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

6 months to
19 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 31 43 30
Rank change year-on-year +12 -13 +9
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 2,715 1,374 1,908
As % of all contract jobs in England 5.83% 4.94% 5.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.88% 5.43% 6.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,460 836 1,167
10th Percentile £400 £380 £413
25th Percentile £463 £463 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% +2.29%
75th Percentile £682 £748 £810
90th Percentile £775 £838 £888
UK median daily rate £550 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 431 118 231
10th Percentile £51.25 £43.96 £45.22
25th Percentile £58.69 £52.50 £56.88
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year - -0.76% +0.77%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £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 39,448 25,281 28,365
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.75% 90.90% 86.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,130 16,062 17,635
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £645
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,805 1,509 1,303
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.75 £17.79 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -3.37%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £66.55
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -1.91%

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 19 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 19 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 19 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 -3 1,208 £600 -7.69% 4,540
North of England +22 451 £525 +6.62% 879
South East +30 346 £525 +10.53% 854
South West +18 313 £550 +10.00% 546
East of England +17 229 £507 +1.40% 584
North West +16 207 £550 +10.00% 535
Yorkshire +19 183 £500 - 220
Midlands +29 142 £466 -13.65% 398
West Midlands +11 99 £470 -18.35% 221
North East +2 65 £650 +41.30% 124
East Midlands +16 42 £435 -3.33% 177
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 (2.25%) Confluence
2 57 (2.10%) Apache Spark
3 47 (1.73%) Apache Airflow
4 33 (1.22%) Apache
5 14 (0.52%) CMS
5 14 (0.52%) SharePoint
6 7 (0.26%) Camunda
6 7 (0.26%) Jupyter
6 7 (0.26%) SAS
7 6 (0.22%) Ethereum
8 5 (0.18%) Apache Solr
8 5 (0.18%) Hyperledger
9 4 (0.15%) Apache Superset
9 4 (0.15%) WordPress
10 3 (0.11%) MQSeries
10 3 (0.11%) nginx
10 3 (0.11%) WebSphere
11 2 (0.074%) Apache Pulsar
11 2 (0.074%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.074%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 14 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (0.44%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.37%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 10 (0.37%) 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 (0.074%) CATIA
7 2 (0.074%) Microsoft PowerPoint
7 2 (0.074%) Notion
7 2 (0.074%) Simulink
8 1 (0.037%) Adobe After Effects
8 1 (0.037%) Adobe XD
8 1 (0.037%) Blender
8 1 (0.037%) S-PLUS
Business Applications
1 7 (0.26%) Payment Gateway
2 5 (0.18%) Oracle Payroll
2 5 (0.18%) R3 Corda
3 4 (0.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.15%) Quorum
3 4 (0.15%) Ripple
4 3 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
4 3 (0.11%) Orchestrade
4 3 (0.11%) Primavera
4 3 (0.11%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.074%) Endur
5 2 (0.074%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.037%) Aladdin
6 1 (0.037%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.037%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.037%) Sage 50
6 1 (0.037%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.037%) SAP S/4HANA
6 1 (0.037%) Shopify
6 1 (0.037%) Sprinklr
Cloud Services
1 690 (25.41%) AWS
2 549 (20.22%) Azure
3 280 (10.31%) GCP
4 243 (8.95%) GitHub
5 144 (5.30%) Serverless
6 126 (4.64%) GitHub Actions
7 114 (4.20%) Azure DevOps
8 104 (3.83%) AWS Lambda
9 70 (2.58%) Amazon S3
10 69 (2.54%) Anthropic Claude
11 63 (2.32%) GitHub Copilot
12 59 (2.17%) OpenShift
13 53 (1.95%) Amazon SQS
14 51 (1.88%) Amazon EKS
15 50 (1.84%) Amazon ECS
16 46 (1.69%) Snowflake
17 45 (1.66%) Power Platform
18 43 (1.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 34 (1.25%) dbt
20 33 (1.22%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 31 (1.14%) Wireless
2 30 (1.10%) Software-Defined Radio
3 20 (0.74%) Firewall
3 20 (0.74%) Internet
4 19 (0.70%) HTTP
5 18 (0.66%) Ethernet
5 18 (0.66%) TCP/IP
6 17 (0.63%) VPN
7 13 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
8 9 (0.33%) Network Security
8 9 (0.33%) RTP
8 9 (0.33%) Wireshark
9 8 (0.29%) DNS
10 6 (0.22%) 3GPP
10 6 (0.22%) Cisco IPT
11 4 (0.15%) RS-232
12 3 (0.11%) Broadband
12 3 (0.11%) Reverse Proxy
12 3 (0.11%) RS-485
12 3 (0.11%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 145 (5.34%) PostgreSQL
2 102 (3.76%) Relational Database
3 88 (3.24%) SQL Server
4 79 (2.91%) NoSQL
5 56 (2.06%) MongoDB
6 51 (1.88%) Data Warehouse
7 44 (1.62%) DynamoDB
8 39 (1.44%) MySQL
9 33 (1.22%) Metadata
10 31 (1.14%) Amazon RDS
11 28 (1.03%) Data Lake
11 28 (1.03%) Power BI
12 27 (0.99%) Elasticsearch
12 27 (0.99%) Redis
13 25 (0.92%) Big Data
13 25 (0.92%) BigQuery
14 24 (0.88%) Pinecone
15 20 (0.74%) Weaviate
16 17 (0.63%) Chroma
17 16 (0.59%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 290 (10.68%) Git
2 158 (5.82%) Jenkins
3 155 (5.71%) GitLab
4 119 (4.38%) JIRA
5 58 (2.14%) SonarQube
6 39 (1.44%) Gradle
6 39 (1.44%) JUnit
7 35 (1.29%) Claude Code
8 30 (1.10%) Maven
8 30 (1.10%) Selenium
9 29 (1.07%) Rational DOORS
9 29 (1.07%) Visual Studio
10 22 (0.81%) Cucumber
11 21 (0.77%) Rational Rhapsody
12 17 (0.63%) Mockito
13 15 (0.55%) LabVIEW
14 13 (0.48%) Bitbucket
14 13 (0.48%) Cypress.io
15 12 (0.44%) Snyk
16 10 (0.37%) MLflow
General
1 573 (21.10%) Social Skills
2 494 (18.20%) Finance
3 215 (7.92%) Banking
4 201 (7.40%) Public Sector
5 194 (7.15%) Analytical Skills
6 97 (3.57%) Aerospace
7 78 (2.87%) Front Office
8 52 (1.92%) Investment Banking
9 51 (1.88%) Manufacturing
10 48 (1.77%) Law
11 46 (1.69%) Retail
12 40 (1.47%) Automotive
13 33 (1.22%) Military
14 27 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
14 27 (0.99%) Telecoms
15 26 (0.96%) Aviation
16 25 (0.92%) Marketing
17 24 (0.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 18 (0.66%) Back Office
19 17 (0.63%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 1,142 (42.06%) Software Engineer
2 521 (19.19%) Developer
3 514 (18.93%) Senior
4 299 (11.01%) Lead
5 209 (7.70%) Senior Software Engineer
6 169 (6.22%) Java Engineer
7 160 (5.89%) Embedded Engineer
8 153 (5.64%) Embedded Software Engineer
9 150 (5.52%) Java Developer
10 135 (4.97%) Java Software Engineer
11 133 (4.90%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 123 (4.53%) Software Developer
13 118 (4.35%) C++ Software Engineer
14 111 (4.09%) Architect
15 109 (4.01%) Senior Developer
16 104 (3.83%) Python Engineer
17 100 (3.68%) Data Engineer
18 82 (3.02%) DevOps Engineer
19 79 (2.91%) Lead Software Engineer
20 77 (2.84%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 306 (11.27%) Terraform
2 248 (9.13%) React
3 240 (8.84%) REST
4 229 (8.43%) Spring
5 223 (8.21%) .NET
6 216 (7.96%) Spring Boot
7 171 (6.30%) Kafka
8 145 (5.34%) RESTful
9 139 (5.12%) Node.js
10 103 (3.79%) AngularJS
11 60 (2.21%) Django
12 58 (2.14%) HTML
13 56 (2.06%) CSS
14 55 (2.03%) LangChain
14 55 (2.03%) Next.js
15 54 (1.99%) OAuth
16 50 (1.84%) Web Services
17 45 (1.66%) JSON
18 42 (1.55%) .NET Core
18 42 (1.55%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 419 (15.43%) Cloud Native
2 237 (8.73%) Distributed Systems
3 150 (5.52%) Product Ownership
4 137 (5.05%) AI Agents
5 79 (2.91%) Algorithms
6 67 (2.47%) Enterprise Software
7 57 (2.10%) Data Structures
8 55 (2.03%) Onboarding
9 48 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
10 47 (1.73%) Embedded Systems
11 38 (1.40%) Self-Motivation
12 37 (1.36%) Legacy Systems
13 33 (1.22%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 30 (1.10%) Fixed Income
15 26 (0.96%) Derivative
16 25 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
16 25 (0.92%) Robotics
17 24 (0.88%) Equities
18 20 (0.74%) Virtual Team
19 19 (0.70%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 190 (7.00%) Linux
2 65 (2.39%) Windows
3 36 (1.33%) Unix
4 25 (0.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 23 (0.85%) Embedded Linux
6 14 (0.52%) FreeRTOS
7 13 (0.48%) Android
8 12 (0.44%) Windows Server
9 8 (0.29%) Ubuntu
10 7 (0.26%) Apple iOS
11 5 (0.18%) Debian
12 3 (0.11%) Rocky
12 3 (0.11%) VMS
12 3 (0.11%) VxWorks
13 2 (0.074%) Windows Server 2019
13 2 (0.074%) zOS
14 1 (0.037%) Robot Operating System
14 1 (0.037%) Tizen
14 1 (0.037%) webOS
14 1 (0.037%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 951 (35.03%) CI/CD
2 816 (30.06%) Agile
3 654 (24.09%) DevOps
4 585 (21.55%) AI
5 406 (14.95%) Test Automation
6 405 (14.92%) Microservices
7 336 (12.38%) Continuous Improvement
8 333 (12.27%) Infrastructure as Code
9 332 (12.23%) Problem-Solving
10 287 (10.57%) Observability
11 270 (9.94%) Containerisation
11 270 (9.94%) SDLC
12 256 (9.43%) Full-Stack Development
13 243 (8.95%) Technical Leadership
14 238 (8.77%) Stakeholder Management
15 233 (8.58%) Machine Learning
16 232 (8.55%) Platform Engineering
17 218 (8.03%) Event-Driven
17 218 (8.03%) LLM
18 216 (7.96%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 792 (29.17%) Python
2 682 (25.12%) Java
3 387 (14.25%) SQL
4 300 (11.05%) C#
5 298 (10.98%) TypeScript
6 229 (8.43%) C++
7 222 (8.18%) JavaScript
8 121 (4.46%) C
9 87 (3.20%) Ada
10 86 (3.17%) Go
11 69 (2.54%) Kotlin
12 50 (1.84%) PowerShell
13 45 (1.66%) Rust
14 44 (1.62%) Bash
15 41 (1.51%) Scala
16 26 (0.96%) Embedded C
17 23 (0.85%) PL/SQL
18 22 (0.81%) Bicep
19 20 (0.74%) Ruby
20 19 (0.70%) PHP
Qualifications
1 606 (22.32%) Security Cleared
2 512 (18.86%) SC Cleared
3 216 (7.96%) Degree
4 100 (3.68%) Computer Science Degree
5 90 (3.31%) DV Cleared
6 61 (2.25%) BPSS Clearance
7 48 (1.77%) Master's Degree
8 43 (1.58%) AWS Certification
9 24 (0.88%) Azure Certification
10 19 (0.70%) PhD
11 18 (0.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 12 (0.44%) PMP
13 9 (0.33%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 8 (0.29%) CISSP
15 6 (0.22%) Chartered Engineer
15 6 (0.22%) ISTQB
15 6 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
16 5 (0.18%) Numerate Degree
16 5 (0.18%) PMI Certification
17 4 (0.15%) MBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 180 (6.63%) QA
2 77 (2.84%) Data Quality
3 58 (2.14%) Accessibility
4 22 (0.81%) MISRA
5 21 (0.77%) GDPR
6 19 (0.70%) Def Stans
7 15 (0.55%) WCAG
8 14 (0.52%) NIST
9 13 (0.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 12 (0.44%) IEC 61508
11 11 (0.41%) MISRA C
12 10 (0.37%) DO-178B
13 9 (0.33%) GRC
14 7 (0.26%) NCSC
15 6 (0.22%) HL7
16 5 (0.18%) EMIR
16 5 (0.18%) JSP 440
16 5 (0.18%) MiFID
17 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
18 3 (0.11%) DO-254
System Software
1 399 (14.70%) Docker
2 29 (1.07%) Firmware
3 18 (0.66%) Embedded Firmware
4 15 (0.55%) Active Directory
5 12 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.037%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 452 (16.65%) Kubernetes
2 93 (3.43%) Ansible
3 55 (2.03%) Grafana
4 40 (1.47%) Argo
4 40 (1.47%) Prometheus
5 17 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
6 15 (0.55%) Kibana
7 8 (0.29%) Puppet
8 6 (0.22%) Functional Safety
9 4 (0.15%) Consul
9 4 (0.15%) HAProxy
9 4 (0.15%) Kubeflow
9 4 (0.15%) Kustomize
10 3 (0.11%) HP Fortify
10 3 (0.11%) Istio
10 3 (0.11%) Progress Chef
11 2 (0.074%) Cilium
11 2 (0.074%) Docker Swarm
11 2 (0.074%) Packer
11 2 (0.074%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 151 (5.56%) Microsoft
2 103 (3.79%) Google
3 86 (3.17%) Oracle
4 81 (2.98%) Databricks
5 67 (2.47%) OpenAI
6 44 (1.62%) Red Hat
7 29 (1.07%) Salesforce
8 25 (0.92%) Splunk
9 21 (0.77%) IBM
10 18 (0.66%) Foundry
10 18 (0.66%) ServiceNow
11 17 (0.63%) Informatica
12 12 (0.44%) Adobe
13 11 (0.41%) SAP
14 10 (0.37%) Checkmarx
14 10 (0.37%) VMware
15 9 (0.33%) Dynatrace
16 8 (0.29%) Siemens
17 7 (0.26%) Hitachi
17 7 (0.26%) Okta