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

6 months to
1 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 40 42 34
Rank change year-on-year +2 -8 +8
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 1,919 1,221 1,951
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.03% 5.04% 5.18%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.84% 5.55% 5.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,014 816 1,139
10th Percentile £395 £404 £425
25th Percentile £450 £500 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £600
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -
75th Percentile £667 £753 £746
90th Percentile £788 £838 £825
UK median daily rate £550 £600 £600
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 402 80 320
10th Percentile £52.05 £42.95 £46.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £52.88 £51.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year - +4.00% -2.56%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.46 £68.75 £78.88
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +0.78% +3.20% -2.45%

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 32,858 22,016 32,689
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 86.08% 90.81% 86.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,074 14,505 21,608
10th Percentile £313 £313 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,007 857 2,166
10th Percentile £15.34 £15.00 £13.00
25th Percentile £19.27 £20.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £37.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.85% - -13.33%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £58.36
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.63 £71.25
UK median hourly rate £35.50 £32.00 £32.50
% change year-on-year +10.94% -1.54% -11.33%

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 April 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 April 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 April 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 -12 826 £600 -9.26% 539
North of England +14 280 £500 -5.66% 264
South West +11 259 £543 -7.26% 216
South East +4 201 £525 +2.44% 355
East of England +34 186 £475 -2.66% 135
North West 0 128 £500 -5.66% 145
Yorkshire -3 107 £519 +3.75% 87
Midlands -32 102 £503 +2.65% 126
West Midlands -15 90 £500 - 74
North East +23 48 £464 +0.82% 33
East Midlands -34 12 £538 +8.59% 52
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 61 (3.18%) Confluence
2 47 (2.45%) Apache
3 45 (2.34%) Apache Spark
4 18 (0.94%) Apache Airflow
5 10 (0.52%) CMS
6 9 (0.47%) WebLogic
7 8 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
8 4 (0.21%) IIS
8 4 (0.21%) JBoss
8 4 (0.21%) nginx
8 4 (0.21%) OpenStack
8 4 (0.21%) SharePoint
9 3 (0.16%) Camunda
9 3 (0.16%) SAS
10 2 (0.10%) Magnolia
10 2 (0.10%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.10%) Sitecore CMS
10 2 (0.10%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.10%) WinCC
10 2 (0.10%) WordPress
Applications
1 11 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.52%) Microsoft Excel
3 7 (0.36%) Chatbot
4 5 (0.26%) Simulink
5 4 (0.21%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.10%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.052%) Maya
7 1 (0.052%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.052%) OrCAD
7 1 (0.052%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 4 (0.21%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.10%) LabWindows
2 2 (0.10%) Primavera
3 1 (0.052%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.052%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.052%) Sprinklr
3 1 (0.052%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 549 (28.61%) AWS
2 355 (18.50%) Azure
3 183 (9.54%) GCP
4 128 (6.67%) GitHub
5 127 (6.62%) Serverless
6 68 (3.54%) Azure DevOps
7 61 (3.18%) AWS Lambda
8 57 (2.97%) GitHub Actions
9 55 (2.87%) Amazon S3
10 51 (2.66%) OpenShift
11 46 (2.40%) Power Platform
12 42 (2.19%) AWS CloudFormation
13 39 (2.03%) Azure AKS
14 35 (1.82%) Amazon EKS
15 31 (1.62%) Amazon EC2
15 31 (1.62%) Amazon ECS
15 31 (1.62%) Azure Functions
16 30 (1.56%) SaaS
17 26 (1.35%) Amazon SQS
18 23 (1.20%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.09%) Ethernet
2 13 (0.68%) Network Security
2 13 (0.68%) TCP/IP
3 10 (0.52%) Firewall
4 7 (0.36%) Software-Defined Radio
5 6 (0.31%) Wireless
6 5 (0.26%) 3GPP
6 5 (0.26%) HTTP
6 5 (0.26%) Modbus
7 4 (0.21%) BGP
7 4 (0.21%) Internet
7 4 (0.21%) RS-232
7 4 (0.21%) RS-485
7 4 (0.21%) Software-Defined Networking
7 4 (0.21%) VLAN
8 3 (0.16%) Bluetooth
8 3 (0.16%) IPv4
8 3 (0.16%) IPv6
8 3 (0.16%) RS-422
8 3 (0.16%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 126 (6.57%) PostgreSQL
2 68 (3.54%) Relational Database
3 67 (3.49%) Apache Cassandra
4 63 (3.28%) NoSQL
5 56 (2.92%) SQL Server
6 53 (2.76%) MongoDB
7 34 (1.77%) Data Lake
8 33 (1.72%) Amazon RDS
8 33 (1.72%) Power BI
9 29 (1.51%) MySQL
10 28 (1.46%) BigQuery
11 26 (1.35%) Big Data
12 23 (1.20%) DynamoDB
12 23 (1.20%) Metadata
13 19 (0.99%) Data Warehouse
14 17 (0.89%) Elasticsearch
14 17 (0.89%) Hadoop
15 16 (0.83%) Amazon Athena
16 15 (0.78%) Mixpanel
17 13 (0.68%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 199 (10.37%) Git
2 125 (6.51%) Jenkins
3 107 (5.58%) GitLab
4 103 (5.37%) JIRA
5 34 (1.77%) Rational DOORS
5 34 (1.77%) SonarQube
6 33 (1.72%) Rational Rhapsody
7 32 (1.67%) JUnit
8 26 (1.35%) Selenium
9 25 (1.30%) Cucumber
9 25 (1.30%) Gradle
10 23 (1.20%) Bitbucket
10 23 (1.20%) Cypress.io
11 22 (1.15%) IntelliJ
12 21 (1.09%) Maven
13 17 (0.89%) Eclipse
13 17 (0.89%) Liquibase
13 17 (0.89%) Mockito
13 17 (0.89%) Visual Studio
14 10 (0.52%) Postman
General
1 307 (16.00%) Social Skills
2 300 (15.63%) Finance
3 125 (6.51%) Public Sector
4 110 (5.73%) Banking
5 105 (5.47%) Analytical Skills
6 75 (3.91%) Aerospace
7 63 (3.28%) Front Office
8 41 (2.14%) Electronics
9 33 (1.72%) Law
10 28 (1.46%) Retail
11 27 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
12 26 (1.35%) Financial Institution
13 25 (1.30%) Manufacturing
13 25 (1.30%) Military
14 24 (1.25%) Investment Banking
15 22 (1.15%) Telecoms
16 20 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
17 13 (0.68%) Documentation Skills
18 12 (0.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 12 (0.63%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,019 (53.10%) Software Engineer
2 357 (18.60%) Senior
3 346 (18.03%) Developer
4 164 (8.55%) Senior Software Engineer
5 144 (7.50%) Lead
6 139 (7.24%) Java Engineer
7 120 (6.25%) C++ Software Engineer
8 115 (5.99%) Embedded Engineer
9 110 (5.73%) Java Software Engineer
10 103 (5.37%) Embedded Software Engineer
11 86 (4.48%) Architect
12 79 (4.12%) Java Developer
13 75 (3.91%) Senior Developer
14 68 (3.54%) Python Engineer
15 62 (3.23%) Developer/Software Engineer
16 61 (3.18%) Python Developer
17 58 (3.02%) Lead Software Engineer
18 53 (2.76%) AWS Engineer
18 53 (2.76%) Data Engineer
19 52 (2.71%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 227 (11.83%) React
2 207 (10.79%) Kafka
3 166 (8.65%) Node.js
4 140 (7.30%) REST
5 139 (7.24%) .NET
6 127 (6.62%) Spring
7 113 (5.89%) Spring Boot
8 102 (5.32%) RESTful
9 101 (5.26%) AngularJS
10 69 (3.60%) gRPC
11 67 (3.49%) GraphQL
12 58 (3.02%) Middleware
13 52 (2.71%) Redux
14 49 (2.55%) HTML
15 48 (2.50%) CSS
16 47 (2.45%) JSON
17 43 (2.24%) Playwright
18 35 (1.82%) Web Services
19 33 (1.72%) Vue
20 31 (1.62%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 219 (11.41%) Cloud Native
2 157 (8.18%) Distributed Systems
3 92 (4.79%) Product Ownership
4 72 (3.75%) Algorithms
5 60 (3.13%) Fixed Income
6 34 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
7 32 (1.67%) Mobile App
8 28 (1.46%) Derivative
8 28 (1.46%) Legacy Systems
8 28 (1.46%) Onboarding
9 27 (1.41%) AI Agents
9 27 (1.41%) Data Structures
10 25 (1.30%) Embedded Systems
10 25 (1.30%) Equities
11 24 (1.25%) Greenfield Project
12 22 (1.15%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 21 (1.09%) Public Cloud
14 19 (0.99%) Virtual Team
15 18 (0.94%) Hedge funds
16 17 (0.89%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 201 (10.47%) Linux
2 72 (3.75%) Windows
3 45 (2.34%) Unix
4 26 (1.35%) Android
5 24 (1.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 19 (0.99%) Apple iOS
7 15 (0.78%) Windows Server
8 11 (0.57%) Ubuntu
9 8 (0.42%) Embedded Linux
10 6 (0.31%) FreeRTOS
11 5 (0.26%) Debian
11 5 (0.26%) VMS
12 3 (0.16%) Rocky
13 2 (0.10%) Robot Operating System
13 2 (0.10%) Solaris
13 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
13 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2019
14 1 (0.052%) Mac OS
14 1 (0.052%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 569 (29.65%) Agile
2 556 (28.97%) CI/CD
3 391 (20.38%) DevOps
4 335 (17.46%) Microservices
5 269 (14.02%) AI
6 242 (12.61%) Problem-Solving
7 218 (11.36%) Containerisation
8 206 (10.73%) Test Automation
9 199 (10.37%) Infrastructure as Code
10 195 (10.16%) Full-Stack Development
11 170 (8.86%) Computer Science
12 163 (8.49%) Machine Learning
13 152 (7.92%) Continuous Improvement
14 151 (7.87%) Mentoring
15 145 (7.56%) Observability
16 134 (6.98%) SDLC
17 132 (6.88%) Scrum
18 128 (6.67%) TDD
19 125 (6.51%) Technical Leadership
20 114 (5.94%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 536 (27.93%) Python
2 476 (24.80%) Java
3 249 (12.98%) SQL
4 234 (12.19%) C++
5 233 (12.14%) TypeScript
6 229 (11.93%) C#
7 222 (11.57%) JavaScript
8 165 (8.60%) Go
9 127 (6.62%) Ada
10 111 (5.78%) C
11 39 (2.03%) PowerShell
12 33 (1.72%) Kotlin
13 32 (1.67%) Bash
14 26 (1.35%) Embedded C
14 26 (1.35%) MATLAB
14 26 (1.35%) Ruby
14 26 (1.35%) Rust
15 23 (1.20%) Shell Script
16 20 (1.04%) Embedded C++
17 16 (0.83%) Scala
Qualifications
1 471 (24.54%) Security Cleared
2 364 (18.97%) SC Cleared
3 195 (10.16%) Degree
4 92 (4.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 64 (3.34%) DV Cleared
6 57 (2.97%) Master's Degree
7 27 (1.41%) BPSS Clearance
8 21 (1.09%) AWS Certification
9 20 (1.04%) PhD
10 18 (0.94%) CISSP
11 15 (0.78%) CISM
12 14 (0.73%) Azure Certification
13 13 (0.68%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 13 (0.68%) TOGAF Certification
14 8 (0.42%) ISTQB
15 7 (0.36%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Certification
16 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Certified Professional
17 4 (0.21%) HND
18 3 (0.16%) HNC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 107 (5.58%) QA
2 56 (2.92%) Def Stans
3 40 (2.08%) IEC 61508
4 39 (2.03%) Data Quality
5 30 (1.56%) Accessibility
6 27 (1.41%) MISRA
7 26 (1.35%) GDPR
8 20 (1.04%) MISRA C
9 17 (0.89%) WCAG
10 12 (0.63%) NIST
11 8 (0.42%) DO-178B
12 7 (0.36%) HL7
12 7 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
13 6 (0.31%) NCSC
14 4 (0.21%) EU AI Act
15 3 (0.16%) SLA
16 2 (0.10%) FATCA
16 2 (0.10%) PCI DSS
16 2 (0.10%) PMO
16 2 (0.10%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 319 (16.62%) Docker
2 17 (0.89%) Firmware
3 16 (0.83%) VMware Infrastructure
4 12 (0.63%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.42%) Active Directory
6 5 (0.26%) Embedded Firmware
7 4 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.16%) HDFS
9 2 (0.10%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 362 (18.86%) Kubernetes
2 216 (11.26%) Terraform
3 94 (4.90%) Grafana
4 61 (3.18%) Ansible
5 56 (2.92%) Prometheus
6 32 (1.67%) Argo
7 18 (0.94%) Puppet
8 13 (0.68%) Progress Chef
9 7 (0.36%) Single Sign-On
10 6 (0.31%) Istio
10 6 (0.31%) Kibana
11 5 (0.26%) Kubeflow
12 4 (0.21%) Data Guard
12 4 (0.21%) Docker Swarm
12 4 (0.21%) HAProxy
12 4 (0.21%) HP Quality Center
13 3 (0.16%) Podman
13 3 (0.16%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
14 2 (0.10%) Functional Safety
14 2 (0.10%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 147 (7.66%) Microsoft
2 70 (3.65%) Google
3 63 (3.28%) Oracle
3 63 (3.28%) Red Hat
4 48 (2.50%) Databricks
5 25 (1.30%) Splunk
6 22 (1.15%) IBM
7 21 (1.09%) Foundry
8 17 (0.89%) VMware
9 16 (0.83%) OpenAI
10 14 (0.73%) BiZZdesign
11 11 (0.57%) Atlassian
11 11 (0.57%) Siemens
12 10 (0.52%) PagerDuty
12 10 (0.52%) ServiceNow
13 9 (0.47%) Palantir
13 9 (0.47%) SAP
13 9 (0.47%) Software AG
14 8 (0.42%) ANSYS
14 8 (0.42%) MathWorks