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

6 months to
28 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 43 36 43
Rank change year-on-year -7 +7 -5
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 94 101 94
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 4.38% 5.84% 4.07%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.99% 6.33% 4.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 72 56 46
10th Percentile £415 £463 £438
25th Percentile £501 £522 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £588 £581
Median % change year-on-year -2.13% +1.08% -10.58%
75th Percentile £675 £722 £747
90th Percentile £761 £863 £838
Central London median daily rate £575 £588 £575
% change year-on-year -2.13% +2.17% -11.54%
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 1,884 1,595 2,076
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 87.87% 92.20% 89.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,298 1,028 1,472
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 £669 £680 £688
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
Central London median daily rate £550 £570 £550
% change year-on-year -3.51% +3.64% -7.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 23 9 11
10th Percentile £18.75 £22.00 £18.93
25th Percentile £19.46 £24.66 £20.07
Median hourly rate £28.00 £31.00 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -9.68% +24.00% -45.65%
75th Percentile £45.08 £34.68 £40.92
90th Percentile £58.53 £51.75 £50.25
Central London median hourly rate £26.11 £29.07 £27.81
% change year-on-year -10.18% +4.53% -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 28 March 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 (2.13%) Apache
1 2 (2.13%) Apache Spark
2 1 (1.06%) Apache Airflow
2 1 (1.06%) Camunda
2 1 (1.06%) Cloud Foundry
2 1 (1.06%) SharePoint
2 1 (1.06%) Smallworld
Applications
1 1 (1.06%) Maya
Business Applications
1 2 (2.13%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (1.06%) Aladdin
2 1 (1.06%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
Cloud Services
1 33 (35.11%) AWS
2 24 (25.53%) Azure
3 13 (13.83%) GCP
3 13 (13.83%) GitHub
4 6 (6.38%) Anthropic Claude
5 5 (5.32%) Azure DevOps
5 5 (5.32%) Google Gemini
5 5 (5.32%) Power Platform
6 3 (3.19%) GitHub Actions
6 3 (3.19%) GitHub Copilot
6 3 (3.19%) Serverless
7 2 (2.13%) Amazon S3
7 2 (2.13%) Amazon SageMaker
7 2 (2.13%) AWS Lambda
7 2 (2.13%) Azure AKS
7 2 (2.13%) Azure Cosmos DB
7 2 (2.13%) Cloud Run
7 2 (2.13%) dbt
7 2 (2.13%) Entra ID
7 2 (2.13%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.06%) HTTP
1 1 (1.06%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (10.64%) Relational Database
2 4 (4.26%) MongoDB
2 4 (4.26%) NoSQL
2 4 (4.26%) PostgreSQL
3 2 (2.13%) Apache Cassandra
3 2 (2.13%) BigQuery
3 2 (2.13%) Data Warehouse
3 2 (2.13%) Power BI
3 2 (2.13%) SQL Server
4 1 (1.06%) Amazon Redshift
4 1 (1.06%) Big Data
4 1 (1.06%) Data Hub
4 1 (1.06%) Data Lake
4 1 (1.06%) Delta Lake
4 1 (1.06%) Elasticsearch
4 1 (1.06%) Hadoop
4 1 (1.06%) Metadata
4 1 (1.06%) MySQL
4 1 (1.06%) Pinecone
4 1 (1.06%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 8 (8.51%) Git
2 7 (7.45%) GitLab
3 3 (3.19%) Cypress.io
3 3 (3.19%) Jenkins
4 2 (2.13%) CircleCI
4 2 (2.13%) Claude Code
4 2 (2.13%) JUnit
4 2 (2.13%) Mocha
4 2 (2.13%) Mockito
4 2 (2.13%) webpack
5 1 (1.06%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.06%) Gradle
5 1 (1.06%) Jaeger
5 1 (1.06%) Maven
5 1 (1.06%) MSTest
5 1 (1.06%) Postman
5 1 (1.06%) TeamCity
5 1 (1.06%) Vite
General
1 28 (29.79%) Finance
2 18 (19.15%) Social Skills
3 12 (12.77%) Banking
4 7 (7.45%) Analytical Skills
5 5 (5.32%) Manufacturing
5 5 (5.32%) Public Sector
6 3 (3.19%) Pharmaceutical
7 2 (2.13%) Advertising
7 2 (2.13%) Influencing Skills
8 1 (1.06%) Aerospace
8 1 (1.06%) Back Office
8 1 (1.06%) Financial Institution
8 1 (1.06%) Games
8 1 (1.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 1 (1.06%) Investment Banking
8 1 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
8 1 (1.06%) Retail
8 1 (1.06%) Retail Banking
8 1 (1.06%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 37 (39.36%) Software Engineer
2 23 (24.47%) Senior
3 19 (20.21%) Developer
4 11 (11.70%) Lead
5 9 (9.57%) Python Engineer
6 8 (8.51%) Architect
6 8 (8.51%) Senior Software Engineer
7 7 (7.45%) Senior Developer
8 6 (6.38%) .NET Software Engineer
9 5 (5.32%) Data Scientist
9 5 (5.32%) Hardware Engineer
9 5 (5.32%) Integration Engineer
9 5 (5.32%) Java Engineer
9 5 (5.32%) Software Integration Engineer
9 5 (5.32%) Technical Architect
9 5 (5.32%) Technical Leader
10 4 (4.26%) Backend Developer
10 4 (4.26%) Data Engineer
10 4 (4.26%) Python Developer
11 3 (3.19%) Senior Backend Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (13.83%) React
2 11 (11.70%) REST
3 10 (10.64%) .NET
4 9 (9.57%) Spring
5 8 (8.51%) Node.js
5 8 (8.51%) RESTful
6 7 (7.45%) Kafka
7 6 (6.38%) AngularJS
7 6 (6.38%) HTML
7 6 (6.38%) LangChain
7 6 (6.38%) LangGraph
8 5 (5.32%) CSS
8 5 (5.32%) Playwright
8 5 (5.32%) Spring Boot
9 4 (4.26%) GraphQL
9 4 (4.26%) OpenTelemetry
10 3 (3.19%) FastAPI
10 3 (3.19%) Jest
10 3 (3.19%) React Native
10 3 (3.19%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 17 (18.09%) Cloud Native
2 15 (15.96%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (8.51%) Life Science
4 6 (6.38%) AI Agents
4 6 (6.38%) Product Ownership
5 5 (5.32%) Virtual Team
6 3 (3.19%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (3.19%) Mobile App
7 2 (2.13%) Onboarding
8 1 (1.06%) Analytical Mindset
8 1 (1.06%) Autonomous Agent
8 1 (1.06%) Data Structures
8 1 (1.06%) Distributed Computing
8 1 (1.06%) Enterprise Software
8 1 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (1.06%) Hedge funds
8 1 (1.06%) Media Streaming
8 1 (1.06%) Online Games
8 1 (1.06%) Robotics
8 1 (1.06%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 3 (3.19%) Linux
2 2 (2.13%) Embedded Linux
2 2 (2.13%) Windows
3 1 (1.06%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 36 (38.30%) CI/CD
2 30 (31.91%) AI
3 23 (24.47%) DevOps
3 23 (24.47%) Microservices
4 20 (21.28%) Agile
5 19 (20.21%) Test Automation
6 17 (18.09%) Problem-Solving
7 15 (15.96%) Full-Stack Development
7 15 (15.96%) Generative AI
8 14 (14.89%) Data Science
8 14 (14.89%) Observability
9 13 (13.83%) Machine Learning
10 12 (12.77%) Code Quality
10 12 (12.77%) Containerisation
11 11 (11.70%) Infrastructure as Code
12 9 (9.57%) Data Engineering
12 9 (9.57%) Design Patterns
12 9 (9.57%) LLM
13 8 (8.51%) Platform Engineering
13 8 (8.51%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 30 (31.91%) Python
2 24 (25.53%) Java
3 21 (22.34%) SQL
4 10 (10.64%) C#
4 10 (10.64%) TypeScript
5 7 (7.45%) JavaScript
6 5 (5.32%) Go
7 3 (3.19%) C++
7 3 (3.19%) Ruby
8 2 (2.13%) COBOL
9 1 (1.06%) PowerShell
9 1 (1.06%) R
9 1 (1.06%) Rust
Qualifications
1 16 (17.02%) Security Cleared
2 15 (15.96%) SC Cleared
3 9 (9.57%) Degree
4 3 (3.19%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (2.13%) AWS Certification
5 2 (2.13%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 1 (1.06%) DBS Check
6 1 (1.06%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (3.19%) Data Quality
2 1 (1.06%) Accessibility
2 1 (1.06%) GDPR
2 1 (1.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 1 (1.06%) NIST
2 1 (1.06%) WCAG
System Software
1 20 (21.28%) Docker
2 1 (1.06%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 19 (20.21%) Kubernetes
2 6 (6.38%) Terraform
3 3 (3.19%) Grafana
4 2 (2.13%) Ansible
4 2 (2.13%) Prometheus
5 1 (1.06%) Argo
5 1 (1.06%) Istio
Vendors
1 9 (9.57%) Microsoft
2 7 (7.45%) Google
3 6 (6.38%) Oracle
4 2 (2.13%) Databricks
4 2 (2.13%) IBM
5 1 (1.06%) Dynatrace
5 1 (1.06%) MuleSoft
5 1 (1.06%) OpenAI
5 1 (1.06%) Pega
5 1 (1.06%) Splunk