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 31 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 40 41 33
Rank change year-on-year +1 -8 +8
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 1,918 1,221 1,951
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.04% 5.03% 5.18%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.86% 5.54% 5.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,008 818 1,139
10th Percentile £399 £402 £425
25th Percentile £450 £500 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -
75th Percentile £663 £750 £746
90th Percentile £788 £838 £825
UK median daily rate £550 £600 £600
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 403 80 320
10th Percentile £52.50 £42.95 £46.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £52.88 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year - +4.00% -3.21%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.46 £68.75 £78.88
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +0.78% +3.20% -2.56%

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 32,752 22,033 32,691
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 86.09% 90.76% 86.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,983 14,520 21,608
10th Percentile £313 £312 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,011 860 2,165
10th Percentile £15.34 £15.00 £13.00
25th Percentile £19.25 £20.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £37.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.85% - -13.33%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £58.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.34 £71.25
UK median hourly rate £35.50 £31.88 £32.50
% change year-on-year +11.36% -1.91% -10.48%

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 31 March 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 31 March 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 31 March 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 -11 827 £600 -9.09% 539
North of England +16 280 £500 -4.76% 264
South West +9 263 £543 -7.26% 216
South East +4 197 £525 +2.44% 355
East of England +31 185 £475 -2.36% 135
North West +4 128 £500 -5.66% 145
Yorkshire 0 107 £519 +3.75% 87
Midlands -24 102 £503 +2.65% 126
West Midlands -12 90 £500 - 74
North East +21 48 £464 +0.82% 33
East Midlands -39 12 £538 +8.59% 52
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 61 (3.18%) Confluence
2 47 (2.45%) Apache
3 45 (2.35%) Apache Spark
4 18 (0.94%) Apache Airflow
5 9 (0.47%) CMS
5 9 (0.47%) WebLogic
6 8 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
7 4 (0.21%) IIS
7 4 (0.21%) JBoss
7 4 (0.21%) nginx
7 4 (0.21%) OpenStack
7 4 (0.21%) SharePoint
8 3 (0.16%) Camunda
8 3 (0.16%) SAS
9 2 (0.10%) Magnolia
9 2 (0.10%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.10%) Sitecore CMS
9 2 (0.10%) Tomcat
9 2 (0.10%) WinCC
9 2 (0.10%) WordPress
Applications
1 12 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
2 11 (0.57%) Microsoft Excel
3 8 (0.42%) Chatbot
4 5 (0.26%) Simulink
5 4 (0.21%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.10%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.052%) Maya
7 1 (0.052%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.052%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.052%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 4 (0.21%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.10%) LabWindows
2 2 (0.10%) Primavera
3 1 (0.052%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.052%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.052%) Sprinklr
3 1 (0.052%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 552 (28.78%) AWS
2 354 (18.46%) Azure
3 182 (9.49%) GCP
4 130 (6.78%) Serverless
5 129 (6.73%) GitHub
6 67 (3.49%) Azure DevOps
7 62 (3.23%) AWS Lambda
8 57 (2.97%) GitHub Actions
9 56 (2.92%) Amazon S3
10 51 (2.66%) OpenShift
11 46 (2.40%) Power Platform
12 42 (2.19%) AWS CloudFormation
13 40 (2.09%) Azure AKS
14 35 (1.82%) Amazon EKS
15 32 (1.67%) Amazon EC2
15 32 (1.67%) Azure Functions
16 31 (1.62%) Amazon ECS
17 30 (1.56%) SaaS
18 26 (1.36%) Amazon SQS
19 24 (1.25%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.09%) Ethernet
2 13 (0.68%) Network Security
2 13 (0.68%) TCP/IP
3 10 (0.52%) Firewall
4 7 (0.36%) Software-Defined Radio
5 6 (0.31%) Wireless
6 5 (0.26%) 3GPP
6 5 (0.26%) HTTP
6 5 (0.26%) Internet
6 5 (0.26%) Modbus
7 4 (0.21%) BGP
7 4 (0.21%) RS-232
7 4 (0.21%) RS-485
7 4 (0.21%) Software-Defined Networking
7 4 (0.21%) VLAN
8 3 (0.16%) Bluetooth
8 3 (0.16%) IPv4
8 3 (0.16%) IPv6
8 3 (0.16%) RS-422
8 3 (0.16%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 125 (6.52%) PostgreSQL
2 69 (3.60%) Apache Cassandra
3 68 (3.55%) Relational Database
4 62 (3.23%) NoSQL
5 55 (2.87%) SQL Server
6 54 (2.82%) MongoDB
7 34 (1.77%) Data Lake
8 33 (1.72%) Amazon RDS
8 33 (1.72%) Power BI
9 29 (1.51%) MySQL
10 28 (1.46%) BigQuery
11 26 (1.36%) Big Data
12 23 (1.20%) DynamoDB
12 23 (1.20%) Metadata
13 19 (0.99%) Data Warehouse
14 17 (0.89%) Hadoop
15 16 (0.83%) Amazon Athena
15 16 (0.83%) Elasticsearch
16 15 (0.78%) Mixpanel
17 13 (0.68%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 200 (10.43%) Git
2 125 (6.52%) Jenkins
3 107 (5.58%) GitLab
4 103 (5.37%) JIRA
5 34 (1.77%) Rational DOORS
5 34 (1.77%) SonarQube
6 33 (1.72%) Rational Rhapsody
7 32 (1.67%) JUnit
8 26 (1.36%) Selenium
9 25 (1.30%) Cucumber
9 25 (1.30%) Gradle
10 23 (1.20%) Bitbucket
10 23 (1.20%) Cypress.io
11 22 (1.15%) IntelliJ
12 21 (1.09%) Maven
13 17 (0.89%) Eclipse
13 17 (0.89%) Liquibase
13 17 (0.89%) Mockito
13 17 (0.89%) Visual Studio
14 10 (0.52%) Artifactory
General
1 307 (16.01%) Social Skills
2 302 (15.75%) Finance
3 123 (6.41%) Public Sector
4 111 (5.79%) Banking
5 107 (5.58%) Analytical Skills
6 76 (3.96%) Aerospace
7 63 (3.28%) Front Office
8 44 (2.29%) Electronics
9 34 (1.77%) Law
10 28 (1.46%) Retail
11 27 (1.41%) Financial Institution
12 26 (1.36%) Influencing Skills
13 25 (1.30%) Investment Banking
13 25 (1.30%) Manufacturing
13 25 (1.30%) Military
14 21 (1.09%) Telecoms
15 20 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
16 13 (0.68%) Documentation Skills
16 13 (0.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
17 12 (0.63%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,017 (53.02%) Software Engineer
2 357 (18.61%) Senior
3 346 (18.04%) Developer
4 163 (8.50%) Senior Software Engineer
5 145 (7.56%) Lead
6 138 (7.19%) Java Engineer
7 120 (6.26%) C++ Software Engineer
8 118 (6.15%) Embedded Engineer
9 110 (5.74%) Java Software Engineer
10 106 (5.53%) Embedded Software Engineer
11 87 (4.54%) Architect
12 78 (4.07%) Java Developer
13 75 (3.91%) Senior Developer
14 68 (3.55%) Python Engineer
15 62 (3.23%) Python Developer
16 61 (3.18%) Developer/Software Engineer
17 58 (3.02%) Lead Software Engineer
18 54 (2.82%) Data Engineer
19 53 (2.76%) AWS Engineer
19 53 (2.76%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 224 (11.68%) React
2 209 (10.90%) Kafka
3 165 (8.60%) Node.js
4 140 (7.30%) REST
5 138 (7.19%) .NET
6 127 (6.62%) Spring
7 113 (5.89%) Spring Boot
8 102 (5.32%) AngularJS
8 102 (5.32%) RESTful
9 71 (3.70%) gRPC
10 67 (3.49%) GraphQL
11 58 (3.02%) Middleware
12 52 (2.71%) Redux
13 49 (2.55%) HTML
14 48 (2.50%) CSS
15 47 (2.45%) JSON
16 43 (2.24%) Playwright
17 35 (1.82%) Web Services
18 34 (1.77%) Vue
19 32 (1.67%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 221 (11.52%) Cloud Native
2 157 (8.19%) Distributed Systems
3 90 (4.69%) Product Ownership
4 71 (3.70%) Algorithms
5 60 (3.13%) Fixed Income
6 34 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
7 33 (1.72%) Mobile App
8 28 (1.46%) AI Agents
8 28 (1.46%) Derivative
8 28 (1.46%) Embedded Systems
8 28 (1.46%) Legacy Systems
8 28 (1.46%) Onboarding
9 26 (1.36%) Data Structures
10 25 (1.30%) Equities
11 24 (1.25%) Greenfield Project
12 22 (1.15%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 21 (1.09%) Public Cloud
14 20 (1.04%) Virtual Team
15 19 (0.99%) Hedge funds
16 17 (0.89%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 202 (10.53%) Linux
2 73 (3.81%) Windows
3 45 (2.35%) Unix
4 26 (1.36%) Android
5 24 (1.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 19 (0.99%) Apple iOS
7 15 (0.78%) Windows Server
8 10 (0.52%) Ubuntu
9 8 (0.42%) Embedded Linux
10 6 (0.31%) FreeRTOS
11 4 (0.21%) Debian
11 4 (0.21%) VMS
12 3 (0.16%) Rocky
13 2 (0.10%) Robot Operating System
13 2 (0.10%) Solaris
13 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
13 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2019
14 1 (0.052%) Mac OS
14 1 (0.052%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 568 (29.61%) Agile
2 557 (29.04%) CI/CD
3 390 (20.33%) DevOps
4 336 (17.52%) Microservices
5 268 (13.97%) AI
6 242 (12.62%) Problem-Solving
7 218 (11.37%) Containerisation
8 209 (10.90%) Test Automation
9 197 (10.27%) Infrastructure as Code
10 194 (10.11%) Full-Stack Development
11 170 (8.86%) Computer Science
12 161 (8.39%) Machine Learning
13 153 (7.98%) Continuous Improvement
14 152 (7.92%) Mentoring
15 144 (7.51%) Observability
16 135 (7.04%) SDLC
17 132 (6.88%) Scrum
18 129 (6.73%) TDD
19 125 (6.52%) Technical Leadership
20 112 (5.84%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 536 (27.95%) Python
2 475 (24.77%) Java
3 248 (12.93%) SQL
4 236 (12.30%) C++
5 232 (12.10%) TypeScript
6 231 (12.04%) C#
7 223 (11.63%) JavaScript
8 165 (8.60%) Go
9 126 (6.57%) Ada
10 114 (5.94%) C
11 39 (2.03%) PowerShell
12 32 (1.67%) Bash
12 32 (1.67%) Kotlin
13 27 (1.41%) Rust
14 26 (1.36%) Embedded C
14 26 (1.36%) MATLAB
15 25 (1.30%) Ruby
16 23 (1.20%) Shell Script
17 21 (1.09%) Embedded C++
18 16 (0.83%) Scala
Qualifications
1 468 (24.40%) Security Cleared
2 361 (18.82%) SC Cleared
3 196 (10.22%) Degree
4 93 (4.85%) Computer Science Degree
5 63 (3.28%) DV Cleared
6 57 (2.97%) Master's Degree
7 26 (1.36%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.09%) AWS Certification
9 20 (1.04%) PhD
10 18 (0.94%) CISSP
11 15 (0.78%) CISM
12 14 (0.73%) Azure Certification
13 13 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 13 (0.68%) TOGAF Certification
14 8 (0.42%) ISTQB
15 7 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 6 (0.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
17 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Certification
18 4 (0.21%) HND
19 3 (0.16%) HNC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 105 (5.47%) QA
2 59 (3.08%) Def Stans
3 40 (2.09%) IEC 61508
4 39 (2.03%) Data Quality
5 30 (1.56%) Accessibility
5 30 (1.56%) MISRA
6 26 (1.36%) GDPR
7 20 (1.04%) MISRA C
8 18 (0.94%) WCAG
9 12 (0.63%) NIST
10 11 (0.57%) DO-178B
11 7 (0.36%) HL7
11 7 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 6 (0.31%) NCSC
13 5 (0.26%) EU AI Act
14 3 (0.16%) SLA
15 2 (0.10%) FATCA
15 2 (0.10%) PCI DSS
15 2 (0.10%) PMO
15 2 (0.10%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 323 (16.84%) Docker
2 20 (1.04%) Firmware
3 16 (0.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 12 (0.63%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.42%) Active Directory
6 5 (0.26%) Embedded Firmware
7 4 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.16%) HDFS
9 2 (0.10%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 365 (19.03%) Kubernetes
2 214 (11.16%) Terraform
3 94 (4.90%) Grafana
4 60 (3.13%) Ansible
5 56 (2.92%) Prometheus
6 32 (1.67%) Argo
7 18 (0.94%) Puppet
8 13 (0.68%) Progress Chef
9 7 (0.36%) Single Sign-On
10 6 (0.31%) Istio
11 5 (0.26%) Kibana
11 5 (0.26%) Kubeflow
12 4 (0.21%) Data Guard
12 4 (0.21%) Docker Swarm
12 4 (0.21%) HAProxy
12 4 (0.21%) HP Quality Center
13 3 (0.16%) Podman
13 3 (0.16%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
14 2 (0.10%) Functional Safety
14 2 (0.10%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 149 (7.77%) Microsoft
2 69 (3.60%) Google
3 64 (3.34%) Oracle
4 63 (3.28%) Red Hat
5 48 (2.50%) Databricks
6 25 (1.30%) Splunk
7 22 (1.15%) Foundry
7 22 (1.15%) IBM
8 17 (0.89%) VMware
9 16 (0.83%) OpenAI
10 14 (0.73%) BiZZdesign
11 11 (0.57%) Atlassian
11 11 (0.57%) Siemens
12 10 (0.52%) PagerDuty
12 10 (0.52%) ServiceNow
13 9 (0.47%) Palantir
13 9 (0.47%) SAP
13 9 (0.47%) Software AG
14 8 (0.42%) ANSYS
14 8 (0.42%) MathWorks