SDLC Contract Job Trends in Manchester

Systems or Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
North West > Manchester

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in Manchester requiring SDLC skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 29 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 59 58 66
Rank change year-on-year -1 +8 +32
Contract jobs citing SDLC 30 27 30
As % of all contract jobs in Manchester 2.79% 2.35% 1.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.12% 2.69% 2.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 16 18 24
10th Percentile £269 £397 £393
25th Percentile £309 £436 £483
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £431 £499 £524
Median % change year-on-year -13.53% -4.77% +12.33%
75th Percentile £587 £634 £566
90th Percentile £631 £774 £678
North West median daily rate £480 £490 £513
% change year-on-year -2.04% -4.39% +10.81%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £22.16 - -
Median hourly rate £22.32 - £20.00
75th Percentile £22.47 - -
90th Percentile - - -
North West median hourly rate £22.32 £51.25 £45.88
% change year-on-year -56.46% +11.70% -25.37%

All Process and Methodology Skills
Manchester

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 Manchester.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 963 1,002 1,433
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in Manchester 89.66% 87.05% 88.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 623 577 1,044
10th Percentile £300 £313 £270
25th Percentile £385 £400 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £588 £575 £588
90th Percentile £678 £675 £675
North West median daily rate £450 £475 £500
% change year-on-year -5.26% -5.00% +1.01%
Number of hourly rates quoted 76 32 58
10th Percentile £16.43 £21.25 £15.72
25th Percentile £19.07 £29.25 £16.37
Median hourly rate £22.63 £35.00 £19.50
Median % change year-on-year -35.34% +79.49% -44.29%
75th Percentile £33.00 £63.13 £43.75
90th Percentile £64.38 £74.20 £68.50
North West median hourly rate £25.15 £40.33 £35.50
% change year-on-year -37.63% +13.59% +36.00%

SDLC
Job Vacancy Trend in Manchester

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

SDLC job vacancy trend in Manchester

SDLC
Daily Rate Trend in Manchester

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Manchester citing SDLC.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Manchester citing SDLC

SDLC
Daily Rate Histogram in Manchester

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SDLC in Manchester over the 6 months to 29 October 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SDLC in Manchester

SDLC
Hourly Rate Trend in Manchester

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Manchester citing SDLC.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Manchester citing SDLC

SDLC
Contract Job Locations in Manchester

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SDLC within the Manchester region over the 6 months to 29 October 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
Bolton - 5 - - 7
SDLC
North West

SDLC
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in Manchester 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 6 (20.00%) CICS
2 2 (6.67%) Confluence
3 1 (3.33%) FactoryTalk
Applications
1 5 (16.67%) Microsoft Excel
1 5 (16.67%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (3.33%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 12 (40.00%) AWS
2 8 (26.67%) Azure
3 6 (20.00%) Amazon SQS
3 6 (20.00%) GCP
3 6 (20.00%) GitHub
3 6 (20.00%) Serverless
4 5 (16.67%) Amazon ECS
4 5 (16.67%) Amazon EventBridge
4 5 (16.67%) AWS Fargate
4 5 (16.67%) AWS Lambda
5 4 (13.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 4 (13.33%) Amazon EC2
5 4 (13.33%) Amazon EMR
5 4 (13.33%) Apigee
5 4 (13.33%) Datadog
5 4 (13.33%) Loggly
5 4 (13.33%) Route 53
6 3 (10.00%) AWS Step Functions
6 3 (10.00%) PaaS
6 3 (10.00%) SaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (20.00%) DynamoDB
2 5 (16.67%) PostgreSQL
3 4 (13.33%) Amazon Aurora
3 4 (13.33%) Amazon RDS
3 4 (13.33%) BigQuery
3 4 (13.33%) MySQL
3 4 (13.33%) NoSQL
3 4 (13.33%) RDBMS
3 4 (13.33%) Redis
3 4 (13.33%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 7 (23.33%) Git
1 7 (23.33%) Jenkins
2 6 (20.00%) SonarQube
3 5 (16.67%) GitLab
4 4 (13.33%) Bitbucket
4 4 (13.33%) Gradle
4 4 (13.33%) Maven
4 4 (13.33%) SonarLint
5 2 (6.67%) Android Studio
5 2 (6.67%) JIRA
5 2 (6.67%) JUnit
5 2 (6.67%) Snyk
General
1 8 (26.67%) Social Skills
2 4 (13.33%) Public Sector
3 2 (6.67%) Banking
3 2 (6.67%) Documentation Skills
4 1 (3.33%) Finance
4 1 (3.33%) Influencing Skills
4 1 (3.33%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 7 (23.33%) Platform Engineer
2 5 (16.67%) Administrator
2 5 (16.67%) Architect
2 5 (16.67%) Java Architect
2 5 (16.67%) Java Technical Architect
2 5 (16.67%) SAP Administrator
2 5 (16.67%) SAP Support
2 5 (16.67%) Technical Architect
3 4 (13.33%) Developer
3 4 (13.33%) DevSecOps Engineer
4 3 (10.00%) AWS Engineer
5 2 (6.67%) Android Developer
5 2 (6.67%) AWS Infrastructure Engineer
5 2 (6.67%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 2 (6.67%) Security Engineer
5 2 (6.67%) Test Engineer
6 1 (3.33%) Engineering Manager
6 1 (3.33%) Functional Consultant
6 1 (3.33%) Java Developer
6 1 (3.33%) SAP Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (23.33%) RESTful
2 6 (20.00%) ISPF
3 5 (16.67%) Celery
3 5 (16.67%) Dropwizard
3 5 (16.67%) J2EE
3 5 (16.67%) Micronaut
3 5 (16.67%) Spring Boot
4 4 (13.33%) JWT
5 3 (10.00%) Node.js
6 2 (6.67%) Android Jetpack
6 2 (6.67%) Android SDK
6 2 (6.67%) AWS CDK
6 2 (6.67%) GraphQL
6 2 (6.67%) Jetpack Compose
7 1 (3.33%) Kafka
7 1 (3.33%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 6 (20.00%) Cloud Native
1 6 (20.00%) Mainframe
1 6 (20.00%) VSAM
2 5 (16.67%) IBM Mainframe
2 5 (16.67%) N-Tier
3 3 (10.00%) Product Ownership
4 2 (6.67%) Mobile App
5 1 (3.33%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (3.33%) Distributed Systems
5 1 (3.33%) Greenfield Project
5 1 (3.33%) Management Information System
5 1 (3.33%) Manufacturing Execution System
5 1 (3.33%) Private Cloud
5 1 (3.33%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 6 (20.00%) zOS
2 2 (6.67%) Android
Processes & Methodologies
1 13 (43.33%) CI/CD
2 11 (36.67%) Agile
3 10 (33.33%) DevOps
4 9 (30.00%) Risk Management
5 7 (23.33%) Microservices
5 7 (23.33%) Platform Engineering
6 6 (20.00%) Change Management
6 6 (20.00%) Event-Driven
6 6 (20.00%) Problem Management
6 6 (20.00%) Release Management
6 6 (20.00%) TDD
7 5 (16.67%) BDD
7 5 (16.67%) Continuous Improvement
7 5 (16.67%) Domain-Driven Design
7 5 (16.67%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 5 (16.67%) IT Governance
7 5 (16.67%) OOP
7 5 (16.67%) Stakeholder Management
7 5 (16.67%) TOGAF
7 5 (16.67%) Waterfall
Programming Languages
1 10 (33.33%) Java
2 8 (26.67%) Python
3 6 (20.00%) CLIST
3 6 (20.00%) JCL
3 6 (20.00%) REXX
4 3 (10.00%) Go
4 3 (10.00%) TypeScript
5 2 (6.67%) Kotlin
5 2 (6.67%) Perl
5 2 (6.67%) Shell Script
6 1 (3.33%) C#
6 1 (3.33%) COBOL
6 1 (3.33%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 9 (30.00%) Security Cleared
2 7 (23.33%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (3.33%) Accessibility
1 1 (3.33%) Cyber Essentials
1 1 (3.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 1 (3.33%) NIST
1 1 (3.33%) PCI DSS
1 1 (3.33%) QA
1 1 (3.33%) WCAG
System Software
1 7 (23.33%) Docker
2 6 (20.00%) Time Sharing Option
Systems Management
1 8 (26.67%) Terraform
2 7 (23.33%) Kubernetes
3 6 (20.00%) OMEGAMON
4 5 (16.67%) CA Endevor
5 2 (6.67%) Ansible
5 2 (6.67%) Packer
6 1 (3.33%) Grafana
Vendors
1 6 (20.00%) IBM
1 6 (20.00%) Microsoft
1 6 (20.00%) SAP
2 4 (13.33%) Gigya
3 2 (6.67%) Checkmarx
3 2 (6.67%) Veracode
4 1 (3.33%) Ariba
4 1 (3.33%) AVEVA
4 1 (3.33%) Concur
4 1 (3.33%) Rockwell
4 1 (3.33%) Siemens