Cost Optimisation Contracts in England

Cost Optimization
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in England requiring Cost Optimisation skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Cost Optimisation over the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 364 482 590
Rank change year-on-year +118 +108 +95
Contract jobs citing Cost Optimisation 121 60 63
As % of all contract jobs advertised in England 0.50% 0.16% 0.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.54% 0.19% 0.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 65 28 30
10th Percentile £375 £368 £425
25th Percentile £455 £494 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £570 £500
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +14.00% -9.09%
75th Percentile £625 £631 £628
90th Percentile £700 £691 £727
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £525
% change year-on-year -8.70% +9.52% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £90.00
UK median hourly rate £36.00 - £90.00

All Process and Methodology Skills
England

Cost Optimisation 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 England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 22,202 32,193 45,529
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 91.16% 86.56% 90.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,534 21,105 31,969
10th Percentile £310 £300 £325
25th Percentile £413 £413 £445
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% +2.33%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £675
90th Percentile £750 £750 £765
UK median daily rate £520 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 921 2,246 1,592
10th Percentile £14.42 £12.92 £10.87
25th Percentile £18.20 £16.01 £16.25
Median hourly rate £29.07 £36.00 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year -19.25% -4.00% +53.06%
75th Percentile £63.75 £60.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £29.00 £35.65 £37.30
% change year-on-year -18.65% -4.42% +49.20%

Cost Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Job postings citing Cost Optimisation as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in England.

Job vacancy trend for Cost Optimisation in England

Cost Optimisation
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in England

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Cost Optimisation in England.

Daily rate trend for Cost Optimisation in England

Cost Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cost Optimisation in England over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Cost Optimisation in England

Cost Optimisation
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in England

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Cost Optimisation in England.

Hourly rate trend for Cost Optimisation in England

Cost Optimisation
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Cost Optimisation within the England region over the 6 months to 1 May 2025. 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London +78 88 £525 -4.55% 108
North of England +23 11 £525 -20.75% 28
Midlands +29 10 £537 +53.43% 12
North West +19 8 £525 -22.22% 16
West Midlands +19 8 £537 +53.43% 7
South East +51 6 £409 -39.41% 39
East of England - 4 £638 - 6
Yorkshire +10 3 £463 -26.00% 10
South West - 3 £625 - 11
East Midlands - 2 £588 - 5
Cost Optimisation
UK

Cost Optimisation
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in England by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 8 (6.61%) Confluence
2 2 (1.65%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.83%) Apache
3 1 (0.83%) SharePoint
Applications
1 8 (6.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.83%) CATIA
2 1 (0.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.83%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (1.65%) assyst
1 2 (1.65%) Shopify
2 1 (0.83%) Cloudability
2 1 (0.83%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 52 (42.98%) Azure
2 48 (39.67%) AWS
3 34 (28.10%) GCP
4 20 (16.53%) GitHub
4 20 (16.53%) Serverless
5 17 (14.05%) AWS CloudFormation
6 16 (13.22%) Azure DevOps
7 14 (11.57%) GitHub Actions
7 14 (11.57%) SaaS
8 12 (9.92%) IaaS
8 12 (9.92%) PaaS
9 9 (7.44%) Amazon EKS
9 9 (7.44%) Microsoft 365
10 8 (6.61%) Azure AKS
11 7 (5.79%) Azure Functions
12 6 (4.96%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 6 (4.96%) Entra ID
12 6 (4.96%) Power Platform
12 6 (4.96%) Snowflake
13 5 (4.13%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 11 (9.09%) VPN
2 10 (8.26%) Firewall
3 3 (2.48%) DNS
3 3 (2.48%) Kerberos
3 3 (2.48%) NAS
3 3 (2.48%) SAN
3 3 (2.48%) TCP/IP
3 3 (2.48%) VLAN
4 2 (1.65%) DSL
4 2 (1.65%) HTTP
4 2 (1.65%) SNMP
5 1 (0.83%) BGP
5 1 (0.83%) DHCP
5 1 (0.83%) MPLS
5 1 (0.83%) OSPF
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (7.44%) Data Lake
2 7 (5.79%) Data Warehouse
2 7 (5.79%) PostgreSQL
3 6 (4.96%) MongoDB
3 6 (4.96%) Power BI
4 4 (3.31%) Amazon RDS
4 4 (3.31%) Redis
4 4 (3.31%) SQL Server
5 3 (2.48%) BigQuery
5 3 (2.48%) NoSQL
6 2 (1.65%) Azure SQL Database
6 2 (1.65%) Looker
6 2 (1.65%) Oracle Database
6 2 (1.65%) Snowflake Schema
6 2 (1.65%) Sybase ASE
6 2 (1.65%) Tableau
7 1 (0.83%) Cloudera CDH
7 1 (0.83%) Hadoop
7 1 (0.83%) Oracle Database 11g
7 1 (0.83%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 16 (13.22%) Jenkins
2 8 (6.61%) JIRA
3 6 (4.96%) GitLab
4 4 (3.31%) Git
5 3 (2.48%) Bitbucket
5 3 (2.48%) TeamCity
6 2 (1.65%) CircleCI
6 2 (1.65%) JMeter
6 2 (1.65%) Terragrunt
7 1 (0.83%) Serena SBM
7 1 (0.83%) Subversion
General
1 50 (41.32%) Social Skills
2 40 (33.06%) Finance
3 25 (20.66%) Analytical Skills
4 9 (7.44%) Banking
4 9 (7.44%) Marketing
5 8 (6.61%) Retail
6 7 (5.79%) Financial Institution
6 7 (5.79%) Public Sector
7 5 (4.13%) Legal
8 3 (2.48%) Billing
8 3 (2.48%) Manufacturing
9 2 (1.65%) Influencing Skills
9 2 (1.65%) Organisational Skills
9 2 (1.65%) Presentation Skills
9 2 (1.65%) Telecoms
10 1 (0.83%) Automotive
10 1 (0.83%) Digital Health
10 1 (0.83%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (0.83%) Local Government
10 1 (0.83%) Military
Job Titles
1 21 (17.36%) Architect
2 16 (13.22%) Senior
3 14 (11.57%) Developer
4 11 (9.09%) Azure Engineer
4 11 (9.09%) Cloud Engineer
5 8 (6.61%) DevOps Engineer
5 8 (6.61%) Senior Cloud Engineer
5 8 (6.61%) Solutions Architect
6 7 (5.79%) Analyst
6 7 (5.79%) Project Manager
6 7 (5.79%) Technical Manager
7 6 (4.96%) SailPoint Developer
7 6 (4.96%) Technical Project Manager
8 5 (4.13%) Cloud Architect
8 5 (4.13%) Financial Analyst
8 5 (4.13%) Lead
8 5 (4.13%) Microsoft 365 Engineer
8 5 (4.13%) Site Engineer
8 5 (4.13%) Site Reliability Engineer
9 4 (3.31%) GCP Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (7.44%) Kafka
2 6 (4.96%) GraphQL
2 6 (4.96%) SailPoint
3 5 (4.13%) ARM Templates
3 5 (4.13%) RESTful
4 4 (3.31%) OAuth
4 4 (3.31%) OAuth2
4 4 (3.31%) OpenID
4 4 (3.31%) Prisma
4 4 (3.31%) SAML
5 3 (2.48%) Middleware
5 3 (2.48%) Node.js
5 3 (2.48%) REST
5 3 (2.48%) SOAP
6 2 (1.65%) Elastic Stack
6 2 (1.65%) LDAP
6 2 (1.65%) PySpark
6 2 (1.65%) VML
6 2 (1.65%) YAML
7 1 (0.83%) AWS Amplify
Miscellaneous
1 9 (7.44%) Cloud Native
2 8 (6.61%) Management Information System
2 8 (6.61%) Onboarding
3 7 (5.79%) Hybrid Cloud
4 5 (4.13%) Data Protection Act
5 4 (3.31%) CMDB
5 4 (3.31%) Data Centre
5 4 (3.31%) Public Cloud
6 3 (2.48%) BYOD
6 3 (2.48%) Clustering
6 3 (2.48%) Replication
7 2 (1.65%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (1.65%) Enterprise Cloud
7 2 (1.65%) FMCG
7 2 (1.65%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (1.65%) Private Cloud
8 1 (0.83%) Culture of Ownership
8 1 (0.83%) Product Ownership
8 1 (0.83%) Self-Motivation
8 1 (0.83%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 9 (7.44%) Linux
2 7 (5.79%) Windows
3 5 (4.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 4 (3.31%) Windows Server
5 2 (1.65%) Solaris
6 1 (0.83%) Oracle Linux
6 1 (0.83%) Unix
6 1 (0.83%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 44 (36.36%) DevOps
2 38 (31.40%) CI/CD
3 37 (30.58%) Infrastructure as Code
4 30 (24.79%) Problem-Solving
5 28 (23.14%) Agile
6 24 (19.83%) Containerisation
7 23 (19.01%) Migration
8 22 (18.18%) Artificial Intelligence
9 21 (17.36%) FinOps
10 20 (16.53%) Analytics
10 20 (16.53%) Cost Management
11 18 (14.88%) RBAC
12 17 (14.05%) ETL
12 17 (14.05%) Stakeholder Management
13 16 (13.22%) Cloud Security
14 14 (11.57%) Software Engineering
15 13 (10.74%) Disaster Recovery
15 13 (10.74%) High Availability
16 12 (9.92%) Continuous Integration
16 12 (9.92%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 23 (19.01%) Python
2 12 (9.92%) Bicep
3 11 (9.09%) Java
4 9 (7.44%) JavaScript
5 8 (6.61%) Bash
5 8 (6.61%) PowerShell
5 8 (6.61%) SQL
6 6 (4.96%) BeanShell
7 4 (3.31%) C#
7 4 (3.31%) TypeScript
8 3 (2.48%) Shell Script
9 2 (1.65%) Go
9 2 (1.65%) Kotlin
9 2 (1.65%) Scala
10 1 (0.83%) Groovy
10 1 (0.83%) Perl
10 1 (0.83%) PL/SQL
10 1 (0.83%) Ruby
10 1 (0.83%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 18 (14.88%) Security Cleared
2 15 (12.40%) Azure Certification
3 12 (9.92%) Degree
3 12 (9.92%) SC Cleared
4 7 (5.79%) Master's Degree
5 5 (4.13%) AWS Certification
5 5 (4.13%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 2 (1.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
6 2 (1.65%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (1.65%) SnowPro
6 2 (1.65%) Tableau Certification
6 2 (1.65%) TOGAF Certification
7 1 (0.83%) CCNA
7 1 (0.83%) CCNP
7 1 (0.83%) Cisco Certification
7 1 (0.83%) CISSP
7 1 (0.83%) DV Cleared
7 1 (0.83%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
7 1 (0.83%) PMI Certification
7 1 (0.83%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (7.44%) GDPR
2 7 (5.79%) Data Quality
3 6 (4.96%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 4 (3.31%) QA
5 3 (2.48%) PCI DSS
5 3 (2.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 2 (1.65%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.83%) NCSC
System Software
1 21 (17.36%) Docker
2 7 (5.79%) Active Directory
3 5 (4.13%) VMware Infrastructure
4 4 (3.31%) VMware ESXi
5 3 (2.48%) Virtual Machines
6 2 (1.65%) vSphere
7 1 (0.83%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 33 (27.27%) Kubernetes
1 33 (27.27%) Terraform
2 11 (9.09%) Ansible
3 6 (4.96%) Single Sign-On
4 4 (3.31%) Prometheus
5 3 (2.48%) Grafana
5 3 (2.48%) Opsview
6 2 (1.65%) Dell DRAC
6 2 (1.65%) EMC NetWorker
6 2 (1.65%) Progress Chef
6 2 (1.65%) Puppet
6 2 (1.65%) Salt
6 2 (1.65%) Tivoli
6 2 (1.65%) Tivoli Storage Manager
7 1 (0.83%) Apache Ranger
7 1 (0.83%) Control-M
7 1 (0.83%) Data Guard
7 1 (0.83%) Microsoft Intune
7 1 (0.83%) Nagios
7 1 (0.83%) Netcool
Vendors
1 22 (18.18%) Microsoft
2 17 (14.05%) Google
3 9 (7.44%) ServiceNow
4 6 (4.96%) VMware
5 4 (3.31%) Cisco
5 4 (3.31%) Databricks
5 4 (3.31%) Oracle
5 4 (3.31%) SAP
6 3 (2.48%) IBM
6 3 (2.48%) PagerDuty
6 3 (2.48%) Qualys
6 3 (2.48%) Splunk
6 3 (2.48%) Sybase
7 2 (1.65%) Adobe
7 2 (1.65%) Dell
7 2 (1.65%) EMC
7 2 (1.65%) New Relic
7 2 (1.65%) Salesforce
7 2 (1.65%) Serena
7 2 (1.65%) Sitecore