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

6 months to
4 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 35 44
Rank change year-on-year -12 +9 -6
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 95 101 97
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.35% 5.81% 4.25%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.98% 6.29% 4.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 74 54 50
10th Percentile £416 £463 £448
25th Percentile £504 £532 £516
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £600 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.17% +4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £675 £744 £747
90th Percentile £759 £878 £841
Central London median daily rate £575 £600 £563
% change year-on-year -4.17% +6.67% -11.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £55.81 - -
Median hourly rate £57.77 - -
75th Percentile £59.72 - -
90th Percentile - - -
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 1,906 1,605 2,049
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 87.27% 92.29% 89.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,316 1,035 1,449
10th Percentile £363 £363 £350
25th Percentile £450 £463 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £570
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% +0.88% -5.00%
75th Percentile £673 £679 £688
90th Percentile £775 £771 £800
Central London median daily rate £550 £570 £550
% change year-on-year -3.51% +3.64% -7.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 24 9 11
10th Percentile - £22.00 £18.93
25th Percentile £18.75 £24.66 £20.07
Median hourly rate £30.03 £31.00 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -3.12% +24.00% -38.27%
75th Percentile £48.67 £48.75 £40.92
90th Percentile £57.93 £71.00 £50.25
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £31.00 £27.81
% change year-on-year -15.77% +11.47% -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 4 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
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 2 (2.11%) Apache
1 2 (2.11%) Apache Spark
1 2 (2.11%) SharePoint
2 1 (1.05%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (1.05%) Camunda
2 1 (1.05%) Cloud Foundry
2 1 (1.05%) Smallworld
Applications
1 1 (1.05%) Maya
Business Applications
1 2 (2.11%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (1.05%) Aladdin
2 1 (1.05%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
Cloud Services
1 33 (34.74%) AWS
2 26 (27.37%) Azure
3 14 (14.74%) GCP
3 14 (14.74%) GitHub
4 6 (6.32%) Anthropic Claude
4 6 (6.32%) Power Platform
5 5 (5.26%) Azure DevOps
5 5 (5.26%) Google Gemini
6 3 (3.16%) Entra ID
6 3 (3.16%) GitHub Actions
6 3 (3.16%) GitHub Copilot
6 3 (3.16%) Serverless
7 2 (2.11%) AWS Lambda
7 2 (2.11%) Azure AKS
7 2 (2.11%) Azure Cosmos DB
7 2 (2.11%) Azure Stack
7 2 (2.11%) Cloud Run
7 2 (2.11%) dbt
7 2 (2.11%) Power Automate
7 2 (2.11%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.05%) HTTP
1 1 (1.05%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (10.53%) Relational Database
2 5 (5.26%) NoSQL
2 5 (5.26%) PostgreSQL
3 4 (4.21%) MongoDB
4 3 (3.16%) Power BI
5 2 (2.11%) Apache Cassandra
5 2 (2.11%) BigQuery
5 2 (2.11%) Data Warehouse
5 2 (2.11%) SQL Server
6 1 (1.05%) Amazon Redshift
6 1 (1.05%) Big Data
6 1 (1.05%) Data Hub
6 1 (1.05%) Data Lake
6 1 (1.05%) Delta Lake
6 1 (1.05%) Elasticsearch
6 1 (1.05%) Hadoop
6 1 (1.05%) Metadata
6 1 (1.05%) MySQL
6 1 (1.05%) Pinecone
6 1 (1.05%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 8 (8.42%) Git
2 6 (6.32%) GitLab
3 3 (3.16%) Cypress.io
3 3 (3.16%) Jenkins
3 3 (3.16%) JUnit
3 3 (3.16%) Mockito
4 2 (2.11%) CircleCI
4 2 (2.11%) Claude Code
4 2 (2.11%) Mocha
4 2 (2.11%) webpack
5 1 (1.05%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.05%) Gradle
5 1 (1.05%) Jaeger
5 1 (1.05%) Liquibase
5 1 (1.05%) Maven
5 1 (1.05%) MSTest
5 1 (1.05%) Postman
5 1 (1.05%) Vite
General
1 27 (28.42%) Finance
2 18 (18.95%) Social Skills
3 10 (10.53%) Banking
4 7 (7.37%) Analytical Skills
5 5 (5.26%) Manufacturing
5 5 (5.26%) Public Sector
6 3 (3.16%) Pharmaceutical
7 2 (2.11%) Advertising
7 2 (2.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 2 (2.11%) Influencing Skills
7 2 (2.11%) Presentation Skills
8 1 (1.05%) Aerospace
8 1 (1.05%) Back Office
8 1 (1.05%) Financial Institution
8 1 (1.05%) Games
8 1 (1.05%) Investment Banking
8 1 (1.05%) Retail
8 1 (1.05%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 36 (37.89%) Software Engineer
2 21 (22.11%) Developer
2 21 (22.11%) Senior
3 11 (11.58%) Lead
4 8 (8.42%) Architect
4 8 (8.42%) Python Engineer
4 8 (8.42%) Senior Software Engineer
5 7 (7.37%) Senior Developer
6 6 (6.32%) .NET Software Engineer
7 5 (5.26%) Data Engineer
7 5 (5.26%) Data Scientist
7 5 (5.26%) Hardware Engineer
7 5 (5.26%) Integration Engineer
7 5 (5.26%) Java Engineer
7 5 (5.26%) Python Developer
7 5 (5.26%) Software Integration Engineer
7 5 (5.26%) Technical Architect
7 5 (5.26%) Technical Leader
8 4 (4.21%) Backend Developer
8 4 (4.21%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (13.68%) React
1 13 (13.68%) REST
2 11 (11.58%) Spring
3 9 (9.47%) .NET
4 8 (8.42%) Node.js
5 7 (7.37%) Kafka
5 7 (7.37%) RESTful
5 7 (7.37%) Spring Boot
6 6 (6.32%) AngularJS
6 6 (6.32%) HTML
6 6 (6.32%) LangChain
6 6 (6.32%) LangGraph
7 5 (5.26%) CSS
7 5 (5.26%) Playwright
8 4 (4.21%) GraphQL
8 4 (4.21%) OpenTelemetry
9 3 (3.16%) FastAPI
9 3 (3.16%) Jest
9 3 (3.16%) React Native
9 3 (3.16%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 18 (18.95%) Cloud Native
2 15 (15.79%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (8.42%) Life Science
4 6 (6.32%) AI Agents
4 6 (6.32%) Product Ownership
5 4 (4.21%) Virtual Team
6 3 (3.16%) Mobile App
7 2 (2.11%) Legacy Systems
8 1 (1.05%) Analytical Mindset
8 1 (1.05%) Autonomous Agent
8 1 (1.05%) Data Structures
8 1 (1.05%) Distributed Computing
8 1 (1.05%) Enterprise Software
8 1 (1.05%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
8 1 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (1.05%) Hedge funds
8 1 (1.05%) NHS
8 1 (1.05%) Onboarding
8 1 (1.05%) Online Games
8 1 (1.05%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 3 (3.16%) Linux
2 2 (2.11%) Embedded Linux
2 2 (2.11%) Windows
3 1 (1.05%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 36 (37.89%) CI/CD
2 31 (32.63%) AI
3 24 (25.26%) Microservices
4 23 (24.21%) Agile
4 23 (24.21%) DevOps
5 17 (17.89%) Problem-Solving
5 17 (17.89%) Test Automation
6 16 (16.84%) Full-Stack Development
7 15 (15.79%) Data Science
7 15 (15.79%) Generative AI
7 15 (15.79%) Observability
8 14 (14.74%) Machine Learning
9 13 (13.68%) Containerisation
10 11 (11.58%) Code Quality
10 11 (11.58%) Infrastructure as Code
11 10 (10.53%) Data Engineering
12 9 (9.47%) LLM
12 9 (9.47%) Platform Engineering
12 9 (9.47%) SDLC
12 9 (9.47%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 29 (30.53%) Python
2 24 (25.26%) Java
3 22 (23.16%) SQL
4 10 (10.53%) C#
4 10 (10.53%) TypeScript
5 7 (7.37%) JavaScript
6 5 (5.26%) Go
7 3 (3.16%) C++
7 3 (3.16%) Ruby
8 2 (2.11%) COBOL
9 1 (1.05%) PowerShell
9 1 (1.05%) R
Qualifications
1 17 (17.89%) Security Cleared
2 16 (16.84%) SC Cleared
3 9 (9.47%) Degree
4 3 (3.16%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (2.11%) AWS Certification
5 2 (2.11%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 1 (1.05%) DBS Check
6 1 (1.05%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (4.21%) Data Quality
2 1 (1.05%) Accessibility
2 1 (1.05%) GDPR
2 1 (1.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 1 (1.05%) NIST
2 1 (1.05%) WCAG
System Software
1 20 (21.05%) Docker
2 2 (2.11%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 17 (17.89%) Kubernetes
2 6 (6.32%) Terraform
3 3 (3.16%) Grafana
4 2 (2.11%) Prometheus
5 1 (1.05%) Ansible
5 1 (1.05%) Argo
5 1 (1.05%) Istio
Vendors
1 10 (10.53%) Microsoft
2 7 (7.37%) Google
3 6 (6.32%) Oracle
4 2 (2.11%) Databricks
4 2 (2.11%) IBM
5 1 (1.05%) Dynatrace
5 1 (1.05%) MuleSoft
5 1 (1.05%) OpenAI
5 1 (1.05%) Pega
5 1 (1.05%) Splunk