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 7 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 39 40 33
Rank change year-on-year +1 -7 +8
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 1,959 1,236 1,949
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.03% 5.07% 5.22%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.86% 5.58% 6.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,031 822 1,141
10th Percentile £400 £406 £425
25th Percentile £450 £500 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -
75th Percentile £672 £763 £748
90th Percentile £788 £838 £838
UK median daily rate £550 £600 £600
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 418 81 318
10th Percentile £52.50 £43.00 £46.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.38 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year - +4.00% -2.56%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.46 £68.75 £80.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year - +4.00% -2.45%

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 33,455 22,163 32,367
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.84% 90.86% 86.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,444 14,600 21,357
10th Percentile £313 £311 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,067 867 2,171
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.99 £12.92
25th Percentile £19.54 £19.00 £15.87
Median hourly rate £38.25 £32.50 £33.00
Median % change year-on-year +17.69% -1.52% -12.00%
75th Percentile £65.59 £65.00 £58.69
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.80 £70.50
UK median hourly rate £36.00 £31.51 £33.00
% change year-on-year +14.25% -4.52% -11.53%

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 7 April 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 7 April 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 7 April 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 -11 843 £600 -10.45% 539
North of England +4 279 £500 -4.76% 264
South West +11 268 £550 -5.98% 216
South East +2 210 £525 +2.44% 355
East of England +35 198 £475 -2.66% 135
North West +1 132 £500 -5.66% 145
Yorkshire +1 103 £518 +3.50% 87
Midlands -36 100 £500 +2.04% 126
West Midlands -18 89 £500 - 74
North East +19 47 £478 +3.80% 33
East Midlands -35 11 £525 +6.06% 52
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 56 (2.86%) Confluence
2 47 (2.40%) Apache
3 44 (2.25%) Apache Spark
4 19 (0.97%) Apache Airflow
5 10 (0.51%) CMS
6 9 (0.46%) WebLogic
7 8 (0.41%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.26%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.20%) IIS
9 4 (0.20%) JBoss
9 4 (0.20%) nginx
10 3 (0.15%) Camunda
10 3 (0.15%) OpenStack
10 3 (0.15%) SAS
11 2 (0.10%) Magnolia
11 2 (0.10%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 2 (0.10%) Sitecore CMS
11 2 (0.10%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.10%) WinCC
11 2 (0.10%) WordPress
Applications
1 12 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.51%) Microsoft Excel
3 5 (0.26%) Chatbot
4 4 (0.20%) Simulink
5 3 (0.15%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.10%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.051%) Maya
7 1 (0.051%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.051%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.051%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 4 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (0.10%) Aladdin
2 2 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.10%) LabWindows
2 2 (0.10%) Primavera
3 1 (0.051%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.051%) Orchestrade
3 1 (0.051%) Sprinklr
3 1 (0.051%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 551 (28.13%) AWS
2 361 (18.43%) Azure
3 178 (9.09%) GCP
4 130 (6.64%) GitHub
5 127 (6.48%) Serverless
6 70 (3.57%) Azure DevOps
7 64 (3.27%) AWS Lambda
8 59 (3.01%) Amazon S3
9 58 (2.96%) GitHub Actions
10 51 (2.60%) OpenShift
11 48 (2.45%) Power Platform
12 42 (2.14%) AWS CloudFormation
13 40 (2.04%) Azure AKS
14 35 (1.79%) Amazon EKS
15 32 (1.63%) Amazon ECS
16 30 (1.53%) Amazon EC2
16 30 (1.53%) Azure Functions
16 30 (1.53%) SaaS
17 27 (1.38%) Amazon SQS
18 22 (1.12%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.17%) Ethernet
2 13 (0.66%) Network Security
2 13 (0.66%) TCP/IP
3 12 (0.61%) Firewall
4 11 (0.56%) Software-Defined Radio
5 7 (0.36%) Wireless
6 6 (0.31%) HTTP
7 5 (0.26%) 3GPP
7 5 (0.26%) Modbus
7 5 (0.26%) VPN
8 4 (0.20%) BGP
8 4 (0.20%) RS-232
8 4 (0.20%) RS-485
8 4 (0.20%) Software-Defined Networking
8 4 (0.20%) VLAN
9 3 (0.15%) Bluetooth
9 3 (0.15%) IPv4
9 3 (0.15%) IPv6
9 3 (0.15%) RS-422
10 2 (0.10%) iSCSI
Database & Business Intelligence
1 125 (6.38%) PostgreSQL
2 70 (3.57%) Relational Database
3 64 (3.27%) Apache Cassandra
4 62 (3.16%) NoSQL
5 58 (2.96%) SQL Server
6 53 (2.71%) MongoDB
7 35 (1.79%) Power BI
8 34 (1.74%) Data Lake
9 32 (1.63%) Amazon RDS
10 29 (1.48%) MySQL
11 27 (1.38%) Big Data
11 27 (1.38%) BigQuery
12 24 (1.23%) Metadata
13 23 (1.17%) DynamoDB
14 19 (0.97%) Data Warehouse
15 17 (0.87%) Elasticsearch
16 16 (0.82%) Amazon Athena
17 15 (0.77%) Hadoop
17 15 (0.77%) Mixpanel
18 13 (0.66%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 200 (10.21%) Git
2 124 (6.33%) Jenkins
3 107 (5.46%) GitLab
4 106 (5.41%) JIRA
5 36 (1.84%) Rational DOORS
6 35 (1.79%) Rational Rhapsody
7 34 (1.74%) SonarQube
8 33 (1.68%) JUnit
9 27 (1.38%) Selenium
10 26 (1.33%) Cucumber
10 26 (1.33%) Gradle
11 23 (1.17%) IntelliJ
12 22 (1.12%) Bitbucket
13 21 (1.07%) Cypress.io
14 20 (1.02%) Maven
15 18 (0.92%) Mockito
16 17 (0.87%) Eclipse
16 17 (0.87%) Visual Studio
17 15 (0.77%) Liquibase
18 9 (0.46%) Artifactory
General
1 304 (15.52%) Finance
2 303 (15.47%) Social Skills
3 126 (6.43%) Public Sector
4 115 (5.87%) Banking
5 106 (5.41%) Analytical Skills
6 77 (3.93%) Aerospace
7 67 (3.42%) Front Office
8 41 (2.09%) Electronics
9 34 (1.74%) Law
10 31 (1.58%) Retail
11 29 (1.48%) Investment Banking
12 28 (1.43%) Influencing Skills
12 28 (1.43%) Manufacturing
13 26 (1.33%) Military
14 22 (1.12%) Financial Institution
14 22 (1.12%) Telecoms
15 21 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
16 13 (0.66%) Documentation Skills
16 13 (0.66%) Legal
17 12 (0.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
Job Titles
1 1,044 (53.29%) Software Engineer
2 359 (18.33%) Senior
3 356 (18.17%) Developer
4 167 (8.52%) Senior Software Engineer
5 146 (7.45%) Lead
6 135 (6.89%) Java Engineer
7 128 (6.53%) Embedded Engineer
8 125 (6.38%) C++ Software Engineer
9 116 (5.92%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 106 (5.41%) Java Software Engineer
11 85 (4.34%) Java Developer
12 80 (4.08%) Architect
13 74 (3.78%) Senior Developer
14 67 (3.42%) Python Engineer
15 63 (3.22%) Developer/Software Engineer
16 61 (3.11%) Python Developer
17 58 (2.96%) Lead Software Engineer
18 56 (2.86%) Data Engineer
19 54 (2.76%) Software Developer
20 53 (2.71%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 236 (12.05%) React
2 206 (10.52%) Kafka
3 169 (8.63%) Node.js
4 143 (7.30%) .NET
5 139 (7.10%) REST
6 133 (6.79%) Spring
7 119 (6.07%) Spring Boot
8 102 (5.21%) AngularJS
8 102 (5.21%) RESTful
9 69 (3.52%) GraphQL
10 68 (3.47%) gRPC
11 57 (2.91%) Middleware
12 52 (2.65%) HTML
12 52 (2.65%) Redux
13 51 (2.60%) CSS
14 47 (2.40%) JSON
15 42 (2.14%) Playwright
16 37 (1.89%) Web Services
17 32 (1.63%) Vue
18 31 (1.58%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 214 (10.92%) Cloud Native
2 152 (7.76%) Distributed Systems
3 95 (4.85%) Product Ownership
4 75 (3.83%) Algorithms
5 62 (3.16%) Fixed Income
6 34 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
7 30 (1.53%) Derivative
8 29 (1.48%) Mobile App
9 28 (1.43%) Legacy Systems
9 28 (1.43%) Onboarding
10 27 (1.38%) AI Agents
11 26 (1.33%) Data Structures
12 25 (1.28%) Embedded Systems
12 25 (1.28%) Equities
13 24 (1.23%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 24 (1.23%) Greenfield Project
14 18 (0.92%) Hedge funds
14 18 (0.92%) Public Cloud
14 18 (0.92%) Robotics
15 16 (0.82%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 198 (10.11%) Linux
2 73 (3.73%) Windows
3 45 (2.30%) Unix
4 26 (1.33%) Android
5 25 (1.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 19 (0.97%) Apple iOS
7 15 (0.77%) Windows Server
8 9 (0.46%) Ubuntu
9 8 (0.41%) Embedded Linux
9 8 (0.41%) FreeRTOS
10 5 (0.26%) Debian
10 5 (0.26%) VMS
11 3 (0.15%) Rocky
12 2 (0.10%) Robot Operating System
12 2 (0.10%) Solaris
12 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
12 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2019
13 1 (0.051%) Mac OS
13 1 (0.051%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 575 (29.35%) Agile
2 567 (28.94%) CI/CD
3 393 (20.06%) DevOps
4 336 (17.15%) Microservices
5 265 (13.53%) AI
6 244 (12.46%) Problem-Solving
7 217 (11.08%) Containerisation
8 199 (10.16%) Full-Stack Development
8 199 (10.16%) Test Automation
9 196 (10.01%) Infrastructure as Code
10 164 (8.37%) Computer Science
11 162 (8.27%) Machine Learning
12 155 (7.91%) Continuous Improvement
13 154 (7.86%) Mentoring
14 147 (7.50%) Observability
15 135 (6.89%) SDLC
16 133 (6.79%) Scrum
17 132 (6.74%) TDD
18 128 (6.53%) Technical Leadership
19 117 (5.97%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 539 (27.51%) Python
2 484 (24.71%) Java
3 254 (12.97%) SQL
4 240 (12.25%) C#
5 239 (12.20%) C++
6 237 (12.10%) TypeScript
7 222 (11.33%) JavaScript
8 163 (8.32%) Go
9 129 (6.58%) Ada
10 115 (5.87%) C
11 39 (1.99%) PowerShell
12 35 (1.79%) Kotlin
13 32 (1.63%) Bash
14 29 (1.48%) Embedded C
15 27 (1.38%) Ruby
15 27 (1.38%) Rust
16 26 (1.33%) MATLAB
17 21 (1.07%) Shell Script
18 20 (1.02%) Embedded C++
19 17 (0.87%) Scala
Qualifications
1 481 (24.55%) Security Cleared
2 374 (19.09%) SC Cleared
3 184 (9.39%) Degree
4 89 (4.54%) Computer Science Degree
5 62 (3.16%) DV Cleared
6 50 (2.55%) Master's Degree
7 28 (1.43%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.07%) AWS Certification
9 17 (0.87%) PhD
10 15 (0.77%) CISSP
11 14 (0.71%) Azure Certification
12 13 (0.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 12 (0.61%) CISM
14 10 (0.51%) TOGAF Certification
15 8 (0.41%) ISTQB
16 7 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Certification
18 4 (0.20%) HND
18 4 (0.20%) Microsoft Certified Professional
19 3 (0.15%) HNC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 109 (5.56%) QA
2 56 (2.86%) Def Stans
3 41 (2.09%) Data Quality
4 40 (2.04%) IEC 61508
5 28 (1.43%) Accessibility
6 26 (1.33%) GDPR
6 26 (1.33%) MISRA
7 19 (0.97%) MISRA C
8 15 (0.77%) WCAG
9 11 (0.56%) NIST
10 8 (0.41%) DO-178B
11 7 (0.36%) HL7
11 7 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 6 (0.31%) NCSC
13 3 (0.15%) EU AI Act
13 3 (0.15%) SLA
14 2 (0.10%) FATCA
14 2 (0.10%) PCI DSS
14 2 (0.10%) PMO
14 2 (0.10%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 319 (16.28%) Docker
2 18 (0.92%) Firmware
3 16 (0.82%) VMware Infrastructure
4 12 (0.61%) Virtual Machines
5 9 (0.46%) Active Directory
6 5 (0.26%) Embedded Firmware
7 4 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.15%) HDFS
9 2 (0.10%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 360 (18.38%) Kubernetes
2 213 (10.87%) Terraform
3 90 (4.59%) Grafana
4 57 (2.91%) Ansible
5 51 (2.60%) Prometheus
6 32 (1.63%) Argo
7 17 (0.87%) Puppet
8 12 (0.61%) Progress Chef
9 7 (0.36%) Single Sign-On
10 6 (0.31%) Istio
10 6 (0.31%) Kibana
11 5 (0.26%) Kubeflow
12 4 (0.20%) Data Guard
12 4 (0.20%) Docker Swarm
12 4 (0.20%) HAProxy
12 4 (0.20%) HP Quality Center
13 3 (0.15%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
14 2 (0.10%) HP ALM
14 2 (0.10%) Podman
15 1 (0.051%) Fluentd
Vendors
1 145 (7.40%) Microsoft
2 70 (3.57%) Google
3 63 (3.22%) Oracle
4 61 (3.11%) Red Hat
5 49 (2.50%) Databricks
6 23 (1.17%) IBM
7 21 (1.07%) Splunk
8 20 (1.02%) Foundry
9 17 (0.87%) OpenAI
9 17 (0.87%) VMware
10 11 (0.56%) BiZZdesign
10 11 (0.56%) Siemens
11 10 (0.51%) Atlassian
11 10 (0.51%) PagerDuty
11 10 (0.51%) ServiceNow
12 9 (0.46%) MathWorks
12 9 (0.46%) Palantir
12 9 (0.46%) SAP
12 9 (0.46%) Software AG
13 8 (0.41%) ANSYS