SMS Contract Job Trends in England

Short Message Service (SMS)
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring SMS skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 28 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 546 469 510
Rank change year-on-year -77 +41 +129
Contract jobs citing SMS 38 17 25
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.095% 0.070% 0.068%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 0.99% 0.53% 0.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 25 7 16
10th Percentile - £345 £388
25th Percentile £204 £405 £411
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £278 £420 £491
Median % change year-on-year -33.93% -14.50% -14.57%
75th Percentile £488 £675 £634
90th Percentile £610 £735 £669
UK median daily rate £325 £500 £450
% change year-on-year -35.00% +11.11% -21.74%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
England

SMS falls under the Communications and Computer Networking category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring communications or computer networking skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 3,821 3,197 5,003
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 9.51% 13.07% 13.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,395 1,989 3,017
10th Percentile £246 £220 £206
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £490
Median % change year-on-year - +2.04% -6.67%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £489 £490
% change year-on-year +2.30% -0.26% -5.59%
Number of hourly rates quoted 203 123 396
10th Percentile £16.11 £14.20 £13.50
25th Percentile £21.25 £16.30 £17.00
Median hourly rate £41.94 £36.65 £39.25
Median % change year-on-year +14.45% -6.64% +107.95%
75th Percentile £65.94 £65.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £81.01 £70.00
UK median hourly rate £41.24 £37.50 £38.00
% change year-on-year +9.97% -1.32% +100.00%

SMS
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SMS relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

SMS job vacancy trend in England

SMS
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SMS.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SMS

SMS
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SMS in England over the 6 months to 28 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for SMS in England

SMS
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SMS.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SMS

SMS
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 SMS within the England region over the 6 months to 28 April 2026. 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 -47 26 £208 -50.60% 13
North of England -72 5 £500 - 4
Yorkshire - 4 - -
Midlands - 4 £435 - 4
East Midlands - 3 £435 - 2
South East -65 2 £475 - 7
West Midlands - 1 - - 2
North West - 1 £500 - 4
SMS
UK

SMS
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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 2 (5.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
2 1 (2.63%) Jupyter
Business Applications
1 1 (2.63%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 16 (42.11%) Dynamics 365
2 13 (34.21%) Azure
3 7 (18.42%) Azure Service Bus
3 7 (18.42%) Power Platform
3 7 (18.42%) Serverless
4 6 (15.79%) Azure Functions
4 6 (15.79%) WhatsApp
5 3 (7.89%) Copilot Studio
5 3 (7.89%) Microsoft Copilot
5 3 (7.89%) Power Automate
6 1 (2.63%) Amazon EMR
6 1 (2.63%) Amazon S3
6 1 (2.63%) Amazon SQS
6 1 (2.63%) AWS
6 1 (2.63%) AWS Lambda
6 1 (2.63%) Azure Event Grid
6 1 (2.63%) Azure Logic Apps
6 1 (2.63%) Boomi
6 1 (2.63%) Entra ID
6 1 (2.63%) Twilio
Communications & Networking
1 3 (7.89%) 3GPP
1 3 (7.89%) MVNO
1 3 (7.89%) Network Security
1 3 (7.89%) SMPP
2 1 (2.63%) DKIM
2 1 (2.63%) DMARC
2 1 (2.63%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (5.26%) RDBMS
1 2 (5.26%) Relational Database
2 1 (2.63%) Data Lake
2 1 (2.63%) Metadata
2 1 (2.63%) Metadata Repository
Development Applications
1 1 (2.63%) GitLab
1 1 (2.63%) JIRA
General
1 18 (47.37%) Marketing
2 11 (28.95%) Social Skills
3 8 (21.05%) Documentation Skills
4 6 (15.79%) Analytical Skills
5 4 (10.53%) Organisational Skills
6 3 (7.89%) Telecoms
7 2 (5.26%) Finance
8 1 (2.63%) Billing
8 1 (2.63%) Financial Institution
8 1 (2.63%) Public Sector
8 1 (2.63%) Retail
Job Titles
1 16 (42.11%) Consultant
2 12 (31.58%) Dynamics 365 Consultant
3 9 (23.68%) Architect
4 6 (15.79%) Functional Consultant
4 6 (15.79%) Technical Consultant
5 5 (13.16%) Developer
5 5 (13.16%) Lead
6 4 (10.53%) Lead Architect
7 3 (7.89%) Solutions Architect
7 3 (7.89%) Telephony Consultant
8 2 (5.26%) CRM Specialist
8 2 (5.26%) Marketing Specialist
9 1 (2.63%) Active Directory Engineer
9 1 (2.63%) Azure Engineer
9 1 (2.63%) CRM Architect
9 1 (2.63%) Data Architect
9 1 (2.63%) DevOps Engineer
9 1 (2.63%) Enterprise Solutions Architect
9 1 (2.63%) Senior Consultant
9 1 (2.63%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (23.68%) REST
2 6 (15.79%) Kafka
3 4 (10.53%) CSS
3 4 (10.53%) HTML
4 2 (5.26%) JSON
5 1 (2.63%) EDI
5 1 (2.63%) HTML5 Canvas
5 1 (2.63%) iOS SDK
5 1 (2.63%) JWT
5 1 (2.63%) Middleware
5 1 (2.63%) OAuth
5 1 (2.63%) OAuth2
5 1 (2.63%) OpenID
5 1 (2.63%) PySpark
5 1 (2.63%) RESTful
5 1 (2.63%) SAML
5 1 (2.63%) Spring
5 1 (2.63%) Spring Boot
5 1 (2.63%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 4 (10.53%) IoT
1 4 (10.53%) Management Information System
2 3 (7.89%) IVR
2 3 (7.89%) Java Card
3 1 (2.63%) Cloud Native
3 1 (2.63%) Data Centre
3 1 (2.63%) Hedge funds
3 1 (2.63%) Life Science
3 1 (2.63%) Mainframe
3 1 (2.63%) Marketing Technology
3 1 (2.63%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 1 (2.63%) Android
1 1 (2.63%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 18 (47.37%) Event-Driven
2 17 (44.74%) Personalization
3 12 (31.58%) Analytics
4 8 (21.05%) DevOps
4 8 (21.05%) User Acceptance Testing
5 7 (18.42%) Customer Insight
5 7 (18.42%) Technical Architecture
6 6 (15.79%) Data Integration
6 6 (15.79%) Event-Driven Architecture
6 6 (15.79%) Requirements Workshops
6 6 (15.79%) Technical Leadership
6 6 (15.79%) Workshop Facilitation
7 5 (13.16%) AI
7 5 (13.16%) User Experience
8 4 (10.53%) Agile
8 4 (10.53%) Document Management
8 4 (10.53%) Ergonomics
8 4 (10.53%) Human Factors
8 4 (10.53%) Knowledge Management
8 4 (10.53%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 6 (15.79%) C#
2 4 (10.53%) Java
2 4 (10.53%) Python
2 4 (10.53%) SQL
3 3 (7.89%) C
3 3 (7.89%) C++
4 2 (5.26%) JavaScript
Qualifications
1 3 (7.89%) Security Cleared
2 1 (2.63%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (26.32%) GDPR
2 2 (5.26%) QA
3 1 (2.63%) Actionable Recommendations
3 1 (2.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 1 (2.63%) NIST
3 1 (2.63%) SOC 2
Systems Management
1 1 (2.63%) Single Sign-On
1 1 (2.63%) Terraform
Vendors
1 4 (10.53%) Adobe
2 3 (7.89%) Braze
2 3 (7.89%) Thales
3 2 (5.26%) Salesforce
3 2 (5.26%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud
4 1 (2.63%) Databricks
4 1 (2.63%) IBM
4 1 (2.63%) MuleSoft