
Number of hourly rates quoted 20 18 18
10th Percentile £17.39 £16.90 £17.15
25th Percentile £17.60 £20.63 £24.09
Median hourly rate £20.25 £27.04 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -25.10% -33.25% +29.60%
75th Percentile £27.35 £35.88 £107.13
90th Percentile £44.85 £63.75 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £25.00 £27.04 £35.00
% change year-on-year -7.53% -22.76% +27.27%

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 14 October 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 5 (4.90%) Apache Airflow
1 5 (4.90%) Apache Spark
2 1 (0.98%) Ethereum
2 1 (0.98%) Hyperledger
2 1 (0.98%) Jupyter
Applications
1 2 (1.96%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 3 (2.94%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.98%) Distributed Ledger
2 1 (0.98%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.98%) Orchestrade
2 1 (0.98%) R3 Corda
2 1 (0.98%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 35 (34.31%) Azure
2 29 (28.43%) AWS
3 17 (16.67%) GitHub
4 16 (15.69%) GCP
5 7 (6.86%) Snowflake
6 6 (5.88%) Azure Data Factory
6 6 (5.88%) Azure DevOps
6 6 (5.88%) dbt
7 5 (4.90%) Azure Databricks
7 5 (4.90%) GitHub Actions
7 5 (4.90%) GitHub Copilot
8 4 (3.92%) Azure AKS
8 4 (3.92%) Serverless
9 3 (2.94%) Azure AI
9 3 (2.94%) PaaS
9 3 (2.94%) Power Platform
10 2 (1.96%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 2 (1.96%) AWS CloudFormation
10 2 (1.96%) AWS Lambda
10 2 (1.96%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 1 (0.98%) Asterisk PBX
1 1 (0.98%) RTCP
1 1 (0.98%) RTP
1 1 (0.98%) VoIP
1 1 (0.98%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (5.88%) PostgreSQL
2 5 (4.90%) SQL Server
3 4 (3.92%) NoSQL
3 4 (3.92%) Pinecone
4 3 (2.94%) ClickHouse
4 3 (2.94%) Data Warehouse
4 3 (2.94%) Milvus
4 3 (2.94%) Relational Database
4 3 (2.94%) Weaviate
5 2 (1.96%) Chroma
5 2 (1.96%) Delta Lake
5 2 (1.96%) MongoDB
5 2 (1.96%) Power BI
6 1 (0.98%) Amazon Athena
6 1 (0.98%) Amazon Aurora
6 1 (0.98%) Amazon RDS
6 1 (0.98%) Data Lake
6 1 (0.98%) Db2
6 1 (0.98%) DynamoDB
6 1 (0.98%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 16 (15.69%) Git
2 4 (3.92%) Gradle
3 2 (1.96%) Claude Code
3 2 (1.96%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.96%) JUnit
3 2 (1.96%) Maven
4 1 (0.98%) CircleCI
4 1 (0.98%) CocoaPods
4 1 (0.98%) Cucumber
4 1 (0.98%) Cypress.io
4 1 (0.98%) GitLab
4 1 (0.98%) JIRA
4 1 (0.98%) Liquibase
4 1 (0.98%) MLflow
4 1 (0.98%) Mockito
4 1 (0.98%) REST Assured
4 1 (0.98%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
4 1 (0.98%) Visual Studio
4 1 (0.98%) XCTest
4 1 (0.98%) XCUITest
General
1 44 (43.14%) Finance
2 37 (36.27%) Social Skills
3 15 (14.71%) Banking
4 13 (12.75%) Front Office
5 11 (10.78%) Analytical Skills
6 6 (5.88%) Investment Banking
7 5 (4.90%) Influencing Skills
8 4 (3.92%) Back Office
9 3 (2.94%) Legal
9 3 (2.94%) Pharmaceutical
9 3 (2.94%) Public Sector
9 3 (2.94%) Retail
10 2 (1.96%) Local Government
11 1 (0.98%) Corporate Banking
11 1 (0.98%) Documentation Skills
11 1 (0.98%) Financial Institution
11 1 (0.98%) Legal Technology
11 1 (0.98%) Marketing
11 1 (0.98%) Retail Banking
11 1 (0.98%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 24 (23.53%) Senior
2 17 (16.67%) Developer
2 17 (16.67%) Software Engineer
3 12 (11.76%) Data Engineer
4 11 (10.78%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 9 (8.82%) Architect
5 9 (8.82%) C# Developer
6 7 (6.86%) Senior C# Developer
6 7 (6.86%) Senior Developer
7 5 (4.90%) Engineering Specialist
7 5 (4.90%) Senior Data Engineer
8 4 (3.92%) Azure Engineer
8 4 (3.92%) Platform Engineer
8 4 (3.92%) Solutions Architect
9 3 (2.94%) Analyst
9 3 (2.94%) AWS Engineer
9 3 (2.94%) DevOps Engineer
9 3 (2.94%) Java Developer
9 3 (2.94%) Software Asset Manager
9 3 (2.94%) Technical Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (14.71%) .NET
1 15 (14.71%) Terraform
2 10 (9.80%) React
2 10 (9.80%) Spring
3 9 (8.82%) Spring Boot
4 8 (7.84%) Kafka
5 7 (6.86%) REST
5 7 (6.86%) Web Services
6 6 (5.88%) LangChain
6 6 (5.88%) RESTful
7 5 (4.90%) AngularJS
8 4 (3.92%) FastAPI
8 4 (3.92%) LangGraph
8 4 (3.92%) LlamaIndex
9 3 (2.94%) .NET Core
9 3 (2.94%) CrewAI
9 3 (2.94%) HTML
9 3 (2.94%) Node.js
9 3 (2.94%) PyTorch
9 3 (2.94%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 25 (24.51%) Cloud Native
2 16 (15.69%) Distributed Systems
3 11 (10.78%) AI Agents
4 8 (7.84%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 7 (6.86%) Fixed Income
5 7 (6.86%) Product Ownership
6 5 (4.90%) Derivative
6 5 (4.90%) Enterprise Software
6 5 (4.90%) Self-Motivation
7 3 (2.94%) Distributed Computing
7 3 (2.94%) Equities
7 3 (2.94%) Life Science
7 3 (2.94%) Onboarding
8 2 (1.96%) Client/Server
8 2 (1.96%) Cyber Defence
8 2 (1.96%) Distributed Applications
8 2 (1.96%) Distributed Architecture
8 2 (1.96%) Genomics
8 2 (1.96%) OTC Derivatives
9 1 (0.98%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 4 (3.92%) Linux
1 4 (3.92%) Unix
2 3 (2.94%) Apple iOS
3 2 (1.96%) Android
4 1 (0.98%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 57 (55.88%) CI/CD
2 42 (41.18%) AI
3 29 (28.43%) Agile
4 27 (26.47%) DevOps
5 23 (22.55%) Observability
6 21 (20.59%) Machine Learning
6 21 (20.59%) Test Automation
7 20 (19.61%) LLM
8 18 (17.65%) Containerisation
8 18 (17.65%) Infrastructure as Code
9 14 (13.73%) Continuous Improvement
9 14 (13.73%) Data Engineering
9 14 (13.73%) Microservices
10 13 (12.75%) Platform Engineering
10 13 (12.75%) SDLC
10 13 (12.75%) Stakeholder Management
11 12 (11.76%) Analytics
11 12 (11.76%) Generative AI
11 12 (11.76%) Problem-Solving
12 11 (10.78%) Enterprise Architecture
Programming Languages
1 42 (41.18%) Python
2 27 (26.47%) SQL
3 23 (22.55%) Java
4 20 (19.61%) C#
5 12 (11.76%) TypeScript
6 8 (7.84%) JavaScript
7 5 (4.90%) Korn
7 5 (4.90%) Scala
8 4 (3.92%) PowerShell
9 3 (2.94%) Bicep
9 3 (2.94%) C++
9 3 (2.94%) Kotlin
9 3 (2.94%) Ruby
10 1 (0.98%) Apex Code
10 1 (0.98%) DAML
10 1 (0.98%) Rust
10 1 (0.98%) Shell Script
10 1 (0.98%) Solidity
10 1 (0.98%) Swift
10 1 (0.98%) VBA
Qualifications
1 15 (14.71%) Security Cleared
2 12 (11.76%) SC Cleared
3 6 (5.88%) Degree
4 2 (1.96%) DV Cleared
5 1 (0.98%) AWS Certification
5 1 (0.98%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 1 (0.98%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (0.98%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (6.86%) Data Quality
2 5 (4.90%) GDPR
3 4 (3.92%) QA
4 2 (1.96%) Accessibility
4 2 (1.96%) EMIR
4 2 (1.96%) MiFID
System Software
1 20 (19.61%) Docker
Systems Management
1 19 (18.63%) Kubernetes
2 3 (2.94%) Grafana
3 2 (1.96%) Ansible
3 2 (1.96%) Prometheus
4 1 (0.98%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 9 (8.82%) Google
2 8 (7.84%) Databricks
2 8 (7.84%) Microsoft
3 6 (5.88%) Oracle
4 3 (2.94%) IBM
5 2 (1.96%) Foundry
5 2 (1.96%) Salesforce
6 1 (0.98%) Apple
6 1 (0.98%) Metaswitch
6 1 (0.98%) MuleSoft
6 1 (0.98%) OpenAI
6 1 (0.98%) Remedy
6 1 (0.98%) Sybase
6 1 (0.98%) TIBCO