SC Cleared Contract Job Trends in Birmingham

Security Check (SC) Clearance
West Midlands > Birmingham

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in Birmingham with a requirement for SC Cleared qualifications. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered over the 6 months leading up to 22 January 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 9 21 9
Rank change year-on-year +12 -12 +33
Contract jobs citing SC Cleared 95 49 84
As % of all contract jobs in Birmingham 11.90% 7.61% 11.91%
As % of the Qualifications category 47.98% 31.41% 38.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 67 34 62
10th Percentile £263 £420 £325
25th Percentile £380 £525 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £689 £438
Median % change year-on-year -31.06% +57.49% -6.67%
75th Percentile £588 £700 £578
90th Percentile £619 £706 £673
West Midlands median daily rate £519 £551 £500
% change year-on-year -5.90% +10.20% -7.41%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 0 11
10th Percentile - - £42.50
25th Percentile £18.20 - £62.50
Median hourly rate £18.40 - £65.00
75th Percentile £18.87 - £67.50
90th Percentile - - £68.75
West Midlands median hourly rate £20.17 £35.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -42.39% -46.15% +7.44%

All Academic and Professional Certifications
Birmingham

SC Cleared falls under the Academic Qualifications and Professional Certifications category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications in Birmingham.

Contract vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications 198 156 219
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in Birmingham 24.81% 24.22% 31.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 126 106 122
10th Percentile £209 £165 £258
25th Percentile £380 £400 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £546 £438
Median % change year-on-year -12.94% +24.71% -8.85%
75th Percentile £575 £693 £573
90th Percentile £619 £704 £656
West Midlands median daily rate £514 £520 £500
% change year-on-year -1.25% +4.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 21 6 17
10th Percentile £15.62 £23.03 £19.21
25th Percentile £16.30 £26.42 £25.50
Median hourly rate £18.40 £39.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -53.42% -39.23% +333.33%
75th Percentile £18.87 £52.50 £67.50
90th Percentile £20.00 £54.88 £68.00
West Midlands median hourly rate £18.87 £26.13 £34.50
% change year-on-year -27.77% -24.28% +76.92%

SC Cleared
Job Vacancy Trend in Birmingham

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SC Cleared relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in Birmingham.

SC Cleared job vacancy trend in Birmingham

SC Cleared
Daily Rate Trend in Birmingham

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing SC Cleared.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing SC Cleared

SC Cleared
Daily Rate Histogram in Birmingham

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SC Cleared in Birmingham over the 6 months to 22 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for SC Cleared in Birmingham

SC Cleared
Hourly Rate Trend in Birmingham

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing SC Cleared.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing SC Cleared

SC Cleared
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in Birmingham 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 14 (14.74%) Confluence
2 8 (8.42%) nginx
3 2 (2.11%) SAS
4 1 (1.05%) Apache
4 1 (1.05%) WebLogic
Applications
1 8 (8.42%) Mozilla Thunderbird
2 3 (3.16%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
4 1 (1.05%) MS Visio
Cloud Services
1 20 (21.05%) AWS
2 17 (17.89%) Azure
3 16 (16.84%) Amazon S3
4 15 (15.79%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 15 (15.79%) Amazon EC2
4 15 (15.79%) Amazon ELB
4 15 (15.79%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 13 (13.68%) AWS KMS
6 11 (11.58%) Microsoft 365
7 8 (8.42%) Amazon ECS
7 8 (8.42%) Route 53
8 5 (5.26%) Amazon Glacier
9 3 (3.16%) Entra ID
10 2 (2.11%) Azure Sentinel
10 2 (2.11%) IaaS
10 2 (2.11%) OpenShift
10 2 (2.11%) Power Platform
11 1 (1.05%) Amazon SageMaker
11 1 (1.05%) Azure ExpressRoute
11 1 (1.05%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 21 (22.11%) Firewall
1 21 (22.11%) VPN
2 17 (17.89%) DNS
2 17 (17.89%) WAN
3 16 (16.84%) BGP
3 16 (16.84%) IPsec
3 16 (16.84%) MPLS
4 15 (15.79%) SMTP
5 13 (13.68%) FTP
5 13 (13.68%) HTTP
5 13 (13.68%) SSH
6 8 (8.42%) IMAP
6 8 (8.42%) OpenLDAP
7 5 (5.26%) TCP/IP
8 4 (4.21%) Unified Communications
9 3 (3.16%) NX-OS
10 2 (2.11%) DKIM
10 2 (2.11%) Junos
10 2 (2.11%) SSL
10 2 (2.11%) X.25
Database & Business Intelligence
1 13 (13.68%) Amazon RDS
2 9 (9.47%) PostgreSQL
3 8 (8.42%) Amazon Aurora
4 2 (2.11%) Data Hub
5 1 (1.05%) Amazon Athena
5 1 (1.05%) Amazon Redshift
5 1 (1.05%) Metadata
5 1 (1.05%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 17 (17.89%) Git
2 16 (16.84%) Jenkins
2 16 (16.84%) JIRA
3 13 (13.68%) Vagrant
4 2 (2.11%) GitLab
5 1 (1.05%) Selenium
5 1 (1.05%) TestDirector
General
1 26 (27.37%) Public Sector
1 26 (27.37%) Social Skills
2 8 (8.42%) Presentation Skills
3 7 (7.37%) Legal
4 4 (4.21%) Analytical Skills
5 3 (3.16%) Documentation Skills
6 1 (1.05%) Finance
6 1 (1.05%) Military
6 1 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
6 1 (1.05%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 17 (17.89%) DevOps Engineer
2 15 (15.79%) AWS Engineer
3 14 (14.74%) AWS DevOps
3 14 (14.74%) AWS DevOps Engineer
4 13 (13.68%) Cloud Platform Engineer
4 13 (13.68%) Platform Engineer
5 12 (12.63%) Support Engineer
6 11 (11.58%) Analyst
7 9 (9.47%) 3rd Line Engineer
7 9 (9.47%) 3rd Line Support
7 9 (9.47%) 3rd Line Support Engineer
8 8 (8.42%) AWS Platform Engineer
9 7 (7.37%) 2nd Line Engineer
9 7 (7.37%) Architect
9 7 (7.37%) DevOps Platform Engineer
9 7 (7.37%) SOC Analyst
9 7 (7.37%) WAN Engineer
10 6 (6.32%) Senior
11 5 (5.26%) Consultant
12 3 (3.16%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (10.53%) LDAP
2 3 (3.16%) Middleware
3 2 (2.11%) REST
4 1 (1.05%) .NET
4 1 (1.05%) ARM Templates
4 1 (1.05%) Azure Blueprints
4 1 (1.05%) pytest
4 1 (1.05%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 16 (16.84%) PKI
2 13 (13.68%) Replication
3 9 (9.47%) Driving Licence
4 3 (3.16%) Cloud Native
4 3 (3.16%) Data Centre
4 3 (3.16%) Enterprise Software
4 3 (3.16%) Handset
4 3 (3.16%) SCADA
4 3 (3.16%) Security Operations Centre
5 2 (2.11%) Cyber Defence
5 2 (2.11%) Security Posture
5 2 (2.11%) Self-Motivation
6 1 (1.05%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 24 (25.26%) Linux
2 23 (24.21%) Windows
3 13 (13.68%) Amazon Linux
3 13 (13.68%) VMS
4 10 (10.53%) Ubuntu
5 4 (4.21%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (2.11%) CentOS
7 1 (1.05%) Mac OS X
7 1 (1.05%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 25 (26.32%) DevOps
2 19 (20.00%) CI/CD
3 14 (14.74%) Change Management
3 14 (14.74%) Cloud Security
4 13 (13.68%) Configuration Management
4 13 (13.68%) Patch Management
4 13 (13.68%) Platform Engineering
5 12 (12.63%) Load Balancing
6 10 (10.53%) Knowledge Transfer
7 8 (8.42%) Performance Tuning
7 8 (8.42%) SIEM
8 7 (7.37%) Agile
8 7 (7.37%) Network Design
8 7 (7.37%) Problem-Solving
9 5 (5.26%) Break/Fix
9 5 (5.26%) Cybersecurity
9 5 (5.26%) Infrastructure as Code
9 5 (5.26%) Threat Detection
10 4 (4.21%) Analytics
10 4 (4.21%) Security Operations
Programming Languages
1 27 (28.42%) Python
2 20 (21.05%) PowerShell
3 13 (13.68%) Groovy
4 12 (12.63%) SQL
5 6 (6.32%) Bash
6 5 (5.26%) Java
6 5 (5.26%) Perl
7 1 (1.05%) Bicep
7 1 (1.05%) Kusto Query Language
7 1 (1.05%) Search Processing Language
7 1 (1.05%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 95 (100.00%) Security Cleared
2 11 (11.58%) Degree
3 10 (10.53%) Azure Certification
4 8 (8.42%) AWS Certification
5 6 (6.32%) BPSS Clearance
6 5 (5.26%) DV Cleared
7 3 (3.16%) CISSP
8 1 (1.05%) CEH
8 1 (1.05%) CISM
8 1 (1.05%) Citrix Certification
8 1 (1.05%) CSSLP
8 1 (1.05%) GCIH
8 1 (1.05%) GIAC
8 1 (1.05%) Microsoft Certification
8 1 (1.05%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (5.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 4 (4.21%) NIST
3 2 (2.11%) QA
4 1 (1.05%) NCSC
4 1 (1.05%) PMO
4 1 (1.05%) SLA
System Software
1 20 (21.05%) Docker
2 13 (13.68%) DFS Replication
3 10 (10.53%) Postfix
4 8 (8.42%) Dovecot
4 8 (8.42%) Squid
5 6 (6.32%) Active Directory
6 3 (3.16%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (3.16%) VMware NSX
7 1 (1.05%) Snort
Systems Management
1 21 (22.11%) Terraform
2 13 (13.68%) Grafana
2 13 (13.68%) Prometheus
3 8 (8.42%) Nessus
3 8 (8.42%) Proxmox
4 6 (6.32%) Kubernetes
5 3 (3.16%) Ansible
5 3 (3.16%) FortiGate
6 1 (1.05%) QRadar
Vendors
1 17 (17.89%) ServiceNow
2 16 (16.84%) Juniper
3 12 (12.63%) Cisco
4 11 (11.58%) Microsoft
5 8 (8.42%) Jaspersoft
6 6 (6.32%) CyberArk
7 5 (5.26%) VMware
8 4 (4.21%) Splunk
9 3 (3.16%) Broadcom
9 3 (3.16%) F5
10 2 (2.11%) CheckPoint
10 2 (2.11%) Google
10 2 (2.11%) Palo Alto
10 2 (2.11%) Tenable
11 1 (1.05%) Dynatrace
11 1 (1.05%) Fortinet
11 1 (1.05%) Foundry
11 1 (1.05%) IBM
11 1 (1.05%) Oracle