Software Engineer Salary in the UK: Pay, Costs and How to Hire

What software engineers earn in the UK

The UK government's going rate for SOC 2020 code 2134, programmers and software development professionals, is £54,700 a year. The Home Office bases it on median pay in the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), for a 37.5-hour week. The occupation covers software developers, computer programmers and computer games designers. It is gross pay before tax for employees, so it does not cover contractors' day rates or equity.

For comparison, ONS ASHE puts median gross annual pay for all full-time employees at £40,911 in April 2026, up 4.5% from £39,157 a year earlier. The software rate is about 1.34 times that figure. The 2 numbers are built in different ways, so treat the gap as a guide, not an exact premium.

Lower and middle of the pay range

The Home Office publishes a second going rate based on the 25th percentile of ASHE pay: £40,000 a year for code 2134. A quarter of jobs in the occupation pay less than the survey figure behind it. That is a fair reference for junior roles, though it is not an official entry-level salary. The middle of the range sits at £54,700. Our sources do not give an official figure for the top of the range (75th or 90th percentile) or for senior engineers specifically.

Related IT occupations sit close by: £54,900 for IT business analysts, architects and systems designers (code 2133, which includes data engineers), £52,300 for other IT professionals such as DevOps engineers (2139), £48,500 for cyber security professionals (2135) and £41,200 for IT quality and testing professionals (2136). The full list is in the table above.

How the UK compares with Europe

The UK is not in Eurostat's Structure of Earnings Survey 2022, the standard source for comparing pay across Europe, so there is no like-for-like figure. In that survey, professionals working in information and communication earned a mean of €57,522 a year across the EU 27 in firms with 10 or more employees. By country: Switzerland €126,024, Ireland €90,905, Germany €78,189, Netherlands €69,120, France €60,737, Sweden €58,225, Spain €45,646, Portugal €39,232, Poland €29,721. These are 2022 means in euros for a whole sector, while the UK figures on this page are recent rates in pounds for one occupation, so we do not convert one into the other.

What an employer pays on top of salary

In the 2026 to 2027 tax year, UK employers pay 15% National Insurance on an employee's pay above £5,000 a year (£96 a week). Under automatic enrolment, the employer must also pay at least 3% of the employee's earnings between £6,240 and £50,270 into a workplace pension, with 8% in total once the employee's share is added. On a £54,700 salary that is about £7,455 in National Insurance and £1,320.90 in pension, for a total cost of about £63,475.90 a year. Eligible employers can reduce their National Insurance bill with the Employment Allowance of £10,500. Benefits, equipment and recruitment costs come on top.

Hiring remotely from or into the UK

We do placement. We source, screen and interview remote engineers and other professionals across Europe, then deliver a shortlist of 3 vetted candidates within 21 days for a flat $6,500, or your deposit back, with a 12-month replacement guarantee. See how placement works. Prefer to run the search yourself? Post a job for $299, live for 60 days.

Once you have chosen someone, a company outside the UK can employ a UK-based engineer through its own UK entity, through an employer of record that runs UK payroll for a monthly fee, or as a genuinely independent contractor. Euro Remote Talent does not employ people on your behalf: we find and shortlist the candidate, and you employ them through the route that fits.

Hiring someone to move to the UK is different: the going rates in the table above are the salary levels the Home Office uses for Skilled Worker visas, so check them before you make an offer. Engineers based in the UK who want to work for European or US companies can browse remote jobs open to people in the UK.

How we worked out these figures

The occupation pay figures come from the Home Office going rates in Appendix Skilled Occupations, which the Home Office bases on ONS ASHE data for each SOC 2020 code; the page does not say which ASHE year it uses. The all-jobs figure is the ONS ASHE 2026 provisional release of 22 October 2026, which is based on employer responses for a 1% sample of employees, found through HMRC PAYE records and covers the pay period that includes 22 April 2026. The ONS publishes four-digit occupation tables (ASHE Table 14) as a spreadsheet download; we will replace the Home Office rates with those figures in the next update. Employer costs use HMRC and GOV.UK rates for 2026 to 2027. Cost figures are our calculations, rounded to the penny, and annual approximations of amounts worked out each pay period.

More guides

• Hiring in the UK: employer costs and labor laws
• Cost of living in the UK
• Minimum wage in the UK
• Software engineer salaries in Europe, compared by country
• Remote engineering jobs open to people in Europe