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

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 43 29
Rank change year-on-year +12 -14 +12
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,467 1,333 2,083
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.50% 4.86% 5.83%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.44% 5.36% 6.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,357 864 1,319
10th Percentile £400 £387 £405
25th Percentile £463 £463 £499
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 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 420 79 341
10th Percentile £52.26 £38.40 £48.00
25th Percentile £60.88 £55.29 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £78.00 £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 38,301 24,864 30,650
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.33% 90.66% 85.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,041 15,953 19,995
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £421 £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 £745 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.02%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,379 1,324 2,046
10th Percentile £15.33 £14.23 £13.22
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.88 £16.90
Median hourly rate £47.50 £25.15 £39.50
Median % change year-on-year +88.87% -36.33% -7.06%
75th Percentile £69.10 £53.75 £63.75
90th Percentile £83.00 £71.39 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%

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 20 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 20 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 20 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 -4 1,084 £600 -7.69% 827
North of England +28 388 £538 +9.25% 273
South West +21 315 £550 +10.00% 176
South East +23 312 £525 +4.90% 305
East of England +30 223 £505 +3.48% 133
North West +6 184 £540 +8.00% 159
Yorkshire +12 141 £525 +7.14% 72
Midlands -9 103 £461 -5.97% 107
West Midlands -24 80 £459 -17.67% 55
North East +12 68 £650 +41.30% 44
East Midlands -10 22 £513 +7.89% 52
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 (2.31%) Confluence
2 44 (1.78%) Apache Spark
3 31 (1.26%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (1.22%) Apache
5 10 (0.41%) SAS
6 9 (0.36%) CMS
7 6 (0.24%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.20%) Ethereum
8 5 (0.20%) Hyperledger
8 5 (0.20%) nginx
9 4 (0.16%) WebLogic
10 3 (0.12%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.12%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.12%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.081%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.081%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.081%) IIS
11 2 (0.081%) MQSeries
11 2 (0.081%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.081%) WordPress
Applications
1 16 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.41%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 8 (0.32%) Chatbot
3 8 (0.32%) Microsoft Excel
4 6 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
5 5 (0.20%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.16%) Simulink
7 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.081%) CATIA
8 2 (0.081%) Trello
9 1 (0.041%) Adobe After Effects
9 1 (0.041%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.041%) Blender
9 1 (0.041%) Maya
9 1 (0.041%) Notion
9 1 (0.041%) S-PLUS
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
5 3 (0.12%) Primavera
5 3 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.081%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.081%) Endur
6 2 (0.081%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.041%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.041%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.041%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 617 (25.01%) AWS
2 474 (19.21%) Azure
3 245 (9.93%) GCP
4 188 (7.62%) GitHub
5 119 (4.82%) Serverless
6 95 (3.85%) Azure DevOps
7 92 (3.73%) GitHub Actions
8 79 (3.20%) AWS Lambda
9 62 (2.51%) Amazon S3
10 55 (2.23%) OpenShift
11 45 (1.82%) Power Platform
12 44 (1.78%) Anthropic Claude
13 41 (1.66%) Amazon SQS
14 40 (1.62%) Amazon EKS
15 38 (1.54%) Amazon ECS
15 38 (1.54%) Azure AKS
16 30 (1.22%) Amazon EC2
16 30 (1.22%) SaaS
17 29 (1.18%) GitHub Copilot
18 28 (1.13%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.01%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (0.97%) Wireless
3 23 (0.93%) Ethernet
4 18 (0.73%) Firewall
4 18 (0.73%) TCP/IP
5 16 (0.65%) Internet
6 15 (0.61%) HTTP
7 13 (0.53%) VPN
8 12 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
9 9 (0.36%) 3GPP
9 9 (0.36%) Network Security
10 8 (0.32%) RTP
11 7 (0.28%) Wireshark
12 6 (0.24%) RS-232
13 5 (0.20%) DNS
13 5 (0.20%) RS-485
14 4 (0.16%) RS-422
15 3 (0.12%) HTTPS
15 3 (0.12%) IPv4
15 3 (0.12%) IPv6
Database & Business Intelligence
1 153 (6.20%) PostgreSQL
2 93 (3.77%) Relational Database
3 76 (3.08%) SQL Server
4 71 (2.88%) NoSQL
5 52 (2.11%) MongoDB
6 35 (1.42%) Data Warehouse
7 32 (1.30%) DynamoDB
8 28 (1.13%) Big Data
8 28 (1.13%) MySQL
8 28 (1.13%) Power BI
9 23 (0.93%) BigQuery
10 22 (0.89%) Amazon RDS
10 22 (0.89%) Redis
11 21 (0.85%) Data Lake
11 21 (0.85%) Elasticsearch
11 21 (0.85%) Metadata
12 18 (0.73%) Apache Cassandra
13 17 (0.69%) Amazon Redshift
13 17 (0.69%) Pinecone
14 15 (0.61%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 246 (9.97%) Git
2 149 (6.04%) Jenkins
3 126 (5.11%) GitLab
4 109 (4.42%) JIRA
5 57 (2.31%) SonarQube
6 35 (1.42%) Gradle
7 31 (1.26%) 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 19 (0.77%) Bitbucket
13 17 (0.69%) Maven
14 16 (0.65%) Liquibase
15 14 (0.57%) Mockito
16 12 (0.49%) Cypress.io
16 12 (0.49%) Eclipse
16 12 (0.49%) IntelliJ
General
1 441 (17.88%) Finance
2 437 (17.71%) Social Skills
3 173 (7.01%) Banking
4 166 (6.73%) Analytical Skills
5 159 (6.45%) Public Sector
6 108 (4.38%) Aerospace
7 92 (3.73%) Front Office
8 56 (2.27%) Retail
9 45 (1.82%) Law
9 45 (1.82%) Manufacturing
10 42 (1.70%) Investment Banking
11 32 (1.30%) Telecoms
12 29 (1.18%) Automotive
13 27 (1.09%) Military
14 25 (1.01%) Aviation
15 24 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
16 22 (0.89%) Electronics
17 17 (0.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 16 (0.65%) Documentation Skills
18 16 (0.65%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,197 (48.52%) Software Engineer
2 465 (18.85%) Developer
3 420 (17.02%) Senior
4 266 (10.78%) Lead
5 174 (7.05%) Senior Software Engineer
6 162 (6.57%) Java Engineer
7 147 (5.96%) Embedded Engineer
8 136 (5.51%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 134 (5.43%) Java Software Engineer
10 131 (5.31%) Java Developer
11 123 (4.99%) C++ Software Engineer
12 102 (4.13%) Lead Software Engineer
13 101 (4.09%) Architect
14 96 (3.89%) Python Engineer
15 95 (3.85%) Software Developer
16 84 (3.40%) Senior Developer
17 78 (3.16%) Python Developer
18 75 (3.04%) DevOps Engineer
19 74 (3.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
19 74 (3.00%) Developer/Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 281 (11.39%) React
2 191 (7.74%) .NET
3 182 (7.38%) Node.js
4 179 (7.26%) Spring
5 178 (7.22%) Kafka
6 176 (7.13%) REST
7 160 (6.49%) Spring Boot
8 113 (4.58%) RESTful
9 109 (4.42%) AngularJS
10 76 (3.08%) GraphQL
11 59 (2.39%) Redux
12 47 (1.91%) CSS
12 47 (1.91%) Next.js
13 46 (1.86%) HTML
14 44 (1.78%) Django
15 40 (1.62%) JSON
16 37 (1.50%) Quarkus
17 36 (1.46%) OAuth
18 35 (1.42%) Web Services
19 34 (1.38%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 298 (12.08%) Cloud Native
2 199 (8.07%) Distributed Systems
3 131 (5.31%) Product Ownership
4 80 (3.24%) Algorithms
5 74 (3.00%) Fixed Income
6 67 (2.72%) AI Agents
7 45 (1.82%) Data Structures
8 44 (1.78%) Embedded Systems
9 43 (1.74%) Onboarding
10 42 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
11 34 (1.38%) Derivative
11 34 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
12 33 (1.34%) Legacy Systems
13 32 (1.30%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 32 (1.30%) Self-Motivation
14 28 (1.13%) Equities
15 21 (0.85%) Greenfield Project
15 21 (0.85%) Robotics
16 16 (0.65%) Virtual Team
17 15 (0.61%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 185 (7.50%) Linux
2 57 (2.31%) Windows
3 35 (1.42%) Unix
4 29 (1.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 19 (0.77%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.57%) Android
6 14 (0.57%) Apple iOS
7 11 (0.45%) FreeRTOS
8 10 (0.41%) Windows Server
9 8 (0.32%) Ubuntu
10 4 (0.16%) Debian
10 4 (0.16%) VMS
10 4 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.12%) Rocky
11 3 (0.12%) Solaris
11 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
12 2 (0.081%) VxWorks
13 1 (0.041%) Tizen
13 1 (0.041%) webOS
13 1 (0.041%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 771 (31.25%) CI/CD
2 764 (30.97%) Agile
3 548 (22.21%) DevOps
4 420 (17.02%) AI
5 360 (14.59%) Microservices
6 322 (13.05%) Test Automation
7 283 (11.47%) Problem-Solving
8 270 (10.94%) Full-Stack Development
9 246 (9.97%) Continuous Improvement
9 246 (9.97%) Infrastructure as Code
10 234 (9.49%) Containerisation
11 206 (8.35%) Machine Learning
12 203 (8.23%) Observability
13 198 (8.03%) Mentoring
14 196 (7.94%) SDLC
14 196 (7.94%) TDD
15 183 (7.42%) Scrum
16 174 (7.05%) Platform Engineering
16 174 (7.05%) Technical Leadership
17 167 (6.77%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 688 (27.89%) Python
2 628 (25.46%) Java
3 317 (12.85%) SQL
4 312 (12.65%) TypeScript
5 288 (11.67%) C#
6 240 (9.73%) JavaScript
7 226 (9.16%) C++
8 125 (5.07%) Go
9 123 (4.99%) Ada
10 115 (4.66%) C
11 50 (2.03%) Kotlin
12 41 (1.66%) Rust
13 33 (1.34%) Bash
13 33 (1.34%) PowerShell
14 31 (1.26%) Scala
15 25 (1.01%) PL/SQL
16 19 (0.77%) Embedded C
17 18 (0.73%) Ruby
18 17 (0.69%) MATLAB
18 17 (0.69%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 586 (23.75%) Security Cleared
2 485 (19.66%) SC Cleared
3 190 (7.70%) Degree
4 81 (3.28%) Computer Science Degree
5 73 (2.96%) DV Cleared
6 55 (2.23%) BPSS Clearance
7 36 (1.46%) Master's Degree
8 34 (1.38%) AWS Certification
9 20 (0.81%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 15 (0.61%) Azure Certification
10 15 (0.61%) PhD
11 9 (0.36%) CISSP
12 7 (0.28%) ISTQB
12 7 (0.28%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.24%) Chartered Engineer
14 5 (0.20%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.20%) PMP
14 5 (0.20%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
14 5 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
15 4 (0.16%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 145 (5.88%) QA
2 50 (2.03%) Data Quality
3 46 (1.86%) Accessibility
4 32 (1.30%) Def Stans
5 21 (0.85%) GDPR
6 17 (0.69%) IEC 61508
7 16 (0.65%) MISRA
8 14 (0.57%) 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 3 (0.12%) DO-254
14 3 (0.12%) FATCA
15 2 (0.081%) EMIR
System Software
1 345 (13.98%) Docker
2 23 (0.93%) Firmware
3 11 (0.45%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.41%) Active Directory
5 7 (0.28%) Virtual Machines
6 6 (0.24%) VMware Infrastructure
7 3 (0.12%) HDFS
8 2 (0.081%) SRDF
9 1 (0.041%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 397 (16.09%) Kubernetes
2 241 (9.77%) Terraform
3 70 (2.84%) Ansible
4 59 (2.39%) Grafana
5 39 (1.58%) Argo
5 39 (1.58%) Prometheus
6 12 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
7 11 (0.45%) Kibana
8 7 (0.28%) Puppet
9 6 (0.24%) Kubeflow
10 5 (0.20%) HAProxy
10 5 (0.20%) Progress Chef
11 3 (0.12%) Consul
11 3 (0.12%) Functional Safety
11 3 (0.12%) HP Quality Center
12 2 (0.081%) Cilium
12 2 (0.081%) Docker Swarm
12 2 (0.081%) HP ALM
12 2 (0.081%) HP Fortify
12 2 (0.081%) Istio
Vendors
1 126 (5.11%) Microsoft
2 83 (3.36%) Google
3 75 (3.04%) Oracle
4 51 (2.07%) Red Hat
5 40 (1.62%) Databricks
6 36 (1.46%) OpenAI
7 19 (0.77%) Informatica
7 19 (0.77%) Splunk
8 18 (0.73%) IBM
9 17 (0.69%) ServiceNow
10 16 (0.65%) Salesforce
11 15 (0.61%) Foundry
12 12 (0.49%) Adobe
12 12 (0.49%) SAP
12 12 (0.49%) Siemens
13 10 (0.41%) Checkmarx
13 10 (0.41%) ForgeRock
13 10 (0.41%) Okta
14 8 (0.32%) Confluent
14 8 (0.32%) Dynatrace