Software Engineering Contract Job Trends in the West Midlands

Software Engineering
England > West Midlands

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the West Midlands requiring Software Engineering skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 87 62 42
Rank change year-on-year -25 -20 +43
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 75 40 78
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 2.27% 2.70% 3.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.68% 3.03% 4.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 44 21 44
10th Percentile £405 £450 £350
25th Percentile £424 £456 £358
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £459 £558 £469
Median % change year-on-year -17.67% +18.93% -17.76%
75th Percentile £532 £588 £541
90th Percentile £697 £638 £605
England median daily rate £550 £600 £601
% change year-on-year -8.33% -0.08% -1.72%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 0 14
10th Percentile £56.50 - £46.25
25th Percentile £60.50 - £48.75
Median hourly rate £75.00 - £57.50
75th Percentile £77.50 - £58.75
90th Percentile - - £72.50
England median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

All Process & Methodology Skills
West Midlands

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 the West Midlands.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 2,796 1,319 1,677
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 84.80% 88.94% 81.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,837 832 1,106
10th Percentile £313 £204 £273
25th Percentile £405 £375 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £483 £500
Median % change year-on-year -0.62% -3.40% -2.10%
75th Percentile £575 £577 £625
90th Percentile £675 £663 £734
England median daily rate £520 £515 £525
% change year-on-year +0.97% -1.90% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 137 76 121
10th Percentile £14.82 £12.62 £11.13
25th Percentile £22.50 £14.32 £14.25
Median hourly rate £33.99 £22.28 £22.50
Median % change year-on-year +52.59% -1.00% -4.70%
75th Percentile £61.00 £34.16 £40.00
90th Percentile £72.54 £50.00 £58.75
England median hourly rate £47.50 £27.40 £37.63
% change year-on-year +73.36% -27.18% +4.81%

Software Engineering
Job Vacancy Trend in the West Midlands

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

Software Engineering job vacancy trend in the West Midlands

Software Engineering
Daily Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Software Engineering.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Software Engineering

Software Engineering
Daily Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Software Engineering in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 20 June 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Software Engineering in the West Midlands

Software Engineering
Hourly Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Software Engineering.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Software Engineering

Software Engineering
Hourly Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Software Engineering in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 20 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Software Engineering in the West Midlands

Software Engineering
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 Engineering within the West Midlands region over the 6 months to 20 June 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
Shropshire -37 24 £450 -16.67% 4
Birmingham -29 12 £513 +93.40% 28
Warwickshire -4 11 £520 - 8
Coventry -8 11 £475 +2.70% 3
Herefordshire -1 6 £425 -19.05% 5
Worcestershire -4 6 £568 -1.30% 7
Staffordshire -3 2 - - 9
Solihull - 2 £1,375 -
Software Engineering
England

Software Engineering
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 12 (16.00%) Confluence
2 6 (8.00%) SAS
3 4 (5.33%) WebLogic
4 2 (2.67%) Apache
5 1 (1.33%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 2 (2.67%) Chatbot
1 2 (2.67%) Microsoft Excel
1 2 (2.67%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (2.67%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 19 (25.33%) Azure
2 16 (21.33%) AWS
3 10 (13.33%) Power Platform
4 5 (6.67%) Azure Machine Learning
4 5 (6.67%) Azure Synapse Analytics
5 4 (5.33%) GCP
5 4 (5.33%) GitHub
5 4 (5.33%) Serverless
6 3 (4.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 3 (4.00%) Amazon EMR
6 3 (4.00%) Amazon Kinesis
6 3 (4.00%) Amazon S3
7 2 (2.67%) AWS Lambda
7 2 (2.67%) Azure DevOps
7 2 (2.67%) Azure Monitor
7 2 (2.67%) Entra ID
8 1 (1.33%) Bitrise
8 1 (1.33%) Cloud Run
8 1 (1.33%) GitHub Actions
8 1 (1.33%) Miro
Communications & Networking
1 3 (4.00%) 3GPP
2 1 (1.33%) AMQP
2 1 (1.33%) Firewall
2 1 (1.33%) HTTP
2 1 (1.33%) RTCP
2 1 (1.33%) RTP
2 1 (1.33%) SSL
2 1 (1.33%) XCAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (13.33%) Power BI
2 9 (12.00%) Pentaho
3 6 (8.00%) Amazon Redshift
3 6 (8.00%) BusinessObjects
3 6 (8.00%) Relational Database
4 5 (6.67%) MongoDB
4 5 (6.67%) MySQL
4 5 (6.67%) PostgreSQL
5 4 (5.33%) SQL Server
6 3 (4.00%) Amazon Athena
6 3 (4.00%) Amazon RDS
6 3 (4.00%) Apache Hive
6 3 (4.00%) Apache Iceberg
6 3 (4.00%) Data Lake
6 3 (4.00%) Data Warehouse
6 3 (4.00%) DynamoDB
6 3 (4.00%) Hadoop
6 3 (4.00%) Impala
7 2 (2.67%) Ingres
7 2 (2.67%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 14 (18.67%) JIRA
2 12 (16.00%) Git
3 10 (13.33%) GitLab
4 5 (6.67%) Atlassian Bamboo
4 5 (6.67%) Jenkins
5 4 (5.33%) MLflow
6 3 (4.00%) Bitbucket
7 2 (2.67%) Artifactory
7 2 (2.67%) JMeter
7 2 (2.67%) REST Assured
7 2 (2.67%) Team Foundation Server
8 1 (1.33%) Liquibase
8 1 (1.33%) MSTest
8 1 (1.33%) Oracle Forms
8 1 (1.33%) PetaLinux
8 1 (1.33%) Visual Studio
8 1 (1.33%) XCTest
General
1 12 (16.00%) Finance
1 12 (16.00%) Social Skills
2 10 (13.33%) Public Sector
3 7 (9.33%) Automotive
4 4 (5.33%) Aerospace
4 4 (5.33%) Analytical Skills
4 4 (5.33%) Banking
5 2 (2.67%) Influencing Skills
5 2 (2.67%) Retail
5 2 (2.67%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 35 (46.67%) Software Engineer
2 16 (21.33%) Senior
3 11 (14.67%) Embedded Engineer
3 11 (14.67%) Embedded Software Engineer
4 7 (9.33%) Data Engineer
4 7 (9.33%) Lead
5 6 (8.00%) Developer
6 5 (6.67%) SC Cleared Software Engineer
7 4 (5.33%) Analyst
7 4 (5.33%) Java Engineer
7 4 (5.33%) Java Software Engineer
7 4 (5.33%) Senior Software Engineer
8 3 (4.00%) AWS Engineer
8 3 (4.00%) C# Software Engineer
8 3 (4.00%) Data Scientist
8 3 (4.00%) Delivery Manager
8 3 (4.00%) DevOps Engineer
8 3 (4.00%) Head of Software Engineering
8 3 (4.00%) Senior Developer
8 3 (4.00%) Services Director
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (16.00%) .NET
2 7 (9.33%) XML
3 6 (8.00%) Spring
3 6 (8.00%) Spring Boot
4 5 (6.67%) REST
5 4 (5.33%) .NET Framework
5 4 (5.33%) JSON
5 4 (5.33%) RESTful
6 3 (4.00%) .NET Core
6 3 (4.00%) ADO
6 3 (4.00%) XML Schema
7 2 (2.67%) Apache NiFi
7 2 (2.67%) ASP.NET
7 2 (2.67%) Playwright
7 2 (2.67%) QML
7 2 (2.67%) Qt
7 2 (2.67%) Yocto
8 1 (1.33%) Entity Framework
8 1 (1.33%) RabbitMQ
8 1 (1.33%) WCF
Miscellaneous
1 9 (12.00%) Cloud Native
2 5 (6.67%) Product Ownership
3 4 (5.33%) Data Centre
4 3 (4.00%) Legacy Systems
5 2 (2.67%) Distributed Systems
5 2 (2.67%) Embedded Systems
6 1 (1.33%) FPGA
6 1 (1.33%) Greenfield Project
6 1 (1.33%) Legacy Applications
6 1 (1.33%) Low-Code
6 1 (1.33%) Media Streaming
6 1 (1.33%) Mobile App
6 1 (1.33%) Mobile Banking
6 1 (1.33%) Onboarding
6 1 (1.33%) Public Cloud
6 1 (1.33%) SCADA
6 1 (1.33%) Verilog
6 1 (1.33%) VHDL
6 1 (1.33%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 12 (16.00%) Linux
2 6 (8.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (6.67%) Unix
4 3 (4.00%) Embedded Linux
4 3 (4.00%) Windows
5 2 (2.67%) Apple iOS
5 2 (2.67%) FreeRTOS
6 1 (1.33%) Android
6 1 (1.33%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 37 (49.33%) Agile
2 31 (41.33%) CI/CD
3 26 (34.67%) DevOps
4 18 (24.00%) Continuous Improvement
4 18 (24.00%) Scrum
5 12 (16.00%) Problem-Solving
5 12 (16.00%) Software Delivery
6 11 (14.67%) Containerisation
6 11 (14.67%) Software Testing
7 10 (13.33%) Business Intelligence
7 10 (13.33%) Roadmaps
7 10 (13.33%) Stakeholder Management
7 10 (13.33%) Test Automation
8 9 (12.00%) ETL
8 9 (12.00%) Mentoring
8 9 (12.00%) SDLC
9 8 (10.67%) Analytics
9 8 (10.67%) Microservices
9 8 (10.67%) Migration
9 8 (10.67%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 28 (37.33%) SQL
2 19 (25.33%) Java
3 18 (24.00%) Python
4 11 (14.67%) C#
5 9 (12.00%) PL/SQL
6 7 (9.33%) Shell Script
7 6 (8.00%) C
8 4 (5.33%) Perl
8 4 (5.33%) VB
9 3 (4.00%) C++
9 3 (4.00%) HiveQL
9 3 (4.00%) PowerShell
10 2 (2.67%) Kotlin
10 2 (2.67%) ProC
10 2 (2.67%) Swift
10 2 (2.67%) VB6
11 1 (1.33%) JavaScript
11 1 (1.33%) SystemVerilog
11 1 (1.33%) Tcl
11 1 (1.33%) VBA
Qualifications
1 32 (42.67%) Security Cleared
2 28 (37.33%) SC Cleared
3 7 (9.33%) Degree
4 4 (5.33%) Master's Degree
4 4 (5.33%) PhD
5 3 (4.00%) DV Cleared
6 2 (2.67%) ISTQB
6 2 (2.67%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
6 2 (2.67%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
7 1 (1.33%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (5.33%) Data Quality
2 3 (4.00%) FATCA
2 3 (4.00%) QA
3 2 (2.67%) ISO 26262
3 2 (2.67%) MISRA
3 2 (2.67%) SLA
4 1 (1.33%) GDPR
4 1 (1.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 11 (14.67%) Docker
2 3 (4.00%) HDFS
3 1 (1.33%) Active Directory
3 1 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (1.33%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 14 (18.67%) Kubernetes
2 12 (16.00%) Terraform
3 10 (13.33%) Grafana
4 7 (9.33%) Ansible
5 2 (2.67%) HP ALM
5 2 (2.67%) HP Quality Center
5 2 (2.67%) Prometheus
6 1 (1.33%) Docker Swarm
6 1 (1.33%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 19 (25.33%) Oracle
2 7 (9.33%) Informatica
2 7 (9.33%) Microsoft
3 6 (8.00%) Denodo
3 6 (8.00%) Red Hat
3 6 (8.00%) Talend
4 5 (6.67%) Databricks
5 3 (4.00%) Dynatrace
5 3 (4.00%) Google
5 3 (4.00%) ServiceNow
5 3 (4.00%) Splunk
6 2 (2.67%) HP
6 2 (2.67%) QNX
6 2 (2.67%) Sage
6 2 (2.67%) SAP
7 1 (1.33%) Actian
7 1 (1.33%) Cadence
7 1 (1.33%) Salesforce
7 1 (1.33%) VMware
7 1 (1.33%) Xilinx