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 vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 493 517 571
Rank change year-on-year +24 +54 +178
Contract jobs citing SMS 19 11 19
As % of all contract jobs advertised in England 0.068% 0.033% 0.045%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 0.58% 0.28% 0.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 7 8 14
10th Percentile £250 £348 £350
25th Percentile £316 £419 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £400 £590 £443
Median % change year-on-year -32.20% +33.33% -16.51%
75th Percentile £425 £603 £584
90th Percentile £460 £618 £819
UK median daily rate £400 £543 £450
% change year-on-year -26.27% +20.56% -15.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £20.00
UK median hourly rate - - £20.00

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 3,282 3,967 5,565
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 11.81% 12.04% 13.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,054 2,323 3,578
10th Percentile £227 £242 £225
25th Percentile £363 £388 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £508 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.94% +1.50% -1.96%
75th Percentile £600 £613 £618
90th Percentile £688 £688 £713
UK median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 166 217 280
10th Percentile £15.31 £14.44 £16.73
25th Percentile £25.04 £22.75 £24.03
Median hourly rate £41.72 £57.35 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year -27.25% +1.52% +34.02%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £67.78
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £76.12
UK median hourly rate £43.00 £50.50 £56.49
% change year-on-year -14.85% -10.60% +34.50%

SMS
Job Vacancy Trend in England

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

Job vacancy trend for SMS 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 18 September 2025.

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 18 September 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 +28 11 £319 -25.00% 19
North of England -13 4 £463 -22.59% 10
South East +22 3 £400 - 9
Yorkshire -13 3 £450 - 4
North West - 1 £475 - 6
East of England - 1 - -
SMS
UK

SMS
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 2 (10.53%) Confluence
2 1 (5.26%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 2 (10.53%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 1 (5.26%) Dynamics NAV
Cloud Services
1 4 (21.05%) AWS
2 3 (15.79%) Azure
2 3 (15.79%) WhatsApp
3 2 (10.53%) Amazon S3
3 2 (10.53%) GCP
3 2 (10.53%) Twilio
4 1 (5.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 1 (5.26%) Amazon EC2
4 1 (5.26%) Amazon EMR
4 1 (5.26%) Amazon SQS
4 1 (5.26%) AWS CloudFormation
4 1 (5.26%) AWS CloudTrail
4 1 (5.26%) AWS CodePipeline
4 1 (5.26%) AWS Fargate
4 1 (5.26%) AWS Lambda
4 1 (5.26%) Azure DevOps
4 1 (5.26%) Dialogflow
4 1 (5.26%) Serverless
4 1 (5.26%) Snowflake
4 1 (5.26%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (15.79%) Firewall
1 3 (15.79%) NGFW
1 3 (15.79%) VoWiFi
2 2 (10.53%) 5G
2 2 (10.53%) Diameter Protocol
2 2 (10.53%) Internet
2 2 (10.53%) LAN
2 2 (10.53%) SIGTRAN
2 2 (10.53%) SS7
2 2 (10.53%) VoLTE
2 2 (10.53%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (10.53%) DB2
1 2 (10.53%) Relational Database
2 1 (5.26%) Amazon RDS
2 1 (5.26%) DynamoDB
2 1 (5.26%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 6 (31.58%) JIRA
2 2 (10.53%) Git
3 1 (5.26%) Jenkins
General
1 4 (21.05%) Marketing
1 4 (21.05%) Social Skills
2 2 (10.53%) Analytical Skills
2 2 (10.53%) Banking
2 2 (10.53%) Finance
2 2 (10.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
2 2 (10.53%) Telecoms
3 1 (5.26%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 3 (15.79%) Analyst
1 3 (15.79%) Developer
1 3 (15.79%) Senior
1 3 (15.79%) Test Analyst
2 2 (10.53%) C++ Developer
2 2 (10.53%) Network Analyst
2 2 (10.53%) Project Manager
2 2 (10.53%) Senior Analyst
2 2 (10.53%) Senior Network Analyst
2 2 (10.53%) Senior Test Analyst
2 2 (10.53%) Unix Developer
3 1 (5.26%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
3 1 (5.26%) AWS Engineer
3 1 (5.26%) Azure Developer
3 1 (5.26%) Data Manager
3 1 (5.26%) Infrastructure Security Engineer
3 1 (5.26%) Linux Developer
3 1 (5.26%) Network Infrastructure Engineer
3 1 (5.26%) Security Engineer
3 1 (5.26%) Voice Specialist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (15.79%) JSON
1 3 (15.79%) Node.js
2 2 (10.53%) HTML
2 2 (10.53%) React
2 2 (10.53%) Spring
2 2 (10.53%) Spring Boot
2 2 (10.53%) XML
3 1 (5.26%) AWS CDK
3 1 (5.26%) Express.js
3 1 (5.26%) FastAPI
3 1 (5.26%) FHIR
3 1 (5.26%) GraphQL
3 1 (5.26%) Kafka
3 1 (5.26%) LangChain
3 1 (5.26%) REST
3 1 (5.26%) ServiceStack
3 1 (5.26%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 2 (10.53%) Online Banking
2 1 (5.26%) AI Agents
2 1 (5.26%) Cloud Native
2 1 (5.26%) IVR
2 1 (5.26%) Mobile App
2 1 (5.26%) PMI
2 1 (5.26%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 2 (10.53%) Linux
1 2 (10.53%) Unix
2 1 (5.26%) AIX
2 1 (5.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 5 (26.32%) Migration
2 4 (21.05%) CI/CD
2 4 (21.05%) High Availability
3 3 (15.79%) Agile
3 3 (15.79%) Observability
3 3 (15.79%) Problem-Solving
3 3 (15.79%) Stakeholder Management
4 2 (10.53%) Analytics
4 2 (10.53%) Artificial Intelligence
4 2 (10.53%) Conversational UI
4 2 (10.53%) CRM
4 2 (10.53%) Customer Engagement
4 2 (10.53%) Defect Management
4 2 (10.53%) DevOps
4 2 (10.53%) Infrastructure as Code
4 2 (10.53%) Microservices
4 2 (10.53%) Product Marketing
4 2 (10.53%) Regulatory Compliance
4 2 (10.53%) Software Testing
4 2 (10.53%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 4 (21.05%) Python
2 3 (15.79%) Java
3 2 (10.53%) C
3 2 (10.53%) C++
3 2 (10.53%) Shell Script
4 1 (5.26%) Bicep
4 1 (5.26%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 5 (26.32%) Security Cleared
2 3 (15.79%) SC Cleared
3 2 (10.53%) DV Cleared
4 1 (5.26%) AWS Certification
4 1 (5.26%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
4 1 (5.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
4 1 (5.26%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (5.26%) HL7
1 1 (5.26%) QA
1 1 (5.26%) SLA
System Software
1 4 (21.05%) Docker
Systems Management
1 4 (21.05%) Kubernetes
2 2 (10.53%) Terraform
Vendors
1 3 (15.79%) CheckPoint
1 3 (15.79%) IBM
2 2 (10.53%) Cisco
2 2 (10.53%) Dynatrace
2 2 (10.53%) Splunk
3 1 (5.26%) Google
3 1 (5.26%) HubSpot
3 1 (5.26%) Red Hat
3 1 (5.26%) Salesforce
3 1 (5.26%) StreamSets
3 1 (5.26%) Zoho