WAN Contract Job Trends in the North East

Wide Area Network (WAN)
England > North East

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North East requiring WAN skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 1 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 53 34 35
Rank change year-on-year -19 +1 +10
Contract jobs citing WAN 9 2 2
As % of all contract jobs in the North East 1.41% 0.65% 0.64%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 14.06% 5.88% 4.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 2 2 1
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £650 £375 £400
Median % change year-on-year +73.33% -6.25% +190.91%
England median daily rate £500 £500 £488
% change year-on-year - +2.56% +2.63%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £40.00
Median hourly rate - - £43.00
75th Percentile - - £46.00
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £22.50 £30.00 £24.87
% change year-on-year -25.00% +20.63% -56.62%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
North East

WAN 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 the North East.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 64 34 47
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North East 10.00% 11.11% 15.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 19 29 25
10th Percentile £191 £153 £335
25th Percentile £403 £213 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £325 £431
Median % change year-on-year +46.15% -24.59% +53.93%
75th Percentile £638 £500 £588
90th Percentile £650 £628 £648
England median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 9 0 5
10th Percentile - - £29.80
25th Percentile £21.33 - £40.00
Median hourly rate £26.66 - £47.50
75th Percentile £28.75 - £48.75
90th Percentile £49.00 - -
England median hourly rate £32.50 £38.41 £40.00
% change year-on-year -15.39% -3.98% +135.29%

WAN
Job Vacancy Trend in the North East

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing WAN relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North East.

WAN job vacancy trend in the North East

WAN
Daily Rate Trend in the North East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North East citing WAN.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North East citing WAN

WAN
Hourly Rate Trend in the North East

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North East citing WAN.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North East citing WAN

WAN
Contract Job Locations in the North East

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing WAN within the North East region over the 6 months to 1 June 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
Tyne and Wear - 9 £650 - 6
WAN
England

WAN
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North East 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:

Cloud Services
1 9 (100.00%) AWS
1 9 (100.00%) Azure
1 9 (100.00%) OCI
2 3 (33.33%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 9 (100.00%) BGP
1 9 (100.00%) BIG-IP
1 9 (100.00%) Ethernet VPN
1 9 (100.00%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
1 9 (100.00%) Firewall
1 9 (100.00%) OSPF
1 9 (100.00%) SD-WAN
1 9 (100.00%) VXLAN
2 3 (33.33%) Wi-Fi
2 3 (33.33%) WLAN
Development Applications
1 9 (100.00%) GitLab
General
1 3 (33.33%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 9 (100.00%) Infrastructure Engineer
1 9 (100.00%) Senior
1 9 (100.00%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Miscellaneous
1 9 (100.00%) Data Centre
2 8 (88.89%) Hybrid Cloud
3 2 (22.22%) Cloud Native
4 1 (11.11%) Legacy Systems
Processes & Methodologies
1 9 (100.00%) CI/CD
1 9 (100.00%) Infrastructure as Code
1 9 (100.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
1 9 (100.00%) Zero Trust
2 8 (88.89%) Load Balancing
3 7 (77.78%) Site Reliability Engineering
4 5 (55.56%) Incident Management
5 4 (44.44%) Network Design
6 3 (33.33%) High Availability
7 2 (22.22%) DevOps
7 2 (22.22%) Network Architecture
8 1 (11.11%) Network Segmentation
8 1 (11.11%) Task Automation
Programming Languages
1 9 (100.00%) Python
Qualifications
1 5 (55.56%) Security Cleared
2 3 (33.33%) SC Cleared
Systems Management
1 9 (100.00%) Ansible
1 9 (100.00%) Terraform
Vendors
1 9 (100.00%) Arista
1 9 (100.00%) Aruba
1 9 (100.00%) F5
1 9 (100.00%) Palo Alto