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

6 months to
5 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 45 28
Rank change year-on-year +13 -17 +11
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,237 1,140 2,190
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.33% 4.73% 5.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.27% 5.18% 6.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,177 746 1,271
10th Percentile £400 £400 £419
25th Percentile £463 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -
75th Percentile £675 £759 £750
90th Percentile £775 £838 £850
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 461 65 384
10th Percentile £52.50 £43.76 £46.25
25th Percentile £60.00 £57.50 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £63.25
Median % change year-on-year - +2.77% -2.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £74.50 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year - +4.00% -3.85%

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 35,679 21,999 31,507
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.05% 91.35% 85.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,608 14,249 20,517
10th Percentile £325 £304 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.96% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,238 979 2,317
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.83
25th Percentile £20.76 £18.10 £16.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £28.50 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +66.67% -24.00% +1.35%
75th Percentile £68.00 £59.60 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.93 £75.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £27.53 £36.50
% change year-on-year +59.68% -24.58% +1.39%

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 5 June 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 5 June 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 5 June 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 -4 938 £575 -11.54% 1,319
North of England +25 333 £515 +3.00% 460
South West +24 327 £575 +6.98% 282
South East +21 283 £525 +3.65% 486
East of England +40 220 £495 +1.43% 214
North West +6 155 £500 - 287
Yorkshire +21 123 £525 +7.14% 95
Midlands -23 84 £468 -6.42% 194
West Midlands -22 70 £465 -16.59% 119
North East +16 60 £593 +28.80% 78
East Midlands -26 13 £525 +7.14% 75
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 (2.37%) Confluence
2 46 (2.06%) Apache Spark
3 33 (1.48%) Apache
4 26 (1.16%) Apache Airflow
5 8 (0.36%) SAS
6 6 (0.27%) CMS
6 6 (0.27%) SharePoint
7 5 (0.22%) IIS
7 5 (0.22%) nginx
8 4 (0.18%) Ethereum
8 4 (0.18%) Hyperledger
8 4 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
8 4 (0.18%) WebLogic
9 3 (0.13%) Camunda
9 3 (0.13%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.089%) Cloud Foundry
10 2 (0.089%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.089%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.089%) WinCC
11 1 (0.045%) OpenStack
Applications
1 14 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
2 6 (0.27%) Chatbot
2 6 (0.27%) Microsoft Excel
3 5 (0.22%) CPLEX
4 4 (0.18%) Adobe Creative Suite
4 4 (0.18%) Simulink
5 2 (0.089%) CATIA
5 2 (0.089%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 2 (0.089%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.045%) Adobe After Effects
6 1 (0.045%) Blender
6 1 (0.045%) Maya
6 1 (0.045%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.045%) Notion
6 1 (0.045%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 6 (0.27%) Dynamics CRM
1 6 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
2 5 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
3 4 (0.18%) Quorum
3 4 (0.18%) R3 Corda
3 4 (0.18%) Ripple
4 2 (0.089%) Aladdin
4 2 (0.089%) LabWindows
4 2 (0.089%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 2 (0.089%) Orchestrade
4 2 (0.089%) Remedy ITSM
5 1 (0.045%) Sprinklr
5 1 (0.045%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 550 (24.59%) AWS
2 421 (18.82%) Azure
3 199 (8.90%) GCP
4 154 (6.88%) GitHub
5 117 (5.23%) Serverless
6 90 (4.02%) Azure DevOps
7 74 (3.31%) AWS Lambda
8 67 (3.00%) GitHub Actions
9 60 (2.68%) Amazon S3
10 52 (2.32%) OpenShift
11 45 (2.01%) Power Platform
12 37 (1.65%) Amazon SQS
13 36 (1.61%) Amazon EKS
13 36 (1.61%) Azure AKS
14 34 (1.52%) Amazon ECS
15 33 (1.48%) Amazon EC2
16 28 (1.25%) Anthropic Claude
16 28 (1.25%) SaaS
17 24 (1.07%) AWS CloudFormation
17 24 (1.07%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.34%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (1.07%) Ethernet
3 20 (0.89%) Wireless
4 17 (0.76%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.67%) HTTP
6 11 (0.49%) Firewall
6 11 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
7 10 (0.45%) 3GPP
8 8 (0.36%) Network Security
9 7 (0.31%) Internet
9 7 (0.31%) RTP
9 7 (0.31%) VPN
10 6 (0.27%) Wireshark
11 4 (0.18%) DNS
11 4 (0.18%) Modbus
12 3 (0.13%) Bluetooth
12 3 (0.13%) IPv4
12 3 (0.13%) IPv6
12 3 (0.13%) RS-232
12 3 (0.13%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 130 (5.81%) PostgreSQL
2 73 (3.26%) Relational Database
3 63 (2.82%) SQL Server
4 59 (2.64%) NoSQL
5 50 (2.24%) MongoDB
6 40 (1.79%) Apache Cassandra
7 33 (1.48%) Power BI
8 32 (1.43%) DynamoDB
9 30 (1.34%) Amazon RDS
10 29 (1.30%) Big Data
10 29 (1.30%) BigQuery
11 28 (1.25%) Data Lake
12 25 (1.12%) Data Warehouse
13 24 (1.07%) Metadata
13 24 (1.07%) MySQL
14 16 (0.72%) Elasticsearch
14 16 (0.72%) Pinecone
15 15 (0.67%) Amazon Redshift
15 15 (0.67%) Weaviate
16 14 (0.63%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 221 (9.88%) Git
2 143 (6.39%) Jenkins
3 135 (6.03%) GitLab
4 109 (4.87%) JIRA
5 49 (2.19%) Gradle
6 46 (2.06%) SonarQube
7 35 (1.56%) JUnit
8 32 (1.43%) Rational DOORS
9 31 (1.39%) Rational Rhapsody
10 25 (1.12%) Cucumber
11 24 (1.07%) IntelliJ
12 23 (1.03%) Selenium
13 22 (0.98%) Bitbucket
13 22 (0.98%) Visual Studio
14 21 (0.94%) Maven
15 17 (0.76%) Cypress.io
16 16 (0.72%) Liquibase
16 16 (0.72%) Mockito
17 13 (0.58%) Artifactory
18 12 (0.54%) Eclipse
General
1 381 (17.03%) Finance
2 331 (14.80%) Social Skills
3 140 (6.26%) Banking
4 134 (5.99%) Analytical Skills
5 128 (5.72%) Public Sector
6 98 (4.38%) Aerospace
7 74 (3.31%) Front Office
8 46 (2.06%) Manufacturing
9 39 (1.74%) Law
10 36 (1.61%) Investment Banking
10 36 (1.61%) Retail
11 28 (1.25%) Military
12 25 (1.12%) Automotive
12 25 (1.12%) Influencing Skills
13 24 (1.07%) Aviation
14 22 (0.98%) Telecoms
15 21 (0.94%) Electronics
16 17 (0.76%) Financial Institution
16 17 (0.76%) Presentation Skills
17 14 (0.63%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,170 (52.30%) Software Engineer
2 411 (18.37%) Developer
3 389 (17.39%) Senior
4 192 (8.58%) Lead
5 182 (8.14%) Senior Software Engineer
6 161 (7.20%) Java Engineer
7 154 (6.88%) Embedded Engineer
8 143 (6.39%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 131 (5.86%) Java Software Engineer
10 124 (5.54%) C++ Software Engineer
11 115 (5.14%) Java Developer
12 91 (4.07%) Architect
13 77 (3.44%) Senior Developer
14 68 (3.04%) Developer/Software Engineer
14 68 (3.04%) Python Developer
14 68 (3.04%) Software Developer
15 66 (2.95%) DevOps Engineer
16 64 (2.86%) Python Engineer
17 63 (2.82%) Full-Stack Engineer
18 62 (2.77%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 249 (11.13%) React
2 178 (7.96%) Kafka
3 176 (7.87%) Spring
4 172 (7.69%) .NET
5 166 (7.42%) Node.js
6 164 (7.33%) Spring Boot
7 158 (7.06%) REST
8 107 (4.78%) AngularJS
9 105 (4.69%) RESTful
10 73 (3.26%) GraphQL
11 53 (2.37%) Redux
12 46 (2.06%) CSS
13 44 (1.97%) HTML
14 43 (1.92%) Middleware
15 40 (1.79%) JSON
16 36 (1.61%) gRPC
16 36 (1.61%) Next.js
17 35 (1.56%) Playwright
18 34 (1.52%) LangChain
19 33 (1.48%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 240 (10.73%) Cloud Native
2 161 (7.20%) Distributed Systems
3 108 (4.83%) Product Ownership
4 89 (3.98%) Algorithms
5 64 (2.86%) Fixed Income
6 55 (2.46%) AI Agents
7 40 (1.79%) Embedded Systems
8 37 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
9 36 (1.61%) Onboarding
10 32 (1.43%) Derivative
11 30 (1.34%) Legacy Systems
11 30 (1.34%) Robotics
12 29 (1.30%) Data Structures
13 25 (1.12%) Equities
14 24 (1.07%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
15 23 (1.03%) Self-Motivation
16 22 (0.98%) Greenfield Project
17 21 (0.94%) Mobile App
18 18 (0.80%) Enterprise Software
19 16 (0.72%) FPGA
Operating Systems
1 186 (8.31%) Linux
2 66 (2.95%) Windows
3 41 (1.83%) Unix
4 25 (1.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 18 (0.80%) Android
6 17 (0.76%) Apple iOS
7 16 (0.72%) Embedded Linux
8 12 (0.54%) Windows Server
9 11 (0.49%) FreeRTOS
10 5 (0.22%) Debian
10 5 (0.22%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.18%) Rocky
11 4 (0.18%) VMS
11 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.13%) Solaris
12 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2008
13 2 (0.089%) Robot Operating System
13 2 (0.089%) VxWorks
14 1 (0.045%) Mac OS
14 1 (0.045%) webOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 658 (29.41%) CI/CD
2 628 (28.07%) Agile
3 461 (20.61%) DevOps
4 346 (15.47%) Microservices
5 336 (15.02%) AI
6 257 (11.49%) Test Automation
7 239 (10.68%) Problem-Solving
8 235 (10.51%) Full-Stack Development
9 218 (9.75%) Containerisation
10 198 (8.85%) Infrastructure as Code
11 176 (7.87%) Continuous Improvement
12 170 (7.60%) Observability
12 170 (7.60%) TDD
13 168 (7.51%) SDLC
14 164 (7.33%) Machine Learning
15 158 (7.06%) Mentoring
16 155 (6.93%) Scrum
17 147 (6.57%) Computer Science
17 147 (6.57%) Technical Leadership
18 142 (6.35%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 585 (26.15%) Java
2 571 (25.53%) Python
3 297 (13.28%) SQL
4 283 (12.65%) C#
5 256 (11.44%) TypeScript
6 230 (10.28%) JavaScript
7 217 (9.70%) C++
8 134 (5.99%) Ada
9 129 (5.77%) Go
10 108 (4.83%) C
11 49 (2.19%) Kotlin
12 40 (1.79%) PowerShell
13 31 (1.39%) Rust
14 29 (1.30%) Bash
15 26 (1.16%) Embedded C
15 26 (1.16%) MATLAB
16 23 (1.03%) Scala
17 18 (0.80%) PL/SQL
17 18 (0.80%) Ruby
18 17 (0.76%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 530 (23.69%) Security Cleared
2 421 (18.82%) SC Cleared
3 181 (8.09%) Degree
4 87 (3.89%) Computer Science Degree
5 67 (3.00%) DV Cleared
6 46 (2.06%) BPSS Clearance
7 29 (1.30%) Master's Degree
8 23 (1.03%) AWS Certification
9 15 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 12 (0.54%) Azure Certification
11 8 (0.36%) CISSP
11 8 (0.36%) PhD
12 7 (0.31%) ISTQB
12 7 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.27%) Chartered Engineer
14 5 (0.22%) CISM
14 5 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
15 3 (0.13%) HNC
15 3 (0.13%) MBA
15 3 (0.13%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 123 (5.50%) QA
2 44 (1.97%) Def Stans
3 40 (1.79%) Data Quality
4 36 (1.61%) IEC 61508
5 34 (1.52%) Accessibility
6 21 (0.94%) GDPR
7 18 (0.80%) MISRA
8 14 (0.63%) MISRA C
9 11 (0.49%) NCSC
10 9 (0.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 9 (0.40%) NIST
11 8 (0.36%) WCAG
12 6 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.22%) DO-178B
13 5 (0.22%) JSP 440
14 4 (0.18%) DO-254
14 4 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.13%) FATCA
15 3 (0.13%) HL7
15 3 (0.13%) MiFID
System Software
1 311 (13.90%) Docker
2 21 (0.94%) Firmware
3 12 (0.54%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.45%) Embedded Firmware
5 7 (0.31%) Active Directory
5 7 (0.31%) Virtual Machines
6 4 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
7 3 (0.13%) HDFS
8 2 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 364 (16.27%) Kubernetes
2 203 (9.07%) Terraform
3 73 (3.26%) Grafana
4 58 (2.59%) Ansible
5 40 (1.79%) Prometheus
6 34 (1.52%) Argo
7 9 (0.40%) Puppet
8 8 (0.36%) Progress Chef
9 7 (0.31%) Single Sign-On
10 6 (0.27%) Istio
10 6 (0.27%) Kibana
11 5 (0.22%) HAProxy
12 4 (0.18%) Data Guard
12 4 (0.18%) Docker Swarm
12 4 (0.18%) Functional Safety
12 4 (0.18%) HP Quality Center
13 3 (0.13%) Kubeflow
14 2 (0.089%) Cilium
14 2 (0.089%) Consul
14 2 (0.089%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 127 (5.68%) Microsoft
2 75 (3.35%) Google
3 66 (2.95%) Oracle
4 57 (2.55%) Red Hat
5 46 (2.06%) Databricks
6 32 (1.43%) OpenAI
7 22 (0.98%) IBM
8 17 (0.76%) Splunk
9 15 (0.67%) Informatica
9 15 (0.67%) ServiceNow
10 13 (0.58%) Siemens
11 12 (0.54%) Foundry
11 12 (0.54%) VMware
12 10 (0.45%) ForgeRock
12 10 (0.45%) MathWorks
12 10 (0.45%) Okta
12 10 (0.45%) Salesforce
12 10 (0.45%) SAP
13 8 (0.36%) Checkmarx
13 8 (0.36%) Dynatrace