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

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 43 30
Rank change year-on-year +12 -13 +10
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,725 1,395 1,851
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.85% 4.99% 5.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.91% 5.49% 6.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,457 842 1,117
10th Percentile £400 £375 £409
25th Percentile £463 £463 £498
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £551 £575 £625
Median % change year-on-year -4.26% -8.00% +2.46%
75th Percentile £688 £738 £810
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £555 £600
% change year-on-year -0.90% -7.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 429 119 216
10th Percentile £51.25 £41.53 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.00 £52.50 £57.53
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.25 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £73.40 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
% change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%

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 39,431 25,424 27,856
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.70% 90.99% 86.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,955 16,149 17,033
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.64% -2.57% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £645
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,897 1,546 1,199
10th Percentile £13.87 £14.42 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.60 £17.87 £20.30
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £67.50 £46.55 £67.01
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.25 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £39.00 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +55.07% -40.82% -

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 1,218 £600 -4.00% 4,271
North of England +19 465 £525 +5.00% 939
South East +34 344 £525 +10.53% 896
South West +17 302 £550 +15.79% 646
East of England +18 232 £510 +2.00% 587
North West +20 223 £550 +10.00% 589
Yorkshire +10 179 £500 - 243
Midlands +28 142 £470 -7.84% 480
West Midlands +21 98 £470 -18.26% 256
North East +4 67 £650 +31.65% 111
East Midlands +15 43 £435 +3.57% 224
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 (2.13%) Apache Spark
2 57 (2.09%) Confluence
3 48 (1.76%) Apache Airflow
4 31 (1.14%) Apache
5 16 (0.59%) CMS
6 14 (0.51%) SharePoint
7 9 (0.33%) Ethereum
7 9 (0.33%) Jupyter
8 7 (0.26%) SAS
9 6 (0.22%) Camunda
10 5 (0.18%) Apache Solr
10 5 (0.18%) Apache Superset
10 5 (0.18%) Hyperledger
10 5 (0.18%) WordPress
11 4 (0.15%) nginx
12 3 (0.11%) MQSeries
12 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
13 2 (0.073%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 2 (0.073%) Headless CMS
13 2 (0.073%) IIS
Applications
1 15 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (0.44%) 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%) 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%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (0.22%) Oracle Payroll
3 5 (0.18%) R3 Corda
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%) Orchestrade
5 3 (0.11%) Primavera
5 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
5 3 (0.11%) Temenos T24
6 2 (0.073%) Endur
6 2 (0.073%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.037%) Aladdin
7 1 (0.037%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.037%) Sage 50
7 1 (0.037%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.037%) SAP S/4HANA
7 1 (0.037%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 690 (25.32%) AWS
2 555 (20.37%) Azure
3 287 (10.53%) GCP
4 242 (8.88%) GitHub
5 144 (5.28%) Serverless
6 124 (4.55%) GitHub Actions
7 119 (4.37%) Azure DevOps
8 101 (3.71%) AWS Lambda
9 74 (2.72%) Anthropic Claude
10 69 (2.53%) Amazon S3
11 68 (2.50%) GitHub Copilot
12 55 (2.02%) Amazon EKS
13 52 (1.91%) Amazon SQS
13 52 (1.91%) OpenShift
14 50 (1.83%) Amazon ECS
15 46 (1.69%) Snowflake
16 45 (1.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 44 (1.61%) Power Platform
18 35 (1.28%) dbt
19 32 (1.17%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.17%) Wireless
2 29 (1.06%) Software-Defined Radio
3 23 (0.84%) Firewall
4 20 (0.73%) Internet
4 20 (0.73%) TCP/IP
4 20 (0.73%) VPN
5 19 (0.70%) HTTP
6 18 (0.66%) Ethernet
7 14 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
8 11 (0.40%) DNS
9 10 (0.37%) Network Security
10 9 (0.33%) RTP
10 9 (0.33%) Wireshark
11 6 (0.22%) 3GPP
11 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
12 5 (0.18%) SSL
13 4 (0.15%) Broadband
13 4 (0.15%) RS-232
14 3 (0.11%) RS-485
14 3 (0.11%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 140 (5.14%) PostgreSQL
2 95 (3.49%) Relational Database
3 86 (3.16%) SQL Server
4 84 (3.08%) NoSQL
5 60 (2.20%) MongoDB
6 53 (1.94%) Data Warehouse
7 41 (1.50%) MySQL
8 40 (1.47%) DynamoDB
9 35 (1.28%) Metadata
10 30 (1.10%) Amazon RDS
10 30 (1.10%) Data Lake
11 28 (1.03%) Big Data
12 27 (0.99%) Redis
13 26 (0.95%) BigQuery
13 26 (0.95%) Elasticsearch
13 26 (0.95%) Pinecone
13 26 (0.95%) Power BI
14 20 (0.73%) Weaviate
15 19 (0.70%) Chroma
16 16 (0.59%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 277 (10.17%) Git
2 156 (5.72%) GitLab
3 152 (5.58%) Jenkins
4 118 (4.33%) JIRA
5 50 (1.83%) SonarQube
6 41 (1.50%) Claude Code
7 37 (1.36%) Gradle
8 35 (1.28%) JUnit
9 31 (1.14%) Visual Studio
10 30 (1.10%) Rational DOORS
11 28 (1.03%) Selenium
12 27 (0.99%) Maven
13 22 (0.81%) Cucumber
14 20 (0.73%) Rational Rhapsody
15 17 (0.62%) Mockito
16 15 (0.55%) LabVIEW
17 14 (0.51%) Cypress.io
18 13 (0.48%) Bitbucket
19 12 (0.44%) Snyk
20 10 (0.37%) Postman
General
1 577 (21.17%) Social Skills
2 520 (19.08%) Finance
3 225 (8.26%) Banking
4 205 (7.52%) Public Sector
5 194 (7.12%) Analytical Skills
6 94 (3.45%) Aerospace
7 80 (2.94%) Front Office
8 57 (2.09%) Investment Banking
9 54 (1.98%) Manufacturing
10 47 (1.72%) Retail
11 45 (1.65%) Law
12 40 (1.47%) Automotive
13 32 (1.17%) Military
13 32 (1.17%) Telecoms
14 26 (0.95%) Aviation
14 26 (0.95%) Influencing Skills
14 26 (0.95%) Marketing
15 25 (0.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 20 (0.73%) Back Office
17 16 (0.59%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,102 (40.44%) Software Engineer
2 538 (19.74%) Developer
3 522 (19.16%) Senior
4 297 (10.90%) Lead
5 202 (7.41%) Senior Software Engineer
6 157 (5.76%) Java Engineer
7 153 (5.61%) Embedded Engineer
7 153 (5.61%) Java Developer
8 147 (5.39%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 147 (5.39%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 132 (4.84%) Software Developer
10 126 (4.62%) Java Software Engineer
11 117 (4.29%) C++ Software Engineer
12 114 (4.18%) Architect
13 113 (4.15%) Senior Developer
14 106 (3.89%) Python Engineer
15 104 (3.82%) Data Engineer
16 85 (3.12%) DevOps Engineer
17 77 (2.83%) AWS Engineer
18 75 (2.75%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 299 (10.97%) Terraform
2 255 (9.36%) React
3 243 (8.92%) REST
4 226 (8.29%) Spring
5 222 (8.15%) .NET
6 215 (7.89%) Spring Boot
7 174 (6.39%) Kafka
8 152 (5.58%) RESTful
9 139 (5.10%) Node.js
10 98 (3.60%) AngularJS
11 62 (2.28%) Django
12 60 (2.20%) HTML
12 60 (2.20%) LangChain
12 60 (2.20%) OAuth
13 58 (2.13%) CSS
14 54 (1.98%) Next.js
15 51 (1.87%) Web Services
16 45 (1.65%) FastAPI
16 45 (1.65%) Model Context Protocol
17 44 (1.61%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 429 (15.74%) Cloud Native
2 241 (8.84%) Distributed Systems
3 157 (5.76%) Product Ownership
4 152 (5.58%) AI Agents
5 73 (2.68%) Algorithms
6 69 (2.53%) Enterprise Software
7 61 (2.24%) Onboarding
8 59 (2.17%) Data Structures
9 48 (1.76%) Data Protection Act
10 45 (1.65%) Embedded Systems
11 36 (1.32%) Legacy Systems
12 35 (1.28%) Self-Motivation
13 33 (1.21%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 29 (1.06%) Fixed Income
15 28 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
16 27 (0.99%) Derivative
17 24 (0.88%) Equities
18 23 (0.84%) Robotics
19 21 (0.77%) Virtual Team
20 19 (0.70%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 191 (7.01%) Linux
2 67 (2.46%) Windows
3 35 (1.28%) Unix
4 20 (0.73%) Embedded Linux
4 20 (0.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 15 (0.55%) FreeRTOS
6 12 (0.44%) Android
6 12 (0.44%) Windows Server
7 8 (0.29%) Ubuntu
8 7 (0.26%) Apple iOS
9 5 (0.18%) Debian
10 3 (0.11%) Rocky
10 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
11 2 (0.073%) VMS
11 2 (0.073%) Windows Server 2019
11 2 (0.073%) zOS
12 1 (0.037%) Solaris
12 1 (0.037%) Tizen
12 1 (0.037%) Windows 10
12 1 (0.037%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 958 (35.16%) CI/CD
2 834 (30.61%) Agile
3 657 (24.11%) DevOps
4 608 (22.31%) AI
5 410 (15.05%) Test Automation
6 404 (14.83%) Microservices
7 354 (12.99%) Continuous Improvement
8 336 (12.33%) Problem-Solving
9 328 (12.04%) Infrastructure as Code
10 291 (10.68%) Observability
11 275 (10.09%) SDLC
12 266 (9.76%) Containerisation
13 261 (9.58%) Full-Stack Development
14 259 (9.50%) Stakeholder Management
15 243 (8.92%) Technical Leadership
16 236 (8.66%) Machine Learning
17 233 (8.55%) LLM
18 228 (8.37%) Platform Engineering
19 222 (8.15%) Scrum
20 221 (8.11%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 801 (29.39%) Python
2 679 (24.92%) Java
3 394 (14.46%) SQL
4 313 (11.49%) TypeScript
5 301 (11.05%) C#
6 230 (8.44%) C++
6 230 (8.44%) JavaScript
7 118 (4.33%) C
8 84 (3.08%) Go
9 76 (2.79%) Ada
10 68 (2.50%) Kotlin
11 50 (1.83%) PowerShell
12 47 (1.72%) Bash
13 44 (1.61%) Rust
14 39 (1.43%) Scala
15 30 (1.10%) Embedded C
16 24 (0.88%) PL/SQL
17 23 (0.84%) Bicep
18 21 (0.77%) PHP
19 17 (0.62%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 590 (21.65%) Security Cleared
2 493 (18.09%) SC Cleared
3 221 (8.11%) Degree
4 103 (3.78%) Computer Science Degree
5 96 (3.52%) DV Cleared
6 62 (2.28%) BPSS Clearance
7 49 (1.80%) Master's Degree
8 47 (1.72%) AWS Certification
9 25 (0.92%) Azure Certification
10 18 (0.66%) PhD
11 15 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 13 (0.48%) PMP
13 11 (0.40%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 9 (0.33%) CISSP
15 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
15 6 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
16 5 (0.18%) ISTQB
16 5 (0.18%) Numerate Degree
16 5 (0.18%) PMI Certification
17 4 (0.15%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 179 (6.57%) QA
2 79 (2.90%) Data Quality
3 61 (2.24%) Accessibility
4 23 (0.84%) MISRA
5 20 (0.73%) GDPR
6 17 (0.62%) Def Stans
7 14 (0.51%) NIST
7 14 (0.51%) WCAG
8 12 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 12 (0.44%) MISRA C
9 11 (0.40%) IEC 61508
10 10 (0.37%) DO-178B
11 9 (0.33%) GRC
12 7 (0.26%) NCSC
13 5 (0.18%) EMIR
13 5 (0.18%) HL7
13 5 (0.18%) JSP 440
13 5 (0.18%) MiFID
14 4 (0.15%) EU AI Act
14 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 395 (14.50%) Docker
2 28 (1.03%) Firmware
3 17 (0.62%) Embedded Firmware
4 16 (0.59%) Active Directory
5 13 (0.48%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.037%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.037%) zsh
Systems Management
1 448 (16.44%) Kubernetes
2 98 (3.60%) Ansible
3 58 (2.13%) Grafana
4 45 (1.65%) Prometheus
5 36 (1.32%) Argo
6 19 (0.70%) Single Sign-On
7 16 (0.59%) Kibana
8 10 (0.37%) Puppet
9 6 (0.22%) Functional Safety
10 4 (0.15%) Consul
10 4 (0.15%) Istio
10 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
10 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
10 4 (0.15%) Progress Chef
11 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
12 2 (0.073%) Control-M
12 2 (0.073%) HAProxy
12 2 (0.073%) Packer
12 2 (0.073%) Podman
12 2 (0.073%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 156 (5.72%) Microsoft
2 108 (3.96%) Google
3 86 (3.16%) Databricks
4 83 (3.05%) Oracle
5 71 (2.61%) OpenAI
6 38 (1.39%) Red Hat
7 31 (1.14%) Salesforce
8 26 (0.95%) Splunk
9 18 (0.66%) Foundry
9 18 (0.66%) IBM
10 17 (0.62%) Informatica
10 17 (0.62%) ServiceNow
11 13 (0.48%) Adobe
12 12 (0.44%) SAP
13 10 (0.37%) VMware
14 9 (0.33%) Checkmarx
15 8 (0.29%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.29%) Siemens
16 7 (0.26%) ForgeRock
16 7 (0.26%) Hitachi