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 20 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 45 31
Rank change year-on-year +13 -14 +9
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,574 1,352 1,930
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.64% 4.90% 5.82%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.64% 5.39% 6.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,414 870 1,212
10th Percentile £400 £374 £408
25th Percentile £468 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £560 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% -4.00% +4.17%
75th Percentile £688 £750 £800
90th Percentile £788 £850 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.30% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 415 99 266
10th Percentile £51.25 £31.54 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.00 £52.50 £54.43
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.00 £75.50 £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 38,776 25,061 28,469
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.95% 90.80% 85.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,043 15,975 18,472
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £530
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -3.77% -3.64%
75th Percentile £630 £626 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.58%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,543 1,444 1,583
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.22 £14.05
25th Percentile £19.25 £17.88 £18.12
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +4.83%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.21 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.63 £25.15 £40.94
% change year-on-year +65.54% -38.57% -0.24%

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 20 August 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 20 August 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 20 August 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% 881
North of England +29 393 £525 +5.00% 324
South East +26 330 £525 +4.90% 383
South West +21 320 £550 +10.00% 258
East of England +25 218 £505 +2.17% 217
North West +16 178 £540 +8.00% 171
Yorkshire +18 151 £500 - 80
Midlands -5 113 £459 -14.53% 159
West Midlands -16 78 £455 -20.96% 82
North East +10 69 £650 +41.30% 74
East Midlands +1 34 £500 +5.26% 76
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 56 (2.18%) Confluence
2 52 (2.02%) Apache Spark
3 41 (1.59%) Apache Airflow
4 33 (1.28%) Apache
5 11 (0.43%) CMS
6 10 (0.39%) SAS
7 8 (0.31%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.23%) Jupyter
9 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.19%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.19%) Hyperledger
10 4 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.16%) Camunda
11 3 (0.12%) nginx
11 3 (0.12%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.12%) WordPress
12 2 (0.078%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.078%) MQSeries
12 2 (0.078%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 2 (0.078%) Tomcat
Applications
1 15 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.39%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 10 (0.39%) Chatbot
3 9 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
4 5 (0.19%) Microsoft Excel
5 4 (0.16%) CPLEX
5 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.16%) Simulink
6 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.12%) Trello
7 2 (0.078%) CATIA
7 2 (0.078%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 2 (0.078%) Notion
8 1 (0.039%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.039%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.039%) Blender
8 1 (0.039%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.23%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.19%) 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 (0.078%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.078%) Endur
6 2 (0.078%) Oracle Payroll
6 2 (0.078%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.039%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.039%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.039%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.039%) Shopify
7 1 (0.039%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 641 (24.90%) AWS
2 525 (20.40%) Azure
3 261 (10.14%) GCP
4 218 (8.47%) GitHub
5 126 (4.90%) Serverless
6 110 (4.27%) Azure DevOps
7 109 (4.23%) GitHub Actions
8 90 (3.50%) AWS Lambda
9 62 (2.41%) Amazon S3
10 58 (2.25%) OpenShift
11 57 (2.21%) Anthropic Claude
12 50 (1.94%) Amazon EKS
13 49 (1.90%) Amazon SQS
13 49 (1.90%) Power Platform
14 47 (1.83%) Amazon ECS
15 44 (1.71%) GitHub Copilot
16 38 (1.48%) Snowflake
17 37 (1.44%) Azure AKS
18 31 (1.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 28 (1.09%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 28 (1.09%) Software-Defined Radio
2 27 (1.05%) Wireless
3 20 (0.78%) Ethernet
4 19 (0.74%) Firewall
4 19 (0.74%) Internet
5 18 (0.70%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.58%) VPN
7 14 (0.54%) HTTP
8 11 (0.43%) Wi-Fi
9 7 (0.27%) Network Security
9 7 (0.27%) RTP
9 7 (0.27%) Wireshark
10 6 (0.23%) 3GPP
11 4 (0.16%) DNS
11 4 (0.16%) RS-232
11 4 (0.16%) SSL
12 3 (0.12%) Cisco IPT
12 3 (0.12%) IPv4
12 3 (0.12%) IPv6
12 3 (0.12%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 150 (5.83%) PostgreSQL
2 99 (3.85%) Relational Database
3 84 (3.26%) NoSQL
3 84 (3.26%) SQL Server
4 49 (1.90%) Data Warehouse
4 49 (1.90%) MongoDB
5 38 (1.48%) DynamoDB
6 36 (1.40%) MySQL
7 34 (1.32%) Power BI
8 28 (1.09%) Big Data
8 28 (1.09%) Metadata
9 25 (0.97%) Amazon RDS
9 25 (0.97%) Redis
10 24 (0.93%) Data Lake
11 23 (0.89%) Elasticsearch
12 21 (0.82%) Pinecone
13 20 (0.78%) BigQuery
14 19 (0.74%) Weaviate
15 18 (0.70%) Amazon Redshift
16 12 (0.47%) Apache Cassandra
Development Applications
1 271 (10.53%) Git
2 167 (6.49%) Jenkins
3 149 (5.79%) GitLab
4 116 (4.51%) JIRA
5 58 (2.25%) SonarQube
6 38 (1.48%) Gradle
6 38 (1.48%) JUnit
7 28 (1.09%) Claude Code
7 28 (1.09%) Rational DOORS
8 25 (0.97%) Visual Studio
9 24 (0.93%) Selenium
10 23 (0.89%) Rational Rhapsody
11 20 (0.78%) Maven
12 17 (0.66%) Bitbucket
12 17 (0.66%) Cucumber
12 17 (0.66%) Mockito
13 13 (0.51%) Cypress.io
13 13 (0.51%) Liquibase
14 12 (0.47%) Eclipse
14 12 (0.47%) Snyk
General
1 499 (19.39%) Social Skills
2 453 (17.60%) Finance
3 194 (7.54%) Banking
4 184 (7.15%) Analytical Skills
5 183 (7.11%) Public Sector
6 96 (3.73%) Aerospace
7 90 (3.50%) Front Office
8 49 (1.90%) Investment Banking
8 49 (1.90%) Retail
9 46 (1.79%) Law
9 46 (1.79%) Manufacturing
10 35 (1.36%) Automotive
11 30 (1.17%) Military
12 27 (1.05%) Telecoms
13 26 (1.01%) Aviation
14 24 (0.93%) Influencing Skills
15 20 (0.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 20 (0.78%) Marketing
16 18 (0.70%) Electronics
16 18 (0.70%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,171 (45.49%) Software Engineer
2 476 (18.49%) Developer
3 447 (17.37%) Senior
4 286 (11.11%) Lead
5 189 (7.34%) Senior Software Engineer
6 167 (6.49%) Java Engineer
7 157 (6.10%) Embedded Engineer
8 144 (5.59%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 136 (5.28%) Java Software Engineer
10 126 (4.90%) Java Developer
11 117 (4.55%) C++ Software Engineer
12 111 (4.31%) Software Developer
13 106 (4.12%) Python Engineer
14 103 (4.00%) Architect
15 98 (3.81%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 92 (3.57%) Lead Software Engineer
17 91 (3.54%) Senior Developer
18 86 (3.34%) Data Engineer
19 75 (2.91%) Python Developer
20 73 (2.84%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 263 (10.22%) Terraform
2 262 (10.18%) React
3 214 (8.31%) REST
4 210 (8.16%) .NET
5 201 (7.81%) Spring
6 184 (7.15%) Spring Boot
7 171 (6.64%) Kafka
8 158 (6.14%) Node.js
9 125 (4.86%) RESTful
10 109 (4.23%) AngularJS
11 56 (2.18%) Django
12 54 (2.10%) GraphQL
13 51 (1.98%) Next.js
14 47 (1.83%) HTML
15 45 (1.75%) CSS
16 43 (1.67%) LangChain
17 40 (1.55%) JSON
18 39 (1.52%) Quarkus
19 38 (1.48%) FastAPI
20 37 (1.44%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 363 (14.10%) Cloud Native
2 226 (8.78%) Distributed Systems
3 130 (5.05%) Product Ownership
4 96 (3.73%) AI Agents
5 84 (3.26%) Algorithms
6 55 (2.14%) Enterprise Software
7 52 (2.02%) Fixed Income
8 51 (1.98%) Data Structures
9 49 (1.90%) Onboarding
10 48 (1.86%) Embedded Systems
11 44 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
12 34 (1.32%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 34 (1.32%) Legacy Systems
13 31 (1.20%) Derivative
14 30 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
15 27 (1.05%) Equities
15 27 (1.05%) Robotics
16 23 (0.89%) Greenfield Project
17 18 (0.70%) NHS
17 18 (0.70%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 185 (7.19%) Linux
2 58 (2.25%) Windows
3 33 (1.28%) Unix
4 23 (0.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 22 (0.85%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.54%) FreeRTOS
7 13 (0.51%) Android
8 8 (0.31%) Ubuntu
8 8 (0.31%) Windows Server
9 6 (0.23%) Apple iOS
10 5 (0.19%) Debian
11 4 (0.16%) VMS
12 3 (0.12%) Rocky
12 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
13 2 (0.078%) Solaris
13 2 (0.078%) VxWorks
13 2 (0.078%) Windows Server 2008
14 1 (0.039%) Tizen
14 1 (0.039%) webOS
14 1 (0.039%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 862 (33.49%) CI/CD
2 786 (30.54%) Agile
3 598 (23.23%) DevOps
4 494 (19.19%) AI
5 396 (15.38%) Microservices
6 344 (13.36%) Test Automation
7 303 (11.77%) Problem-Solving
8 288 (11.19%) Continuous Improvement
9 280 (10.88%) Infrastructure as Code
10 262 (10.18%) Full-Stack Development
11 257 (9.98%) Containerisation
12 235 (9.13%) SDLC
13 231 (8.97%) Observability
14 220 (8.55%) Machine Learning
15 202 (7.85%) Mentoring
15 202 (7.85%) Technical Leadership
16 197 (7.65%) Platform Engineering
17 193 (7.50%) Scrum
18 192 (7.46%) TDD
19 190 (7.38%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 752 (29.22%) Python
2 652 (25.33%) Java
3 358 (13.91%) SQL
4 296 (11.50%) C#
4 296 (11.50%) TypeScript
5 224 (8.70%) C++
5 224 (8.70%) JavaScript
6 115 (4.47%) C
7 107 (4.16%) Ada
8 99 (3.85%) Go
9 62 (2.41%) Kotlin
10 43 (1.67%) PowerShell
11 41 (1.59%) Rust
12 39 (1.52%) Bash
13 38 (1.48%) Scala
14 25 (0.97%) PL/SQL
15 22 (0.85%) Embedded C
16 21 (0.82%) Bicep
17 20 (0.78%) Ruby
18 18 (0.70%) PHP
Qualifications
1 597 (23.19%) Security Cleared
2 499 (19.39%) SC Cleared
3 203 (7.89%) Degree
4 92 (3.57%) Computer Science Degree
5 79 (3.07%) DV Cleared
6 58 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
7 46 (1.79%) Master's Degree
8 33 (1.28%) AWS Certification
9 20 (0.78%) PhD
10 16 (0.62%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 14 (0.54%) Azure Certification
12 8 (0.31%) CISSP
13 7 (0.27%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 7 (0.27%) PMP
14 6 (0.23%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.23%) ISTQB
15 4 (0.16%) GIAC
15 4 (0.16%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 4 (0.16%) MBA
16 3 (0.12%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 154 (5.98%) QA
2 62 (2.41%) Data Quality
3 47 (1.83%) Accessibility
4 25 (0.97%) Def Stans
4 25 (0.97%) GDPR
5 17 (0.66%) MISRA
6 15 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.58%) NIST
7 14 (0.54%) IEC 61508
8 11 (0.43%) WCAG
9 10 (0.39%) DO-178B
10 9 (0.35%) NCSC
11 7 (0.27%) GRC
12 6 (0.23%) MISRA C
13 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.19%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 3 (0.12%) DO-254
14 3 (0.12%) HL7
14 3 (0.12%) MiFID
System Software
1 380 (14.76%) Docker
2 28 (1.09%) Firmware
3 17 (0.66%) Embedded Firmware
4 9 (0.35%) Active Directory
4 9 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (0.27%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (0.12%) HDFS
7 2 (0.078%) SRDF
8 1 (0.039%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 429 (16.67%) Kubernetes
2 86 (3.34%) Ansible
3 53 (2.06%) Grafana
4 41 (1.59%) Argo
5 37 (1.44%) Prometheus
6 14 (0.54%) Single Sign-On
7 11 (0.43%) Kibana
8 10 (0.39%) Puppet
9 7 (0.27%) Progress Chef
10 6 (0.23%) Functional Safety
10 6 (0.23%) Kubeflow
11 4 (0.16%) Consul
11 4 (0.16%) HAProxy
12 3 (0.12%) HP Fortify
12 3 (0.12%) Istio
12 3 (0.12%) Kustomize
13 2 (0.078%) Cilium
13 2 (0.078%) Docker Swarm
13 2 (0.078%) Packer
13 2 (0.078%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 137 (5.32%) Microsoft
2 92 (3.57%) Google
3 77 (2.99%) Oracle
4 64 (2.49%) Databricks
5 51 (1.98%) OpenAI
6 43 (1.67%) Red Hat
7 24 (0.93%) Salesforce
8 20 (0.78%) Informatica
9 19 (0.74%) ServiceNow
10 18 (0.70%) IBM
11 17 (0.66%) Splunk
12 13 (0.51%) Foundry
13 12 (0.47%) Adobe
13 12 (0.47%) SAP
14 11 (0.43%) Checkmarx
15 10 (0.39%) ForgeRock
15 10 (0.39%) Okta
16 9 (0.35%) Dynatrace
17 8 (0.31%) Confluent
17 8 (0.31%) VMware