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

6 months to
5 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 2,630 1,331 1,890
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.73% 4.86% 5.82%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.75% 5.35% 6.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,431 824 1,177
10th Percentile £400 £381 £413
25th Percentile £463 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £551 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.25% -4.00% +4.17%
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 412 110 243
10th Percentile £51.25 £38.63 £45.22
25th Percentile £57.63 £52.50 £54.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.41 £75.38 £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 38,940 24,864 27,870
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.85% 90.76% 85.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,004 15,800 17,728
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £509 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.05% -2.96% -4.55%
75th Percentile £636 £626 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £751
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,613 1,459 1,377
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.24 £14.43
25th Percentile £18.31 £17.79 £20.00
Median hourly rate £43.56 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +73.20% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £66.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.88
% change year-on-year +63.02% -41.35% +3.33%

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 5 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 5 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 5 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 1,175 £600 -7.69% 3,185
North of England +25 426 £525 +6.71% 537
South East +23 337 £525 +4.90% 510
South West +21 309 £550 +8.64% 427
East of England +19 215 £507 +1.40% 387
North West +15 196 £550 +10.00% 334
Yorkshire +16 167 £500 +2.04% 130
Midlands +19 133 £460 -16.36% 226
West Midlands +1 91 £463 -19.57% 121
North East +10 66 £650 +41.30% 73
East Midlands +10 41 £435 -8.42% 104
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 57 (2.17%) Confluence
2 53 (2.02%) Apache Spark
3 44 (1.67%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (1.33%) Apache
5 12 (0.46%) CMS
6 11 (0.42%) SharePoint
7 7 (0.27%) SAS
8 6 (0.23%) Camunda
8 6 (0.23%) Jupyter
9 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.19%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.19%) Hyperledger
10 4 (0.15%) Apache Superset
11 3 (0.11%) MQSeries
11 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
11 3 (0.11%) WordPress
12 2 (0.076%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.076%) IIS
12 2 (0.076%) nginx
12 2 (0.076%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 14 (0.53%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.38%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 10 (0.38%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.19%) Microsoft Excel
4 4 (0.15%) CPLEX
4 4 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
4 4 (0.15%) Simulink
5 3 (0.11%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.11%) Trello
6 2 (0.076%) CATIA
6 2 (0.076%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.076%) Notion
7 1 (0.038%) Adobe After Effects
7 1 (0.038%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.038%) Blender
7 1 (0.038%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
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 (0.076%) Endur
5 2 (0.076%) 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%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.038%) Shopify
6 1 (0.038%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 665 (25.29%) AWS
2 531 (20.19%) Azure
3 268 (10.19%) GCP
4 231 (8.78%) GitHub
5 137 (5.21%) Serverless
6 114 (4.33%) GitHub Actions
7 112 (4.26%) Azure DevOps
8 100 (3.80%) AWS Lambda
9 65 (2.47%) Amazon S3
10 64 (2.43%) Anthropic Claude
11 58 (2.21%) OpenShift
12 51 (1.94%) Amazon SQS
13 50 (1.90%) GitHub Copilot
14 49 (1.86%) Amazon ECS
15 46 (1.75%) Amazon EKS
16 43 (1.63%) Power Platform
17 41 (1.56%) Snowflake
18 39 (1.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 32 (1.22%) Azure AKS
20 31 (1.18%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.14%) Software-Defined Radio
1 30 (1.14%) Wireless
2 20 (0.76%) Firewall
3 19 (0.72%) HTTP
3 19 (0.72%) Internet
4 17 (0.65%) VPN
5 13 (0.49%) Ethernet
5 13 (0.49%) TCP/IP
6 12 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
7 8 (0.30%) RTP
7 8 (0.30%) Wireshark
8 7 (0.27%) Network Security
9 6 (0.23%) 3GPP
9 6 (0.23%) DNS
10 4 (0.15%) IPv4
10 4 (0.15%) IPv6
10 4 (0.15%) RS-232
10 4 (0.15%) SSL
11 3 (0.11%) Cisco IPT
11 3 (0.11%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 142 (5.40%) PostgreSQL
2 103 (3.92%) Relational Database
3 86 (3.27%) NoSQL
4 82 (3.12%) SQL Server
5 53 (2.02%) MongoDB
6 50 (1.90%) Data Warehouse
7 42 (1.60%) DynamoDB
8 38 (1.44%) MySQL
9 30 (1.14%) Amazon RDS
9 30 (1.14%) Metadata
10 29 (1.10%) Power BI
11 28 (1.06%) Big Data
12 27 (1.03%) Redis
13 25 (0.95%) Elasticsearch
14 24 (0.91%) Data Lake
15 22 (0.84%) Pinecone
16 21 (0.80%) BigQuery
17 20 (0.76%) Weaviate
18 16 (0.61%) Chroma
19 13 (0.49%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 279 (10.61%) Git
2 154 (5.86%) GitLab
2 154 (5.86%) Jenkins
3 116 (4.41%) JIRA
4 60 (2.28%) SonarQube
5 41 (1.56%) JUnit
6 38 (1.44%) Gradle
7 31 (1.18%) Claude Code
8 28 (1.06%) Selenium
9 25 (0.95%) Rational DOORS
10 23 (0.87%) Maven
10 23 (0.87%) Rational Rhapsody
11 19 (0.72%) Cucumber
11 19 (0.72%) Mockito
12 17 (0.65%) Visual Studio
13 14 (0.53%) LabVIEW
14 13 (0.49%) Bitbucket
14 13 (0.49%) Cypress.io
14 13 (0.49%) Liquibase
15 12 (0.46%) Snyk
General
1 532 (20.23%) Social Skills
2 454 (17.26%) Finance
3 207 (7.87%) Banking
4 196 (7.45%) Public Sector
5 192 (7.30%) Analytical Skills
6 88 (3.35%) Aerospace
7 74 (2.81%) Front Office
8 52 (1.98%) Investment Banking
9 49 (1.86%) Manufacturing
10 46 (1.75%) Retail
11 44 (1.67%) Law
12 36 (1.37%) Automotive
13 29 (1.10%) Influencing Skills
14 27 (1.03%) Military
14 27 (1.03%) Telecoms
15 26 (0.99%) Aviation
16 22 (0.84%) Marketing
17 20 (0.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 18 (0.68%) Back Office
18 18 (0.68%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,144 (43.50%) Software Engineer
2 489 (18.59%) Developer
3 478 (18.17%) Senior
4 285 (10.84%) Lead
5 198 (7.53%) Senior Software Engineer
6 170 (6.46%) Java Engineer
7 160 (6.08%) Embedded Engineer
8 151 (5.74%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 143 (5.44%) Java Developer
10 136 (5.17%) Java Software Engineer
11 120 (4.56%) Software Developer
12 112 (4.26%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 109 (4.14%) C++ Software Engineer
14 106 (4.03%) Architect
15 104 (3.95%) Python Engineer
16 103 (3.92%) Senior Developer
17 90 (3.42%) Data Engineer
18 79 (3.00%) DevOps Engineer
19 78 (2.97%) Lead Software Engineer
20 75 (2.85%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 286 (10.87%) Terraform
2 247 (9.39%) React
3 228 (8.67%) REST
4 226 (8.59%) Spring
5 211 (8.02%) .NET
6 209 (7.95%) Spring Boot
7 169 (6.43%) Kafka
8 134 (5.10%) RESTful
9 126 (4.79%) Node.js
10 104 (3.95%) AngularJS
11 62 (2.36%) Django
12 53 (2.02%) Next.js
13 52 (1.98%) HTML
14 51 (1.94%) CSS
15 50 (1.90%) LangChain
16 48 (1.83%) OAuth
17 44 (1.67%) FastAPI
17 44 (1.67%) JSON
18 39 (1.48%) Quarkus
19 38 (1.44%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 399 (15.17%) Cloud Native
2 240 (9.13%) Distributed Systems
3 140 (5.32%) Product Ownership
4 114 (4.33%) AI Agents
5 85 (3.23%) Algorithms
6 63 (2.40%) Enterprise Software
7 57 (2.17%) Data Structures
8 50 (1.90%) Embedded Systems
9 49 (1.86%) Onboarding
10 45 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
11 36 (1.37%) Legacy Systems
12 33 (1.25%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 32 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
14 28 (1.06%) Fixed Income
15 27 (1.03%) Robotics
16 25 (0.95%) Derivative
16 25 (0.95%) Greenfield Project
17 21 (0.80%) Equities
18 19 (0.72%) NHS
19 18 (0.68%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 176 (6.69%) Linux
2 49 (1.86%) Windows
3 31 (1.18%) Unix
4 23 (0.87%) Embedded Linux
5 22 (0.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 14 (0.53%) Android
6 14 (0.53%) FreeRTOS
7 9 (0.34%) Windows Server
8 8 (0.30%) Apple iOS
8 8 (0.30%) Ubuntu
9 6 (0.23%) Debian
10 3 (0.11%) Rocky
10 3 (0.11%) VMS
10 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
11 2 (0.076%) Windows Server 2019
11 2 (0.076%) zOS
12 1 (0.038%) Solaris
12 1 (0.038%) Tizen
12 1 (0.038%) webOS
12 1 (0.038%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 897 (34.11%) CI/CD
2 791 (30.08%) Agile
3 625 (23.76%) DevOps
4 534 (20.30%) AI
5 412 (15.67%) Microservices
6 382 (14.52%) Test Automation
7 317 (12.05%) Problem-Solving
8 314 (11.94%) Continuous Improvement
9 312 (11.86%) Infrastructure as Code
10 268 (10.19%) Containerisation
11 267 (10.15%) Observability
12 264 (10.04%) SDLC
13 257 (9.77%) Full-Stack Development
14 225 (8.56%) Technical Leadership
15 221 (8.40%) Platform Engineering
16 219 (8.33%) Machine Learning
17 216 (8.21%) Event-Driven
18 209 (7.95%) Scrum
19 203 (7.72%) Mentoring
20 197 (7.49%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 765 (29.09%) Python
2 678 (25.78%) Java
3 375 (14.26%) SQL
4 286 (10.87%) C#
5 278 (10.57%) TypeScript
6 215 (8.17%) C++
7 204 (7.76%) JavaScript
8 115 (4.37%) C
9 90 (3.42%) Ada
10 79 (3.00%) Go
11 66 (2.51%) Kotlin
12 44 (1.67%) PowerShell
13 43 (1.63%) Rust
14 42 (1.60%) Bash
15 40 (1.52%) Scala
16 26 (0.99%) Ruby
17 24 (0.91%) Embedded C
18 22 (0.84%) PL/SQL
19 21 (0.80%) Bicep
20 18 (0.68%) PHP
Qualifications
1 587 (22.32%) Security Cleared
2 495 (18.82%) SC Cleared
3 208 (7.91%) Degree
4 99 (3.76%) Computer Science Degree
5 84 (3.19%) DV Cleared
6 58 (2.21%) BPSS Clearance
7 47 (1.79%) Master's Degree
8 37 (1.41%) AWS Certification
9 19 (0.72%) PhD
10 17 (0.65%) Azure Certification
11 15 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 10 (0.38%) PMP
13 8 (0.30%) CISSP
14 6 (0.23%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.23%) ISTQB
14 6 (0.23%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 5 (0.19%) TOGAF Certification
16 4 (0.15%) GIAC
16 4 (0.15%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 4 (0.15%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 172 (6.54%) QA
2 67 (2.55%) Data Quality
3 51 (1.94%) Accessibility
4 20 (0.76%) GDPR
5 17 (0.65%) Def Stans
5 17 (0.65%) MISRA
6 15 (0.57%) NIST
7 14 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 14 (0.53%) WCAG
8 10 (0.38%) DO-178B
9 9 (0.34%) IEC 61508
9 9 (0.34%) NCSC
10 8 (0.30%) GRC
11 6 (0.23%) MISRA C
12 5 (0.19%) HL7
12 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
13 4 (0.15%) EMIR
13 4 (0.15%) MiFID
13 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
14 3 (0.11%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 393 (14.94%) Docker
2 30 (1.14%) Firmware
3 19 (0.72%) Embedded Firmware
4 11 (0.42%) Virtual Machines
5 10 (0.38%) Active Directory
6 6 (0.23%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.038%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 448 (17.03%) Kubernetes
2 86 (3.27%) Ansible
3 55 (2.09%) Grafana
4 42 (1.60%) Argo
5 39 (1.48%) Prometheus
6 16 (0.61%) Single Sign-On
7 14 (0.53%) Kibana
8 7 (0.27%) Puppet
9 6 (0.23%) Functional Safety
10 4 (0.15%) Consul
10 4 (0.15%) HAProxy
10 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
10 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
11 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
11 3 (0.11%) Istio
11 3 (0.11%) Progress Chef
12 2 (0.076%) Cilium
12 2 (0.076%) Docker Swarm
12 2 (0.076%) Packer
12 2 (0.076%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 135 (5.13%) Microsoft
2 94 (3.57%) Google
3 83 (3.16%) Oracle
4 72 (2.74%) Databricks
5 58 (2.21%) OpenAI
6 44 (1.67%) Red Hat
7 27 (1.03%) Salesforce
8 24 (0.91%) Splunk
9 21 (0.80%) IBM
10 18 (0.68%) ServiceNow
11 17 (0.65%) Foundry
11 17 (0.65%) Informatica
12 12 (0.46%) Adobe
13 11 (0.42%) Checkmarx
13 11 (0.42%) SAP
14 9 (0.34%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.30%) Confluent
15 8 (0.30%) VMware
16 7 (0.27%) Hitachi
16 7 (0.27%) Siemens