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

6 months to
15 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 40 41 33
Rank change year-on-year +1 -8 +8
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 1,983 1,229 1,949
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.06% 5.04% 5.26%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.92% 5.54% 6.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,044 819 1,138
10th Percentile £400 £407 £425
25th Percentile £450 £500 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -
75th Percentile £664 £763 £750
90th Percentile £784 £838 £850
UK median daily rate £550 £600 £600
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 432 78 320
10th Percentile £52.50 £42.85 £46.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £52.63 £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 £73.41 £68.75 £80.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year - +4.00% -2.56%

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 33,504 22,203 32,130
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.48% 91.02% 86.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,453 14,593 21,161
10th Percentile £313 £313 £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 £613 £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 2,080 880 2,196
10th Percentile £15.38 £14.83 £12.85
25th Percentile £20.07 £18.51 £15.75
Median hourly rate £41.56 £31.76 £34.00
Median % change year-on-year +30.84% -6.59% -9.33%
75th Percentile £66.50 £64.50 £58.69
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.28 £71.75
UK median hourly rate £37.00 £30.78 £33.07
% change year-on-year +20.21% -6.91% -8.79%

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 15 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 15 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 15 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 -13 837 £600 -11.11% 550
North of England +8 280 £500 -0.20% 259
South West +15 277 £575 -0.86% 189
South East +2 224 £525 +2.44% 349
East of England +40 209 £475 -2.66% 151
North West +1 135 £500 -3.05% 139
Yorkshire +1 102 £519 +3.75% 84
Midlands -26 95 £495 +3.77% 129
West Midlands -24 84 £492 -3.09% 70
North East +17 48 £478 +3.80% 39
East Midlands -31 11 £500 +3.63% 59
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 51 (2.57%) Confluence
2 47 (2.37%) Apache Spark
3 43 (2.17%) Apache
4 21 (1.06%) Apache Airflow
5 11 (0.55%) CMS
6 9 (0.45%) WebLogic
7 6 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
8 5 (0.25%) 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 10 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
2 8 (0.40%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.20%) Chatbot
3 4 (0.20%) Simulink
4 3 (0.15%) CPLEX
4 3 (0.15%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 2 (0.10%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.050%) Maya
6 1 (0.050%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.050%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.050%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 5 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 4 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
3 2 (0.10%) Aladdin
3 2 (0.10%) LabWindows
4 1 (0.050%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.050%) Orchestrade
4 1 (0.050%) Primavera
4 1 (0.050%) Sprinklr
4 1 (0.050%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 545 (27.48%) AWS
2 359 (18.10%) Azure
3 177 (8.93%) GCP
4 133 (6.71%) GitHub
5 115 (5.80%) Serverless
6 70 (3.53%) Azure DevOps
7 65 (3.28%) AWS Lambda
8 60 (3.03%) Amazon S3
9 54 (2.72%) GitHub Actions
10 48 (2.42%) Power Platform
11 47 (2.37%) OpenShift
12 41 (2.07%) AWS CloudFormation
13 36 (1.82%) Amazon ECS
13 36 (1.82%) Amazon EKS
14 35 (1.77%) Azure AKS
15 31 (1.56%) SaaS
16 27 (1.36%) Amazon EC2
16 27 (1.36%) Amazon SQS
17 26 (1.31%) Azure Functions
18 20 (1.01%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.26%) Ethernet
2 17 (0.86%) Software-Defined Radio
3 14 (0.71%) Network Security
4 13 (0.66%) TCP/IP
5 11 (0.55%) Firewall
6 8 (0.40%) Wireless
7 7 (0.35%) 3GPP
7 7 (0.35%) HTTP
8 5 (0.25%) Modbus
9 4 (0.20%) BGP
9 4 (0.20%) RS-232
9 4 (0.20%) RS-485
9 4 (0.20%) Software-Defined Networking
9 4 (0.20%) VLAN
9 4 (0.20%) VPN
10 3 (0.15%) Bluetooth
10 3 (0.15%) IPv4
10 3 (0.15%) IPv6
10 3 (0.15%) RS-422
10 3 (0.15%) RTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 125 (6.30%) PostgreSQL
2 68 (3.43%) Relational Database
3 61 (3.08%) NoSQL
4 60 (3.03%) Apache Cassandra
4 60 (3.03%) SQL Server
5 55 (2.77%) MongoDB
6 35 (1.77%) Power BI
7 31 (1.56%) Amazon RDS
7 31 (1.56%) Data Lake
8 28 (1.41%) Big Data
8 28 (1.41%) MySQL
9 27 (1.36%) BigQuery
10 25 (1.26%) Metadata
11 23 (1.16%) DynamoDB
12 19 (0.96%) Data Warehouse
13 15 (0.76%) Elasticsearch
13 15 (0.76%) Mixpanel
14 14 (0.71%) Amazon Athena
15 13 (0.66%) Amazon Redshift
16 12 (0.61%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 202 (10.19%) Git
2 125 (6.30%) Jenkins
3 105 (5.30%) JIRA
4 103 (5.19%) GitLab
5 38 (1.92%) Rational DOORS
5 38 (1.92%) SonarQube
6 35 (1.77%) Rational Rhapsody
7 34 (1.71%) JUnit
8 27 (1.36%) IntelliJ
9 26 (1.31%) Gradle
10 24 (1.21%) Selenium
11 23 (1.16%) Cucumber
12 22 (1.11%) Bitbucket
13 21 (1.06%) Cypress.io
14 17 (0.86%) Eclipse
14 17 (0.86%) Maven
14 17 (0.86%) Visual Studio
15 15 (0.76%) Mockito
16 11 (0.55%) Liquibase
17 9 (0.45%) Artifactory
General
1 301 (15.18%) Finance
2 296 (14.93%) Social Skills
3 125 (6.30%) Public Sector
4 113 (5.70%) Analytical Skills
5 110 (5.55%) Banking
6 81 (4.08%) Aerospace
7 65 (3.28%) Front Office
8 41 (2.07%) Electronics
9 36 (1.82%) Law
10 32 (1.61%) Retail
11 31 (1.56%) Manufacturing
12 28 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
13 27 (1.36%) Military
14 26 (1.31%) Investment Banking
15 22 (1.11%) Telecoms
16 21 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
17 17 (0.86%) Financial Institution
18 13 (0.66%) Documentation Skills
18 13 (0.66%) Legal
19 11 (0.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
Job Titles
1 1,075 (54.21%) Software Engineer
2 360 (18.15%) Senior
3 351 (17.70%) Developer
4 171 (8.62%) Senior Software Engineer
5 146 (7.36%) Lead
6 140 (7.06%) Embedded Engineer
7 133 (6.71%) Java Engineer
8 128 (6.45%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 127 (6.40%) C++ Software Engineer
10 104 (5.24%) Java Software Engineer
11 85 (4.29%) Java Developer
12 81 (4.08%) Architect
13 71 (3.58%) Senior Developer
14 67 (3.38%) Developer/Software Engineer
15 61 (3.08%) Python Developer
16 60 (3.03%) Data Engineer
16 60 (3.03%) Python Engineer
17 58 (2.92%) Lead Software Engineer
17 58 (2.92%) Software Developer
18 53 (2.67%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 229 (11.55%) React
2 199 (10.04%) Kafka
3 165 (8.32%) Node.js
4 147 (7.41%) .NET
5 141 (7.11%) REST
6 134 (6.76%) Spring
7 119 (6.00%) Spring Boot
8 100 (5.04%) AngularJS
9 94 (4.74%) RESTful
10 72 (3.63%) GraphQL
11 62 (3.13%) gRPC
12 56 (2.82%) Middleware
13 52 (2.62%) Redux
14 48 (2.42%) HTML
15 47 (2.37%) CSS
16 44 (2.22%) JSON
17 39 (1.97%) Playwright
18 37 (1.87%) Web Services
19 32 (1.61%) Vue
20 31 (1.56%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 211 (10.64%) Cloud Native
2 145 (7.31%) Distributed Systems
3 95 (4.79%) Product Ownership
4 80 (4.03%) Algorithms
5 59 (2.98%) Fixed Income
6 35 (1.77%) AI Agents
6 35 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
7 28 (1.41%) Data Structures
7 28 (1.41%) Derivative
7 28 (1.41%) Onboarding
8 27 (1.36%) Embedded Systems
8 27 (1.36%) Mobile App
9 26 (1.31%) Legacy Systems
10 22 (1.11%) Equities
10 22 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
10 22 (1.11%) Robotics
11 20 (1.01%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 14 (0.71%) Hedge funds
12 14 (0.71%) Life Science
12 14 (0.71%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 196 (9.88%) Linux
2 73 (3.68%) Windows
3 46 (2.32%) Unix
4 26 (1.31%) Android
5 25 (1.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 19 (0.96%) Apple iOS
7 15 (0.76%) Windows Server
8 10 (0.50%) FreeRTOS
9 9 (0.45%) Embedded Linux
10 8 (0.40%) Ubuntu
11 5 (0.25%) Debian
12 4 (0.20%) VMS
13 3 (0.15%) Rocky
14 2 (0.10%) Robot Operating System
14 2 (0.10%) Solaris
14 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
14 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2019
15 1 (0.050%) Mac OS
15 1 (0.050%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 575 (29.00%) CI/CD
2 568 (28.64%) Agile
3 394 (19.87%) DevOps
4 324 (16.34%) Microservices
5 267 (13.46%) AI
6 238 (12.00%) Problem-Solving
7 209 (10.54%) Full-Stack Development
8 208 (10.49%) Containerisation
9 203 (10.24%) Test Automation
10 199 (10.04%) Infrastructure as Code
11 159 (8.02%) Machine Learning
12 154 (7.77%) Computer Science
12 154 (7.77%) Continuous Improvement
13 151 (7.61%) Mentoring
13 151 (7.61%) Observability
14 135 (6.81%) Scrum
14 135 (6.81%) SDLC
15 133 (6.71%) TDD
16 129 (6.51%) Technical Leadership
17 120 (6.05%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 531 (26.78%) Python
2 482 (24.31%) Java
3 261 (13.16%) SQL
4 251 (12.66%) C#
5 236 (11.90%) C++
5 236 (11.90%) TypeScript
6 214 (10.79%) JavaScript
7 156 (7.87%) Go
8 131 (6.61%) Ada
9 116 (5.85%) C
10 39 (1.97%) PowerShell
11 35 (1.77%) Kotlin
12 33 (1.66%) Bash
13 32 (1.61%) Embedded C
14 26 (1.31%) MATLAB
14 26 (1.31%) Ruby
14 26 (1.31%) Rust
15 21 (1.06%) Scala
15 21 (1.06%) Shell Script
16 19 (0.96%) Embedded C++
Qualifications
1 480 (24.21%) Security Cleared
2 371 (18.71%) SC Cleared
3 173 (8.72%) Degree
4 84 (4.24%) Computer Science Degree
5 61 (3.08%) DV Cleared
6 43 (2.17%) Master's Degree
7 31 (1.56%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.06%) AWS Certification
9 14 (0.71%) PhD
10 13 (0.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 13 (0.66%) Azure Certification
10 13 (0.66%) CISSP
11 10 (0.50%) CISM
12 8 (0.40%) ISTQB
12 8 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
13 7 (0.35%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 4 (0.20%) HND
14 4 (0.20%) Microsoft Certification
15 3 (0.15%) HNC
15 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 109 (5.50%) QA
2 55 (2.77%) Def Stans
3 43 (2.17%) Data Quality
4 40 (2.02%) IEC 61508
5 26 (1.31%) Accessibility
6 25 (1.26%) GDPR
6 25 (1.26%) MISRA
7 19 (0.96%) MISRA C
8 10 (0.50%) NIST
8 10 (0.50%) WCAG
9 7 (0.35%) DO-178B
9 7 (0.35%) HL7
9 7 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 6 (0.30%) NCSC
11 2 (0.10%) EU AI Act
11 2 (0.10%) FATCA
11 2 (0.10%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.10%) PMO
11 2 (0.10%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 2 (0.10%) SLA
System Software
1 315 (15.89%) Docker
2 17 (0.86%) Firmware
3 16 (0.81%) VMware Infrastructure
4 11 (0.55%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.40%) Active Directory
6 5 (0.25%) Embedded Firmware
7 4 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.15%) HDFS
9 2 (0.10%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 340 (17.15%) Kubernetes
2 214 (10.79%) Terraform
3 85 (4.29%) Grafana
4 53 (2.67%) Ansible
5 46 (2.32%) Prometheus
6 29 (1.46%) Argo
7 17 (0.86%) Puppet
8 12 (0.61%) Progress Chef
9 7 (0.35%) Kibana
10 6 (0.30%) Istio
10 6 (0.30%) Single Sign-On
11 5 (0.25%) 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 (0.050%) Consul
Vendors
1 137 (6.91%) Microsoft
2 77 (3.88%) Google
3 59 (2.98%) Oracle
4 57 (2.87%) Red Hat
5 49 (2.47%) Databricks
6 23 (1.16%) IBM
7 20 (1.01%) OpenAI
7 20 (1.01%) Splunk
8 17 (0.86%) Foundry
8 17 (0.86%) VMware
9 14 (0.71%) ServiceNow
10 11 (0.55%) Siemens
11 10 (0.50%) Atlassian
11 10 (0.50%) PagerDuty
11 10 (0.50%) SAP
12 9 (0.45%) BiZZdesign
12 9 (0.45%) MathWorks
12 9 (0.45%) Software AG
13 8 (0.40%) ANSYS
13 8 (0.40%) Spotify