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

6 months to
4 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 42 30
Rank change year-on-year +11 -12 +11
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,732 1,402 1,853
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.90% 4.99% 5.72%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.96% 5.49% 6.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,451 842 1,118
10th Percentile £400 £375 £406
25th Percentile £463 £463 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £560 £575 £613
Median % change year-on-year -2.61% -6.12% +0.25%
75th Percentile £688 £725 £810
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £563 £600
% change year-on-year -2.22% -6.25% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 434 123 214
10th Percentile £51.25 £43.05 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.00 £52.50 £58.16
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £74.60 £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 39,229 25,540 27,994
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.68% 90.96% 86.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,740 16,195 17,136
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 £638 £625 £643
90th Percentile £738 £734 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,947 1,574 1,191
10th Percentile £13.81 £14.50 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.54 £17.87 £20.50
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.47 £46.55 £67.01
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £38.62 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +53.57% -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 4 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 4 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 4 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 1,227 £600 -4.00% 5,017
North of England +18 468 £525 +5.00% 1,236
South East +39 341 £525 +10.53% 1,057
South West +15 304 £550 +17.33% 740
East of England +17 228 £510 -2.86% 765
North West +27 226 £550 +10.89% 691
Yorkshire +8 177 £500 - 337
Midlands +36 142 £470 -7.84% 633
West Midlands +14 98 £470 -18.26% 333
North East +1 69 £650 +33.33% 222
East Midlands +21 43 £435 +3.57% 300
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 (2.20%) Apache Spark
2 57 (2.09%) Confluence
3 49 (1.79%) Apache Airflow
4 34 (1.24%) 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%) nginx
10 5 (0.18%) WordPress
11 3 (0.11%) MQSeries
11 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
12 2 (0.073%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 2 (0.073%) Cloud Foundry
12 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%) 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
1 693 (25.37%) AWS
2 552 (20.20%) Azure
3 286 (10.47%) GCP
4 247 (9.04%) GitHub
5 144 (5.27%) Serverless
6 125 (4.58%) GitHub Actions
7 118 (4.32%) Azure DevOps
8 99 (3.62%) AWS Lambda
9 76 (2.78%) Anthropic Claude
10 71 (2.60%) GitHub Copilot
11 68 (2.49%) Amazon S3
12 58 (2.12%) Amazon EKS
13 52 (1.90%) Amazon SQS
14 51 (1.87%) OpenShift
15 50 (1.83%) Amazon ECS
16 46 (1.68%) Snowflake
17 45 (1.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 45 (1.65%) Power Platform
18 34 (1.24%) dbt
19 32 (1.17%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.10%) Wireless
2 26 (0.95%) Software-Defined Radio
3 24 (0.88%) Firewall
4 20 (0.73%) Internet
4 20 (0.73%) TCP/IP
4 20 (0.73%) VPN
5 18 (0.66%) HTTP
6 16 (0.59%) Ethernet
7 14 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
8 12 (0.44%) DNS
9 11 (0.40%) 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%) Reverse Proxy
13 4 (0.15%) RS-232
14 3 (0.11%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 140 (5.12%) PostgreSQL
2 97 (3.55%) Relational Database
3 84 (3.07%) SQL Server
4 82 (3.00%) NoSQL
5 61 (2.23%) MongoDB
6 53 (1.94%) Data Warehouse
7 41 (1.50%) MySQL
8 40 (1.46%) DynamoDB
9 35 (1.28%) Metadata
10 31 (1.13%) Data Lake
11 29 (1.06%) Amazon RDS
12 28 (1.02%) Redis
13 27 (0.99%) Big Data
13 27 (0.99%) BigQuery
13 27 (0.99%) Power BI
14 26 (0.95%) Elasticsearch
14 26 (0.95%) Pinecone
15 20 (0.73%) Weaviate
16 19 (0.70%) Chroma
17 18 (0.66%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 276 (10.10%) Git
2 157 (5.75%) GitLab
3 150 (5.49%) Jenkins
4 114 (4.17%) JIRA
5 49 (1.79%) SonarQube
6 43 (1.57%) Claude Code
7 37 (1.35%) Gradle
8 34 (1.24%) JUnit
9 31 (1.13%) Visual Studio
10 29 (1.06%) Rational DOORS
11 27 (0.99%) Maven
12 26 (0.95%) Selenium
13 22 (0.81%) Cucumber
14 21 (0.77%) Rational Rhapsody
15 17 (0.62%) Mockito
16 15 (0.55%) LabVIEW
17 13 (0.48%) Bitbucket
17 13 (0.48%) Cypress.io
18 12 (0.44%) Snyk
19 11 (0.40%) Postman
General
1 584 (21.38%) Social Skills
2 521 (19.07%) Finance
3 223 (8.16%) Banking
4 204 (7.47%) Public Sector
5 191 (6.99%) Analytical Skills
6 96 (3.51%) Aerospace
7 77 (2.82%) Front Office
8 55 (2.01%) Investment Banking
8 55 (2.01%) Manufacturing
9 46 (1.68%) Law
10 45 (1.65%) Retail
11 39 (1.43%) Automotive
12 33 (1.21%) Telecoms
13 31 (1.13%) Military
14 27 (0.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 25 (0.92%) Aviation
15 25 (0.92%) Influencing Skills
15 25 (0.92%) Marketing
16 21 (0.77%) Back Office
17 17 (0.62%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,099 (40.23%) Software Engineer
2 535 (19.58%) Developer
3 525 (19.22%) Senior
4 297 (10.87%) Lead
5 199 (7.28%) Senior Software Engineer
6 157 (5.75%) Java Engineer
7 151 (5.53%) Java Developer
8 150 (5.49%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 150 (5.49%) Embedded Engineer
9 144 (5.27%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 132 (4.83%) Software Developer
11 127 (4.65%) Java Software Engineer
12 118 (4.32%) Architect
13 114 (4.17%) C++ Software Engineer
14 112 (4.10%) Senior Developer
15 110 (4.03%) Python Engineer
16 105 (3.84%) Data Engineer
17 89 (3.26%) DevOps Engineer
18 79 (2.89%) AWS Engineer
19 76 (2.78%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 302 (11.05%) Terraform
2 250 (9.15%) React
3 242 (8.86%) REST
4 224 (8.20%) Spring
5 218 (7.98%) .NET
6 213 (7.80%) Spring Boot
7 177 (6.48%) Kafka
8 152 (5.56%) RESTful
9 134 (4.90%) Node.js
10 97 (3.55%) AngularJS
11 63 (2.31%) Django
12 60 (2.20%) LangChain
12 60 (2.20%) OAuth
13 59 (2.16%) HTML
14 57 (2.09%) CSS
15 54 (1.98%) Next.js
16 51 (1.87%) Web Services
17 47 (1.72%) FastAPI
18 46 (1.68%) Model Context Protocol
19 43 (1.57%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 434 (15.89%) Cloud Native
2 241 (8.82%) Distributed Systems
3 160 (5.86%) AI Agents
4 153 (5.60%) Product Ownership
5 71 (2.60%) Enterprise Software
6 70 (2.56%) Algorithms
7 63 (2.31%) Onboarding
8 57 (2.09%) Data Structures
9 50 (1.83%) Data Protection Act
10 44 (1.61%) Embedded Systems
11 37 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
12 36 (1.32%) Legacy Systems
13 32 (1.17%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 28 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
15 27 (0.99%) Derivative
15 27 (0.99%) Fixed Income
16 24 (0.88%) Equities
17 23 (0.84%) Robotics
18 21 (0.77%) Virtual Team
19 20 (0.73%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 190 (6.95%) Linux
2 67 (2.45%) Windows
3 34 (1.24%) Unix
4 20 (0.73%) Embedded Linux
5 19 (0.70%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 14 (0.51%) Android
6 14 (0.51%) FreeRTOS
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%) Solaris
13 1 (0.037%) Tizen
13 1 (0.037%) VMS
13 1 (0.037%) webOS
13 1 (0.037%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 958 (35.07%) CI/CD
2 838 (30.67%) Agile
3 656 (24.01%) DevOps
4 620 (22.69%) AI
5 415 (15.19%) Test Automation
6 401 (14.68%) Microservices
7 355 (12.99%) Continuous Improvement
8 332 (12.15%) Problem-Solving
9 331 (12.12%) Infrastructure as Code
10 295 (10.80%) Observability
11 277 (10.14%) SDLC
12 266 (9.74%) Containerisation
13 262 (9.59%) Stakeholder Management
14 260 (9.52%) Full-Stack Development
15 242 (8.86%) Technical Leadership
16 238 (8.71%) LLM
16 238 (8.71%) Machine Learning
17 231 (8.46%) Platform Engineering
18 222 (8.13%) Scrum
19 221 (8.09%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 809 (29.61%) Python
2 676 (24.74%) Java
3 397 (14.53%) SQL
4 313 (11.46%) TypeScript
5 296 (10.83%) C#
6 229 (8.38%) JavaScript
7 227 (8.31%) C++
8 115 (4.21%) C
9 81 (2.96%) Go
10 76 (2.78%) Ada
11 67 (2.45%) Kotlin
12 50 (1.83%) PowerShell
13 48 (1.76%) Bash
14 44 (1.61%) Rust
15 37 (1.35%) Scala
16 29 (1.06%) Embedded C
17 24 (0.88%) PL/SQL
18 23 (0.84%) Bicep
19 21 (0.77%) PHP
20 17 (0.62%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 584 (21.38%) Security Cleared
2 485 (17.75%) SC Cleared
3 220 (8.05%) Degree
4 103 (3.77%) Computer Science Degree
5 99 (3.62%) DV Cleared
6 60 (2.20%) BPSS Clearance
7 49 (1.79%) 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%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 12 (0.44%) PMP
13 9 (0.33%) CISSP
14 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
15 5 (0.18%) ISTQB
15 5 (0.18%) Numerate Degree
15 5 (0.18%) PMI Certification
16 4 (0.15%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 174 (6.37%) QA
2 81 (2.96%) Data Quality
3 61 (2.23%) Accessibility
4 23 (0.84%) MISRA
5 20 (0.73%) GDPR
6 17 (0.62%) Def Stans
7 15 (0.55%) NIST
8 14 (0.51%) WCAG
9 12 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 12 (0.44%) MISRA C
10 11 (0.40%) IEC 61508
11 10 (0.37%) DO-178B
12 8 (0.29%) GRC
13 7 (0.26%) NCSC
14 5 (0.18%) EMIR
14 5 (0.18%) HL7
14 5 (0.18%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.18%) MiFID
14 5 (0.18%) PCI DSS
15 4 (0.15%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 399 (14.60%) Docker
2 27 (0.99%) Firmware
3 17 (0.62%) Active Directory
3 17 (0.62%) Embedded Firmware
4 12 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
6 1 (0.037%) Oracle RAC
6 1 (0.037%) zsh
Systems Management
1 455 (16.65%) Kubernetes
2 98 (3.59%) Ansible
3 57 (2.09%) Grafana
4 45 (1.65%) 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 5 (0.18%) Progress Chef
11 4 (0.15%) Istio
11 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
11 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
12 3 (0.11%) Consul
12 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
13 2 (0.073%) Cilium
13 2 (0.073%) HAProxy
13 2 (0.073%) Packer
13 2 (0.073%) Podman
13 2 (0.073%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 160 (5.86%) Microsoft
2 109 (3.99%) Google
3 89 (3.26%) Databricks
4 84 (3.07%) Oracle
5 74 (2.71%) OpenAI
6 39 (1.43%) Red Hat
7 31 (1.13%) 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 8 (0.29%) Checkmarx
14 8 (0.29%) Dynatrace
14 8 (0.29%) Siemens
15 7 (0.26%) Hitachi
15 7 (0.26%) Mistral