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

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 44 32
Rank change year-on-year +13 -12 +6
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,566 1,343 1,937
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.63% 4.86% 5.81%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.62% 5.35% 6.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,418 868 1,226
10th Percentile £400 £375 £409
25th Percentile £469 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £565 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -5.83% -4.00% +4.17%
75th Percentile £694 £763 £800
90th Percentile £788 £850 £888
UK median daily rate £560 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -2.61% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 415 87 277
10th Percentile £51.25 £35.68 £46.22
25th Percentile £60.00 £51.88 £56.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £73.00 £76.00 £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 38,759 25,103 28,648
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.06% 90.80% 85.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,089 16,021 18,628
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,530 1,424 1,656
10th Percentile £14.55 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.87 £18.50
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +3.24%
75th Percentile £68.75 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £41.50
% change year-on-year +68.99% -39.40% -1.55%

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 August 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 August 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 August 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 1,155 £603 -7.27% 2,865
North of England +27 391 £538 +7.50% 458
South East +34 328 £525 +2.44% 527
South West +19 317 £550 +10.00% 341
East of England +23 222 £505 +3.37% 295
North West +13 179 £550 +10.00% 289
Yorkshire +16 147 £500 - 96
Midlands -3 111 £455 -13.09% 205
West Midlands -6 78 £450 -21.74% 110
North East +10 70 £650 +42.86% 74
East Midlands 0 32 £513 +7.89% 95
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 53 (2.07%) Confluence
2 49 (1.91%) Apache Spark
3 36 (1.40%) Apache Airflow
4 34 (1.33%) Apache
5 11 (0.43%) CMS
6 10 (0.39%) SAS
7 8 (0.31%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.23%) Jupyter
9 5 (0.19%) Apache Solr
9 5 (0.19%) Ethereum
9 5 (0.19%) Hyperledger
9 5 (0.19%) nginx
10 3 (0.12%) Apache Superset
10 3 (0.12%) Palantir Foundry
10 3 (0.12%) Tomcat
10 3 (0.12%) WordPress
11 2 (0.078%) Apache Pulsar
11 2 (0.078%) Camunda
11 2 (0.078%) IIS
11 2 (0.078%) MQSeries
Applications
1 12 (0.47%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.39%) Adobe Creative Suite
2 10 (0.39%) Chatbot
3 7 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
4 5 (0.19%) Microsoft Excel
5 4 (0.16%) CPLEX
5 4 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.16%) Simulink
6 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.12%) Trello
7 2 (0.078%) CATIA
7 2 (0.078%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 2 (0.078%) Notion
8 1 (0.039%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.039%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.039%) Blender
8 1 (0.039%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
1 7 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
2 6 (0.23%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.19%) R3 Corda
4 4 (0.16%) Quorum
4 4 (0.16%) Ripple
5 3 (0.12%) Orchestrade
5 3 (0.12%) Primavera
5 3 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
6 2 (0.078%) Aladdin
6 2 (0.078%) Endur
6 2 (0.078%) Remedy ITSM
7 1 (0.039%) Distributed Ledger
7 1 (0.039%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.039%) SAP ERP
7 1 (0.039%) Shopify
7 1 (0.039%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 639 (24.90%) AWS
2 511 (19.91%) Azure
3 260 (10.13%) GCP
4 218 (8.50%) GitHub
5 125 (4.87%) Serverless
6 108 (4.21%) GitHub Actions
7 103 (4.01%) Azure DevOps
8 87 (3.39%) AWS Lambda
9 62 (2.42%) Amazon S3
10 58 (2.26%) OpenShift
11 56 (2.18%) Anthropic Claude
12 49 (1.91%) Power Platform
13 48 (1.87%) Amazon EKS
13 48 (1.87%) Amazon SQS
14 47 (1.83%) Amazon ECS
15 45 (1.75%) GitHub Copilot
16 39 (1.52%) Azure AKS
17 33 (1.29%) Snowflake
18 29 (1.13%) Amazon EC2
18 29 (1.13%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 28 (1.09%) Software-Defined Radio
2 27 (1.05%) Wireless
3 23 (0.90%) Ethernet
4 20 (0.78%) TCP/IP
5 19 (0.74%) Firewall
5 19 (0.74%) Internet
6 16 (0.62%) VPN
7 14 (0.55%) HTTP
8 11 (0.43%) Wi-Fi
9 7 (0.27%) 3GPP
9 7 (0.27%) Network Security
9 7 (0.27%) RS-232
9 7 (0.27%) RTP
9 7 (0.27%) Wireshark
10 6 (0.23%) RS-485
11 5 (0.19%) DNS
12 4 (0.16%) RS-422
12 4 (0.16%) SSL
13 3 (0.12%) IPv4
13 3 (0.12%) IPv6
Database & Business Intelligence
1 151 (5.88%) PostgreSQL
2 98 (3.82%) Relational Database
3 80 (3.12%) NoSQL
4 78 (3.04%) SQL Server
5 48 (1.87%) MongoDB
6 43 (1.68%) Data Warehouse
7 37 (1.44%) DynamoDB
8 35 (1.36%) MySQL
9 34 (1.33%) Power BI
10 29 (1.13%) Big Data
11 26 (1.01%) Metadata
12 24 (0.94%) Data Lake
12 24 (0.94%) Redis
13 22 (0.86%) Amazon RDS
14 20 (0.78%) BigQuery
14 20 (0.78%) Elasticsearch
14 20 (0.78%) Pinecone
15 18 (0.70%) Weaviate
16 17 (0.66%) Amazon Redshift
17 13 (0.51%) Apache Cassandra
Development Applications
1 265 (10.33%) Git
2 164 (6.39%) Jenkins
3 147 (5.73%) GitLab
4 106 (4.13%) JIRA
5 59 (2.30%) SonarQube
6 37 (1.44%) Gradle
6 37 (1.44%) JUnit
7 28 (1.09%) Claude Code
8 25 (0.97%) Rational DOORS
8 25 (0.97%) Visual Studio
9 20 (0.78%) Rational Rhapsody
9 20 (0.78%) Selenium
10 19 (0.74%) Maven
11 18 (0.70%) Bitbucket
12 17 (0.66%) Cucumber
12 17 (0.66%) Mockito
13 14 (0.55%) Liquibase
14 13 (0.51%) Cypress.io
15 12 (0.47%) Eclipse
15 12 (0.47%) Mocha
General
1 477 (18.59%) Social Skills
2 460 (17.93%) Finance
3 188 (7.33%) Banking
4 185 (7.21%) Analytical Skills
5 176 (6.86%) Public Sector
6 103 (4.01%) Aerospace
7 98 (3.82%) Front Office
8 52 (2.03%) Retail
9 48 (1.87%) Manufacturing
10 46 (1.79%) Investment Banking
11 45 (1.75%) Law
12 33 (1.29%) Automotive
13 30 (1.17%) Military
14 29 (1.13%) Telecoms
15 26 (1.01%) Aviation
16 24 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
17 21 (0.82%) Electronics
18 20 (0.78%) Marketing
19 18 (0.70%) Financial Institution
19 18 (0.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
Job Titles
1 1,188 (46.30%) Software Engineer
2 480 (18.71%) Developer
3 442 (17.23%) Senior
4 284 (11.07%) Lead
5 182 (7.09%) Senior Software Engineer
6 167 (6.51%) Java Engineer
7 156 (6.08%) Embedded Engineer
8 143 (5.57%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 136 (5.30%) Java Software Engineer
10 127 (4.95%) Java Developer
11 115 (4.48%) C++ Software Engineer
12 113 (4.40%) Software Developer
13 107 (4.17%) Python Engineer
14 105 (4.09%) Architect
15 102 (3.98%) Lead Software Engineer
16 91 (3.55%) Senior Developer
17 90 (3.51%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 85 (3.31%) Data Engineer
19 78 (3.04%) Python Developer
20 74 (2.88%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 268 (10.44%) React
2 209 (8.14%) REST
3 204 (7.95%) .NET
4 192 (7.48%) Spring
5 174 (6.78%) Spring Boot
6 173 (6.74%) Kafka
7 167 (6.51%) Node.js
8 121 (4.72%) RESTful
9 111 (4.33%) AngularJS
10 61 (2.38%) GraphQL
11 52 (2.03%) Django
12 49 (1.91%) Next.js
13 46 (1.79%) HTML
14 45 (1.75%) Redux
15 44 (1.71%) CSS
16 41 (1.60%) LangChain
17 40 (1.56%) Quarkus
18 38 (1.48%) JSON
18 38 (1.48%) Web Services
19 37 (1.44%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 352 (13.72%) Cloud Native
2 216 (8.42%) Distributed Systems
3 133 (5.18%) Product Ownership
4 92 (3.59%) AI Agents
5 84 (3.27%) Algorithms
6 64 (2.49%) Fixed Income
7 52 (2.03%) Data Structures
8 50 (1.95%) Embedded Systems
9 48 (1.87%) Enterprise Software
9 48 (1.87%) Onboarding
10 43 (1.68%) Data Protection Act
11 34 (1.33%) Derivative
11 34 (1.33%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 31 (1.21%) Legacy Systems
13 30 (1.17%) Equities
13 30 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
14 27 (1.05%) Robotics
15 21 (0.82%) Greenfield Project
16 19 (0.74%) NHS
17 17 (0.66%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 192 (7.48%) Linux
2 60 (2.34%) Windows
3 33 (1.29%) Unix
4 26 (1.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 22 (0.86%) Embedded Linux
6 12 (0.47%) Android
7 11 (0.43%) FreeRTOS
8 9 (0.35%) Ubuntu
8 9 (0.35%) Windows Server
9 5 (0.19%) Apple iOS
9 5 (0.19%) Debian
10 4 (0.16%) Rocky
10 4 (0.16%) VMS
10 4 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.12%) Solaris
11 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
12 2 (0.078%) VxWorks
13 1 (0.039%) Tizen
13 1 (0.039%) webOS
13 1 (0.039%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 843 (32.85%) CI/CD
2 796 (31.02%) Agile
3 603 (23.50%) DevOps
4 478 (18.63%) AI
5 390 (15.20%) Microservices
6 341 (13.29%) Test Automation
7 306 (11.93%) Problem-Solving
8 283 (11.03%) Continuous Improvement
9 277 (10.80%) Infrastructure as Code
10 265 (10.33%) Full-Stack Development
11 253 (9.86%) Containerisation
12 226 (8.81%) SDLC
13 219 (8.53%) Machine Learning
13 219 (8.53%) Observability
14 208 (8.11%) Mentoring
15 200 (7.79%) Technical Leadership
16 194 (7.56%) Platform Engineering
17 191 (7.44%) Scrum
18 189 (7.37%) TDD
19 182 (7.09%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 752 (29.31%) Python
2 654 (25.49%) Java
3 342 (13.33%) SQL
4 305 (11.89%) TypeScript
5 293 (11.42%) C#
6 239 (9.31%) JavaScript
7 221 (8.61%) C++
8 118 (4.60%) C
9 110 (4.29%) Ada
9 110 (4.29%) Go
10 56 (2.18%) Kotlin
11 42 (1.64%) PowerShell
11 42 (1.64%) Rust
12 40 (1.56%) Bash
13 38 (1.48%) Scala
14 25 (0.97%) PL/SQL
15 22 (0.86%) Embedded C
16 20 (0.78%) Bicep
16 20 (0.78%) Ruby
17 18 (0.70%) PHP
Qualifications
1 608 (23.69%) Security Cleared
2 511 (19.91%) SC Cleared
3 199 (7.76%) Degree
4 90 (3.51%) Computer Science Degree
5 79 (3.08%) DV Cleared
6 54 (2.10%) BPSS Clearance
7 41 (1.60%) Master's Degree
8 35 (1.36%) AWS Certification
9 20 (0.78%) PhD
10 18 (0.70%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 14 (0.55%) Azure Certification
12 8 (0.31%) CISSP
13 7 (0.27%) ISTQB
13 7 (0.27%) PMP
14 6 (0.23%) Chartered Engineer
14 6 (0.23%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
14 6 (0.23%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 4 (0.16%) GIAC
15 4 (0.16%) MBA
15 4 (0.16%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 151 (5.88%) QA
2 60 (2.34%) Data Quality
3 47 (1.83%) Accessibility
4 25 (0.97%) Def Stans
5 19 (0.74%) GDPR
6 15 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.58%) NIST
7 14 (0.55%) IEC 61508
8 13 (0.51%) MISRA
9 12 (0.47%) WCAG
10 10 (0.39%) DO-178B
11 9 (0.35%) NCSC
12 7 (0.27%) GRC
13 6 (0.23%) PCI DSS
14 5 (0.19%) JSP 440
14 5 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.12%) Automotive SPICE
15 3 (0.12%) DO-254
15 3 (0.12%) HL7
15 3 (0.12%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 376 (14.65%) Docker
2 27 (1.05%) Firmware
3 16 (0.62%) Embedded Firmware
4 9 (0.35%) Active Directory
4 9 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (0.27%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (0.12%) HDFS
7 2 (0.078%) SRDF
8 1 (0.039%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 427 (16.64%) Kubernetes
2 261 (10.17%) Terraform
3 84 (3.27%) Ansible
4 53 (2.07%) Grafana
5 42 (1.64%) Argo
6 38 (1.48%) Prometheus
7 12 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
8 11 (0.43%) Kibana
9 10 (0.39%) Puppet
10 7 (0.27%) Progress Chef
11 6 (0.23%) Functional Safety
12 5 (0.19%) HAProxy
12 5 (0.19%) Kubeflow
13 4 (0.16%) Consul
14 3 (0.12%) HP Fortify
15 2 (0.078%) Cilium
15 2 (0.078%) Docker Swarm
15 2 (0.078%) Istio
15 2 (0.078%) Kustomize
15 2 (0.078%) Packer
Vendors
1 131 (5.11%) Microsoft
2 90 (3.51%) Google
3 73 (2.84%) Oracle
4 59 (2.30%) Databricks
5 47 (1.83%) OpenAI
5 47 (1.83%) Red Hat
6 22 (0.86%) Salesforce
7 20 (0.78%) Informatica
8 19 (0.74%) ServiceNow
9 18 (0.70%) IBM
10 16 (0.62%) Splunk
11 12 (0.47%) Adobe
11 12 (0.47%) Foundry
11 12 (0.47%) SAP
12 11 (0.43%) Checkmarx
13 10 (0.39%) ForgeRock
13 10 (0.39%) Okta
14 9 (0.35%) Dynatrace
15 8 (0.31%) Confluent
15 8 (0.31%) VMware