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 5 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 43 31
Rank change year-on-year +12 -12 +9
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,543 1,356 1,961
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.60% 4.91% 5.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.57% 5.41% 6.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,422 884 1,251
10th Percentile £400 £380 £413
25th Percentile £469 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £564 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -6.04% -4.00% +4.17%
75th Percentile £694 £775 £800
90th Percentile £788 £850 £888
UK median daily rate £563 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -2.17% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 414 81 283
10th Percentile £50.55 £31.25 £47.10
25th Percentile £60.00 £51.75 £56.88
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.46 £77.50 £77.50
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 38,695 25,047 28,792
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.19% 90.72% 85.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,133 16,039 18,801
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £758
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,478 1,391 1,685
10th Percentile £14.96 £14.20 £14.05
25th Percentile £20.69 £17.87 £18.16
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £68.75 £50.88 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.50
% change year-on-year +74.79% -37.90% -4.71%

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 5 August 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 5 August 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 5 August 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 1,152 £600 -7.69% 2,718
North of England +29 393 £538 +7.50% 498
South East +27 320 £525 +3.65% 513
South West +20 308 £550 +10.00% 352
East of England +26 218 £505 +3.48% 283
North West +12 181 £550 +10.00% 304
Yorkshire +17 146 £500 +1.46% 115
Midlands -13 111 £466 -7.74% 215
West Midlands -18 83 £464 -19.35% 124
North East +15 71 £650 +42.86% 80
East Midlands -1 27 £513 +7.89% 91
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 55 (2.16%) Confluence
2 47 (1.85%) Apache Spark
3 36 (1.42%) Apache Airflow
4 32 (1.26%) Apache
5 11 (0.43%) CMS
6 10 (0.39%) SAS
7 8 (0.31%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.24%) Jupyter
9 5 (0.20%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.20%) Hyperledger
9 5 (0.20%) nginx
10 4 (0.16%) Apache Solr
10 4 (0.16%) WebLogic
11 3 (0.12%) Apache Superset
11 3 (0.12%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.12%) Tomcat
11 3 (0.12%) WordPress
12 2 (0.079%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.079%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.079%) WinCC
Applications
1 13 (0.51%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.39%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 10 (0.39%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.24%) Microsoft Excel
3 6 (0.24%) Spreadsheet
4 5 (0.20%) CPLEX
5 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.16%) Simulink
6 3 (0.12%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.12%) Trello
7 2 (0.079%) CATIA
7 2 (0.079%) Notion
8 1 (0.039%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.039%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.039%) Blender
8 1 (0.039%) Maya
8 1 (0.039%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.28%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.28%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
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 (0.079%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.079%) Endur
6 2 (0.079%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.039%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.039%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.039%) Shopify
7 1 (0.039%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 644 (25.32%) AWS
2 494 (19.43%) Azure
3 253 (9.95%) GCP
4 206 (8.10%) GitHub
5 117 (4.60%) Serverless
6 101 (3.97%) GitHub Actions
7 99 (3.89%) Azure DevOps
8 82 (3.22%) AWS Lambda
9 60 (2.36%) Amazon S3
10 59 (2.32%) OpenShift
11 50 (1.97%) Anthropic Claude
12 47 (1.85%) Amazon EKS
13 46 (1.81%) Power Platform
14 44 (1.73%) Amazon SQS
15 43 (1.69%) Amazon ECS
16 40 (1.57%) Azure AKS
17 38 (1.49%) GitHub Copilot
18 31 (1.22%) AWS CloudFormation
18 31 (1.22%) Snowflake
19 29 (1.14%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 25 (0.98%) Software-Defined Radio
2 24 (0.94%) Wireless
3 23 (0.90%) Ethernet
4 19 (0.75%) Firewall
4 19 (0.75%) Internet
5 18 (0.71%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.59%) VPN
7 14 (0.55%) HTTP
8 10 (0.39%) Wi-Fi
9 9 (0.35%) 3GPP
10 8 (0.31%) Network Security
10 8 (0.31%) RTP
11 7 (0.28%) RS-232
11 7 (0.28%) Wireshark
12 6 (0.24%) RS-485
13 4 (0.16%) DNS
13 4 (0.16%) RS-422
14 3 (0.12%) HTTPS
14 3 (0.12%) IPv4
14 3 (0.12%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 152 (5.98%) PostgreSQL
2 96 (3.78%) Relational Database
3 81 (3.19%) NoSQL
4 77 (3.03%) SQL Server
5 52 (2.04%) MongoDB
6 40 (1.57%) Data Warehouse
7 38 (1.49%) DynamoDB
8 33 (1.30%) MySQL
9 32 (1.26%) Power BI
10 30 (1.18%) Big Data
11 25 (0.98%) Metadata
12 23 (0.90%) Data Lake
13 22 (0.87%) Elasticsearch
13 22 (0.87%) Redis
14 21 (0.83%) BigQuery
15 20 (0.79%) Amazon RDS
16 17 (0.67%) Amazon Redshift
16 17 (0.67%) Pinecone
17 16 (0.63%) Weaviate
18 14 (0.55%) Apache Cassandra
Development Applications
1 267 (10.50%) Git
2 157 (6.17%) Jenkins
3 140 (5.51%) GitLab
4 113 (4.44%) JIRA
5 60 (2.36%) SonarQube
6 36 (1.42%) Gradle
7 35 (1.38%) JUnit
8 24 (0.94%) Claude Code
8 24 (0.94%) Visual Studio
9 23 (0.90%) Rational DOORS
10 19 (0.75%) Bitbucket
10 19 (0.75%) Selenium
11 18 (0.71%) Cucumber
11 18 (0.71%) Rational Rhapsody
12 17 (0.67%) Maven
12 17 (0.67%) Mockito
13 15 (0.59%) Liquibase
14 12 (0.47%) Cypress.io
14 12 (0.47%) Eclipse
14 12 (0.47%) Mocha
General
1 469 (18.44%) Finance
2 460 (18.09%) Social Skills
3 186 (7.31%) Banking
4 180 (7.08%) Analytical Skills
5 172 (6.76%) Public Sector
6 101 (3.97%) Aerospace
7 100 (3.93%) Front Office
8 56 (2.20%) Retail
9 49 (1.93%) Manufacturing
10 43 (1.69%) Investment Banking
10 43 (1.69%) Law
11 30 (1.18%) Military
11 30 (1.18%) Telecoms
12 28 (1.10%) Automotive
13 26 (1.02%) Aviation
13 26 (1.02%) Influencing Skills
14 21 (0.83%) Electronics
15 19 (0.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 19 (0.75%) Marketing
16 17 (0.67%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,203 (47.31%) Software Engineer
2 483 (18.99%) Developer
3 437 (17.18%) Senior
4 285 (11.21%) Lead
5 179 (7.04%) Senior Software Engineer
6 173 (6.80%) Java Engineer
7 146 (5.74%) Embedded Engineer
8 142 (5.58%) Java Software Engineer
9 137 (5.39%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 130 (5.11%) Java Developer
11 113 (4.44%) C++ Software Engineer
12 108 (4.25%) Python Engineer
13 107 (4.21%) Lead Software Engineer
14 105 (4.13%) Architect
14 105 (4.13%) Software Developer
15 91 (3.58%) Senior Developer
16 82 (3.22%) Data Engineer
17 79 (3.11%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
17 79 (3.11%) Python Developer
18 74 (2.91%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 279 (10.97%) React
2 208 (8.18%) .NET
3 200 (7.86%) REST
4 193 (7.59%) Spring
5 184 (7.24%) Kafka
6 177 (6.96%) Node.js
7 173 (6.80%) Spring Boot
8 118 (4.64%) RESTful
9 113 (4.44%) AngularJS
10 70 (2.75%) GraphQL
11 53 (2.08%) Redux
12 51 (2.01%) Django
13 49 (1.93%) Next.js
14 46 (1.81%) HTML
15 44 (1.73%) CSS
16 42 (1.65%) Quarkus
17 39 (1.53%) JSON
18 38 (1.49%) LangChain
19 36 (1.42%) .NET Core
20 35 (1.38%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 340 (13.37%) Cloud Native
2 218 (8.57%) Distributed Systems
3 133 (5.23%) Product Ownership
4 85 (3.34%) AI Agents
4 85 (3.34%) Algorithms
5 70 (2.75%) Fixed Income
6 55 (2.16%) Data Structures
7 48 (1.89%) Onboarding
8 44 (1.73%) Embedded Systems
9 42 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
10 39 (1.53%) Enterprise Software
11 35 (1.38%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 33 (1.30%) Legacy Systems
13 32 (1.26%) Derivative
14 31 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
15 26 (1.02%) Equities
16 23 (0.90%) Robotics
17 20 (0.79%) Greenfield Project
18 18 (0.71%) NHS
19 17 (0.67%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 186 (7.31%) Linux
2 58 (2.28%) Windows
3 31 (1.22%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 28 (1.10%) Unix
5 19 (0.75%) Embedded Linux
6 13 (0.51%) Android
7 11 (0.43%) FreeRTOS
8 10 (0.39%) Apple iOS
8 10 (0.39%) Windows Server
9 9 (0.35%) Ubuntu
10 5 (0.20%) Debian
11 4 (0.16%) Rocky
11 4 (0.16%) VMS
11 4 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.12%) Solaris
12 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 2 (0.079%) VxWorks
14 1 (0.039%) Tizen
14 1 (0.039%) webOS
14 1 (0.039%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 837 (32.91%) CI/CD
2 798 (31.38%) Agile
3 589 (23.16%) DevOps
4 455 (17.89%) AI
5 386 (15.18%) Microservices
6 333 (13.09%) Test Automation
7 296 (11.64%) Problem-Solving
8 280 (11.01%) Continuous Improvement
9 279 (10.97%) Full-Stack Development
10 265 (10.42%) Infrastructure as Code
11 251 (9.87%) Containerisation
12 219 (8.61%) Observability
13 216 (8.49%) Machine Learning
14 215 (8.45%) SDLC
15 208 (8.18%) Mentoring
16 199 (7.83%) TDD
17 192 (7.55%) Platform Engineering
17 192 (7.55%) Scrum
18 191 (7.51%) Technical Leadership
19 181 (7.12%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 737 (28.98%) Python
2 663 (26.07%) Java
3 336 (13.21%) SQL
4 307 (12.07%) TypeScript
5 295 (11.60%) C#
6 244 (9.59%) JavaScript
7 210 (8.26%) C++
8 119 (4.68%) Go
9 111 (4.36%) C
10 110 (4.33%) Ada
11 61 (2.40%) Kotlin
12 42 (1.65%) Rust
13 39 (1.53%) PowerShell
14 37 (1.45%) Bash
15 35 (1.38%) Scala
16 23 (0.90%) PL/SQL
17 21 (0.83%) Embedded C
18 20 (0.79%) Ruby
19 19 (0.75%) Bicep
20 17 (0.67%) PHP
Qualifications
1 608 (23.91%) Security Cleared
2 510 (20.06%) SC Cleared
3 194 (7.63%) Degree
4 88 (3.46%) Computer Science Degree
5 80 (3.15%) DV Cleared
6 54 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
7 37 (1.45%) Master's Degree
8 36 (1.42%) AWS Certification
9 20 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 19 (0.75%) PhD
11 15 (0.59%) Azure Certification
12 7 (0.28%) CISSP
12 7 (0.28%) ISTQB
13 6 (0.24%) Chartered Engineer
13 6 (0.24%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 6 (0.24%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 6 (0.24%) PMP
14 5 (0.20%) TOGAF Certification
15 4 (0.16%) GIAC
15 4 (0.16%) MBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 153 (6.02%) QA
2 59 (2.32%) Data Quality
3 50 (1.97%) Accessibility
4 23 (0.90%) Def Stans
5 19 (0.75%) GDPR
6 15 (0.59%) NIST
7 14 (0.55%) IEC 61508
8 13 (0.51%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 13 (0.51%) WCAG
9 12 (0.47%) MISRA
10 10 (0.39%) DO-178B
11 8 (0.31%) NCSC
12 7 (0.28%) GRC
13 6 (0.24%) PCI DSS
14 5 (0.20%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.12%) DO-254
15 3 (0.12%) HL7
15 3 (0.12%) MISRA C
15 3 (0.12%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 369 (14.51%) Docker
2 23 (0.90%) Firmware
3 12 (0.47%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.39%) Active Directory
5 9 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.31%) VMware Infrastructure
7 3 (0.12%) HDFS
8 2 (0.079%) SRDF
9 1 (0.039%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 423 (16.63%) Kubernetes
2 245 (9.63%) Terraform
3 78 (3.07%) Ansible
4 56 (2.20%) Grafana
5 43 (1.69%) Argo
6 36 (1.42%) Prometheus
7 11 (0.43%) Kibana
7 11 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
8 9 (0.35%) Puppet
9 7 (0.28%) Progress Chef
10 5 (0.20%) HAProxy
10 5 (0.20%) Kubeflow
11 4 (0.16%) Functional Safety
12 3 (0.12%) Consul
13 2 (0.079%) Cilium
13 2 (0.079%) Docker Swarm
13 2 (0.079%) HP Fortify
14 1 (0.039%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
14 1 (0.039%) Kustomize
14 1 (0.039%) Podman
Vendors
1 126 (4.95%) Microsoft
2 90 (3.54%) Google
3 72 (2.83%) Oracle
4 57 (2.24%) Databricks
5 53 (2.08%) Red Hat
6 41 (1.61%) OpenAI
7 19 (0.75%) Informatica
7 19 (0.75%) Salesforce
7 19 (0.75%) Splunk
8 18 (0.71%) IBM
8 18 (0.71%) ServiceNow
9 12 (0.47%) Adobe
10 10 (0.39%) Checkmarx
10 10 (0.39%) ForgeRock
10 10 (0.39%) Foundry
10 10 (0.39%) Okta
10 10 (0.39%) SAP
11 9 (0.35%) Dynatrace
11 9 (0.35%) Siemens
11 9 (0.35%) Solace