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

6 months to
16 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 32 43 31
Rank change year-on-year +11 -12 +10
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,789 1,422 1,814
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.96% 5.04% 5.66%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 7.01% 5.54% 6.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,487 845 1,092
10th Percentile £400 £375 £405
25th Percentile £463 £463 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £601
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% -4.25% -0.99%
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 433 132 199
10th Percentile £51.35 £44.65 £46.18
25th Percentile £60.33 £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 £67.63 £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 39,797 25,656 27,726
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.00% 90.96% 86.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,013 16,263 16,907
10th Percentile £325 £296 £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% -2.42%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,100 1,620 1,099
10th Percentile £13.54 £14.64 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.87 £20.30
Median hourly rate £38.13 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.59% -40.82% -5.56%
75th Percentile £67.25 £45.00 £66.80
90th Percentile £79.00 £67.55 £74.09
UK median hourly rate £37.24 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +48.07% -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 16 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 16 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 16 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 1,264 £600 -4.00% 3,138
North of England +24 497 £520 +4.00% 776
South East +41 349 £525 +10.53% 712
South West +13 298 £550 +20.22% 404
North West +34 242 £550 +10.00% 470
East of England +12 209 £505 -9.21% 476
Yorkshire +6 183 £500 -2.44% 193
Midlands +28 149 £470 -10.48% 332
West Midlands +18 107 £470 -14.55% 197
North East +5 74 £600 +23.08% 117
East Midlands +17 41 £413 -2.02% 135
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 (2.29%) Confluence
2 60 (2.15%) Apache Spark
3 46 (1.65%) Apache Airflow
4 37 (1.33%) Apache
5 17 (0.61%) SharePoint
6 15 (0.54%) CMS
7 10 (0.36%) Jupyter
8 9 (0.32%) Ethereum
9 7 (0.25%) Camunda
9 7 (0.25%) SAS
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%) Palantir Foundry
12 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
13 2 (0.072%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 2 (0.072%) Microsoft Exchange
13 2 (0.072%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 16 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
2 11 (0.39%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.36%) Adobe Creative Suite
4 9 (0.32%) Spreadsheet
5 5 (0.18%) Microsoft Excel
6 4 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
7 3 (0.11%) MS Visio
7 3 (0.11%) Trello
8 2 (0.072%) CATIA
8 2 (0.072%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.072%) LaTeX
8 2 (0.072%) Microsoft PowerPoint
8 2 (0.072%) Notion
8 2 (0.072%) Simulink
9 1 (0.036%) Adobe After Effects
9 1 (0.036%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.036%) Blender
9 1 (0.036%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.22%) Oracle Payroll
3 5 (0.18%) R3 Corda
4 4 (0.14%) Dynamics CRM
4 4 (0.14%) Quorum
4 4 (0.14%) 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 (0.072%) Endur
6 2 (0.072%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 2 (0.072%) Orchestrade
6 2 (0.072%) 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
1 718 (25.74%) AWS
2 581 (20.83%) Azure
3 289 (10.36%) GCP
4 259 (9.29%) GitHub
5 155 (5.56%) Serverless
6 136 (4.88%) GitHub Actions
7 134 (4.80%) Azure DevOps
8 101 (3.62%) AWS Lambda
9 79 (2.83%) Anthropic Claude
10 77 (2.76%) GitHub Copilot
11 65 (2.33%) Amazon S3
12 60 (2.15%) Amazon EKS
13 58 (2.08%) Amazon SQS
14 56 (2.01%) Power Platform
15 53 (1.90%) OpenShift
16 52 (1.86%) Amazon ECS
17 47 (1.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 46 (1.65%) Snowflake
19 38 (1.36%) AWS CloudFormation
20 36 (1.29%) Azure AI
Communications & Networking
1 32 (1.15%) Wireless
2 23 (0.82%) Firewall
3 21 (0.75%) TCP/IP
4 20 (0.72%) Internet
4 20 (0.72%) Software-Defined Radio
4 20 (0.72%) VPN
5 16 (0.57%) HTTP
6 15 (0.54%) Wi-Fi
7 14 (0.50%) DNS
7 14 (0.50%) Ethernet
8 13 (0.47%) Network Security
9 7 (0.25%) RTP
9 7 (0.25%) Wireshark
10 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
11 5 (0.18%) SSL
12 4 (0.14%) 3GPP
12 4 (0.14%) Broadband
12 4 (0.14%) Reverse Proxy
12 4 (0.14%) RS-232
13 3 (0.11%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 139 (4.98%) PostgreSQL
2 100 (3.59%) Relational Database
3 87 (3.12%) SQL Server
4 84 (3.01%) NoSQL
5 61 (2.19%) MongoDB
6 53 (1.90%) Data Warehouse
7 44 (1.58%) DynamoDB
8 43 (1.54%) MySQL
9 39 (1.40%) Data Lake
9 39 (1.40%) Metadata
10 32 (1.15%) Power BI
11 29 (1.04%) Elasticsearch
12 28 (1.00%) Amazon RDS
12 28 (1.00%) BigQuery
12 28 (1.00%) Redis
13 25 (0.90%) Pinecone
14 23 (0.82%) Big Data
15 21 (0.75%) Delta Lake
16 19 (0.68%) Weaviate
17 18 (0.65%) Chroma
Development Applications
1 280 (10.04%) Git
2 154 (5.52%) Jenkins
3 152 (5.45%) GitLab
4 117 (4.20%) JIRA
5 50 (1.79%) Claude Code
6 47 (1.69%) SonarQube
7 41 (1.47%) Gradle
8 33 (1.18%) JUnit
8 33 (1.18%) Visual Studio
9 31 (1.11%) Maven
10 28 (1.00%) Cucumber
11 27 (0.97%) Rational DOORS
12 25 (0.90%) Selenium
13 22 (0.79%) Rational Rhapsody
14 19 (0.68%) Mockito
15 15 (0.54%) LabVIEW
16 12 (0.43%) Bitbucket
16 12 (0.43%) Snyk
17 11 (0.39%) Postman
17 11 (0.39%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 619 (22.19%) Social Skills
2 545 (19.54%) Finance
3 232 (8.32%) Banking
4 221 (7.92%) Public Sector
5 199 (7.14%) Analytical Skills
6 100 (3.59%) Aerospace
7 79 (2.83%) Front Office
8 55 (1.97%) Manufacturing
9 54 (1.94%) Investment Banking
10 45 (1.61%) Law
10 45 (1.61%) Retail
11 37 (1.33%) Automotive
12 35 (1.25%) Telecoms
13 30 (1.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 29 (1.04%) Military
15 27 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
16 24 (0.86%) Marketing
17 23 (0.82%) Back Office
18 22 (0.79%) Aviation
19 21 (0.75%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,067 (38.26%) Software Engineer
2 542 (19.43%) Developer
3 540 (19.36%) Senior
4 312 (11.19%) Lead
5 195 (6.99%) Senior Software Engineer
6 161 (5.77%) Java Engineer
7 157 (5.63%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 147 (5.27%) Java Developer
9 136 (4.88%) Architect
10 135 (4.84%) Software Developer
11 134 (4.80%) Embedded Engineer
12 127 (4.55%) Embedded Software Engineer
13 125 (4.48%) Java Software Engineer
14 117 (4.20%) Senior Developer
15 113 (4.05%) Python Engineer
16 112 (4.02%) C++ Software Engineer
17 107 (3.84%) Data Engineer
18 95 (3.41%) DevOps Engineer
19 81 (2.90%) AWS Engineer
20 76 (2.72%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 315 (11.29%) Terraform
2 273 (9.79%) REST
3 245 (8.78%) React
4 235 (8.43%) Spring
5 224 (8.03%) Spring Boot
6 218 (7.82%) .NET
7 189 (6.78%) Kafka
8 161 (5.77%) RESTful
9 138 (4.95%) Node.js
10 101 (3.62%) AngularJS
11 68 (2.44%) OAuth
12 63 (2.26%) Django
12 63 (2.26%) LangChain
13 55 (1.97%) Web Services
14 53 (1.90%) HTML
15 52 (1.86%) Model Context Protocol
15 52 (1.86%) Next.js
16 51 (1.83%) CSS
17 44 (1.58%) FastAPI
17 44 (1.58%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 446 (15.99%) Cloud Native
2 252 (9.04%) Distributed Systems
3 169 (6.06%) AI Agents
4 161 (5.77%) Product Ownership
5 91 (3.26%) Enterprise Software
6 63 (2.26%) Onboarding
7 59 (2.12%) Data Structures
8 58 (2.08%) Algorithms
9 57 (2.04%) Data Protection Act
10 42 (1.51%) Embedded Systems
10 42 (1.51%) Legacy Systems
11 36 (1.29%) Self-Motivation
12 32 (1.15%) Greenfield Project
13 31 (1.11%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 29 (1.04%) Fixed Income
15 27 (0.97%) Derivative
15 27 (0.97%) Management Information System
16 24 (0.86%) Equities
16 24 (0.86%) Virtual Team
17 20 (0.72%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 195 (6.99%) Linux
2 69 (2.47%) Windows
3 34 (1.22%) Unix
4 20 (0.72%) Embedded Linux
4 20 (0.72%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 18 (0.65%) Android
6 12 (0.43%) Apple iOS
6 12 (0.43%) FreeRTOS
6 12 (0.43%) Windows Server
7 7 (0.25%) Ubuntu
8 4 (0.14%) Debian
8 4 (0.14%) macOS
9 3 (0.11%) Rocky
9 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
9 3 (0.11%) zOS
10 2 (0.072%) Windows 10
10 2 (0.072%) Windows Server 2019
11 1 (0.036%) Robot Operating System
11 1 (0.036%) Solaris
11 1 (0.036%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 999 (35.82%) CI/CD
2 870 (31.19%) Agile
3 689 (24.70%) DevOps
4 642 (23.02%) AI
5 452 (16.21%) Test Automation
6 426 (15.27%) Microservices
7 383 (13.73%) Continuous Improvement
8 350 (12.55%) Problem-Solving
9 349 (12.51%) Infrastructure as Code
10 326 (11.69%) Observability
11 296 (10.61%) SDLC
12 295 (10.58%) Stakeholder Management
13 274 (9.82%) Containerisation
14 260 (9.32%) Technical Leadership
15 257 (9.21%) Full-Stack Development
16 247 (8.86%) LLM
17 245 (8.78%) Machine Learning
18 243 (8.71%) Platform Engineering
19 241 (8.64%) Event-Driven
20 235 (8.43%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 826 (29.62%) Python
2 703 (25.21%) Java
3 418 (14.99%) SQL
4 323 (11.58%) TypeScript
5 292 (10.47%) C#
6 230 (8.25%) JavaScript
7 229 (8.21%) C++
8 112 (4.02%) C
9 84 (3.01%) Go
10 72 (2.58%) Kotlin
11 69 (2.47%) Ada
12 53 (1.90%) PowerShell
13 51 (1.83%) Bash
14 44 (1.58%) Rust
15 35 (1.25%) Scala
16 30 (1.08%) Bicep
17 28 (1.00%) Embedded C
18 24 (0.86%) PL/SQL
19 20 (0.72%) PHP
20 18 (0.65%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 607 (21.76%) Security Cleared
2 504 (18.07%) SC Cleared
3 235 (8.43%) Degree
4 112 (4.02%) Computer Science Degree
5 108 (3.87%) DV Cleared
6 61 (2.19%) BPSS Clearance
7 52 (1.86%) AWS Certification
8 50 (1.79%) Master's Degree
9 32 (1.15%) Azure Certification
10 18 (0.65%) PhD
11 15 (0.54%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 14 (0.50%) Microsoft Certified Professional
13 12 (0.43%) CISSP
13 12 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
14 11 (0.39%) PMP
15 7 (0.25%) Chartered Engineer
16 5 (0.18%) ISTQB
16 5 (0.18%) Numerate Degree
16 5 (0.18%) PMI Certification
17 4 (0.14%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 176 (6.31%) QA
2 92 (3.30%) Data Quality
3 65 (2.33%) Accessibility
4 24 (0.86%) MISRA
5 20 (0.72%) GDPR
6 17 (0.61%) Def Stans
7 15 (0.54%) NIST
8 14 (0.50%) WCAG
9 13 (0.47%) MISRA C
10 12 (0.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 11 (0.39%) 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
1 409 (14.66%) Docker
2 30 (1.08%) Firmware
3 18 (0.65%) Active Directory
3 18 (0.65%) Embedded Firmware
4 13 (0.47%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
6 2 (0.072%) Hyper-V
6 2 (0.072%) Virtual Desktop
7 1 (0.036%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.036%) zsh
Systems Management
1 471 (16.89%) Kubernetes
2 99 (3.55%) Ansible
3 62 (2.22%) Grafana
4 48 (1.72%) Prometheus
5 38 (1.36%) Argo
6 23 (0.82%) Single Sign-On
7 13 (0.47%) Kibana
8 10 (0.36%) Puppet
9 6 (0.22%) Functional Safety
10 5 (0.18%) Progress Chef
11 4 (0.14%) Istio
11 4 (0.14%) Kubeflow
11 4 (0.14%) Kustomize
11 4 (0.14%) Podman
12 3 (0.11%) Consul
12 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
13 2 (0.072%) Cilium
13 2 (0.072%) Control-M
13 2 (0.072%) Packer
13 2 (0.072%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 189 (6.78%) Microsoft
2 113 (4.05%) Google
3 104 (3.73%) Databricks
4 92 (3.30%) Oracle
5 79 (2.83%) OpenAI
6 42 (1.51%) Red Hat
7 33 (1.18%) Salesforce
8 25 (0.90%) Splunk
9 21 (0.75%) Foundry
10 20 (0.72%) IBM
11 16 (0.57%) Adobe
11 16 (0.57%) Dynatrace
11 16 (0.57%) Informatica
12 15 (0.54%) SAP
12 15 (0.54%) 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%) Palantir