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

6 months to
26 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 45 31
Rank change year-on-year +13 -14 +9
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,569 1,346 1,918
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.62% 4.89% 5.77%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.63% 5.38% 6.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,406 849 1,199
10th Percentile £400 £375 £407
25th Percentile £469 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £563 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -4.00% +3.22%
75th Percentile £688 £750 £810
90th Percentile £788 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £560 £575 £601
% change year-on-year -2.61% -4.25% +0.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 409 108 261
10th Percentile £50.20 £36.52 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.00 £52.50 £54.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.09 £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 38,747 25,016 28,488
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.82% 90.80% 85.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,944 15,923 18,325
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £423
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £630 £626 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £753
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,579 1,477 1,517
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.23 £14.05
25th Percentile £18.80 £17.87 £18.13
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.05 £69.79 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.06 £25.15 £40.50
% change year-on-year +63.26% -37.90% -4.71%

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 26 August 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 26 August 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 26 August 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 -3 1,154 £600 -7.69% 669
North of England +26 407 £538 +9.25% 232
South East +28 331 £525 +4.90% 233
South West +19 310 £550 +10.00% 303
East of England +21 215 £505 +1.00% 155
North West +11 187 £550 +10.00% 125
Yorkshire +20 157 £500 +0.73% 60
Midlands +4 113 £450 -18.18% 114
West Midlands -22 77 £459 -20.17% 50
North East +9 68 £650 +41.30% 48
East Midlands +8 35 £435 -8.42% 63
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 (2.06%) Confluence
2 52 (2.02%) Apache Spark
3 41 (1.60%) Apache Airflow
4 33 (1.28%) Apache
5 11 (0.43%) CMS
6 9 (0.35%) SharePoint
7 7 (0.27%) SAS
8 6 (0.23%) Jupyter
9 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.19%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.19%) Hyperledger
10 4 (0.16%) Apache Superset
10 4 (0.16%) Camunda
11 3 (0.12%) WebSphere
11 3 (0.12%) WordPress
12 2 (0.078%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.078%) IIS
12 2 (0.078%) MQSeries
12 2 (0.078%) nginx
12 2 (0.078%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 14 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.39%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 10 (0.39%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.39%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.19%) Microsoft Excel
4 4 (0.16%) CPLEX
4 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
4 4 (0.16%) Simulink
5 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.12%) Trello
6 2 (0.078%) CATIA
6 2 (0.078%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.078%) Notion
7 1 (0.039%) Adobe After Effects
7 1 (0.039%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.039%) Blender
7 1 (0.039%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.23%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.19%) R3 Corda
4 4 (0.16%) Quorum
4 4 (0.16%) Ripple
5 3 (0.12%) Oracle Payroll
5 3 (0.12%) Orchestrade
5 3 (0.12%) Primavera
5 3 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.078%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.078%) Endur
6 2 (0.078%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.039%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.039%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.039%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.039%) Shopify
7 1 (0.039%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 648 (25.22%) AWS
2 517 (20.12%) Azure
3 258 (10.04%) GCP
4 218 (8.49%) GitHub
5 128 (4.98%) Serverless
6 109 (4.24%) GitHub Actions
7 106 (4.13%) Azure DevOps
8 93 (3.62%) AWS Lambda
9 64 (2.49%) Amazon S3
10 59 (2.30%) Anthropic Claude
11 58 (2.26%) OpenShift
12 50 (1.95%) Amazon SQS
13 48 (1.87%) Amazon EKS
14 47 (1.83%) Amazon ECS
15 45 (1.75%) GitHub Copilot
16 44 (1.71%) Power Platform
17 38 (1.48%) Snowflake
18 34 (1.32%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (1.32%) Azure AKS
19 29 (1.13%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.17%) Software-Defined Radio
2 29 (1.13%) Wireless
3 20 (0.78%) Firewall
4 19 (0.74%) Internet
5 17 (0.66%) HTTP
5 17 (0.66%) VPN
6 13 (0.51%) Ethernet
7 12 (0.47%) TCP/IP
8 11 (0.43%) Wi-Fi
9 7 (0.27%) Network Security
9 7 (0.27%) RTP
9 7 (0.27%) Wireshark
10 6 (0.23%) 3GPP
11 5 (0.19%) DNS
12 4 (0.16%) IPv4
12 4 (0.16%) IPv6
12 4 (0.16%) RS-232
12 4 (0.16%) SSL
13 3 (0.12%) Cisco IPT
13 3 (0.12%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 141 (5.49%) PostgreSQL
2 104 (4.05%) Relational Database
3 85 (3.31%) NoSQL
4 84 (3.27%) SQL Server
5 51 (1.99%) MongoDB
6 49 (1.91%) Data Warehouse
7 41 (1.60%) DynamoDB
8 35 (1.36%) MySQL
9 31 (1.21%) Power BI
10 29 (1.13%) Metadata
11 28 (1.09%) Big Data
12 27 (1.05%) Amazon RDS
13 26 (1.01%) Redis
14 25 (0.97%) Data Lake
15 24 (0.93%) Elasticsearch
16 21 (0.82%) Pinecone
17 20 (0.78%) BigQuery
18 19 (0.74%) Weaviate
19 15 (0.58%) Amazon Redshift
20 12 (0.47%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 268 (10.43%) Git
2 157 (6.11%) Jenkins
3 149 (5.80%) GitLab
4 110 (4.28%) JIRA
5 58 (2.26%) SonarQube
6 38 (1.48%) Gradle
6 38 (1.48%) JUnit
7 29 (1.13%) Claude Code
8 26 (1.01%) Rational DOORS
9 24 (0.93%) Selenium
10 22 (0.86%) Rational Rhapsody
11 20 (0.78%) Maven
12 17 (0.66%) Cucumber
12 17 (0.66%) Mockito
12 17 (0.66%) Visual Studio
13 13 (0.51%) Cypress.io
13 13 (0.51%) Liquibase
14 12 (0.47%) Bitbucket
14 12 (0.47%) LabVIEW
14 12 (0.47%) MLflow
General
1 501 (19.50%) Social Skills
2 449 (17.48%) Finance
3 198 (7.71%) Banking
4 184 (7.16%) Analytical Skills
4 184 (7.16%) Public Sector
5 92 (3.58%) Aerospace
6 81 (3.15%) Front Office
7 49 (1.91%) Investment Banking
7 49 (1.91%) Manufacturing
8 47 (1.83%) Retail
9 43 (1.67%) Law
10 35 (1.36%) Automotive
11 27 (1.05%) Telecoms
12 26 (1.01%) Aviation
13 25 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
14 23 (0.90%) Military
15 20 (0.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 20 (0.78%) Marketing
16 18 (0.70%) Legal
17 17 (0.66%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 1,152 (44.84%) Software Engineer
2 473 (18.41%) Developer
3 454 (17.67%) Senior
4 284 (11.05%) Lead
5 191 (7.43%) Senior Software Engineer
6 170 (6.62%) Java Engineer
7 158 (6.15%) Embedded Engineer
8 147 (5.72%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 136 (5.29%) Java Software Engineer
10 131 (5.10%) Java Developer
11 117 (4.55%) Software Developer
12 112 (4.36%) C++ Software Engineer
13 105 (4.09%) Architect
14 104 (4.05%) Python Engineer
15 99 (3.85%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
16 92 (3.58%) Senior Developer
17 85 (3.31%) Lead Software Engineer
18 84 (3.27%) Data Engineer
19 75 (2.92%) DevOps Engineer
19 75 (2.92%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 268 (10.43%) Terraform
2 253 (9.85%) React
3 215 (8.37%) REST
4 214 (8.33%) Spring
5 205 (7.98%) .NET
6 198 (7.71%) Spring Boot
7 170 (6.62%) Kafka
8 141 (5.49%) Node.js
9 128 (4.98%) RESTful
10 105 (4.09%) AngularJS
11 60 (2.34%) Django
12 52 (2.02%) Next.js
13 48 (1.87%) CSS
14 47 (1.83%) HTML
15 45 (1.75%) GraphQL
16 44 (1.71%) LangChain
17 40 (1.56%) JSON
18 39 (1.52%) FastAPI
18 39 (1.52%) Quarkus
19 38 (1.48%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 373 (14.52%) Cloud Native
2 231 (8.99%) Distributed Systems
3 132 (5.14%) Product Ownership
4 97 (3.78%) AI Agents
5 83 (3.23%) Algorithms
6 59 (2.30%) Enterprise Software
7 53 (2.06%) Data Structures
8 50 (1.95%) Embedded Systems
9 49 (1.91%) Onboarding
10 43 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
11 40 (1.56%) Fixed Income
12 34 (1.32%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 34 (1.32%) Legacy Systems
13 30 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
14 27 (1.05%) Derivative
14 27 (1.05%) Robotics
15 24 (0.93%) Equities
15 24 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
16 18 (0.70%) NHS
16 18 (0.70%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 175 (6.81%) Linux
2 46 (1.79%) Windows
3 30 (1.17%) Unix
4 23 (0.90%) Embedded Linux
5 21 (0.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 14 (0.54%) FreeRTOS
7 13 (0.51%) Android
8 8 (0.31%) Ubuntu
9 7 (0.27%) Windows Server
10 6 (0.23%) Apple iOS
10 6 (0.23%) Debian
11 3 (0.12%) Rocky
11 3 (0.12%) VMS
12 2 (0.078%) VxWorks
12 2 (0.078%) Windows Server 2019
13 1 (0.039%) Solaris
13 1 (0.039%) Tizen
13 1 (0.039%) webOS
13 1 (0.039%) Windows Server 2008
13 1 (0.039%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 865 (33.67%) CI/CD
2 772 (30.05%) Agile
3 605 (23.55%) DevOps
4 506 (19.70%) AI
5 399 (15.53%) Microservices
6 356 (13.86%) Test Automation
7 307 (11.95%) Problem-Solving
8 293 (11.41%) Continuous Improvement
9 289 (11.25%) Infrastructure as Code
10 260 (10.12%) Containerisation
11 255 (9.93%) Full-Stack Development
12 246 (9.58%) Observability
13 245 (9.54%) SDLC
14 214 (8.33%) Machine Learning
15 207 (8.06%) Platform Engineering
16 204 (7.94%) Technical Leadership
17 200 (7.79%) Mentoring
18 197 (7.67%) Event-Driven
19 194 (7.55%) Scrum
20 189 (7.36%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 741 (28.84%) Python
2 653 (25.42%) Java
3 364 (14.17%) SQL
4 283 (11.02%) C#
5 282 (10.98%) TypeScript
6 216 (8.41%) C++
7 204 (7.94%) JavaScript
8 114 (4.44%) C
9 95 (3.70%) Ada
10 88 (3.43%) Go
11 63 (2.45%) Kotlin
12 45 (1.75%) PowerShell
13 41 (1.60%) Rust
14 40 (1.56%) Bash
15 38 (1.48%) Scala
16 22 (0.86%) Embedded C
16 22 (0.86%) PL/SQL
16 22 (0.86%) Ruby
17 19 (0.74%) Bicep
18 17 (0.66%) PHP
Qualifications
1 580 (22.58%) Security Cleared
2 487 (18.96%) SC Cleared
3 206 (8.02%) Degree
4 95 (3.70%) Computer Science Degree
5 79 (3.08%) DV Cleared
6 53 (2.06%) BPSS Clearance
7 46 (1.79%) Master's Degree
8 32 (1.25%) AWS Certification
9 20 (0.78%) PhD
10 15 (0.58%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 14 (0.54%) Azure Certification
12 8 (0.31%) CISSP
13 7 (0.27%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 7 (0.27%) PMP
14 6 (0.23%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.23%) ISTQB
15 4 (0.16%) GIAC
15 4 (0.16%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 4 (0.16%) MBA
15 4 (0.16%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 161 (6.27%) QA
2 61 (2.37%) Data Quality
3 48 (1.87%) Accessibility
4 24 (0.93%) GDPR
5 18 (0.70%) Def Stans
6 17 (0.66%) MISRA
7 15 (0.58%) NIST
8 14 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 12 (0.47%) WCAG
10 10 (0.39%) DO-178B
11 9 (0.35%) IEC 61508
11 9 (0.35%) NCSC
12 7 (0.27%) GRC
13 6 (0.23%) MISRA C
14 5 (0.19%) HL7
14 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 4 (0.16%) PCI DSS
16 3 (0.12%) DO-254
16 3 (0.12%) EMIR
System Software
1 382 (14.87%) Docker
2 30 (1.17%) Firmware
3 19 (0.74%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.39%) Active Directory
4 10 (0.39%) Virtual Machines
5 4 (0.16%) VMware Infrastructure
6 1 (0.039%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 432 (16.82%) Kubernetes
2 80 (3.11%) Ansible
3 52 (2.02%) Grafana
4 41 (1.60%) Argo
5 38 (1.48%) Prometheus
6 14 (0.54%) Single Sign-On
7 11 (0.43%) Kibana
8 7 (0.27%) Puppet
9 6 (0.23%) Functional Safety
9 6 (0.23%) Kubeflow
10 4 (0.16%) Consul
10 4 (0.16%) HAProxy
11 3 (0.12%) HP Fortify
11 3 (0.12%) Istio
11 3 (0.12%) Kustomize
11 3 (0.12%) Progress Chef
12 2 (0.078%) Cilium
12 2 (0.078%) Docker Swarm
12 2 (0.078%) Packer
12 2 (0.078%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 132 (5.14%) Microsoft
2 90 (3.50%) Google
3 78 (3.04%) Oracle
4 67 (2.61%) Databricks
5 53 (2.06%) OpenAI
6 43 (1.67%) Red Hat
7 25 (0.97%) Salesforce
8 23 (0.90%) Splunk
9 20 (0.78%) ServiceNow
10 19 (0.74%) IBM
11 17 (0.66%) Informatica
12 12 (0.47%) Adobe
12 12 (0.47%) Foundry
12 12 (0.47%) SAP
13 11 (0.43%) Checkmarx
14 9 (0.35%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.31%) Confluent
16 7 (0.27%) ForgeRock
16 7 (0.27%) Okta
16 7 (0.27%) Solace