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

6 months to
9 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 44 30
Rank change year-on-year +13 -14 +9
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,657 1,340 1,892
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.74% 4.86% 5.80%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.76% 5.35% 6.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,441 830 1,168
10th Percentile £400 £380 £413
25th Percentile £463 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% +4.17%
75th Percentile £688 £750 £823
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 416 110 238
10th Percentile £50.63 £38.63 £45.22
25th Percentile £57.63 £52.50 £54.43
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.23 £75.38 £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 39,321 25,058 28,015
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.90% 90.80% 85.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,195 15,905 17,612
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £636 £625 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £752
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,661 1,475 1,343
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.27 £14.84
25th Percentile £18.00 £17.83 £20.24
Median hourly rate £43.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +72.96% -41.51% +0.58%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £66.61
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £40.03 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +59.17% -41.51% +1.96%

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 9 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 9 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 9 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 1,192 £600 -7.69% 4,036
North of England +27 432 £525 +6.62% 647
South East +31 339 £525 +10.53% 621
South West +21 309 £550 +7.32% 446
East of England +19 216 £507 +1.40% 461
North West +18 198 £550 +10.00% 389
Yorkshire +19 170 £500 +1.75% 173
Midlands +18 137 £463 -17.04% 294
West Midlands +6 95 £464 -19.37% 178
North East +7 67 £650 +41.30% 88
East Midlands +12 41 £435 -8.42% 115
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 57 (2.15%) Confluence
2 54 (2.03%) Apache Spark
3 44 (1.66%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (1.32%) Apache
5 13 (0.49%) SharePoint
6 12 (0.45%) CMS
7 7 (0.26%) Jupyter
7 7 (0.26%) SAS
8 6 (0.23%) Camunda
9 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.19%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.19%) Hyperledger
10 4 (0.15%) Apache Superset
11 3 (0.11%) MQSeries
11 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
11 3 (0.11%) WordPress
12 2 (0.075%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.075%) IIS
12 2 (0.075%) nginx
12 2 (0.075%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 14 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.38%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 10 (0.38%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.38%) 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 (0.11%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.11%) Trello
6 2 (0.075%) CATIA
6 2 (0.075%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.075%) Notion
7 1 (0.038%) Adobe After Effects
7 1 (0.038%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.038%) Blender
7 1 (0.038%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.26%) 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 (0.11%) Oracle Payroll
4 3 (0.11%) Orchestrade
4 3 (0.11%) Primavera
4 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.075%) Endur
5 2 (0.075%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.038%) Aladdin
6 1 (0.038%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.038%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.038%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.038%) Shopify
6 1 (0.038%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 673 (25.33%) AWS
2 534 (20.10%) Azure
3 273 (10.27%) GCP
4 236 (8.88%) GitHub
5 139 (5.23%) Serverless
6 119 (4.48%) GitHub Actions
7 112 (4.22%) Azure DevOps
8 102 (3.84%) AWS Lambda
9 70 (2.63%) Amazon S3
10 64 (2.41%) Anthropic Claude
11 58 (2.18%) OpenShift
12 51 (1.92%) Amazon ECS
12 51 (1.92%) Amazon SQS
13 50 (1.88%) GitHub Copilot
14 48 (1.81%) Amazon EKS
15 44 (1.66%) Snowflake
16 43 (1.62%) Power Platform
17 41 (1.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (1.28%) Amazon EC2
19 32 (1.20%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.13%) Software-Defined Radio
1 30 (1.13%) Wireless
2 20 (0.75%) Firewall
3 19 (0.72%) HTTP
3 19 (0.72%) Internet
4 17 (0.64%) VPN
5 13 (0.49%) Ethernet
5 13 (0.49%) TCP/IP
6 12 (0.45%) Wi-Fi
7 8 (0.30%) RTP
7 8 (0.30%) Wireshark
8 7 (0.26%) Network Security
9 6 (0.23%) 3GPP
9 6 (0.23%) DNS
10 4 (0.15%) IPv4
10 4 (0.15%) IPv6
10 4 (0.15%) RS-232
10 4 (0.15%) SSL
11 3 (0.11%) Cisco IPT
11 3 (0.11%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 143 (5.38%) PostgreSQL
2 104 (3.91%) Relational Database
3 87 (3.27%) NoSQL
4 85 (3.20%) SQL Server
5 54 (2.03%) MongoDB
6 50 (1.88%) Data Warehouse
7 42 (1.58%) DynamoDB
8 38 (1.43%) MySQL
9 30 (1.13%) Amazon RDS
9 30 (1.13%) Metadata
10 29 (1.09%) Big Data
10 29 (1.09%) Power BI
11 27 (1.02%) Redis
12 26 (0.98%) Elasticsearch
13 24 (0.90%) Data Lake
14 22 (0.83%) Pinecone
15 21 (0.79%) BigQuery
16 20 (0.75%) Weaviate
17 16 (0.60%) Chroma
18 14 (0.53%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 286 (10.76%) Git
2 157 (5.91%) Jenkins
3 155 (5.83%) GitLab
4 117 (4.40%) JIRA
5 60 (2.26%) SonarQube
6 42 (1.58%) JUnit
7 38 (1.43%) Gradle
8 33 (1.24%) Claude Code
9 29 (1.09%) Selenium
10 25 (0.94%) Rational DOORS
11 24 (0.90%) Rational Rhapsody
12 23 (0.87%) Maven
13 20 (0.75%) Cucumber
14 19 (0.72%) Mockito
15 17 (0.64%) Visual Studio
16 14 (0.53%) Cypress.io
16 14 (0.53%) LabVIEW
17 13 (0.49%) Bitbucket
17 13 (0.49%) Liquibase
18 12 (0.45%) MLflow
General
1 541 (20.36%) Social Skills
2 465 (17.50%) Finance
3 210 (7.90%) Banking
4 199 (7.49%) Public Sector
5 195 (7.34%) Analytical Skills
6 89 (3.35%) Aerospace
7 76 (2.86%) Front Office
8 53 (1.99%) Investment Banking
9 50 (1.88%) Manufacturing
10 46 (1.73%) Retail
11 45 (1.69%) Law
12 37 (1.39%) Automotive
13 29 (1.09%) Influencing Skills
14 27 (1.02%) Military
14 27 (1.02%) Telecoms
15 26 (0.98%) Aviation
16 22 (0.83%) Marketing
17 21 (0.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 18 (0.68%) Back Office
18 18 (0.68%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,147 (43.17%) Software Engineer
2 495 (18.63%) Developer
3 490 (18.44%) Senior
4 290 (10.91%) Lead
5 202 (7.60%) Senior Software Engineer
6 172 (6.47%) Java Engineer
7 161 (6.06%) Embedded Engineer
8 153 (5.76%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 143 (5.38%) Java Developer
10 139 (5.23%) Java Software Engineer
11 121 (4.55%) Software Developer
12 113 (4.25%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 108 (4.06%) Architect
13 108 (4.06%) C++ Software Engineer
14 105 (3.95%) Python Engineer
15 104 (3.91%) Senior Developer
16 94 (3.54%) Data Engineer
17 79 (2.97%) DevOps Engineer
18 78 (2.94%) Lead Software Engineer
19 77 (2.90%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 291 (10.95%) Terraform
2 248 (9.33%) React
3 229 (8.62%) Spring
4 228 (8.58%) REST
5 214 (8.05%) .NET
6 212 (7.98%) Spring Boot
7 170 (6.40%) Kafka
8 136 (5.12%) RESTful
9 128 (4.82%) Node.js
10 105 (3.95%) AngularJS
11 62 (2.33%) Django
12 53 (1.99%) HTML
13 52 (1.96%) CSS
13 52 (1.96%) Next.js
14 51 (1.92%) LangChain
15 48 (1.81%) OAuth
16 44 (1.66%) FastAPI
16 44 (1.66%) JSON
17 39 (1.47%) Quarkus
18 38 (1.43%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 408 (15.36%) Cloud Native
2 241 (9.07%) Distributed Systems
3 143 (5.38%) Product Ownership
4 116 (4.37%) AI Agents
5 84 (3.16%) Algorithms
6 65 (2.45%) Enterprise Software
7 57 (2.15%) Data Structures
8 49 (1.84%) Embedded Systems
8 49 (1.84%) Onboarding
9 46 (1.73%) Data Protection Act
10 37 (1.39%) Legacy Systems
11 32 (1.20%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 32 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
12 29 (1.09%) Fixed Income
13 27 (1.02%) Robotics
14 25 (0.94%) Derivative
14 25 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
15 21 (0.79%) Equities
16 19 (0.72%) NHS
16 19 (0.72%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 180 (6.77%) Linux
2 53 (1.99%) Windows
3 31 (1.17%) Unix
4 25 (0.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 23 (0.87%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.53%) Android
6 14 (0.53%) FreeRTOS
7 12 (0.45%) Windows Server
8 8 (0.30%) Apple iOS
8 8 (0.30%) Ubuntu
9 6 (0.23%) Debian
10 3 (0.11%) Rocky
10 3 (0.11%) VMS
10 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
11 2 (0.075%) Windows Server 2019
11 2 (0.075%) zOS
12 1 (0.038%) Solaris
12 1 (0.038%) Tizen
12 1 (0.038%) webOS
12 1 (0.038%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 919 (34.59%) CI/CD
2 800 (30.11%) Agile
3 639 (24.05%) DevOps
4 544 (20.47%) AI
5 418 (15.73%) Microservices
6 392 (14.75%) Test Automation
7 322 (12.12%) Infrastructure as Code
8 321 (12.08%) Continuous Improvement
8 321 (12.08%) Problem-Solving
9 275 (10.35%) Containerisation
10 274 (10.31%) Observability
11 270 (10.16%) SDLC
12 255 (9.60%) Full-Stack Development
13 229 (8.62%) Technical Leadership
14 225 (8.47%) Machine Learning
14 225 (8.47%) Platform Engineering
15 218 (8.20%) Event-Driven
16 214 (8.05%) Scrum
17 207 (7.79%) Stakeholder Management
18 206 (7.75%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 776 (29.21%) Python
2 684 (25.74%) Java
3 386 (14.53%) SQL
4 288 (10.84%) C#
5 282 (10.61%) TypeScript
6 214 (8.05%) C++
7 206 (7.75%) JavaScript
8 115 (4.33%) C
9 89 (3.35%) Ada
10 83 (3.12%) Go
11 67 (2.52%) Kotlin
12 46 (1.73%) PowerShell
13 43 (1.62%) Rust
14 42 (1.58%) Bash
15 40 (1.51%) Scala
16 26 (0.98%) Ruby
17 25 (0.94%) Embedded C
18 22 (0.83%) Bicep
18 22 (0.83%) PL/SQL
19 18 (0.68%) PHP
Qualifications
1 597 (22.47%) Security Cleared
2 504 (18.97%) SC Cleared
3 212 (7.98%) Degree
4 99 (3.73%) Computer Science Degree
5 87 (3.27%) DV Cleared
6 58 (2.18%) BPSS Clearance
7 47 (1.77%) Master's Degree
8 40 (1.51%) AWS Certification
9 19 (0.72%) PhD
10 17 (0.64%) Azure Certification
11 15 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 11 (0.41%) PMP
13 8 (0.30%) CISSP
14 6 (0.23%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.23%) ISTQB
14 6 (0.23%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 5 (0.19%) PMI Certification
15 5 (0.19%) TOGAF Certification
16 4 (0.15%) GIAC
16 4 (0.15%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 175 (6.59%) QA
2 72 (2.71%) Data Quality
3 52 (1.96%) Accessibility
4 20 (0.75%) GDPR
5 17 (0.64%) Def Stans
5 17 (0.64%) MISRA
6 15 (0.56%) NIST
7 14 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 14 (0.53%) WCAG
8 10 (0.38%) DO-178B
9 9 (0.34%) IEC 61508
9 9 (0.34%) NCSC
10 8 (0.30%) GRC
11 6 (0.23%) MISRA C
12 5 (0.19%) EMIR
12 5 (0.19%) HL7
12 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
12 5 (0.19%) MiFID
13 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
14 3 (0.11%) DO-254
System Software
1 398 (14.98%) Docker
2 30 (1.13%) Firmware
3 19 (0.72%) Embedded Firmware
4 12 (0.45%) Active Directory
5 11 (0.41%) Virtual Machines
6 6 (0.23%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.038%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 454 (17.09%) Kubernetes
2 86 (3.24%) Ansible
3 55 (2.07%) Grafana
4 42 (1.58%) Argo
5 39 (1.47%) Prometheus
6 16 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
7 14 (0.53%) Kibana
8 7 (0.26%) 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 (0.11%) HP Fortify
11 3 (0.11%) Istio
11 3 (0.11%) Progress Chef
12 2 (0.075%) Cilium
12 2 (0.075%) Docker Swarm
12 2 (0.075%) Packer
12 2 (0.075%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 138 (5.19%) Microsoft
2 97 (3.65%) Google
3 85 (3.20%) Oracle
4 74 (2.79%) Databricks
5 59 (2.22%) OpenAI
6 47 (1.77%) Red Hat
7 29 (1.09%) Salesforce
8 24 (0.90%) Splunk
9 21 (0.79%) IBM
10 18 (0.68%) ServiceNow
11 17 (0.64%) Foundry
11 17 (0.64%) Informatica
12 12 (0.45%) Adobe
13 11 (0.41%) Checkmarx
13 11 (0.41%) SAP
14 9 (0.34%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.30%) Confluent
15 8 (0.30%) VMware
16 7 (0.26%) Hitachi
16 7 (0.26%) Siemens