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

6 months to
10 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 44 30
Rank change year-on-year +13 -14 +8
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,661 1,353 1,897
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.75% 4.87% 5.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.77% 5.36% 6.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,445 839 1,173
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% +4.17%
75th Percentile £680 £750 £823
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 415 111 236
10th Percentile £51.25 £38.63 £45.22
25th Percentile £57.63 £52.50 £54.56
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 £73.46 £75.00 £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 39,304 25,245 28,138
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.88% 90.83% 85.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,151 16,024 17,695
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.95% -2.87% -4.55%
75th Percentile £636 £625 £650
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 2,693 1,483 1,349
10th Percentile £14.01 £14.31 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.87 £20.22
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £66.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +2.87%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 1,193 £600 -7.69% 2,290
North of England +27 434 £525 +6.62% 409
South East +29 339 £525 +10.53% 445
South West +22 309 £550 +7.32% 316
East of England +16 217 £507 +1.40% 258
North West +12 198 £550 +10.00% 240
Yorkshire +14 172 £500 +1.75% 115
Midlands +17 137 £463 -16.94% 177
West Midlands +7 95 £466 -18.90% 83
North East +7 67 £650 +41.30% 54
East Midlands +12 41 £435 -8.42% 93
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 59 (2.22%) Confluence
2 54 (2.03%) Apache Spark
3 44 (1.65%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (1.32%) Apache
5 13 (0.49%) SharePoint
6 12 (0.45%) CMS
7 7 (0.26%) Jupyter
7 7 (0.26%) SAS
8 6 (0.23%) Camunda
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 (0.075%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.075%) IIS
12 2 (0.075%) nginx
12 2 (0.075%) 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 (0.075%) CATIA
6 2 (0.075%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.075%) 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 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.26%) 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 (0.075%) 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%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.038%) Shopify
6 1 (0.038%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 674 (25.33%) AWS
2 534 (20.07%) Azure
3 273 (10.26%) GCP
4 237 (8.91%) GitHub
5 139 (5.22%) Serverless
6 120 (4.51%) GitHub Actions
7 110 (4.13%) Azure DevOps
8 102 (3.83%) AWS Lambda
9 70 (2.63%) Amazon S3
10 64 (2.41%) Anthropic Claude
11 59 (2.22%) OpenShift
12 53 (1.99%) GitHub Copilot
13 51 (1.92%) Amazon ECS
13 51 (1.92%) Amazon SQS
14 48 (1.80%) Amazon EKS
15 44 (1.65%) Snowflake
16 43 (1.62%) Power Platform
17 41 (1.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (1.28%) Amazon EC2
19 32 (1.20%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.13%) Software-Defined Radio
1 30 (1.13%) Wireless
2 20 (0.75%) Firewall
3 19 (0.71%) HTTP
3 19 (0.71%) Internet
4 17 (0.64%) VPN
5 13 (0.49%) Ethernet
5 13 (0.49%) TCP/IP
6 12 (0.45%) Wi-Fi
7 8 (0.30%) RTP
7 8 (0.30%) Wireshark
8 7 (0.26%) Network Security
9 6 (0.23%) 3GPP
9 6 (0.23%) DNS
10 5 (0.19%) Cisco IPT
11 4 (0.15%) RS-232
11 4 (0.15%) SSL
12 3 (0.11%) RS-485
13 2 (0.075%) Broadband
13 2 (0.075%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 145 (5.45%) PostgreSQL
2 104 (3.91%) Relational Database
3 87 (3.27%) SQL Server
4 84 (3.16%) NoSQL
5 54 (2.03%) MongoDB
6 51 (1.92%) Data Warehouse
7 42 (1.58%) DynamoDB
8 38 (1.43%) MySQL
9 32 (1.20%) Metadata
10 30 (1.13%) Amazon RDS
11 29 (1.09%) Power BI
12 27 (1.01%) Redis
13 26 (0.98%) Big Data
13 26 (0.98%) Elasticsearch
14 25 (0.94%) Data Lake
15 23 (0.86%) BigQuery
16 22 (0.83%) Pinecone
17 20 (0.75%) Weaviate
18 16 (0.60%) Chroma
19 14 (0.53%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 285 (10.71%) Git
2 159 (5.98%) Jenkins
3 157 (5.90%) GitLab
4 119 (4.47%) JIRA
5 61 (2.29%) SonarQube
6 43 (1.62%) JUnit
7 38 (1.43%) Gradle
8 33 (1.24%) Claude Code
9 29 (1.09%) Selenium
10 27 (1.01%) Rational DOORS
11 24 (0.90%) Maven
11 24 (0.90%) Rational Rhapsody
12 20 (0.75%) Cucumber
12 20 (0.75%) Mockito
13 17 (0.64%) Visual Studio
14 14 (0.53%) Cypress.io
14 14 (0.53%) LabVIEW
15 13 (0.49%) Bitbucket
15 13 (0.49%) Liquibase
16 12 (0.45%) Snyk
General
1 548 (20.59%) Social Skills
2 471 (17.70%) Finance
3 211 (7.93%) Banking
4 202 (7.59%) Public Sector
5 194 (7.29%) Analytical Skills
6 88 (3.31%) Aerospace
7 76 (2.86%) Front Office
8 53 (1.99%) Investment Banking
9 50 (1.88%) Manufacturing
10 47 (1.77%) Law
11 45 (1.69%) Retail
12 38 (1.43%) Automotive
13 29 (1.09%) Influencing Skills
14 27 (1.01%) Military
15 26 (0.98%) Aviation
16 24 (0.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 24 (0.90%) Telecoms
17 22 (0.83%) Marketing
18 18 (0.68%) Back Office
19 17 (0.64%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 1,144 (42.99%) Software Engineer
2 501 (18.83%) Developer
3 490 (18.41%) Senior
4 294 (11.05%) Lead
5 202 (7.59%) Senior Software Engineer
6 171 (6.43%) Java Engineer
7 162 (6.09%) Embedded Engineer
8 154 (5.79%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 144 (5.41%) Java Developer
10 139 (5.22%) Java Software Engineer
11 123 (4.62%) Software Developer
12 114 (4.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 107 (4.02%) C++ Software Engineer
14 105 (3.95%) Python Engineer
14 105 (3.95%) Senior Developer
15 103 (3.87%) Architect
16 96 (3.61%) Data Engineer
17 79 (2.97%) DevOps Engineer
18 78 (2.93%) Lead Software Engineer
18 78 (2.93%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 295 (11.09%) Terraform
2 250 (9.39%) React
3 228 (8.57%) REST
4 227 (8.53%) Spring
5 215 (8.08%) .NET
6 213 (8.00%) Spring Boot
7 172 (6.46%) Kafka
8 137 (5.15%) RESTful
9 130 (4.89%) Node.js
10 106 (3.98%) AngularJS
11 62 (2.33%) Django
12 53 (1.99%) HTML
13 52 (1.95%) CSS
13 52 (1.95%) Next.js
14 51 (1.92%) LangChain
15 48 (1.80%) OAuth
16 44 (1.65%) FastAPI
16 44 (1.65%) JSON
17 39 (1.47%) Quarkus
18 38 (1.43%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 407 (15.30%) Cloud Native
2 238 (8.94%) Distributed Systems
3 144 (5.41%) Product Ownership
4 118 (4.43%) AI Agents
5 84 (3.16%) Algorithms
6 65 (2.44%) Enterprise Software
7 57 (2.14%) Data Structures
8 49 (1.84%) Embedded Systems
8 49 (1.84%) Onboarding
9 46 (1.73%) Data Protection Act
10 36 (1.35%) Legacy Systems
11 34 (1.28%) Self-Motivation
12 32 (1.20%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 29 (1.09%) Fixed Income
14 27 (1.01%) Robotics
15 25 (0.94%) Derivative
15 25 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
16 21 (0.79%) Equities
17 20 (0.75%) Virtual Team
18 19 (0.71%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 182 (6.84%) Linux
2 54 (2.03%) Windows
3 32 (1.20%) 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 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 (0.075%) Windows Server 2019
11 2 (0.075%) zOS
12 1 (0.038%) Robot Operating System
12 1 (0.038%) Solaris
12 1 (0.038%) Tizen
12 1 (0.038%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 921 (34.61%) CI/CD
2 798 (29.99%) Agile
3 639 (24.01%) DevOps
4 547 (20.56%) AI
5 416 (15.63%) Microservices
6 394 (14.81%) Test Automation
7 323 (12.14%) Infrastructure as Code
8 321 (12.06%) Continuous Improvement
8 321 (12.06%) Problem-Solving
9 277 (10.41%) Containerisation
10 273 (10.26%) Observability
11 271 (10.18%) SDLC
12 257 (9.66%) Full-Stack Development
13 228 (8.57%) Platform Engineering
14 226 (8.49%) Technical Leadership
15 225 (8.46%) Machine Learning
16 218 (8.19%) Event-Driven
17 214 (8.04%) Scrum
17 214 (8.04%) Stakeholder Management
18 206 (7.74%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 780 (29.31%) Python
2 681 (25.59%) Java
3 385 (14.47%) SQL
4 287 (10.79%) C#
5 286 (10.75%) TypeScript
6 215 (8.08%) C++
7 209 (7.85%) JavaScript
8 118 (4.43%) C
9 89 (3.34%) Ada
10 84 (3.16%) Go
11 67 (2.52%) Kotlin
12 47 (1.77%) PowerShell
13 43 (1.62%) Rust
14 42 (1.58%) Bash
15 40 (1.50%) Scala
16 26 (0.98%) Embedded C
16 26 (0.98%) Ruby
17 22 (0.83%) Bicep
17 22 (0.83%) PL/SQL
18 18 (0.68%) PHP
Qualifications
1 596 (22.40%) Security Cleared
2 502 (18.87%) SC Cleared
3 207 (7.78%) Degree
4 95 (3.57%) Computer Science Degree
5 89 (3.34%) DV Cleared
6 58 (2.18%) BPSS Clearance
7 46 (1.73%) Master's Degree
8 38 (1.43%) AWS Certification
9 18 (0.68%) PhD
10 16 (0.60%) Azure Certification
11 15 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 11 (0.41%) PMP
13 9 (0.34%) CISSP
14 6 (0.23%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.23%) ISTQB
14 6 (0.23%) Microsoft Certified Professional
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
1 175 (6.58%) QA
2 73 (2.74%) Data Quality
3 52 (1.95%) Accessibility
4 20 (0.75%) GDPR
5 17 (0.64%) Def Stans
5 17 (0.64%) MISRA
6 14 (0.53%) WCAG
7 12 (0.45%) NIST
8 11 (0.41%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 10 (0.38%) DO-178B
10 9 (0.34%) IEC 61508
10 9 (0.34%) NCSC
11 8 (0.30%) GRC
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%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 398 (14.96%) Docker
2 30 (1.13%) Firmware
3 19 (0.71%) Embedded Firmware
4 13 (0.49%) Active Directory
4 13 (0.49%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.30%) VMware Infrastructure
6 1 (0.038%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 451 (16.95%) Kubernetes
2 88 (3.31%) Ansible
3 54 (2.03%) Grafana
4 42 (1.58%) Argo
5 38 (1.43%) Prometheus
6 16 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
7 14 (0.53%) Kibana
8 7 (0.26%) 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 (0.075%) Cilium
12 2 (0.075%) Docker Swarm
12 2 (0.075%) Packer
12 2 (0.075%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 137 (5.15%) Microsoft
2 96 (3.61%) Google
3 85 (3.19%) Oracle
4 74 (2.78%) Databricks
5 59 (2.22%) OpenAI
6 47 (1.77%) Red Hat
7 29 (1.09%) Salesforce
8 24 (0.90%) 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%) Checkmarx
13 11 (0.41%) SAP
14 10 (0.38%) VMware
15 9 (0.34%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.30%) Confluent
17 7 (0.26%) Okta
17 7 (0.26%) Solace