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

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 43 31
Rank change year-on-year +12 -12 +8
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,609 1,352 1,893
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.72% 4.94% 5.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.74% 5.44% 6.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,415 842 1,186
10th Percentile £400 £380 £410
25th Percentile £463 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £555 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -7.50% -4.00% +4.17%
75th Percentile £688 £749 £810
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £551 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.26% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 412 112 248
10th Percentile £51.25 £38.63 £45.22
25th Percentile £57.63 £52.50 £52.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.41 £75.00 £77.50
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 38,735 24,846 28,143
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.90% 90.77% 85.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,900 15,805 17,939
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £634 £625 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £751
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.49%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,596 1,469 1,428
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.25 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.38 £17.87 £18.50
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.01
90th Percentile £80.00 £69.65 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%

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 3 September 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 3 September 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 3 September 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 1,166 £600 -7.69% 3,852
North of England +27 423 £528 +7.43% 657
South East +24 332 £525 +4.90% 650
South West +21 307 £550 +7.32% 506
East of England +20 215 £506 +1.20% 445
North West +13 196 £550 +10.00% 406
Yorkshire +16 164 £500 +2.04% 164
Midlands +16 133 £461 -16.14% 297
West Midlands -3 92 £463 -19.47% 176
North East +9 66 £650 +41.30% 89
East Midlands +8 40 £435 -8.42% 120
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 55 (2.11%) Confluence
2 53 (2.03%) Apache Spark
3 43 (1.65%) Apache Airflow
4 36 (1.38%) Apache
5 12 (0.46%) CMS
6 11 (0.42%) SharePoint
7 7 (0.27%) SAS
8 6 (0.23%) Jupyter
9 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.19%) Camunda
9 5 (0.19%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.19%) Hyperledger
10 4 (0.15%) Apache Superset
11 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
11 3 (0.11%) WordPress
12 2 (0.077%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.077%) IIS
12 2 (0.077%) MQSeries
12 2 (0.077%) nginx
12 2 (0.077%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 14 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.38%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 10 (0.38%) Chatbot
2 10 (0.38%) Spreadsheet
3 5 (0.19%) Microsoft Excel
4 4 (0.15%) CPLEX
4 4 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
4 4 (0.15%) Simulink
5 3 (0.11%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.11%) Trello
6 2 (0.077%) CATIA
6 2 (0.077%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.077%) Notion
7 1 (0.038%) Adobe After Effects
7 1 (0.038%) Adobe XD
7 1 (0.038%) Blender
7 1 (0.038%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
2 5 (0.19%) R3 Corda
3 4 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.15%) Quorum
3 4 (0.15%) Ripple
4 3 (0.11%) Oracle Payroll
4 3 (0.11%) Orchestrade
4 3 (0.11%) Primavera
4 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.077%) Aladdin
5 2 (0.077%) Endur
5 2 (0.077%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.038%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.038%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.038%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.038%) Shopify
6 1 (0.038%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 651 (24.95%) AWS
2 528 (20.24%) Azure
3 262 (10.04%) GCP
4 230 (8.82%) GitHub
5 133 (5.10%) Serverless
6 114 (4.37%) GitHub Actions
7 113 (4.33%) Azure DevOps
8 96 (3.68%) AWS Lambda
9 64 (2.45%) Amazon S3
10 63 (2.41%) Anthropic Claude
11 58 (2.22%) OpenShift
12 50 (1.92%) Amazon SQS
13 49 (1.88%) Amazon ECS
13 49 (1.88%) GitHub Copilot
14 46 (1.76%) Amazon EKS
15 45 (1.72%) Power Platform
16 41 (1.57%) Snowflake
17 37 (1.42%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 33 (1.26%) Azure AKS
19 31 (1.19%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (1.15%) Software-Defined Radio
1 30 (1.15%) Wireless
2 20 (0.77%) Firewall
3 19 (0.73%) HTTP
3 19 (0.73%) Internet
4 17 (0.65%) VPN
5 13 (0.50%) Ethernet
6 12 (0.46%) TCP/IP
6 12 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
7 8 (0.31%) RTP
7 8 (0.31%) Wireshark
8 7 (0.27%) Network Security
9 6 (0.23%) 3GPP
10 5 (0.19%) DNS
11 4 (0.15%) IPv4
11 4 (0.15%) IPv6
11 4 (0.15%) RS-232
11 4 (0.15%) SSL
12 3 (0.11%) Cisco IPT
12 3 (0.11%) RS-485
Database & Business Intelligence
1 137 (5.25%) PostgreSQL
2 103 (3.95%) Relational Database
3 85 (3.26%) NoSQL
4 83 (3.18%) SQL Server
5 52 (1.99%) MongoDB
6 49 (1.88%) Data Warehouse
7 39 (1.49%) DynamoDB
8 37 (1.42%) MySQL
9 31 (1.19%) Power BI
10 28 (1.07%) Amazon RDS
10 28 (1.07%) Metadata
11 27 (1.03%) Big Data
11 27 (1.03%) Redis
12 25 (0.96%) Elasticsearch
13 23 (0.88%) Data Lake
14 22 (0.84%) Pinecone
15 20 (0.77%) BigQuery
15 20 (0.77%) Weaviate
16 16 (0.61%) Chroma
17 13 (0.50%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 276 (10.58%) Git
2 153 (5.86%) Jenkins
3 152 (5.83%) GitLab
4 112 (4.29%) JIRA
5 60 (2.30%) SonarQube
6 41 (1.57%) JUnit
7 38 (1.46%) Gradle
8 31 (1.19%) Claude Code
9 28 (1.07%) Selenium
10 24 (0.92%) Rational DOORS
11 23 (0.88%) Maven
12 22 (0.84%) Rational Rhapsody
13 19 (0.73%) Cucumber
13 19 (0.73%) Mockito
14 17 (0.65%) Visual Studio
15 14 (0.54%) LabVIEW
16 13 (0.50%) Bitbucket
16 13 (0.50%) Cypress.io
16 13 (0.50%) Liquibase
16 13 (0.50%) MLflow
General
1 524 (20.08%) Social Skills
2 450 (17.25%) Finance
3 204 (7.82%) Banking
4 196 (7.51%) Public Sector
5 190 (7.28%) Analytical Skills
6 88 (3.37%) Aerospace
7 73 (2.80%) Front Office
8 51 (1.95%) Investment Banking
9 49 (1.88%) Manufacturing
10 45 (1.72%) Retail
11 44 (1.69%) Law
12 36 (1.38%) Automotive
13 29 (1.11%) Influencing Skills
14 27 (1.03%) Telecoms
15 26 (1.00%) Aviation
15 26 (1.00%) Military
16 21 (0.80%) Marketing
17 20 (0.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 18 (0.69%) Back Office
18 18 (0.69%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,143 (43.81%) Software Engineer
2 483 (18.51%) Developer
3 474 (18.17%) Senior
4 282 (10.81%) Lead
5 197 (7.55%) Senior Software Engineer
6 171 (6.55%) Java Engineer
7 158 (6.06%) Embedded Engineer
8 149 (5.71%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 139 (5.33%) Java Developer
10 137 (5.25%) Java Software Engineer
11 120 (4.60%) Software Developer
12 110 (4.22%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 109 (4.18%) C++ Software Engineer
14 105 (4.02%) Architect
14 105 (4.02%) Python Engineer
15 101 (3.87%) Senior Developer
16 88 (3.37%) Data Engineer
17 79 (3.03%) DevOps Engineer
18 77 (2.95%) Lead Software Engineer
19 75 (2.87%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 281 (10.77%) Terraform
2 245 (9.39%) React
3 226 (8.66%) Spring
4 225 (8.62%) REST
5 210 (8.05%) .NET
5 210 (8.05%) Spring Boot
6 165 (6.32%) Kafka
7 134 (5.14%) RESTful
8 127 (4.87%) Node.js
9 103 (3.95%) AngularJS
10 61 (2.34%) Django
11 52 (1.99%) Next.js
12 51 (1.95%) HTML
13 50 (1.92%) CSS
13 50 (1.92%) LangChain
14 44 (1.69%) JSON
14 44 (1.69%) OAuth
15 42 (1.61%) FastAPI
16 39 (1.49%) Quarkus
17 38 (1.46%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 397 (15.22%) Cloud Native
2 236 (9.05%) Distributed Systems
3 137 (5.25%) Product Ownership
4 112 (4.29%) AI Agents
5 84 (3.22%) Algorithms
6 61 (2.34%) Enterprise Software
7 56 (2.15%) Data Structures
8 49 (1.88%) Embedded Systems
9 48 (1.84%) Onboarding
10 44 (1.69%) Data Protection Act
11 36 (1.38%) Legacy Systems
12 33 (1.26%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 32 (1.23%) Self-Motivation
14 27 (1.03%) Fixed Income
14 27 (1.03%) Robotics
15 26 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
16 24 (0.92%) Derivative
17 21 (0.80%) Equities
18 19 (0.73%) NHS
19 18 (0.69%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 173 (6.63%) Linux
2 48 (1.84%) Windows
3 29 (1.11%) Unix
4 23 (0.88%) Embedded Linux
5 22 (0.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 14 (0.54%) Android
6 14 (0.54%) FreeRTOS
7 9 (0.34%) Windows Server
8 8 (0.31%) Apple iOS
8 8 (0.31%) Ubuntu
9 6 (0.23%) Debian
10 3 (0.11%) Rocky
10 3 (0.11%) VMS
11 2 (0.077%) VxWorks
11 2 (0.077%) Windows Server 2019
12 1 (0.038%) Solaris
12 1 (0.038%) Tizen
12 1 (0.038%) webOS
12 1 (0.038%) Windows Server 2008
12 1 (0.038%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 893 (34.23%) CI/CD
2 784 (30.05%) Agile
3 621 (23.80%) DevOps
4 530 (20.31%) AI
5 410 (15.71%) Microservices
6 379 (14.53%) Test Automation
7 311 (11.92%) Problem-Solving
8 310 (11.88%) Continuous Improvement
9 308 (11.81%) Infrastructure as Code
10 267 (10.23%) Containerisation
11 264 (10.12%) Observability
12 261 (10.00%) SDLC
13 255 (9.77%) Full-Stack Development
14 220 (8.43%) Platform Engineering
15 218 (8.36%) Machine Learning
15 218 (8.36%) Technical Leadership
16 212 (8.13%) Event-Driven
17 205 (7.86%) Scrum
18 202 (7.74%) Mentoring
19 196 (7.51%) LLM
Programming Languages
1 762 (29.21%) Python
2 675 (25.87%) Java
3 375 (14.37%) SQL
4 285 (10.92%) C#
5 278 (10.66%) TypeScript
6 213 (8.16%) C++
7 202 (7.74%) JavaScript
8 113 (4.33%) C
9 90 (3.45%) Ada
10 79 (3.03%) Go
11 66 (2.53%) Kotlin
12 44 (1.69%) PowerShell
13 42 (1.61%) Bash
13 42 (1.61%) Rust
14 39 (1.49%) Scala
15 26 (1.00%) Ruby
16 23 (0.88%) Embedded C
17 22 (0.84%) PL/SQL
18 21 (0.80%) Bicep
19 18 (0.69%) PHP
Qualifications
1 583 (22.35%) Security Cleared
2 492 (18.86%) SC Cleared
3 209 (8.01%) Degree
4 99 (3.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 83 (3.18%) DV Cleared
6 57 (2.18%) BPSS Clearance
7 47 (1.80%) Master's Degree
8 34 (1.30%) AWS Certification
9 20 (0.77%) PhD
10 16 (0.61%) Azure Certification
11 15 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 9 (0.34%) PMP
13 8 (0.31%) CISSP
14 6 (0.23%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.23%) ISTQB
14 6 (0.23%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 4 (0.15%) GIAC
15 4 (0.15%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
15 4 (0.15%) MBA
15 4 (0.15%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 170 (6.52%) QA
2 65 (2.49%) Data Quality
3 51 (1.95%) Accessibility
4 22 (0.84%) GDPR
5 17 (0.65%) Def Stans
5 17 (0.65%) MISRA
6 15 (0.57%) NIST
7 14 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 14 (0.54%) WCAG
8 10 (0.38%) DO-178B
9 9 (0.34%) IEC 61508
9 9 (0.34%) NCSC
10 8 (0.31%) GRC
11 6 (0.23%) MISRA C
12 5 (0.19%) HL7
12 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
12 5 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 4 (0.15%) EMIR
13 4 (0.15%) MiFID
13 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 394 (15.10%) Docker
2 30 (1.15%) Firmware
3 19 (0.73%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.38%) Active Directory
4 10 (0.38%) Virtual Machines
5 6 (0.23%) VMware Infrastructure
6 1 (0.038%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 449 (17.21%) Kubernetes
2 84 (3.22%) Ansible
3 55 (2.11%) Grafana
4 42 (1.61%) Argo
5 39 (1.49%) Prometheus
6 15 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
7 13 (0.50%) Kibana
8 7 (0.27%) Puppet
9 6 (0.23%) Functional Safety
10 4 (0.15%) Consul
10 4 (0.15%) HAProxy
10 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
10 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
11 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
11 3 (0.11%) Istio
11 3 (0.11%) Progress Chef
12 2 (0.077%) Cilium
12 2 (0.077%) Docker Swarm
12 2 (0.077%) Packer
12 2 (0.077%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 139 (5.33%) Microsoft
2 93 (3.56%) Google
3 83 (3.18%) Oracle
4 70 (2.68%) Databricks
5 58 (2.22%) OpenAI
6 44 (1.69%) Red Hat
7 26 (1.00%) Salesforce
8 24 (0.92%) Splunk
9 19 (0.73%) IBM
10 18 (0.69%) ServiceNow
11 17 (0.65%) Foundry
11 17 (0.65%) Informatica
12 12 (0.46%) Adobe
12 12 (0.46%) SAP
13 11 (0.42%) Checkmarx
14 9 (0.34%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.31%) Confluent
15 8 (0.31%) VMware
16 7 (0.27%) Hitachi
16 7 (0.27%) Siemens