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

6 months to
13 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 44 31
Rank change year-on-year +12 -13 +10
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,753 1,397 1,812
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.91% 5.01% 5.67%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.97% 5.51% 6.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,462 842 1,085
10th Percentile £400 £375 £406
25th Percentile £463 £463 £493
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £603
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% -4.64% -0.41%
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 432 122 203
10th Percentile £51.25 £42.48 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.25 £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 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.00 £74.80 £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 39,523 25,365 27,653
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.90% 90.87% 86.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,845 16,097 16,849
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 3,022 1,590 1,111
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.50 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.36 £17.87 £20.27
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -40.82% -5.56%
75th Percentile £67.44 £44.80 £66.80
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.28 £74.44
UK median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -10.11%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 1,255 £600 -4.00% 3,823
North of England +19 480 £517 +3.33% 810
South East +39 344 £525 +10.53% 710
South West +17 296 £550 +19.57% 384
North West +28 234 £550 +10.00% 479
East of England +16 209 £505 -10.22% 440
Yorkshire +3 177 £500 -2.44% 206
Midlands +29 147 £470 -10.48% 322
West Midlands +11 104 £470 -14.55% 195
North East 0 71 £650 +33.33% 129
East Midlands +15 42 £425 +0.95% 127
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 64 (2.32%) Apache Spark
2 61 (2.22%) Confluence
3 50 (1.82%) Apache Airflow
4 37 (1.34%) Apache
5 16 (0.58%) CMS
6 15 (0.54%) SharePoint
7 10 (0.36%) Jupyter
8 9 (0.33%) Ethereum
9 7 (0.25%) 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%) IIS
13 2 (0.073%) Microsoft Exchange
13 2 (0.073%) MQSeries
Applications
1 16 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
2 11 (0.40%) 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%) LaTeX
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%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.22%) Oracle Payroll
3 5 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
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%) 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 (0.036%) Sage 50
7 1 (0.036%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.036%) Shopify
7 1 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 707 (25.68%) AWS
2 573 (20.81%) Azure
3 287 (10.42%) GCP
4 251 (9.12%) GitHub
5 149 (5.41%) Serverless
6 133 (4.83%) GitHub Actions
7 131 (4.76%) Azure DevOps
8 100 (3.63%) AWS Lambda
9 77 (2.80%) Anthropic Claude
10 72 (2.62%) GitHub Copilot
11 67 (2.43%) Amazon S3
12 57 (2.07%) Amazon EKS
13 56 (2.03%) Amazon SQS
14 52 (1.89%) Power Platform
15 51 (1.85%) OpenShift
16 50 (1.82%) Amazon ECS
17 46 (1.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 46 (1.67%) Snowflake
18 34 (1.24%) dbt
19 33 (1.20%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.13%) Wireless
2 23 (0.84%) Firewall
3 21 (0.76%) TCP/IP
4 20 (0.73%) Internet
4 20 (0.73%) VPN
5 19 (0.69%) Software-Defined Radio
6 16 (0.58%) HTTP
7 15 (0.54%) Wi-Fi
8 14 (0.51%) DNS
8 14 (0.51%) Ethernet
9 13 (0.47%) Network Security
10 7 (0.25%) RTP
10 7 (0.25%) 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 (5.12%) PostgreSQL
2 98 (3.56%) Relational Database
3 87 (3.16%) NoSQL
3 87 (3.16%) SQL Server
4 66 (2.40%) MongoDB
5 53 (1.93%) Data Warehouse
6 43 (1.56%) MySQL
7 41 (1.49%) DynamoDB
8 37 (1.34%) Metadata
9 36 (1.31%) Data Lake
10 30 (1.09%) Amazon RDS
11 29 (1.05%) Power BI
11 29 (1.05%) Redis
12 28 (1.02%) BigQuery
12 28 (1.02%) Elasticsearch
13 27 (0.98%) Big Data
14 25 (0.91%) Pinecone
15 21 (0.76%) Delta Lake
16 19 (0.69%) Weaviate
17 18 (0.65%) Chroma
Development Applications
1 276 (10.03%) Git
2 154 (5.59%) Jenkins
3 150 (5.45%) GitLab
4 114 (4.14%) JIRA
5 46 (1.67%) Claude Code
6 45 (1.63%) SonarQube
7 39 (1.42%) Gradle
8 33 (1.20%) Visual Studio
9 31 (1.13%) JUnit
10 29 (1.05%) Maven
11 27 (0.98%) Rational DOORS
12 26 (0.94%) Selenium
13 25 (0.91%) Cucumber
14 23 (0.84%) Rational Rhapsody
15 18 (0.65%) Mockito
16 15 (0.54%) LabVIEW
17 13 (0.47%) Cypress.io
18 12 (0.44%) Bitbucket
18 12 (0.44%) Snyk
19 11 (0.40%) Postman
General
1 608 (22.08%) Social Skills
2 538 (19.54%) Finance
3 229 (8.32%) Banking
4 213 (7.74%) Public Sector
5 199 (7.23%) Analytical Skills
6 100 (3.63%) Aerospace
7 80 (2.91%) Front Office
8 57 (2.07%) Investment Banking
9 55 (2.00%) Manufacturing
10 45 (1.63%) Law
11 44 (1.60%) Retail
12 38 (1.38%) Automotive
13 35 (1.27%) Telecoms
14 30 (1.09%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 29 (1.05%) Military
16 24 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
16 24 (0.87%) Marketing
17 23 (0.84%) Back Office
18 21 (0.76%) Aviation
18 21 (0.76%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,066 (38.72%) Software Engineer
2 535 (19.43%) Developer
3 532 (19.32%) Senior
4 300 (10.90%) Lead
5 194 (7.05%) Senior Software Engineer
6 157 (5.70%) Java Engineer
7 153 (5.56%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 145 (5.27%) Java Developer
9 136 (4.94%) Embedded Engineer
10 133 (4.83%) Architect
11 131 (4.76%) Software Developer
12 130 (4.72%) Embedded Software Engineer
13 126 (4.58%) Java Software Engineer
14 116 (4.21%) Senior Developer
15 113 (4.10%) C++ Software Engineer
16 111 (4.03%) Python Engineer
17 109 (3.96%) Data Engineer
18 93 (3.38%) DevOps Engineer
19 80 (2.91%) AWS Engineer
20 76 (2.76%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 310 (11.26%) Terraform
2 259 (9.41%) REST
3 241 (8.75%) React
4 225 (8.17%) Spring
5 215 (7.81%) .NET
6 214 (7.77%) Spring Boot
7 188 (6.83%) Kafka
8 159 (5.78%) RESTful
9 135 (4.90%) Node.js
10 98 (3.56%) AngularJS
11 68 (2.47%) OAuth
12 62 (2.25%) Django
13 60 (2.18%) LangChain
14 57 (2.07%) HTML
15 55 (2.00%) CSS
16 52 (1.89%) Next.js
16 52 (1.89%) Web Services
17 49 (1.78%) Model Context Protocol
18 45 (1.63%) FastAPI
19 44 (1.60%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 436 (15.84%) Cloud Native
2 247 (8.97%) Distributed Systems
3 162 (5.88%) AI Agents
4 159 (5.78%) Product Ownership
5 83 (3.01%) Enterprise Software
6 64 (2.32%) Onboarding
7 62 (2.25%) Algorithms
8 61 (2.22%) Data Structures
9 57 (2.07%) Data Protection Act
10 41 (1.49%) Embedded Systems
10 41 (1.49%) Legacy Systems
11 37 (1.34%) Self-Motivation
12 32 (1.16%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 30 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
14 29 (1.05%) Fixed Income
15 27 (0.98%) Derivative
16 24 (0.87%) Equities
16 24 (0.87%) Management Information System
17 22 (0.80%) Virtual Team
18 19 (0.69%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 194 (7.05%) Linux
2 70 (2.54%) Windows
3 37 (1.34%) Unix
4 19 (0.69%) Embedded Linux
4 19 (0.69%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 17 (0.62%) Android
6 12 (0.44%) FreeRTOS
6 12 (0.44%) Windows Server
7 11 (0.40%) Apple iOS
8 7 (0.25%) 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 (0.036%) Robot Operating System
12 1 (0.036%) Solaris
12 1 (0.036%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 975 (35.42%) CI/CD
2 848 (30.80%) Agile
3 672 (24.41%) DevOps
4 630 (22.88%) AI
5 437 (15.87%) Test Automation
6 410 (14.89%) Microservices
7 370 (13.44%) Continuous Improvement
8 342 (12.42%) Problem-Solving
9 340 (12.35%) Infrastructure as Code
10 312 (11.33%) Observability
11 284 (10.32%) Stakeholder Management
12 282 (10.24%) SDLC
13 270 (9.81%) Containerisation
14 253 (9.19%) Full-Stack Development
15 247 (8.97%) Technical Leadership
16 242 (8.79%) LLM
16 242 (8.79%) Machine Learning
17 238 (8.65%) Platform Engineering
18 232 (8.43%) Event-Driven
18 232 (8.43%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 820 (29.79%) Python
2 690 (25.06%) Java
3 412 (14.97%) SQL
4 316 (11.48%) TypeScript
5 287 (10.42%) C#
6 231 (8.39%) JavaScript
7 226 (8.21%) C++
8 111 (4.03%) C
9 82 (2.98%) Go
10 70 (2.54%) Ada
10 70 (2.54%) Kotlin
11 53 (1.93%) PowerShell
12 50 (1.82%) Bash
13 44 (1.60%) Rust
14 38 (1.38%) Scala
15 29 (1.05%) Bicep
15 29 (1.05%) Embedded C
16 24 (0.87%) PL/SQL
17 21 (0.76%) PHP
18 18 (0.65%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 596 (21.65%) Security Cleared
2 495 (17.98%) SC Cleared
3 230 (8.35%) Degree
4 106 (3.85%) Computer Science Degree
5 105 (3.81%) DV Cleared
6 61 (2.22%) BPSS Clearance
7 50 (1.82%) AWS Certification
7 50 (1.82%) Master's Degree
8 31 (1.13%) Azure Certification
9 18 (0.65%) PhD
10 15 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 13 (0.47%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 12 (0.44%) CISSP
12 12 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
13 11 (0.40%) PMP
14 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
15 5 (0.18%) ISTQB
15 5 (0.18%) Numerate Degree
15 5 (0.18%) PMI Certification
16 4 (0.15%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 173 (6.28%) QA
2 88 (3.20%) Data Quality
3 63 (2.29%) Accessibility
4 24 (0.87%) MISRA
5 20 (0.73%) GDPR
6 17 (0.62%) Def Stans
7 15 (0.54%) NIST
8 14 (0.51%) WCAG
9 13 (0.47%) MISRA C
10 12 (0.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 11 (0.40%) IEC 61508
12 10 (0.36%) DO-178B
13 8 (0.29%) GRC
14 7 (0.25%) 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
1 400 (14.53%) Docker
2 29 (1.05%) Firmware
3 18 (0.65%) Active Directory
4 17 (0.62%) Embedded Firmware
5 13 (0.47%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
7 2 (0.073%) Virtual Desktop
8 1 (0.036%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.036%) Oracle RAC
8 1 (0.036%) zsh
Systems Management
1 463 (16.82%) Kubernetes
2 98 (3.56%) Ansible
3 65 (2.36%) Grafana
4 47 (1.71%) Prometheus
5 36 (1.31%) Argo
6 23 (0.84%) 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
11 4 (0.15%) Podman
12 3 (0.11%) Consul
12 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
13 2 (0.073%) Cilium
13 2 (0.073%) HAProxy
13 2 (0.073%) Packer
13 2 (0.073%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 181 (6.57%) Microsoft
2 108 (3.92%) Google
3 100 (3.63%) Databricks
4 91 (3.31%) Oracle
5 76 (2.76%) OpenAI
6 40 (1.45%) Red Hat
7 34 (1.24%) Salesforce
8 27 (0.98%) Splunk
9 20 (0.73%) Foundry
9 20 (0.73%) IBM
10 16 (0.58%) Adobe
10 16 (0.58%) Informatica
10 16 (0.58%) SAP
11 15 (0.54%) Dynatrace
12 14 (0.51%) ServiceNow
13 10 (0.36%) VMware
14 8 (0.29%) Siemens
15 7 (0.25%) Cisco
15 7 (0.25%) Hitachi
15 7 (0.25%) Mistral