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

6 months to
11 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 44 30
Rank change year-on-year +13 -14 +9
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,665 1,364 1,912
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.74% 4.90% 5.80%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.77% 5.40% 6.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,449 845 1,185
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 £688 £738 £813
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 411 111 236
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 39,380 25,274 28,344
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.88% 90.84% 85.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,176 16,039 17,819
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 £634 £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 2,707 1,489 1,353
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.33 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.79 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.30 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.19% -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% +3.61%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 1,198 £600 -7.69% 2,913
North of England +25 434 £525 +6.53% 488
South East +35 337 £525 +10.53% 554
South West +17 309 £550 +4.76% 373
East of England +15 219 £507 +1.40% 343
North West +18 199 £550 +10.00% 280
Yorkshire +12 173 £500 +1.46% 144
Midlands +20 138 £463 -16.94% 231
West Midlands +5 96 £466 -18.90% 115
North East +7 65 £650 +41.30% 64
East Midlands +15 41 £435 -8.42% 115
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 54 (2.03%) Apache Spark
3 44 (1.65%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (1.31%) 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
10 3 (0.11%) MQSeries
10 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
10 3 (0.11%) WordPress
11 2 (0.075%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.075%) IIS
11 2 (0.075%) nginx
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%) 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%) Sage 50
6 1 (0.038%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.038%) Shopify
6 1 (0.038%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 674 (25.29%) AWS
2 536 (20.11%) Azure
3 274 (10.28%) GCP
4 239 (8.97%) GitHub
5 139 (5.22%) Serverless
6 122 (4.58%) GitHub Actions
7 109 (4.09%) Azure DevOps
8 102 (3.83%) AWS Lambda
9 70 (2.63%) Amazon S3
10 64 (2.40%) Anthropic Claude
11 57 (2.14%) OpenShift
12 54 (2.03%) GitHub Copilot
13 51 (1.91%) Amazon ECS
13 51 (1.91%) Amazon SQS
14 48 (1.80%) Amazon EKS
15 44 (1.65%) Power Platform
15 44 (1.65%) Snowflake
16 41 (1.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 34 (1.28%) Amazon EC2
18 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%) Cisco IPT
9 6 (0.23%) DNS
10 4 (0.15%) RS-232
10 4 (0.15%) SSL
11 3 (0.11%) RS-485
12 2 (0.075%) HTTPS
12 2 (0.075%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 144 (5.40%) PostgreSQL
2 104 (3.90%) Relational Database
3 87 (3.26%) SQL Server
4 82 (3.08%) NoSQL
5 54 (2.03%) MongoDB
6 52 (1.95%) Data Warehouse
7 42 (1.58%) DynamoDB
8 38 (1.43%) MySQL
9 33 (1.24%) Metadata
10 30 (1.13%) Amazon RDS
11 29 (1.09%) Power BI
12 27 (1.01%) Redis
13 26 (0.98%) Elasticsearch
14 25 (0.94%) Big Data
14 25 (0.94%) BigQuery
14 25 (0.94%) Data Lake
15 22 (0.83%) Pinecone
16 20 (0.75%) Weaviate
17 16 (0.60%) Chroma
18 14 (0.53%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 286 (10.73%) Git
2 158 (5.93%) Jenkins
3 157 (5.89%) GitLab
4 121 (4.54%) JIRA
5 59 (2.21%) SonarQube
6 42 (1.58%) JUnit
7 37 (1.39%) 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 21 (0.79%) Cucumber
13 19 (0.71%) Mockito
14 18 (0.68%) Visual Studio
15 14 (0.53%) Cypress.io
15 14 (0.53%) LabVIEW
16 13 (0.49%) Bitbucket
17 12 (0.45%) Liquibase
17 12 (0.45%) Snyk
General
1 555 (20.83%) Social Skills
2 477 (17.90%) Finance
3 212 (7.95%) Banking
4 205 (7.69%) Public Sector
5 195 (7.32%) Analytical Skills
6 88 (3.30%) Aerospace
7 76 (2.85%) Front Office
8 54 (2.03%) Investment Banking
9 49 (1.84%) Manufacturing
10 46 (1.73%) Law
10 46 (1.73%) Retail
11 38 (1.43%) Automotive
12 30 (1.13%) Influencing Skills
13 28 (1.05%) Military
14 26 (0.98%) Aviation
15 24 (0.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 24 (0.90%) Telecoms
16 22 (0.83%) Marketing
17 18 (0.68%) Back Office
18 17 (0.64%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 1,137 (42.66%) Software Engineer
2 506 (18.99%) Developer
3 495 (18.57%) Senior
4 298 (11.18%) Lead
5 204 (7.65%) Senior Software Engineer
6 168 (6.30%) Java Engineer
7 162 (6.08%) Embedded Engineer
8 154 (5.78%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 144 (5.40%) Java Developer
10 136 (5.10%) Java Software Engineer
11 123 (4.62%) Software Developer
12 118 (4.43%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 108 (4.05%) C++ Software Engineer
14 107 (4.02%) Python Engineer
15 106 (3.98%) Senior Developer
16 102 (3.83%) Architect
17 97 (3.64%) Data Engineer
18 81 (3.04%) Lead Software Engineer
19 80 (3.00%) DevOps Engineer
20 78 (2.93%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 297 (11.14%) Terraform
2 250 (9.38%) React
3 232 (8.71%) REST
4 225 (8.44%) Spring
5 215 (8.07%) .NET
6 212 (7.95%) Spring Boot
7 169 (6.34%) Kafka
8 137 (5.14%) RESTful
9 131 (4.92%) Node.js
10 104 (3.90%) AngularJS
11 62 (2.33%) Django
12 53 (1.99%) HTML
13 52 (1.95%) CSS
13 52 (1.95%) Next.js
14 50 (1.88%) LangChain
15 48 (1.80%) OAuth
16 45 (1.69%) FastAPI
17 44 (1.65%) JSON
18 39 (1.46%) .NET Core
19 38 (1.43%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 408 (15.31%) Cloud Native
2 237 (8.89%) Distributed Systems
3 145 (5.44%) Product Ownership
4 120 (4.50%) AI Agents
5 84 (3.15%) Algorithms
6 66 (2.48%) Enterprise Software
7 57 (2.14%) Data Structures
8 49 (1.84%) Data Protection Act
8 49 (1.84%) Onboarding
9 48 (1.80%) Embedded Systems
10 36 (1.35%) Legacy Systems
10 36 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
11 32 (1.20%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 28 (1.05%) Fixed Income
13 27 (1.01%) Robotics
14 25 (0.94%) Derivative
14 25 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
15 21 (0.79%) Equities
15 21 (0.79%) Virtual Team
16 19 (0.71%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 183 (6.87%) Linux
2 55 (2.06%) Windows
3 32 (1.20%) Unix
4 27 (1.01%) 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
1 926 (34.75%) CI/CD
2 803 (30.13%) Agile
3 641 (24.05%) DevOps
4 557 (20.90%) AI
5 415 (15.57%) Microservices
6 393 (14.75%) Test Automation
7 327 (12.27%) Continuous Improvement
8 326 (12.23%) Infrastructure as Code
9 323 (12.12%) Problem-Solving
10 277 (10.39%) Containerisation
11 273 (10.24%) Observability
12 270 (10.13%) SDLC
13 256 (9.61%) Full-Stack Development
14 229 (8.59%) Platform Engineering
15 227 (8.52%) Machine Learning
16 226 (8.48%) Technical Leadership
17 220 (8.26%) Stakeholder Management
18 219 (8.22%) Event-Driven
19 213 (7.99%) Scrum
20 206 (7.73%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 786 (29.49%) Python
2 677 (25.40%) Java
3 386 (14.48%) SQL
4 288 (10.81%) C#
5 287 (10.77%) TypeScript
6 216 (8.11%) C++
7 211 (7.92%) JavaScript
8 118 (4.43%) C
9 89 (3.34%) Ada
10 82 (3.08%) Go
11 66 (2.48%) Kotlin
12 49 (1.84%) PowerShell
13 43 (1.61%) 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
1 598 (22.44%) Security Cleared
2 501 (18.80%) SC Cleared
3 210 (7.88%) Degree
4 98 (3.68%) Computer Science Degree
5 90 (3.38%) 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
1 172 (6.45%) QA
2 74 (2.78%) Data Quality
3 53 (1.99%) Accessibility
4 21 (0.79%) GDPR
5 17 (0.64%) Def Stans
5 17 (0.64%) MISRA
6 15 (0.56%) 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%) DO-254
System Software
1 396 (14.86%) 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 (16.92%) Kubernetes
2 91 (3.41%) Ansible
3 55 (2.06%) Grafana
4 40 (1.50%) Argo
5 39 (1.46%) Prometheus
6 16 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
7 14 (0.53%) Kibana
8 8 (0.30%) 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
1 138 (5.18%) Microsoft
2 97 (3.64%) Google
3 86 (3.23%) Oracle
4 74 (2.78%) Databricks
5 60 (2.25%) OpenAI
6 45 (1.69%) Red Hat
7 29 (1.09%) Salesforce
8 24 (0.90%) Splunk
9 22 (0.83%) IBM
10 18 (0.68%) Foundry
10 18 (0.68%) ServiceNow
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%) Mistral
17 7 (0.26%) Solace