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

6 months to
16 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 42 29
Rank change year-on-year +10 -13 +12
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,468 1,324 2,128
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.51% 4.87% 5.82%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.45% 5.37% 6.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,359 862 1,330
10th Percentile £400 £390 £413
25th Percentile £463 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £615
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -2.44% +2.50%
75th Percentile £688 £775 £788
90th Percentile £788 £850 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 427 83 366
10th Percentile £52.18 £32.50 £46.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £51.63 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £77.00 £75.00
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 38,234 24,648 31,320
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.43% 90.68% 85.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,071 15,798 20,362
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £645
90th Percentile £735 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,374 1,309 2,214
10th Percentile £15.57 £14.39 £13.00
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.98 £16.25
Median hourly rate £47.50 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +88.87% -34.02% -8.14%
75th Percentile £68.75 £54.00 £62.50
90th Percentile £83.00 £71.70 £73.60
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -5.29%

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 July 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 July 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 July 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 1,087 £600 -7.69% 782
North of England +23 385 £534 +8.71% 268
South West +26 320 £550 +8.64% 189
South East +20 306 £525 +4.90% 332
East of England +29 224 £505 +3.43% 144
North West +6 183 £525 +5.00% 158
Yorkshire +13 140 £525 +7.14% 76
Midlands -25 102 £459 -7.27% 135
West Midlands -22 79 £459 -17.11% 64
North East +12 67 £650 +41.30% 35
East Midlands -8 22 £513 +7.89% 71
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 (2.39%) Confluence
2 44 (1.78%) Apache Spark
3 31 (1.26%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (1.22%) Apache
5 10 (0.41%) CMS
5 10 (0.41%) SAS
6 5 (0.20%) Ethereum
6 5 (0.20%) Hyperledger
6 5 (0.20%) nginx
6 5 (0.20%) SharePoint
7 4 (0.16%) WebLogic
8 3 (0.12%) Jupyter
8 3 (0.12%) Palantir Foundry
8 3 (0.12%) Tomcat
9 2 (0.081%) Apache Superset
9 2 (0.081%) Cloud Foundry
9 2 (0.081%) IIS
9 2 (0.081%) MQSeries
9 2 (0.081%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.081%) WinCC
Applications
1 15 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.41%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 8 (0.32%) Chatbot
4 7 (0.28%) Microsoft Excel
5 6 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
6 5 (0.20%) CPLEX
6 5 (0.20%) Simulink
7 4 (0.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
8 3 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
8 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
9 2 (0.081%) CATIA
10 1 (0.041%) Adobe After Effects
10 1 (0.041%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.041%) Blender
10 1 (0.041%) Maya
10 1 (0.041%) Notion
10 1 (0.041%) S-PLUS
10 1 (0.041%) Trello
Business Applications
1 7 (0.28%) Oracle EBS
2 6 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
3 5 (0.20%) R3 Corda
4 4 (0.16%) Quorum
4 4 (0.16%) Ripple
5 3 (0.12%) Orchestrade
6 2 (0.081%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.081%) Endur
6 2 (0.081%) Primavera
6 2 (0.081%) Remedy ITSM
6 2 (0.081%) Salesforce CRM
7 1 (0.041%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.041%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.041%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 617 (25.00%) AWS
2 473 (19.17%) Azure
3 242 (9.81%) GCP
4 182 (7.37%) GitHub
5 121 (4.90%) Serverless
6 96 (3.89%) Azure DevOps
7 88 (3.57%) GitHub Actions
8 80 (3.24%) AWS Lambda
9 63 (2.55%) Amazon S3
10 54 (2.19%) OpenShift
11 46 (1.86%) Power Platform
12 44 (1.78%) Anthropic Claude
13 41 (1.66%) Amazon SQS
14 40 (1.62%) Amazon EKS
15 39 (1.58%) Amazon ECS
15 39 (1.58%) Azure AKS
16 33 (1.34%) Amazon EC2
17 31 (1.26%) SaaS
18 29 (1.18%) AWS CloudFormation
19 28 (1.13%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.01%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (0.97%) Ethernet
2 24 (0.97%) Wireless
3 18 (0.73%) Firewall
3 18 (0.73%) TCP/IP
4 16 (0.65%) Internet
5 15 (0.61%) HTTP
6 13 (0.53%) VPN
7 12 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
8 9 (0.36%) 3GPP
9 8 (0.32%) Network Security
10 7 (0.28%) RTP
11 6 (0.24%) Wireshark
12 5 (0.20%) DNS
12 5 (0.20%) RS-232
13 4 (0.16%) RS-422
13 4 (0.16%) RS-485
14 3 (0.12%) IPv4
14 3 (0.12%) IPv6
14 3 (0.12%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 151 (6.12%) PostgreSQL
2 93 (3.77%) Relational Database
3 75 (3.04%) SQL Server
4 69 (2.80%) NoSQL
5 50 (2.03%) MongoDB
6 34 (1.38%) Data Warehouse
7 31 (1.26%) DynamoDB
8 29 (1.18%) MySQL
8 29 (1.18%) Power BI
9 28 (1.13%) Big Data
10 24 (0.97%) Amazon RDS
11 23 (0.93%) Apache Cassandra
11 23 (0.93%) BigQuery
12 22 (0.89%) Data Lake
12 22 (0.89%) Metadata
12 22 (0.89%) Redis
13 19 (0.77%) Elasticsearch
13 19 (0.77%) Pinecone
14 17 (0.69%) Amazon Redshift
14 17 (0.69%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 244 (9.89%) Git
2 148 (6.00%) Jenkins
3 123 (4.98%) GitLab
4 110 (4.46%) JIRA
5 55 (2.23%) SonarQube
6 35 (1.42%) Gradle
7 32 (1.30%) JUnit
8 26 (1.05%) Rational DOORS
9 24 (0.97%) Visual Studio
10 23 (0.93%) Rational Rhapsody
11 20 (0.81%) Claude Code
11 20 (0.81%) Cucumber
11 20 (0.81%) Selenium
12 18 (0.73%) Bitbucket
13 17 (0.69%) Maven
14 16 (0.65%) Liquibase
15 14 (0.57%) Cypress.io
15 14 (0.57%) Mockito
16 13 (0.53%) IntelliJ
17 12 (0.49%) Eclipse
General
1 441 (17.87%) Finance
2 429 (17.38%) Social Skills
3 171 (6.93%) Banking
4 164 (6.65%) Analytical Skills
5 159 (6.44%) Public Sector
6 107 (4.34%) Aerospace
7 89 (3.61%) Front Office
8 56 (2.27%) Retail
9 46 (1.86%) Law
10 45 (1.82%) Manufacturing
11 41 (1.66%) Investment Banking
12 32 (1.30%) Telecoms
13 29 (1.18%) Automotive
14 27 (1.09%) Military
15 25 (1.01%) Aviation
16 24 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
17 22 (0.89%) Electronics
18 16 (0.65%) Documentation Skills
18 16 (0.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 16 (0.65%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,206 (48.87%) Software Engineer
2 456 (18.48%) Developer
3 423 (17.14%) Senior
4 261 (10.58%) Lead
5 178 (7.21%) Senior Software Engineer
6 173 (7.01%) Java Engineer
7 145 (5.88%) Embedded Engineer
8 143 (5.79%) Java Software Engineer
9 134 (5.43%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 133 (5.39%) Java Developer
11 121 (4.90%) C++ Software Engineer
12 104 (4.21%) Architect
13 100 (4.05%) Lead Software Engineer
14 94 (3.81%) Python Engineer
15 88 (3.57%) Software Developer
16 84 (3.40%) Senior Developer
17 77 (3.12%) Python Developer
18 76 (3.08%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
19 75 (3.04%) DevOps Engineer
20 72 (2.92%) Developer/Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 279 (11.30%) React
2 188 (7.62%) .NET
3 180 (7.29%) Kafka
3 180 (7.29%) Node.js
4 178 (7.21%) REST
5 176 (7.13%) Spring
6 158 (6.40%) Spring Boot
7 111 (4.50%) RESTful
8 105 (4.25%) AngularJS
9 78 (3.16%) GraphQL
10 60 (2.43%) Redux
11 47 (1.90%) Next.js
12 46 (1.86%) CSS
13 45 (1.82%) HTML
14 42 (1.70%) Django
15 40 (1.62%) JSON
16 37 (1.50%) OAuth
17 35 (1.42%) Quarkus
18 34 (1.38%) Web Services
19 33 (1.34%) LangChain
Miscellaneous
1 293 (11.87%) Cloud Native
2 198 (8.02%) Distributed Systems
3 125 (5.06%) Product Ownership
4 83 (3.36%) Algorithms
5 72 (2.92%) Fixed Income
6 66 (2.67%) AI Agents
7 45 (1.82%) Onboarding
8 44 (1.78%) Data Structures
8 44 (1.78%) Embedded Systems
9 43 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
10 34 (1.38%) Derivative
11 32 (1.30%) Legacy Systems
11 32 (1.30%) Self-Motivation
12 31 (1.26%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 29 (1.18%) Enterprise Software
14 28 (1.13%) Equities
15 21 (0.85%) Robotics
16 20 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
17 17 (0.69%) Mobile App
17 17 (0.69%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 186 (7.54%) Linux
2 58 (2.35%) Windows
3 35 (1.42%) Unix
4 29 (1.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 19 (0.77%) Embedded Linux
6 15 (0.61%) Apple iOS
7 13 (0.53%) Android
8 11 (0.45%) FreeRTOS
9 10 (0.41%) Windows Server
10 8 (0.32%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.16%) Debian
11 4 (0.16%) VMS
11 4 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.12%) Rocky
12 3 (0.12%) Solaris
12 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 2 (0.081%) VxWorks
14 1 (0.041%) Tizen
14 1 (0.041%) webOS
14 1 (0.041%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 762 (30.88%) CI/CD
2 751 (30.43%) Agile
3 542 (21.96%) DevOps
4 422 (17.10%) AI
5 361 (14.63%) Microservices
6 313 (12.68%) Test Automation
7 275 (11.14%) Problem-Solving
8 265 (10.74%) Full-Stack Development
9 245 (9.93%) Infrastructure as Code
10 241 (9.76%) Continuous Improvement
11 232 (9.40%) Containerisation
12 211 (8.55%) Machine Learning
13 203 (8.23%) Observability
14 196 (7.94%) Mentoring
15 195 (7.90%) TDD
16 192 (7.78%) SDLC
17 177 (7.17%) Scrum
18 173 (7.01%) Platform Engineering
19 172 (6.97%) Technical Leadership
20 168 (6.81%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 691 (28.00%) Python
2 636 (25.77%) Java
3 315 (12.76%) SQL
4 310 (12.56%) TypeScript
5 284 (11.51%) C#
6 239 (9.68%) JavaScript
7 222 (9.00%) C++
8 129 (5.23%) Ada
9 127 (5.15%) Go
10 113 (4.58%) C
11 48 (1.94%) Kotlin
12 40 (1.62%) Rust
13 33 (1.34%) Bash
13 33 (1.34%) PowerShell
14 32 (1.30%) Scala
15 25 (1.01%) PL/SQL
16 19 (0.77%) Embedded C
16 19 (0.77%) MATLAB
17 18 (0.73%) Ruby
17 18 (0.73%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 585 (23.70%) Security Cleared
2 483 (19.57%) SC Cleared
3 188 (7.62%) Degree
4 83 (3.36%) Computer Science Degree
5 73 (2.96%) DV Cleared
6 55 (2.23%) BPSS Clearance
7 36 (1.46%) Master's Degree
8 32 (1.30%) AWS Certification
9 18 (0.73%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 15 (0.61%) Azure Certification
10 15 (0.61%) PhD
11 10 (0.41%) CISSP
12 7 (0.28%) ISTQB
12 7 (0.28%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.24%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.24%) TOGAF Certification
14 5 (0.20%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.20%) PMP
15 4 (0.16%) CISM
15 4 (0.16%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 144 (5.83%) QA
2 49 (1.99%) Data Quality
3 46 (1.86%) Accessibility
4 39 (1.58%) Def Stans
5 24 (0.97%) IEC 61508
6 21 (0.85%) GDPR
7 16 (0.65%) MISRA
8 15 (0.61%) NIST
9 11 (0.45%) DO-178B
9 11 (0.45%) WCAG
10 10 (0.41%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 8 (0.32%) NCSC
12 6 (0.24%) GRC
12 6 (0.24%) MISRA C
12 6 (0.24%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.20%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 4 (0.16%) DO-254
15 3 (0.12%) FATCA
16 2 (0.081%) EMIR
System Software
1 343 (13.90%) Docker
2 23 (0.93%) Firmware
3 10 (0.41%) Active Directory
3 10 (0.41%) Embedded Firmware
4 7 (0.28%) Virtual Machines
5 6 (0.24%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (0.12%) HDFS
7 2 (0.081%) SRDF
8 1 (0.041%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 397 (16.09%) Kubernetes
2 240 (9.72%) Terraform
3 70 (2.84%) Ansible
4 60 (2.43%) Grafana
5 39 (1.58%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.50%) Argo
7 12 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
8 11 (0.45%) Kibana
9 7 (0.28%) Puppet
10 6 (0.24%) Kubeflow
10 6 (0.24%) Progress Chef
11 5 (0.20%) HAProxy
12 3 (0.12%) Consul
12 3 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
12 3 (0.12%) Functional Safety
12 3 (0.12%) HP Quality Center
13 2 (0.081%) Cilium
13 2 (0.081%) HP ALM
13 2 (0.081%) HP Fortify
13 2 (0.081%) Istio
Vendors
1 126 (5.11%) Microsoft
2 82 (3.32%) Google
3 75 (3.04%) Oracle
4 49 (1.99%) Red Hat
5 42 (1.70%) Databricks
6 38 (1.54%) OpenAI
7 19 (0.77%) Informatica
7 19 (0.77%) Splunk
8 18 (0.73%) IBM
9 17 (0.69%) ServiceNow
10 15 (0.61%) Foundry
10 15 (0.61%) Salesforce
11 12 (0.49%) Adobe
11 12 (0.49%) SAP
11 12 (0.49%) Siemens
12 10 (0.41%) Checkmarx
12 10 (0.41%) ForgeRock
12 10 (0.41%) Okta
13 8 (0.32%) Dynatrace
13 8 (0.32%) Solace