Microsoft Certification Contract Job Trends in the North of England

Microsoft Certification
England > North of England

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in the North of England with a requirement for Microsoft Certification qualifications. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered over the 6 months leading up to 11 October 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 188 153 142
Rank change year-on-year -35 -11 +25
Contract jobs citing Microsoft Certification 75 36 32
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 0.98% 0.87% 0.77%
As % of the Qualifications category 3.46% 2.83% 2.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 47 28 18
10th Percentile £421 £190 £328
25th Percentile £463 £287 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £497 £413 £488
Median % change year-on-year +20.44% -15.38% +21.88%
75th Percentile £530 £478 £625
90th Percentile £640 £624 £675
England median daily rate £474 £450 £475
% change year-on-year +5.22% -5.26% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 1 1
10th Percentile £14.00 - -
25th Percentile £19.50 - £11.75
Median hourly rate £25.84 £17.44 £13.50
Median % change year-on-year +48.17% +29.19% -22.86%
75th Percentile £178.75 - £15.25
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £38.25 £18.84 £16.30
% change year-on-year +103.08% +15.55% -8.17%

All Academic and Professional Certifications
North of England

Microsoft Certification falls under the Academic Qualifications and Professional Certifications category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications in the North of England.

Contract vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications 2,170 1,270 1,089
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 28.45% 30.55% 26.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,362 843 605
10th Percentile £313 £264 £279
25th Percentile £413 £400 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.76%
75th Percentile £600 £616 £588
90th Percentile £675 £703 £672
England median daily rate £535 £525 £526
% change year-on-year +1.90% -0.19% -4.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 272 94 81
10th Percentile £17.29 £15.50 £16.85
25th Percentile £24.67 £20.00 £24.18
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -45.54% +0.65%
75th Percentile £51.00 £50.78 £58.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £70.11 £73.56
England median hourly rate £49.50 £25.15 £52.50
% change year-on-year +96.82% -52.10% -2.02%

Microsoft Certification
Job Vacancy Trend in the North of England

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

Microsoft Certification job vacancy trend in the North of England

Microsoft Certification
Daily Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Microsoft Certification.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Microsoft Certification

Microsoft Certification
Daily Rate Histogram in the North of England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Microsoft Certification in the North of England over the 6 months to 11 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Microsoft Certification in the North of England

Microsoft Certification
Hourly Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Microsoft Certification.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Microsoft Certification

Microsoft Certification
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North of England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Microsoft Certification in the North of England over the 6 months to 11 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Microsoft Certification in the North of England

Microsoft Certification
Contract Job Locations in the North of England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Microsoft Certification within the North of England region over the 6 months to 11 October 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
North West -18 61 £485 +14.12% 34
Yorkshire -24 11 £650 +79.43% 26
North East - 3 £363 - 8
Microsoft Certification
England

Microsoft Certification
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North of 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 5 (6.67%) SharePoint
2 1 (1.33%) Microsoft Exchange
2 1 (1.33%) SharePoint Server
Applications
1 4 (5.33%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.33%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 6 (8.00%) Oracle Payables
2 1 (1.33%) Dynamics AX
2 1 (1.33%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 33 (44.00%) Azure
2 24 (32.00%) Microsoft 365
3 19 (25.33%) Power Platform
4 17 (22.67%) Entra ID
5 14 (18.67%) Azure Monitor
6 12 (16.00%) Azure DevOps
7 6 (8.00%) AWS
8 5 (6.67%) Azure Sentinel
9 4 (5.33%) GCP
9 4 (5.33%) Power Automate
9 4 (5.33%) PowerApps
9 4 (5.33%) Serverless
10 3 (4.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 3 (4.00%) Amazon ECS
10 3 (4.00%) Amazon EKS
10 3 (4.00%) AWS CloudFormation
10 3 (4.00%) AWS CloudTrail
10 3 (4.00%) AWS KMS
10 3 (4.00%) AWS Lambda
10 3 (4.00%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 10 (13.33%) SSL
2 7 (9.33%) Firewall
3 4 (5.33%) Network Security
3 4 (5.33%) SAN
4 2 (2.67%) SNMP
4 2 (2.67%) TCP/IP
5 1 (1.33%) 4G
5 1 (1.33%) 5G
5 1 (1.33%) DNS
5 1 (1.33%) Kerberos
5 1 (1.33%) LAN
5 1 (1.33%) VoIP
5 1 (1.33%) VPN
5 1 (1.33%) WLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (36.00%) MySQL
1 27 (36.00%) SQL Server
2 17 (22.67%) PostgreSQL
3 11 (14.67%) Power BI
4 10 (13.33%) SQL Server Integration Services
5 3 (4.00%) Amazon RDS
6 2 (2.67%) Oracle Database
General
1 28 (37.33%) Social Skills
2 12 (16.00%) Analytical Skills
3 8 (10.67%) Finance
4 6 (8.00%) Telecoms
5 2 (2.67%) Documentation Skills
6 1 (1.33%) Aerospace
6 1 (1.33%) Legal
6 1 (1.33%) Presentation Skills
6 1 (1.33%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 27 (36.00%) DBA
2 16 (21.33%) SQL DBA
3 14 (18.67%) Administrator
4 10 (13.33%) SC Cleared DBA
5 8 (10.67%) Cloud Engineer
5 8 (10.67%) Lead
5 8 (10.67%) Security Engineer
5 8 (10.67%) Wintel Engineer
6 7 (9.33%) Architect
7 6 (8.00%) Analyst
8 5 (6.67%) Cybersecurity Engineer
8 5 (6.67%) Solutions Architect
9 4 (5.33%) IT Analyst
9 4 (5.33%) IT Support
9 4 (5.33%) IT Support Analyst
9 4 (5.33%) Support Analyst
10 3 (4.00%) Field Engineer
10 3 (4.00%) Field Service Engineer
10 3 (4.00%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 3 (4.00%) Oracle DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (9.33%) Terraform
2 4 (5.33%) ARM Templates
3 3 (4.00%) Azure Blueprints
4 1 (1.33%) HTML5 Canvas
4 1 (1.33%) LDAP
4 1 (1.33%) OAuth
4 1 (1.33%) OpenID
4 1 (1.33%) SAML
Miscellaneous
1 17 (22.67%) Clustering
1 17 (22.67%) Replication
2 7 (9.33%) Cloud Native
2 7 (9.33%) Onboarding
3 5 (6.67%) Security Posture
4 3 (4.00%) Analytical Mindset
4 3 (4.00%) Data Centre
4 3 (4.00%) Management Information System
4 3 (4.00%) Video Conferencing
5 2 (2.67%) Cloud Security Posture
5 2 (2.67%) Cyber Security Posture
5 2 (2.67%) Enterprise Cloud
5 2 (2.67%) Mobile App
6 1 (1.33%) Augmented Reality
6 1 (1.33%) Driving Licence
6 1 (1.33%) Hybrid Cloud
6 1 (1.33%) Legacy Systems
6 1 (1.33%) Product Ownership
6 1 (1.33%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 33 (44.00%) Windows
2 21 (28.00%) Windows Server
3 15 (20.00%) Solaris
4 8 (10.67%) Windows 10
5 6 (8.00%) Android
5 6 (8.00%) Linux
6 4 (5.33%) Apple iOS
6 4 (5.33%) Unix
7 3 (4.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 1 (1.33%) macOS
8 1 (1.33%) VMS
8 1 (1.33%) Windows Server 2003
8 1 (1.33%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 20 (26.67%) ITIL
2 18 (24.00%) DevOps
3 16 (21.33%) Problem-Solving
4 13 (17.33%) Customer Service
4 13 (17.33%) Cybersecurity
5 12 (16.00%) Network Virtualisation
6 11 (14.67%) Business Intelligence
7 10 (13.33%) Disaster Recovery
7 10 (13.33%) High Availability
7 10 (13.33%) Incident Response
7 10 (13.33%) Project Delivery
7 10 (13.33%) RBAC
7 10 (13.33%) User Acceptance Testing
8 9 (12.00%) Capacity Planning
8 9 (12.00%) Performance Tuning
9 8 (10.67%) Computer Science
9 8 (10.67%) Identity Access Management
9 8 (10.67%) Security Monitoring
10 7 (9.33%) CI/CD
11 6 (8.00%) Identity Management
Programming Languages
1 27 (36.00%) PowerShell
2 26 (34.67%) SQL
3 10 (13.33%) T-SQL
4 7 (9.33%) Python
5 4 (5.33%) Bicep
6 3 (4.00%) Bash
6 3 (4.00%) Java
7 1 (1.33%) C#
7 1 (1.33%) JavaScript
Qualifications
1 43 (57.33%) Security Cleared
2 41 (54.67%) SC Cleared
3 34 (45.33%) Degree
4 18 (24.00%) Azure Certification
5 15 (20.00%) MCSE
6 10 (13.33%) A+ Certification
7 9 (12.00%) BPSS Clearance
7 9 (12.00%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
8 8 (10.67%) MCSA
8 8 (10.67%) VCAP
8 8 (10.67%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 7 (9.33%) Network+ Certification
10 5 (6.67%) CCNA
10 5 (6.67%) Cisco Certification
10 5 (6.67%) Computer Science Degree
11 3 (4.00%) AWS Certification
11 3 (4.00%) CISSP
11 3 (4.00%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 3 (4.00%) Oracle Certification
12 2 (2.67%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (5.33%) NIST
2 3 (4.00%) Cyber Essentials
2 3 (4.00%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
2 3 (4.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (2.67%) Data Quality
4 1 (1.33%) GDPR
4 1 (1.33%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 24 (32.00%) Active Directory
2 18 (24.00%) Virtual Machines
3 10 (13.33%) VMware Infrastructure
4 8 (10.67%) VMware ESXi
4 8 (10.67%) vSphere
5 5 (6.67%) Docker
6 2 (2.67%) Hyper-V
6 2 (2.67%) NDS
6 2 (2.67%) NetIQ eDirectory
7 1 (1.33%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 10 (13.33%) SCOM
2 9 (12.00%) vCenter Server
3 8 (10.67%) Ansible
4 5 (6.67%) Kubernetes
4 5 (6.67%) Microsoft Intune
5 3 (4.00%) Progress Chef
6 2 (2.67%) Grafana
6 2 (2.67%) SCCM
7 1 (1.33%) Active Directory Federation Services
7 1 (1.33%) Backup Exec
7 1 (1.33%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 72 (96.00%) Microsoft
2 17 (22.67%) Oracle
3 14 (18.67%) ServiceNow
4 11 (14.67%) VMware
5 9 (12.00%) Cisco
6 3 (4.00%) Apple
6 3 (4.00%) Dell
6 3 (4.00%) Google
6 3 (4.00%) Red Hat
6 3 (4.00%) Sophos
7 2 (2.67%) Dynatrace
7 2 (2.67%) Splunk
8 1 (1.33%) Foundry
8 1 (1.33%) OpenAI
8 1 (1.33%) Symantec
8 1 (1.33%) Veeam