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

6 months to
20 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 43 30
Rank change year-on-year +12 -13 +9
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,701 1,376 1,897
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.83% 4.95% 5.76%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.89% 5.45% 6.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,446 842 1,157
10th Percentile £400 £380 £413
25th Percentile £463 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £615
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -2.44% +0.82%
75th Percentile £682 £738 £810
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 434 116 227
10th Percentile £51.25 £42.44 £45.79
25th Percentile £59.81 £52.50 £57.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £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 39,208 25,244 28,362
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.66% 90.88% 86.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,936 16,028 17,611
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £421
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £626 £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 2,812 1,512 1,298
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.74 £17.77 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.41 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.61% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £68.00 £49.56 £66.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -1.91%

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 September 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 September 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 September 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 1,199 £600 -7.69% 4,515
North of England +23 447 £525 +5.00% 851
South East +34 346 £525 +10.53% 835
South West +18 313 £550 +10.00% 543
East of England +18 230 £509 +1.70% 571
North West +17 209 £550 +10.00% 533
Yorkshire +13 177 £500 - 203
Midlands +30 140 £466 -13.65% 394
West Midlands +9 96 £470 -18.35% 216
North East +4 65 £650 +33.33% 115
East Midlands +13 43 £435 -3.33% 178
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 60 (2.22%) Confluence
2 57 (2.11%) Apache Spark
3 47 (1.74%) Apache Airflow
4 32 (1.18%) Apache
5 14 (0.52%) CMS
5 14 (0.52%) SharePoint
6 7 (0.26%) Camunda
6 7 (0.26%) Jupyter
6 7 (0.26%) SAS
7 6 (0.22%) Ethereum
8 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
8 5 (0.19%) Hyperledger
9 4 (0.15%) Apache Superset
9 4 (0.15%) WordPress
10 3 (0.11%) MQSeries
10 3 (0.11%) nginx
10 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
11 2 (0.074%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.074%) IIS
11 2 (0.074%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 14 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (0.44%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.37%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 10 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
4 5 (0.19%) 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 (0.074%) CATIA
7 2 (0.074%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 2 (0.074%) Notion
7 2 (0.074%) Simulink
8 1 (0.037%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.037%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.037%) Blender
8 1 (0.037%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.26%) Payment Gateway
2 5 (0.19%) Oracle Payroll
2 5 (0.19%) R3 Corda
3 4 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.15%) Quorum
3 4 (0.15%) Ripple
4 3 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
4 3 (0.11%) Orchestrade
4 3 (0.11%) Primavera
4 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.074%) Endur
5 2 (0.074%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.037%) Aladdin
6 1 (0.037%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.037%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.037%) Sage 50
6 1 (0.037%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.037%) SAP S/4HANA
6 1 (0.037%) Shopify
6 1 (0.037%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 679 (25.14%) AWS
2 544 (20.14%) Azure
3 279 (10.33%) GCP
4 240 (8.89%) GitHub
5 143 (5.29%) Serverless
6 125 (4.63%) GitHub Actions
7 114 (4.22%) Azure DevOps
8 104 (3.85%) AWS Lambda
9 70 (2.59%) Amazon S3
10 68 (2.52%) Anthropic Claude
11 63 (2.33%) GitHub Copilot
12 59 (2.18%) OpenShift
13 53 (1.96%) Amazon SQS
14 51 (1.89%) Amazon EKS
15 50 (1.85%) Amazon ECS
16 46 (1.70%) Snowflake
17 45 (1.67%) Power Platform
18 43 (1.59%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 34 (1.26%) dbt
20 33 (1.22%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.15%) Wireless
2 30 (1.11%) Software-Defined Radio
3 20 (0.74%) Firewall
3 20 (0.74%) Internet
4 18 (0.67%) Ethernet
4 18 (0.67%) HTTP
4 18 (0.67%) TCP/IP
5 17 (0.63%) VPN
6 13 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
7 9 (0.33%) Network Security
7 9 (0.33%) RTP
7 9 (0.33%) Wireshark
8 8 (0.30%) DNS
9 6 (0.22%) 3GPP
9 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
10 4 (0.15%) RS-232
11 3 (0.11%) Broadband
11 3 (0.11%) RS-485
11 3 (0.11%) SSL
11 3 (0.11%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 140 (5.18%) PostgreSQL
2 101 (3.74%) Relational Database
3 84 (3.11%) SQL Server
4 79 (2.92%) NoSQL
5 56 (2.07%) MongoDB
6 51 (1.89%) Data Warehouse
7 44 (1.63%) DynamoDB
8 39 (1.44%) MySQL
9 33 (1.22%) Metadata
10 31 (1.15%) Amazon RDS
11 28 (1.04%) Data Lake
11 28 (1.04%) Power BI
12 27 (1.00%) Elasticsearch
12 27 (1.00%) Redis
13 25 (0.93%) Big Data
13 25 (0.93%) BigQuery
14 24 (0.89%) Pinecone
15 20 (0.74%) Weaviate
16 17 (0.63%) Chroma
17 16 (0.59%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 287 (10.63%) Git
2 153 (5.66%) GitLab
2 153 (5.66%) Jenkins
3 118 (4.37%) JIRA
4 58 (2.15%) SonarQube
5 38 (1.41%) Gradle
5 38 (1.41%) JUnit
6 35 (1.30%) Claude Code
7 30 (1.11%) Selenium
8 29 (1.07%) Rational DOORS
8 29 (1.07%) Visual Studio
9 27 (1.00%) Maven
10 22 (0.81%) Cucumber
11 21 (0.78%) Rational Rhapsody
12 16 (0.59%) Mockito
13 15 (0.56%) LabVIEW
14 13 (0.48%) Bitbucket
15 12 (0.44%) Cypress.io
15 12 (0.44%) Snyk
16 10 (0.37%) MLflow
General
1 569 (21.07%) Social Skills
2 491 (18.18%) Finance
3 212 (7.85%) Banking
4 199 (7.37%) Public Sector
5 194 (7.18%) Analytical Skills
6 98 (3.63%) Aerospace
7 78 (2.89%) Front Office
8 51 (1.89%) Investment Banking
8 51 (1.89%) Manufacturing
9 47 (1.74%) Law
10 46 (1.70%) Retail
11 40 (1.48%) Automotive
12 33 (1.22%) Military
13 27 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
14 26 (0.96%) Aviation
14 26 (0.96%) Telecoms
15 25 (0.93%) Marketing
16 24 (0.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
17 18 (0.67%) Back Office
18 17 (0.63%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 1,139 (42.17%) Software Engineer
2 520 (19.25%) Developer
3 509 (18.84%) Senior
4 299 (11.07%) Lead
5 208 (7.70%) Senior Software Engineer
6 164 (6.07%) Java Engineer
7 161 (5.96%) Embedded Engineer
8 154 (5.70%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 149 (5.52%) Java Developer
10 133 (4.92%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 131 (4.85%) Java Software Engineer
12 124 (4.59%) Software Developer
13 117 (4.33%) C++ Software Engineer
14 110 (4.07%) Architect
15 107 (3.96%) Senior Developer
16 103 (3.81%) Python Engineer
17 100 (3.70%) Data Engineer
18 81 (3.00%) DevOps Engineer
19 80 (2.96%) Lead Software Engineer
20 75 (2.78%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 299 (11.07%) Terraform
2 246 (9.11%) React
3 237 (8.77%) REST
4 228 (8.44%) Spring
5 223 (8.26%) .NET
6 215 (7.96%) Spring Boot
7 169 (6.26%) Kafka
8 144 (5.33%) RESTful
9 139 (5.15%) Node.js
10 103 (3.81%) AngularJS
11 60 (2.22%) Django
12 57 (2.11%) HTML
13 55 (2.04%) CSS
13 55 (2.04%) LangChain
13 55 (2.04%) Next.js
14 54 (2.00%) OAuth
15 50 (1.85%) Web Services
16 45 (1.67%) JSON
17 42 (1.55%) .NET Core
17 42 (1.55%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 416 (15.40%) Cloud Native
2 232 (8.59%) Distributed Systems
3 149 (5.52%) Product Ownership
4 136 (5.04%) AI Agents
5 77 (2.85%) Algorithms
6 67 (2.48%) Enterprise Software
7 56 (2.07%) Data Structures
8 55 (2.04%) Onboarding
9 48 (1.78%) Data Protection Act
10 47 (1.74%) Embedded Systems
11 38 (1.41%) Self-Motivation
12 37 (1.37%) Legacy Systems
13 33 (1.22%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 30 (1.11%) Fixed Income
15 25 (0.93%) Derivative
15 25 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
16 24 (0.89%) Equities
16 24 (0.89%) Robotics
17 20 (0.74%) Virtual Team
18 19 (0.70%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 189 (7.00%) Linux
2 64 (2.37%) Windows
3 36 (1.33%) Unix
4 24 (0.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 23 (0.85%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.52%) FreeRTOS
7 13 (0.48%) Android
8 12 (0.44%) Windows Server
9 8 (0.30%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.26%) Apple iOS
11 5 (0.19%) Debian
12 3 (0.11%) Rocky
12 3 (0.11%) VMS
12 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
13 2 (0.074%) Windows Server 2019
13 2 (0.074%) zOS
14 1 (0.037%) Solaris
14 1 (0.037%) Tizen
14 1 (0.037%) webOS
14 1 (0.037%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 942 (34.88%) CI/CD
2 812 (30.06%) Agile
3 647 (23.95%) DevOps
4 583 (21.58%) AI
5 403 (14.92%) Test Automation
6 400 (14.81%) Microservices
7 334 (12.37%) Continuous Improvement
8 330 (12.22%) Infrastructure as Code
8 330 (12.22%) Problem-Solving
9 286 (10.59%) Observability
10 267 (9.89%) SDLC
11 266 (9.85%) Containerisation
12 253 (9.37%) Full-Stack Development
13 242 (8.96%) Technical Leadership
14 237 (8.77%) Stakeholder Management
15 232 (8.59%) Machine Learning
16 228 (8.44%) Platform Engineering
17 217 (8.03%) LLM
18 216 (8.00%) Event-Driven
19 213 (7.89%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 786 (29.10%) Python
2 674 (24.95%) Java
3 384 (14.22%) SQL
4 299 (11.07%) C#
5 296 (10.96%) TypeScript
6 228 (8.44%) C++
7 221 (8.18%) JavaScript
8 122 (4.52%) C
9 87 (3.22%) Ada
10 85 (3.15%) Go
11 69 (2.55%) Kotlin
12 48 (1.78%) PowerShell
13 44 (1.63%) Bash
13 44 (1.63%) Rust
14 39 (1.44%) Scala
15 27 (1.00%) Embedded C
16 23 (0.85%) PL/SQL
17 22 (0.81%) Bicep
18 19 (0.70%) PHP
18 19 (0.70%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 600 (22.21%) Security Cleared
2 508 (18.81%) SC Cleared
3 215 (7.96%) Degree
4 99 (3.67%) Computer Science Degree
5 89 (3.30%) DV Cleared
6 61 (2.26%) BPSS Clearance
7 48 (1.78%) Master's Degree
8 43 (1.59%) AWS Certification
9 24 (0.89%) Azure Certification
10 19 (0.70%) PhD
11 18 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 12 (0.44%) PMP
13 9 (0.33%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 7 (0.26%) CISSP
15 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
15 6 (0.22%) ISTQB
15 6 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
16 5 (0.19%) Numerate Degree
16 5 (0.19%) PMI Certification
17 4 (0.15%) MBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 180 (6.66%) QA
2 77 (2.85%) Data Quality
3 57 (2.11%) Accessibility
4 22 (0.81%) MISRA
5 21 (0.78%) GDPR
6 19 (0.70%) Def Stans
7 14 (0.52%) NIST
7 14 (0.52%) WCAG
8 13 (0.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 12 (0.44%) IEC 61508
10 11 (0.41%) MISRA C
11 10 (0.37%) DO-178B
12 9 (0.33%) GRC
13 7 (0.26%) NCSC
14 6 (0.22%) HL7
15 5 (0.19%) EMIR
15 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.19%) MiFID
16 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
17 3 (0.11%) DO-254
System Software
1 392 (14.51%) Docker
2 29 (1.07%) Firmware
3 18 (0.67%) Embedded Firmware
4 15 (0.56%) Active Directory
5 12 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.30%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.037%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 445 (16.48%) Kubernetes
2 92 (3.41%) Ansible
3 55 (2.04%) Grafana
4 40 (1.48%) Argo
4 40 (1.48%) Prometheus
5 17 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
6 15 (0.56%) Kibana
7 8 (0.30%) Puppet
8 6 (0.22%) Functional Safety
9 4 (0.15%) Consul
9 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
9 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
10 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
10 3 (0.11%) Istio
10 3 (0.11%) Progress Chef
11 2 (0.074%) Cilium
11 2 (0.074%) Control-M
11 2 (0.074%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.074%) Packer
11 2 (0.074%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 146 (5.41%) Microsoft
2 103 (3.81%) Google
3 86 (3.18%) Oracle
4 81 (3.00%) Databricks
5 67 (2.48%) OpenAI
6 43 (1.59%) Red Hat
7 29 (1.07%) Salesforce
8 25 (0.93%) Splunk
9 21 (0.78%) IBM
10 18 (0.67%) Foundry
11 17 (0.63%) Informatica
11 17 (0.63%) ServiceNow
12 12 (0.44%) Adobe
13 11 (0.41%) SAP
14 10 (0.37%) Checkmarx
14 10 (0.37%) VMware
15 9 (0.33%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.30%) Siemens
17 7 (0.26%) ForgeRock
17 7 (0.26%) Hitachi