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

6 months to
2 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 48 42 69
Rank change year-on-year -6 +27 -31
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 103 89 59
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.52% 4.99% 2.83%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.12% 5.29% 3.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 74 56 38
10th Percentile £456 £463 £488
25th Percentile £513 £563 £506
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £655 £650
Median % change year-on-year -8.40% +0.77% -0.65%
75th Percentile £737 £747 £791
90th Percentile £850 £838 £908
Central London median daily rate £575 £650 £650
% change year-on-year -11.54% - -
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 2,010 1,681 1,910
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 88.20% 94.23% 91.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,381 1,112 1,243
10th Percentile £380 £325 £377
25th Percentile £460 £419 £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 £775 £788
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 23 22 16
10th Percentile - £17.35 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.60 £23.98 £19.79
Median hourly rate £21.00 £28.33 £26.63
Median % change year-on-year -25.86% +6.38% -3.18%
75th Percentile £32.05 £53.50 £82.19
90th Percentile £50.59 £63.75 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £24.00 £29.07 £27.00
% change year-on-year -17.44% +7.67% -1.82%

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 2 September 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 6 (5.83%) Apache Airflow
2 5 (4.85%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.97%) Apache
3 1 (0.97%) Camunda
3 1 (0.97%) Ethereum
3 1 (0.97%) Hyperledger
3 1 (0.97%) Jupyter
3 1 (0.97%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (1.94%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 5 (4.85%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (1.94%) Orchestrade
3 1 (0.97%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.97%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (0.97%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.97%) R3 Corda
3 1 (0.97%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 33 (32.04%) Azure
2 31 (30.10%) AWS
3 19 (18.45%) GitHub
4 17 (16.50%) GCP
5 8 (7.77%) Azure DevOps
5 8 (7.77%) Snowflake
6 7 (6.80%) dbt
7 6 (5.83%) Anthropic Claude
8 5 (4.85%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (4.85%) GitHub Copilot
8 5 (4.85%) PaaS
8 5 (4.85%) Power Platform
9 4 (3.88%) Serverless
10 3 (2.91%) Amazon S3
10 3 (2.91%) Azure AI
10 3 (2.91%) Azure AKS
10 3 (2.91%) Azure Databricks
10 3 (2.91%) GitHub Actions
11 2 (1.94%) AWS Lambda
11 2 (1.94%) Azure Cosmos DB
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (5.83%) NoSQL
2 5 (4.85%) Relational Database
2 5 (4.85%) SQL Server
3 4 (3.88%) Data Warehouse
3 4 (3.88%) Pinecone
3 4 (3.88%) PostgreSQL
4 3 (2.91%) Milvus
4 3 (2.91%) Power BI
4 3 (2.91%) Weaviate
5 2 (1.94%) Chroma
5 2 (1.94%) ClickHouse
5 2 (1.94%) MongoDB
6 1 (0.97%) Amazon Athena
6 1 (0.97%) Amazon Aurora
6 1 (0.97%) Amazon RDS
6 1 (0.97%) Data Lake
6 1 (0.97%) Db2
6 1 (0.97%) Delta Lake
6 1 (0.97%) DynamoDB
6 1 (0.97%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 16 (15.53%) Git
2 3 (2.91%) Gradle
2 3 (2.91%) Jenkins
2 3 (2.91%) JUnit
3 2 (1.94%) CircleCI
3 2 (1.94%) Claude Code
3 2 (1.94%) Cypress.io
3 2 (1.94%) Liquibase
3 2 (1.94%) Mockito
4 1 (0.97%) CocoaPods
4 1 (0.97%) Cucumber
4 1 (0.97%) GitLab
4 1 (0.97%) MLflow
4 1 (0.97%) Mocha
4 1 (0.97%) REST Assured
4 1 (0.97%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
4 1 (0.97%) Visual Studio
4 1 (0.97%) webpack
4 1 (0.97%) XCTest
4 1 (0.97%) XCUITest
General
1 36 (34.95%) Finance
2 31 (30.10%) Social Skills
3 13 (12.62%) Banking
4 12 (11.65%) Analytical Skills
5 10 (9.71%) Front Office
6 7 (6.80%) Influencing Skills
7 5 (4.85%) Investment Banking
7 5 (4.85%) Public Sector
8 4 (3.88%) Back Office
9 3 (2.91%) Legal
9 3 (2.91%) Pharmaceutical
9 3 (2.91%) Retail
10 2 (1.94%) Advertising
11 1 (0.97%) Corporate Banking
11 1 (0.97%) Local Government
11 1 (0.97%) Marketing
11 1 (0.97%) Military
11 1 (0.97%) Publishing
11 1 (0.97%) Retail Banking
11 1 (0.97%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 25 (24.27%) Software Engineer
2 23 (22.33%) Developer
3 21 (20.39%) Senior
4 13 (12.62%) Data Engineer
5 9 (8.74%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 8 (7.77%) C# Developer
6 8 (7.77%) Senior Developer
7 7 (6.80%) Architect
8 6 (5.83%) Senior C# Developer
8 6 (5.83%) Technical Architect
9 4 (3.88%) Azure Engineer
9 4 (3.88%) Engineering Specialist
9 4 (3.88%) Java Developer
9 4 (3.88%) Lead
9 4 (3.88%) Platform Engineer
9 4 (3.88%) Python Engineer
9 4 (3.88%) Senior Data Engineer
9 4 (3.88%) Senior Software Engineer
10 3 (2.91%) AWS Engineer
10 3 (2.91%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (13.59%) .NET
2 13 (12.62%) React
2 13 (12.62%) Spring
2 13 (12.62%) Terraform
3 12 (11.65%) Spring Boot
4 10 (9.71%) Kafka
5 8 (7.77%) REST
6 6 (5.83%) RESTful
7 5 (4.85%) AngularJS
7 5 (4.85%) LangChain
7 5 (4.85%) Web Services
8 4 (3.88%) FastAPI
8 4 (3.88%) LangGraph
8 4 (3.88%) Node.js
8 4 (3.88%) Playwright
9 3 (2.91%) .NET Core
9 3 (2.91%) GraphQL
9 3 (2.91%) HTML
9 3 (2.91%) PyTorch
9 3 (2.91%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 28 (27.18%) Cloud Native
2 17 (16.50%) Distributed Systems
3 9 (8.74%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 8 (7.77%) AI Agents
5 5 (4.85%) Enterprise Software
5 5 (4.85%) Product Ownership
6 4 (3.88%) Fixed Income
7 3 (2.91%) Derivative
7 3 (2.91%) Distributed Computing
7 3 (2.91%) Life Science
7 3 (2.91%) Onboarding
7 3 (2.91%) Self-Motivation
8 2 (1.94%) Distributed Applications
8 2 (1.94%) Distributed Architecture
8 2 (1.94%) Equities
8 2 (1.94%) Genomics
9 1 (0.97%) Clustering
9 1 (0.97%) CMDB
9 1 (0.97%) Grid Computing
9 1 (0.97%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 4 (3.88%) Linux
2 3 (2.91%) Apple iOS
3 2 (1.94%) Android
3 2 (1.94%) Embedded Linux
3 2 (1.94%) Unix
4 1 (0.97%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 56 (54.37%) CI/CD
2 39 (37.86%) AI
3 32 (31.07%) DevOps
4 28 (27.18%) Agile
5 22 (21.36%) Microservices
6 21 (20.39%) Containerisation
6 21 (20.39%) Observability
6 21 (20.39%) Test Automation
7 20 (19.42%) Infrastructure as Code
7 20 (19.42%) Machine Learning
8 18 (17.48%) Data Engineering
9 17 (16.50%) LLM
9 17 (16.50%) Platform Engineering
10 15 (14.56%) Analytics
11 13 (12.62%) Event-Driven
11 13 (12.62%) Generative AI
11 13 (12.62%) Problem-Solving
11 13 (12.62%) SDLC
11 13 (12.62%) TDD
12 12 (11.65%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 41 (39.81%) Python
2 32 (31.07%) SQL
3 28 (27.18%) Java
4 22 (21.36%) C#
5 16 (15.53%) TypeScript
6 7 (6.80%) JavaScript
7 5 (4.85%) Ruby
8 4 (3.88%) C++
8 4 (3.88%) Go
8 4 (3.88%) Korn
8 4 (3.88%) Scala
9 3 (2.91%) Bicep
9 3 (2.91%) Kotlin
10 2 (1.94%) PowerShell
11 1 (0.97%) Bash
11 1 (0.97%) DAML
11 1 (0.97%) Rust
11 1 (0.97%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.97%) Swift
11 1 (0.97%) VBA
Qualifications
1 17 (16.50%) Security Cleared
2 15 (14.56%) SC Cleared
3 6 (5.83%) Degree
4 2 (1.94%) Computer Science Degree
4 2 (1.94%) DV Cleared
5 1 (0.97%) AWS Certification
5 1 (0.97%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 1 (0.97%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (6.80%) Data Quality
2 5 (4.85%) GDPR
3 2 (1.94%) Accessibility
3 2 (1.94%) EMIR
3 2 (1.94%) MiFID
3 2 (1.94%) QA
System Software
1 21 (20.39%) Docker
2 1 (0.97%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 19 (18.45%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.94%) Grafana
3 1 (0.97%) Kubeflow
3 1 (0.97%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 8 (7.77%) Microsoft
2 7 (6.80%) Oracle
3 6 (5.83%) Databricks
3 6 (5.83%) Google
4 4 (3.88%) IBM
5 2 (1.94%) Foundry
5 2 (1.94%) OpenAI
6 1 (0.97%) Apple
6 1 (0.97%) MuleSoft
6 1 (0.97%) Pega
6 1 (0.97%) Remedy
6 1 (0.97%) Salesforce
6 1 (0.97%) Sybase