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

6 months to
1 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 33 44 27
Rank change year-on-year +11 -17 +14
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,392 1,235 2,303
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.46% 4.82% 6.20%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.39% 5.28% 7.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,293 808 1,339
10th Percentile £400 £400 £419
25th Percentile £463 £475 £493
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £603
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -0.50% -0.50%
75th Percentile £688 £775 £775
90th Percentile £788 £841 £875
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 442 74 400
10th Percentile £52.50 £37.84 £46.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £52.84 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £76.75 £77.50
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 37,409 23,372 31,772
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.35% 91.17% 85.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,567 15,052 20,589
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
25th Percentile £418 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.97% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £729 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £515 £501 £525
% change year-on-year +2.79% -4.57% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,348 1,165 2,330
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.97 £17.88 £16.06
Median hourly rate £46.90 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +86.48% -34.02% +1.65%
75th Percentile £68.50 £55.00 £61.60
90th Percentile £82.25 £72.50 £72.93
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +3.81%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 -5 1,037 £600 -7.69% 1,062
North of England +27 364 £538 +8.28% 373
South West +26 334 £550 +4.76% 273
South East +22 297 £525 +4.90% 443
East of England +30 220 £495 +1.38% 224
North West +12 172 £525 +5.00% 197
Yorkshire +25 126 £538 +9.69% 97
Midlands -25 96 £462 -7.60% 161
West Midlands -19 76 £459 -17.67% 81
North East +18 71 £650 +41.30% 81
East Midlands -12 19 £513 +7.89% 80
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 54 (2.26%) Confluence
2 41 (1.71%) Apache Spark
3 28 (1.17%) Apache
3 28 (1.17%) Apache Airflow
4 9 (0.38%) SAS
5 7 (0.29%) CMS
6 6 (0.25%) SharePoint
7 5 (0.21%) nginx
8 4 (0.17%) Ethereum
8 4 (0.17%) Hyperledger
8 4 (0.17%) WebLogic
9 3 (0.13%) Palantir Foundry
9 3 (0.13%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.084%) Camunda
10 2 (0.084%) Cloud Foundry
10 2 (0.084%) IIS
10 2 (0.084%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.084%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.084%) WinCC
11 1 (0.042%) Headless CMS
Applications
1 15 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
2 8 (0.33%) Chatbot
3 7 (0.29%) Adobe Creative Suite
4 5 (0.21%) CPLEX
5 4 (0.17%) Simulink
6 3 (0.13%) Microsoft Excel
6 3 (0.13%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.084%) CATIA
7 2 (0.084%) Microsoft PowerPoint
8 1 (0.042%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.042%) Blender
8 1 (0.042%) Maya
8 1 (0.042%) MS Visio
8 1 (0.042%) Notion
8 1 (0.042%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 6 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
1 6 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
1 6 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 4 (0.17%) Quorum
2 4 (0.17%) R3 Corda
2 4 (0.17%) Ripple
3 3 (0.13%) Orchestrade
4 2 (0.084%) Aladdin
4 2 (0.084%) Remedy ITSM
5 1 (0.042%) Endur
5 1 (0.042%) LabWindows
5 1 (0.042%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.042%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.042%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 587 (24.54%) AWS
2 457 (19.11%) Azure
3 214 (8.95%) GCP
4 166 (6.94%) GitHub
5 121 (5.06%) Serverless
6 98 (4.10%) Azure DevOps
7 77 (3.22%) AWS Lambda
7 77 (3.22%) GitHub Actions
8 62 (2.59%) Amazon S3
9 58 (2.42%) OpenShift
10 46 (1.92%) Power Platform
11 40 (1.67%) Amazon SQS
12 39 (1.63%) Azure AKS
13 37 (1.55%) Anthropic Claude
14 36 (1.51%) Amazon ECS
14 36 (1.51%) Amazon EKS
15 31 (1.30%) Amazon EC2
15 31 (1.30%) SaaS
16 28 (1.17%) Entra ID
17 26 (1.09%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.25%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (1.00%) Ethernet
3 22 (0.92%) Wireless
4 17 (0.71%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.63%) HTTP
6 14 (0.59%) Internet
7 13 (0.54%) Firewall
8 12 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
9 10 (0.42%) 3GPP
10 9 (0.38%) VPN
11 8 (0.33%) Network Security
12 7 (0.29%) RTP
13 6 (0.25%) Wireshark
14 4 (0.17%) DNS
14 4 (0.17%) RS-232
14 4 (0.17%) RS-422
15 3 (0.13%) IPv4
15 3 (0.13%) IPv6
15 3 (0.13%) Modbus
15 3 (0.13%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 145 (6.06%) PostgreSQL
2 86 (3.60%) Relational Database
3 73 (3.05%) SQL Server
4 67 (2.80%) NoSQL
5 55 (2.30%) MongoDB
6 35 (1.46%) DynamoDB
7 32 (1.34%) Data Warehouse
8 30 (1.25%) MySQL
8 30 (1.25%) Power BI
9 29 (1.21%) Apache Cassandra
10 28 (1.17%) Amazon RDS
11 25 (1.05%) Big Data
12 24 (1.00%) Data Lake
13 23 (0.96%) BigQuery
14 21 (0.88%) Metadata
15 20 (0.84%) Redis
16 18 (0.75%) Pinecone
17 17 (0.71%) Elasticsearch
18 16 (0.67%) Amazon Redshift
18 16 (0.67%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 237 (9.91%) Git
2 147 (6.15%) Jenkins
3 123 (5.14%) GitLab
4 107 (4.47%) JIRA
5 56 (2.34%) SonarQube
6 38 (1.59%) Gradle
7 33 (1.38%) JUnit
8 28 (1.17%) Rational DOORS
8 28 (1.17%) Rational Rhapsody
9 25 (1.05%) Visual Studio
10 21 (0.88%) Cucumber
11 20 (0.84%) Maven
11 20 (0.84%) Selenium
12 19 (0.79%) Bitbucket
13 16 (0.67%) Liquibase
14 15 (0.63%) Cypress.io
14 15 (0.63%) IntelliJ
14 15 (0.63%) Mockito
15 14 (0.59%) Claude Code
16 12 (0.50%) Eclipse
General
1 424 (17.73%) Finance
2 398 (16.64%) Social Skills
3 160 (6.69%) Banking
4 152 (6.35%) Analytical Skills
5 149 (6.23%) Public Sector
6 99 (4.14%) Aerospace
7 85 (3.55%) Front Office
8 48 (2.01%) Retail
9 45 (1.88%) Law
10 42 (1.76%) Investment Banking
10 42 (1.76%) Manufacturing
11 28 (1.17%) Military
12 25 (1.05%) Automotive
12 25 (1.05%) Aviation
12 25 (1.05%) Influencing Skills
13 24 (1.00%) Telecoms
14 20 (0.84%) Electronics
15 16 (0.67%) Documentation Skills
15 16 (0.67%) Legal
16 15 (0.63%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,208 (50.50%) Software Engineer
2 441 (18.44%) Developer
3 404 (16.89%) Senior
4 242 (10.12%) Lead
5 179 (7.48%) Senior Software Engineer
6 169 (7.07%) Java Engineer
7 145 (6.06%) Embedded Engineer
8 139 (5.81%) Java Software Engineer
9 134 (5.60%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 130 (5.43%) C++ Software Engineer
11 128 (5.35%) Java Developer
12 103 (4.31%) Architect
13 89 (3.72%) Lead Software Engineer
14 84 (3.51%) Python Engineer
15 83 (3.47%) Senior Developer
16 81 (3.39%) Software Developer
17 73 (3.05%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 73 (3.05%) Python Developer
18 70 (2.93%) Developer/Software Engineer
19 66 (2.76%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 268 (11.20%) React
2 190 (7.94%) .NET
3 183 (7.65%) Kafka
4 176 (7.36%) Spring
5 171 (7.15%) Node.js
6 166 (6.94%) REST
7 161 (6.73%) Spring Boot
8 108 (4.52%) AngularJS
8 108 (4.52%) RESTful
9 77 (3.22%) GraphQL
10 59 (2.47%) Redux
11 48 (2.01%) CSS
12 47 (1.96%) HTML
13 41 (1.71%) Next.js
14 40 (1.67%) JSON
15 36 (1.51%) Middleware
16 35 (1.46%) Django
16 35 (1.46%) Quarkus
16 35 (1.46%) Web Services
17 34 (1.42%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 271 (11.33%) Cloud Native
2 181 (7.57%) Distributed Systems
3 121 (5.06%) Product Ownership
4 88 (3.68%) Algorithms
5 71 (2.97%) Fixed Income
6 65 (2.72%) AI Agents
7 42 (1.76%) Embedded Systems
7 42 (1.76%) Onboarding
8 36 (1.51%) Data Structures
9 35 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
10 33 (1.38%) Derivative
10 33 (1.38%) Legacy Systems
11 30 (1.25%) Self-Motivation
12 27 (1.13%) Equities
12 27 (1.13%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 25 (1.05%) Enterprise Software
14 21 (0.88%) Robotics
15 19 (0.79%) Greenfield Project
16 18 (0.75%) Mobile App
17 14 (0.59%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 184 (7.69%) Linux
2 59 (2.47%) Windows
3 38 (1.59%) Unix
4 30 (1.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 15 (0.63%) Apple iOS
5 15 (0.63%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.59%) Android
7 11 (0.46%) FreeRTOS
8 9 (0.38%) Ubuntu
8 9 (0.38%) Windows Server
9 5 (0.21%) Debian
10 4 (0.17%) Rocky
10 4 (0.17%) VMS
10 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.13%) Solaris
11 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2008
12 2 (0.084%) VxWorks
13 1 (0.042%) Tizen
13 1 (0.042%) webOS
13 1 (0.042%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 720 (30.10%) CI/CD
2 719 (30.06%) Agile
3 506 (21.15%) DevOps
4 381 (15.93%) AI
5 346 (14.46%) Microservices
6 293 (12.25%) Test Automation
7 260 (10.87%) Problem-Solving
8 255 (10.66%) Full-Stack Development
9 222 (9.28%) Containerisation
10 220 (9.20%) Infrastructure as Code
11 219 (9.16%) Continuous Improvement
12 189 (7.90%) TDD
13 186 (7.78%) SDLC
14 184 (7.69%) Observability
15 183 (7.65%) Machine Learning
16 177 (7.40%) Scrum
17 175 (7.32%) Mentoring
18 162 (6.77%) Platform Engineering
19 156 (6.52%) Technical Leadership
20 155 (6.48%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 643 (26.88%) Python
2 611 (25.54%) Java
3 315 (13.17%) SQL
4 297 (12.42%) C#
5 290 (12.12%) TypeScript
6 243 (10.16%) JavaScript
7 230 (9.62%) C++
8 131 (5.48%) Ada
9 128 (5.35%) Go
10 114 (4.77%) C
11 44 (1.84%) Kotlin
12 37 (1.55%) Rust
13 31 (1.30%) Bash
13 31 (1.30%) PowerShell
14 27 (1.13%) Scala
15 25 (1.05%) PL/SQL
16 24 (1.00%) MATLAB
17 22 (0.92%) Embedded C
18 18 (0.75%) Ruby
19 17 (0.71%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 588 (24.58%) Security Cleared
2 480 (20.07%) SC Cleared
3 178 (7.44%) Degree
4 80 (3.34%) Computer Science Degree
5 72 (3.01%) DV Cleared
6 50 (2.09%) BPSS Clearance
7 29 (1.21%) Master's Degree
8 28 (1.17%) AWS Certification
9 18 (0.75%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 13 (0.54%) Azure Certification
11 12 (0.50%) PhD
12 10 (0.42%) CISSP
13 7 (0.29%) ISTQB
13 7 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 6 (0.25%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.25%) TOGAF Certification
15 4 (0.17%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 4 (0.17%) GIAC
15 4 (0.17%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 4 (0.17%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 131 (5.48%) QA
2 45 (1.88%) Data Quality
3 44 (1.84%) Def Stans
4 40 (1.67%) Accessibility
5 30 (1.25%) IEC 61508
6 21 (0.88%) GDPR
7 20 (0.84%) MISRA
8 14 (0.59%) NIST
9 11 (0.46%) MISRA C
10 10 (0.42%) DO-178B
10 10 (0.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 10 (0.42%) NCSC
10 10 (0.42%) WCAG
11 6 (0.25%) GRC
11 6 (0.25%) PCI DSS
12 5 (0.21%) JSP 440
12 5 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 4 (0.17%) DO-254
14 3 (0.13%) FATCA
15 2 (0.084%) EMIR
System Software
1 325 (13.59%) Docker
2 24 (1.00%) Firmware
3 10 (0.42%) Active Directory
4 9 (0.38%) Embedded Firmware
5 8 (0.33%) VMware Infrastructure
6 5 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
7 4 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.13%) HDFS
9 2 (0.084%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 383 (16.01%) Kubernetes
2 222 (9.28%) Terraform
3 66 (2.76%) Ansible
4 64 (2.68%) Grafana
5 40 (1.67%) Prometheus
6 38 (1.59%) Argo
7 11 (0.46%) Kibana
8 9 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
9 7 (0.29%) Puppet
10 6 (0.25%) Progress Chef
11 5 (0.21%) HAProxy
12 4 (0.17%) Data Guard
12 4 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
13 3 (0.13%) Consul
13 3 (0.13%) Docker Swarm
13 3 (0.13%) Functional Safety
13 3 (0.13%) Kubeflow
14 2 (0.084%) Cilium
14 2 (0.084%) HP Fortify
14 2 (0.084%) Istio
Vendors
1 126 (5.27%) Microsoft
2 77 (3.22%) Google
3 74 (3.09%) Oracle
4 52 (2.17%) Red Hat
5 43 (1.80%) Databricks
6 37 (1.55%) OpenAI
7 21 (0.88%) IBM
8 18 (0.75%) Informatica
8 18 (0.75%) ServiceNow
8 18 (0.75%) Splunk
9 14 (0.59%) Salesforce
10 13 (0.54%) Foundry
11 12 (0.50%) Siemens
12 11 (0.46%) SAP
13 10 (0.42%) Checkmarx
13 10 (0.42%) ForgeRock
13 10 (0.42%) Okta
14 9 (0.38%) MathWorks
15 8 (0.33%) Adobe
15 8 (0.33%) VMware