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

6 months to
2 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 42 30
Rank change year-on-year +11 -12 +10
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,729 1,402 1,863
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.86% 5.01% 5.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.92% 5.51% 6.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,454 845 1,125
10th Percentile £400 £375 £409
25th Percentile £463 £463 £498
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £555 £575 £615
Median % change year-on-year -3.48% -6.50% +0.65%
75th Percentile £688 £738 £810
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £555 £600
% change year-on-year -0.90% -7.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 431 122 216
10th Percentile £51.25 £42.65 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.00 £52.50 £57.53
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.19 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.70 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
% change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%

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 39,430 25,460 28,039
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.71% 90.97% 86.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,919 16,157 17,165
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.64% -2.57% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £645
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 2,918 1,560 1,201
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.42 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.60 £17.87 £20.25
Median hourly rate £40.08 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.36% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.50 £47.00 £67.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.28 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £38.72 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +53.96% -40.82% -

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 2 October 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 2 October 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 2 October 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 -1 1,225 £600 -4.00% 4,962
North of England +21 468 £525 +5.00% 991
South East +33 341 £525 +10.53% 946
South West +12 303 £550 +15.79% 666
East of England +18 230 £510 -2.86% 644
North West +21 226 £550 +10.00% 614
Yorkshire +7 179 £500 - 259
Midlands +25 142 £470 -7.84% 504
West Midlands +19 98 £470 -18.26% 266
North East +2 67 £650 +31.65% 122
East Midlands +16 43 £435 +3.57% 238
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 (2.16%) Apache Spark
2 57 (2.09%) Confluence
3 50 (1.83%) Apache Airflow
4 33 (1.21%) Apache
5 16 (0.59%) CMS
6 14 (0.51%) SharePoint
7 9 (0.33%) Ethereum
7 9 (0.33%) Jupyter
8 7 (0.26%) SAS
9 6 (0.22%) Camunda
10 5 (0.18%) Apache Solr
10 5 (0.18%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.18%) Hyperledger
10 5 (0.18%) WordPress
11 4 (0.15%) nginx
12 3 (0.11%) MQSeries
12 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
13 2 (0.073%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 2 (0.073%) Cloud Foundry
13 2 (0.073%) IIS
Applications
1 16 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (0.44%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.37%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 10 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
4 5 (0.18%) Microsoft Excel
5 4 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.11%) CPLEX
6 3 (0.11%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.11%) Trello
7 2 (0.073%) CATIA
7 2 (0.073%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 2 (0.073%) Notion
7 2 (0.073%) Simulink
8 1 (0.037%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.037%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.037%) Blender
8 1 (0.037%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.037%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.26%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.22%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (0.22%) Oracle Payroll
3 5 (0.18%) R3 Corda
4 4 (0.15%) Quorum
4 4 (0.15%) Ripple
5 3 (0.11%) Distributed Ledger
5 3 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
5 3 (0.11%) Orchestrade
5 3 (0.11%) Primavera
5 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
5 3 (0.11%) Temenos T24
6 2 (0.073%) Endur
6 2 (0.073%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.037%) Aladdin
7 1 (0.037%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.037%) Sage 50
7 1 (0.037%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.037%) SAP S/4HANA
7 1 (0.037%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 696 (25.50%) AWS
2 555 (20.34%) Azure
3 290 (10.63%) GCP
4 244 (8.94%) GitHub
5 145 (5.31%) Serverless
6 124 (4.54%) GitHub Actions
7 119 (4.36%) Azure DevOps
8 102 (3.74%) AWS Lambda
9 75 (2.75%) Anthropic Claude
10 69 (2.53%) Amazon S3
10 69 (2.53%) GitHub Copilot
11 57 (2.09%) Amazon EKS
12 53 (1.94%) Amazon SQS
13 52 (1.91%) OpenShift
14 51 (1.87%) Amazon ECS
15 46 (1.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 46 (1.69%) Snowflake
16 45 (1.65%) Power Platform
17 35 (1.28%) dbt
18 32 (1.17%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.17%) Wireless
2 29 (1.06%) Software-Defined Radio
3 23 (0.84%) Firewall
4 20 (0.73%) Internet
4 20 (0.73%) TCP/IP
4 20 (0.73%) VPN
5 19 (0.70%) HTTP
6 18 (0.66%) Ethernet
7 14 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
8 11 (0.40%) DNS
9 10 (0.37%) Network Security
10 9 (0.33%) RTP
10 9 (0.33%) Wireshark
11 6 (0.22%) 3GPP
11 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
12 5 (0.18%) SSL
13 4 (0.15%) Broadband
13 4 (0.15%) RS-232
14 3 (0.11%) RS-485
14 3 (0.11%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 140 (5.13%) PostgreSQL
2 96 (3.52%) Relational Database
3 85 (3.11%) SQL Server
4 83 (3.04%) NoSQL
5 61 (2.24%) MongoDB
6 53 (1.94%) Data Warehouse
7 41 (1.50%) MySQL
8 40 (1.47%) DynamoDB
9 35 (1.28%) Metadata
10 30 (1.10%) Amazon RDS
10 30 (1.10%) Data Lake
11 27 (0.99%) Big Data
11 27 (0.99%) BigQuery
11 27 (0.99%) Power BI
11 27 (0.99%) Redis
12 26 (0.95%) Pinecone
13 25 (0.92%) Elasticsearch
14 20 (0.73%) Weaviate
15 19 (0.70%) Chroma
16 18 (0.66%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 277 (10.15%) Git
2 158 (5.79%) GitLab
3 152 (5.57%) Jenkins
4 119 (4.36%) JIRA
5 50 (1.83%) SonarQube
6 41 (1.50%) Claude Code
7 37 (1.36%) Gradle
8 35 (1.28%) JUnit
9 31 (1.14%) Rational DOORS
9 31 (1.14%) Visual Studio
10 28 (1.03%) Selenium
11 27 (0.99%) Maven
12 23 (0.84%) Cucumber
13 21 (0.77%) Rational Rhapsody
14 17 (0.62%) Mockito
15 15 (0.55%) LabVIEW
16 14 (0.51%) Cypress.io
17 13 (0.48%) Bitbucket
18 12 (0.44%) Snyk
19 11 (0.40%) Postman
General
1 579 (21.22%) Social Skills
2 520 (19.05%) Finance
3 227 (8.32%) Banking
4 205 (7.51%) Public Sector
5 194 (7.11%) Analytical Skills
6 95 (3.48%) Aerospace
7 80 (2.93%) Front Office
8 58 (2.13%) Investment Banking
9 54 (1.98%) Manufacturing
10 47 (1.72%) Retail
11 46 (1.69%) Law
12 40 (1.47%) Automotive
13 32 (1.17%) Military
14 31 (1.14%) Telecoms
15 26 (0.95%) Aviation
16 25 (0.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 25 (0.92%) Influencing Skills
16 25 (0.92%) Marketing
17 21 (0.77%) Back Office
18 17 (0.62%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,104 (40.45%) Software Engineer
2 536 (19.64%) Developer
3 523 (19.16%) Senior
4 298 (10.92%) Lead
5 203 (7.44%) Senior Software Engineer
6 157 (5.75%) Java Engineer
7 152 (5.57%) Embedded Engineer
7 152 (5.57%) Java Developer
8 146 (5.35%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 146 (5.35%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 132 (4.84%) Software Developer
10 127 (4.65%) Java Software Engineer
11 116 (4.25%) Architect
11 116 (4.25%) C++ Software Engineer
12 111 (4.07%) Senior Developer
13 109 (3.99%) Python Engineer
14 108 (3.96%) Data Engineer
15 86 (3.15%) DevOps Engineer
16 79 (2.89%) AWS Engineer
17 76 (2.78%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 300 (10.99%) Terraform
2 253 (9.27%) React
3 245 (8.98%) REST
4 226 (8.28%) Spring
5 222 (8.13%) .NET
6 215 (7.88%) Spring Boot
7 176 (6.45%) Kafka
8 152 (5.57%) RESTful
9 138 (5.06%) Node.js
10 98 (3.59%) AngularJS
11 62 (2.27%) Django
12 60 (2.20%) HTML
12 60 (2.20%) LangChain
12 60 (2.20%) OAuth
13 58 (2.13%) CSS
14 54 (1.98%) Next.js
15 51 (1.87%) Web Services
16 47 (1.72%) FastAPI
17 45 (1.65%) Model Context Protocol
18 43 (1.58%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 435 (15.94%) Cloud Native
2 240 (8.79%) Distributed Systems
3 156 (5.72%) Product Ownership
4 154 (5.64%) AI Agents
5 71 (2.60%) Algorithms
6 69 (2.53%) Enterprise Software
7 63 (2.31%) Onboarding
8 58 (2.13%) Data Structures
9 50 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
10 45 (1.65%) Embedded Systems
11 37 (1.36%) Self-Motivation
12 36 (1.32%) Legacy Systems
13 33 (1.21%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 29 (1.06%) Fixed Income
15 28 (1.03%) Derivative
15 28 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
16 24 (0.88%) Equities
17 23 (0.84%) Robotics
18 21 (0.77%) Virtual Team
19 19 (0.70%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 191 (7.00%) Linux
2 67 (2.46%) Windows
3 34 (1.25%) Unix
4 20 (0.73%) Embedded Linux
4 20 (0.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (0.59%) FreeRTOS
6 13 (0.48%) Android
7 12 (0.44%) Windows Server
8 9 (0.33%) Apple iOS
9 7 (0.26%) Ubuntu
10 4 (0.15%) Debian
11 3 (0.11%) Rocky
11 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
12 2 (0.073%) Windows Server 2019
12 2 (0.073%) zOS
13 1 (0.037%) Mac OS
13 1 (0.037%) Solaris
13 1 (0.037%) VMS
13 1 (0.037%) webOS
13 1 (0.037%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 961 (35.21%) CI/CD
2 837 (30.67%) Agile
3 660 (24.18%) DevOps
4 607 (22.24%) AI
5 415 (15.21%) Test Automation
6 405 (14.84%) Microservices
7 357 (13.08%) Continuous Improvement
8 335 (12.28%) Problem-Solving
9 328 (12.02%) Infrastructure as Code
10 294 (10.77%) Observability
11 276 (10.11%) SDLC
12 268 (9.82%) Containerisation
13 261 (9.56%) Full-Stack Development
14 257 (9.42%) Stakeholder Management
15 245 (8.98%) Technical Leadership
16 235 (8.61%) Machine Learning
17 234 (8.57%) LLM
18 230 (8.43%) Platform Engineering
19 223 (8.17%) Event-Driven
20 221 (8.10%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 810 (29.68%) Python
2 679 (24.88%) Java
3 397 (14.55%) SQL
4 314 (11.51%) TypeScript
5 300 (10.99%) C#
6 230 (8.43%) C++
6 230 (8.43%) JavaScript
7 118 (4.32%) C
8 82 (3.00%) Go
9 76 (2.78%) Ada
10 68 (2.49%) Kotlin
11 50 (1.83%) PowerShell
12 47 (1.72%) Bash
13 44 (1.61%) Rust
14 38 (1.39%) Scala
15 30 (1.10%) Embedded C
16 24 (0.88%) PL/SQL
17 23 (0.84%) Bicep
18 21 (0.77%) PHP
19 16 (0.59%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 590 (21.62%) Security Cleared
2 490 (17.96%) SC Cleared
3 220 (8.06%) Degree
4 103 (3.77%) Computer Science Degree
5 99 (3.63%) DV Cleared
6 61 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
7 49 (1.80%) Master's Degree
8 48 (1.76%) AWS Certification
9 25 (0.92%) Azure Certification
10 18 (0.66%) PhD
11 15 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 12 (0.44%) PMP
13 11 (0.40%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 9 (0.33%) CISSP
15 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
15 6 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
16 5 (0.18%) ISTQB
16 5 (0.18%) Numerate Degree
16 5 (0.18%) PMI Certification
17 4 (0.15%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 177 (6.49%) QA
2 82 (3.00%) Data Quality
3 61 (2.24%) Accessibility
4 23 (0.84%) MISRA
5 20 (0.73%) GDPR
6 17 (0.62%) Def Stans
7 14 (0.51%) NIST
7 14 (0.51%) WCAG
8 12 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 12 (0.44%) MISRA C
9 11 (0.40%) IEC 61508
10 10 (0.37%) DO-178B
11 8 (0.29%) GRC
12 7 (0.26%) NCSC
13 5 (0.18%) EMIR
13 5 (0.18%) HL7
13 5 (0.18%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.18%) MiFID
14 4 (0.15%) EU AI Act
14 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 399 (14.62%) Docker
2 28 (1.03%) Firmware
3 17 (0.62%) Embedded Firmware
4 16 (0.59%) Active Directory
5 12 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.037%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.037%) zsh
Systems Management
1 454 (16.64%) Kubernetes
2 98 (3.59%) Ansible
3 57 (2.09%) Grafana
4 44 (1.61%) Prometheus
5 36 (1.32%) Argo
6 19 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
7 15 (0.55%) Kibana
8 10 (0.37%) Puppet
9 6 (0.22%) Functional Safety
10 4 (0.15%) Istio
10 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
10 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
10 4 (0.15%) Progress Chef
11 3 (0.11%) Consul
11 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
12 2 (0.073%) Cilium
12 2 (0.073%) HAProxy
12 2 (0.073%) Packer
12 2 (0.073%) Podman
12 2 (0.073%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 157 (5.75%) Microsoft
2 110 (4.03%) Google
3 89 (3.26%) Databricks
4 83 (3.04%) Oracle
5 72 (2.64%) OpenAI
6 38 (1.39%) Red Hat
7 31 (1.14%) Salesforce
8 26 (0.95%) Splunk
9 18 (0.66%) Foundry
9 18 (0.66%) IBM
10 17 (0.62%) Informatica
10 17 (0.62%) ServiceNow
11 13 (0.48%) Adobe
12 12 (0.44%) SAP
13 10 (0.37%) VMware
14 9 (0.33%) Checkmarx
15 8 (0.29%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.29%) Siemens
16 7 (0.26%) ForgeRock
16 7 (0.26%) Hitachi