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 15 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 44 30
Rank change year-on-year +12 -14 +11
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,785 1,404 1,814
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.95% 4.99% 5.65%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 7.00% 5.49% 6.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,486 842 1,088
10th Percentile £400 £375 £406
25th Percentile £463 £463 £492
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £603
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% -4.64% -0.58%
75th Percentile £688 £725 £800
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £550 £600
% change year-on-year - -8.33% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 434 123 202
10th Percentile £51.40 £42.70 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.37 £52.50 £60.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.25
Median % change year-on-year - -0.38% +0.38%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £75.00 £75.00
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 39,799 25,590 27,763
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.96% 90.90% 86.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,011 16,250 16,937
10th Percentile £325 £294 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.42%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,071 1,598 1,107
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.53 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.87 £20.50
Median hourly rate £38.72 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +53.96% -40.82% -5.56%
75th Percentile £67.25 £44.78 £66.61
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.50 £74.18
UK median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -10.11%

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 15 October 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 15 October 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 15 October 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 1,264 £600 -4.00% 400
North of England +25 495 £517 +3.33% 222
South East +40 346 £525 +10.53% 242
South West +14 299 £550 +19.57% 184
North West +34 240 £550 +10.00% 130
East of England +15 209 £505 -9.21% 124
Yorkshire +4 183 £500 -2.44% 55
Midlands +29 149 £470 -10.48% 88
West Midlands +15 106 £470 -14.55% 53
North East +6 74 £600 +23.08% 41
East Midlands +14 42 £425 +0.95% 35
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 62 (2.23%) Confluence
2 60 (2.15%) Apache Spark
3 46 (1.65%) Apache Airflow
4 37 (1.33%) Apache
5 16 (0.57%) SharePoint
6 15 (0.54%) CMS
7 10 (0.36%) Jupyter
8 9 (0.32%) Ethereum
9 7 (0.25%) SAS
10 6 (0.22%) Camunda
10 6 (0.22%) nginx
11 5 (0.18%) Apache Solr
11 5 (0.18%) Apache Superset
11 5 (0.18%) Hyperledger
11 5 (0.18%) WordPress
12 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
13 2 (0.072%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 2 (0.072%) Cloud Foundry
13 2 (0.072%) Headless CMS
13 2 (0.072%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 16 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
2 11 (0.39%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.36%) Adobe Creative Suite
4 9 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 5 (0.18%) Microsoft Excel
6 4 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.11%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.11%) Trello
8 2 (0.072%) CATIA
8 2 (0.072%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.072%) LaTeX
8 2 (0.072%) Microsoft PowerPoint
8 2 (0.072%) Notion
8 2 (0.072%) Simulink
9 1 (0.036%) Adobe After Effects
9 1 (0.036%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.036%) Blender
9 1 (0.036%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.22%) Oracle Payroll
3 5 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.18%) R3 Corda
4 4 (0.14%) Quorum
4 4 (0.14%) Ripple
5 3 (0.11%) Distributed Ledger
5 3 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
5 3 (0.11%) Primavera
5 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
5 3 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.11%) Temenos T24
6 2 (0.072%) Endur
6 2 (0.072%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 2 (0.072%) Orchestrade
6 2 (0.072%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.036%) Sage 50
7 1 (0.036%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.036%) Shopify
7 1 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 715 (25.67%) AWS
2 583 (20.93%) Azure
3 291 (10.45%) GCP
4 259 (9.30%) GitHub
5 151 (5.42%) Serverless
6 136 (4.88%) GitHub Actions
7 134 (4.81%) Azure DevOps
8 98 (3.52%) AWS Lambda
9 78 (2.80%) Anthropic Claude
10 76 (2.73%) GitHub Copilot
11 63 (2.26%) Amazon S3
12 58 (2.08%) Amazon EKS
13 57 (2.05%) Amazon SQS
14 54 (1.94%) Power Platform
15 53 (1.90%) OpenShift
16 49 (1.76%) Amazon ECS
17 47 (1.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 46 (1.65%) Snowflake
19 37 (1.33%) AWS CloudFormation
20 34 (1.22%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.15%) Wireless
2 23 (0.83%) Firewall
3 21 (0.75%) TCP/IP
4 20 (0.72%) Internet
4 20 (0.72%) Software-Defined Radio
4 20 (0.72%) VPN
5 16 (0.57%) HTTP
6 15 (0.54%) Wi-Fi
7 14 (0.50%) DNS
7 14 (0.50%) Ethernet
8 13 (0.47%) Network Security
9 7 (0.25%) RTP
9 7 (0.25%) Wireshark
10 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
11 5 (0.18%) SSL
12 4 (0.14%) 3GPP
12 4 (0.14%) Broadband
12 4 (0.14%) Reverse Proxy
12 4 (0.14%) RS-232
13 3 (0.11%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 140 (5.03%) PostgreSQL
2 100 (3.59%) Relational Database
3 86 (3.09%) SQL Server
4 85 (3.05%) NoSQL
5 61 (2.19%) MongoDB
6 53 (1.90%) Data Warehouse
7 43 (1.54%) DynamoDB
7 43 (1.54%) MySQL
8 37 (1.33%) Data Lake
8 37 (1.33%) Metadata
9 30 (1.08%) Power BI
10 29 (1.04%) Elasticsearch
10 29 (1.04%) Redis
11 28 (1.01%) Amazon RDS
11 28 (1.01%) BigQuery
12 25 (0.90%) Pinecone
13 23 (0.83%) Big Data
14 21 (0.75%) Delta Lake
15 19 (0.68%) Weaviate
16 18 (0.65%) Chroma
Development Applications
1 280 (10.05%) Git
2 156 (5.60%) Jenkins
3 153 (5.49%) GitLab
4 116 (4.17%) JIRA
5 49 (1.76%) Claude Code
6 47 (1.69%) SonarQube
7 40 (1.44%) Gradle
8 33 (1.18%) JUnit
8 33 (1.18%) Visual Studio
9 32 (1.15%) Maven
10 28 (1.01%) Cucumber
11 27 (0.97%) Rational DOORS
12 26 (0.93%) Selenium
13 23 (0.83%) Rational Rhapsody
14 19 (0.68%) Mockito
15 15 (0.54%) LabVIEW
16 12 (0.43%) Bitbucket
16 12 (0.43%) Cypress.io
16 12 (0.43%) Postman
16 12 (0.43%) Snyk
General
1 618 (22.19%) Social Skills
2 545 (19.57%) Finance
3 232 (8.33%) Banking
4 217 (7.79%) Public Sector
5 197 (7.07%) Analytical Skills
6 100 (3.59%) Aerospace
7 79 (2.84%) Front Office
8 56 (2.01%) Investment Banking
9 55 (1.97%) Manufacturing
10 46 (1.65%) Retail
11 45 (1.62%) Law
12 38 (1.36%) Automotive
13 35 (1.26%) Telecoms
14 30 (1.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 29 (1.04%) Military
16 24 (0.86%) Influencing Skills
16 24 (0.86%) Marketing
17 23 (0.83%) Back Office
18 21 (0.75%) Aviation
18 21 (0.75%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,067 (38.31%) Software Engineer
2 546 (19.61%) Developer
3 538 (19.32%) Senior
4 307 (11.02%) Lead
5 195 (7.00%) Senior Software Engineer
6 162 (5.82%) Java Engineer
7 153 (5.49%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 147 (5.28%) Java Developer
9 136 (4.88%) Architect
9 136 (4.88%) Embedded Engineer
10 135 (4.85%) Software Developer
11 129 (4.63%) Embedded Software Engineer
12 126 (4.52%) Java Software Engineer
13 117 (4.20%) Senior Developer
14 112 (4.02%) C++ Software Engineer
14 112 (4.02%) Python Engineer
15 107 (3.84%) Data Engineer
16 95 (3.41%) DevOps Engineer
17 81 (2.91%) AWS Engineer
18 76 (2.73%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 314 (11.27%) Terraform
2 271 (9.73%) REST
3 246 (8.83%) React
4 232 (8.33%) Spring
5 221 (7.94%) Spring Boot
6 219 (7.86%) .NET
7 189 (6.79%) Kafka
8 160 (5.75%) RESTful
9 138 (4.96%) Node.js
10 102 (3.66%) AngularJS
11 69 (2.48%) OAuth
12 62 (2.23%) Django
13 61 (2.19%) LangChain
14 55 (1.97%) HTML
14 55 (1.97%) Web Services
15 53 (1.90%) CSS
15 53 (1.90%) Next.js
16 50 (1.80%) Model Context Protocol
17 44 (1.58%) JSON
18 43 (1.54%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 444 (15.94%) Cloud Native
2 252 (9.05%) Distributed Systems
3 166 (5.96%) AI Agents
4 161 (5.78%) Product Ownership
5 88 (3.16%) Enterprise Software
6 63 (2.26%) Onboarding
7 61 (2.19%) Algorithms
8 60 (2.15%) Data Structures
9 57 (2.05%) Data Protection Act
10 42 (1.51%) Embedded Systems
11 41 (1.47%) Legacy Systems
12 37 (1.33%) Self-Motivation
13 32 (1.15%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 31 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
15 29 (1.04%) Fixed Income
16 27 (0.97%) Derivative
17 26 (0.93%) Management Information System
18 24 (0.86%) Equities
19 22 (0.79%) Virtual Team
20 21 (0.75%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 195 (7.00%) Linux
2 70 (2.51%) Windows
3 34 (1.22%) Unix
4 20 (0.72%) Embedded Linux
4 20 (0.72%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 17 (0.61%) Android
6 12 (0.43%) FreeRTOS
6 12 (0.43%) Windows Server
7 11 (0.39%) Apple iOS
8 7 (0.25%) Ubuntu
9 4 (0.14%) Debian
9 4 (0.14%) macOS
10 3 (0.11%) Rocky
10 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
10 3 (0.11%) zOS
11 2 (0.072%) Windows 10
11 2 (0.072%) Windows Server 2019
12 1 (0.036%) Robot Operating System
12 1 (0.036%) Tizen
12 1 (0.036%) webOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 994 (35.69%) CI/CD
2 864 (31.02%) Agile
3 691 (24.81%) DevOps
4 639 (22.94%) AI
5 448 (16.09%) Test Automation
6 423 (15.19%) Microservices
7 378 (13.57%) Continuous Improvement
8 346 (12.42%) Problem-Solving
9 345 (12.39%) Infrastructure as Code
10 321 (11.53%) Observability
11 292 (10.48%) SDLC
12 291 (10.45%) Stakeholder Management
13 276 (9.91%) Containerisation
14 256 (9.19%) Full-Stack Development
15 254 (9.12%) Technical Leadership
16 245 (8.80%) Machine Learning
17 244 (8.76%) LLM
18 241 (8.65%) Platform Engineering
19 238 (8.55%) Event-Driven
20 235 (8.44%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 823 (29.55%) Python
2 700 (25.13%) Java
3 415 (14.90%) SQL
4 324 (11.63%) TypeScript
5 294 (10.56%) C#
6 233 (8.37%) JavaScript
7 228 (8.19%) C++
8 111 (3.99%) C
9 85 (3.05%) Go
10 70 (2.51%) Ada
10 70 (2.51%) Kotlin
11 53 (1.90%) PowerShell
12 51 (1.83%) Bash
13 44 (1.58%) Rust
14 36 (1.29%) Scala
15 30 (1.08%) Bicep
16 28 (1.01%) Embedded C
17 25 (0.90%) PL/SQL
18 21 (0.75%) PHP
19 18 (0.65%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 604 (21.69%) Security Cleared
2 502 (18.03%) SC Cleared
3 232 (8.33%) Degree
4 109 (3.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 107 (3.84%) DV Cleared
6 58 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
7 52 (1.87%) AWS Certification
8 50 (1.80%) Master's Degree
9 33 (1.18%) Azure Certification
10 18 (0.65%) PhD
11 15 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 13 (0.47%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 12 (0.43%) CISSP
13 12 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
14 11 (0.39%) PMP
15 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
16 5 (0.18%) ISTQB
16 5 (0.18%) Numerate Degree
16 5 (0.18%) PMI Certification
17 4 (0.14%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 176 (6.32%) QA
2 90 (3.23%) Data Quality
3 66 (2.37%) Accessibility
4 24 (0.86%) MISRA
5 20 (0.72%) GDPR
6 17 (0.61%) Def Stans
7 15 (0.54%) NIST
8 14 (0.50%) WCAG
9 13 (0.47%) MISRA C
10 12 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 11 (0.39%) IEC 61508
12 10 (0.36%) DO-178B
13 8 (0.29%) GRC
14 7 (0.25%) NCSC
15 5 (0.18%) EMIR
15 5 (0.18%) HL7
15 5 (0.18%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.18%) MiFID
15 5 (0.18%) PCI DSS
15 5 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 407 (14.61%) Docker
2 30 (1.08%) Firmware
3 18 (0.65%) Active Directory
3 18 (0.65%) Embedded Firmware
4 13 (0.47%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.072%) Hyper-V
6 2 (0.072%) Virtual Desktop
7 1 (0.036%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.036%) zsh
Systems Management
1 474 (17.02%) Kubernetes
2 99 (3.55%) Ansible
3 63 (2.26%) Grafana
4 49 (1.76%) Prometheus
5 38 (1.36%) Argo
6 23 (0.83%) Single Sign-On
7 13 (0.47%) Kibana
8 10 (0.36%) Puppet
9 6 (0.22%) Functional Safety
10 5 (0.18%) Progress Chef
11 4 (0.14%) Istio
11 4 (0.14%) Kubeflow
11 4 (0.14%) Kustomize
11 4 (0.14%) Podman
12 3 (0.11%) Consul
12 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
13 2 (0.072%) Cilium
13 2 (0.072%) HAProxy
13 2 (0.072%) Packer
13 2 (0.072%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 186 (6.68%) Microsoft
2 112 (4.02%) Google
3 102 (3.66%) Databricks
4 91 (3.27%) Oracle
5 77 (2.76%) OpenAI
6 42 (1.51%) Red Hat
7 34 (1.22%) Salesforce
8 25 (0.90%) Splunk
9 20 (0.72%) Foundry
9 20 (0.72%) IBM
10 16 (0.57%) Adobe
10 16 (0.57%) Dynatrace
10 16 (0.57%) Informatica
11 15 (0.54%) SAP
11 15 (0.54%) ServiceNow
12 10 (0.36%) VMware
13 8 (0.29%) Siemens
14 7 (0.25%) Cisco
14 7 (0.25%) Hitachi
14 7 (0.25%) Mistral