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 18 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 45 27
Rank change year-on-year +13 -18 +12
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,311 1,181 2,301
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.38% 4.76% 6.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.31% 5.21% 7.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,229 783 1,319
10th Percentile £400 £400 £417
25th Percentile £463 £475 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -1.80%
75th Percentile £680 £775 £763
90th Percentile £788 £838 £875
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 451 63 414
10th Percentile £52.50 £38.65 £46.25
25th Percentile £60.00 £51.63 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £79.50 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year - - +1.33%

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 36,618 22,657 32,179
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.18% 91.33% 85.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,120 14,657 20,816
10th Percentile £325 £303 £300
25th Percentile £415 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.23% -1.00% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £727 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £505 £525
% change year-on-year +1.46% -3.79% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,297 1,070 2,391
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £21.00 £18.11 £16.04
Median hourly rate £47.00 £27.40 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +71.53% -26.93% +5.19%
75th Percentile £68.00 £57.19 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £75.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £26.21 £37.18
% change year-on-year +67.72% -29.51% +6.14%

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 18 June 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 18 June 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 18 June 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 -5 991 £586 -9.81% 461
North of England +27 349 £538 +7.50% 238
South West +27 338 £570 +8.57% 175
South East +18 284 £525 +3.65% 355
East of England +33 211 £500 +2.46% 162
North West +8 162 £505 +1.00% 134
Yorkshire +18 122 £531 +8.42% 50
Midlands -21 92 £459 -9.11% 98
West Midlands -16 73 £459 -18.94% 58
North East +16 70 £621 +35.05% 55
East Midlands -20 18 £513 +6.22% 40
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 54 (2.34%) Confluence
2 38 (1.64%) Apache Spark
3 26 (1.13%) Apache
3 26 (1.13%) Apache Airflow
4 8 (0.35%) SAS
5 7 (0.30%) CMS
6 6 (0.26%) SharePoint
7 5 (0.22%) nginx
8 4 (0.17%) Ethereum
8 4 (0.17%) Hyperledger
8 4 (0.17%) WebLogic
9 3 (0.13%) Camunda
9 3 (0.13%) Palantir Foundry
9 3 (0.13%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.087%) Cloud Foundry
10 2 (0.087%) IIS
10 2 (0.087%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.087%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.087%) WinCC
11 1 (0.043%) Adobe Experience Manager
Applications
1 16 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (0.30%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.26%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 6 (0.26%) Microsoft Excel
4 5 (0.22%) CPLEX
5 4 (0.17%) Simulink
6 2 (0.087%) CATIA
6 2 (0.087%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.087%) Spreadsheet
7 1 (0.043%) Adobe After Effects
7 1 (0.043%) Blender
7 1 (0.043%) Maya
7 1 (0.043%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.043%) Notion
7 1 (0.043%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 6 (0.26%) Dynamics CRM
1 6 (0.26%) Payment Gateway
2 5 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
3 4 (0.17%) Quorum
3 4 (0.17%) R3 Corda
3 4 (0.17%) Ripple
4 3 (0.13%) Orchestrade
5 2 (0.087%) Aladdin
5 2 (0.087%) LabWindows
5 2 (0.087%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.043%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.043%) Sprinklr
6 1 (0.043%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 568 (24.58%) AWS
2 440 (19.04%) Azure
3 205 (8.87%) GCP
4 166 (7.18%) GitHub
5 121 (5.24%) Serverless
6 95 (4.11%) Azure DevOps
7 78 (3.38%) AWS Lambda
8 76 (3.29%) GitHub Actions
9 63 (2.73%) Amazon S3
10 54 (2.34%) OpenShift
11 45 (1.95%) Power Platform
12 40 (1.73%) Amazon SQS
13 37 (1.60%) Amazon ECS
13 37 (1.60%) Amazon EKS
14 36 (1.56%) Anthropic Claude
15 35 (1.51%) Azure AKS
16 33 (1.43%) Amazon EC2
17 27 (1.17%) AWS CloudFormation
18 26 (1.13%) Entra ID
18 26 (1.13%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.30%) Software-Defined Radio
2 23 (1.00%) Ethernet
3 22 (0.95%) Wireless
4 17 (0.74%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.65%) HTTP
6 13 (0.56%) Firewall
7 12 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
8 11 (0.48%) Internet
9 10 (0.43%) 3GPP
10 9 (0.39%) VPN
11 7 (0.30%) Network Security
11 7 (0.30%) RTP
12 6 (0.26%) Wireshark
13 4 (0.17%) DNS
14 3 (0.13%) Bluetooth
14 3 (0.13%) IPv4
14 3 (0.13%) IPv6
14 3 (0.13%) Modbus
14 3 (0.13%) RS-232
14 3 (0.13%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 141 (6.10%) PostgreSQL
2 80 (3.46%) Relational Database
3 66 (2.86%) SQL Server
4 62 (2.68%) NoSQL
5 53 (2.29%) MongoDB
6 35 (1.51%) Apache Cassandra
7 34 (1.47%) DynamoDB
8 31 (1.34%) Power BI
9 30 (1.30%) Amazon RDS
9 30 (1.30%) MySQL
10 27 (1.17%) Data Warehouse
11 25 (1.08%) Big Data
12 24 (1.04%) BigQuery
12 24 (1.04%) Data Lake
12 24 (1.04%) Metadata
13 17 (0.74%) Pinecone
13 17 (0.74%) Redis
14 16 (0.69%) Weaviate
15 15 (0.65%) Amazon Redshift
15 15 (0.65%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 225 (9.74%) Git
2 141 (6.10%) Jenkins
3 123 (5.32%) GitLab
4 109 (4.72%) JIRA
5 54 (2.34%) SonarQube
6 43 (1.86%) Gradle
7 34 (1.47%) JUnit
8 29 (1.25%) Rational Rhapsody
9 28 (1.21%) Rational DOORS
10 23 (1.00%) Cucumber
10 23 (1.00%) Visual Studio
11 21 (0.91%) Bitbucket
11 21 (0.91%) Maven
12 20 (0.87%) Selenium
13 19 (0.82%) IntelliJ
14 16 (0.69%) Cypress.io
14 16 (0.69%) Liquibase
14 16 (0.69%) Mockito
15 15 (0.65%) Claude Code
16 12 (0.52%) Eclipse
General
1 405 (17.52%) Finance
2 351 (15.19%) Social Skills
3 151 (6.53%) Banking
4 139 (6.01%) Analytical Skills
5 137 (5.93%) Public Sector
6 99 (4.28%) Aerospace
7 78 (3.38%) Front Office
8 44 (1.90%) Law
8 44 (1.90%) Manufacturing
9 43 (1.86%) Retail
10 38 (1.64%) Investment Banking
11 27 (1.17%) Military
12 25 (1.08%) Automotive
12 25 (1.08%) Aviation
12 25 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
13 23 (1.00%) Telecoms
14 18 (0.78%) Financial Institution
15 15 (0.65%) Documentation Skills
16 14 (0.61%) Electronics
16 14 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,177 (50.93%) Software Engineer
2 429 (18.56%) Developer
3 403 (17.44%) Senior
4 208 (9.00%) Lead
5 183 (7.92%) Senior Software Engineer
6 172 (7.44%) Java Engineer
7 145 (6.27%) Embedded Engineer
8 142 (6.14%) Java Software Engineer
9 134 (5.80%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 125 (5.41%) Java Developer
11 124 (5.37%) C++ Software Engineer
12 102 (4.41%) Architect
13 83 (3.59%) Senior Developer
14 75 (3.25%) Software Developer
15 74 (3.20%) Python Developer
16 70 (3.03%) Developer/Software Engineer
17 69 (2.99%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 69 (2.99%) Python Engineer
18 66 (2.86%) DevOps Engineer
19 64 (2.77%) Lead Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 261 (11.29%) React
2 180 (7.79%) .NET
3 179 (7.75%) Kafka
4 173 (7.49%) Spring
5 165 (7.14%) Node.js
6 161 (6.97%) REST
6 161 (6.97%) Spring Boot
7 107 (4.63%) RESTful
8 105 (4.54%) AngularJS
9 71 (3.07%) GraphQL
10 55 (2.38%) Redux
11 48 (2.08%) CSS
12 47 (2.03%) HTML
13 40 (1.73%) Next.js
14 39 (1.69%) JSON
14 39 (1.69%) Middleware
15 36 (1.56%) LangChain
16 33 (1.43%) Quarkus
16 33 (1.43%) Web Services
17 32 (1.38%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 260 (11.25%) Cloud Native
2 177 (7.66%) Distributed Systems
3 116 (5.02%) Product Ownership
4 92 (3.98%) Algorithms
5 67 (2.90%) Fixed Income
6 63 (2.73%) AI Agents
7 40 (1.73%) Onboarding
8 39 (1.69%) Embedded Systems
9 35 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
9 35 (1.51%) Legacy Systems
10 34 (1.47%) Data Structures
10 34 (1.47%) Derivative
11 28 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
12 26 (1.13%) Equities
12 26 (1.13%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 26 (1.13%) Robotics
13 22 (0.95%) Enterprise Software
14 21 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
15 19 (0.82%) Mobile App
16 15 (0.65%) FPGA
Operating Systems
1 180 (7.79%) Linux
2 56 (2.42%) Windows
3 40 (1.73%) Unix
4 28 (1.21%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (0.69%) Embedded Linux
6 15 (0.65%) Apple iOS
7 14 (0.61%) Android
8 11 (0.48%) FreeRTOS
9 9 (0.39%) Windows Server
10 7 (0.30%) Ubuntu
11 5 (0.22%) Debian
12 4 (0.17%) Rocky
12 4 (0.17%) VMS
12 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 3 (0.13%) Solaris
13 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2008
14 2 (0.087%) VxWorks
15 1 (0.043%) Tizen
15 1 (0.043%) webOS
15 1 (0.043%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 690 (29.86%) CI/CD
2 672 (29.08%) Agile
3 475 (20.55%) DevOps
4 374 (16.18%) AI
5 349 (15.10%) Microservices
6 278 (12.03%) Test Automation
7 248 (10.73%) Problem-Solving
8 245 (10.60%) Full-Stack Development
9 215 (9.30%) Containerisation
10 208 (9.00%) Infrastructure as Code
11 186 (8.05%) Continuous Improvement
12 179 (7.75%) SDLC
13 178 (7.70%) Machine Learning
14 173 (7.49%) TDD
15 172 (7.44%) Observability
16 169 (7.31%) Scrum
17 163 (7.05%) Mentoring
18 158 (6.84%) Platform Engineering
19 147 (6.36%) Technical Leadership
20 143 (6.19%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 604 (26.14%) Java
2 600 (25.96%) Python
3 304 (13.15%) SQL
4 293 (12.68%) C#
5 277 (11.99%) TypeScript
6 237 (10.26%) JavaScript
7 215 (9.30%) C++
8 130 (5.63%) Go
9 128 (5.54%) Ada
10 108 (4.67%) C
11 45 (1.95%) Kotlin
12 33 (1.43%) Rust
13 32 (1.38%) PowerShell
14 27 (1.17%) Bash
15 26 (1.13%) MATLAB
16 24 (1.04%) Embedded C
17 23 (1.00%) PL/SQL
17 23 (1.00%) Scala
18 18 (0.78%) Ruby
19 17 (0.74%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 554 (23.97%) Security Cleared
2 446 (19.30%) SC Cleared
3 169 (7.31%) Degree
4 78 (3.38%) Computer Science Degree
5 67 (2.90%) DV Cleared
6 49 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
7 27 (1.17%) AWS Certification
8 25 (1.08%) Master's Degree
9 18 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 12 (0.52%) Azure Certification
11 9 (0.39%) CISSP
11 9 (0.39%) PhD
12 7 (0.30%) ISTQB
12 7 (0.30%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.26%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.26%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.17%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 4 (0.17%) CISM
14 4 (0.17%) GIAC
14 4 (0.17%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 127 (5.50%) QA
2 40 (1.73%) Def Stans
3 38 (1.64%) Accessibility
4 37 (1.60%) Data Quality
5 32 (1.38%) IEC 61508
6 21 (0.91%) GDPR
7 15 (0.65%) MISRA
8 12 (0.52%) MISRA C
9 11 (0.48%) NCSC
9 11 (0.48%) NIST
10 10 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 10 (0.43%) WCAG
11 6 (0.26%) PCI DSS
12 5 (0.22%) GRC
12 5 (0.22%) JSP 440
13 4 (0.17%) DO-178B
13 4 (0.17%) DO-254
13 4 (0.17%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 3 (0.13%) FATCA
15 2 (0.087%) HL7
System Software
1 317 (13.72%) Docker
2 20 (0.87%) Firmware
3 10 (0.43%) Embedded Firmware
4 9 (0.39%) VMware Infrastructure
5 7 (0.30%) Active Directory
6 6 (0.26%) Virtual Machines
7 4 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.13%) HDFS
9 2 (0.087%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 372 (16.10%) Kubernetes
2 210 (9.09%) Terraform
3 66 (2.86%) Grafana
4 57 (2.47%) Ansible
5 37 (1.60%) Argo
5 37 (1.60%) Prometheus
6 7 (0.30%) Puppet
6 7 (0.30%) Single Sign-On
7 6 (0.26%) Kibana
7 6 (0.26%) Progress Chef
8 5 (0.22%) HAProxy
9 4 (0.17%) Data Guard
9 4 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
10 3 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
10 3 (0.13%) Functional Safety
10 3 (0.13%) Istio
10 3 (0.13%) Kubeflow
11 2 (0.087%) Cilium
11 2 (0.087%) Consul
11 2 (0.087%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 120 (5.19%) Microsoft
2 75 (3.25%) Google
3 69 (2.99%) Oracle
4 55 (2.38%) Red Hat
5 41 (1.77%) Databricks
6 35 (1.51%) OpenAI
7 20 (0.87%) IBM
8 18 (0.78%) ServiceNow
8 18 (0.78%) Splunk
9 15 (0.65%) Informatica
10 13 (0.56%) Salesforce
11 12 (0.52%) Siemens
12 11 (0.48%) Foundry
13 10 (0.43%) Checkmarx
13 10 (0.43%) ForgeRock
13 10 (0.43%) MathWorks
13 10 (0.43%) Okta
13 10 (0.43%) SAP
14 9 (0.39%) VMware
15 8 (0.35%) Dynatrace