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 vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 33 30 36
Rank change year-on-year -3 +6 +2
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 811 1,089 1,187
As % of all contract jobs advertised in London 6.03% 6.68% 5.37%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.51% 7.49% 5.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 561 843 909
10th Percentile £403 £450 £463
25th Percentile £513 £548 £550
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £650 £675 £650
Median % change year-on-year -3.70% +3.85% +4.00%
75th Percentile £825 £850 £788
90th Percentile £875 £888 £863
England median daily rate £600 £615 £610
% change year-on-year -2.44% +0.82% +1.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 7 17
10th Percentile £26.14 £49.25 £40.82
25th Percentile £36.65 £51.88 £48.60
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -8.33% +20.39%
75th Percentile £79.69 £65.09 £75.00
90th Percentile £87.50 £73.72 £90.00
England median hourly rate £65.00 £65.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -0.76% +0.77% +3.73%

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 12,450 14,530 19,983
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in London 92.51% 89.15% 90.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,226 9,664 14,478
10th Percentile £331 £350 £363
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £540 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -1.82% -4.35% -0.86%
75th Percentile £675 £675 £694
90th Percentile £775 £800 £800
England median daily rate £510 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -2.86% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 252 178 230
10th Percentile £17.01 £17.25 £18.15
25th Percentile £24.94 £23.80 £21.25
Median hourly rate £31.50 £35.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year -10.01% -6.67% +3.45%
75th Percentile £49.56 £55.00 £63.44
90th Percentile £63.75 £71.88 £76.38
England median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -41.51% -3.37% +53.98%

Software Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in London

Job postings citing Software Engineering as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in London.

Job vacancy trend for Software Engineering 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 20 September 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 20 September 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 20 September 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 +17 93 £650 +10.64% 102
South London -3 10 £513 -27.30% 7
East London +2 8 £585 +10.90% 20
West London -18 8 - - 22
Software Engineering
England

Software Engineering
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 93 (11.47%) Apache Airflow
2 69 (8.51%) Apache
3 32 (3.95%) Confluence
4 11 (1.36%) Apache Spark
5 5 (0.62%) JBoss
6 3 (0.37%) CMS
7 2 (0.25%) CICS
7 2 (0.25%) GemFire
7 2 (0.25%) Headless CMS
7 2 (0.25%) Oracle Coherence
7 2 (0.25%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.12%) Appian
8 1 (0.12%) Drupal
8 1 (0.12%) Luigi
8 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.12%) nginx
8 1 (0.12%) Oracle Workflow
8 1 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 10 (1.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 8 (0.99%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 7 (0.86%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.62%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.49%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 10 (1.23%) FLEXCUBE
1 10 (1.23%) Oracle BPM
2 8 (0.99%) Aladdin
2 8 (0.99%) Temenos T24
3 3 (0.37%) Fidessa
3 3 (0.37%) thinkFolio
4 2 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
4 2 (0.25%) Oracle 11i
5 1 (0.12%) IBM Planning Analytics
5 1 (0.12%) ION Anvil
5 1 (0.12%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.12%) Salesforce CRM
5 1 (0.12%) SAP Hybris
Cloud Services
1 356 (43.90%) AWS
2 166 (20.47%) Azure
3 130 (16.03%) GCP
4 93 (11.47%) dbt
5 73 (9.00%) Serverless
6 64 (7.89%) GitHub
7 60 (7.40%) Snowflake
8 38 (4.69%) GitHub Actions
9 31 (3.82%) AWS Lambda
9 31 (3.82%) Azure DevOps
10 25 (3.08%) Power Platform
11 21 (2.59%) Amazon S3
12 16 (1.97%) AWS Step Functions
13 15 (1.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 15 (1.85%) Azure AKS
13 15 (1.85%) Azure Cosmos DB
14 14 (1.73%) Entra ID
15 13 (1.60%) Amazon ECS
15 13 (1.60%) Power Automate
15 13 (1.60%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 7 (0.86%) HTTP
2 6 (0.74%) Firewall
3 5 (0.62%) Network Security
4 4 (0.49%) HTTPS
4 4 (0.49%) tcpdump
5 2 (0.25%) Internet
5 2 (0.25%) TCP/IP
6 1 (0.12%) DNS
6 1 (0.12%) MPLS
6 1 (0.12%) Radio Access Network
6 1 (0.12%) SMS
6 1 (0.12%) SSH
6 1 (0.12%) SSL
6 1 (0.12%) VoWiFi
6 1 (0.12%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 114 (14.06%) PostgreSQL
2 87 (10.73%) Amazon Athena
3 84 (10.36%) Apache Arrow
3 84 (10.36%) Apache Iceberg
3 84 (10.36%) Dremio
4 56 (6.91%) Data Lake
5 48 (5.92%) Apache Ignite
6 33 (4.07%) SQL Server
7 32 (3.95%) Apache Cassandra
7 32 (3.95%) NoSQL
8 28 (3.45%) Big Data
9 26 (3.21%) Hadoop
10 23 (2.84%) Elasticsearch
11 22 (2.71%) MongoDB
11 22 (2.71%) Relational Database
12 19 (2.34%) Power BI
13 18 (2.22%) DynamoDB
14 16 (1.97%) MySQL
15 12 (1.48%) DB2
16 9 (1.11%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 79 (9.74%) Git
2 65 (8.01%) Jenkins
3 42 (5.18%) JIRA
4 30 (3.70%) GitLab
5 21 (2.59%) JUnit
6 20 (2.47%) Gradle
7 15 (1.85%) Cypress.io
8 13 (1.60%) Bitbucket
8 13 (1.60%) Cucumber
9 12 (1.48%) Mockito
10 11 (1.36%) TeamCity
11 9 (1.11%) Liquibase
11 9 (1.11%) Maven
11 9 (1.11%) Selenium
12 8 (0.99%) MLflow
13 7 (0.86%) CircleCI
13 7 (0.86%) SonarQube
14 5 (0.62%) Postman
15 4 (0.49%) IntelliJ
16 2 (0.25%) Toad
General
1 341 (42.05%) Finance
2 177 (21.82%) Front Office
3 172 (21.21%) Banking
4 159 (19.61%) Social Skills
5 96 (11.84%) Investment Banking
6 54 (6.66%) Analytical Skills
7 40 (4.93%) Public Sector
8 18 (2.22%) Telecoms
9 15 (1.85%) Marketing
10 14 (1.73%) Financial Institution
11 12 (1.48%) Manufacturing
12 11 (1.36%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 11 (1.36%) Military
13 10 (1.23%) Electronics
14 9 (1.11%) Pharmaceutical
15 7 (0.86%) Publishing
15 7 (0.86%) Retail
15 7 (0.86%) Retail Banking
16 6 (0.74%) Games
16 6 (0.74%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 364 (44.88%) Software Engineer
2 300 (36.99%) Developer
3 148 (18.25%) Senior
4 111 (13.69%) Python Engineer
5 99 (12.21%) AWS Engineer
6 97 (11.96%) Python Software Engineer
7 94 (11.59%) AWS Software Engineer
7 94 (11.59%) Java Engineer
8 93 (11.47%) Developer/Software Engineer
8 93 (11.47%) Java Software Engineer
9 86 (10.60%) Senior Software Engineer
10 69 (8.51%) Python Developer
11 57 (7.03%) Java Developer
12 55 (6.78%) AWS Developer
13 50 (6.17%) React Developer
13 50 (6.17%) Senior Java Engineer
13 50 (6.17%) Senior Java Software Engineer
14 49 (6.04%) Lead
15 42 (5.18%) Full-Stack Engineer
16 34 (4.19%) Full-Stack Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 206 (25.40%) React
2 137 (16.89%) Kafka
3 131 (16.15%) Node.js
4 116 (14.30%) Pandas
5 112 (13.81%) NumPy
6 109 (13.44%) AngularJS
7 102 (12.58%) SciPy
8 86 (10.60%) gRPC
9 76 (9.37%) .NET
9 76 (9.37%) Vue
10 63 (7.77%) REST
11 60 (7.40%) Redux
12 50 (6.17%) Spring
13 48 (5.92%) Protocol Buffers
14 47 (5.80%) GraphQL
14 47 (5.80%) RESTful
15 39 (4.81%) FastAPI
16 34 (4.19%) Spring Boot
17 30 (3.70%) HTML
18 22 (2.71%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 157 (19.36%) Fixed Income
2 148 (18.25%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 110 (13.56%) Equities
4 90 (11.10%) Hedge funds
5 61 (7.52%) Cloud Native
6 56 (6.91%) Distributed Systems
7 55 (6.78%) Derivative
8 48 (5.92%) Pricing Data
9 31 (3.82%) Algorithms
9 31 (3.82%) Data Structures
10 22 (2.71%) Product Ownership
11 21 (2.59%) Greenfield Project
12 20 (2.47%) Data Protection Act
12 20 (2.47%) Virtual Team
13 14 (1.73%) Self-Motivation
14 13 (1.60%) Linux Command Line
15 10 (1.23%) Life Science
15 10 (1.23%) Virtual Reality
16 9 (1.11%) Enterprise Software
17 8 (0.99%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 93 (11.47%) Linux
2 29 (3.58%) Unix
3 18 (2.22%) Windows
4 13 (1.60%) Android
5 8 (0.99%) Apple iOS
6 5 (0.62%) Mac OS
7 2 (0.25%) AIX
7 2 (0.25%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.25%) zOS
8 1 (0.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (0.12%) VMS
8 1 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 399 (49.20%) Agile
2 223 (27.50%) CI/CD
3 169 (20.84%) DevOps
4 145 (17.88%) Investment Management
5 137 (16.89%) Microservices
6 128 (15.78%) Asset Management
7 119 (14.67%) Fintech
8 111 (13.69%) Problem-Solving
9 105 (12.95%) Full-Stack Development
10 86 (10.60%) Test Automation
11 83 (10.23%) Infrastructure as Code
12 82 (10.11%) Artificial Intelligence
12 82 (10.11%) Mentoring
13 80 (9.86%) Clean Code
14 77 (9.49%) Computer Science
15 68 (8.38%) Containerisation
15 68 (8.38%) Scrum
16 66 (8.14%) TDD
17 65 (8.01%) Machine Learning
18 55 (6.78%) Order Management
Programming Languages
1 374 (46.12%) Python
2 268 (33.05%) Java
3 240 (29.59%) JavaScript
4 218 (26.88%) TypeScript
5 152 (18.74%) SQL
6 132 (16.28%) C#
7 99 (12.21%) C++
8 62 (7.64%) Go
9 24 (2.96%) Rust
10 15 (1.85%) PL/SQL
11 14 (1.73%) Ruby
12 13 (1.60%) Bash
12 13 (1.60%) Bicep
13 12 (1.48%) PowerShell
14 11 (1.36%) PHP
15 10 (1.23%) Scala
16 9 (1.11%) C
17 6 (0.74%) Kotlin
18 5 (0.62%) DAML
19 4 (0.49%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 95 (11.71%) Security Cleared
2 89 (10.97%) Degree
3 81 (9.99%) SC Cleared
4 35 (4.32%) Computer Science Degree
5 30 (3.70%) DV Cleared
6 10 (1.23%) Master's Degree
7 6 (0.74%) MCP
8 5 (0.62%) BPSS Clearance
9 4 (0.49%) AWS Certification
10 3 (0.37%) EMC Certification
10 3 (0.37%) HNC
10 3 (0.37%) HND
10 3 (0.37%) PhD
11 2 (0.25%) CISSP
11 2 (0.25%) DBS Check
11 2 (0.25%) ISTQB
11 2 (0.25%) Numerate Degree
11 2 (0.25%) Postgraduate
11 2 (0.25%) SnowPro
12 1 (0.12%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (3.58%) QA
2 15 (1.85%) Data Quality
3 8 (0.99%) Accessibility
4 5 (0.62%) GDPR
4 5 (0.62%) NIST
5 4 (0.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 4 (0.49%) MiFID
5 4 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 4 (0.49%) SEPA
5 4 (0.49%) SLA
6 3 (0.37%) Def Stans
6 3 (0.37%) IEC 61508
6 3 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 15288
6 3 (0.37%) SOC 2
7 2 (0.25%) EU AI Act
7 2 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
7 2 (0.25%) PMO
8 1 (0.12%) EMIR
8 1 (0.12%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.12%) ISO 19650
System Software
1 156 (19.24%) Docker
2 7 (0.86%) Active Directory
3 5 (0.62%) zsh
4 2 (0.25%) GridGain
5 1 (0.12%) KVM
5 1 (0.12%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 142 (17.51%) Kubernetes
2 61 (7.52%) Terraform
3 17 (2.10%) Prometheus
4 14 (1.73%) Grafana
5 13 (1.60%) Ansible
6 5 (0.62%) Kibana
7 3 (0.37%) Argo
7 3 (0.37%) Functional Safety
7 3 (0.37%) Single Sign-On
8 2 (0.25%) CA Endevor
8 2 (0.25%) Kubeflow
8 2 (0.25%) Progress Chef
8 2 (0.25%) Puppet
9 1 (0.12%) Docker Swarm
9 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Intune
9 1 (0.12%) Packer
Vendors
1 49 (6.04%) Microsoft
2 46 (5.67%) Oracle
3 22 (2.71%) Foundry
3 22 (2.71%) Google
4 18 (2.22%) Databricks
5 14 (1.73%) Palantir
6 13 (1.60%) Cloudera
7 11 (1.36%) SAP
8 10 (1.23%) Temenos
9 8 (0.99%) IBM
9 8 (0.99%) OpenAI
10 6 (0.74%) Atlassian
10 6 (0.74%) Salesforce
11 5 (0.62%) DocuSign
11 5 (0.62%) Splunk
12 4 (0.49%) Murex
13 3 (0.37%) Cisco
13 3 (0.37%) EMC
13 3 (0.37%) ION Trading
13 3 (0.37%) Portware