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

6 months to
7 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 33 43 29
Rank change year-on-year +10 -14 +11
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,396 1,287 2,280
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.40% 4.84% 6.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.33% 5.33% 7.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,302 841 1,366
10th Percentile £400 £400 £419
25th Percentile £463 £475 £493
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £613
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -2.04% +2.08%
75th Percentile £688 £775 £788
90th Percentile £788 £850 £881
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 435 77 386
10th Percentile £52.50 £35.00 £46.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £52.00 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £76.00 £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 37,874 24,162 31,847
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.36% 90.93% 85.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,840 15,529 20,666
10th Percentile £325 £300 £305
25th Percentile £419 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £524 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.80% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £645
90th Percentile £730 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £517 £505 £525
% change year-on-year +2.28% -3.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,373 1,216 2,288
10th Percentile £15.32 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.75 £17.95 £16.06
Median hourly rate £47.00 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +86.88% -34.02% -4.70%
75th Percentile £68.55 £55.00 £61.60
90th Percentile £82.25 £72.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -3.85%

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 7 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 7 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 7 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 -5 1,043 £600 -7.69% 797
North of England +29 368 £538 +9.16% 346
South West +24 320 £550 +4.76% 246
South East +20 301 £525 +4.90% 420
East of England +29 223 £500 +2.40% 221
North West +10 176 £525 +5.00% 187
Yorkshire +21 128 £538 +9.69% 99
Midlands -24 97 £459 -8.20% 171
West Midlands -28 76 £457 -18.03% 79
North East +15 69 £650 +41.30% 62
East Midlands -14 20 £513 +7.89% 91
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 53 (2.21%) Confluence
2 44 (1.84%) Apache Spark
3 31 (1.29%) Apache
4 30 (1.25%) Apache Airflow
5 9 (0.38%) SAS
6 7 (0.29%) CMS
7 6 (0.25%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.21%) nginx
9 4 (0.17%) Ethereum
9 4 (0.17%) Hyperledger
9 4 (0.17%) WebLogic
10 3 (0.13%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.13%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.083%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.083%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.083%) IIS
11 2 (0.083%) MQSeries
11 2 (0.083%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.083%) WinCC
12 1 (0.042%) Traefik
Applications
1 14 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
2 8 (0.33%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 8 (0.33%) Chatbot
3 5 (0.21%) CPLEX
3 5 (0.21%) Simulink
4 3 (0.13%) Microsoft Excel
4 3 (0.13%) Spreadsheet
5 2 (0.083%) CATIA
5 2 (0.083%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.042%) Adobe After Effects
6 1 (0.042%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.042%) Blender
6 1 (0.042%) Maya
6 1 (0.042%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.042%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.042%) Notion
6 1 (0.042%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 6 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
1 6 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
1 6 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 4 (0.17%) Quorum
2 4 (0.17%) R3 Corda
2 4 (0.17%) Ripple
3 3 (0.13%) Orchestrade
4 2 (0.083%) Aladdin
4 2 (0.083%) Endur
4 2 (0.083%) Remedy ITSM
5 1 (0.042%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.042%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 587 (24.50%) AWS
2 459 (19.16%) Azure
3 221 (9.22%) GCP
4 166 (6.93%) GitHub
5 116 (4.84%) Serverless
6 97 (4.05%) Azure DevOps
7 78 (3.26%) GitHub Actions
8 76 (3.17%) AWS Lambda
9 61 (2.55%) Amazon S3
10 57 (2.38%) OpenShift
11 46 (1.92%) Power Platform
12 40 (1.67%) Amazon SQS
13 39 (1.63%) Azure AKS
14 37 (1.54%) Anthropic Claude
15 36 (1.50%) Amazon ECS
15 36 (1.50%) Amazon EKS
16 31 (1.29%) SaaS
17 30 (1.25%) Amazon EC2
18 28 (1.17%) Entra ID
19 27 (1.13%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.25%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (1.00%) Ethernet
3 22 (0.92%) Wireless
4 17 (0.71%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.63%) Firewall
5 15 (0.63%) HTTP
6 14 (0.58%) Internet
7 12 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
8 11 (0.46%) VPN
9 10 (0.42%) 3GPP
10 8 (0.33%) Network Security
11 7 (0.29%) RTP
12 6 (0.25%) Wireshark
13 4 (0.17%) DNS
13 4 (0.17%) RS-232
13 4 (0.17%) RS-422
14 3 (0.13%) IPv4
14 3 (0.13%) IPv6
14 3 (0.13%) Modbus
14 3 (0.13%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 143 (5.97%) PostgreSQL
2 87 (3.63%) Relational Database
3 71 (2.96%) SQL Server
4 66 (2.75%) NoSQL
5 53 (2.21%) MongoDB
6 33 (1.38%) Data Warehouse
6 33 (1.38%) DynamoDB
7 30 (1.25%) Power BI
8 27 (1.13%) MySQL
9 26 (1.09%) Big Data
10 25 (1.04%) Amazon RDS
10 25 (1.04%) Apache Cassandra
11 24 (1.00%) Data Lake
12 23 (0.96%) BigQuery
13 22 (0.92%) Metadata
14 20 (0.83%) Redis
15 18 (0.75%) Elasticsearch
15 18 (0.75%) Pinecone
16 16 (0.67%) Amazon Redshift
16 16 (0.67%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 237 (9.89%) Git
2 146 (6.09%) Jenkins
3 123 (5.13%) GitLab
4 107 (4.47%) JIRA
5 55 (2.30%) SonarQube
6 36 (1.50%) Gradle
7 32 (1.34%) JUnit
8 28 (1.17%) Rational DOORS
9 27 (1.13%) Rational Rhapsody
10 24 (1.00%) Visual Studio
11 20 (0.83%) Cucumber
11 20 (0.83%) Selenium
12 19 (0.79%) Bitbucket
12 19 (0.79%) Maven
13 16 (0.67%) Liquibase
14 14 (0.58%) Claude Code
14 14 (0.58%) Cypress.io
14 14 (0.58%) IntelliJ
14 14 (0.58%) Mockito
15 12 (0.50%) Eclipse
General
1 429 (17.90%) Finance
2 410 (17.11%) Social Skills
3 162 (6.76%) Banking
4 152 (6.34%) Analytical Skills
5 150 (6.26%) Public Sector
6 102 (4.26%) Aerospace
7 85 (3.55%) Front Office
8 50 (2.09%) Retail
9 46 (1.92%) Law
10 44 (1.84%) Manufacturing
11 41 (1.71%) Investment Banking
12 28 (1.17%) Military
13 27 (1.13%) Automotive
14 26 (1.09%) Aviation
15 25 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
15 25 (1.04%) Telecoms
16 21 (0.88%) Electronics
17 17 (0.71%) Legal
18 16 (0.67%) Documentation Skills
19 14 (0.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
Job Titles
1 1,203 (50.21%) Software Engineer
2 443 (18.49%) Developer
3 401 (16.74%) Senior
4 246 (10.27%) Lead
5 176 (7.35%) Senior Software Engineer
6 172 (7.18%) Java Engineer
7 145 (6.05%) Embedded Engineer
8 142 (5.93%) Java Software Engineer
9 134 (5.59%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 133 (5.55%) Java Developer
11 127 (5.30%) C++ Software Engineer
12 106 (4.42%) Architect
13 94 (3.92%) Lead Software Engineer
14 84 (3.51%) Python Engineer
15 83 (3.46%) Software Developer
16 82 (3.42%) Senior Developer
17 77 (3.21%) Python Developer
18 73 (3.05%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
19 71 (2.96%) Developer/Software Engineer
20 68 (2.84%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 269 (11.23%) React
2 186 (7.76%) .NET
3 178 (7.43%) Kafka
4 175 (7.30%) Spring
5 174 (7.26%) Node.js
6 165 (6.89%) REST
7 157 (6.55%) Spring Boot
8 108 (4.51%) RESTful
9 104 (4.34%) AngularJS
10 77 (3.21%) GraphQL
11 59 (2.46%) Redux
12 46 (1.92%) CSS
13 45 (1.88%) HTML
14 40 (1.67%) JSON
14 40 (1.67%) Next.js
15 37 (1.54%) Django
16 35 (1.46%) Quarkus
16 35 (1.46%) Web Services
17 34 (1.42%) OAuth
18 33 (1.38%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 271 (11.31%) Cloud Native
2 183 (7.64%) Distributed Systems
3 119 (4.97%) Product Ownership
4 83 (3.46%) Algorithms
5 71 (2.96%) Fixed Income
6 63 (2.63%) AI Agents
7 43 (1.79%) Embedded Systems
8 40 (1.67%) Onboarding
9 38 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
10 35 (1.46%) Data Structures
11 33 (1.38%) Derivative
11 33 (1.38%) Legacy Systems
12 31 (1.29%) Self-Motivation
13 27 (1.13%) Equities
13 27 (1.13%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 25 (1.04%) Enterprise Software
15 21 (0.88%) Robotics
16 18 (0.75%) Greenfield Project
17 17 (0.71%) Mobile App
18 14 (0.58%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 186 (7.76%) Linux
2 59 (2.46%) Windows
3 36 (1.50%) Unix
4 30 (1.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 15 (0.63%) Apple iOS
5 15 (0.63%) Embedded Linux
6 13 (0.54%) Android
7 11 (0.46%) FreeRTOS
8 9 (0.38%) Ubuntu
8 9 (0.38%) Windows Server
9 5 (0.21%) Debian
10 4 (0.17%) Rocky
10 4 (0.17%) VMS
10 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.13%) Solaris
11 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2008
12 2 (0.083%) VxWorks
13 1 (0.042%) Tizen
13 1 (0.042%) webOS
13 1 (0.042%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 727 (30.34%) CI/CD
2 722 (30.13%) Agile
3 513 (21.41%) DevOps
4 382 (15.94%) AI
5 344 (14.36%) Microservices
6 297 (12.40%) Test Automation
7 261 (10.89%) Problem-Solving
8 251 (10.48%) Full-Stack Development
9 224 (9.35%) Containerisation
10 222 (9.27%) Infrastructure as Code
11 219 (9.14%) Continuous Improvement
12 189 (7.89%) TDD
13 188 (7.85%) Machine Learning
14 187 (7.80%) SDLC
15 185 (7.72%) Observability
16 178 (7.43%) Mentoring
17 176 (7.35%) Scrum
18 163 (6.80%) Platform Engineering
19 156 (6.51%) Technical Leadership
20 154 (6.43%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 651 (27.17%) Python
2 614 (25.63%) Java
3 308 (12.85%) SQL
4 293 (12.23%) TypeScript
5 289 (12.06%) C#
6 239 (9.97%) JavaScript
7 227 (9.47%) C++
8 128 (5.34%) Ada
9 124 (5.18%) Go
10 116 (4.84%) C
11 43 (1.79%) Kotlin
12 37 (1.54%) Rust
13 31 (1.29%) Bash
13 31 (1.29%) PowerShell
14 29 (1.21%) Scala
15 23 (0.96%) MATLAB
15 23 (0.96%) PL/SQL
16 20 (0.83%) Embedded C
17 17 (0.71%) Ruby
17 17 (0.71%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 586 (24.46%) Security Cleared
2 477 (19.91%) SC Cleared
3 180 (7.51%) Degree
4 81 (3.38%) Computer Science Degree
5 73 (3.05%) DV Cleared
6 51 (2.13%) BPSS Clearance
7 32 (1.34%) Master's Degree
8 28 (1.17%) AWS Certification
9 18 (0.75%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 13 (0.54%) Azure Certification
10 13 (0.54%) PhD
11 10 (0.42%) CISSP
12 7 (0.29%) ISTQB
12 7 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.25%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.25%) TOGAF Certification
14 5 (0.21%) PMP
15 4 (0.17%) CISM
15 4 (0.17%) GIAC
15 4 (0.17%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 131 (5.47%) QA
2 46 (1.92%) Data Quality
3 42 (1.75%) Accessibility
4 41 (1.71%) Def Stans
5 26 (1.09%) IEC 61508
6 21 (0.88%) GDPR
7 18 (0.75%) MISRA
8 15 (0.63%) NIST
9 11 (0.46%) DO-178B
9 11 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 11 (0.46%) WCAG
10 9 (0.38%) NCSC
11 8 (0.33%) MISRA C
12 6 (0.25%) GRC
12 6 (0.25%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.21%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 4 (0.17%) DO-254
15 3 (0.13%) FATCA
16 2 (0.083%) EMIR
System Software
1 328 (13.69%) Docker
2 24 (1.00%) Firmware
3 10 (0.42%) Active Directory
4 9 (0.38%) Embedded Firmware
5 7 (0.29%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (0.13%) HDFS
7 2 (0.083%) Oracle RAC
7 2 (0.083%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 382 (15.94%) Kubernetes
2 223 (9.31%) Terraform
3 67 (2.80%) Ansible
4 63 (2.63%) Grafana
5 40 (1.67%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.54%) Argo
7 11 (0.46%) Kibana
8 10 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
9 7 (0.29%) Puppet
10 6 (0.25%) Progress Chef
11 5 (0.21%) HAProxy
12 4 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
13 3 (0.13%) Consul
13 3 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
13 3 (0.13%) Functional Safety
13 3 (0.13%) Kubeflow
14 2 (0.083%) Cilium
14 2 (0.083%) HP ALM
14 2 (0.083%) HP Fortify
14 2 (0.083%) Istio
Vendors
1 125 (5.22%) Microsoft
2 77 (3.21%) Google
3 71 (2.96%) Oracle
4 50 (2.09%) Red Hat
5 43 (1.79%) Databricks
6 37 (1.54%) OpenAI
7 19 (0.79%) IBM
8 18 (0.75%) Informatica
8 18 (0.75%) ServiceNow
8 18 (0.75%) Splunk
9 14 (0.58%) Salesforce
10 13 (0.54%) Foundry
11 12 (0.50%) SAP
11 12 (0.50%) Siemens
12 10 (0.42%) Adobe
12 10 (0.42%) Checkmarx
12 10 (0.42%) ForgeRock
12 10 (0.42%) Okta
13 8 (0.33%) Dynatrace
14 7 (0.29%) Confluent