Software Engineer Contract Job Trends in the West Midlands

Software Engineer
England > West Midlands

The median Software Engineer daily rate in the West Midlands is £514, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 18 February 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 115 93 103
Rank change year-on-year -22 +10 -51
Contract jobs requiring a Software Engineer 34 8 8
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 1.30% 0.55% 0.42%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.44% 0.61% 0.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 26 5 6
10th Percentile £391 £418 £401
25th Percentile £429 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +8.21% -5.00% -7.41%
75th Percentile £584 £500 £538
90th Percentile £892 £523 £605
England median daily rate £550 £600 £625
% change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% +5.93%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 0 2
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £56.50 - £67.50
Median hourly rate £58.00 - £70.00
75th Percentile £68.50 - £72.50
90th Percentile £73.90 - -
England median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year - +4.00% -3.85%

All Contract IT Job Roles
West Midlands

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the West Midlands. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the West Midlands with a recognized job title 2,359 1,319 1,746
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 89.94% 91.34% 92.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,525 845 1,152
10th Percentile £283 £200 £222
25th Percentile £400 £375 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £475
Median % change year-on-year - +5.26% -2.06%
75th Percentile £588 £594 £588
90th Percentile £688 £700 £687
England median daily rate £501 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.67% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 53 130
10th Percentile £14.00 £13.96 £11.89
25th Percentile £17.13 £16.67 £15.00
Median hourly rate £25.00 £21.59 £22.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.79% -4.04% +26.98%
75th Percentile £30.00 £30.68 £43.75
90th Percentile £50.00 £40.58 £67.50
England median hourly rate £31.93 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -8.77% - -12.50%

Software Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the West Midlands

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Software Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands.

Software Engineer job vacancy trend in the West Midlands

Software Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Software Engineer job vacancies in the West Midlands.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Software Engineer job vacancies in the West Midlands

Software Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Software Engineer in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 18 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Software Engineer in the West Midlands

Software Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Software Engineer job vacancies in the West Midlands.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Software Engineer job vacancies in the West Midlands

Software Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Software Engineer in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 18 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Software Engineer in the West Midlands

Software Engineer
Contract Job Locations in the West Midlands

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Software Engineer within the West Midlands region over the 6 months to 18 February 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
Birmingham -9 14 £534 +18.56% 7
Shropshire - 7 £429 - 14
Warwickshire - 5 £444 - 4
Coventry -18 3 £270 -46.00% 2
Worcestershire - 3 £563 - 3
Staffordshire - 2 - - 7
Software Engineer
England

Software Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the West Midlands

For the 6 months to 18 February 2026, Software Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the West Midlands region featuring Software Engineer in the job title.

1 34 (100.00%) Software Engineering
2 21 (61.76%) Agile
2 21 (61.76%) CI/CD
3 20 (58.82%) Microservices
4 17 (50.00%) AWS
5 16 (47.06%) DevOps
5 16 (47.06%) Kubernetes
6 15 (44.12%) Linux
7 14 (41.18%) Docker
8 13 (38.24%) Infrastructure as Code
8 13 (38.24%) Python
8 13 (38.24%) REST
8 13 (38.24%) SQL
9 12 (35.29%) Terraform
10 11 (32.35%) Ansible
10 11 (32.35%) Containerisation
10 11 (32.35%) RESTful
11 10 (29.41%) Elastic Stack
11 10 (29.41%) GCP
11 10 (29.41%) Go
11 10 (29.41%) Grafana
11 10 (29.41%) Liquibase
11 10 (29.41%) Problem-Solving
11 10 (29.41%) Prometheus
11 10 (29.41%) Splunk
12 9 (26.47%) Change Management
12 9 (26.47%) Computer Science
12 9 (26.47%) Computer Science Degree
12 9 (26.47%) Continuous Delivery
12 9 (26.47%) Cryptography

Software Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the West Midlands 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 5 (14.71%) WebLogic
2 3 (8.82%) Apache
2 3 (8.82%) Confluence
3 2 (5.88%) JBoss
Cloud Services
1 17 (50.00%) AWS
2 10 (29.41%) GCP
3 9 (26.47%) Serverless
4 3 (8.82%) AWS KMS
5 2 (5.88%) Azure
5 2 (5.88%) Azure Monitor
5 2 (5.88%) Cloud Computing
5 2 (5.88%) GitHub
5 2 (5.88%) GitHub Actions
6 1 (2.94%) Amazon EKS
6 1 (2.94%) Azure DevOps
6 1 (2.94%) Bitrise
6 1 (2.94%) Entra ID
6 1 (2.94%) NuGet
6 1 (2.94%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 3 (8.82%) 3GPP
2 1 (2.94%) HTTP
2 1 (2.94%) RTCP
2 1 (2.94%) RTP
2 1 (2.94%) XCAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (26.47%) NoSQL
2 6 (17.65%) MongoDB
3 4 (11.76%) PostgreSQL
4 1 (2.94%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 10 (29.41%) Liquibase
2 9 (26.47%) GitLab
3 8 (23.53%) Jenkins
4 5 (14.71%) Git
5 4 (11.76%) JIRA
6 3 (8.82%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 2 (5.88%) Eclipse
7 2 (5.88%) IntelliJ
7 2 (5.88%) JUnit
7 2 (5.88%) Selenium
8 1 (2.94%) Artifactory
8 1 (2.94%) REST Assured
8 1 (2.94%) XCTest
General
1 16 (47.06%) Social Skills
2 9 (26.47%) Banking
3 8 (23.53%) Finance
4 7 (20.59%) Financial Institution
5 3 (8.82%) Influencing Skills
5 3 (8.82%) Public Sector
6 2 (5.88%) Analytical Skills
6 2 (5.88%) Electronics
6 2 (5.88%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (38.24%) REST
2 11 (32.35%) RESTful
3 10 (29.41%) Elastic Stack
4 7 (20.59%) Spring
5 6 (17.65%) .NET
5 6 (17.65%) Spring Boot
6 5 (14.71%) XML
7 3 (8.82%) .NET Core
7 3 (8.82%) .NET Framework
7 3 (8.82%) XML Schema
8 2 (5.88%) CSS
8 2 (5.88%) EJB
8 2 (5.88%) Hibernate
8 2 (5.88%) HTML
8 2 (5.88%) HTML5
8 2 (5.88%) J2EE
8 2 (5.88%) J2SE
8 2 (5.88%) JSON
8 2 (5.88%) React
8 2 (5.88%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 10 (29.41%) Cloud Native
1 10 (29.41%) Public Cloud
2 7 (20.59%) Distributed Systems
3 2 (5.88%) Data Centre
3 2 (5.88%) Product Ownership
4 1 (2.94%) Embedded Systems
4 1 (2.94%) FPGA
4 1 (2.94%) Greenfield Project
4 1 (2.94%) Media Streaming
Operating Systems
1 15 (44.12%) Linux
2 3 (8.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 3 (8.82%) Windows
3 2 (5.88%) Unix
4 1 (2.94%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 34 (100.00%) Software Engineering
2 21 (61.76%) Agile
2 21 (61.76%) CI/CD
3 20 (58.82%) Microservices
4 16 (47.06%) DevOps
5 13 (38.24%) Infrastructure as Code
6 11 (32.35%) Containerisation
7 10 (29.41%) Problem-Solving
8 9 (26.47%) Change Management
8 9 (26.47%) Computer Science
8 9 (26.47%) Continuous Delivery
8 9 (26.47%) Cryptography
8 9 (26.47%) Root Cause Analysis
9 8 (23.53%) Continuous Integration
9 8 (23.53%) Infrastructure Automation
10 7 (20.59%) Continuous Improvement
10 7 (20.59%) Cost Optimisation
10 7 (20.59%) Data Encryption
10 7 (20.59%) High Availability
10 7 (20.59%) Non-Functional Testing
Programming Languages
1 13 (38.24%) Python
1 13 (38.24%) SQL
2 10 (29.41%) Go
3 7 (20.59%) Java
4 5 (14.71%) C#
5 3 (8.82%) C++
5 3 (8.82%) Perl
5 3 (8.82%) Shell Script
6 2 (5.88%) Kotlin
6 2 (5.88%) Scala
6 2 (5.88%) TypeScript
7 1 (2.94%) PL/SQL
7 1 (2.94%) PowerShell
7 1 (2.94%) Swift
Qualifications
1 9 (26.47%) Computer Science Degree
1 9 (26.47%) Degree
1 9 (26.47%) Security Cleared
2 7 (20.59%) Master's Degree
2 7 (20.59%) SC Cleared
3 2 (5.88%) AWS Certification
3 2 (5.88%) AWS Certified Developer
3 2 (5.88%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
4 1 (2.94%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (2.94%) QA
System Software
1 14 (41.18%) Docker
Systems Management
1 16 (47.06%) Kubernetes
2 12 (35.29%) Terraform
3 11 (32.35%) Ansible
4 10 (29.41%) Grafana
4 10 (29.41%) Prometheus
5 2 (5.88%) Puppet
6 1 (2.94%) Argo
Vendors
1 10 (29.41%) Splunk
2 4 (11.76%) Red Hat
3 3 (8.82%) Google
3 3 (8.82%) Oracle
4 2 (5.88%) Microsoft
4 2 (5.88%) webMethods
5 1 (2.94%) Cadence