SDLC Contract Job Trends in the City of London

Systems or Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
Central London > City of London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the City of London requiring SDLC skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 21 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 65 47 61
Rank change year-on-year -18 +14 -9
Contract jobs citing SDLC 60 83 84
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 3.29% 4.02% 3.31%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.63% 4.36% 3.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 38 55 44
10th Percentile £398 £393 £434
25th Percentile £451 £484 £509
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £650 £600
Median % change year-on-year -7.69% +8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £713 £725 £791
90th Percentile £899 £905 £825
Central London median daily rate £600 £640 £600
% change year-on-year -6.25% +6.67% -7.69%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £26.25 - £72.50
Median hourly rate £27.50 - £75.00
75th Percentile £28.75 - £77.50
90th Percentile - - -
Central London median hourly rate £27.50 £35.00 £75.00
% change year-on-year -21.43% -53.33% -7.98%

All Process and Methodology Skills
City of London

SDLC 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 City of London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 1,651 1,902 2,263
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 90.57% 92.06% 89.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,165 1,162 1,616
10th Percentile £340 £363 £363
25th Percentile £421 £465 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £543 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -5.65% - -1.71%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £688
90th Percentile £756 £790 £800
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -4.35% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 15 11
10th Percentile £20.02 £15.80 £17.00
25th Percentile £20.82 £22.00 £17.97
Median hourly rate £28.00 £42.50 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -34.12% +70.00% -41.86%
75th Percentile £41.94 £102.25 £42.38
90th Percentile £54.95 £127.30 £73.75
Central London median hourly rate £26.31 £35.00 £25.50
% change year-on-year -24.84% +37.25% -37.04%

SDLC
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SDLC relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London.

SDLC job vacancy trend in the City of London

SDLC
Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing SDLC.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing SDLC

SDLC
Daily Rate Histogram in the City of London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SDLC in the City of London over the 6 months to 21 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SDLC in the City of London

SDLC
Hourly Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing SDLC.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing SDLC

SDLC
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the City of London 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 3 (5.00%) Confluence
2 2 (3.33%) Microsoft Exchange
3 1 (1.67%) Apache
3 1 (1.67%) Apache Airflow
3 1 (1.67%) Apache Spark
3 1 (1.67%) IIS
3 1 (1.67%) SharePoint
3 1 (1.67%) Skype for Business
Applications
1 2 (3.33%) Microsoft Excel
1 2 (3.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
1 2 (3.33%) MS Visio
2 1 (1.67%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (1.67%) Exchequer
1 1 (1.67%) Loan IQ
1 1 (1.67%) Remedy ITSM
1 1 (1.67%) Salesforce CRM
1 1 (1.67%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 17 (28.33%) Azure
2 12 (20.00%) GCP
3 8 (13.33%) AWS
3 8 (13.33%) Power Platform
4 5 (8.33%) Google Gemini
5 4 (6.67%) GitHub
6 3 (5.00%) Azure DevOps
6 3 (5.00%) GitHub Actions
6 3 (5.00%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 2 (3.33%) Cloud Run
7 2 (3.33%) Entra ID
7 2 (3.33%) Microsoft 365
7 2 (3.33%) Serverless
8 1 (1.67%) Amazon S3
8 1 (1.67%) Azure Logic Apps
8 1 (1.67%) Azure Monitor
8 1 (1.67%) Collibra
8 1 (1.67%) Nutanix
8 1 (1.67%) PaaS
8 1 (1.67%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 2 (3.33%) DNS
1 2 (3.33%) HTTP
1 2 (3.33%) SSL
1 2 (3.33%) TCP/IP
2 1 (1.67%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (10.00%) Power BI
2 4 (6.67%) Tableau
3 3 (5.00%) Big Data
3 3 (5.00%) BigQuery
3 3 (5.00%) MongoDB
3 3 (5.00%) SQL Server
4 2 (3.33%) Apache Cassandra
4 2 (3.33%) Data Warehouse
4 2 (3.33%) KDB
4 2 (3.33%) Kdb+
4 2 (3.33%) MySQL
4 2 (3.33%) NoSQL
4 2 (3.33%) PostgreSQL
4 2 (3.33%) Relational Database
5 1 (1.67%) Delta Lake
5 1 (1.67%) DynamoDB
5 1 (1.67%) RDBMS
5 1 (1.67%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 8 (13.33%) JIRA
2 4 (6.67%) Git
3 3 (5.00%) Jenkins
3 3 (5.00%) Selenium
4 2 (3.33%) JUnit
4 2 (3.33%) Robot Framework
4 2 (3.33%) Team Foundation Server
5 1 (1.67%) Ant
5 1 (1.67%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.67%) GitLab
5 1 (1.67%) Gradle
5 1 (1.67%) Jaeger
5 1 (1.67%) Mockito
5 1 (1.67%) Snyk
General
1 31 (51.67%) Finance
2 24 (40.00%) Social Skills
3 12 (20.00%) Analytical Skills
4 8 (13.33%) Financial Institution
5 7 (11.67%) Banking
5 7 (11.67%) Front Office
6 6 (10.00%) Influencing Skills
7 4 (6.67%) Investment Banking
8 3 (5.00%) Legal
9 2 (3.33%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (1.67%) Back Office
10 1 (1.67%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (1.67%) Games
10 1 (1.67%) Law
10 1 (1.67%) Public Sector
10 1 (1.67%) Retail
Job Titles
1 10 (16.67%) Developer
2 7 (11.67%) Analyst
2 7 (11.67%) Architect
3 6 (10.00%) Business Analyst
3 6 (10.00%) Solutions Architect
4 5 (8.33%) Java Developer
5 4 (6.67%) Technical Analyst
6 3 (5.00%) Consultant
6 3 (5.00%) Data Scientist
6 3 (5.00%) Full-Stack Developer
6 3 (5.00%) GCP Engineer
6 3 (5.00%) Low Latency Java Developer
6 3 (5.00%) Network Engineer
6 3 (5.00%) Python Engineer
6 3 (5.00%) Senior
6 3 (5.00%) Technical Business Analyst
7 2 (3.33%) Data Engineer
7 2 (3.33%) Lead
7 2 (3.33%) Monitoring Engineer
7 2 (3.33%) Site Reliability Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 6 (10.00%) React
2 5 (8.33%) RESTful
3 4 (6.67%) .NET
3 4 (6.67%) Spring
4 3 (5.00%) AngularJS
4 3 (5.00%) CSS
4 3 (5.00%) HTML
4 3 (5.00%) REST
4 3 (5.00%) Spring Boot
5 2 (3.33%) GraphQL
5 2 (3.33%) Hibernate
5 2 (3.33%) HTML5
5 2 (3.33%) Kafka
5 2 (3.33%) OAuth
5 2 (3.33%) OAuth2
5 2 (3.33%) OpenTelemetry
6 1 (1.67%) ActiveMQ
6 1 (1.67%) Web Services
6 1 (1.67%) WinForms
6 1 (1.67%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 6 (10.00%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
2 5 (8.33%) Product Ownership
3 3 (5.00%) Distributed Systems
3 3 (5.00%) Public Cloud
4 2 (3.33%) Algorithms
4 2 (3.33%) Cloud Native
4 2 (3.33%) Derivative
4 2 (3.33%) Distributed Computing
4 2 (3.33%) Equities
4 2 (3.33%) Greenfield Project
4 2 (3.33%) Legacy Systems
4 2 (3.33%) Market Risk
4 2 (3.33%) Private Cloud
4 2 (3.33%) Self-Motivation
5 1 (1.67%) CMDB
5 1 (1.67%) Credit Risk
5 1 (1.67%) e-Learning
5 1 (1.67%) Fixed Income
5 1 (1.67%) Media Streaming
5 1 (1.67%) Online Games
Operating Systems
1 5 (8.33%) Unix
2 4 (6.67%) Linux
3 2 (3.33%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 28 (46.67%) Agile
2 17 (28.33%) CI/CD
2 17 (28.33%) Problem-Solving
3 15 (25.00%) DevOps
4 11 (18.33%) Scrum
5 10 (16.67%) Computer Science
5 10 (16.67%) Software Engineering
5 10 (16.67%) Stakeholder Engagement
6 8 (13.33%) Containerisation
6 8 (13.33%) Low Latency
7 7 (11.67%) Analytics
7 7 (11.67%) Business Intelligence
7 7 (11.67%) Data Science
7 7 (11.67%) Microservices
7 7 (11.67%) Requirements Gathering
7 7 (11.67%) User Acceptance Testing
8 6 (10.00%) AI
8 6 (10.00%) Change Management
8 6 (10.00%) OO
8 6 (10.00%) Service Management
Programming Languages
1 17 (28.33%) Java
1 17 (28.33%) Python
2 12 (20.00%) SQL
3 7 (11.67%) C#
4 3 (5.00%) JavaScript
5 2 (3.33%) C++
5 2 (3.33%) Go
5 2 (3.33%) Perl
5 2 (3.33%) TypeScript
6 1 (1.67%) Fortran
6 1 (1.67%) MATLAB
6 1 (1.67%) R
6 1 (1.67%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 13 (21.67%) Degree
2 5 (8.33%) Computer Science Degree
3 2 (3.33%) CBAP
3 2 (3.33%) CFA
3 2 (3.33%) CISSP
3 2 (3.33%) ISEB
4 1 (1.67%) BPSS Clearance
4 1 (1.67%) IIBA
4 1 (1.67%) Master's Degree
4 1 (1.67%) PMI Certification
4 1 (1.67%) PMP
4 1 (1.67%) Postgraduate
4 1 (1.67%) SC Cleared
4 1 (1.67%) Security Cleared
4 1 (1.67%) Six Sigma Green Belt
4 1 (1.67%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (10.00%) QA
2 5 (8.33%) GDPR
3 2 (3.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.67%) Basel III
4 1 (1.67%) COBIT
4 1 (1.67%) Data Quality
System Software
1 7 (11.67%) Docker
2 1 (1.67%) Active Directory
2 1 (1.67%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 9 (15.00%) Terraform
2 7 (11.67%) Kubernetes
3 2 (3.33%) Ansible
3 2 (3.33%) Progress Chef
4 1 (1.67%) Argo
4 1 (1.67%) Grafana
4 1 (1.67%) Istio
4 1 (1.67%) Prometheus
4 1 (1.67%) WMI
Vendors
1 9 (15.00%) Microsoft
2 7 (11.67%) Google
3 4 (6.67%) IFS
4 3 (5.00%) Oracle
5 2 (3.33%) Databricks
5 2 (3.33%) F5
5 2 (3.33%) Workday
6 1 (1.67%) Alteryx
6 1 (1.67%) Atlassian
6 1 (1.67%) Citrix
6 1 (1.67%) MuleSoft
6 1 (1.67%) OpenAI
6 1 (1.67%) Remedy
6 1 (1.67%) Salesforce
6 1 (1.67%) ServiceNow
6 1 (1.67%) Splunk
6 1 (1.67%) Spotify