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

6 months to
31 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 44 31
Rank change year-on-year +13 -13 +10
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,531 1,352 1,982
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.58% 4.91% 5.83%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.55% 5.41% 6.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,419 879 1,265
10th Percentile £400 £380 £409
25th Percentile £468 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £563 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -4.00% +4.17%
75th Percentile £688 £769 £800
90th Percentile £788 £850 £888
UK median daily rate £560 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -2.61% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 410 81 300
10th Percentile £50.25 £31.25 £47.45
25th Percentile £60.00 £52.00 £56.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £77.50 £75.25
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 38,641 24,977 29,189
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.26% 90.76% 85.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,154 16,016 19,101
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,462 1,371 1,780
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.25 £13.87
25th Percentile £20.92 £17.98 £17.72
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -39.40% -2.35%
75th Percentile £68.75 £52.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%

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 July 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 July 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 July 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 -1 1,147 £600 -7.69% 1,577
North of England +29 391 £538 +9.16% 324
South East +25 317 £525 +4.90% 359
South West +23 311 £550 +10.00% 195
East of England +24 214 £505 +3.48% 153
North West +5 182 £550 +10.00% 204
Yorkshire +13 143 £505 +3.06% 70
Midlands -8 109 £465 -7.00% 133
West Midlands -19 83 £463 -19.57% 80
North East +13 71 £650 +42.86% 52
East Midlands -6 25 £513 +7.89% 53
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 55 (2.17%) Confluence
2 46 (1.82%) Apache Spark
3 32 (1.26%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (1.19%) Apache
5 11 (0.43%) CMS
6 10 (0.40%) SAS
7 8 (0.32%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.24%) Jupyter
9 5 (0.20%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.20%) Hyperledger
9 5 (0.20%) nginx
10 4 (0.16%) WebLogic
11 3 (0.12%) Apache Solr
11 3 (0.12%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.12%) Tomcat
12 2 (0.079%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.079%) Apache Superset
12 2 (0.079%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.079%) MQSeries
12 2 (0.079%) WinCC
Applications
1 14 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.40%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 10 (0.40%) Chatbot
3 7 (0.28%) Microsoft Excel
4 6 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
5 5 (0.20%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.16%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.16%) Simulink
7 3 (0.12%) Trello
8 2 (0.079%) CATIA
8 2 (0.079%) Notion
9 1 (0.040%) Adobe After Effects
9 1 (0.040%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.040%) Blender
9 1 (0.040%) Maya
9 1 (0.040%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.28%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.28%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.20%) 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 (0.079%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.079%) Endur
6 2 (0.079%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.040%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.040%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.040%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 641 (25.33%) AWS
2 493 (19.48%) Azure
3 257 (10.15%) GCP
4 202 (7.98%) GitHub
5 116 (4.58%) Serverless
6 98 (3.87%) GitHub Actions
7 96 (3.79%) Azure DevOps
8 81 (3.20%) AWS Lambda
9 59 (2.33%) OpenShift
10 58 (2.29%) Amazon S3
11 50 (1.98%) Anthropic Claude
12 47 (1.86%) Amazon EKS
13 45 (1.78%) Amazon SQS
14 43 (1.70%) Power Platform
15 41 (1.62%) Amazon ECS
16 40 (1.58%) Azure AKS
17 38 (1.50%) GitHub Copilot
18 31 (1.22%) AWS CloudFormation
19 28 (1.11%) Amazon EC2
19 28 (1.11%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 25 (0.99%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (0.95%) Wireless
3 23 (0.91%) Ethernet
4 20 (0.79%) Firewall
5 18 (0.71%) Internet
5 18 (0.71%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.59%) HTTP
6 15 (0.59%) VPN
7 10 (0.40%) Wi-Fi
8 9 (0.36%) 3GPP
9 8 (0.32%) Network Security
9 8 (0.32%) RTP
10 7 (0.28%) RS-232
10 7 (0.28%) Wireshark
11 6 (0.24%) RS-485
12 5 (0.20%) DNS
13 4 (0.16%) RS-422
14 3 (0.12%) HTTPS
14 3 (0.12%) Modbus
14 3 (0.12%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 159 (6.28%) PostgreSQL
2 97 (3.83%) Relational Database
3 79 (3.12%) NoSQL
3 79 (3.12%) SQL Server
4 53 (2.09%) MongoDB
5 38 (1.50%) Data Warehouse
6 37 (1.46%) DynamoDB
7 33 (1.30%) MySQL
8 30 (1.19%) Big Data
9 29 (1.15%) Power BI
10 23 (0.91%) Elasticsearch
10 23 (0.91%) Redis
11 21 (0.83%) BigQuery
11 21 (0.83%) Data Lake
11 21 (0.83%) Metadata
12 20 (0.79%) Amazon RDS
13 17 (0.67%) Amazon Redshift
13 17 (0.67%) Pinecone
14 16 (0.63%) Apache Cassandra
14 16 (0.63%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 258 (10.19%) Git
2 153 (6.05%) Jenkins
3 137 (5.41%) GitLab
4 111 (4.39%) JIRA
5 60 (2.37%) SonarQube
6 35 (1.38%) JUnit
7 34 (1.34%) Gradle
8 24 (0.95%) Visual Studio
9 23 (0.91%) Claude Code
10 21 (0.83%) Rational DOORS
11 20 (0.79%) Bitbucket
11 20 (0.79%) Cucumber
12 18 (0.71%) Rational Rhapsody
12 18 (0.71%) Selenium
13 17 (0.67%) Mockito
14 15 (0.59%) Liquibase
14 15 (0.59%) Maven
15 13 (0.51%) Mocha
16 12 (0.47%) Cypress.io
16 12 (0.47%) Eclipse
General
1 474 (18.73%) Finance
2 452 (17.86%) Social Skills
3 185 (7.31%) Banking
4 173 (6.84%) Analytical Skills
5 169 (6.68%) Public Sector
6 102 (4.03%) Aerospace
7 100 (3.95%) Front Office
8 56 (2.21%) Retail
9 49 (1.94%) Manufacturing
10 44 (1.74%) Investment Banking
11 42 (1.66%) Law
12 31 (1.22%) Telecoms
13 30 (1.19%) Military
14 27 (1.07%) Automotive
14 27 (1.07%) Influencing Skills
15 26 (1.03%) Aviation
16 20 (0.79%) Electronics
17 18 (0.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
17 18 (0.71%) Legal
18 16 (0.63%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 1,200 (47.41%) Software Engineer
2 486 (19.20%) Developer
3 430 (16.99%) Senior
4 283 (11.18%) Lead
5 176 (6.95%) Senior Software Engineer
6 171 (6.76%) Java Engineer
7 142 (5.61%) Embedded Engineer
8 140 (5.53%) Java Software Engineer
9 135 (5.33%) Java Developer
10 133 (5.25%) Embedded Software Engineer
11 115 (4.54%) C++ Software Engineer
12 108 (4.27%) Python Engineer
13 107 (4.23%) Lead Software Engineer
14 104 (4.11%) Software Developer
15 103 (4.07%) Architect
16 88 (3.48%) Senior Developer
17 78 (3.08%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 78 (3.08%) Python Developer
18 74 (2.92%) Data Engineer
18 74 (2.92%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 288 (11.38%) React
2 203 (8.02%) .NET
3 198 (7.82%) REST
4 191 (7.55%) Spring
5 182 (7.19%) Kafka
5 182 (7.19%) Node.js
6 171 (6.76%) Spring Boot
7 119 (4.70%) RESTful
8 118 (4.66%) AngularJS
9 73 (2.88%) GraphQL
10 57 (2.25%) Redux
11 49 (1.94%) Next.js
12 48 (1.90%) Django
12 48 (1.90%) HTML
13 47 (1.86%) CSS
14 42 (1.66%) Quarkus
15 39 (1.54%) JSON
16 38 (1.50%) LangChain
17 35 (1.38%) .NET Core
17 35 (1.38%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 334 (13.20%) Cloud Native
2 217 (8.57%) Distributed Systems
3 132 (5.22%) Product Ownership
4 87 (3.44%) Algorithms
5 82 (3.24%) AI Agents
6 75 (2.96%) Fixed Income
7 51 (2.02%) Data Structures
8 47 (1.86%) Onboarding
9 44 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
9 44 (1.74%) Embedded Systems
10 39 (1.54%) Enterprise Software
11 36 (1.42%) Derivative
12 35 (1.38%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 35 (1.38%) Legacy Systems
13 32 (1.26%) Self-Motivation
14 30 (1.19%) Equities
15 23 (0.91%) Robotics
16 21 (0.83%) Greenfield Project
17 17 (0.67%) NHS
17 17 (0.67%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 184 (7.27%) Linux
2 58 (2.29%) Windows
3 31 (1.22%) Unix
4 30 (1.19%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 19 (0.75%) Embedded Linux
6 15 (0.59%) Android
7 11 (0.43%) Apple iOS
7 11 (0.43%) FreeRTOS
8 10 (0.40%) Windows Server
9 8 (0.32%) Ubuntu
10 4 (0.16%) Debian
10 4 (0.16%) VMS
10 4 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.12%) Rocky
11 3 (0.12%) Solaris
11 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
12 2 (0.079%) VxWorks
13 1 (0.040%) Tizen
13 1 (0.040%) webOS
13 1 (0.040%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 824 (32.56%) CI/CD
2 799 (31.57%) Agile
3 581 (22.96%) DevOps
4 451 (17.82%) AI
5 384 (15.17%) Microservices
6 328 (12.96%) Test Automation
7 292 (11.54%) Problem-Solving
8 283 (11.18%) Full-Stack Development
9 273 (10.79%) Continuous Improvement
10 264 (10.43%) Infrastructure as Code
11 250 (9.88%) Containerisation
12 217 (8.57%) Machine Learning
12 217 (8.57%) Observability
13 216 (8.53%) SDLC
14 210 (8.30%) Mentoring
15 198 (7.82%) TDD
16 191 (7.55%) Scrum
17 190 (7.51%) Platform Engineering
18 185 (7.31%) Technical Leadership
19 177 (6.99%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 733 (28.96%) Python
2 664 (26.23%) Java
3 332 (13.12%) SQL
4 315 (12.45%) TypeScript
5 292 (11.54%) C#
6 251 (9.92%) JavaScript
7 213 (8.42%) C++
8 119 (4.70%) Go
9 110 (4.35%) Ada
10 107 (4.23%) C
11 60 (2.37%) Kotlin
12 43 (1.70%) Rust
13 36 (1.42%) PowerShell
14 35 (1.38%) Bash
15 34 (1.34%) Scala
16 24 (0.95%) PL/SQL
17 20 (0.79%) Ruby
18 18 (0.71%) Bicep
18 18 (0.71%) Embedded C
19 17 (0.67%) PHP
Qualifications
1 598 (23.63%) Security Cleared
2 499 (19.72%) SC Cleared
3 191 (7.55%) Degree
4 84 (3.32%) Computer Science Degree
5 80 (3.16%) DV Cleared
6 55 (2.17%) BPSS Clearance
7 37 (1.46%) Master's Degree
8 35 (1.38%) AWS Certification
9 21 (0.83%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 19 (0.75%) PhD
11 12 (0.47%) Azure Certification
12 7 (0.28%) CISSP
13 6 (0.24%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.24%) ISTQB
13 6 (0.24%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.24%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 6 (0.24%) PMP
14 4 (0.16%) MBA
14 4 (0.16%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
14 4 (0.16%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 155 (6.12%) QA
2 54 (2.13%) Data Quality
3 49 (1.94%) Accessibility
4 23 (0.91%) Def Stans
5 19 (0.75%) GDPR
6 15 (0.59%) NIST
7 14 (0.55%) IEC 61508
8 13 (0.51%) WCAG
9 12 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 12 (0.47%) MISRA
10 10 (0.40%) DO-178B
11 8 (0.32%) NCSC
12 7 (0.28%) GRC
13 6 (0.24%) PCI DSS
14 5 (0.20%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.12%) DO-254
15 3 (0.12%) MISRA C
15 3 (0.12%) Software Quality Assurance
16 2 (0.079%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 367 (14.50%) Docker
2 23 (0.91%) Firmware
3 12 (0.47%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.40%) Active Directory
5 7 (0.28%) Virtual Machines
6 6 (0.24%) VMware Infrastructure
7 3 (0.12%) HDFS
8 2 (0.079%) SRDF
9 1 (0.040%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 422 (16.67%) Kubernetes
2 246 (9.72%) Terraform
3 76 (3.00%) Ansible
4 56 (2.21%) Grafana
5 43 (1.70%) Argo
6 37 (1.46%) Prometheus
7 11 (0.43%) Kibana
7 11 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
8 9 (0.36%) Puppet
9 7 (0.28%) Progress Chef
10 5 (0.20%) HAProxy
10 5 (0.20%) Kubeflow
11 4 (0.16%) Functional Safety
12 3 (0.12%) Consul
13 2 (0.079%) Cilium
13 2 (0.079%) Docker Swarm
13 2 (0.079%) HP Fortify
14 1 (0.040%) Kustomize
14 1 (0.040%) Podman
14 1 (0.040%) PTC Integrity
Vendors
1 125 (4.94%) Microsoft
2 86 (3.40%) Google
3 75 (2.96%) Oracle
4 53 (2.09%) Red Hat
5 50 (1.98%) Databricks
6 40 (1.58%) OpenAI
7 19 (0.75%) Informatica
7 19 (0.75%) Splunk
8 18 (0.71%) IBM
8 18 (0.71%) Salesforce
8 18 (0.71%) ServiceNow
9 12 (0.47%) Adobe
10 11 (0.43%) SAP
11 10 (0.40%) Checkmarx
11 10 (0.40%) ForgeRock
11 10 (0.40%) Foundry
11 10 (0.40%) Okta
11 10 (0.40%) Siemens
12 9 (0.36%) Dynatrace
12 9 (0.36%) Solace