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

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 52 39 60
Rank change year-on-year -13 +21 -19
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 96 100 67
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.10% 5.39% 3.25%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.68% 5.71% 3.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 71 60 40
10th Percentile £456 £413 £487
25th Percentile £513 £563 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £661 £650
Median % change year-on-year -9.26% +1.73% -0.65%
75th Percentile £736 £781 £763
90th Percentile £850 £838 £903
Central London median daily rate £575 £655 £650
% change year-on-year -12.21% +0.77% -
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 2,053 1,751 1,893
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 87.62% 94.29% 91.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,403 1,147 1,266
10th Percentile £380 £325 £379
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 £774 £789
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 25 22 16
10th Percentile - £17.35 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.60 £23.98 £19.79
Median hourly rate £19.50 £28.33 £26.63
Median % change year-on-year -31.16% +6.38% -3.18%
75th Percentile £33.10 £53.50 £82.19
90th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £24.65 £29.07 £26.78
% change year-on-year -15.22% +8.55% -23.49%

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 18 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 (3.13%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (2.08%) Apache Spark
2 2 (2.08%) SharePoint
3 1 (1.04%) Apache
3 1 (1.04%) Camunda
3 1 (1.04%) Ethereum
3 1 (1.04%) Hyperledger
3 1 (1.04%) Jupyter
Applications
1 2 (2.08%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 5 (5.21%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (2.08%) Orchestrade
3 1 (1.04%) Aladdin
3 1 (1.04%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (1.04%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (1.04%) R3 Corda
3 1 (1.04%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 31 (32.29%) Azure
2 28 (29.17%) AWS
3 22 (22.92%) GitHub
4 14 (14.58%) GCP
5 8 (8.33%) Azure DevOps
6 6 (6.25%) Anthropic Claude
6 6 (6.25%) Power Platform
7 5 (5.21%) GitHub Actions
7 5 (5.21%) GitHub Copilot
7 5 (5.21%) PaaS
7 5 (5.21%) Snowflake
8 4 (4.17%) dbt
9 3 (3.13%) Azure AKS
9 3 (3.13%) Azure Data Factory
9 3 (3.13%) Entra ID
10 2 (2.08%) Azure AI
10 2 (2.08%) Azure Cosmos DB
10 2 (2.08%) Power Automate
10 2 (2.08%) PowerApps
10 2 (2.08%) Serverless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (7.29%) NoSQL
2 5 (5.21%) Relational Database
2 5 (5.21%) SQL Server
3 4 (4.17%) Pinecone
3 4 (4.17%) PostgreSQL
3 4 (4.17%) Power BI
4 3 (3.13%) MongoDB
4 3 (3.13%) Weaviate
5 2 (2.08%) Data Warehouse
6 1 (1.04%) Amazon Aurora
6 1 (1.04%) Apache Cassandra
6 1 (1.04%) ClickHouse
6 1 (1.04%) Data Lake
6 1 (1.04%) Db2
6 1 (1.04%) Delta Lake
6 1 (1.04%) DynamoDB
6 1 (1.04%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 13 (13.54%) Git
2 4 (4.17%) Jenkins
2 4 (4.17%) JUnit
3 3 (3.13%) Gradle
3 3 (3.13%) Mockito
4 2 (2.08%) CircleCI
4 2 (2.08%) Claude Code
4 2 (2.08%) Cypress.io
4 2 (2.08%) Liquibase
5 1 (1.04%) CocoaPods
5 1 (1.04%) Cucumber
5 1 (1.04%) GitLab
5 1 (1.04%) MLflow
5 1 (1.04%) Mocha
5 1 (1.04%) REST Assured
5 1 (1.04%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
5 1 (1.04%) Visual Studio
5 1 (1.04%) webpack
5 1 (1.04%) XCTest
5 1 (1.04%) XCUITest
General
1 35 (36.46%) Finance
2 31 (32.29%) Social Skills
3 11 (11.46%) Analytical Skills
3 11 (11.46%) Banking
4 7 (7.29%) Front Office
5 6 (6.25%) Influencing Skills
6 5 (5.21%) Public Sector
7 4 (4.17%) Investment Banking
8 3 (3.13%) Back Office
8 3 (3.13%) Legal
8 3 (3.13%) Retail
9 2 (2.08%) Advertising
9 2 (2.08%) Pharmaceutical
9 2 (2.08%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (1.04%) Corporate Banking
10 1 (1.04%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (1.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (1.04%) Military
10 1 (1.04%) Publishing
10 1 (1.04%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 27 (28.13%) Software Engineer
2 20 (20.83%) Developer
3 15 (15.63%) Senior
4 9 (9.38%) Data Engineer
5 7 (7.29%) Architect
5 7 (7.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 7 (7.29%) Senior Developer
6 6 (6.25%) C# Developer
6 6 (6.25%) Technical Architect
7 5 (5.21%) Full-Stack Engineer
7 5 (5.21%) Lead
7 5 (5.21%) Senior C# Developer
8 4 (4.17%) Engineering Specialist
8 4 (4.17%) Platform Engineer
8 4 (4.17%) Python Engineer
8 4 (4.17%) Senior Software Engineer
9 3 (3.13%) Java Developer
9 3 (3.13%) Python Software Engineer
9 3 (3.13%) Software Asset Manager
9 3 (3.13%) Software Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (15.63%) React
2 13 (13.54%) .NET
2 13 (13.54%) Spring
3 12 (12.50%) Spring Boot
4 11 (11.46%) REST
5 8 (8.33%) Kafka
6 7 (7.29%) AngularJS
7 6 (6.25%) RESTful
8 5 (5.21%) GraphQL
8 5 (5.21%) LangChain
8 5 (5.21%) Playwright
8 5 (5.21%) Web Services
9 4 (4.17%) FastAPI
9 4 (4.17%) HTML
9 4 (4.17%) LangGraph
9 4 (4.17%) Node.js
10 3 (3.13%) .NET Core
10 3 (3.13%) CrewAI
10 3 (3.13%) CSS
10 3 (3.13%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 22 (22.92%) Cloud Native
2 16 (16.67%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (8.33%) AI Agents
3 8 (8.33%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 5 (5.21%) Product Ownership
5 4 (4.17%) Enterprise Software
5 4 (4.17%) Fixed Income
6 3 (3.13%) Derivative
6 3 (3.13%) Onboarding
6 3 (3.13%) Self-Motivation
7 2 (2.08%) Distributed Applications
7 2 (2.08%) Distributed Architecture
7 2 (2.08%) Equities
7 2 (2.08%) Genomics
7 2 (2.08%) Life Science
8 1 (1.04%) Clustering
8 1 (1.04%) CMDB
8 1 (1.04%) Hedge funds
8 1 (1.04%) Market Risk
8 1 (1.04%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 4 (4.17%) Linux
2 3 (3.13%) Apple iOS
3 2 (2.08%) Android
3 2 (2.08%) Embedded Linux
3 2 (2.08%) Unix
4 1 (1.04%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 52 (54.17%) CI/CD
2 34 (35.42%) AI
3 32 (33.33%) DevOps
4 30 (31.25%) Agile
5 23 (23.96%) Microservices
6 22 (22.92%) Containerisation
7 21 (21.88%) Test Automation
8 19 (19.79%) Observability
9 17 (17.71%) LLM
9 17 (17.71%) Machine Learning
10 15 (15.63%) Full-Stack Development
11 14 (14.58%) Data Engineering
11 14 (14.58%) Infrastructure as Code
11 14 (14.58%) Platform Engineering
11 14 (14.58%) Problem-Solving
12 12 (12.50%) Analytics
12 12 (12.50%) Continuous Improvement
12 12 (12.50%) Generative AI
13 11 (11.46%) Event-Driven
13 11 (11.46%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 31 (32.29%) Python
2 28 (29.17%) SQL
3 25 (26.04%) Java
4 20 (20.83%) C#
5 18 (18.75%) TypeScript
6 8 (8.33%) JavaScript
7 5 (5.21%) Ruby
8 4 (4.17%) C++
8 4 (4.17%) Go
9 3 (3.13%) Korn
9 3 (3.13%) Kotlin
10 2 (2.08%) Bicep
10 2 (2.08%) Scala
11 1 (1.04%) DAML
11 1 (1.04%) PowerShell
11 1 (1.04%) Rust
11 1 (1.04%) Shell Script
11 1 (1.04%) Solidity
11 1 (1.04%) Swift
11 1 (1.04%) VBA
Qualifications
1 18 (18.75%) Security Cleared
2 16 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 6 (6.25%) Degree
4 2 (2.08%) Computer Science Degree
4 2 (2.08%) DV Cleared
5 1 (1.04%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (5.21%) GDPR
2 4 (4.17%) Data Quality
3 2 (2.08%) Accessibility
3 2 (2.08%) EMIR
3 2 (2.08%) MiFID
3 2 (2.08%) QA
4 1 (1.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 22 (22.92%) Docker
2 2 (2.08%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 19 (19.79%) Kubernetes
2 8 (8.33%) Terraform
3 2 (2.08%) Grafana
4 1 (1.04%) Kubeflow
4 1 (1.04%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 8 (8.33%) Microsoft
2 7 (7.29%) Oracle
3 6 (6.25%) Google
4 4 (4.17%) IBM
5 3 (3.13%) Databricks
6 2 (2.08%) OpenAI
7 1 (1.04%) Apple
7 1 (1.04%) Foundry
7 1 (1.04%) MuleSoft
7 1 (1.04%) Pega
7 1 (1.04%) Remedy
7 1 (1.04%) Salesforce
7 1 (1.04%) Sybase