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

6 months to
26 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 45 27
Rank change year-on-year +13 -18 +13
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,374 1,213 2,311
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.47% 4.81% 6.19%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.41% 5.27% 7.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,273 802 1,336
10th Percentile £400 £400 £418
25th Percentile £463 £475 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £602
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -0.30% -0.61%
75th Percentile £684 £775 £775
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 447 66 404
10th Percentile £52.50 £34.38 £46.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £51.44 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.10 £78.75 £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 37,044 23,037 31,936
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.35% 91.39% 85.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,386 14,872 20,693
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
25th Percentile £417 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.97% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £729 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £515 £502 £525
% change year-on-year +2.54% -4.33% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,321 1,118 2,341
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.87 £16.06
Median hourly rate £47.50 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +88.87% -34.02% +8.48%
75th Percentile £68.55 £55.00 £61.60
90th Percentile £82.25 £72.50 £72.90
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%

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 26 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 26 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 26 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 -3 1,025 £588 -9.62% 637
North of England +26 357 £544 +10.34% 250
South West +26 342 £551 +5.00% 192
South East +20 290 £525 +4.90% 367
East of England +32 218 £498 +1.89% 158
North West +10 168 £528 +5.50% 153
Yorkshire +24 123 £538 +9.38% 52
Midlands -29 96 £462 -8.51% 115
West Midlands -24 76 £459 -17.67% 59
North East +19 71 £621 +35.05% 47
East Midlands -7 19 £513 +7.89% 56
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 (2.27%) Confluence
2 40 (1.68%) Apache Spark
3 27 (1.14%) Apache
3 27 (1.14%) Apache Airflow
4 8 (0.34%) SAS
5 7 (0.29%) CMS
6 6 (0.25%) SharePoint
7 5 (0.21%) nginx
8 4 (0.17%) Ethereum
8 4 (0.17%) Hyperledger
8 4 (0.17%) WebLogic
9 3 (0.13%) Palantir Foundry
9 3 (0.13%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.084%) Camunda
10 2 (0.084%) Cloud Foundry
10 2 (0.084%) IIS
10 2 (0.084%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.084%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.084%) WinCC
11 1 (0.042%) Headless CMS
Applications
1 15 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
2 8 (0.34%) Chatbot
3 7 (0.29%) Adobe Creative Suite
4 5 (0.21%) CPLEX
5 4 (0.17%) Microsoft Excel
5 4 (0.17%) Simulink
6 2 (0.084%) CATIA
6 2 (0.084%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.084%) Spreadsheet
7 1 (0.042%) Adobe After Effects
7 1 (0.042%) Blender
7 1 (0.042%) Maya
7 1 (0.042%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.042%) Notion
7 1 (0.042%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.042%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 6 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
1 6 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
1 6 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 4 (0.17%) Quorum
2 4 (0.17%) R3 Corda
2 4 (0.17%) Ripple
3 3 (0.13%) Orchestrade
4 2 (0.084%) Aladdin
4 2 (0.084%) Remedy ITSM
5 1 (0.042%) Endur
5 1 (0.042%) LabWindows
5 1 (0.042%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.042%) Sprinklr
5 1 (0.042%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 584 (24.60%) AWS
2 453 (19.08%) Azure
3 211 (8.89%) GCP
4 165 (6.95%) GitHub
5 120 (5.05%) Serverless
6 99 (4.17%) Azure DevOps
7 76 (3.20%) AWS Lambda
7 76 (3.20%) GitHub Actions
8 61 (2.57%) Amazon S3
9 59 (2.49%) OpenShift
10 44 (1.85%) Power Platform
11 39 (1.64%) Amazon SQS
11 39 (1.64%) Azure AKS
12 37 (1.56%) Anthropic Claude
13 36 (1.52%) Amazon EKS
14 35 (1.47%) Amazon ECS
15 31 (1.31%) Amazon EC2
16 29 (1.22%) SaaS
17 28 (1.18%) Entra ID
18 26 (1.10%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.26%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (1.01%) Ethernet
3 22 (0.93%) Wireless
4 17 (0.72%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.63%) HTTP
6 13 (0.55%) Firewall
6 13 (0.55%) Internet
7 12 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
8 10 (0.42%) 3GPP
9 9 (0.38%) VPN
10 7 (0.29%) Network Security
10 7 (0.29%) RTP
11 6 (0.25%) Wireshark
12 4 (0.17%) DNS
12 4 (0.17%) RS-232
12 4 (0.17%) RS-422
13 3 (0.13%) IPv4
13 3 (0.13%) IPv6
13 3 (0.13%) Modbus
13 3 (0.13%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 143 (6.02%) PostgreSQL
2 84 (3.54%) Relational Database
3 70 (2.95%) SQL Server
4 65 (2.74%) NoSQL
5 54 (2.27%) MongoDB
6 34 (1.43%) DynamoDB
7 33 (1.39%) Apache Cassandra
8 30 (1.26%) MySQL
8 30 (1.26%) Power BI
9 29 (1.22%) Data Warehouse
10 28 (1.18%) Amazon RDS
11 25 (1.05%) Big Data
12 23 (0.97%) Data Lake
13 22 (0.93%) BigQuery
13 22 (0.93%) Metadata
14 20 (0.84%) Redis
15 18 (0.76%) Pinecone
16 16 (0.67%) Weaviate
17 15 (0.63%) Amazon Redshift
17 15 (0.63%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 236 (9.94%) Git
2 146 (6.15%) Jenkins
3 123 (5.18%) GitLab
4 107 (4.51%) JIRA
5 55 (2.32%) SonarQube
6 38 (1.60%) Gradle
7 33 (1.39%) JUnit
8 28 (1.18%) Rational DOORS
8 28 (1.18%) Rational Rhapsody
9 26 (1.10%) Visual Studio
10 21 (0.88%) Cucumber
11 20 (0.84%) Bitbucket
11 20 (0.84%) Maven
11 20 (0.84%) Selenium
12 16 (0.67%) Liquibase
13 15 (0.63%) Claude Code
13 15 (0.63%) Cypress.io
13 15 (0.63%) IntelliJ
13 15 (0.63%) Mockito
14 12 (0.51%) Eclipse
General
1 415 (17.48%) Finance
2 389 (16.39%) Social Skills
3 160 (6.74%) Banking
4 149 (6.28%) Analytical Skills
5 142 (5.98%) Public Sector
6 101 (4.25%) Aerospace
7 83 (3.50%) Front Office
8 47 (1.98%) Retail
9 45 (1.90%) Law
10 42 (1.77%) Manufacturing
11 41 (1.73%) Investment Banking
12 26 (1.10%) Military
13 25 (1.05%) Automotive
13 25 (1.05%) Aviation
13 25 (1.05%) Influencing Skills
14 23 (0.97%) Telecoms
15 18 (0.76%) Electronics
16 17 (0.72%) Financial Institution
17 16 (0.67%) Documentation Skills
18 14 (0.59%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,207 (50.84%) Software Engineer
2 436 (18.37%) Developer
3 403 (16.98%) Senior
4 235 (9.90%) Lead
5 181 (7.62%) Senior Software Engineer
6 168 (7.08%) Java Engineer
7 143 (6.02%) Embedded Engineer
8 138 (5.81%) Java Software Engineer
9 133 (5.60%) C++ Software Engineer
10 132 (5.56%) Embedded Software Engineer
11 126 (5.31%) Java Developer
12 102 (4.30%) Architect
13 84 (3.54%) Lead Software Engineer
14 83 (3.50%) Senior Developer
15 82 (3.45%) Python Engineer
16 76 (3.20%) Software Developer
17 74 (3.12%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 73 (3.07%) Python Developer
19 70 (2.95%) Developer/Software Engineer
20 66 (2.78%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 268 (11.29%) React
2 187 (7.88%) .NET
3 181 (7.62%) Kafka
4 171 (7.20%) Node.js
4 171 (7.20%) Spring
5 164 (6.91%) REST
6 157 (6.61%) Spring Boot
7 109 (4.59%) RESTful
8 105 (4.42%) AngularJS
9 76 (3.20%) GraphQL
10 59 (2.49%) Redux
11 48 (2.02%) CSS
12 47 (1.98%) HTML
13 41 (1.73%) Next.js
14 39 (1.64%) JSON
15 37 (1.56%) LangChain
15 37 (1.56%) Middleware
16 35 (1.47%) Web Services
17 34 (1.43%) Quarkus
18 33 (1.39%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 266 (11.20%) Cloud Native
2 178 (7.50%) Distributed Systems
3 121 (5.10%) Product Ownership
4 92 (3.88%) Algorithms
5 71 (2.99%) Fixed Income
6 64 (2.70%) AI Agents
7 42 (1.77%) Embedded Systems
8 41 (1.73%) Onboarding
9 37 (1.56%) Data Structures
10 36 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
11 34 (1.43%) Derivative
11 34 (1.43%) Legacy Systems
12 29 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
13 27 (1.14%) Equities
13 27 (1.14%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 23 (0.97%) Enterprise Software
15 21 (0.88%) Robotics
16 20 (0.84%) Greenfield Project
17 18 (0.76%) Mobile App
18 15 (0.63%) FPGA
Operating Systems
1 184 (7.75%) Linux
2 58 (2.44%) Windows
3 38 (1.60%) Unix
4 30 (1.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (0.67%) Embedded Linux
6 15 (0.63%) Apple iOS
7 13 (0.55%) Android
8 11 (0.46%) FreeRTOS
9 9 (0.38%) Ubuntu
9 9 (0.38%) Windows Server
10 5 (0.21%) Debian
11 4 (0.17%) Rocky
11 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.13%) Solaris
12 3 (0.13%) VMS
12 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2008
13 2 (0.084%) VxWorks
14 1 (0.042%) Tizen
14 1 (0.042%) webOS
14 1 (0.042%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 709 (29.87%) Agile
1 709 (29.87%) CI/CD
2 495 (20.85%) DevOps
3 379 (15.96%) AI
4 348 (14.66%) Microservices
5 288 (12.13%) Test Automation
6 263 (11.08%) Problem-Solving
7 257 (10.83%) Full-Stack Development
8 221 (9.31%) Containerisation
9 214 (9.01%) Infrastructure as Code
10 211 (8.89%) Continuous Improvement
11 184 (7.75%) SDLC
12 183 (7.71%) TDD
13 178 (7.50%) Machine Learning
14 176 (7.41%) Observability
15 175 (7.37%) Scrum
16 174 (7.33%) Mentoring
17 161 (6.78%) Platform Engineering
18 155 (6.53%) Technical Leadership
19 151 (6.36%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 631 (26.58%) Python
2 605 (25.48%) Java
3 308 (12.97%) SQL
4 299 (12.59%) C#
5 290 (12.22%) TypeScript
6 244 (10.28%) JavaScript
7 231 (9.73%) C++
8 133 (5.60%) Ada
9 130 (5.48%) Go
10 115 (4.84%) C
11 42 (1.77%) Kotlin
12 36 (1.52%) Rust
13 31 (1.31%) PowerShell
14 29 (1.22%) Bash
15 26 (1.10%) MATLAB
16 24 (1.01%) Scala
17 23 (0.97%) Embedded C
17 23 (0.97%) PL/SQL
18 17 (0.72%) Ruby
18 17 (0.72%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 577 (24.30%) Security Cleared
2 466 (19.63%) SC Cleared
3 175 (7.37%) Degree
4 79 (3.33%) Computer Science Degree
5 71 (2.99%) DV Cleared
6 50 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
7 28 (1.18%) Master's Degree
8 27 (1.14%) AWS Certification
9 18 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 12 (0.51%) Azure Certification
10 12 (0.51%) PhD
11 9 (0.38%) CISSP
12 7 (0.29%) ISTQB
12 7 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.25%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.25%) TOGAF Certification
14 4 (0.17%) CISM
14 4 (0.17%) GIAC
14 4 (0.17%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 4 (0.17%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 127 (5.35%) QA
2 44 (1.85%) Def Stans
3 41 (1.73%) Data Quality
4 39 (1.64%) Accessibility
5 31 (1.31%) IEC 61508
6 21 (0.88%) GDPR
7 20 (0.84%) MISRA
8 13 (0.55%) NIST
9 12 (0.51%) MISRA C
10 10 (0.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 10 (0.42%) NCSC
10 10 (0.42%) WCAG
11 9 (0.38%) DO-178B
12 6 (0.25%) GRC
12 6 (0.25%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.21%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 4 (0.17%) DO-254
15 3 (0.13%) FATCA
16 2 (0.084%) EMIR
System Software
1 325 (13.69%) Docker
2 25 (1.05%) Firmware
3 10 (0.42%) Embedded Firmware
4 9 (0.38%) Active Directory
5 8 (0.34%) VMware Infrastructure
6 5 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
7 4 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.13%) HDFS
9 2 (0.084%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 380 (16.01%) Kubernetes
2 218 (9.18%) Terraform
3 65 (2.74%) Ansible
4 64 (2.70%) Grafana
5 39 (1.64%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.56%) Argo
7 11 (0.46%) Kibana
8 9 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
9 7 (0.29%) Puppet
10 6 (0.25%) Progress Chef
11 5 (0.21%) HAProxy
12 4 (0.17%) Data Guard
12 4 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
13 3 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
13 3 (0.13%) Functional Safety
13 3 (0.13%) Kubeflow
14 2 (0.084%) Cilium
14 2 (0.084%) HP ALM
14 2 (0.084%) HP Fortify
14 2 (0.084%) Istio
Vendors
1 121 (5.10%) Microsoft
2 76 (3.20%) Google
3 71 (2.99%) Oracle
4 53 (2.23%) Red Hat
5 41 (1.73%) Databricks
6 36 (1.52%) OpenAI
7 21 (0.88%) IBM
8 18 (0.76%) ServiceNow
8 18 (0.76%) Splunk
9 16 (0.67%) Informatica
10 13 (0.55%) Salesforce
11 12 (0.51%) Siemens
12 11 (0.46%) Foundry
12 11 (0.46%) SAP
13 10 (0.42%) Checkmarx
13 10 (0.42%) ForgeRock
13 10 (0.42%) MathWorks
13 10 (0.42%) Okta
14 8 (0.34%) Dynatrace
14 8 (0.34%) VMware