Developer/Software Engineer Job Trends

Software Engineer/Developer
UK

The median Software Engineer/Developer salary in the UK is £55,000 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 18 September 2026.

The table below compares current salary benchmarking and summary statistics with the previous two years.

 6 months to
18 Sep 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 761 496 470
Rank change year-on-year -265 -26 -19
Permanent jobs requiring a Developer/Software Engineer 43 183 339
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.037% 0.37% 0.43%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.040% 0.41% 0.46%
Number of salaries quoted 29 154 305
10th Percentile - - £71,250
25th Percentile £47,500 £100,000 £87,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £130,000 £110,000
Median % change year-on-year -57.69% +18.18% +4.76%
75th Percentile £66,500 £137,500 £142,500
90th Percentile £134,500 £142,500 £165,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £60,000 £70,000
% change year-on-year -8.33% -14.29% +27.27%

All Permanent IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent IT job vacancies. 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 permanent jobs in our overall sample.

Permanent vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 107,455 44,314 74,420
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 93.24% 89.66% 95.24%
Number of salaries quoted 73,770 26,055 44,614
10th Percentile £30,000 £28,250 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,250 £36,250 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £58,589 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +6.53% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £77,500 £75,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year +15.79% -5.00% -4.76%

Developer/Software Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings featuring 'Developer/Software Engineer' in the job title relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Developer/Software Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Developer/Software Engineer
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for Developer/Software Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Salary distribution trend for Developer/Software Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Developer/Software Engineer
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Developer/Software Engineer over the 6 months to 18 September 2026.

Salary histogram for Developer/Software Engineer in the UK

Developer/Software Engineer
Top 9 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Developer/Software Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 18 September 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads		 Median Salary
Past 6 Months		 Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year		 Live
Jobs
England -225 41 £55,000 -57.69% 26
Work from Home -143 27 £55,000 -57.69% 9
UK excluding London -123 25 £55,000 -8.33% 16
London -195 19 £111,250 -14.42% 13
South East -30 12 £55,000 -15.38%
North of England -56 12 £50,000 -16.67% 4
Yorkshire -37 11 £50,000 -16.67%
North West - 1 £65,000 - 3
South West - 1 £47,500 - 4

Developer/Software Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 18 September 2026, Developer/Software Engineer 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 permanent job ads featuring Developer/Software Engineer in the job title.

1 40 (93.02%) Software Engineering
2 27 (62.79%) AWS
3 23 (53.49%) .NET
3 23 (53.49%) C#
3 23 (53.49%) Full-Stack Development
3 23 (53.49%) Microservices
4 21 (48.84%) Continuous Improvement
4 21 (48.84%) SaaS
5 20 (46.51%) CQRS
5 20 (46.51%) CSS
5 20 (46.51%) HTML
5 20 (46.51%) Product Vision
5 20 (46.51%) Resource Allocation
5 20 (46.51%) SDLC
5 20 (46.51%) Vue
6 14 (32.56%) Python
7 13 (30.23%) SQL
8 9 (20.93%) Investment Management
9 8 (18.60%) Agile
10 7 (16.28%) AI
10 7 (16.28%) Analytics
11 6 (13.95%) Kafka
11 6 (13.95%) Problem-Solving
12 5 (11.63%) Azure
12 5 (11.63%) CI/CD
12 5 (11.63%) Quantitative Research
12 5 (11.63%) RabbitMQ
13 4 (9.30%) DevOps
13 4 (9.30%) GCP
13 4 (9.30%) Go

Developer/Software Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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:

Cloud Services
1 27 (62.79%) AWS
2 21 (48.84%) SaaS
3 5 (11.63%) Azure
4 4 (9.30%) GCP
4 4 (9.30%) Serverless
5 3 (6.98%) Amazon Bedrock
5 3 (6.98%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 3 (6.98%) Amazon EC2
5 3 (6.98%) Amazon S3
5 3 (6.98%) AWS CloudFormation
5 3 (6.98%) AWS Lambda
5 3 (6.98%) Cloud Computing
5 3 (6.98%) Datadog
6 1 (2.33%) Anthropic Claude
6 1 (2.33%) Azure AKS
6 1 (2.33%) Azure Functions
6 1 (2.33%) Azure Service Bus
6 1 (2.33%) ChatGPT
6 1 (2.33%) GitHub Copilot
6 1 (2.33%) Microsoft Copilot
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (6.98%) Amazon RDS
1 3 (6.98%) DynamoDB
1 3 (6.98%) KDB
1 3 (6.98%) NoSQL
1 3 (6.98%) SQL Server
2 2 (4.65%) MySQL
3 1 (2.33%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 3 (6.98%) CircleCI
1 3 (6.98%) GitLab
1 3 (6.98%) Jenkins
2 2 (4.65%) Git
2 2 (4.65%) JIRA
2 2 (4.65%) Visual Studio
3 1 (2.33%) Claude Code
General
1 12 (27.91%) Finance
2 11 (25.58%) Banking
3 9 (20.93%) Front Office
4 6 (13.95%) Social Skills
5 3 (6.98%) Aerospace
5 3 (6.98%) Analytical Skills
5 3 (6.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 3 (6.98%) Investment Banking
5 3 (6.98%) Law
5 3 (6.98%) Marketing
6 2 (4.65%) Manufacturing
7 1 (2.33%) Agriculture
7 1 (2.33%) Military
7 1 (2.33%) Public Sector
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (53.49%) .NET
2 20 (46.51%) CSS
2 20 (46.51%) HTML
2 20 (46.51%) Vue
3 6 (13.95%) Kafka
4 5 (11.63%) RabbitMQ
5 3 (6.98%) CrewAI
5 3 (6.98%) FIX Protocol
5 3 (6.98%) gRPC
5 3 (6.98%) LangChain
5 3 (6.98%) LangGraph
5 3 (6.98%) pydantic
5 3 (6.98%) RESTful
5 3 (6.98%) Terraform
6 2 (4.65%) AngularJS
6 2 (4.65%) OpenCV
6 2 (4.65%) React
6 2 (4.65%) web3js
7 1 (2.33%) Laravel
7 1 (2.33%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 5 (11.63%) Equities
1 5 (11.63%) Hedge funds
2 4 (9.30%) AI Agents
3 3 (6.98%) Algorithms
3 3 (6.98%) Cloud Native
3 3 (6.98%) Fixed Income
4 2 (4.65%) Blockchain
4 2 (4.65%) Derivative
4 2 (4.65%) Web3
5 1 (2.33%) Credit Derivative
5 1 (2.33%) Equity Derivative
5 1 (2.33%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 1 (2.33%) IoT
5 1 (2.33%) Mobile App
5 1 (2.33%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 3 (6.98%) Linux
2 2 (4.65%) Windows
3 1 (2.33%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 40 (93.02%) Software Engineering
2 23 (53.49%) Full-Stack Development
2 23 (53.49%) Microservices
3 21 (48.84%) Continuous Improvement
4 20 (46.51%) CQRS
4 20 (46.51%) Product Vision
4 20 (46.51%) Resource Allocation
4 20 (46.51%) SDLC
5 9 (20.93%) Investment Management
6 8 (18.60%) Agile
7 7 (16.28%) AI
7 7 (16.28%) Analytics
8 6 (13.95%) Problem-Solving
9 5 (11.63%) CI/CD
9 5 (11.63%) Quantitative Research
10 4 (9.30%) DevOps
10 4 (9.30%) Order Management
10 4 (9.30%) Performance Optimisation
11 3 (6.98%) Low Latency
11 3 (6.98%) Performance Monitoring
Programming Languages
1 23 (53.49%) C#
2 14 (32.56%) Python
3 13 (30.23%) SQL
4 4 (9.30%) Go
4 4 (9.30%) JavaScript
4 4 (9.30%) R
5 3 (6.98%) C++
5 3 (6.98%) Java
6 2 (4.65%) VB.NET
7 1 (2.33%) PHP
7 1 (2.33%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 3 (6.98%) Computer Science Degree
1 3 (6.98%) Degree
2 1 (2.33%) SC Cleared
2 1 (2.33%) Security Cleared
System Software
1 3 (6.98%) Docker
Systems Management
1 3 (6.98%) Kubernetes
1 3 (6.98%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 3 (6.98%) Google
2 1 (2.33%) Bloomberg
2 1 (2.33%) Microsoft
30 Developer/Software Engineer jobs Nationwide