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

6 months to
18 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 2,693 1,374 1,908
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.83% 4.94% 5.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.88% 5.43% 6.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,450 836 1,167
10th Percentile £400 £380 £413
25th Percentile £463 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% +2.29%
75th Percentile £686 £748 £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 428 118 231
10th Percentile £51.25 £43.96 £45.22
25th Percentile £57.63 £52.50 £56.88
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 £65.00

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 39,123 25,281 28,365
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.74% 90.90% 86.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,918 16,062 17,635
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -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 2,776 1,509 1,303
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.75 £17.79 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £66.55
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 18 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 18 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 18 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 1,202 £600 -7.69% 4,350
North of England +22 449 £525 +6.62% 847
South East +30 344 £525 +10.53% 826
South West +18 310 £550 +10.00% 516
East of England +15 224 £509 +1.70% 551
North West +19 207 £550 +10.00% 523
Yorkshire +19 181 £500 - 204
Midlands +27 139 £469 -13.15% 392
West Midlands +12 96 £470 -18.26% 210
North East +3 65 £650 +41.30% 120
East Midlands +14 42 £435 -3.33% 182
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 61 (2.27%) Confluence
2 57 (2.12%) Apache Spark
3 47 (1.75%) Apache Airflow
4 33 (1.23%) 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 (0.45%) 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
1 681 (25.29%) AWS
2 539 (20.01%) Azure
3 277 (10.29%) GCP
4 243 (9.02%) GitHub
5 144 (5.35%) Serverless
6 126 (4.68%) GitHub Actions
7 110 (4.08%) Azure DevOps
8 104 (3.86%) AWS Lambda
9 70 (2.60%) Amazon S3
10 69 (2.56%) Anthropic Claude
11 63 (2.34%) GitHub Copilot
12 59 (2.19%) OpenShift
13 53 (1.97%) Amazon SQS
14 50 (1.86%) Amazon ECS
14 50 (1.86%) Amazon EKS
15 46 (1.71%) Snowflake
16 45 (1.67%) Power Platform
17 43 (1.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (1.26%) dbt
19 33 (1.23%) 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 19 (0.71%) HTTP
5 18 (0.67%) Ethernet
5 18 (0.67%) TCP/IP
6 17 (0.63%) VPN
7 13 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
8 9 (0.33%) Network Security
9 8 (0.30%) DNS
9 8 (0.30%) RTP
9 8 (0.30%) Wireshark
10 6 (0.22%) 3GPP
10 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
11 4 (0.15%) RS-232
12 3 (0.11%) Broadband
12 3 (0.11%) Reverse Proxy
12 3 (0.11%) RS-485
12 3 (0.11%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 145 (5.38%) PostgreSQL
2 101 (3.75%) Relational Database
3 87 (3.23%) SQL Server
4 79 (2.93%) NoSQL
5 54 (2.01%) MongoDB
6 51 (1.89%) Data Warehouse
7 44 (1.63%) DynamoDB
8 39 (1.45%) MySQL
9 32 (1.19%) Metadata
10 31 (1.15%) Amazon RDS
11 28 (1.04%) Power BI
12 27 (1.00%) Elasticsearch
12 27 (1.00%) Redis
13 26 (0.97%) Data Lake
14 25 (0.93%) Big Data
14 25 (0.93%) BigQuery
15 24 (0.89%) Pinecone
16 20 (0.74%) Weaviate
17 17 (0.63%) Chroma
18 16 (0.59%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 287 (10.66%) Git
2 158 (5.87%) Jenkins
3 155 (5.76%) GitLab
4 118 (4.38%) JIRA
5 58 (2.15%) SonarQube
6 39 (1.45%) Gradle
6 39 (1.45%) JUnit
7 35 (1.30%) Claude Code
8 30 (1.11%) Maven
8 30 (1.11%) Selenium
9 28 (1.04%) Rational DOORS
10 26 (0.97%) Visual Studio
11 22 (0.82%) Cucumber
12 21 (0.78%) Rational Rhapsody
13 17 (0.63%) Mockito
14 15 (0.56%) LabVIEW
15 13 (0.48%) Bitbucket
15 13 (0.48%) Cypress.io
16 12 (0.45%) Snyk
17 10 (0.37%) MLflow
General
1 568 (21.09%) Social Skills
2 491 (18.23%) Finance
3 215 (7.98%) Banking
4 200 (7.43%) Public Sector
5 194 (7.20%) Analytical Skills
6 97 (3.60%) Aerospace
7 78 (2.90%) Front Office
8 52 (1.93%) Investment Banking
9 51 (1.89%) Manufacturing
10 48 (1.78%) Law
11 46 (1.71%) Retail
12 40 (1.49%) Automotive
13 33 (1.23%) Military
14 26 (0.97%) Aviation
14 26 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
15 25 (0.93%) Marketing
15 25 (0.93%) Telecoms
16 23 (0.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
17 18 (0.67%) Back Office
18 17 (0.63%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 1,136 (42.18%) Software Engineer
2 515 (19.12%) Developer
3 510 (18.94%) Senior
4 294 (10.92%) Lead
5 209 (7.76%) Senior Software Engineer
6 169 (6.28%) Java Engineer
7 160 (5.94%) Embedded Engineer
8 153 (5.68%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 147 (5.46%) Java Developer
10 135 (5.01%) Java Software Engineer
11 133 (4.94%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 122 (4.53%) Software Developer
13 117 (4.34%) C++ Software Engineer
14 108 (4.01%) Architect
14 108 (4.01%) Senior Developer
15 104 (3.86%) Python Engineer
16 100 (3.71%) Data Engineer
17 82 (3.04%) DevOps Engineer
18 78 (2.90%) Lead Software Engineer
19 77 (2.86%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 303 (11.25%) Terraform
2 248 (9.21%) React
3 240 (8.91%) REST
4 226 (8.39%) Spring
5 219 (8.13%) .NET
6 213 (7.91%) Spring Boot
7 167 (6.20%) Kafka
8 141 (5.24%) RESTful
9 139 (5.16%) Node.js
10 103 (3.82%) AngularJS
11 60 (2.23%) Django
12 58 (2.15%) HTML
13 56 (2.08%) CSS
14 55 (2.04%) LangChain
14 55 (2.04%) Next.js
15 51 (1.89%) OAuth
16 47 (1.75%) Web Services
17 45 (1.67%) JSON
18 42 (1.56%) FastAPI
19 41 (1.52%) Model Context Protocol
Miscellaneous
1 419 (15.56%) Cloud Native
2 235 (8.73%) Distributed Systems
3 149 (5.53%) Product Ownership
4 136 (5.05%) AI Agents
5 79 (2.93%) Algorithms
6 66 (2.45%) Enterprise Software
7 57 (2.12%) Data Structures
8 55 (2.04%) Onboarding
9 48 (1.78%) Data Protection Act
10 47 (1.75%) Embedded Systems
11 38 (1.41%) Self-Motivation
12 37 (1.37%) Legacy Systems
13 32 (1.19%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 29 (1.08%) Fixed Income
15 26 (0.97%) Derivative
16 25 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
16 25 (0.93%) Robotics
17 23 (0.85%) Equities
18 19 (0.71%) NHS
18 19 (0.71%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 189 (7.02%) Linux
2 62 (2.30%) Windows
3 36 (1.34%) Unix
4 25 (0.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 23 (0.85%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.52%) FreeRTOS
7 13 (0.48%) Android
8 12 (0.45%) 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
1 941 (34.94%) CI/CD
2 810 (30.08%) Agile
3 644 (23.91%) DevOps
4 581 (21.57%) AI
5 401 (14.89%) Test Automation
6 398 (14.78%) Microservices
7 334 (12.40%) Continuous Improvement
8 330 (12.25%) Infrastructure as Code
8 330 (12.25%) Problem-Solving
9 283 (10.51%) Observability
10 269 (9.99%) Containerisation
10 269 (9.99%) SDLC
11 256 (9.51%) Full-Stack Development
12 240 (8.91%) Technical Leadership
13 237 (8.80%) Stakeholder Management
14 231 (8.58%) Machine Learning
15 228 (8.47%) Platform Engineering
16 218 (8.10%) LLM
17 216 (8.02%) Event-Driven
18 212 (7.87%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 786 (29.19%) Python
2 675 (25.06%) Java
3 384 (14.26%) SQL
4 298 (11.07%) TypeScript
5 294 (10.92%) C#
6 227 (8.43%) C++
7 222 (8.24%) JavaScript
8 121 (4.49%) C
9 87 (3.23%) Ada
10 83 (3.08%) Go
11 69 (2.56%) Kotlin
12 49 (1.82%) PowerShell
13 45 (1.67%) Rust
14 44 (1.63%) Bash
15 41 (1.52%) Scala
16 26 (0.97%) Embedded C
17 23 (0.85%) PL/SQL
18 22 (0.82%) Bicep
19 20 (0.74%) Ruby
20 19 (0.71%) PHP
Qualifications
1 600 (22.28%) Security Cleared
2 506 (18.79%) SC Cleared
3 214 (7.95%) Degree
4 100 (3.71%) Computer Science Degree
5 90 (3.34%) DV Cleared
6 61 (2.27%) BPSS Clearance
7 46 (1.71%) Master's Degree
8 43 (1.60%) AWS Certification
9 24 (0.89%) Azure Certification
10 18 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 17 (0.63%) PhD
12 12 (0.45%) PMP
13 9 (0.33%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 8 (0.30%) 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%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 180 (6.68%) QA
2 77 (2.86%) Data Quality
3 56 (2.08%) Accessibility
4 22 (0.82%) MISRA
5 21 (0.78%) GDPR
6 19 (0.71%) Def Stans
7 15 (0.56%) WCAG
8 14 (0.52%) NIST
9 13 (0.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 12 (0.45%) IEC 61508
11 11 (0.41%) MISRA C
12 10 (0.37%) DO-178B
13 9 (0.33%) GRC
14 7 (0.26%) NCSC
15 5 (0.19%) EMIR
15 5 (0.19%) HL7
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
1 397 (14.74%) Docker
2 29 (1.08%) Firmware
3 18 (0.67%) Embedded Firmware
4 15 (0.56%) Active Directory
5 12 (0.45%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.30%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.037%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 449 (16.67%) Kubernetes
2 93 (3.45%) Ansible
3 55 (2.04%) Grafana
4 40 (1.49%) Argo
4 40 (1.49%) 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%) HAProxy
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%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.074%) Packer
11 2 (0.074%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 151 (5.61%) Microsoft
2 102 (3.79%) Google
3 84 (3.12%) Oracle
4 78 (2.90%) Databricks
5 67 (2.49%) OpenAI
6 44 (1.63%) Red Hat
7 29 (1.08%) Salesforce
8 25 (0.93%) Splunk
9 21 (0.78%) IBM
10 18 (0.67%) Foundry
10 18 (0.67%) ServiceNow
11 17 (0.63%) Informatica
12 12 (0.45%) 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