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 12 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 43 31
Rank change year-on-year +11 -12 +11
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,725 1,398 1,820
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.89% 5.01% 5.65%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.94% 5.51% 6.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,444 841 1,092
10th Percentile £400 £375 £406
25th Percentile £463 £463 £490
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £551 £575 £603
Median % change year-on-year -4.26% -4.64% -1.31%
75th Percentile £688 £725 £800
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £550 £600
% change year-on-year - -8.33% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 430 123 203
10th Percentile £51.25 £42.70 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.08 £52.50 £60.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.13 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £74.60 £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 39,254 25,364 27,855
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.86% 90.88% 86.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,668 16,092 16,994
10th Percentile £325 £293 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,012 1,593 1,122
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.50 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.36 £17.87 £20.14
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -40.82% -5.56%
75th Percentile £67.47 £44.81 £66.61
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.45 £74.40
UK median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -9.60%

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 12 October 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 12 October 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 12 October 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 -2 1,242 £600 -4.00% 3,578
North of England +23 473 £522 +4.30% 776
South East +41 338 £525 +10.53% 672
South West +14 296 £550 +19.57% 371
North West +30 232 £550 +10.00% 460
East of England +16 208 £505 -10.22% 417
Yorkshire +5 173 £500 -2.44% 198
Midlands +30 146 £470 -10.48% 309
West Midlands +16 103 £470 -14.55% 187
North East +3 70 £650 +33.33% 121
East Midlands +15 42 £425 +0.95% 122
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 63 (2.31%) Apache Spark
2 60 (2.20%) Confluence
3 50 (1.83%) Apache Airflow
4 36 (1.32%) Apache
5 16 (0.59%) CMS
6 14 (0.51%) SharePoint
7 10 (0.37%) Jupyter
8 9 (0.33%) Ethereum
9 7 (0.26%) SAS
10 6 (0.22%) Camunda
10 6 (0.22%) nginx
11 5 (0.18%) Apache Solr
11 5 (0.18%) Apache Superset
11 5 (0.18%) Hyperledger
11 5 (0.18%) WordPress
12 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
13 2 (0.073%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 2 (0.073%) Cloud Foundry
13 2 (0.073%) Headless CMS
13 2 (0.073%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 16 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
2 11 (0.40%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.37%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 10 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
4 5 (0.18%) Microsoft Excel
5 4 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.11%) CPLEX
6 3 (0.11%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.11%) Trello
7 2 (0.073%) CATIA
7 2 (0.073%) LaTeX
7 2 (0.073%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 2 (0.073%) Notion
7 2 (0.073%) Simulink
8 1 (0.037%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.037%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.037%) Blender
8 1 (0.037%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.26%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.22%) Oracle Payroll
3 5 (0.18%) R3 Corda
4 4 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
4 4 (0.15%) Quorum
4 4 (0.15%) Ripple
5 3 (0.11%) Distributed Ledger
5 3 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
5 3 (0.11%) Primavera
5 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
5 3 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.11%) Temenos T24
6 2 (0.073%) Endur
6 2 (0.073%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 2 (0.073%) Orchestrade
6 2 (0.073%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.037%) Sage 50
7 1 (0.037%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.037%) Shopify
7 1 (0.037%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 703 (25.80%) AWS
2 566 (20.77%) Azure
3 286 (10.50%) GCP
4 248 (9.10%) GitHub
5 147 (5.39%) Serverless
6 130 (4.77%) GitHub Actions
7 129 (4.73%) Azure DevOps
8 99 (3.63%) AWS Lambda
9 77 (2.83%) Anthropic Claude
10 72 (2.64%) GitHub Copilot
11 67 (2.46%) Amazon S3
12 56 (2.06%) Amazon EKS
13 55 (2.02%) Amazon SQS
14 51 (1.87%) OpenShift
15 50 (1.83%) Amazon ECS
15 50 (1.83%) Power Platform
16 46 (1.69%) Snowflake
17 45 (1.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (1.25%) dbt
19 33 (1.21%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.10%) Wireless
2 23 (0.84%) Firewall
3 21 (0.77%) TCP/IP
4 20 (0.73%) Internet
4 20 (0.73%) VPN
5 19 (0.70%) Software-Defined Radio
6 16 (0.59%) HTTP
7 15 (0.55%) Wi-Fi
8 14 (0.51%) DNS
8 14 (0.51%) Ethernet
9 13 (0.48%) Network Security
10 7 (0.26%) RTP
10 7 (0.26%) Wireshark
11 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
12 5 (0.18%) SSL
13 4 (0.15%) 3GPP
13 4 (0.15%) Broadband
13 4 (0.15%) Reverse Proxy
13 4 (0.15%) RS-232
14 3 (0.11%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 141 (5.17%) PostgreSQL
2 98 (3.60%) Relational Database
3 87 (3.19%) NoSQL
3 87 (3.19%) SQL Server
4 65 (2.39%) MongoDB
5 53 (1.94%) Data Warehouse
6 43 (1.58%) MySQL
7 40 (1.47%) DynamoDB
8 37 (1.36%) Metadata
9 34 (1.25%) Data Lake
10 30 (1.10%) Amazon RDS
11 29 (1.06%) Redis
12 28 (1.03%) BigQuery
12 28 (1.03%) Elasticsearch
12 28 (1.03%) Power BI
13 27 (0.99%) Big Data
14 25 (0.92%) Pinecone
15 21 (0.77%) Delta Lake
16 19 (0.70%) Weaviate
17 18 (0.66%) Chroma
Development Applications
1 274 (10.06%) Git
2 153 (5.61%) Jenkins
3 150 (5.50%) GitLab
4 113 (4.15%) JIRA
5 46 (1.69%) Claude Code
6 45 (1.65%) SonarQube
7 37 (1.36%) Gradle
8 32 (1.17%) Visual Studio
9 30 (1.10%) JUnit
10 28 (1.03%) Maven
11 27 (0.99%) Rational DOORS
12 26 (0.95%) Selenium
13 24 (0.88%) Cucumber
14 23 (0.84%) Rational Rhapsody
15 17 (0.62%) Mockito
16 15 (0.55%) LabVIEW
17 13 (0.48%) Cypress.io
18 12 (0.44%) Bitbucket
18 12 (0.44%) Snyk
19 11 (0.40%) Postman
General
1 602 (22.09%) Social Skills
2 532 (19.52%) Finance
3 227 (8.33%) Banking
4 210 (7.71%) Public Sector
5 197 (7.23%) Analytical Skills
6 100 (3.67%) Aerospace
7 78 (2.86%) Front Office
8 56 (2.06%) Investment Banking
9 55 (2.02%) Manufacturing
10 45 (1.65%) Law
11 44 (1.61%) Retail
12 38 (1.39%) Automotive
13 34 (1.25%) Telecoms
14 30 (1.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 29 (1.06%) Military
16 24 (0.88%) Influencing Skills
16 24 (0.88%) Marketing
17 22 (0.81%) Back Office
18 21 (0.77%) Aviation
19 20 (0.73%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,060 (38.90%) Software Engineer
2 528 (19.38%) Developer
3 527 (19.34%) Senior
4 297 (10.90%) Lead
5 193 (7.08%) Senior Software Engineer
6 156 (5.72%) Java Engineer
7 150 (5.50%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 145 (5.32%) Java Developer
9 134 (4.92%) Embedded Engineer
10 129 (4.73%) Architect
11 128 (4.70%) Embedded Software Engineer
11 128 (4.70%) Software Developer
12 125 (4.59%) Java Software Engineer
13 114 (4.18%) Senior Developer
14 112 (4.11%) C++ Software Engineer
15 111 (4.07%) Python Engineer
16 108 (3.96%) Data Engineer
17 88 (3.23%) DevOps Engineer
18 80 (2.94%) AWS Engineer
19 75 (2.75%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 305 (11.19%) Terraform
2 254 (9.32%) REST
3 241 (8.84%) React
4 221 (8.11%) Spring
5 212 (7.78%) .NET
5 212 (7.78%) Spring Boot
6 186 (6.83%) Kafka
7 159 (5.83%) RESTful
8 134 (4.92%) Node.js
9 98 (3.60%) AngularJS
10 64 (2.35%) OAuth
11 62 (2.28%) Django
12 60 (2.20%) LangChain
13 57 (2.09%) HTML
14 55 (2.02%) CSS
15 52 (1.91%) Next.js
16 51 (1.87%) Web Services
17 47 (1.72%) Model Context Protocol
18 45 (1.65%) FastAPI
19 44 (1.61%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 433 (15.89%) Cloud Native
2 247 (9.06%) Distributed Systems
3 159 (5.83%) AI Agents
4 158 (5.80%) Product Ownership
5 79 (2.90%) Enterprise Software
6 64 (2.35%) Onboarding
7 61 (2.24%) Algorithms
8 60 (2.20%) Data Structures
9 55 (2.02%) Data Protection Act
10 41 (1.50%) Embedded Systems
11 40 (1.47%) Legacy Systems
12 38 (1.39%) Self-Motivation
13 32 (1.17%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 30 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
15 29 (1.06%) Fixed Income
16 27 (0.99%) Derivative
17 24 (0.88%) Equities
18 23 (0.84%) Management Information System
19 22 (0.81%) Virtual Team
20 19 (0.70%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 189 (6.94%) Linux
2 70 (2.57%) Windows
3 37 (1.36%) Unix
4 19 (0.70%) Embedded Linux
4 19 (0.70%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (0.59%) Android
6 12 (0.44%) FreeRTOS
6 12 (0.44%) Windows Server
7 10 (0.37%) Apple iOS
8 7 (0.26%) Ubuntu
9 4 (0.15%) Debian
9 4 (0.15%) macOS
10 3 (0.11%) Rocky
10 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
10 3 (0.11%) zOS
11 2 (0.073%) Windows 10
11 2 (0.073%) Windows Server 2019
12 1 (0.037%) Robot Operating System
12 1 (0.037%) Tizen
12 1 (0.037%) webOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 963 (35.34%) CI/CD
2 837 (30.72%) Agile
3 663 (24.33%) DevOps
4 625 (22.94%) AI
5 428 (15.71%) Test Automation
6 407 (14.94%) Microservices
7 367 (13.47%) Continuous Improvement
8 340 (12.48%) Problem-Solving
9 336 (12.33%) Infrastructure as Code
10 308 (11.30%) Observability
11 280 (10.28%) SDLC
11 280 (10.28%) Stakeholder Management
12 268 (9.83%) Containerisation
13 253 (9.28%) Full-Stack Development
14 243 (8.92%) Technical Leadership
15 240 (8.81%) LLM
15 240 (8.81%) Machine Learning
16 233 (8.55%) Platform Engineering
17 232 (8.51%) Event-Driven
18 227 (8.33%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 812 (29.80%) Python
2 681 (24.99%) Java
3 410 (15.05%) SQL
4 312 (11.45%) TypeScript
5 284 (10.42%) C#
6 230 (8.44%) JavaScript
7 225 (8.26%) C++
8 110 (4.04%) C
9 82 (3.01%) Go
10 70 (2.57%) Ada
11 67 (2.46%) Kotlin
12 52 (1.91%) PowerShell
13 48 (1.76%) Bash
14 44 (1.61%) Rust
15 38 (1.39%) Scala
16 29 (1.06%) Bicep
16 29 (1.06%) Embedded C
17 24 (0.88%) PL/SQL
18 21 (0.77%) PHP
19 18 (0.66%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 591 (21.69%) Security Cleared
2 491 (18.02%) SC Cleared
3 227 (8.33%) Degree
4 104 (3.82%) Computer Science Degree
4 104 (3.82%) DV Cleared
5 61 (2.24%) BPSS Clearance
6 50 (1.83%) AWS Certification
6 50 (1.83%) Master's Degree
7 31 (1.14%) Azure Certification
8 18 (0.66%) PhD
9 15 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 12 (0.44%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 11 (0.40%) CISSP
11 11 (0.40%) PMP
11 11 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
12 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
13 5 (0.18%) ISTQB
13 5 (0.18%) Numerate Degree
13 5 (0.18%) PMI Certification
14 4 (0.15%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 172 (6.31%) QA
2 88 (3.23%) Data Quality
3 63 (2.31%) Accessibility
4 24 (0.88%) MISRA
5 20 (0.73%) GDPR
6 17 (0.62%) Def Stans
7 15 (0.55%) NIST
8 14 (0.51%) WCAG
9 13 (0.48%) MISRA C
10 12 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 11 (0.40%) IEC 61508
12 10 (0.37%) DO-178B
13 8 (0.29%) GRC
14 7 (0.26%) NCSC
15 5 (0.18%) EMIR
15 5 (0.18%) HL7
15 5 (0.18%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.18%) MiFID
15 5 (0.18%) PCI DSS
15 5 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 398 (14.61%) Docker
2 29 (1.06%) Firmware
3 17 (0.62%) Active Directory
3 17 (0.62%) Embedded Firmware
4 13 (0.48%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.073%) Virtual Desktop
7 1 (0.037%) Hyper-V
7 1 (0.037%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.037%) zsh
Systems Management
1 460 (16.88%) Kubernetes
2 98 (3.60%) Ansible
3 63 (2.31%) Grafana
4 45 (1.65%) Prometheus
5 36 (1.32%) Argo
6 21 (0.77%) Single Sign-On
7 16 (0.59%) Kibana
8 10 (0.37%) Puppet
9 6 (0.22%) Functional Safety
10 5 (0.18%) Progress Chef
11 4 (0.15%) Istio
11 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
11 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
12 3 (0.11%) Consul
12 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
12 3 (0.11%) Podman
13 2 (0.073%) Cilium
13 2 (0.073%) HAProxy
13 2 (0.073%) Packer
13 2 (0.073%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 178 (6.53%) Microsoft
2 108 (3.96%) Google
3 96 (3.52%) Databricks
4 90 (3.30%) Oracle
5 74 (2.72%) OpenAI
6 39 (1.43%) Red Hat
7 33 (1.21%) Salesforce
8 27 (0.99%) Splunk
9 20 (0.73%) Foundry
9 20 (0.73%) IBM
10 16 (0.59%) Adobe
10 16 (0.59%) Informatica
10 16 (0.59%) SAP
11 15 (0.55%) Dynatrace
12 14 (0.51%) ServiceNow
13 10 (0.37%) VMware
14 8 (0.29%) Siemens
15 7 (0.26%) Cisco
15 7 (0.26%) Hitachi
15 7 (0.26%) Mistral