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

6 months to
17 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 42 30
Rank change year-on-year +10 -12 +11
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,463 1,322 2,099
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.50% 4.86% 5.80%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.44% 5.36% 6.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,362 864 1,319
10th Percentile £400 £390 £413
25th Percentile £463 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £615
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -2.44% +2.50%
75th Percentile £688 £766 £788
90th Percentile £788 £846 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 417 78 349
10th Percentile £52.18 £38.63 £48.00
25th Percentile £61.00 £58.81 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £78.25 £75.00
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 38,249 24,669 31,010
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.41% 90.67% 85.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,059 15,837 20,183
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £645
90th Percentile £735 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,360 1,307 2,114
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.26 £13.18
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.88 £16.30
Median hourly rate £47.00 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +86.88% -34.02% -8.14%
75th Percentile £68.75 £53.75 £63.67
90th Percentile £83.00 £71.33 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -5.88%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 -4 1,088 £600 -7.69% 779
North of England +26 385 £538 +9.69% 253
South West +23 312 £550 +10.00% 175
South East +21 307 £525 +4.90% 300
East of England +29 224 £505 +3.48% 132
North West +7 181 £530 +6.85% 145
Yorkshire +18 142 £525 +7.14% 71
Midlands -21 103 £459 -7.27% 112
West Midlands -23 80 £459 -17.11% 51
North East +13 67 £650 +41.30% 39
East Midlands -11 22 £513 +7.89% 61
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 58 (2.35%) Confluence
2 44 (1.79%) Apache Spark
3 31 (1.26%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (1.22%) Apache
5 10 (0.41%) SAS
6 9 (0.37%) CMS
7 5 (0.20%) Ethereum
7 5 (0.20%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.20%) nginx
7 5 (0.20%) SharePoint
8 4 (0.16%) WebLogic
9 3 (0.12%) Jupyter
9 3 (0.12%) Palantir Foundry
9 3 (0.12%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.081%) Apache Superset
10 2 (0.081%) Cloud Foundry
10 2 (0.081%) IIS
10 2 (0.081%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.081%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.081%) WinCC
Applications
1 16 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.41%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 8 (0.32%) Chatbot
3 8 (0.32%) Microsoft Excel
4 6 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
5 5 (0.20%) CPLEX
5 5 (0.20%) Simulink
6 4 (0.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.081%) CATIA
8 2 (0.081%) Trello
9 1 (0.041%) Adobe After Effects
9 1 (0.041%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.041%) Blender
9 1 (0.041%) Maya
9 1 (0.041%) Notion
9 1 (0.041%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.28%) Oracle EBS
2 6 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
3 5 (0.20%) R3 Corda
4 4 (0.16%) Quorum
4 4 (0.16%) Ripple
5 3 (0.12%) Orchestrade
5 3 (0.12%) Primavera
5 3 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.081%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.081%) Endur
6 2 (0.081%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.041%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.041%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.041%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 623 (25.29%) AWS
2 474 (19.24%) Azure
3 246 (9.99%) GCP
4 186 (7.55%) GitHub
5 121 (4.91%) Serverless
6 96 (3.90%) Azure DevOps
7 92 (3.74%) GitHub Actions
8 80 (3.25%) AWS Lambda
9 63 (2.56%) Amazon S3
10 54 (2.19%) OpenShift
11 46 (1.87%) Power Platform
12 44 (1.79%) Anthropic Claude
13 42 (1.71%) Amazon SQS
14 40 (1.62%) Amazon EKS
15 39 (1.58%) Amazon ECS
16 38 (1.54%) Azure AKS
17 31 (1.26%) Amazon EC2
17 31 (1.26%) SaaS
18 29 (1.18%) AWS CloudFormation
19 28 (1.14%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.02%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (0.97%) Ethernet
2 24 (0.97%) Wireless
3 18 (0.73%) Firewall
3 18 (0.73%) TCP/IP
4 16 (0.65%) Internet
5 15 (0.61%) HTTP
6 13 (0.53%) VPN
7 12 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
8 10 (0.41%) Network Security
9 9 (0.37%) 3GPP
10 7 (0.28%) RTP
11 6 (0.24%) RS-232
11 6 (0.24%) Wireshark
12 5 (0.20%) DNS
12 5 (0.20%) RS-485
13 4 (0.16%) RS-422
14 3 (0.12%) IPv4
14 3 (0.12%) IPv6
14 3 (0.12%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 153 (6.21%) PostgreSQL
2 93 (3.78%) Relational Database
3 75 (3.05%) SQL Server
4 71 (2.88%) NoSQL
5 53 (2.15%) MongoDB
6 34 (1.38%) Data Warehouse
7 32 (1.30%) DynamoDB
8 29 (1.18%) Power BI
9 28 (1.14%) Big Data
9 28 (1.14%) MySQL
10 23 (0.93%) BigQuery
10 23 (0.93%) Redis
11 22 (0.89%) Amazon RDS
11 22 (0.89%) Data Lake
11 22 (0.89%) Metadata
12 21 (0.85%) Apache Cassandra
13 20 (0.81%) Elasticsearch
14 17 (0.69%) Amazon Redshift
14 17 (0.69%) Pinecone
15 15 (0.61%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 244 (9.91%) Git
2 150 (6.09%) Jenkins
3 126 (5.12%) GitLab
4 110 (4.47%) JIRA
5 55 (2.23%) SonarQube
6 35 (1.42%) Gradle
7 31 (1.26%) JUnit
8 26 (1.06%) Rational DOORS
9 24 (0.97%) Visual Studio
10 23 (0.93%) Rational Rhapsody
11 20 (0.81%) Claude Code
11 20 (0.81%) Cucumber
11 20 (0.81%) Selenium
12 19 (0.77%) Bitbucket
13 17 (0.69%) Maven
14 16 (0.65%) Liquibase
15 14 (0.57%) Mockito
16 12 (0.49%) Cypress.io
16 12 (0.49%) Eclipse
16 12 (0.49%) IntelliJ
General
1 443 (17.99%) Finance
2 436 (17.70%) Social Skills
3 172 (6.98%) Banking
4 164 (6.66%) Analytical Skills
5 159 (6.46%) Public Sector
6 107 (4.34%) Aerospace
7 90 (3.65%) Front Office
8 56 (2.27%) Retail
9 46 (1.87%) Manufacturing
10 45 (1.83%) Law
11 41 (1.66%) Investment Banking
12 33 (1.34%) Telecoms
13 29 (1.18%) Automotive
14 27 (1.10%) Military
15 25 (1.02%) Aviation
16 24 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
17 23 (0.93%) Electronics
18 17 (0.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
19 16 (0.65%) Documentation Skills
19 16 (0.65%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,198 (48.64%) Software Engineer
2 459 (18.64%) Developer
3 421 (17.09%) Senior
4 263 (10.68%) Lead
5 175 (7.11%) Senior Software Engineer
6 168 (6.82%) Java Engineer
7 145 (5.89%) Embedded Engineer
8 138 (5.60%) Java Software Engineer
9 134 (5.44%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 131 (5.32%) Java Developer
11 121 (4.91%) C++ Software Engineer
12 101 (4.10%) Architect
12 101 (4.10%) Lead Software Engineer
13 96 (3.90%) Python Engineer
14 90 (3.65%) Software Developer
15 84 (3.41%) Senior Developer
16 78 (3.17%) Python Developer
17 75 (3.05%) DevOps Engineer
18 74 (3.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
19 73 (2.96%) Developer/Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 281 (11.41%) React
2 186 (7.55%) .NET
3 183 (7.43%) Node.js
4 180 (7.31%) Kafka
5 177 (7.19%) REST
5 177 (7.19%) Spring
6 158 (6.41%) Spring Boot
7 112 (4.55%) RESTful
8 105 (4.26%) AngularJS
9 77 (3.13%) GraphQL
10 60 (2.44%) Redux
11 47 (1.91%) Next.js
12 46 (1.87%) CSS
13 45 (1.83%) HTML
14 43 (1.75%) Django
15 40 (1.62%) JSON
16 37 (1.50%) OAuth
17 35 (1.42%) Quarkus
18 34 (1.38%) Web Services
19 33 (1.34%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 296 (12.02%) Cloud Native
2 197 (8.00%) Distributed Systems
3 128 (5.20%) Product Ownership
4 81 (3.29%) Algorithms
5 73 (2.96%) Fixed Income
6 66 (2.68%) AI Agents
7 45 (1.83%) Data Structures
8 44 (1.79%) Embedded Systems
8 44 (1.79%) Onboarding
9 43 (1.75%) Data Protection Act
10 34 (1.38%) Derivative
11 33 (1.34%) Legacy Systems
12 32 (1.30%) Enterprise Software
12 32 (1.30%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 32 (1.30%) Self-Motivation
13 28 (1.14%) Equities
14 21 (0.85%) Greenfield Project
14 21 (0.85%) Robotics
15 17 (0.69%) Mobile App
16 16 (0.65%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 186 (7.55%) Linux
2 57 (2.31%) Windows
3 35 (1.42%) Unix
4 29 (1.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 19 (0.77%) Embedded Linux
6 15 (0.61%) Apple iOS
7 13 (0.53%) Android
8 11 (0.45%) FreeRTOS
9 10 (0.41%) Windows Server
10 8 (0.32%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.16%) Debian
11 4 (0.16%) VMS
11 4 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.12%) Rocky
12 3 (0.12%) Solaris
12 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 2 (0.081%) VxWorks
14 1 (0.041%) Tizen
14 1 (0.041%) webOS
14 1 (0.041%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 769 (31.22%) CI/CD
2 758 (30.78%) Agile
3 544 (22.09%) DevOps
4 420 (17.05%) AI
5 361 (14.66%) Microservices
6 318 (12.91%) Test Automation
7 279 (11.33%) Problem-Solving
8 269 (10.92%) Full-Stack Development
9 247 (10.03%) Infrastructure as Code
10 244 (9.91%) Continuous Improvement
11 235 (9.54%) Containerisation
12 207 (8.40%) Machine Learning
13 203 (8.24%) Observability
14 197 (8.00%) TDD
15 196 (7.96%) Mentoring
16 193 (7.84%) SDLC
17 180 (7.31%) Scrum
18 174 (7.06%) Platform Engineering
19 173 (7.02%) Technical Leadership
20 167 (6.78%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 688 (27.93%) Python
2 629 (25.54%) Java
3 316 (12.83%) SQL
4 310 (12.59%) TypeScript
5 283 (11.49%) C#
6 240 (9.74%) JavaScript
7 223 (9.05%) C++
8 128 (5.20%) Go
9 121 (4.91%) Ada
10 114 (4.63%) C
11 50 (2.03%) Kotlin
12 40 (1.62%) Rust
13 33 (1.34%) Bash
13 33 (1.34%) PowerShell
14 31 (1.26%) Scala
15 25 (1.02%) PL/SQL
16 19 (0.77%) Embedded C
17 18 (0.73%) MATLAB
17 18 (0.73%) Ruby
17 18 (0.73%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 582 (23.63%) Security Cleared
2 481 (19.53%) SC Cleared
3 192 (7.80%) Degree
4 83 (3.37%) Computer Science Degree
5 74 (3.00%) DV Cleared
6 54 (2.19%) BPSS Clearance
7 37 (1.50%) Master's Degree
8 33 (1.34%) AWS Certification
9 19 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 15 (0.61%) Azure Certification
10 15 (0.61%) PhD
11 10 (0.41%) CISSP
12 7 (0.28%) ISTQB
12 7 (0.28%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.24%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.24%) TOGAF Certification
14 5 (0.20%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 5 (0.20%) PMP
14 5 (0.20%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
15 4 (0.16%) CISM
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 144 (5.85%) QA
2 50 (2.03%) Data Quality
3 46 (1.87%) Accessibility
4 32 (1.30%) Def Stans
5 21 (0.85%) GDPR
6 17 (0.69%) IEC 61508
7 16 (0.65%) MISRA
8 15 (0.61%) NIST
9 11 (0.45%) DO-178B
9 11 (0.45%) WCAG
10 10 (0.41%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 8 (0.32%) NCSC
12 6 (0.24%) GRC
12 6 (0.24%) MISRA C
12 6 (0.24%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.20%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 4 (0.16%) DO-254
15 3 (0.12%) FATCA
16 2 (0.081%) EMIR
System Software
1 348 (14.13%) Docker
2 24 (0.97%) Firmware
3 11 (0.45%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.41%) Active Directory
5 7 (0.28%) Virtual Machines
6 6 (0.24%) VMware Infrastructure
7 3 (0.12%) HDFS
8 2 (0.081%) SRDF
9 1 (0.041%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 399 (16.20%) Kubernetes
2 242 (9.83%) Terraform
3 71 (2.88%) Ansible
4 60 (2.44%) Grafana
5 40 (1.62%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.50%) Argo
7 12 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
8 11 (0.45%) Kibana
9 7 (0.28%) Puppet
10 6 (0.24%) Kubeflow
10 6 (0.24%) Progress Chef
11 5 (0.20%) HAProxy
12 3 (0.12%) Consul
12 3 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
12 3 (0.12%) Functional Safety
12 3 (0.12%) HP Quality Center
13 2 (0.081%) Cilium
13 2 (0.081%) HP ALM
13 2 (0.081%) HP Fortify
13 2 (0.081%) Istio
Vendors
1 124 (5.03%) Microsoft
2 84 (3.41%) Google
3 75 (3.05%) Oracle
4 49 (1.99%) Red Hat
5 42 (1.71%) Databricks
6 36 (1.46%) OpenAI
7 19 (0.77%) Informatica
7 19 (0.77%) Splunk
8 18 (0.73%) IBM
9 17 (0.69%) ServiceNow
10 16 (0.65%) Salesforce
11 15 (0.61%) Foundry
12 12 (0.49%) Adobe
12 12 (0.49%) SAP
12 12 (0.49%) Siemens
13 10 (0.41%) Checkmarx
13 10 (0.41%) ForgeRock
13 10 (0.41%) Okta
14 8 (0.32%) Dynatrace
14 8 (0.32%) Solace