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

6 months to
19 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 33 45 27
Rank change year-on-year +12 -18 +12
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,327 1,181 2,311
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.40% 4.75% 6.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.34% 5.20% 7.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,240 782 1,325
10th Percentile £400 £400 £419
25th Percentile £463 £475 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £601
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -0.08% -1.72%
75th Percentile £681 £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 448 62 416
10th Percentile £52.50 £38.08 £46.25
25th Percentile £60.46 £51.44 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.38 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.08 £79.75 £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 36,727 22,725 32,193
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.21% 91.37% 85.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,194 14,704 20,811
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £518 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.48% -1.43% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £729 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £505 £525
% change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,299 1,073 2,390
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.88 £16.06
Median hourly rate £47.00 £27.13 £37.63
Median % change year-on-year +73.27% -27.91% +5.54%
75th Percentile £68.55 £56.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £75.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.40 £37.50
% change year-on-year +73.07% -32.27% +7.05%

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 19 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 19 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 19 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 -6 1,004 £588 -9.62% 487
North of England +29 351 £538 +7.50% 260
South West +27 336 £570 +8.57% 188
South East +17 285 £525 +3.65% 354
East of England +33 212 £500 +2.46% 161
North West +8 164 £505 +1.00% 149
Yorkshire +13 122 £531 +8.11% 60
Midlands -21 93 £459 -9.56% 101
West Midlands -26 73 £459 -17.67% 61
North East +17 70 £621 +35.05% 52
East Midlands -14 19 £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 (2.32%) Confluence
2 38 (1.63%) Apache Spark
3 26 (1.12%) Apache
3 26 (1.12%) Apache Airflow
4 8 (0.34%) SAS
5 7 (0.30%) CMS
6 6 (0.26%) 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%) Camunda
9 3 (0.13%) Palantir Foundry
9 3 (0.13%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.086%) Cloud Foundry
10 2 (0.086%) IIS
10 2 (0.086%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.086%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.086%) 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 (0.21%) CPLEX
5 4 (0.17%) Simulink
6 2 (0.086%) CATIA
6 2 (0.086%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.086%) 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 (0.21%) 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 (0.086%) Aladdin
5 2 (0.086%) LabWindows
5 2 (0.086%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.043%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.043%) Sprinklr
6 1 (0.043%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 576 (24.75%) AWS
2 446 (19.17%) Azure
3 208 (8.94%) GCP
4 164 (7.05%) GitHub
5 123 (5.29%) Serverless
6 98 (4.21%) Azure DevOps
7 78 (3.35%) AWS Lambda
8 75 (3.22%) GitHub Actions
9 63 (2.71%) Amazon S3
10 54 (2.32%) OpenShift
11 45 (1.93%) Power Platform
12 40 (1.72%) Amazon SQS
13 37 (1.59%) Amazon ECS
13 37 (1.59%) Amazon EKS
14 35 (1.50%) Anthropic Claude
14 35 (1.50%) Azure AKS
15 33 (1.42%) Amazon EC2
16 29 (1.25%) SaaS
17 27 (1.16%) AWS CloudFormation
18 26 (1.12%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.29%) Software-Defined Radio
2 23 (0.99%) Ethernet
3 22 (0.95%) Wireless
4 17 (0.73%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.64%) HTTP
6 13 (0.56%) Firewall
7 12 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
8 11 (0.47%) 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 (6.06%) PostgreSQL
2 81 (3.48%) Relational Database
3 68 (2.92%) SQL Server
4 62 (2.66%) NoSQL
5 53 (2.28%) MongoDB
6 35 (1.50%) Apache Cassandra
7 34 (1.46%) DynamoDB
8 31 (1.33%) Power BI
9 30 (1.29%) Amazon RDS
9 30 (1.29%) MySQL
10 28 (1.20%) Data Warehouse
11 25 (1.07%) Big Data
12 24 (1.03%) Data Lake
12 24 (1.03%) Metadata
13 23 (0.99%) BigQuery
14 17 (0.73%) Pinecone
14 17 (0.73%) Redis
15 16 (0.69%) Weaviate
16 15 (0.64%) Amazon Redshift
16 15 (0.64%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 230 (9.88%) Git
2 143 (6.15%) Jenkins
3 125 (5.37%) GitLab
4 109 (4.68%) JIRA
5 54 (2.32%) SonarQube
6 43 (1.85%) Gradle
7 34 (1.46%) JUnit
8 29 (1.25%) Rational Rhapsody
9 28 (1.20%) Rational DOORS
10 25 (1.07%) Visual Studio
11 23 (0.99%) Cucumber
12 21 (0.90%) Bitbucket
12 21 (0.90%) Maven
13 20 (0.86%) Selenium
14 19 (0.82%) IntelliJ
15 16 (0.69%) Cypress.io
15 16 (0.69%) Liquibase
15 16 (0.69%) Mockito
16 14 (0.60%) Claude Code
17 12 (0.52%) Eclipse
General
1 411 (17.66%) Finance
2 354 (15.21%) Social Skills
3 157 (6.75%) Banking
4 140 (6.02%) Analytical Skills
5 138 (5.93%) Public Sector
6 99 (4.25%) Aerospace
7 83 (3.57%) Front Office
8 44 (1.89%) Law
8 44 (1.89%) Manufacturing
9 42 (1.80%) Retail
10 39 (1.68%) Investment Banking
11 26 (1.12%) Military
12 25 (1.07%) Automotive
12 25 (1.07%) Aviation
12 25 (1.07%) Influencing Skills
13 23 (0.99%) Telecoms
14 18 (0.77%) Financial Institution
15 15 (0.64%) Documentation Skills
16 14 (0.60%) Electronics
16 14 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,184 (50.88%) Software Engineer
2 434 (18.65%) Developer
3 405 (17.40%) Senior
4 210 (9.02%) Lead
5 185 (7.95%) Senior Software Engineer
6 171 (7.35%) Java Engineer
7 143 (6.15%) Embedded Engineer
8 142 (6.10%) Java Software Engineer
9 132 (5.67%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 125 (5.37%) C++ Software Engineer
10 125 (5.37%) Java Developer
11 102 (4.38%) Architect
12 83 (3.57%) Senior Developer
13 76 (3.27%) Software Developer
14 74 (3.18%) Python Developer
15 71 (3.05%) Developer/Software Engineer
16 69 (2.97%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 69 (2.97%) Python Engineer
17 66 (2.84%) Full-Stack Engineer
18 65 (2.79%) Lead Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 266 (11.43%) React
2 184 (7.91%) .NET
3 179 (7.69%) Kafka
4 173 (7.43%) Spring
5 169 (7.26%) Node.js
6 162 (6.96%) REST
7 161 (6.92%) Spring Boot
8 110 (4.73%) RESTful
9 107 (4.60%) AngularJS
10 72 (3.09%) GraphQL
11 59 (2.54%) Redux
12 48 (2.06%) CSS
13 47 (2.02%) HTML
14 40 (1.72%) Middleware
14 40 (1.72%) Next.js
15 38 (1.63%) JSON
16 36 (1.55%) Web Services
17 35 (1.50%) LangChain
18 33 (1.42%) Quarkus
19 32 (1.38%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 262 (11.26%) Cloud Native
2 178 (7.65%) Distributed Systems
3 119 (5.11%) Product Ownership
4 91 (3.91%) Algorithms
5 71 (3.05%) Fixed Income
6 63 (2.71%) AI Agents
7 40 (1.72%) Onboarding
8 39 (1.68%) Embedded Systems
9 36 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
10 35 (1.50%) Legacy Systems
11 34 (1.46%) Data Structures
11 34 (1.46%) Derivative
12 28 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
13 26 (1.12%) Equities
13 26 (1.12%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 25 (1.07%) Robotics
15 23 (0.99%) Enterprise Software
16 21 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
17 19 (0.82%) Mobile App
18 15 (0.64%) FPGA
Operating Systems
1 181 (7.78%) Linux
2 58 (2.49%) Windows
3 40 (1.72%) Unix
4 28 (1.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (0.69%) Embedded Linux
6 15 (0.64%) Apple iOS
7 14 (0.60%) Android
8 11 (0.47%) FreeRTOS
9 9 (0.39%) Windows Server
10 7 (0.30%) Ubuntu
11 5 (0.21%) 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 (0.086%) VxWorks
15 1 (0.043%) Tizen
15 1 (0.043%) webOS
15 1 (0.043%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 694 (29.82%) CI/CD
2 684 (29.39%) Agile
3 482 (20.71%) DevOps
4 371 (15.94%) AI
5 351 (15.08%) Microservices
6 279 (11.99%) Test Automation
7 255 (10.96%) Problem-Solving
8 252 (10.83%) Full-Stack Development
9 215 (9.24%) Containerisation
10 213 (9.15%) Infrastructure as Code
11 192 (8.25%) Continuous Improvement
12 179 (7.69%) SDLC
13 178 (7.65%) Machine Learning
14 174 (7.48%) Observability
14 174 (7.48%) TDD
15 173 (7.43%) Scrum
16 164 (7.05%) Mentoring
17 160 (6.88%) Platform Engineering
18 148 (6.36%) Technical Leadership
19 145 (6.23%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 606 (26.04%) Java
2 604 (25.96%) Python
3 307 (13.19%) SQL
4 298 (12.81%) C#
5 286 (12.29%) TypeScript
6 246 (10.57%) JavaScript
7 216 (9.28%) C++
8 131 (5.63%) Go
9 129 (5.54%) Ada
10 107 (4.60%) C
11 45 (1.93%) Kotlin
12 34 (1.46%) Rust
13 32 (1.38%) PowerShell
14 29 (1.25%) Bash
15 26 (1.12%) MATLAB
16 24 (1.03%) Embedded C
17 23 (0.99%) PL/SQL
17 23 (0.99%) Scala
18 18 (0.77%) Ruby
19 17 (0.73%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 556 (23.89%) Security Cleared
2 446 (19.17%) SC Cleared
3 171 (7.35%) Degree
4 78 (3.35%) Computer Science Degree
5 69 (2.97%) DV Cleared
6 48 (2.06%) BPSS Clearance
7 27 (1.16%) AWS Certification
7 27 (1.16%) Master's Degree
8 18 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 12 (0.52%) Azure Certification
10 11 (0.47%) PhD
11 9 (0.39%) CISSP
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
1 128 (5.50%) QA
2 41 (1.76%) Def Stans
3 38 (1.63%) Accessibility
4 37 (1.59%) Data Quality
5 33 (1.42%) IEC 61508
6 21 (0.90%) GDPR
7 16 (0.69%) MISRA
8 13 (0.56%) MISRA C
9 11 (0.47%) NCSC
9 11 (0.47%) NIST
10 10 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 10 (0.43%) WCAG
11 6 (0.26%) PCI DSS
12 5 (0.21%) GRC
12 5 (0.21%) 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 (0.086%) EMIR
System Software
1 319 (13.71%) Docker
2 20 (0.86%) 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 (0.086%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 376 (16.16%) Kubernetes
2 215 (9.24%) Terraform
3 68 (2.92%) Grafana
4 63 (2.71%) Ansible
5 39 (1.68%) Prometheus
6 36 (1.55%) Argo
7 7 (0.30%) Puppet
7 7 (0.30%) Single Sign-On
8 6 (0.26%) Kibana
8 6 (0.26%) Progress Chef
9 5 (0.21%) HAProxy
10 4 (0.17%) Data Guard
10 4 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
11 3 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
11 3 (0.13%) Functional Safety
11 3 (0.13%) Kubeflow
12 2 (0.086%) Cilium
12 2 (0.086%) Consul
12 2 (0.086%) HP ALM
12 2 (0.086%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 121 (5.20%) Microsoft
2 74 (3.18%) Google
3 69 (2.97%) Oracle
4 54 (2.32%) Red Hat
5 41 (1.76%) Databricks
6 35 (1.50%) OpenAI
7 20 (0.86%) IBM
8 18 (0.77%) ServiceNow
8 18 (0.77%) Splunk
9 15 (0.64%) Informatica
10 13 (0.56%) Salesforce
11 12 (0.52%) Siemens
12 11 (0.47%) 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 (0.34%) Atlassian