Software Engineering Contract Job Trends in England

Software Engineering
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring Software Engineering skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 22 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 43 30
Rank change year-on-year +12 -13 +11
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,474 1,330 2,061
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.51% 4.87% 5.83%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.46% 5.37% 6.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,370 865 1,309
10th Percentile £400 £384 £405
25th Percentile £468 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £615
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -2.44% +2.50%
75th Percentile £688 £775 £788
90th Percentile £788 £850 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 414 78 330
10th Percentile £51.48 £38.29 £48.00
25th Percentile £60.50 £53.65 £55.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £78.25 £75.25
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

All Process & Methodology Skills
England

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 England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 38,278 24,745 30,322
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.32% 90.65% 85.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,038 15,865 19,799
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £635 £645
90th Percentile £737 £738 £751
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,361 1,324 1,984
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.23 £13.25
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.95 £17.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +88.87% -37.13% -6.98%
75th Percentile £69.50 £53.56 £63.75
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.16 £74.31
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%

Software Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Software Engineering relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Software Engineering job vacancy trend in England

Software Engineering
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Software Engineering.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Software Engineering

Software Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Software Engineering in England over the 6 months to 22 July 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Software Engineering in England

Software Engineering
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Software Engineering.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Software Engineering

Software Engineering
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Software Engineering in England over the 6 months to 22 July 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Software Engineering in England

Software Engineering
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Software Engineering within the England region over the 6 months to 22 July 2026. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London -2 1,089 £600 -7.69% 1,355
North of England +23 394 £538 +9.25% 353
South West +20 314 £550 +10.00% 198
South East +24 312 £525 +3.65% 355
East of England +26 217 £505 +3.48% 155
North West +10 190 £530 +6.00% 207
Yorkshire +17 141 £525 +7.14% 95
Midlands -17 105 £464 -5.36% 148
West Midlands -18 81 £461 -17.35% 75
North East +14 68 £650 +41.30% 54
East Midlands -8 23 £513 +7.89% 73
Software Engineering
UK

Software Engineering
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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 55 (2.22%) Confluence
2 45 (1.82%) Apache Spark
3 31 (1.25%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (1.21%) Apache
5 11 (0.44%) CMS
6 10 (0.40%) SAS
7 7 (0.28%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.20%) Ethereum
8 5 (0.20%) Hyperledger
8 5 (0.20%) nginx
9 4 (0.16%) WebLogic
10 3 (0.12%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.12%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.12%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.081%) Apache Solr
11 2 (0.081%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.081%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.081%) IIS
11 2 (0.081%) MQSeries
11 2 (0.081%) WordPress
Applications
1 15 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.40%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 8 (0.32%) Chatbot
4 7 (0.28%) Microsoft Excel
5 6 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
6 5 (0.20%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
7 4 (0.16%) Simulink
8 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
9 2 (0.081%) CATIA
9 2 (0.081%) Trello
10 1 (0.040%) Adobe After Effects
10 1 (0.040%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.040%) Blender
10 1 (0.040%) Maya
10 1 (0.040%) Notion
10 1 (0.040%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.28%) Oracle EBS
2 6 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
3 5 (0.20%) R3 Corda
4 4 (0.16%) Quorum
4 4 (0.16%) Ripple
5 3 (0.12%) Orchestrade
5 3 (0.12%) Primavera
5 3 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.081%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.081%) Endur
6 2 (0.081%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.040%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.040%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.040%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 620 (25.06%) AWS
2 478 (19.32%) Azure
3 248 (10.02%) GCP
4 192 (7.76%) GitHub
5 122 (4.93%) Serverless
6 97 (3.92%) Azure DevOps
7 94 (3.80%) GitHub Actions
8 81 (3.27%) AWS Lambda
9 62 (2.51%) Amazon S3
10 55 (2.22%) OpenShift
11 48 (1.94%) Power Platform
12 47 (1.90%) Anthropic Claude
13 44 (1.78%) Amazon SQS
14 43 (1.74%) Amazon EKS
15 41 (1.66%) Amazon ECS
16 39 (1.58%) Azure AKS
17 32 (1.29%) AWS CloudFormation
18 31 (1.25%) GitHub Copilot
19 30 (1.21%) Amazon EC2
20 28 (1.13%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.01%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (0.97%) Wireless
3 23 (0.93%) Ethernet
4 18 (0.73%) Firewall
4 18 (0.73%) TCP/IP
5 17 (0.69%) Internet
6 15 (0.61%) HTTP
7 13 (0.53%) VPN
8 11 (0.44%) Wi-Fi
9 9 (0.36%) 3GPP
9 9 (0.36%) Network Security
10 8 (0.32%) RTP
11 7 (0.28%) Wireshark
12 6 (0.24%) RS-232
13 5 (0.20%) DNS
13 5 (0.20%) RS-485
14 4 (0.16%) RS-422
15 3 (0.12%) HTTPS
15 3 (0.12%) IPv4
15 3 (0.12%) IPv6
Database & Business Intelligence
1 157 (6.35%) PostgreSQL
2 94 (3.80%) Relational Database
3 77 (3.11%) SQL Server
4 75 (3.03%) NoSQL
5 53 (2.14%) MongoDB
6 37 (1.50%) Data Warehouse
7 36 (1.46%) DynamoDB
8 32 (1.29%) MySQL
9 30 (1.21%) Power BI
10 29 (1.17%) Big Data
11 24 (0.97%) BigQuery
12 22 (0.89%) Amazon RDS
12 22 (0.89%) Redis
13 21 (0.85%) Data Lake
13 21 (0.85%) Elasticsearch
13 21 (0.85%) Metadata
14 18 (0.73%) Apache Cassandra
15 17 (0.69%) Amazon Redshift
15 17 (0.69%) Pinecone
16 15 (0.61%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 251 (10.15%) Git
2 150 (6.06%) Jenkins
3 130 (5.25%) GitLab
4 108 (4.37%) JIRA
5 58 (2.34%) SonarQube
6 36 (1.46%) Gradle
7 34 (1.37%) JUnit
8 24 (0.97%) Visual Studio
9 22 (0.89%) Rational DOORS
10 21 (0.85%) Selenium
11 20 (0.81%) Claude Code
12 19 (0.77%) Bitbucket
12 19 (0.77%) Cucumber
12 19 (0.77%) Rational Rhapsody
13 18 (0.73%) Maven
14 16 (0.65%) Liquibase
14 16 (0.65%) Mockito
15 13 (0.53%) Cypress.io
16 12 (0.49%) Eclipse
16 12 (0.49%) Mocha
General
1 449 (18.15%) Finance
2 433 (17.50%) Social Skills
3 175 (7.07%) Banking
4 167 (6.75%) Analytical Skills
5 164 (6.63%) Public Sector
6 105 (4.24%) Aerospace
7 94 (3.80%) Front Office
8 58 (2.34%) Retail
9 45 (1.82%) Manufacturing
10 43 (1.74%) Investment Banking
11 42 (1.70%) Law
12 32 (1.29%) Telecoms
13 28 (1.13%) Military
14 27 (1.09%) Automotive
15 25 (1.01%) Aviation
15 25 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
16 20 (0.81%) Electronics
17 17 (0.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 16 (0.65%) Legal
19 14 (0.57%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,193 (48.22%) Software Engineer
2 471 (19.04%) Developer
3 424 (17.14%) Senior
4 271 (10.95%) Lead
5 175 (7.07%) Senior Software Engineer
6 166 (6.71%) Java Engineer
7 142 (5.74%) Embedded Engineer
8 137 (5.54%) Java Software Engineer
9 133 (5.38%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 132 (5.34%) Java Developer
11 123 (4.97%) C++ Software Engineer
12 104 (4.20%) Lead Software Engineer
13 101 (4.08%) Architect
14 99 (4.00%) Python Engineer
15 97 (3.92%) Software Developer
16 85 (3.44%) Senior Developer
17 80 (3.23%) Python Developer
18 77 (3.11%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 77 (3.11%) DevOps Engineer
19 74 (2.99%) Developer/Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 281 (11.36%) React
2 193 (7.80%) .NET
3 186 (7.52%) Spring
4 184 (7.44%) REST
5 182 (7.36%) Kafka
6 181 (7.32%) Node.js
7 168 (6.79%) Spring Boot
8 117 (4.73%) RESTful
9 108 (4.37%) AngularJS
10 75 (3.03%) GraphQL
11 59 (2.38%) Redux
12 47 (1.90%) CSS
12 47 (1.90%) Next.js
13 46 (1.86%) HTML
14 44 (1.78%) Django
15 43 (1.74%) JSON
16 37 (1.50%) Quarkus
17 35 (1.41%) OAuth
18 34 (1.37%) .NET Core
18 34 (1.37%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 305 (12.33%) Cloud Native
2 208 (8.41%) Distributed Systems
3 133 (5.38%) Product Ownership
4 82 (3.31%) Algorithms
5 74 (2.99%) Fixed Income
6 71 (2.87%) AI Agents
7 45 (1.82%) Data Structures
8 44 (1.78%) Onboarding
9 43 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
9 43 (1.74%) Embedded Systems
10 35 (1.41%) Derivative
10 35 (1.41%) Enterprise Software
11 33 (1.33%) Legacy Systems
12 32 (1.29%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 32 (1.29%) Self-Motivation
13 29 (1.17%) Equities
14 22 (0.89%) Greenfield Project
15 21 (0.85%) Robotics
16 17 (0.69%) Virtual Team
17 16 (0.65%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 187 (7.56%) Linux
2 58 (2.34%) Windows
3 36 (1.46%) Unix
4 29 (1.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 19 (0.77%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.57%) Android
6 14 (0.57%) Apple iOS
7 11 (0.44%) FreeRTOS
8 10 (0.40%) Windows Server
9 8 (0.32%) Ubuntu
10 4 (0.16%) Debian
10 4 (0.16%) VMS
10 4 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.12%) Rocky
11 3 (0.12%) Solaris
11 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
12 2 (0.081%) VxWorks
13 1 (0.040%) Tizen
13 1 (0.040%) webOS
13 1 (0.040%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 786 (31.77%) CI/CD
2 774 (31.29%) Agile
3 560 (22.64%) DevOps
4 428 (17.30%) AI
5 369 (14.92%) Microservices
6 321 (12.97%) Test Automation
7 279 (11.28%) Problem-Solving
8 270 (10.91%) Full-Stack Development
9 252 (10.19%) Continuous Improvement
10 250 (10.11%) Infrastructure as Code
11 238 (9.62%) Containerisation
12 211 (8.53%) Machine Learning
12 211 (8.53%) Observability
13 202 (8.16%) Mentoring
14 198 (8.00%) SDLC
14 198 (8.00%) TDD
15 184 (7.44%) Scrum
16 178 (7.19%) Platform Engineering
17 177 (7.15%) Technical Leadership
18 171 (6.91%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 700 (28.29%) Python
2 633 (25.59%) Java
3 323 (13.06%) SQL
4 309 (12.49%) TypeScript
5 291 (11.76%) C#
6 240 (9.70%) JavaScript
7 220 (8.89%) C++
8 126 (5.09%) Go
9 117 (4.73%) Ada
10 108 (4.37%) C
11 50 (2.02%) Kotlin
12 41 (1.66%) Rust
13 34 (1.37%) PowerShell
14 32 (1.29%) Bash
15 31 (1.25%) Scala
16 24 (0.97%) PL/SQL
17 19 (0.77%) Embedded C
18 18 (0.73%) Bicep
18 18 (0.73%) Ruby
19 17 (0.69%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 583 (23.57%) Security Cleared
2 483 (19.52%) SC Cleared
3 190 (7.68%) Degree
4 82 (3.31%) Computer Science Degree
5 74 (2.99%) DV Cleared
6 54 (2.18%) BPSS Clearance
7 35 (1.41%) Master's Degree
8 34 (1.37%) AWS Certification
9 20 (0.81%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 16 (0.65%) PhD
11 15 (0.61%) Azure Certification
12 8 (0.32%) CISSP
13 6 (0.24%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.24%) ISTQB
13 6 (0.24%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.24%) PMP
14 5 (0.20%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
15 4 (0.16%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 4 (0.16%) MBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 150 (6.06%) QA
2 51 (2.06%) Data Quality
3 46 (1.86%) Accessibility
4 27 (1.09%) Def Stans
5 21 (0.85%) GDPR
6 17 (0.69%) IEC 61508
7 15 (0.61%) MISRA
8 14 (0.57%) NIST
9 11 (0.44%) WCAG
10 10 (0.40%) DO-178B
10 10 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 8 (0.32%) NCSC
12 6 (0.24%) GRC
12 6 (0.24%) MISRA C
12 6 (0.24%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.20%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 3 (0.12%) DO-254
14 3 (0.12%) FATCA
15 2 (0.081%) EMIR
System Software
1 355 (14.35%) Docker
2 22 (0.89%) Firmware
3 11 (0.44%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.40%) Active Directory
5 7 (0.28%) Virtual Machines
6 6 (0.24%) VMware Infrastructure
7 3 (0.12%) HDFS
8 2 (0.081%) SRDF
9 1 (0.040%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 404 (16.33%) Kubernetes
2 246 (9.94%) Terraform
3 71 (2.87%) Ansible
4 60 (2.43%) Grafana
5 40 (1.62%) Prometheus
6 39 (1.58%) Argo
7 11 (0.44%) Kibana
7 11 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
8 8 (0.32%) Puppet
9 6 (0.24%) Kubeflow
9 6 (0.24%) Progress Chef
10 5 (0.20%) HAProxy
11 3 (0.12%) Consul
11 3 (0.12%) Functional Safety
12 2 (0.081%) Cilium
12 2 (0.081%) Docker Swarm
12 2 (0.081%) HP Fortify
12 2 (0.081%) HP Quality Center
12 2 (0.081%) Istio
13 1 (0.040%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 126 (5.09%) Microsoft
2 87 (3.52%) Google
3 75 (3.03%) Oracle
4 50 (2.02%) Red Hat
5 43 (1.74%) Databricks
6 40 (1.62%) OpenAI
7 20 (0.81%) Splunk
8 19 (0.77%) Informatica
9 18 (0.73%) IBM
10 17 (0.69%) Salesforce
10 17 (0.69%) ServiceNow
11 15 (0.61%) Foundry
12 12 (0.49%) Adobe
12 12 (0.49%) Siemens
13 11 (0.44%) SAP
14 10 (0.40%) Checkmarx
14 10 (0.40%) ForgeRock
14 10 (0.40%) Okta
15 8 (0.32%) Confluent
15 8 (0.32%) Dynatrace