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

6 months to
8 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 42 30
Rank change year-on-year +11 -12 +10
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,745 1,401 1,835
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.93% 5.01% 5.68%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 7.00% 5.51% 6.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,460 843 1,105
10th Percentile £400 £375 £406
25th Percentile £463 £463 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £558 £575 £605
Median % change year-on-year -3.04% -4.96% -0.98%
75th Percentile £688 £725 £810
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £553 £600
% change year-on-year -0.45% -7.92% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 428 120 211
10th Percentile £51.25 £41.89 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.00 £52.50 £58.77
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.31 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £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 39,226 25,436 27,906
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.80% 90.90% 86.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,709 16,124 17,045
10th Percentile £325 £294 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £641
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 2,969 1,568 1,160
10th Percentile £13.70 £14.50 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.43 £17.87 £20.28
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £42.69
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.09% -4.07%
75th Percentile £67.25 £45.80 £67.14
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.33
% change year-on-year +49.11% -37.63% -7.56%

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 -1 1,244 £600 -4.00% 4,699
North of England +22 475 £525 +5.00% 907
South East +40 339 £525 +10.53% 907
South West +16 303 £550 +18.92% 510
North West +27 231 £550 +10.00% 546
East of England +12 217 £507 -7.82% 575
Yorkshire +2 177 £500 -2.68% 238
Midlands +29 145 £469 -10.67% 439
West Midlands +18 101 £470 -18.26% 248
North East +2 71 £650 +33.33% 127
East Midlands +16 43 £435 +3.45% 191
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 62 (2.26%) Apache Spark
2 60 (2.19%) Confluence
3 49 (1.79%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (1.28%) Apache
5 15 (0.55%) CMS
6 14 (0.51%) SharePoint
7 10 (0.36%) 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%) MQSeries
12 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
13 2 (0.073%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 2 (0.073%) Cloud Foundry
13 2 (0.073%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 15 (0.55%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (0.44%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.36%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 10 (0.36%) 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 (0.036%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.036%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.036%) Blender
8 1 (0.036%) LaTeX
8 1 (0.036%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.26%) Dynamics CRM
1 7 (0.26%) Payment Gateway
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%) Primavera
5 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
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 (0.036%) Sage 50
7 1 (0.036%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.036%) SAP S/4HANA
7 1 (0.036%) Shopify
7 1 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 708 (25.79%) AWS
2 567 (20.66%) Azure
3 290 (10.56%) GCP
4 250 (9.11%) GitHub
5 147 (5.36%) Serverless
6 128 (4.66%) Azure DevOps
6 128 (4.66%) GitHub Actions
7 98 (3.57%) AWS Lambda
8 77 (2.81%) Anthropic Claude
9 72 (2.62%) GitHub Copilot
10 67 (2.44%) Amazon S3
11 57 (2.08%) Amazon EKS
12 54 (1.97%) Amazon SQS
13 51 (1.86%) OpenShift
14 50 (1.82%) Amazon ECS
15 49 (1.79%) Power Platform
16 46 (1.68%) Snowflake
17 45 (1.64%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 34 (1.24%) dbt
19 33 (1.20%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.17%) Wireless
2 24 (0.87%) Software-Defined Radio
3 23 (0.84%) Firewall
4 21 (0.77%) Internet
4 21 (0.77%) TCP/IP
5 20 (0.73%) VPN
6 18 (0.66%) HTTP
7 16 (0.58%) Ethernet
8 15 (0.55%) Wi-Fi
9 14 (0.51%) Network Security
10 13 (0.47%) DNS
11 8 (0.29%) RTP
11 8 (0.29%) Wireshark
12 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
13 5 (0.18%) 3GPP
13 5 (0.18%) SSL
14 4 (0.15%) Broadband
14 4 (0.15%) Reverse Proxy
14 4 (0.15%) RS-232
15 3 (0.11%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 143 (5.21%) PostgreSQL
2 98 (3.57%) Relational Database
3 88 (3.21%) SQL Server
4 85 (3.10%) NoSQL
5 63 (2.30%) MongoDB
6 53 (1.93%) Data Warehouse
7 42 (1.53%) MySQL
8 40 (1.46%) DynamoDB
9 37 (1.35%) Metadata
10 33 (1.20%) Data Lake
11 30 (1.09%) Amazon RDS
11 30 (1.09%) Redis
12 28 (1.02%) BigQuery
12 28 (1.02%) Elasticsearch
12 28 (1.02%) Power BI
13 27 (0.98%) Big Data
14 25 (0.91%) Pinecone
15 20 (0.73%) Delta Lake
16 19 (0.69%) Weaviate
17 18 (0.66%) Chroma
Development Applications
1 281 (10.24%) Git
2 155 (5.65%) GitLab
3 153 (5.57%) Jenkins
4 116 (4.23%) JIRA
5 49 (1.79%) SonarQube
6 45 (1.64%) Claude Code
7 35 (1.28%) Gradle
8 33 (1.20%) JUnit
9 31 (1.13%) Visual Studio
10 28 (1.02%) Rational DOORS
11 27 (0.98%) Maven
12 26 (0.95%) Selenium
13 23 (0.84%) Cucumber
14 21 (0.77%) Rational Rhapsody
15 16 (0.58%) Mockito
16 15 (0.55%) LabVIEW
17 13 (0.47%) Cypress.io
18 12 (0.44%) Bitbucket
18 12 (0.44%) Snyk
19 11 (0.40%) Postman
General
1 600 (21.86%) Social Skills
2 530 (19.31%) Finance
3 225 (8.20%) Banking
4 212 (7.72%) Public Sector
5 198 (7.21%) Analytical Skills
6 99 (3.61%) Aerospace
7 78 (2.84%) Front Office
8 56 (2.04%) Investment Banking
9 55 (2.00%) Manufacturing
10 46 (1.68%) Law
11 45 (1.64%) Retail
12 39 (1.42%) Automotive
13 34 (1.24%) Telecoms
14 31 (1.13%) Military
15 29 (1.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 25 (0.91%) Marketing
17 24 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
18 22 (0.80%) Aviation
18 22 (0.80%) Back Office
19 19 (0.69%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,082 (39.42%) Software Engineer
2 532 (19.38%) Senior
3 531 (19.34%) Developer
4 299 (10.89%) Lead
5 198 (7.21%) Senior Software Engineer
6 159 (5.79%) Java Engineer
7 151 (5.50%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 148 (5.39%) Java Developer
9 140 (5.10%) Embedded Engineer
10 134 (4.88%) Embedded Software Engineer
11 128 (4.66%) Java Software Engineer
11 128 (4.66%) Software Developer
12 126 (4.59%) Architect
13 115 (4.19%) C++ Software Engineer
13 115 (4.19%) Senior Developer
14 111 (4.04%) Python Engineer
15 108 (3.93%) Data Engineer
16 88 (3.21%) DevOps Engineer
17 79 (2.88%) AWS Engineer
18 76 (2.77%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 308 (11.22%) Terraform
2 253 (9.22%) REST
3 245 (8.93%) React
4 225 (8.20%) Spring
5 215 (7.83%) .NET
6 214 (7.80%) Spring Boot
7 184 (6.70%) Kafka
8 154 (5.61%) RESTful
9 137 (4.99%) Node.js
10 100 (3.64%) AngularJS
11 63 (2.30%) OAuth
12 62 (2.26%) Django
13 60 (2.19%) LangChain
14 57 (2.08%) HTML
15 55 (2.00%) CSS
16 53 (1.93%) Next.js
17 50 (1.82%) Web Services
18 47 (1.71%) Model Context Protocol
19 46 (1.68%) FastAPI
20 43 (1.57%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 441 (16.07%) Cloud Native
2 244 (8.89%) Distributed Systems
3 158 (5.76%) Product Ownership
4 157 (5.72%) AI Agents
5 78 (2.84%) Enterprise Software
6 65 (2.37%) Algorithms
7 63 (2.30%) Onboarding
8 61 (2.22%) Data Structures
9 55 (2.00%) Data Protection Act
10 43 (1.57%) Embedded Systems
11 40 (1.46%) Legacy Systems
12 38 (1.38%) Self-Motivation
13 31 (1.13%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 29 (1.06%) Fixed Income
14 29 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
15 27 (0.98%) Derivative
16 24 (0.87%) Equities
17 23 (0.84%) Management Information System
18 21 (0.77%) Virtual Team
19 20 (0.73%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 190 (6.92%) Linux
2 71 (2.59%) Windows
3 36 (1.31%) Unix
4 19 (0.69%) Embedded Linux
4 19 (0.69%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 14 (0.51%) Android
6 13 (0.47%) FreeRTOS
7 12 (0.44%) Windows Server
8 9 (0.33%) Apple iOS
9 7 (0.26%) Ubuntu
10 4 (0.15%) Debian
11 3 (0.11%) Rocky
11 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
11 3 (0.11%) zOS
12 2 (0.073%) Mac OS
12 2 (0.073%) Windows 10
12 2 (0.073%) Windows Server 2019
13 1 (0.036%) Robot Operating System
13 1 (0.036%) Tizen
13 1 (0.036%) webOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 965 (35.15%) CI/CD
2 846 (30.82%) Agile
3 668 (24.34%) DevOps
4 623 (22.70%) AI
5 429 (15.63%) Test Automation
6 410 (14.94%) Microservices
7 366 (13.33%) Continuous Improvement
8 342 (12.46%) Infrastructure as Code
9 334 (12.17%) Problem-Solving
10 305 (11.11%) Observability
11 281 (10.24%) SDLC
12 277 (10.09%) Stakeholder Management
13 268 (9.76%) Containerisation
14 259 (9.44%) Full-Stack Development
15 246 (8.96%) Technical Leadership
16 241 (8.78%) LLM
17 238 (8.67%) Machine Learning
18 237 (8.63%) Platform Engineering
19 231 (8.42%) Event-Driven
20 230 (8.38%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 810 (29.51%) Python
2 685 (24.95%) Java
3 409 (14.90%) SQL
4 315 (11.48%) TypeScript
5 287 (10.46%) C#
6 229 (8.34%) JavaScript
7 227 (8.27%) C++
8 113 (4.12%) C
9 82 (2.99%) Go
10 71 (2.59%) Ada
11 66 (2.40%) Kotlin
12 52 (1.89%) PowerShell
13 48 (1.75%) Bash
14 45 (1.64%) Rust
15 37 (1.35%) Scala
16 30 (1.09%) Embedded C
17 28 (1.02%) Bicep
18 24 (0.87%) PL/SQL
19 21 (0.77%) PHP
20 18 (0.66%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 593 (21.60%) Security Cleared
2 491 (17.89%) SC Cleared
3 227 (8.27%) Degree
4 104 (3.79%) Computer Science Degree
4 104 (3.79%) DV Cleared
5 60 (2.19%) BPSS Clearance
6 50 (1.82%) AWS Certification
7 49 (1.79%) Master's Degree
8 31 (1.13%) Azure Certification
9 18 (0.66%) PhD
10 15 (0.55%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 12 (0.44%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 11 (0.40%) CISSP
12 11 (0.40%) PMP
12 11 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
13 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
14 5 (0.18%) ISTQB
14 5 (0.18%) Numerate Degree
14 5 (0.18%) PMI Certification
15 4 (0.15%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 174 (6.34%) QA
2 88 (3.21%) Data Quality
3 63 (2.30%) Accessibility
4 23 (0.84%) MISRA
5 20 (0.73%) GDPR
6 17 (0.62%) Def Stans
7 15 (0.55%) NIST
8 14 (0.51%) WCAG
9 12 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 12 (0.44%) MISRA C
10 11 (0.40%) IEC 61508
11 10 (0.36%) DO-178B
12 8 (0.29%) GRC
13 7 (0.26%) NCSC
14 5 (0.18%) EMIR
14 5 (0.18%) HL7
14 5 (0.18%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.18%) MiFID
14 5 (0.18%) PCI DSS
14 5 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 403 (14.68%) Docker
2 29 (1.06%) Firmware
3 17 (0.62%) Active Directory
3 17 (0.62%) Embedded Firmware
4 13 (0.47%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.073%) Virtual Desktop
7 1 (0.036%) Hyper-V
7 1 (0.036%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.036%) zsh
Systems Management
1 461 (16.79%) Kubernetes
2 99 (3.61%) Ansible
3 62 (2.26%) Grafana
4 45 (1.64%) Prometheus
5 36 (1.31%) Argo
6 21 (0.77%) Single Sign-On
7 16 (0.58%) Kibana
8 10 (0.36%) 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
1 174 (6.34%) Microsoft
2 110 (4.01%) Google
3 94 (3.42%) Databricks
4 90 (3.28%) Oracle
5 75 (2.73%) OpenAI
6 39 (1.42%) Red Hat
7 33 (1.20%) Salesforce
8 26 (0.95%) Splunk
9 19 (0.69%) Foundry
9 19 (0.69%) IBM
10 18 (0.66%) ServiceNow
11 16 (0.58%) Informatica
12 15 (0.55%) Adobe
13 14 (0.51%) SAP
14 13 (0.47%) Dynatrace
15 10 (0.36%) VMware
16 8 (0.29%) Checkmarx
16 8 (0.29%) Siemens
17 7 (0.26%) Cisco
17 7 (0.26%) Mistral