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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 44 31
Rank change year-on-year +12 -13 +8
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,594 1,361 1,909
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.68% 4.94% 5.77%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.70% 5.44% 6.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,405 849 1,196
10th Percentile £400 £380 £410
25th Percentile £468 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £560 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% -4.00% +4.17%
75th Percentile £688 £748 £823
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £560 £575 £601
% change year-on-year -2.61% -4.25% +0.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 414 111 249
10th Percentile £51.25 £38.63 £45.22
25th Percentile £58.16 £52.50 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.46 £75.00 £77.50
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 38,738 25,035 28,393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.83% 90.79% 85.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,882 15,942 18,107
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £631 £625 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £753
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,595 1,467 1,443
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.25 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.87 £18.63
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.09 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +63.39% -40.82% +2.41%

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 1 September 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 1 September 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 1 September 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 1,161 £600 -7.69% 3,991
North of England +25 421 £538 +9.25% 686
South East +25 332 £525 +4.90% 645
South West +19 306 £550 +7.32% 508
East of England +23 215 £505 +1.00% 432
North West +14 195 £550 +10.00% 416
Yorkshire +14 163 £500 +2.04% 174
Midlands +8 125 £460 -16.36% 300
West Midlands -6 87 £463 -19.57% 174
North East +6 68 £650 +41.30% 98
East Midlands +11 37 £435 -8.42% 125
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 53 (2.04%) Confluence
2 52 (2.00%) Apache Spark
3 42 (1.62%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (1.35%) Apache
5 12 (0.46%) CMS
6 10 (0.39%) SharePoint
7 7 (0.27%) SAS
8 6 (0.23%) Jupyter
9 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.19%) Camunda
9 5 (0.19%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.19%) Hyperledger
10 4 (0.15%) Apache Superset
11 3 (0.12%) WebSphere
11 3 (0.12%) WordPress
12 2 (0.077%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.077%) IIS
12 2 (0.077%) MQSeries
12 2 (0.077%) nginx
12 2 (0.077%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 14 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.39%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 10 (0.39%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.39%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.19%) Microsoft Excel
4 4 (0.15%) CPLEX
4 4 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
4 4 (0.15%) Simulink
5 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.12%) Trello
6 2 (0.077%) CATIA
6 2 (0.077%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.077%) Notion
7 1 (0.039%) Adobe After Effects
7 1 (0.039%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.039%) Blender
7 1 (0.039%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
2 5 (0.19%) R3 Corda
3 4 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.15%) Quorum
3 4 (0.15%) Ripple
4 3 (0.12%) Oracle Payroll
4 3 (0.12%) Orchestrade
4 3 (0.12%) Primavera
4 3 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.077%) Aladdin
5 2 (0.077%) Endur
5 2 (0.077%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.039%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.039%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.039%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.039%) Shopify
6 1 (0.039%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 648 (24.98%) AWS
2 523 (20.16%) Azure
3 261 (10.06%) GCP
4 230 (8.87%) GitHub
5 133 (5.13%) Serverless
6 114 (4.39%) GitHub Actions
7 113 (4.36%) Azure DevOps
8 96 (3.70%) AWS Lambda
9 66 (2.54%) Amazon S3
10 63 (2.43%) Anthropic Claude
11 58 (2.24%) OpenShift
12 51 (1.97%) Amazon SQS
13 49 (1.89%) GitHub Copilot
14 48 (1.85%) Amazon ECS
15 46 (1.77%) Amazon EKS
16 45 (1.73%) Power Platform
17 40 (1.54%) Snowflake
18 37 (1.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 33 (1.27%) Azure AKS
20 31 (1.20%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.16%) Software-Defined Radio
2 29 (1.12%) Wireless
3 20 (0.77%) Firewall
4 19 (0.73%) HTTP
4 19 (0.73%) Internet
5 17 (0.66%) VPN
6 13 (0.50%) Ethernet
7 12 (0.46%) TCP/IP
7 12 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
8 7 (0.27%) Network Security
8 7 (0.27%) RTP
8 7 (0.27%) Wireshark
9 6 (0.23%) 3GPP
10 5 (0.19%) DNS
11 4 (0.15%) IPv4
11 4 (0.15%) IPv6
11 4 (0.15%) RS-232
11 4 (0.15%) SSL
12 3 (0.12%) Cisco IPT
12 3 (0.12%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 138 (5.32%) PostgreSQL
2 104 (4.01%) Relational Database
3 88 (3.39%) NoSQL
4 85 (3.28%) SQL Server
5 52 (2.00%) MongoDB
6 50 (1.93%) Data Warehouse
7 41 (1.58%) DynamoDB
8 36 (1.39%) MySQL
9 32 (1.23%) Power BI
10 30 (1.16%) Metadata
11 28 (1.08%) Amazon RDS
11 28 (1.08%) Big Data
12 27 (1.04%) Redis
13 25 (0.96%) Data Lake
14 24 (0.93%) Elasticsearch
15 22 (0.85%) Pinecone
16 20 (0.77%) BigQuery
17 19 (0.73%) Weaviate
18 15 (0.58%) Chroma
19 14 (0.54%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 274 (10.56%) Git
2 157 (6.05%) Jenkins
3 151 (5.82%) GitLab
4 109 (4.20%) JIRA
5 59 (2.27%) SonarQube
6 38 (1.46%) Gradle
6 38 (1.46%) JUnit
7 31 (1.20%) Claude Code
8 26 (1.00%) Selenium
9 25 (0.96%) Rational DOORS
10 23 (0.89%) Rational Rhapsody
11 20 (0.77%) Maven
12 18 (0.69%) Visual Studio
13 17 (0.66%) Cucumber
14 16 (0.62%) Mockito
15 14 (0.54%) LabVIEW
16 13 (0.50%) Cypress.io
16 13 (0.50%) Liquibase
16 13 (0.50%) MLflow
17 12 (0.46%) Snyk
General
1 516 (19.89%) Social Skills
2 446 (17.19%) Finance
3 202 (7.79%) Banking
4 189 (7.29%) Analytical Skills
5 188 (7.25%) Public Sector
6 92 (3.55%) Aerospace
7 73 (2.81%) Front Office
8 49 (1.89%) Investment Banking
8 49 (1.89%) Manufacturing
9 46 (1.77%) Retail
10 43 (1.66%) Law
11 36 (1.39%) Automotive
12 28 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
13 27 (1.04%) Telecoms
14 26 (1.00%) Aviation
15 25 (0.96%) Military
16 21 (0.81%) Marketing
17 20 (0.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 17 (0.66%) Back Office
18 17 (0.66%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,143 (44.06%) Software Engineer
2 471 (18.16%) Developer
3 465 (17.93%) Senior
4 284 (10.95%) Lead
5 195 (7.52%) Senior Software Engineer
6 172 (6.63%) Java Engineer
7 158 (6.09%) Embedded Engineer
8 148 (5.71%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 138 (5.32%) Java Software Engineer
10 137 (5.28%) Java Developer
11 117 (4.51%) Software Developer
12 109 (4.20%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 108 (4.16%) C++ Software Engineer
14 106 (4.09%) Architect
15 105 (4.05%) Python Engineer
16 96 (3.70%) Senior Developer
17 87 (3.35%) Data Engineer
18 79 (3.05%) DevOps Engineer
18 79 (3.05%) Lead Software Engineer
19 74 (2.85%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 284 (10.95%) Terraform
2 241 (9.29%) React
3 222 (8.56%) Spring
4 221 (8.52%) REST
5 207 (7.98%) .NET
6 206 (7.94%) Spring Boot
7 165 (6.36%) Kafka
8 130 (5.01%) RESTful
9 126 (4.86%) Node.js
10 102 (3.93%) AngularJS
11 60 (2.31%) Django
12 53 (2.04%) Next.js
13 50 (1.93%) LangChain
14 49 (1.89%) CSS
15 47 (1.81%) HTML
16 42 (1.62%) FastAPI
17 41 (1.58%) JSON
18 39 (1.50%) OAuth
18 39 (1.50%) Quarkus
19 37 (1.43%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 392 (15.11%) Cloud Native
2 233 (8.98%) Distributed Systems
3 136 (5.24%) Product Ownership
4 112 (4.32%) AI Agents
5 84 (3.24%) Algorithms
6 60 (2.31%) Enterprise Software
7 53 (2.04%) Data Structures
8 49 (1.89%) Embedded Systems
9 48 (1.85%) Onboarding
10 45 (1.73%) Data Protection Act
11 36 (1.39%) Legacy Systems
12 33 (1.27%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 31 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
14 27 (1.04%) Fixed Income
14 27 (1.04%) Robotics
15 25 (0.96%) Greenfield Project
16 24 (0.93%) Derivative
17 21 (0.81%) Equities
18 19 (0.73%) NHS
19 18 (0.69%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 174 (6.71%) Linux
2 48 (1.85%) Windows
3 29 (1.12%) Unix
4 23 (0.89%) Embedded Linux
5 22 (0.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 14 (0.54%) Android
6 14 (0.54%) FreeRTOS
7 9 (0.35%) Windows Server
8 8 (0.31%) Apple iOS
8 8 (0.31%) Ubuntu
9 6 (0.23%) Debian
10 3 (0.12%) Rocky
10 3 (0.12%) VMS
11 2 (0.077%) VxWorks
11 2 (0.077%) Windows Server 2019
12 1 (0.039%) Solaris
12 1 (0.039%) Tizen
12 1 (0.039%) webOS
12 1 (0.039%) Windows Server 2008
12 1 (0.039%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 890 (34.31%) CI/CD
2 774 (29.84%) Agile
3 621 (23.94%) DevOps
4 528 (20.35%) AI
5 406 (15.65%) Microservices
6 373 (14.38%) Test Automation
7 311 (11.99%) Problem-Solving
8 309 (11.91%) Infrastructure as Code
9 306 (11.80%) Continuous Improvement
10 264 (10.18%) Containerisation
11 262 (10.10%) Observability
12 257 (9.91%) SDLC
13 253 (9.75%) Full-Stack Development
14 220 (8.48%) Platform Engineering
15 217 (8.37%) Technical Leadership
16 216 (8.33%) Machine Learning
17 208 (8.02%) Event-Driven
18 199 (7.67%) LLM
18 199 (7.67%) Mentoring
18 199 (7.67%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 758 (29.22%) Python
2 664 (25.60%) Java
3 374 (14.42%) SQL
4 284 (10.95%) C#
5 273 (10.52%) TypeScript
6 213 (8.21%) C++
7 197 (7.59%) JavaScript
8 115 (4.43%) C
9 92 (3.55%) Ada
10 79 (3.05%) Go
11 63 (2.43%) Kotlin
12 45 (1.73%) PowerShell
13 42 (1.62%) Bash
14 41 (1.58%) Rust
15 40 (1.54%) Scala
16 25 (0.96%) Ruby
17 24 (0.93%) Embedded C
18 22 (0.85%) PL/SQL
19 21 (0.81%) Bicep
20 18 (0.69%) PHP
Qualifications
1 582 (22.44%) Security Cleared
2 488 (18.81%) SC Cleared
3 209 (8.06%) Degree
4 98 (3.78%) Computer Science Degree
5 81 (3.12%) DV Cleared
6 56 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
7 46 (1.77%) Master's Degree
8 34 (1.31%) AWS Certification
9 20 (0.77%) PhD
10 15 (0.58%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 15 (0.58%) Azure Certification
11 9 (0.35%) PMP
12 8 (0.31%) CISSP
13 7 (0.27%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 6 (0.23%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.23%) ISTQB
15 4 (0.15%) GIAC
15 4 (0.15%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 4 (0.15%) MBA
15 4 (0.15%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 166 (6.40%) QA
2 64 (2.47%) Data Quality
3 50 (1.93%) Accessibility
4 23 (0.89%) GDPR
5 18 (0.69%) Def Stans
6 17 (0.66%) MISRA
7 15 (0.58%) NIST
8 14 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 12 (0.46%) WCAG
10 10 (0.39%) DO-178B
11 9 (0.35%) IEC 61508
11 9 (0.35%) NCSC
12 7 (0.27%) GRC
13 6 (0.23%) MISRA C
14 5 (0.19%) HL7
14 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
16 3 (0.12%) DO-254
16 3 (0.12%) EMIR
System Software
1 390 (15.03%) Docker
2 30 (1.16%) Firmware
3 19 (0.73%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.39%) Active Directory
4 10 (0.39%) Virtual Machines
5 4 (0.15%) VMware Infrastructure
6 1 (0.039%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 444 (17.12%) Kubernetes
2 83 (3.20%) Ansible
3 52 (2.00%) Grafana
4 42 (1.62%) Argo
5 38 (1.46%) Prometheus
6 14 (0.54%) Single Sign-On
7 11 (0.42%) Kibana
8 7 (0.27%) Puppet
9 6 (0.23%) Functional Safety
10 4 (0.15%) Consul
10 4 (0.15%) HAProxy
10 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
10 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
11 3 (0.12%) HP Fortify
11 3 (0.12%) Istio
11 3 (0.12%) Progress Chef
12 2 (0.077%) Cilium
12 2 (0.077%) Docker Swarm
12 2 (0.077%) Packer
12 2 (0.077%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 138 (5.32%) Microsoft
2 93 (3.59%) Google
3 80 (3.08%) Oracle
4 71 (2.74%) Databricks
5 59 (2.27%) OpenAI
6 44 (1.70%) Red Hat
7 26 (1.00%) Salesforce
8 24 (0.93%) Splunk
9 19 (0.73%) IBM
10 18 (0.69%) ServiceNow
11 17 (0.66%) Foundry
11 17 (0.66%) Informatica
12 12 (0.46%) Adobe
12 12 (0.46%) SAP
13 11 (0.42%) Checkmarx
14 9 (0.35%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.31%) Confluent
15 8 (0.31%) Siemens
16 7 (0.27%) ForgeRock
16 7 (0.27%) Hitachi