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

6 months to
16 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 44 30
Rank change year-on-year +13 -14 +10
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,671 1,361 1,899
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.79% 4.90% 5.81%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.84% 5.39% 6.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,441 831 1,163
10th Percentile £400 £380 £413
25th Percentile £463 £473 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% +2.46%
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 419 112 231
10th Percentile £51.25 £39.39 £45.22
25th Percentile £57.63 £52.50 £56.88
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year - - +0.66%

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 39,062 25,238 28,145
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.72% 90.90% 86.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,917 16,041 17,545
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £423
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £645
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 2,725 1,497 1,306
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.38 £14.92
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.87 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -1.91%
75th Percentile £68.00 £49.75 £66.50
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 16 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 16 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 16 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 -3 1,197 £600 -7.69% 5,488
North of England +23 444 £525 +6.62% 1,051
South East +34 342 £525 +10.53% 997
South West +19 302 £550 +7.32% 615
East of England +15 220 £507 +1.40% 686
North West +16 203 £530 +6.00% 638
Yorkshire +9 179 £500 +0.73% 287
Midlands +27 141 £466 -14.44% 486
West Midlands 0 98 £470 -18.35% 280
North East +9 65 £650 +41.30% 131
East Midlands +19 42 £435 -3.33% 206
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 60 (2.25%) Confluence
2 56 (2.10%) Apache Spark
3 48 (1.80%) Apache Airflow
4 34 (1.27%) Apache
5 14 (0.52%) CMS
5 14 (0.52%) SharePoint
6 7 (0.26%) Camunda
6 7 (0.26%) Jupyter
6 7 (0.26%) SAS
7 6 (0.22%) Ethereum
8 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
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 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
2 11 (0.41%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.37%) Adobe Creative Suite
4 9 (0.34%) Spreadsheet
5 5 (0.19%) Microsoft Excel
6 4 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.11%) CPLEX
7 3 (0.11%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.11%) Simulink
7 3 (0.11%) Trello
8 2 (0.075%) CATIA
8 2 (0.075%) Microsoft PowerPoint
8 2 (0.075%) Notion
9 1 (0.037%) Adobe After Effects
9 1 (0.037%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.037%) Blender
9 1 (0.037%) 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 (0.037%) Aladdin
6 1 (0.037%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.037%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.037%) Sage 50
6 1 (0.037%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.037%) Shopify
6 1 (0.037%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 680 (25.46%) AWS
2 537 (20.10%) Azure
3 272 (10.18%) GCP
4 238 (8.91%) GitHub
5 143 (5.35%) Serverless
6 125 (4.68%) GitHub Actions
7 109 (4.08%) Azure DevOps
8 104 (3.89%) AWS Lambda
9 70 (2.62%) Amazon S3
10 67 (2.51%) Anthropic Claude
11 58 (2.17%) GitHub Copilot
11 58 (2.17%) OpenShift
12 54 (2.02%) Amazon SQS
13 50 (1.87%) Amazon ECS
14 49 (1.83%) Amazon EKS
15 46 (1.72%) Snowflake
16 45 (1.68%) Power Platform
17 42 (1.57%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (1.27%) dbt
19 33 (1.24%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.16%) Wireless
2 30 (1.12%) Software-Defined Radio
3 20 (0.75%) Firewall
3 20 (0.75%) Internet
4 19 (0.71%) HTTP
5 18 (0.67%) Ethernet
5 18 (0.67%) TCP/IP
6 17 (0.64%) VPN
7 13 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
8 8 (0.30%) Network Security
8 8 (0.30%) RTP
8 8 (0.30%) Wireshark
9 7 (0.26%) DNS
10 6 (0.22%) 3GPP
10 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
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
1 146 (5.47%) PostgreSQL
2 102 (3.82%) Relational Database
3 87 (3.26%) SQL Server
4 78 (2.92%) NoSQL
5 55 (2.06%) MongoDB
6 50 (1.87%) Data Warehouse
7 44 (1.65%) DynamoDB
8 39 (1.46%) MySQL
9 33 (1.24%) Metadata
10 31 (1.16%) Amazon RDS
11 28 (1.05%) Power BI
12 27 (1.01%) Elasticsearch
12 27 (1.01%) Redis
13 26 (0.97%) Data Lake
14 25 (0.94%) Big Data
14 25 (0.94%) BigQuery
15 22 (0.82%) Pinecone
16 20 (0.75%) Weaviate
17 16 (0.60%) Chroma
18 14 (0.52%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 285 (10.67%) Git
2 156 (5.84%) GitLab
2 156 (5.84%) Jenkins
3 118 (4.42%) JIRA
4 58 (2.17%) SonarQube
5 39 (1.46%) Gradle
5 39 (1.46%) JUnit
6 35 (1.31%) Claude Code
7 30 (1.12%) Maven
7 30 (1.12%) Selenium
8 27 (1.01%) Rational DOORS
9 25 (0.94%) Visual Studio
10 21 (0.79%) Cucumber
10 21 (0.79%) Rational Rhapsody
11 17 (0.64%) Mockito
12 15 (0.56%) LabVIEW
13 13 (0.49%) Cypress.io
14 12 (0.45%) Bitbucket
14 12 (0.45%) Snyk
15 10 (0.37%) MLflow
General
1 560 (20.97%) Social Skills
2 483 (18.08%) Finance
3 212 (7.94%) Banking
4 202 (7.56%) Public Sector
5 193 (7.23%) Analytical Skills
6 94 (3.52%) Aerospace
7 77 (2.88%) Front Office
8 52 (1.95%) Investment Banking
9 50 (1.87%) Manufacturing
10 46 (1.72%) Law
10 46 (1.72%) Retail
11 40 (1.50%) Automotive
12 33 (1.24%) Military
13 28 (1.05%) Influencing Skills
14 26 (0.97%) Aviation
15 25 (0.94%) Marketing
16 24 (0.90%) Telecoms
17 22 (0.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 18 (0.67%) Back Office
19 17 (0.64%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 1,130 (42.31%) Software Engineer
2 508 (19.02%) Developer
3 503 (18.83%) Senior
4 297 (11.12%) Lead
5 207 (7.75%) Senior Software Engineer
6 168 (6.29%) Java Engineer
7 159 (5.95%) Embedded Engineer
8 152 (5.69%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 148 (5.54%) Java Developer
10 133 (4.98%) Java Software Engineer
11 124 (4.64%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 120 (4.49%) Software Developer
13 114 (4.27%) C++ Software Engineer
14 107 (4.01%) Architect
14 107 (4.01%) Senior Developer
15 104 (3.89%) Python Engineer
16 99 (3.71%) Data Engineer
17 82 (3.07%) DevOps Engineer
18 80 (3.00%) Lead Software Engineer
19 75 (2.81%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 303 (11.34%) Terraform
2 248 (9.28%) React
3 236 (8.84%) REST
4 227 (8.50%) Spring
5 220 (8.24%) .NET
6 214 (8.01%) Spring Boot
7 167 (6.25%) Kafka
8 139 (5.20%) RESTful
9 138 (5.17%) Node.js
10 102 (3.82%) AngularJS
11 60 (2.25%) Django
12 55 (2.06%) HTML
12 55 (2.06%) Next.js
13 54 (2.02%) CSS
14 51 (1.91%) LangChain
15 49 (1.83%) OAuth
16 45 (1.68%) Web Services
17 43 (1.61%) JSON
18 42 (1.57%) FastAPI
19 40 (1.50%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 409 (15.31%) Cloud Native
2 239 (8.95%) Distributed Systems
3 151 (5.65%) Product Ownership
4 124 (4.64%) AI Agents
5 79 (2.96%) Algorithms
6 63 (2.36%) Enterprise Software
7 56 (2.10%) Data Structures
8 52 (1.95%) Onboarding
9 48 (1.80%) Embedded Systems
10 46 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
11 37 (1.39%) Legacy Systems
11 37 (1.39%) Self-Motivation
12 32 (1.20%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 29 (1.09%) Fixed Income
14 26 (0.97%) Derivative
15 25 (0.94%) Robotics
16 24 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
17 22 (0.82%) Equities
18 20 (0.75%) Virtual Team
19 19 (0.71%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 191 (7.15%) Linux
2 61 (2.28%) Windows
3 36 (1.35%) Unix
4 25 (0.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 23 (0.86%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.52%) FreeRTOS
7 13 (0.49%) Android
8 12 (0.45%) Windows Server
9 9 (0.34%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.26%) Apple iOS
11 6 (0.22%) Debian
12 4 (0.15%) Rocky
13 3 (0.11%) VMS
13 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
14 2 (0.075%) Windows Server 2019
14 2 (0.075%) zOS
15 1 (0.037%) Robot Operating System
15 1 (0.037%) Solaris
15 1 (0.037%) Tizen
15 1 (0.037%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 935 (35.01%) CI/CD
2 809 (30.29%) Agile
3 638 (23.89%) DevOps
4 564 (21.12%) AI
5 403 (15.09%) Microservices
6 398 (14.90%) Test Automation
7 330 (12.35%) Infrastructure as Code
8 328 (12.28%) Continuous Improvement
9 327 (12.24%) Problem-Solving
10 276 (10.33%) Observability
11 270 (10.11%) Containerisation
12 266 (9.96%) SDLC
13 254 (9.51%) Full-Stack Development
14 235 (8.80%) Technical Leadership
15 229 (8.57%) Stakeholder Management
16 228 (8.54%) Platform Engineering
17 226 (8.46%) Machine Learning
18 217 (8.12%) Event-Driven
19 216 (8.09%) Scrum
20 210 (7.86%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 785 (29.39%) Python
2 680 (25.46%) Java
3 383 (14.34%) SQL
4 293 (10.97%) C#
4 293 (10.97%) TypeScript
5 224 (8.39%) C++
6 222 (8.31%) JavaScript
7 119 (4.46%) C
8 84 (3.14%) Go
9 82 (3.07%) Ada
10 68 (2.55%) Kotlin
11 49 (1.83%) PowerShell
12 44 (1.65%) Bash
12 44 (1.65%) Rust
13 39 (1.46%) Scala
14 25 (0.94%) Embedded C
15 24 (0.90%) Ruby
16 22 (0.82%) Bicep
16 22 (0.82%) PL/SQL
17 19 (0.71%) PHP
Qualifications
1 601 (22.50%) Security Cleared
2 508 (19.02%) SC Cleared
3 214 (8.01%) Degree
4 99 (3.71%) Computer Science Degree
5 89 (3.33%) DV Cleared
6 62 (2.32%) BPSS Clearance
7 45 (1.68%) Master's Degree
8 41 (1.54%) AWS Certification
9 22 (0.82%) Azure Certification
10 17 (0.64%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 17 (0.64%) PhD
11 12 (0.45%) PMP
12 8 (0.30%) CISSP
12 8 (0.30%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.22%) ISTQB
13 6 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
14 5 (0.19%) PMI Certification
15 4 (0.15%) GIAC
15 4 (0.15%) MBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 181 (6.78%) QA
2 73 (2.73%) Data Quality
3 53 (1.98%) Accessibility
4 21 (0.79%) GDPR
5 17 (0.64%) MISRA
6 15 (0.56%) WCAG
7 14 (0.52%) Def Stans
8 13 (0.49%) NIST
9 12 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 10 (0.37%) DO-178B
11 8 (0.30%) GRC
12 7 (0.26%) IEC 61508
12 7 (0.26%) NCSC
13 6 (0.22%) MISRA C
14 5 (0.19%) EMIR
14 5 (0.19%) HL7
14 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.19%) MiFID
15 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
16 3 (0.11%) DO-254
System Software
1 393 (14.71%) Docker
2 29 (1.09%) Firmware
3 18 (0.67%) Embedded Firmware
4 14 (0.52%) Active Directory
5 13 (0.49%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.30%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.037%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 444 (16.62%) Kubernetes
2 91 (3.41%) Ansible
3 56 (2.10%) Grafana
4 40 (1.50%) Argo
4 40 (1.50%) Prometheus
5 16 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
6 15 (0.56%) Kibana
7 8 (0.30%) Puppet
8 6 (0.22%) 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
1 147 (5.50%) Microsoft
2 98 (3.67%) Google
3 85 (3.18%) Oracle
4 75 (2.81%) Databricks
5 63 (2.36%) OpenAI
6 43 (1.61%) Red Hat
7 29 (1.09%) Salesforce
8 25 (0.94%) Splunk
9 21 (0.79%) IBM
10 18 (0.67%) ServiceNow
11 17 (0.64%) Foundry
11 17 (0.64%) Informatica
12 12 (0.45%) Adobe
13 10 (0.37%) Checkmarx
13 10 (0.37%) SAP
13 10 (0.37%) VMware
14 9 (0.34%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.30%) Siemens
16 7 (0.26%) ForgeRock
16 7 (0.26%) Hitachi