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 15 January 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 7 29 11
Rank change year-on-year +22 -18 +31
Contract jobs citing SC Cleared 100 36 80
As % of all contract jobs in Birmingham 12.82% 5.71% 11.76%
As % of the Qualifications category 49.75% 25.71% 37.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 71 23 57
10th Percentile £263 £410 £325
25th Percentile £371 £464 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £600 £438
Median % change year-on-year -20.83% +37.14% -2.78%
75th Percentile £588 £700 £588
90th Percentile £619 £740 £685
West Midlands median daily rate £519 £545 £500
% change year-on-year -4.86% +9.00% -6.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 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% -1.52%

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 201 140 211
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in Birmingham 25.77% 22.22% 31.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 129 94 119
10th Percentile £204 £162 £269
25th Percentile £363 £378 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £438
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% +14.29% -9.56%
75th Percentile £575 £638 £575
90th Percentile £619 £746 £660
West Midlands median daily rate £515 £515 £500
% change year-on-year - +3.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 6 13
10th Percentile £15.69 £23.03 £20.13
25th Percentile £16.73 £26.42 £55.00
Median hourly rate £18.40 £39.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -53.42% -39.23% +283.76%
75th Percentile £18.87 £52.50 £67.50
90th Percentile £19.89 £54.88 £68.50
West Midlands median hourly rate £18.87 £27.56 £34.75
% change year-on-year -31.54% -20.68% +78.21%

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 15 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 15 (15.00%) Confluence
2 8 (8.00%) nginx
3 2 (2.00%) SAS
4 1 (1.00%) Apache
4 1 (1.00%) WebLogic
Applications
1 8 (8.00%) Mozilla Thunderbird
2 3 (3.00%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (2.00%) Microsoft Excel
4 1 (1.00%) MS Visio
Cloud Services
1 21 (21.00%) AWS
2 17 (17.00%) Amazon S3
2 17 (17.00%) Azure
3 16 (16.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
3 16 (16.00%) Amazon EC2
3 16 (16.00%) Amazon ELB
3 16 (16.00%) Virtual Private Cloud
4 14 (14.00%) AWS KMS
5 11 (11.00%) Microsoft 365
6 8 (8.00%) Amazon ECS
6 8 (8.00%) Route 53
7 6 (6.00%) Amazon Glacier
8 3 (3.00%) Entra ID
9 2 (2.00%) Azure Sentinel
9 2 (2.00%) IaaS
9 2 (2.00%) OpenShift
9 2 (2.00%) Power Platform
10 1 (1.00%) Amazon SageMaker
10 1 (1.00%) Azure ExpressRoute
10 1 (1.00%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 23 (23.00%) VPN
2 22 (22.00%) Firewall
3 19 (19.00%) WAN
4 18 (18.00%) BGP
4 18 (18.00%) DNS
4 18 (18.00%) IPsec
4 18 (18.00%) MPLS
5 16 (16.00%) SMTP
6 14 (14.00%) FTP
6 14 (14.00%) HTTP
6 14 (14.00%) SSH
7 8 (8.00%) IMAP
7 8 (8.00%) OpenLDAP
8 5 (5.00%) TCP/IP
9 4 (4.00%) Unified Communications
10 3 (3.00%) Junos
10 3 (3.00%) NX-OS
11 2 (2.00%) DKIM
11 2 (2.00%) SSL
11 2 (2.00%) X.25
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (14.00%) Amazon RDS
2 9 (9.00%) PostgreSQL
3 8 (8.00%) Amazon Aurora
4 2 (2.00%) Data Hub
5 1 (1.00%) Amazon Athena
5 1 (1.00%) Amazon Redshift
5 1 (1.00%) Metadata
5 1 (1.00%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 18 (18.00%) Git
2 17 (17.00%) Jenkins
2 17 (17.00%) JIRA
3 14 (14.00%) Vagrant
4 2 (2.00%) GitLab
5 1 (1.00%) Selenium
5 1 (1.00%) TestDirector
General
1 28 (28.00%) Social Skills
2 27 (27.00%) Public Sector
3 8 (8.00%) Legal
3 8 (8.00%) Presentation Skills
4 4 (4.00%) Analytical Skills
5 3 (3.00%) Documentation Skills
6 1 (1.00%) Finance
6 1 (1.00%) Military
6 1 (1.00%) Organisational Skills
6 1 (1.00%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 18 (18.00%) DevOps Engineer
2 16 (16.00%) AWS Engineer
3 15 (15.00%) AWS DevOps
3 15 (15.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
3 15 (15.00%) Support Engineer
4 14 (14.00%) Cloud Platform Engineer
4 14 (14.00%) Platform Engineer
5 11 (11.00%) Analyst
6 10 (10.00%) 3rd Line Engineer
6 10 (10.00%) 3rd Line Support
6 10 (10.00%) 3rd Line Support Engineer
7 8 (8.00%) 2nd Line Engineer
7 8 (8.00%) AWS Platform Engineer
7 8 (8.00%) WAN Engineer
8 7 (7.00%) Architect
8 7 (7.00%) DevOps Platform Engineer
8 7 (7.00%) SOC Analyst
9 6 (6.00%) Senior
10 5 (5.00%) Consultant
11 3 (3.00%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (10.00%) LDAP
2 3 (3.00%) Middleware
3 2 (2.00%) REST
4 1 (1.00%) .NET
4 1 (1.00%) ARM Templates
4 1 (1.00%) Azure Blueprints
4 1 (1.00%) pytest
4 1 (1.00%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 18 (18.00%) PKI
2 14 (14.00%) Replication
3 10 (10.00%) Driving Licence
4 3 (3.00%) Cloud Native
4 3 (3.00%) Data Centre
4 3 (3.00%) Enterprise Software
4 3 (3.00%) Handset
4 3 (3.00%) SCADA
4 3 (3.00%) Security Operations Centre
4 3 (3.00%) Self-Motivation
5 2 (2.00%) Cyber Defence
5 2 (2.00%) Security Posture
6 1 (1.00%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 25 (25.00%) Linux
1 25 (25.00%) Windows
2 14 (14.00%) Amazon Linux
2 14 (14.00%) VMS
3 10 (10.00%) Ubuntu
4 4 (4.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 2 (2.00%) CentOS
6 1 (1.00%) Android
6 1 (1.00%) Apple iOS
6 1 (1.00%) Mac OS
6 1 (1.00%) Mac OS X
6 1 (1.00%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 26 (26.00%) DevOps
2 19 (19.00%) CI/CD
3 15 (15.00%) Change Management
3 15 (15.00%) Cloud Security
4 14 (14.00%) Configuration Management
4 14 (14.00%) Load Balancing
4 14 (14.00%) Patch Management
4 14 (14.00%) Platform Engineering
5 10 (10.00%) Knowledge Transfer
6 9 (9.00%) Problem-Solving
7 8 (8.00%) Performance Tuning
7 8 (8.00%) SIEM
8 7 (7.00%) Agile
8 7 (7.00%) Network Design
9 6 (6.00%) Break/Fix
10 5 (5.00%) Cybersecurity
10 5 (5.00%) Infrastructure as Code
10 5 (5.00%) Threat Detection
11 4 (4.00%) Analytics
11 4 (4.00%) Security Operations
Programming Languages
1 28 (28.00%) Python
2 21 (21.00%) PowerShell
3 14 (14.00%) Groovy
4 12 (12.00%) SQL
5 6 (6.00%) Bash
5 6 (6.00%) Java
5 6 (6.00%) Perl
6 1 (1.00%) Bicep
6 1 (1.00%) Kusto Query Language
6 1 (1.00%) Search Processing Language
6 1 (1.00%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 100 (100.00%) Security Cleared
2 11 (11.00%) Degree
3 10 (10.00%) Azure Certification
4 8 (8.00%) AWS Certification
5 6 (6.00%) BPSS Clearance
6 5 (5.00%) DV Cleared
7 3 (3.00%) CISSP
8 1 (1.00%) CEH
8 1 (1.00%) CISM
8 1 (1.00%) Citrix Certification
8 1 (1.00%) CSSLP
8 1 (1.00%) GCIH
8 1 (1.00%) GIAC
8 1 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
8 1 (1.00%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (5.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 4 (4.00%) NIST
3 2 (2.00%) QA
4 1 (1.00%) NCSC
4 1 (1.00%) PMO
4 1 (1.00%) SLA
System Software
1 21 (21.00%) Docker
2 14 (14.00%) DFS Replication
3 10 (10.00%) Postfix
4 8 (8.00%) Dovecot
4 8 (8.00%) Squid
5 7 (7.00%) Active Directory
6 3 (3.00%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (3.00%) VMware NSX
7 1 (1.00%) Snort
Systems Management
1 22 (22.00%) Terraform
2 14 (14.00%) Grafana
2 14 (14.00%) Prometheus
3 8 (8.00%) Nessus
3 8 (8.00%) Proxmox
4 6 (6.00%) Kubernetes
5 3 (3.00%) Ansible
5 3 (3.00%) FortiGate
6 1 (1.00%) QRadar
Vendors
1 18 (18.00%) Juniper
1 18 (18.00%) ServiceNow
2 13 (13.00%) Cisco
3 11 (11.00%) Microsoft
4 8 (8.00%) Jaspersoft
5 6 (6.00%) CyberArk
6 5 (5.00%) VMware
7 4 (4.00%) Splunk
8 3 (3.00%) Broadcom
8 3 (3.00%) F5
9 2 (2.00%) CheckPoint
9 2 (2.00%) Google
9 2 (2.00%) Palo Alto
9 2 (2.00%) Tenable
10 1 (1.00%) Dynatrace
10 1 (1.00%) Fortinet
10 1 (1.00%) Foundry
10 1 (1.00%) IBM
10 1 (1.00%) Oracle