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

6 months to
14 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 45 30
Rank change year-on-year +14 -15 +9
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,665 1,340 1,904
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.79% 4.86% 5.80%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.84% 5.35% 6.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,440 821 1,176
10th Percentile £400 £380 £413
25th Percentile £463 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% +4.12%
75th Percentile £688 £750 £810
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 415 110 234
10th Percentile £51.25 £38.63 £45.50
25th Percentile £57.63 £52.50 £57.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.88 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.78 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.25
% change year-on-year - -0.38% +0.38%

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 38,948 25,051 28,234
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.68% 90.90% 86.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,873 15,912 17,703
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £648
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,701 1,483 1,330
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.25 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.65 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -1.71%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.73 £66.58
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%

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 14 September 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 14 September 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 14 September 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 1,200 £600 -7.69% 4,519
North of England +27 435 £525 +6.62% 720
South East +40 340 £525 +10.53% 748
South West +20 303 £550 +7.32% 456
East of England +15 221 £509 +1.70% 532
North West +11 201 £530 +6.00% 420
Yorkshire +18 172 £500 +0.73% 207
Midlands +28 139 £463 -16.38% 327
West Midlands +10 96 £466 -18.90% 188
North East +8 65 £650 +41.30% 98
East Midlands +13 42 £435 -3.33% 138
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 (2.29%) Confluence
2 55 (2.06%) Apache Spark
3 47 (1.76%) Apache Airflow
4 36 (1.35%) Apache
5 14 (0.53%) SharePoint
6 12 (0.45%) CMS
7 7 (0.26%) Camunda
7 7 (0.26%) Jupyter
7 7 (0.26%) SAS
8 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
8 5 (0.19%) Ethereum
8 5 (0.19%) Hyperledger
9 4 (0.15%) Apache Superset
9 4 (0.15%) WordPress
10 3 (0.11%) MQSeries
10 3 (0.11%) nginx
10 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
11 2 (0.075%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.075%) IIS
11 2 (0.075%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 14 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
2 11 (0.41%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.38%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 10 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
4 5 (0.19%) Microsoft Excel
5 4 (0.15%) CPLEX
5 4 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.11%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.11%) Simulink
6 3 (0.11%) Trello
7 2 (0.075%) CATIA
7 2 (0.075%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 2 (0.075%) Notion
8 1 (0.038%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.038%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.038%) Blender
8 1 (0.038%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.26%) Payment Gateway
2 5 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
2 5 (0.19%) R3 Corda
3 4 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.15%) Quorum
3 4 (0.15%) Ripple
4 3 (0.11%) Oracle Payroll
4 3 (0.11%) Orchestrade
4 3 (0.11%) Primavera
4 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.075%) Endur
5 2 (0.075%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.038%) Aladdin
6 1 (0.038%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.038%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.038%) Sage 50
6 1 (0.038%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.038%) Shopify
6 1 (0.038%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 675 (25.33%) AWS
2 536 (20.11%) Azure
3 271 (10.17%) GCP
4 235 (8.82%) GitHub
5 142 (5.33%) Serverless
6 125 (4.69%) GitHub Actions
7 110 (4.13%) Azure DevOps
8 103 (3.86%) AWS Lambda
9 69 (2.59%) Amazon S3
10 66 (2.48%) Anthropic Claude
11 57 (2.14%) OpenShift
12 55 (2.06%) GitHub Copilot
13 53 (1.99%) Amazon SQS
14 51 (1.91%) Amazon ECS
15 49 (1.84%) Amazon EKS
16 46 (1.73%) Power Platform
17 44 (1.65%) Snowflake
18 41 (1.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 34 (1.28%) Amazon EC2
20 33 (1.24%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.16%) Wireless
2 30 (1.13%) Software-Defined Radio
3 20 (0.75%) Firewall
3 20 (0.75%) Internet
4 19 (0.71%) HTTP
5 18 (0.68%) Ethernet
5 18 (0.68%) TCP/IP
6 17 (0.64%) VPN
7 13 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
8 8 (0.30%) RTP
8 8 (0.30%) Wireshark
9 7 (0.26%) Network Security
10 6 (0.23%) 3GPP
10 6 (0.23%) Cisco IPT
10 6 (0.23%) DNS
11 4 (0.15%) RS-232
11 4 (0.15%) SSL
12 3 (0.11%) Broadband
12 3 (0.11%) Reverse Proxy
12 3 (0.11%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 147 (5.52%) PostgreSQL
2 105 (3.94%) Relational Database
3 86 (3.23%) SQL Server
4 81 (3.04%) NoSQL
5 55 (2.06%) MongoDB
6 51 (1.91%) Data Warehouse
7 43 (1.61%) DynamoDB
8 39 (1.46%) MySQL
9 34 (1.28%) Metadata
10 32 (1.20%) Amazon RDS
11 29 (1.09%) Power BI
12 27 (1.01%) Elasticsearch
12 27 (1.01%) Redis
13 25 (0.94%) Data Lake
14 24 (0.90%) Big Data
14 24 (0.90%) BigQuery
15 22 (0.83%) Pinecone
16 20 (0.75%) Weaviate
17 16 (0.60%) Chroma
18 14 (0.53%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 285 (10.69%) Git
2 157 (5.89%) Jenkins
3 154 (5.78%) GitLab
4 121 (4.54%) JIRA
5 58 (2.18%) SonarQube
6 40 (1.50%) JUnit
7 39 (1.46%) Gradle
8 32 (1.20%) Claude Code
9 30 (1.13%) Selenium
10 27 (1.01%) Maven
11 26 (0.98%) Rational DOORS
12 24 (0.90%) Visual Studio
13 21 (0.79%) Cucumber
13 21 (0.79%) Rational Rhapsody
14 18 (0.68%) Mockito
15 15 (0.56%) LabVIEW
16 13 (0.49%) Bitbucket
16 13 (0.49%) Cypress.io
17 12 (0.45%) Snyk
18 11 (0.41%) MLflow
General
1 553 (20.75%) Social Skills
2 479 (17.97%) Finance
3 212 (7.95%) Banking
4 206 (7.73%) Public Sector
5 192 (7.20%) Analytical Skills
6 89 (3.34%) Aerospace
7 76 (2.85%) Front Office
8 52 (1.95%) Investment Banking
9 49 (1.84%) Manufacturing
10 46 (1.73%) Law
10 46 (1.73%) Retail
11 38 (1.43%) Automotive
12 33 (1.24%) Military
13 27 (1.01%) Influencing Skills
14 26 (0.98%) Aviation
15 24 (0.90%) Telecoms
16 23 (0.86%) Marketing
17 22 (0.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 17 (0.64%) Back Office
18 17 (0.64%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,135 (42.59%) Software Engineer
2 510 (19.14%) Developer
3 497 (18.65%) Senior
4 295 (11.07%) Lead
5 206 (7.73%) Senior Software Engineer
6 166 (6.23%) Java Engineer
7 160 (6.00%) Embedded Engineer
8 153 (5.74%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 145 (5.44%) Java Developer
10 133 (4.99%) Java Software Engineer
11 125 (4.69%) Software Developer
12 117 (4.39%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 113 (4.24%) C++ Software Engineer
14 106 (3.98%) Senior Developer
15 105 (3.94%) Python Engineer
16 104 (3.90%) Architect
17 97 (3.64%) Data Engineer
18 81 (3.04%) DevOps Engineer
19 80 (3.00%) Lead Software Engineer
20 77 (2.89%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 300 (11.26%) Terraform
2 249 (9.34%) React
3 234 (8.78%) REST
4 224 (8.41%) Spring
5 218 (8.18%) .NET
6 212 (7.95%) Spring Boot
7 168 (6.30%) Kafka
8 140 (5.25%) RESTful
9 135 (5.07%) Node.js
10 102 (3.83%) AngularJS
11 62 (2.33%) Django
12 55 (2.06%) HTML
13 54 (2.03%) CSS
13 54 (2.03%) Next.js
14 50 (1.88%) LangChain
15 49 (1.84%) OAuth
16 44 (1.65%) FastAPI
16 44 (1.65%) JSON
16 44 (1.65%) Web Services
17 41 (1.54%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 406 (15.23%) Cloud Native
2 237 (8.89%) Distributed Systems
3 148 (5.55%) Product Ownership
4 122 (4.58%) AI Agents
5 81 (3.04%) Algorithms
6 65 (2.44%) Enterprise Software
7 58 (2.18%) Data Structures
8 50 (1.88%) Onboarding
9 48 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
9 48 (1.80%) Embedded Systems
10 37 (1.39%) Self-Motivation
11 36 (1.35%) Legacy Systems
12 33 (1.24%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 29 (1.09%) Fixed Income
14 25 (0.94%) Derivative
14 25 (0.94%) Robotics
15 23 (0.86%) Greenfield Project
16 21 (0.79%) Equities
16 21 (0.79%) Virtual Team
17 19 (0.71%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 189 (7.09%) Linux
2 60 (2.25%) Windows
3 35 (1.31%) Unix
4 25 (0.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 23 (0.86%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.53%) Android
6 14 (0.53%) FreeRTOS
7 12 (0.45%) Windows Server
8 9 (0.34%) Ubuntu
9 8 (0.30%) Apple iOS
10 6 (0.23%) Debian
11 4 (0.15%) Rocky
12 3 (0.11%) VMS
12 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
13 2 (0.075%) Windows Server 2019
13 2 (0.075%) zOS
14 1 (0.038%) Robot Operating System
14 1 (0.038%) Solaris
14 1 (0.038%) Tizen
14 1 (0.038%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 929 (34.86%) CI/CD
2 812 (30.47%) Agile
3 635 (23.83%) DevOps
4 557 (20.90%) AI
5 408 (15.31%) Microservices
6 393 (14.75%) Test Automation
7 325 (12.20%) Infrastructure as Code
7 325 (12.20%) Problem-Solving
8 323 (12.12%) Continuous Improvement
9 275 (10.32%) Containerisation
10 273 (10.24%) Observability
11 268 (10.06%) SDLC
12 253 (9.49%) Full-Stack Development
13 228 (8.56%) Machine Learning
14 226 (8.48%) Technical Leadership
15 225 (8.44%) Platform Engineering
16 224 (8.41%) Stakeholder Management
17 219 (8.22%) Event-Driven
18 214 (8.03%) Scrum
19 207 (7.77%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 777 (29.16%) Python
2 674 (25.29%) Java
3 387 (14.52%) SQL
4 294 (11.03%) C#
5 290 (10.88%) TypeScript
6 222 (8.33%) C++
6 222 (8.33%) JavaScript
7 118 (4.43%) C
8 84 (3.15%) Ada
9 82 (3.08%) Go
10 67 (2.51%) Kotlin
11 48 (1.80%) PowerShell
12 44 (1.65%) Rust
13 42 (1.58%) Bash
14 38 (1.43%) Scala
15 25 (0.94%) Embedded C
16 24 (0.90%) Ruby
17 22 (0.83%) Bicep
17 22 (0.83%) PL/SQL
18 19 (0.71%) PHP
Qualifications
1 601 (22.55%) Security Cleared
2 506 (18.99%) SC Cleared
3 211 (7.92%) Degree
4 99 (3.71%) Computer Science Degree
5 90 (3.38%) DV Cleared
6 61 (2.29%) BPSS Clearance
7 46 (1.73%) Master's Degree
8 41 (1.54%) AWS Certification
9 19 (0.71%) Azure Certification
10 18 (0.68%) PhD
11 17 (0.64%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 11 (0.41%) PMP
13 8 (0.30%) CISSP
13 8 (0.30%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 6 (0.23%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.23%) ISTQB
14 6 (0.23%) TOGAF Certification
15 5 (0.19%) PMI Certification
16 4 (0.15%) GIAC
16 4 (0.15%) MBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 177 (6.64%) QA
2 73 (2.74%) Data Quality
3 53 (1.99%) Accessibility
4 21 (0.79%) GDPR
5 17 (0.64%) MISRA
6 15 (0.56%) Def Stans
6 15 (0.56%) WCAG
7 12 (0.45%) NIST
8 11 (0.41%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 10 (0.38%) DO-178B
10 8 (0.30%) GRC
10 8 (0.30%) IEC 61508
11 7 (0.26%) NCSC
12 6 (0.23%) MISRA C
13 5 (0.19%) EMIR
13 5 (0.19%) HL7
13 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.19%) MiFID
14 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
15 3 (0.11%) DO-254
System Software
1 399 (14.97%) Docker
2 29 (1.09%) Firmware
3 18 (0.68%) Embedded Firmware
4 14 (0.53%) Active Directory
5 13 (0.49%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.30%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.038%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 447 (16.77%) Kubernetes
2 90 (3.38%) Ansible
3 56 (2.10%) Grafana
4 40 (1.50%) Argo
4 40 (1.50%) Prometheus
5 16 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
6 14 (0.53%) Kibana
7 8 (0.30%) Puppet
8 6 (0.23%) Functional Safety
9 4 (0.15%) Consul
9 4 (0.15%) HAProxy
9 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
9 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
10 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
10 3 (0.11%) Istio
10 3 (0.11%) Progress Chef
11 2 (0.075%) Cilium
11 2 (0.075%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.075%) Packer
11 2 (0.075%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 144 (5.40%) Microsoft
2 98 (3.68%) Google
3 85 (3.19%) Oracle
4 75 (2.81%) Databricks
5 61 (2.29%) OpenAI
6 43 (1.61%) Red Hat
7 29 (1.09%) Salesforce
8 25 (0.94%) Splunk
9 21 (0.79%) IBM
10 18 (0.68%) ServiceNow
11 17 (0.64%) Foundry
11 17 (0.64%) Informatica
12 12 (0.45%) Adobe
13 11 (0.41%) SAP
14 10 (0.38%) Checkmarx
14 10 (0.38%) VMware
15 9 (0.34%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.30%) Confluent
16 8 (0.30%) Siemens
17 7 (0.26%) Hitachi