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

6 months to
29 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 42 31
Rank change year-on-year +11 -11 +10
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,505 1,348 1,993
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.59% 4.90% 5.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.56% 5.40% 6.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,404 874 1,272
10th Percentile £400 £381 £406
25th Percentile £468 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £563 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -4.00% +4.17%
75th Percentile £688 £772 £800
90th Percentile £788 £850 £888
UK median daily rate £560 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -2.61% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 409 80 303
10th Percentile £51.05 £31.25 £47.60
25th Percentile £60.00 £51.81 £55.63
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £77.75 £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 38,210 24,959 29,249
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.22% 90.75% 85.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,914 15,999 19,151
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -2.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,406 1,365 1,791
10th Percentile £15.05 £14.22 £13.87
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.88 £17.75
Median hourly rate £46.62 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +85.35% -39.40% -2.35%
75th Percentile £69.49 £51.65 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.10 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 0 1,131 £600 -7.69% 1,425
North of England +24 385 £538 +8.28% 348
South East +29 315 £525 +4.90% 377
South West +20 310 £550 +10.00% 209
East of England +21 214 £505 +3.48% 169
North West +3 179 £550 +10.00% 205
Yorkshire +15 141 £510 +4.08% 87
Midlands -14 109 £463 -7.50% 138
West Midlands -17 83 £459 -20.17% 77
North East +7 70 £650 +42.86% 59
East Midlands -6 25 £513 +7.89% 61
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 55 (2.20%) Confluence
2 46 (1.84%) Apache Spark
3 32 (1.28%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (1.20%) Apache
5 11 (0.44%) CMS
6 10 (0.40%) SAS
7 7 (0.28%) SharePoint
8 5 (0.20%) Ethereum
8 5 (0.20%) Hyperledger
8 5 (0.20%) nginx
9 4 (0.16%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.16%) WebLogic
10 3 (0.12%) Apache Solr
10 3 (0.12%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.12%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.080%) Apache Pulsar
11 2 (0.080%) Apache Superset
11 2 (0.080%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.080%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.080%) WordPress
Applications
1 14 (0.56%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.40%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 9 (0.36%) Chatbot
4 7 (0.28%) Microsoft Excel
5 6 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
6 5 (0.20%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
7 4 (0.16%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.16%) Simulink
8 3 (0.12%) Trello
9 2 (0.080%) CATIA
9 2 (0.080%) Notion
10 1 (0.040%) Adobe After Effects
10 1 (0.040%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.040%) Blender
10 1 (0.040%) Maya
10 1 (0.040%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.28%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.28%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
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 (0.080%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.080%) Endur
6 2 (0.080%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.040%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.040%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.040%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 632 (25.23%) AWS
2 486 (19.40%) Azure
3 253 (10.10%) GCP
4 196 (7.82%) GitHub
5 114 (4.55%) Serverless
6 99 (3.95%) Azure DevOps
7 98 (3.91%) GitHub Actions
8 79 (3.15%) AWS Lambda
9 58 (2.32%) Amazon S3
9 58 (2.32%) OpenShift
10 47 (1.88%) Anthropic Claude
11 46 (1.84%) Amazon EKS
12 45 (1.80%) Power Platform
13 43 (1.72%) Amazon SQS
14 40 (1.60%) Amazon ECS
14 40 (1.60%) Azure AKS
15 33 (1.32%) GitHub Copilot
16 30 (1.20%) AWS CloudFormation
17 28 (1.12%) Amazon EC2
17 28 (1.12%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.00%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (0.96%) Wireless
3 23 (0.92%) Ethernet
4 20 (0.80%) Firewall
5 18 (0.72%) Internet
5 18 (0.72%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.60%) HTTP
6 15 (0.60%) VPN
7 10 (0.40%) Wi-Fi
8 9 (0.36%) 3GPP
9 8 (0.32%) Network Security
9 8 (0.32%) RTP
10 7 (0.28%) RS-232
10 7 (0.28%) Wireshark
11 6 (0.24%) RS-485
12 5 (0.20%) DNS
13 4 (0.16%) RS-422
14 3 (0.12%) HTTPS
14 3 (0.12%) IPv4
14 3 (0.12%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 156 (6.23%) PostgreSQL
2 97 (3.87%) Relational Database
3 77 (3.07%) SQL Server
4 74 (2.95%) NoSQL
5 53 (2.12%) MongoDB
6 38 (1.52%) Data Warehouse
7 34 (1.36%) DynamoDB
8 32 (1.28%) MySQL
9 30 (1.20%) Big Data
9 30 (1.20%) Power BI
10 23 (0.92%) Elasticsearch
10 23 (0.92%) Redis
11 21 (0.84%) BigQuery
11 21 (0.84%) Data Lake
11 21 (0.84%) Metadata
12 20 (0.80%) Amazon RDS
13 17 (0.68%) Amazon Redshift
13 17 (0.68%) Pinecone
14 16 (0.64%) Apache Cassandra
15 15 (0.60%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 248 (9.90%) Git
2 150 (5.99%) Jenkins
3 134 (5.35%) GitLab
4 110 (4.39%) JIRA
5 59 (2.36%) SonarQube
6 34 (1.36%) Gradle
6 34 (1.36%) JUnit
7 24 (0.96%) Visual Studio
8 22 (0.88%) Claude Code
9 21 (0.84%) Rational DOORS
10 20 (0.80%) Bitbucket
10 20 (0.80%) Cucumber
11 18 (0.72%) Rational Rhapsody
11 18 (0.72%) Selenium
12 16 (0.64%) Mockito
13 15 (0.60%) Liquibase
13 15 (0.60%) Maven
14 13 (0.52%) Cypress.io
15 12 (0.48%) IntelliJ
15 12 (0.48%) Mocha
General
1 467 (18.64%) Finance
2 446 (17.80%) Social Skills
3 182 (7.27%) Banking
4 169 (6.75%) Analytical Skills
5 168 (6.71%) Public Sector
6 103 (4.11%) Aerospace
7 99 (3.95%) Front Office
8 55 (2.20%) Retail
9 47 (1.88%) Manufacturing
10 43 (1.72%) Investment Banking
11 42 (1.68%) Law
12 31 (1.24%) Telecoms
13 30 (1.20%) Military
14 26 (1.04%) Automotive
14 26 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
15 25 (1.00%) Aviation
16 20 (0.80%) Electronics
17 19 (0.76%) Legal
18 18 (0.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
19 15 (0.60%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,194 (47.66%) Software Engineer
2 477 (19.04%) Developer
3 426 (17.01%) Senior
4 281 (11.22%) Lead
5 176 (7.03%) Senior Software Engineer
6 168 (6.71%) Java Engineer
7 142 (5.67%) Embedded Engineer
8 138 (5.51%) Java Software Engineer
9 134 (5.35%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 134 (5.35%) Java Developer
10 115 (4.59%) C++ Software Engineer
11 107 (4.27%) Lead Software Engineer
12 103 (4.11%) Python Engineer
13 102 (4.07%) Architect
13 102 (4.07%) Software Developer
14 87 (3.47%) Senior Developer
15 77 (3.07%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 77 (3.07%) Python Developer
16 75 (2.99%) DevOps Engineer
17 73 (2.91%) Developer/Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 286 (11.42%) React
2 198 (7.90%) .NET
3 191 (7.62%) REST
4 186 (7.43%) Spring
5 181 (7.23%) Node.js
6 179 (7.15%) Kafka
7 167 (6.67%) Spring Boot
8 116 (4.63%) RESTful
9 115 (4.59%) AngularJS
10 73 (2.91%) GraphQL
11 58 (2.32%) Redux
12 49 (1.96%) Next.js
13 48 (1.92%) CSS
13 48 (1.92%) Django
13 48 (1.92%) HTML
14 41 (1.64%) Quarkus
15 39 (1.56%) JSON
16 35 (1.40%) FastAPI
16 35 (1.40%) LangChain
17 34 (1.36%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 327 (13.05%) Cloud Native
2 216 (8.62%) Distributed Systems
3 132 (5.27%) Product Ownership
4 86 (3.43%) Algorithms
5 76 (3.03%) AI Agents
6 75 (2.99%) Fixed Income
7 51 (2.04%) Data Structures
8 47 (1.88%) Onboarding
9 44 (1.76%) Data Protection Act
10 43 (1.72%) Embedded Systems
11 37 (1.48%) Enterprise Software
12 36 (1.44%) Derivative
13 35 (1.40%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 34 (1.36%) Legacy Systems
15 32 (1.28%) Self-Motivation
16 30 (1.20%) Equities
17 22 (0.88%) Robotics
18 21 (0.84%) Greenfield Project
19 17 (0.68%) NHS
19 17 (0.68%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 184 (7.35%) Linux
2 58 (2.32%) Windows
3 32 (1.28%) Unix
4 30 (1.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 19 (0.76%) Embedded Linux
6 13 (0.52%) Android
7 11 (0.44%) Apple iOS
7 11 (0.44%) FreeRTOS
8 10 (0.40%) 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 (0.080%) VxWorks
13 1 (0.040%) Tizen
13 1 (0.040%) webOS
13 1 (0.040%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 806 (32.18%) CI/CD
2 786 (31.38%) Agile
3 578 (23.07%) DevOps
4 440 (17.56%) AI
5 375 (14.97%) Microservices
6 322 (12.85%) Test Automation
7 286 (11.42%) Problem-Solving
8 276 (11.02%) Full-Stack Development
9 264 (10.54%) Continuous Improvement
10 260 (10.38%) Infrastructure as Code
11 248 (9.90%) Containerisation
12 214 (8.54%) Machine Learning
12 214 (8.54%) Observability
13 209 (8.34%) Mentoring
13 209 (8.34%) SDLC
14 195 (7.78%) TDD
15 187 (7.47%) Platform Engineering
15 187 (7.47%) Scrum
16 182 (7.27%) Technical Leadership
17 174 (6.95%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 722 (28.82%) Python
2 655 (26.15%) Java
3 326 (13.01%) SQL
4 312 (12.46%) TypeScript
5 289 (11.54%) C#
6 249 (9.94%) JavaScript
7 211 (8.42%) C++
8 117 (4.67%) Go
9 113 (4.51%) Ada
10 107 (4.27%) C
11 56 (2.24%) Kotlin
12 42 (1.68%) Rust
13 36 (1.44%) PowerShell
14 34 (1.36%) Bash
15 32 (1.28%) Scala
16 24 (0.96%) PL/SQL
17 20 (0.80%) Ruby
18 18 (0.72%) Bicep
18 18 (0.72%) Embedded C
19 17 (0.68%) PHP
Qualifications
1 594 (23.71%) Security Cleared
2 494 (19.72%) SC Cleared
3 189 (7.54%) Degree
4 81 (3.23%) Computer Science Degree
5 78 (3.11%) DV Cleared
6 53 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
7 36 (1.44%) Master's Degree
8 35 (1.40%) AWS Certification
9 21 (0.84%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 18 (0.72%) PhD
11 14 (0.56%) Azure Certification
12 7 (0.28%) CISSP
13 6 (0.24%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.24%) ISTQB
13 6 (0.24%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.24%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 6 (0.24%) PMP
14 4 (0.16%) GIAC
14 4 (0.16%) MBA
14 4 (0.16%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 154 (6.15%) QA
2 54 (2.16%) Data Quality
3 48 (1.92%) Accessibility
4 23 (0.92%) Def Stans
5 20 (0.80%) GDPR
6 15 (0.60%) NIST
7 14 (0.56%) IEC 61508
8 13 (0.52%) WCAG
9 12 (0.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 12 (0.48%) MISRA
10 10 (0.40%) DO-178B
11 8 (0.32%) NCSC
12 7 (0.28%) GRC
13 6 (0.24%) PCI DSS
14 5 (0.20%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.12%) DO-254
15 3 (0.12%) FATCA
15 3 (0.12%) MISRA C
15 3 (0.12%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 359 (14.33%) Docker
2 23 (0.92%) Firmware
3 12 (0.48%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.40%) Active Directory
5 7 (0.28%) Virtual Machines
6 6 (0.24%) VMware Infrastructure
7 3 (0.12%) HDFS
8 2 (0.080%) SRDF
9 1 (0.040%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 414 (16.53%) Kubernetes
2 244 (9.74%) Terraform
3 74 (2.95%) Ansible
4 56 (2.24%) Grafana
5 42 (1.68%) Argo
6 37 (1.48%) Prometheus
7 11 (0.44%) Kibana
7 11 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
8 9 (0.36%) Puppet
9 7 (0.28%) Progress Chef
10 5 (0.20%) HAProxy
10 5 (0.20%) Kubeflow
11 3 (0.12%) Consul
11 3 (0.12%) Functional Safety
12 2 (0.080%) Cilium
12 2 (0.080%) Docker Swarm
12 2 (0.080%) HP Fortify
13 1 (0.040%) CASB
13 1 (0.040%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
13 1 (0.040%) PTC Integrity
Vendors
1 125 (4.99%) Microsoft
2 85 (3.39%) Google
3 75 (2.99%) Oracle
4 52 (2.08%) Red Hat
5 48 (1.92%) Databricks
6 39 (1.56%) OpenAI
7 19 (0.76%) Informatica
7 19 (0.76%) Splunk
8 18 (0.72%) IBM
8 18 (0.72%) Salesforce
9 17 (0.68%) ServiceNow
10 12 (0.48%) Adobe
11 11 (0.44%) Foundry
11 11 (0.44%) SAP
12 10 (0.40%) Checkmarx
12 10 (0.40%) ForgeRock
12 10 (0.40%) Okta
12 10 (0.40%) Siemens
13 9 (0.36%) Dynatrace
13 9 (0.36%) Solace