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 22 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 340 482 586
Rank change year-on-year +142 +104 +88
Contract jobs citing Cost Optimisation 127 60 54
As % of all contract jobs advertised in England 0.53% 0.17% 0.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.58% 0.19% 0.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 65 31 26
10th Percentile £375 £350 £425
25th Percentile £463 £475 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% - -
75th Percentile £638 £613 £700
90th Percentile £700 £688 £789
UK median daily rate £525 £558 £550
% change year-on-year -5.83% +1.36% -8.33%
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 21,900 31,359 43,239
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 91.28% 86.26% 90.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 14,297 20,563 30,348
10th Percentile £305 £300 £325
25th Percentile £413 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% +1.85%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £675
90th Percentile £750 £750 £767
UK median daily rate £513 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% +3.77%
Number of hourly rates quoted 932 2,244 1,528
10th Percentile £14.20 £12.92 £10.63
25th Percentile £18.47 £16.00 £16.02
Median hourly rate £28.75 £36.50 £36.77
Median % change year-on-year -21.23% -0.73% +47.08%
75th Percentile £61.69 £60.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £28.00 £36.27 £36.00
% change year-on-year -22.81% +0.76% +40.19%

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 22 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 22 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 +89 93 £525 -4.55% 129
North of England +23 14 £525 -6.67% 34
Midlands +20 10 £539 +53.86% 21
West Midlands +17 8 £539 +53.86% 16
North West +14 8 £525 -22.22% 13
Yorkshire +12 6 £464 +3.17% 17
South East +49 3 £578 -14.44% 43
East of England +28 3 £638 - 3
South West - 3 £625 - 15
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 (6.30%) Confluence
2 3 (2.36%) Apache Spark
3 2 (1.57%) Apache
4 1 (0.79%) Oracle Workflow
4 1 (0.79%) SharePoint
Applications
1 9 (7.09%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 2 (1.57%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.57%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.79%) CATIA
Business Applications
1 2 (1.57%) assyst
1 2 (1.57%) Shopify
2 1 (0.79%) Cloudability
2 1 (0.79%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 56 (44.09%) AWS
2 55 (43.31%) Azure
3 38 (29.92%) GCP
4 24 (18.90%) GitHub
5 22 (17.32%) AWS CloudFormation
6 21 (16.54%) Serverless
7 17 (13.39%) Azure DevOps
7 17 (13.39%) GitHub Actions
8 15 (11.81%) SaaS
9 13 (10.24%) IaaS
9 13 (10.24%) PaaS
10 12 (9.45%) Amazon EKS
11 11 (8.66%) Microsoft 365
12 10 (7.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 9 (7.09%) Power Platform
14 8 (6.30%) AWS Lambda
15 7 (5.51%) Entra ID
15 7 (5.51%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 6 (4.72%) Amazon EC2
16 6 (4.72%) Amazon S3
Communications & Networking
1 16 (12.60%) VPN
2 15 (11.81%) Firewall
3 5 (3.94%) DNS
3 5 (3.94%) TCP/IP
4 4 (3.15%) Network Security
5 3 (2.36%) Kerberos
5 3 (2.36%) NAS
5 3 (2.36%) SAN
5 3 (2.36%) VLAN
6 2 (1.57%) DSL
6 2 (1.57%) HTTP
6 2 (1.57%) SNMP
6 2 (1.57%) SSL
7 1 (0.79%) BGP
7 1 (0.79%) DHCP
7 1 (0.79%) MPLS
7 1 (0.79%) OSPF
7 1 (0.79%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (7.09%) Data Lake
1 9 (7.09%) Power BI
2 7 (5.51%) Amazon RDS
2 7 (5.51%) Data Warehouse
3 6 (4.72%) MongoDB
4 5 (3.94%) SQL Server
5 3 (2.36%) BigQuery
5 3 (2.36%) DynamoDB
5 3 (2.36%) NoSQL
5 3 (2.36%) PostgreSQL
6 2 (1.57%) Azure SQL Database
6 2 (1.57%) Delta Lake
6 2 (1.57%) Looker
6 2 (1.57%) Oracle Database
6 2 (1.57%) Power Query
6 2 (1.57%) Snowflake Schema
6 2 (1.57%) Sybase ASE
6 2 (1.57%) Tableau
7 1 (0.79%) Big Data
7 1 (0.79%) Redis
Development Applications
1 21 (16.54%) Jenkins
2 8 (6.30%) GitLab
2 8 (6.30%) JIRA
3 6 (4.72%) Git
4 3 (2.36%) Bitbucket
4 3 (2.36%) TeamCity
5 2 (1.57%) CircleCI
5 2 (1.57%) JMeter
5 2 (1.57%) Terragrunt
6 1 (0.79%) MLflow
6 1 (0.79%) Serena SBM
6 1 (0.79%) Subversion
General
1 54 (42.52%) Social Skills
2 48 (37.80%) Finance
3 23 (18.11%) Analytical Skills
4 10 (7.87%) Marketing
5 9 (7.09%) Banking
6 8 (6.30%) Financial Institution
6 8 (6.30%) Public Sector
6 8 (6.30%) Retail
7 4 (3.15%) Legal
8 3 (2.36%) Billing
8 3 (2.36%) Manufacturing
9 2 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 2 (1.57%) Influencing Skills
9 2 (1.57%) Organisational Skills
9 2 (1.57%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (0.79%) Automotive
10 1 (0.79%) Digital Health
10 1 (0.79%) Documentation Skills
10 1 (0.79%) Military
10 1 (0.79%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 22 (17.32%) Architect
2 18 (14.17%) Senior
3 12 (9.45%) Cloud Engineer
3 12 (9.45%) Developer
4 11 (8.66%) Azure Engineer
4 11 (8.66%) DevOps Engineer
5 8 (6.30%) Analyst
5 8 (6.30%) Senior Cloud Engineer
5 8 (6.30%) Solutions Architect
5 8 (6.30%) Technical Manager
6 7 (5.51%) Lead
6 7 (5.51%) Project Manager
6 7 (5.51%) SailPoint Developer
6 7 (5.51%) Technical Project Manager
7 6 (4.72%) Cloud Architect
8 5 (3.94%) Azure Architect
8 5 (3.94%) Financial Analyst
8 5 (3.94%) Microsoft 365 Engineer
8 5 (3.94%) Site Engineer
8 5 (3.94%) Site Reliability Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (7.09%) Kafka
2 7 (5.51%) SailPoint
3 6 (4.72%) ARM Templates
4 4 (3.15%) Elastic Stack
4 4 (3.15%) OAuth
4 4 (3.15%) OAuth2
4 4 (3.15%) OpenID
4 4 (3.15%) SAML
5 3 (2.36%) GraphQL
5 3 (2.36%) Middleware
5 3 (2.36%) Node.js
5 3 (2.36%) REST
5 3 (2.36%) SOAP
5 3 (2.36%) YAML
6 2 (1.57%) AWS CDK
6 2 (1.57%) JSON
6 2 (1.57%) LDAP
6 2 (1.57%) PySpark
6 2 (1.57%) VML
7 1 (0.79%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 11 (8.66%) Cloud Native
2 9 (7.09%) Hybrid Cloud
3 8 (6.30%) Onboarding
4 6 (4.72%) Management Information System
5 5 (3.94%) Data Protection Act
6 4 (3.15%) CMDB
6 4 (3.15%) Data Centre
6 4 (3.15%) Public Cloud
7 3 (2.36%) BYOD
7 3 (2.36%) Clustering
7 3 (2.36%) Replication
8 2 (1.57%) Analytical Mindset
8 2 (1.57%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
8 2 (1.57%) Enterprise Cloud
8 2 (1.57%) FMCG
8 2 (1.57%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.57%) Private Cloud
8 2 (1.57%) Product Ownership
9 1 (0.79%) Culture of Ownership
9 1 (0.79%) Microsoft Licensing
Operating Systems
1 9 (7.09%) Linux
2 7 (5.51%) Windows
3 5 (3.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 4 (3.15%) Windows Server
5 2 (1.57%) Solaris
6 1 (0.79%) Oracle Linux
6 1 (0.79%) Unix
6 1 (0.79%) VMS
6 1 (0.79%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 49 (38.58%) DevOps
2 45 (35.43%) Infrastructure as Code
3 43 (33.86%) CI/CD
4 32 (25.20%) Agile
5 31 (24.41%) Problem-Solving
6 28 (22.05%) FinOps
7 27 (21.26%) Migration
8 26 (20.47%) Artificial Intelligence
9 24 (18.90%) Containerisation
10 23 (18.11%) Analytics
11 21 (16.54%) RBAC
12 20 (15.75%) Cloud Security
12 20 (15.75%) ETL
13 19 (14.96%) Stakeholder Management
14 18 (14.17%) Cost Management
15 14 (11.02%) High Availability
15 14 (11.02%) Scrum
16 13 (10.24%) Cost Reduction
16 13 (10.24%) Disaster Recovery
16 13 (10.24%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 30 (23.62%) Python
2 13 (10.24%) Bicep
2 13 (10.24%) Java
3 10 (7.87%) JavaScript
4 9 (7.09%) Bash
4 9 (7.09%) SQL
5 8 (6.30%) PowerShell
6 7 (5.51%) BeanShell
7 5 (3.94%) Shell Script
8 3 (2.36%) C#
9 2 (1.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 2 (1.57%) Go
9 2 (1.57%) Kotlin
9 2 (1.57%) Scala
10 1 (0.79%) Groovy
10 1 (0.79%) Perl
10 1 (0.79%) PL/SQL
10 1 (0.79%) Ruby
10 1 (0.79%) T-SQL
10 1 (0.79%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 21 (16.54%) Security Cleared
2 17 (13.39%) Azure Certification
3 15 (11.81%) SC Cleared
4 11 (8.66%) Degree
5 10 (7.87%) AWS Certification
6 8 (6.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 7 (5.51%) Master's Degree
8 5 (3.94%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
9 2 (1.57%) SnowPro
9 2 (1.57%) Tableau Certification
9 2 (1.57%) TOGAF Certification
10 1 (0.79%) CCNA
10 1 (0.79%) CCNP
10 1 (0.79%) Cisco Certification
10 1 (0.79%) Computer Science Degree
10 1 (0.79%) DV Cleared
10 1 (0.79%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
10 1 (0.79%) PMI Certification
10 1 (0.79%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (9.45%) GDPR
2 8 (6.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 7 (5.51%) Data Quality
4 3 (2.36%) NIST
4 3 (2.36%) PCI DSS
4 3 (2.36%) QA
4 3 (2.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
4 3 (2.36%) SOC 2
5 2 (1.57%) Actionable Recommendations
5 2 (1.57%) HIPAA
6 1 (0.79%) NCSC
System Software
1 24 (18.90%) Docker
2 8 (6.30%) Active Directory
3 4 (3.15%) VMware ESXi
3 4 (3.15%) VMware Infrastructure
4 3 (2.36%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (1.57%) vSphere
6 1 (0.79%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 39 (30.71%) Terraform
2 37 (29.13%) Kubernetes
3 14 (11.02%) Ansible
4 7 (5.51%) Prometheus
4 7 (5.51%) Single Sign-On
5 5 (3.94%) Grafana
6 4 (3.15%) Puppet
7 3 (2.36%) Opsview
8 2 (1.57%) Dell DRAC
8 2 (1.57%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (1.57%) Kustomize
8 2 (1.57%) Progress Chef
8 2 (1.57%) Salt
8 2 (1.57%) Tivoli
8 2 (1.57%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.79%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.79%) Control-M
9 1 (0.79%) Data Guard
9 1 (0.79%) Nagios
9 1 (0.79%) Netcool
Vendors
1 24 (18.90%) Microsoft
2 19 (14.96%) Google
3 9 (7.09%) ServiceNow
4 6 (4.72%) Cisco
5 5 (3.94%) Databricks
5 5 (3.94%) Oracle
5 5 (3.94%) SAP
5 5 (3.94%) Splunk
5 5 (3.94%) VMware
6 4 (3.15%) Salesforce
7 3 (2.36%) IBM
7 3 (2.36%) PagerDuty
7 3 (2.36%) Qualys
7 3 (2.36%) Sybase
8 2 (1.57%) Adobe
8 2 (1.57%) CyberArk
8 2 (1.57%) Dell
8 2 (1.57%) New Relic
8 2 (1.57%) Serena
8 2 (1.57%) Sitecore