Software Engineering Contract Job Trends in London

Software Engineering
England > London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in London requiring Software Engineering skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 39 31 43
Rank change year-on-year -8 +12 -6
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 825 936 949
As % of all contract jobs in London 5.90% 6.04% 4.72%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.39% 6.77% 5.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 551 696 730
10th Percentile £400 £425 £463
25th Percentile £504 £550 £550
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £625 £675 £650
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% +3.85% +1.88%
75th Percentile £788 £838 £788
90th Percentile £850 £888 £850
England median daily rate £565 £600 £608
% change year-on-year -5.83% -1.28% +1.29%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 7 11
10th Percentile £26.79 £47.95 £40.82
25th Percentile £42.40 £56.34 £45.35
Median hourly rate £65.00 £67.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -3.70% +12.50% +13.27%
75th Percentile £81.88 £71.13 £68.80
90th Percentile £87.50 £75.22 £75.00
England median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

All Process and Methodology Skills
London

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 London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 12,903 13,835 18,054
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in London 92.34% 89.23% 89.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,481 8,908 12,964
10th Percentile £333 £350 £356
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £550 £570
Median % change year-on-year -2.27% -3.51% -3.39%
75th Percentile £656 £675 £688
90th Percentile £775 £800 £800
England median daily rate £505 £525 £545
% change year-on-year -3.81% -3.67% -0.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 263 165 248
10th Percentile £18.03 £17.35 £18.55
25th Percentile £24.77 £23.80 £21.50
Median hourly rate £29.00 £37.50 £36.33
Median % change year-on-year -22.67% +3.21% -3.11%
75th Percentile £47.25 £55.75 £62.25
90th Percentile £67.00 £80.45 £76.63
England median hourly rate £25.15 £37.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -32.93% -16.67% +28.57%

Software Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Software Engineering relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in London.

Software Engineering job vacancy trend in London

Software Engineering
Daily Rate Trend in London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing Software Engineering.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing Software Engineering

Software Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram in London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Software Engineering in London over the 6 months to 18 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Software Engineering in London

Software Engineering
Hourly Rate Trend in London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing Software Engineering.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing Software Engineering

Software Engineering
Hourly Rate Histogram in London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Software Engineering in London over the 6 months to 18 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Software Engineering in London

Software Engineering
Contract Job Locations in London

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 London region over the 6 months to 18 November 2025. 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
Central London +20 107 £625 +14.16% 657
West London -10 15 £625 +8.70% 43
South London -6 9 £530 -24.82% 13
East London +1 5 £813 +47.39% 30
Software Engineering
England

Software Engineering
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in London 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 67 (8.12%) Apache Airflow
2 57 (6.91%) Apache
3 33 (4.00%) Confluence
4 27 (3.27%) Apache Spark
5 7 (0.85%) CMS
6 5 (0.61%) JBoss
7 2 (0.24%) Appian
7 2 (0.24%) Magnolia
7 2 (0.24%) Sitecore CMS
7 2 (0.24%) WordPress
8 1 (0.12%) CICS
8 1 (0.12%) Cloud Foundry
8 1 (0.12%) IIS
8 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.12%) nginx
8 1 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
8 1 (0.12%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 13 (1.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.97%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 6 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.61%) Chatbot
5 3 (0.36%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 8 (0.97%) Aladdin
1 8 (0.97%) Temenos T24
2 6 (0.73%) FLEXCUBE
2 6 (0.73%) Oracle BPM
3 3 (0.36%) Fidessa
3 3 (0.36%) thinkFolio
4 2 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
5 1 (0.12%) ION Anvil
5 1 (0.12%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.12%) SAP Hybris
Cloud Services
1 334 (40.48%) AWS
2 162 (19.64%) Azure
3 102 (12.36%) GCP
4 77 (9.33%) Serverless
5 72 (8.73%) GitHub
6 62 (7.52%) dbt
7 52 (6.30%) Snowflake
8 43 (5.21%) GitHub Actions
9 34 (4.12%) AWS Lambda
10 33 (4.00%) Power Platform
11 31 (3.76%) Amazon S3
12 27 (3.27%) Azure DevOps
13 21 (2.55%) AWS Step Functions
14 19 (2.30%) SaaS
15 17 (2.06%) Amazon ECS
15 17 (2.06%) AWS CloudFormation
16 15 (1.82%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 13 (1.58%) Amazon Kinesis
17 13 (1.58%) Datadog
18 12 (1.45%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 6 (0.73%) Firewall
2 4 (0.48%) Network Security
2 4 (0.48%) tcpdump
3 3 (0.36%) VPN
4 2 (0.24%) HTTP
4 2 (0.24%) HTTPS
4 2 (0.24%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.12%) DNS
5 1 (0.12%) Internet
5 1 (0.12%) MPLS
5 1 (0.12%) Multicast
5 1 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.12%) SMS
5 1 (0.12%) SSH
5 1 (0.12%) SSL
5 1 (0.12%) VoWiFi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 76 (9.21%) PostgreSQL
2 56 (6.79%) Amazon Athena
3 53 (6.42%) Apache Arrow
3 53 (6.42%) Apache Iceberg
3 53 (6.42%) Dremio
4 49 (5.94%) Data Lake
5 36 (4.36%) Apache Cassandra
6 35 (4.24%) Big Data
6 35 (4.24%) NoSQL
7 34 (4.12%) Apache Ignite
8 32 (3.88%) SQL Server
9 29 (3.52%) Hadoop
10 24 (2.91%) MongoDB
10 24 (2.91%) Power BI
11 22 (2.67%) Elasticsearch
11 22 (2.67%) Relational Database
12 20 (2.42%) MySQL
13 16 (1.94%) Amazon RDS
14 15 (1.82%) Metadata
15 14 (1.70%) Data Warehouse
Development Applications
1 91 (11.03%) Git
2 55 (6.67%) Jenkins
3 43 (5.21%) JIRA
4 31 (3.76%) GitLab
5 18 (2.18%) Cypress.io
6 15 (1.82%) Cucumber
7 14 (1.70%) JUnit
8 13 (1.58%) Gradle
9 12 (1.45%) SonarQube
9 12 (1.45%) TeamCity
10 9 (1.09%) Selenium
11 7 (0.85%) Bitbucket
11 7 (0.85%) MLflow
12 6 (0.73%) Maven
12 6 (0.73%) Mockito
13 5 (0.61%) CircleCI
13 5 (0.61%) Postman
14 3 (0.36%) Lerna
15 2 (0.24%) rollup.js
15 2 (0.24%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 292 (35.39%) Finance
2 180 (21.82%) Social Skills
3 142 (17.21%) Banking
4 114 (13.82%) Front Office
5 84 (10.18%) Investment Banking
6 53 (6.42%) Analytical Skills
7 41 (4.97%) Public Sector
8 17 (2.06%) Pharmaceutical
9 16 (1.94%) Financial Institution
10 13 (1.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 9 (1.09%) Back Office
11 9 (1.09%) Military
11 9 (1.09%) Retail Banking
12 7 (0.85%) Influencing Skills
12 7 (0.85%) Retail
13 6 (0.73%) Documentation Skills
13 6 (0.73%) Publishing
13 6 (0.73%) Telecoms
14 5 (0.61%) Games
15 4 (0.48%) Legal
Job Titles
1 322 (39.03%) Software Engineer
2 256 (31.03%) Developer
3 181 (21.94%) Senior
4 91 (11.03%) Python Engineer
5 83 (10.06%) Senior Software Engineer
6 77 (9.33%) Java Engineer
7 76 (9.21%) Java Software Engineer
8 69 (8.36%) Python Software Engineer
9 68 (8.24%) AWS Engineer
10 65 (7.88%) Python Developer
11 63 (7.64%) AWS Software Engineer
12 59 (7.15%) Lead
13 48 (5.82%) Developer/Software Engineer
14 43 (5.21%) Java Developer
14 43 (5.21%) Senior Developer
15 38 (4.61%) AWS Developer
15 38 (4.61%) Senior Java Engineer
15 38 (4.61%) Senior Java Software Engineer
16 35 (4.24%) Full-Stack Engineer
17 34 (4.12%) Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 164 (19.88%) React
2 153 (18.55%) Kafka
3 107 (12.97%) Node.js
4 81 (9.82%) NumPy
4 81 (9.82%) Pandas
5 79 (9.58%) AngularJS
6 77 (9.33%) gRPC
7 74 (8.97%) .NET
8 72 (8.73%) SciPy
9 55 (6.67%) REST
10 53 (6.42%) RESTful
11 52 (6.30%) Vue
12 45 (5.45%) Spring
13 43 (5.21%) FastAPI
14 40 (4.85%) GraphQL
15 34 (4.12%) Protocol Buffers
16 31 (3.76%) CSS
17 30 (3.64%) HTML
18 29 (3.52%) Spring Boot
19 28 (3.39%) Redux
Miscellaneous
1 107 (12.97%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 100 (12.12%) Fixed Income
3 94 (11.39%) Cloud Native
4 69 (8.36%) Hedge funds
5 67 (8.12%) Equities
6 65 (7.88%) Distributed Systems
7 47 (5.70%) Derivative
8 34 (4.12%) Pricing Data
9 27 (3.27%) Data Structures
10 26 (3.15%) Product Ownership
11 25 (3.03%) Algorithms
11 25 (3.03%) Virtual Team
12 20 (2.42%) Data Protection Act
12 20 (2.42%) Greenfield Project
13 15 (1.82%) Genomics
14 14 (1.70%) Linux Command Line
14 14 (1.70%) Onboarding
15 13 (1.58%) AI Agents
15 13 (1.58%) Legacy Systems
15 13 (1.58%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 104 (12.61%) Linux
2 38 (4.61%) Unix
3 19 (2.30%) Windows
4 13 (1.58%) Android
5 10 (1.21%) Apple iOS
6 5 (0.61%) Mac OS
7 3 (0.36%) Windows Server
8 2 (0.24%) VMS
9 1 (0.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 1 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
9 1 (0.12%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 372 (45.09%) Agile
2 256 (31.03%) CI/CD
3 176 (21.33%) DevOps
4 135 (16.36%) Microservices
5 124 (15.03%) AI
6 114 (13.82%) Problem-Solving
7 105 (12.73%) Infrastructure as Code
7 105 (12.73%) Test Automation
8 100 (12.12%) Machine Learning
9 96 (11.64%) Full-Stack Development
10 88 (10.67%) Computer Science
11 86 (10.42%) Investment Management
12 85 (10.30%) Clean Code
13 83 (10.06%) Containerisation
14 82 (9.94%) Mentoring
15 75 (9.09%) Fintech
16 73 (8.85%) Asset Management
17 61 (7.39%) Open Source
18 60 (7.27%) Data Pipeline
18 60 (7.27%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 369 (44.73%) Python
2 256 (31.03%) Java
3 190 (23.03%) JavaScript
4 175 (21.21%) TypeScript
5 164 (19.88%) SQL
6 131 (15.88%) C#
7 114 (13.82%) C++
8 71 (8.61%) Go
9 27 (3.27%) Rust
10 16 (1.94%) Ruby
11 12 (1.45%) PL/SQL
12 11 (1.33%) Bash
12 11 (1.33%) C
13 10 (1.21%) PHP
13 10 (1.21%) PowerShell
14 9 (1.09%) Bicep
15 8 (0.97%) Kotlin
15 8 (0.97%) Scala
16 7 (0.85%) JSX
17 5 (0.61%) R
Qualifications
1 102 (12.36%) Degree
1 102 (12.36%) Security Cleared
2 88 (10.67%) SC Cleared
3 37 (4.48%) Computer Science Degree
4 31 (3.76%) DV Cleared
5 17 (2.06%) Master's Degree
6 9 (1.09%) MCP
7 8 (0.97%) AWS Certification
7 8 (0.97%) PhD
8 5 (0.61%) Azure Certification
8 5 (0.61%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (0.36%) CISSP
9 3 (0.36%) EMC Certification
9 3 (0.36%) HNC
9 3 (0.36%) HND
9 3 (0.36%) ISTQB
9 3 (0.36%) Postgraduate
10 2 (0.24%) CISM
10 2 (0.24%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.24%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 36 (4.36%) QA
2 24 (2.91%) Data Quality
3 11 (1.33%) Accessibility
4 10 (1.21%) GDPR
5 4 (0.48%) MiFID
5 4 (0.48%) SLA
6 3 (0.36%) Def Stans
6 3 (0.36%) IEC 61508
6 3 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 15288
6 3 (0.36%) NIST
6 3 (0.36%) SEPA
6 3 (0.36%) WCAG
7 2 (0.24%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.24%) PMO
8 1 (0.12%) EMIR
8 1 (0.12%) GxP
8 1 (0.12%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.12%) ISO 19650
8 1 (0.12%) SOC 2
System Software
1 176 (21.33%) Docker
2 9 (1.09%) Active Directory
3 5 (0.61%) zsh
4 1 (0.12%) KVM
4 1 (0.12%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 166 (20.12%) Kubernetes
2 79 (9.58%) Terraform
3 26 (3.15%) Grafana
4 22 (2.67%) Prometheus
5 21 (2.55%) Ansible
6 5 (0.61%) Kibana
7 4 (0.48%) Argo
8 3 (0.36%) Functional Safety
9 2 (0.24%) Kubeflow
9 2 (0.24%) Puppet
9 2 (0.24%) rkt
10 1 (0.12%) CA Endevor
10 1 (0.12%) Fluentd
10 1 (0.12%) HP ALM
10 1 (0.12%) HP Quality Center
10 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Intune
10 1 (0.12%) Packer
10 1 (0.12%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 55 (6.67%) Microsoft
2 43 (5.21%) Oracle
3 32 (3.88%) Google
4 29 (3.52%) Databricks
5 23 (2.79%) Foundry
6 14 (1.70%) Palantir
7 13 (1.58%) Cloudera
8 10 (1.21%) Temenos
9 9 (1.09%) OpenAI
10 6 (0.73%) Salesforce
11 5 (0.61%) Atlassian
11 5 (0.61%) Cisco
11 5 (0.61%) DocuSign
11 5 (0.61%) Dynatrace
12 4 (0.48%) Alteryx
12 4 (0.48%) IBM
12 4 (0.48%) Murex
12 4 (0.48%) Splunk
13 3 (0.36%) EMC
13 3 (0.36%) Red Hat