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 £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 6 November 2025.

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

6 months to
6 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 120 104 98
Rank change year-on-year -16 -6 -45
Contract jobs requiring a Software Engineer 19 11 12
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 0.94% 0.58% 0.63%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.05% 0.62% 0.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 15 5 11
10th Percentile £415 £388 £425
25th Percentile £465 £463 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% +1.85%
75th Percentile £719 £588 £600
90th Percentile £892 £670 £650
England median daily rate £625 £625 £589
% change year-on-year - +6.16% -1.88%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 0
Median hourly rate - £50.00 -
England median hourly rate £65.00 £65.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -0.76% +0.77% -

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
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 1,803 1,766 1,797
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 89.30% 92.85% 94.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,168 1,119 1,229
10th Percentile £256 £213 £220
25th Percentile £392 £381 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £475
Median % change year-on-year - +5.26% -4.04%
75th Percentile £588 £612 £588
90th Percentile £675 £700 £700
England median daily rate £510 £525 £538
% change year-on-year -2.86% -2.33% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 58 66
10th Percentile £12.62 £12.58 £15.38
25th Percentile £15.71 £14.09 £17.31
Median hourly rate £25.15 £23.05 £22.20
Median % change year-on-year +9.11% +3.85% +25.25%
75th Percentile £36.75 £33.23 £33.64
90th Percentile £50.00 £45.63 £67.50
England median hourly rate £25.15 £40.33 £45.88
% change year-on-year -37.63% -12.11% +52.93%

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 6 November 2025.

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
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 6 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
Birmingham +8 12 £530 +11.58% 22
Shropshire -32 6 £429 +24.42% 7
Coventry -13 1 £270 -46.00% 6
Software Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 6 November 2025, 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 19 (100.00%) Software Engineering
2 15 (78.95%) Agile
2 15 (78.95%) CI/CD
3 14 (73.68%) AWS
4 13 (68.42%) DevOps
4 13 (68.42%) Microservices
5 12 (63.16%) Docker
5 12 (63.16%) REST
6 11 (57.89%) Infrastructure as Code
6 11 (57.89%) Kubernetes
6 11 (57.89%) Python
7 10 (52.63%) Linux
7 10 (52.63%) RESTful
7 10 (52.63%) SQL
8 9 (47.37%) Computer Science
8 9 (47.37%) Computer Science Degree
8 9 (47.37%) Containerisation
8 9 (47.37%) Cryptography
8 9 (47.37%) Degree
8 9 (47.37%) Elastic Stack
8 9 (47.37%) GCP
8 9 (47.37%) Go
8 9 (47.37%) Grafana
8 9 (47.37%) Liquibase
8 9 (47.37%) NoSQL
8 9 (47.37%) Prometheus
8 9 (47.37%) Root Cause Analysis
8 9 (47.37%) Serverless
8 9 (47.37%) Splunk
8 9 (47.37%) Terraform

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 4 (21.05%) WebLogic
2 2 (10.53%) Apache
2 2 (10.53%) JBoss
3 1 (5.26%) Confluence
3 1 (5.26%) Tuxedo
Cloud Services
1 14 (73.68%) AWS
2 9 (47.37%) GCP
2 9 (47.37%) Serverless
3 3 (15.79%) AWS KMS
4 2 (10.53%) Cloud Computing
5 1 (5.26%) Azure
5 1 (5.26%) Azure DevOps
5 1 (5.26%) Azure Monitor
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (47.37%) NoSQL
2 4 (21.05%) MongoDB
2 4 (21.05%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (5.26%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 9 (47.37%) Liquibase
2 7 (36.84%) GitLab
2 7 (36.84%) Jenkins
3 3 (15.79%) Git
4 2 (10.53%) Eclipse
4 2 (10.53%) IntelliJ
4 2 (10.53%) JUnit
4 2 (10.53%) Selenium
5 1 (5.26%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 1 (5.26%) JIRA
General
1 12 (63.16%) Social Skills
2 7 (36.84%) Banking
2 7 (36.84%) Finance
2 7 (36.84%) Financial Institution
3 2 (10.53%) Influencing Skills
3 2 (10.53%) Public Sector
4 1 (5.26%) Analytical Skills
4 1 (5.26%) Manufacturing
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (63.16%) REST
2 10 (52.63%) RESTful
3 9 (47.37%) Elastic Stack
4 5 (26.32%) Spring
5 3 (15.79%) JSON
5 3 (15.79%) SOAP
5 3 (15.79%) Spring Boot
6 2 (10.53%) EJB
6 2 (10.53%) Hibernate
6 2 (10.53%) HTML
6 2 (10.53%) HTML5
6 2 (10.53%) J2EE
6 2 (10.53%) J2SE
6 2 (10.53%) Play Framework
6 2 (10.53%) XML
7 1 (5.26%) .NET
7 1 (5.26%) AngularJS
7 1 (5.26%) Flask
7 1 (5.26%) Swagger
7 1 (5.26%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 9 (47.37%) Cloud Native
1 9 (47.37%) Public Cloud
2 7 (36.84%) Distributed Systems
3 1 (5.26%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (5.26%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 10 (52.63%) Linux
2 2 (10.53%) Unix
3 1 (5.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 19 (100.00%) Software Engineering
2 15 (78.95%) Agile
2 15 (78.95%) CI/CD
3 13 (68.42%) DevOps
3 13 (68.42%) Microservices
4 11 (57.89%) Infrastructure as Code
5 9 (47.37%) Computer Science
5 9 (47.37%) Containerisation
5 9 (47.37%) Cryptography
5 9 (47.37%) Root Cause Analysis
6 8 (42.11%) Continuous Delivery
6 8 (42.11%) Continuous Integration
7 7 (36.84%) Change Management
7 7 (36.84%) Data Encryption
7 7 (36.84%) High Availability
7 7 (36.84%) Non-Functional Testing
8 6 (31.58%) Cost Optimisation
8 6 (31.58%) Cybersecurity
8 6 (31.58%) Infrastructure Automation
8 6 (31.58%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 11 (57.89%) Python
2 10 (52.63%) SQL
3 9 (47.37%) Go
4 4 (21.05%) Java
5 3 (15.79%) Scala
6 2 (10.53%) Shell Script
7 1 (5.26%) Bash
7 1 (5.26%) C
7 1 (5.26%) C#
7 1 (5.26%) Korn
7 1 (5.26%) Kotlin
7 1 (5.26%) Perl
7 1 (5.26%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 9 (47.37%) Computer Science Degree
1 9 (47.37%) Degree
2 7 (36.84%) Master's Degree
3 4 (21.05%) Security Cleared
4 3 (15.79%) SC Cleared
5 2 (10.53%) AWS Certification
5 2 (10.53%) AWS Certified Developer
5 2 (10.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
System Software
1 12 (63.16%) Docker
Systems Management
1 11 (57.89%) Kubernetes
2 9 (47.37%) Grafana
2 9 (47.37%) Prometheus
2 9 (47.37%) Terraform
3 8 (42.11%) Ansible
4 2 (10.53%) Puppet
Vendors
1 9 (47.37%) Splunk
2 3 (15.79%) webMethods
3 2 (10.53%) Google
3 2 (10.53%) Microsoft
3 2 (10.53%) Oracle
4 1 (5.26%) Red Hat
4 1 (5.26%) ServiceNow
4 1 (5.26%) Trillium