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 4 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 33 45 28
Rank change year-on-year +12 -17 +13
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,227 1,134 2,169
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.33% 4.73% 5.90%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.27% 5.18% 6.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,170 743 1,258
10th Percentile £400 £400 £419
25th Percentile £463 £475 £495
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -
75th Percentile £675 £763 £750
90th Percentile £776 £838 £850
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 458 65 383
10th Percentile £52.44 £43.76 £46.25
25th Percentile £60.00 £57.50 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year - +4.00% -3.85%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £74.50 £77.50
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 35,523 21,911 31,466
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.02% 91.34% 85.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,505 14,200 20,503
10th Percentile £325 £303 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £523 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.55% -0.36% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £513 £513 £525
% change year-on-year - -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,228 974 2,317
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.83
25th Percentile £20.69 £18.10 £16.00
Median hourly rate £47.00 £28.53 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +64.77% -23.93% +0.54%
75th Percentile £68.00 £59.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £42.71 £27.64 £36.50
% change year-on-year +54.50% -24.27% +1.39%

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 4 June 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 4 June 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 4 June 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 -3 933 £575 -12.11% 1,307
North of England +22 332 £515 +3.00% 445
South West +23 324 £575 +6.98% 273
South East +24 280 £525 +2.44% 483
East of England +40 221 £495 +1.43% 218
North West +8 154 £500 - 280
Yorkshire +14 123 £525 +7.14% 83
Midlands -34 84 £468 -5.47% 200
West Midlands -27 70 £465 -13.89% 120
North East +15 60 £593 +28.80% 82
East Midlands -27 13 £525 +7.14% 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 53 (2.38%) Confluence
2 46 (2.07%) Apache Spark
3 33 (1.48%) Apache
4 26 (1.17%) Apache Airflow
5 8 (0.36%) SAS
6 6 (0.27%) CMS
6 6 (0.27%) SharePoint
7 5 (0.22%) IIS
7 5 (0.22%) nginx
8 4 (0.18%) Ethereum
8 4 (0.18%) Hyperledger
8 4 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
8 4 (0.18%) WebLogic
9 3 (0.13%) Camunda
9 3 (0.13%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.090%) Cloud Foundry
10 2 (0.090%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.090%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.090%) WinCC
11 1 (0.045%) OpenStack
Applications
1 14 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
2 6 (0.27%) Chatbot
2 6 (0.27%) Microsoft Excel
3 5 (0.22%) CPLEX
4 4 (0.18%) Adobe Creative Suite
4 4 (0.18%) Simulink
5 2 (0.090%) CATIA
5 2 (0.090%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 2 (0.090%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.045%) Adobe After Effects
6 1 (0.045%) Blender
6 1 (0.045%) Maya
6 1 (0.045%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.045%) Notion
6 1 (0.045%) OrCAD
Business Applications
1 6 (0.27%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
2 5 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
3 4 (0.18%) Quorum
3 4 (0.18%) R3 Corda
3 4 (0.18%) Ripple
4 2 (0.090%) Aladdin
4 2 (0.090%) LabWindows
4 2 (0.090%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 2 (0.090%) Orchestrade
4 2 (0.090%) Remedy ITSM
5 1 (0.045%) Sprinklr
5 1 (0.045%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 546 (24.52%) AWS
2 420 (18.86%) Azure
3 199 (8.94%) GCP
4 150 (6.74%) GitHub
5 116 (5.21%) Serverless
6 89 (4.00%) Azure DevOps
7 73 (3.28%) AWS Lambda
8 64 (2.87%) GitHub Actions
9 60 (2.69%) Amazon S3
10 52 (2.33%) OpenShift
11 45 (2.02%) Power Platform
12 38 (1.71%) Azure AKS
13 37 (1.66%) Amazon EKS
14 36 (1.62%) Amazon SQS
15 34 (1.53%) Amazon ECS
16 32 (1.44%) Amazon EC2
17 28 (1.26%) Anthropic Claude
17 28 (1.26%) SaaS
18 24 (1.08%) AWS CloudFormation
19 23 (1.03%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.35%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (1.08%) Ethernet
3 20 (0.90%) Wireless
4 17 (0.76%) TCP/IP
5 15 (0.67%) HTTP
6 11 (0.49%) Firewall
6 11 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
7 10 (0.45%) 3GPP
8 8 (0.36%) Network Security
9 7 (0.31%) RTP
9 7 (0.31%) VPN
10 6 (0.27%) Internet
10 6 (0.27%) Wireshark
11 4 (0.18%) DNS
11 4 (0.18%) Modbus
12 3 (0.13%) Bluetooth
12 3 (0.13%) IPv4
12 3 (0.13%) IPv6
12 3 (0.13%) RS-232
12 3 (0.13%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 128 (5.75%) PostgreSQL
2 73 (3.28%) Relational Database
3 62 (2.78%) SQL Server
4 58 (2.60%) NoSQL
5 50 (2.25%) MongoDB
6 40 (1.80%) Apache Cassandra
7 33 (1.48%) Power BI
8 32 (1.44%) DynamoDB
9 30 (1.35%) Amazon RDS
10 29 (1.30%) Big Data
10 29 (1.30%) BigQuery
11 28 (1.26%) Data Lake
12 25 (1.12%) Data Warehouse
13 24 (1.08%) Metadata
13 24 (1.08%) MySQL
14 16 (0.72%) Elasticsearch
14 16 (0.72%) Pinecone
15 15 (0.67%) Amazon Redshift
15 15 (0.67%) Weaviate
16 14 (0.63%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 221 (9.92%) Git
2 142 (6.38%) Jenkins
3 134 (6.02%) GitLab
4 107 (4.80%) JIRA
5 49 (2.20%) Gradle
6 45 (2.02%) SonarQube
7 35 (1.57%) JUnit
8 32 (1.44%) Rational DOORS
9 31 (1.39%) Rational Rhapsody
10 24 (1.08%) Cucumber
10 24 (1.08%) IntelliJ
11 23 (1.03%) Selenium
12 22 (0.99%) Bitbucket
12 22 (0.99%) Visual Studio
13 21 (0.94%) Maven
14 17 (0.76%) Cypress.io
15 16 (0.72%) Liquibase
15 16 (0.72%) Mockito
16 13 (0.58%) Artifactory
17 12 (0.54%) Eclipse
General
1 378 (16.97%) Finance
2 330 (14.82%) Social Skills
3 141 (6.33%) Banking
4 134 (6.02%) Analytical Skills
5 127 (5.70%) Public Sector
6 98 (4.40%) Aerospace
7 74 (3.32%) Front Office
8 46 (2.07%) Manufacturing
9 39 (1.75%) Law
10 36 (1.62%) Investment Banking
11 35 (1.57%) Retail
12 27 (1.21%) Military
13 25 (1.12%) Automotive
13 25 (1.12%) Influencing Skills
14 24 (1.08%) Aviation
15 22 (0.99%) Telecoms
16 21 (0.94%) Electronics
17 18 (0.81%) Presentation Skills
18 17 (0.76%) Financial Institution
19 14 (0.63%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,163 (52.22%) Software Engineer
2 408 (18.32%) Developer
3 388 (17.42%) Senior
4 191 (8.58%) Lead
5 181 (8.13%) Senior Software Engineer
6 159 (7.14%) Java Engineer
7 154 (6.92%) Embedded Engineer
8 143 (6.42%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 129 (5.79%) Java Software Engineer
10 123 (5.52%) C++ Software Engineer
11 115 (5.16%) Java Developer
12 92 (4.13%) Architect
13 76 (3.41%) Senior Developer
14 68 (3.05%) Developer/Software Engineer
15 67 (3.01%) Python Developer
15 67 (3.01%) Software Developer
16 66 (2.96%) DevOps Engineer
17 64 (2.87%) Python Engineer
18 63 (2.83%) Full-Stack Engineer
19 62 (2.78%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 248 (11.14%) React
2 176 (7.90%) Kafka
3 175 (7.86%) Spring
4 171 (7.68%) .NET
5 165 (7.41%) Node.js
6 162 (7.27%) Spring Boot
7 157 (7.05%) REST
8 106 (4.76%) AngularJS
9 104 (4.67%) RESTful
10 73 (3.28%) GraphQL
11 53 (2.38%) Redux
12 45 (2.02%) CSS
13 44 (1.98%) Middleware
14 43 (1.93%) HTML
15 40 (1.80%) JSON
16 36 (1.62%) gRPC
16 36 (1.62%) Next.js
17 34 (1.53%) LangChain
17 34 (1.53%) Playwright
18 33 (1.48%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 239 (10.73%) Cloud Native
2 159 (7.14%) Distributed Systems
3 107 (4.80%) Product Ownership
4 89 (4.00%) Algorithms
5 63 (2.83%) Fixed Income
6 55 (2.47%) AI Agents
7 38 (1.71%) Embedded Systems
8 37 (1.66%) Data Protection Act
9 35 (1.57%) Onboarding
10 32 (1.44%) Derivative
11 30 (1.35%) Legacy Systems
11 30 (1.35%) Robotics
12 29 (1.30%) Data Structures
13 24 (1.08%) Equities
13 24 (1.08%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 23 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
14 23 (1.03%) Self-Motivation
15 21 (0.94%) Mobile App
16 18 (0.81%) Enterprise Software
17 16 (0.72%) FPGA
Operating Systems
1 186 (8.35%) Linux
2 66 (2.96%) Windows
3 42 (1.89%) Unix
4 25 (1.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 18 (0.81%) Android
6 17 (0.76%) Apple iOS
7 16 (0.72%) Embedded Linux
8 12 (0.54%) Windows Server
9 11 (0.49%) FreeRTOS
10 5 (0.22%) Debian
10 5 (0.22%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.18%) Rocky
11 4 (0.18%) VMS
11 4 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.13%) Solaris
12 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2008
13 2 (0.090%) Robot Operating System
13 2 (0.090%) VxWorks
14 1 (0.045%) Mac OS
14 1 (0.045%) webOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 656 (29.46%) CI/CD
2 625 (28.06%) Agile
3 462 (20.75%) DevOps
4 344 (15.45%) Microservices
5 333 (14.95%) AI
6 254 (11.41%) Test Automation
7 240 (10.78%) Problem-Solving
8 233 (10.46%) Full-Stack Development
9 219 (9.83%) Containerisation
10 198 (8.89%) Infrastructure as Code
11 174 (7.81%) Continuous Improvement
12 169 (7.59%) Observability
13 168 (7.54%) TDD
14 166 (7.45%) SDLC
15 163 (7.32%) Machine Learning
16 155 (6.96%) Mentoring
17 153 (6.87%) Scrum
18 149 (6.69%) Computer Science
19 147 (6.60%) Technical Leadership
20 145 (6.51%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 581 (26.09%) Java
2 569 (25.55%) Python
3 295 (13.25%) SQL
4 282 (12.66%) C#
5 255 (11.45%) TypeScript
6 229 (10.28%) JavaScript
7 216 (9.70%) C++
8 134 (6.02%) Ada
9 129 (5.79%) Go
10 107 (4.80%) C
11 46 (2.07%) Kotlin
12 40 (1.80%) PowerShell
13 31 (1.39%) Rust
14 29 (1.30%) Bash
15 26 (1.17%) Embedded C
15 26 (1.17%) MATLAB
16 23 (1.03%) Scala
17 18 (0.81%) PL/SQL
17 18 (0.81%) Ruby
18 17 (0.76%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 526 (23.62%) Security Cleared
2 417 (18.72%) SC Cleared
3 184 (8.26%) Degree
4 89 (4.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 67 (3.01%) DV Cleared
6 46 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
7 30 (1.35%) Master's Degree
8 22 (0.99%) AWS Certification
9 15 (0.67%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 11 (0.49%) Azure Certification
11 8 (0.36%) PhD
12 7 (0.31%) CISSP
12 7 (0.31%) ISTQB
12 7 (0.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.27%) Chartered Engineer
14 5 (0.22%) CISM
14 5 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
15 3 (0.13%) HNC
15 3 (0.13%) MBA
15 3 (0.13%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 120 (5.39%) QA
2 44 (1.98%) Def Stans
3 40 (1.80%) Data Quality
4 36 (1.62%) IEC 61508
5 34 (1.53%) Accessibility
6 21 (0.94%) GDPR
7 18 (0.81%) MISRA
8 14 (0.63%) MISRA C
9 11 (0.49%) NCSC
10 8 (0.36%) WCAG
11 7 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 7 (0.31%) NIST
12 6 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.22%) DO-178B
13 5 (0.22%) JSP 440
14 4 (0.18%) DO-254
14 4 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.13%) FATCA
15 3 (0.13%) HL7
15 3 (0.13%) MiFID
System Software
1 310 (13.92%) Docker
2 21 (0.94%) Firmware
3 12 (0.54%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (0.45%) Embedded Firmware
5 7 (0.31%) Active Directory
6 6 (0.27%) Virtual Machines
7 4 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.13%) HDFS
9 2 (0.090%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 363 (16.30%) Kubernetes
2 203 (9.12%) Terraform
3 73 (3.28%) Grafana
4 58 (2.60%) Ansible
5 40 (1.80%) Prometheus
6 34 (1.53%) Argo
7 9 (0.40%) Puppet
8 8 (0.36%) Progress Chef
9 6 (0.27%) Istio
9 6 (0.27%) Kibana
9 6 (0.27%) Single Sign-On
10 5 (0.22%) HAProxy
11 4 (0.18%) Data Guard
11 4 (0.18%) Docker Swarm
11 4 (0.18%) Functional Safety
11 4 (0.18%) HP Quality Center
12 3 (0.13%) Kubeflow
13 2 (0.090%) Cilium
13 2 (0.090%) Consul
13 2 (0.090%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 129 (5.79%) Microsoft
2 75 (3.37%) Google
3 66 (2.96%) Oracle
4 57 (2.56%) Red Hat
5 46 (2.07%) Databricks
6 32 (1.44%) OpenAI
7 22 (0.99%) IBM
8 17 (0.76%) Splunk
9 15 (0.67%) Informatica
10 13 (0.58%) ServiceNow
10 13 (0.58%) Siemens
11 12 (0.54%) Foundry
11 12 (0.54%) VMware
12 10 (0.45%) ForgeRock
12 10 (0.45%) MathWorks
12 10 (0.45%) Okta
12 10 (0.45%) Salesforce
12 10 (0.45%) SAP
13 8 (0.36%) Atlassian
13 8 (0.36%) Dynatrace