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 29 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 75 63 51
Rank change year-on-year -12 -12 -2
Contract jobs citing Software Engineering 86 36 59
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 2.76% 2.65% 3.06%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.32% 3.00% 3.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 60 18 27
10th Percentile £419 £398 -
25th Percentile £439 £451 £358
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £483 £531 £463
Median % change year-on-year -8.98% +14.81% -14.35%
75th Percentile £556 £588 £525
90th Percentile £625 £629 £543
England median daily rate £550 £600 £600
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 0 13
10th Percentile £56.50 - -
25th Percentile £64.50 - £46.25
Median hourly rate £75.00 - £57.50
75th Percentile £77.50 - £58.75
90th Percentile - - £69.75
England median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year - +4.00% -3.85%

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 2,594 1,201 1,618
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 83.22% 88.44% 84.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,690 801 1,066
10th Percentile £306 £200 £275
25th Percentile £402 £385 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -2.34%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £625
90th Percentile £651 £678 £750
England median daily rate £507 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -3.48% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 106 58 115
10th Percentile £14.00 £12.62 £11.09
25th Percentile £20.11 £14.55 £14.00
Median hourly rate £30.00 £18.07 £22.50
Median % change year-on-year +66.07% -19.71% +26.98%
75th Percentile £67.19 £24.10 £41.13
90th Percentile £72.54 £38.67 £57.75
England median hourly rate £44.00 £30.45 £35.50
% change year-on-year +44.50% -14.23% -5.33%

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 29 April 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 29 April 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 29 April 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 -26 26 £450 -16.43% 6
Birmingham -19 17 £525 +23.53% 25
Warwickshire -5 12 £520 - 7
Coventry -13 12 £475 +5.56% 2
Worcestershire -2 9 £568 -1.30% 6
Herefordshire -10 5 £550 +4.76%
Solihull -13 2 £1,375 - 2
Staffordshire - 2 - - 9
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 13 (15.12%) Confluence
2 6 (6.98%) SAS
2 6 (6.98%) WebLogic
3 3 (3.49%) Apache
3 3 (3.49%) OpenStack
4 1 (1.16%) JBoss
Applications
1 2 (2.33%) Chatbot
1 2 (2.33%) Microsoft Excel
1 2 (2.33%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (2.33%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 27 (31.40%) Azure
2 24 (27.91%) AWS
3 14 (16.28%) Power Platform
4 11 (12.79%) Serverless
5 7 (8.14%) Amazon S3
5 7 (8.14%) GCP
5 7 (8.14%) GitHub
6 6 (6.98%) AWS Lambda
6 6 (6.98%) Azure Machine Learning
6 6 (6.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 6 (6.98%) OpenShift
7 5 (5.81%) GitHub Actions
8 4 (4.65%) Amazon EC2
9 3 (3.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 3 (3.49%) Amazon EMR
9 3 (3.49%) Amazon Kinesis
9 3 (3.49%) Azure Logic Apps
9 3 (3.49%) Microsoft 365
9 3 (3.49%) Power Automate
9 3 (3.49%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 4 (4.65%) Network Security
2 3 (3.49%) 3GPP
3 1 (1.16%) AMQP
3 1 (1.16%) Firewall
3 1 (1.16%) HTTP
3 1 (1.16%) RTCP
3 1 (1.16%) RTP
3 1 (1.16%) SSL
3 1 (1.16%) XCAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (12.79%) Power BI
2 9 (10.47%) Pentaho
3 8 (9.30%) Relational Database
4 7 (8.14%) Amazon RDS
4 7 (8.14%) MongoDB
5 6 (6.98%) Amazon Redshift
5 6 (6.98%) BusinessObjects
6 5 (5.81%) InfluxDB
6 5 (5.81%) MySQL
6 5 (5.81%) PostgreSQL
7 3 (3.49%) Amazon Athena
7 3 (3.49%) Apache Hive
7 3 (3.49%) Apache Iceberg
7 3 (3.49%) Data Lake
7 3 (3.49%) Data Warehouse
7 3 (3.49%) DynamoDB
7 3 (3.49%) Hadoop
7 3 (3.49%) Impala
8 2 (2.33%) Oracle Database
9 1 (1.16%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 19 (22.09%) JIRA
2 15 (17.44%) Git
2 15 (17.44%) GitLab
3 12 (13.95%) Jenkins
4 6 (6.98%) Atlassian Bamboo
5 5 (5.81%) MLflow
6 4 (4.65%) Bitbucket
7 3 (3.49%) Artifactory
7 3 (3.49%) CircleCI
7 3 (3.49%) REST Assured
8 2 (2.33%) JMeter
8 2 (2.33%) JUnit
8 2 (2.33%) Selenium
9 1 (1.16%) Cypress.io
9 1 (1.16%) Eclipse
9 1 (1.16%) Gradle
9 1 (1.16%) IntelliJ
9 1 (1.16%) Maven
9 1 (1.16%) MSTest
9 1 (1.16%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 18 (20.93%) Social Skills
2 10 (11.63%) Public Sector
3 7 (8.14%) Finance
4 4 (4.65%) Aerospace
4 4 (4.65%) Analytical Skills
4 4 (4.65%) Banking
4 4 (4.65%) Telecoms
5 3 (3.49%) Automotive
5 3 (3.49%) Influencing Skills
6 2 (2.33%) Electronics
6 2 (2.33%) Retail
Job Titles
1 34 (39.53%) Software Engineer
2 15 (17.44%) Senior
3 9 (10.47%) Embedded Engineer
3 9 (10.47%) Embedded Software Engineer
4 8 (9.30%) Data Engineer
5 6 (6.98%) Developer
5 6 (6.98%) SC Cleared Software Engineer
6 5 (5.81%) Analyst
6 5 (5.81%) Engineering Specialist
6 5 (5.81%) Java Engineer
6 5 (5.81%) Lead
6 5 (5.81%) Site Engineer
6 5 (5.81%) Site Reliability Engineer
7 4 (4.65%) Data Scientist
7 4 (4.65%) DevOps Engineer
7 4 (4.65%) Java Software Engineer
7 4 (4.65%) Senior Software Engineer
8 3 (3.49%) C# Software Engineer
8 3 (3.49%) Delivery Manager
8 3 (3.49%) Head of Software Engineering
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (11.63%) REST
2 8 (9.30%) Spring
2 8 (9.30%) Spring Boot
3 7 (8.14%) .NET
3 7 (8.14%) RabbitMQ
3 7 (8.14%) XML
4 6 (6.98%) JSON
5 4 (4.65%) .NET Framework
5 4 (4.65%) Elastic Stack
5 4 (4.65%) RESTful
6 3 (3.49%) .NET Core
6 3 (3.49%) FastAPI
6 3 (3.49%) Flask
6 3 (3.49%) NumPy
6 3 (3.49%) Pandas
6 3 (3.49%) XML Schema
7 2 (2.33%) ADO
7 2 (2.33%) ASP.NET
7 2 (2.33%) CSS
7 2 (2.33%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 10 (11.63%) Product Ownership
2 8 (9.30%) Cloud Native
3 4 (4.65%) Data Centre
4 2 (2.33%) Distributed Systems
4 2 (2.33%) FPGA
5 1 (1.16%) Embedded Systems
5 1 (1.16%) Enterprise Software
5 1 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
5 1 (1.16%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (1.16%) Media Streaming
5 1 (1.16%) Mobile App
5 1 (1.16%) Mobile Banking
5 1 (1.16%) Onboarding
5 1 (1.16%) Private Cloud
5 1 (1.16%) Public Cloud
5 1 (1.16%) SCADA
5 1 (1.16%) Verilog
5 1 (1.16%) VHDL
Operating Systems
1 19 (22.09%) Linux
2 8 (9.30%) Windows
3 6 (6.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 6 (6.98%) Unix
4 2 (2.33%) Apple iOS
4 2 (2.33%) Windows Server
5 1 (1.16%) Android
5 1 (1.16%) Embedded Linux
5 1 (1.16%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 39 (45.35%) CI/CD
2 38 (44.19%) Agile
3 28 (32.56%) DevOps
4 20 (23.26%) Scrum
5 19 (22.09%) Containerisation
6 18 (20.93%) Continuous Improvement
7 17 (19.77%) Microservices
8 14 (16.28%) Problem-Solving
8 14 (16.28%) Software Delivery
9 12 (13.95%) Observability
9 12 (13.95%) Test Automation
10 11 (12.79%) Analytics
10 11 (12.79%) Business Intelligence
10 11 (12.79%) Infrastructure as Code
10 11 (12.79%) Service Management
11 10 (11.63%) AI
11 10 (11.63%) Software Testing
12 9 (10.47%) Configuration Management
12 9 (10.47%) ETL
12 9 (10.47%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 35 (40.70%) SQL
2 29 (33.72%) Python
3 26 (30.23%) Java
4 12 (13.95%) Shell Script
5 7 (8.14%) Go
5 7 (8.14%) PL/SQL
6 6 (6.98%) C#
7 5 (5.81%) Perl
8 4 (4.65%) C++
8 4 (4.65%) PowerShell
9 3 (3.49%) HiveQL
9 3 (3.49%) JavaScript
9 3 (3.49%) Kotlin
10 2 (2.33%) Swift
10 2 (2.33%) TypeScript
10 2 (2.33%) VB
11 1 (1.16%) Bash
11 1 (1.16%) C
11 1 (1.16%) Scala
11 1 (1.16%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 39 (45.35%) Security Cleared
2 33 (38.37%) SC Cleared
3 9 (10.47%) Degree
4 7 (8.14%) DV Cleared
5 5 (5.81%) Master's Degree
5 5 (5.81%) PhD
6 2 (2.33%) ISTQB
6 2 (2.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
6 2 (2.33%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
7 1 (1.16%) BPSS Clearance
7 1 (1.16%) CISM
7 1 (1.16%) CISSP
7 1 (1.16%) Computer Science Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (5.81%) Data Quality
2 4 (4.65%) QA
3 3 (3.49%) FATCA
4 2 (2.33%) Accessibility
4 2 (2.33%) SLA
5 1 (1.16%) GDPR
5 1 (1.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 18 (20.93%) Docker
2 3 (3.49%) HDFS
3 1 (1.16%) Active Directory
3 1 (1.16%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (1.16%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 24 (27.91%) Kubernetes
2 19 (22.09%) Terraform
3 17 (19.77%) Grafana
4 15 (17.44%) Ansible
5 7 (8.14%) Prometheus
6 6 (6.98%) Progress Chef
7 4 (4.65%) Puppet
8 3 (3.49%) Argo
8 3 (3.49%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (2.33%) HP ALM
9 2 (2.33%) HP Quality Center
10 1 (1.16%) Podman
Vendors
1 16 (18.60%) Oracle
2 12 (13.95%) Microsoft
3 7 (8.14%) Informatica
3 7 (8.14%) Red Hat
4 6 (6.98%) Denodo
4 6 (6.98%) Talend
5 5 (5.81%) Databricks
6 4 (4.65%) Splunk
7 3 (3.49%) Dynatrace
7 3 (3.49%) Google
7 3 (3.49%) ServiceNow
8 2 (2.33%) HP
8 2 (2.33%) Sage
8 2 (2.33%) SAP
9 1 (1.16%) Atlassian
9 1 (1.16%) Cadence
9 1 (1.16%) Salesforce
9 1 (1.16%) VMware
9 1 (1.16%) webMethods
9 1 (1.16%) Xilinx