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

6 months to
30 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 48 40 59
Rank change year-on-year -8 +19 -13
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 100 86 66
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.52% 4.98% 3.14%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.04% 5.27% 3.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 67 56 39
10th Percentile £447 £413 £481
25th Percentile £501 £551 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £656 £589
Median % change year-on-year -8.57% +11.42% -12.74%
75th Percentile £736 £747 £756
90th Percentile £855 £838 £885
Central London median daily rate £575 £650 £589
% change year-on-year -11.54% +10.36% -12.74%
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 1,984 1,631 1,931
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 89.73% 94.39% 91.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,370 1,097 1,201
10th Percentile £367 £325 £375
25th Percentile £455 £421 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year - -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £675 £675 £690
90th Percentile £775 £774 £792
Central London median daily rate £550 £550 £575
% change year-on-year - -4.35% -3.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 23 19 19
10th Percentile £16.98 £16.96 £15.60
25th Percentile £17.60 £22.88 £21.25
Median hourly rate £21.00 £28.15 £38.50
Median % change year-on-year -25.40% -26.88% +40.00%
75th Percentile £36.13 £50.25 £102.25
90th Percentile £59.70 £68.75 £137.50
Central London median hourly rate £25.00 £28.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year -12.28% -18.57% +30.84%

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 30 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 5 (5.00%) Apache Airflow
1 5 (5.00%) Apache Spark
2 1 (1.00%) Ethereum
2 1 (1.00%) Hyperledger
2 1 (1.00%) Jupyter
2 1 (1.00%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (2.00%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 3 (3.00%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (2.00%) Orchestrade
3 1 (1.00%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (1.00%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (1.00%) R3 Corda
3 1 (1.00%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 33 (33.00%) Azure
2 30 (30.00%) AWS
3 17 (17.00%) GitHub
4 16 (16.00%) GCP
5 7 (7.00%) Snowflake
6 6 (6.00%) Azure Data Factory
6 6 (6.00%) dbt
7 5 (5.00%) Azure Databricks
7 5 (5.00%) Azure DevOps
7 5 (5.00%) GitHub Actions
8 4 (4.00%) Azure AKS
8 4 (4.00%) GitHub Copilot
8 4 (4.00%) Power Platform
8 4 (4.00%) Serverless
9 3 (3.00%) Azure AI
9 3 (3.00%) PaaS
10 2 (2.00%) Amazon S3
10 2 (2.00%) AWS Lambda
10 2 (2.00%) n8n
11 1 (1.00%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.00%) Asterisk PBX
1 1 (1.00%) RTCP
1 1 (1.00%) RTP
1 1 (1.00%) VoIP
1 1 (1.00%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (7.00%) PostgreSQL
2 5 (5.00%) NoSQL
2 5 (5.00%) SQL Server
3 4 (4.00%) Pinecone
3 4 (4.00%) Relational Database
4 3 (3.00%) ClickHouse
4 3 (3.00%) Data Warehouse
4 3 (3.00%) Milvus
4 3 (3.00%) Power BI
4 3 (3.00%) Weaviate
5 2 (2.00%) Chroma
5 2 (2.00%) Delta Lake
5 2 (2.00%) MongoDB
6 1 (1.00%) Amazon Athena
6 1 (1.00%) Amazon Aurora
6 1 (1.00%) Amazon RDS
6 1 (1.00%) Data Lake
6 1 (1.00%) Db2
6 1 (1.00%) DynamoDB
6 1 (1.00%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 16 (16.00%) Git
2 5 (5.00%) Gradle
3 3 (3.00%) Jenkins
3 3 (3.00%) JUnit
4 2 (2.00%) Liquibase
4 2 (2.00%) Maven
4 2 (2.00%) Mockito
5 1 (1.00%) CircleCI
5 1 (1.00%) Claude Code
5 1 (1.00%) CocoaPods
5 1 (1.00%) Cucumber
5 1 (1.00%) Cypress.io
5 1 (1.00%) GitLab
5 1 (1.00%) JIRA
5 1 (1.00%) MLflow
5 1 (1.00%) REST Assured
5 1 (1.00%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
5 1 (1.00%) Visual Studio
5 1 (1.00%) XCTest
5 1 (1.00%) XCUITest
General
1 40 (40.00%) Finance
2 36 (36.00%) Social Skills
3 15 (15.00%) Banking
4 13 (13.00%) Front Office
5 11 (11.00%) Analytical Skills
6 6 (6.00%) Investment Banking
7 5 (5.00%) Influencing Skills
8 4 (4.00%) Back Office
8 4 (4.00%) Legal
9 3 (3.00%) Pharmaceutical
9 3 (3.00%) Public Sector
9 3 (3.00%) Retail
10 2 (2.00%) Local Government
11 1 (1.00%) Advertising
11 1 (1.00%) Corporate Banking
11 1 (1.00%) Financial Institution
11 1 (1.00%) Military
11 1 (1.00%) Publishing
11 1 (1.00%) Retail Banking
11 1 (1.00%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 22 (22.00%) Senior
2 19 (19.00%) Developer
3 17 (17.00%) Software Engineer
4 13 (13.00%) Data Engineer
5 11 (11.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 9 (9.00%) C# Developer
7 7 (7.00%) Architect
7 7 (7.00%) Senior C# Developer
7 7 (7.00%) Senior Developer
8 5 (5.00%) Engineering Specialist
8 5 (5.00%) Senior Data Engineer
9 4 (4.00%) Azure Engineer
9 4 (4.00%) Java Developer
9 4 (4.00%) Platform Engineer
10 3 (3.00%) AWS Engineer
10 3 (3.00%) DevOps Engineer
10 3 (3.00%) Full-Stack Developer
10 3 (3.00%) Software Asset Manager
10 3 (3.00%) Software Manager
10 3 (3.00%) Technical Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (14.00%) .NET
1 14 (14.00%) Terraform
2 13 (13.00%) React
2 13 (13.00%) Spring
3 12 (12.00%) Spring Boot
4 9 (9.00%) Kafka
4 9 (9.00%) REST
5 7 (7.00%) Web Services
6 6 (6.00%) LangChain
6 6 (6.00%) RESTful
7 5 (5.00%) AngularJS
8 4 (4.00%) FastAPI
8 4 (4.00%) LangGraph
8 4 (4.00%) LlamaIndex
9 3 (3.00%) .NET Core
9 3 (3.00%) CrewAI
9 3 (3.00%) GraphQL
9 3 (3.00%) Node.js
9 3 (3.00%) PyTorch
9 3 (3.00%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 25 (25.00%) Cloud Native
2 13 (13.00%) Distributed Systems
3 9 (9.00%) AI Agents
3 9 (9.00%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 7 (7.00%) Product Ownership
5 6 (6.00%) Fixed Income
6 5 (5.00%) Derivative
6 5 (5.00%) Enterprise Software
6 5 (5.00%) Self-Motivation
7 3 (3.00%) Distributed Computing
7 3 (3.00%) Equities
7 3 (3.00%) Life Science
7 3 (3.00%) Onboarding
8 2 (2.00%) Client/Server
8 2 (2.00%) Cyber Defence
8 2 (2.00%) Distributed Applications
8 2 (2.00%) Distributed Architecture
8 2 (2.00%) Genomics
9 1 (1.00%) Blockchain
9 1 (1.00%) OTC Derivatives
Operating Systems
1 4 (4.00%) Linux
1 4 (4.00%) Unix
2 3 (3.00%) Apple iOS
3 2 (2.00%) Android
4 1 (1.00%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 57 (57.00%) CI/CD
2 38 (38.00%) AI
3 31 (31.00%) Agile
4 27 (27.00%) DevOps
5 22 (22.00%) Observability
6 20 (20.00%) Containerisation
6 20 (20.00%) Test Automation
7 19 (19.00%) Machine Learning
8 18 (18.00%) LLM
9 17 (17.00%) Infrastructure as Code
10 16 (16.00%) Microservices
11 15 (15.00%) Continuous Improvement
11 15 (15.00%) Data Engineering
12 13 (13.00%) Analytics
12 13 (13.00%) Platform Engineering
12 13 (13.00%) Problem-Solving
12 13 (13.00%) SDLC
13 12 (12.00%) Generative AI
14 11 (11.00%) Stakeholder Management
14 11 (11.00%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 41 (41.00%) Python
2 28 (28.00%) SQL
3 26 (26.00%) Java
4 20 (20.00%) C#
5 14 (14.00%) TypeScript
6 7 (7.00%) JavaScript
7 5 (5.00%) Korn
7 5 (5.00%) Scala
8 4 (4.00%) C++
8 4 (4.00%) PowerShell
9 3 (3.00%) Bicep
9 3 (3.00%) Kotlin
9 3 (3.00%) Ruby
10 1 (1.00%) DAML
10 1 (1.00%) Go
10 1 (1.00%) Rust
10 1 (1.00%) Shell Script
10 1 (1.00%) Solidity
10 1 (1.00%) Swift
10 1 (1.00%) VBA
Qualifications
1 16 (16.00%) Security Cleared
2 13 (13.00%) SC Cleared
3 6 (6.00%) Degree
4 2 (2.00%) DV Cleared
5 1 (1.00%) AWS Certification
5 1 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 1 (1.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.00%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 8 (8.00%) Data Quality
2 5 (5.00%) GDPR
3 4 (4.00%) QA
4 2 (2.00%) Accessibility
4 2 (2.00%) EMIR
4 2 (2.00%) MiFID
System Software
1 22 (22.00%) Docker
2 1 (1.00%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 19 (19.00%) Kubernetes
2 2 (2.00%) Ansible
2 2 (2.00%) Grafana
3 1 (1.00%) Kubeflow
3 1 (1.00%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 8 (8.00%) Databricks
1 8 (8.00%) Google
2 6 (6.00%) Microsoft
2 6 (6.00%) Oracle
3 3 (3.00%) IBM
4 2 (2.00%) Foundry
5 1 (1.00%) Apple
5 1 (1.00%) Metaswitch
5 1 (1.00%) OpenAI
5 1 (1.00%) Remedy
5 1 (1.00%) Salesforce
5 1 (1.00%) Sybase
5 1 (1.00%) TIBCO