Service-Level Objective Contract Job Trends in the North of England

Service-Level Objectives (SLO)
England > North of England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North of England requiring Service-Level Objective skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 16 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 205 160 181
Rank change year-on-year -45 +21 +40
Contract jobs citing Service-Level Objective 14 1 2
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 0.25% 0.031% 0.041%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.29% 0.034% 0.047%
Number of daily rates quoted 12 0 1
10th Percentile £363 - -
25th Percentile £453 - £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £522 - £525
Median % change year-on-year - - +20.00%
75th Percentile £581 - £538
90th Percentile £585 - -
England median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £66.25
Median hourly rate - - £67.50
75th Percentile - - £68.75
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate - - £67.50

All Process & Methodology Skills
North of England

Service-Level Objective 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 the North of England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 4,857 2,915 4,213
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 86.16% 89.86% 86.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,145 1,835 2,620
10th Percentile £261 £263 £275
25th Percentile £380 £375 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £493
Median % change year-on-year - -3.65% -1.40%
75th Percentile £556 £575 £580
90th Percentile £650 £650 £672
England median daily rate £504 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.05% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 306 154 368
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.23 £11.05
25th Percentile £22.63 £21.00 £12.81
Median hourly rate £45.00 £28.75 £18.25
Median % change year-on-year +56.52% +57.53% -36.74%
75th Percentile £66.25 £50.00 £44.74
90th Percentile £74.26 £79.66 £53.07
England median hourly rate £30.15 £34.00 £32.50
% change year-on-year -11.32% +4.62% -12.16%

Service-Level Objective
Job Vacancy Trend in the North of England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Service-Level Objective relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England.

Service-Level Objective job vacancy trend in the North of England

Service-Level Objective
Daily Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Service-Level Objective.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Service-Level Objective

Service-Level Objective
Daily Rate Histogram in the North of England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Service-Level Objective in the North of England over the 6 months to 16 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Service-Level Objective in the North of England

Service-Level Objective
Hourly Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Service-Level Objective.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Service-Level Objective

Service-Level Objective
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 Service-Level Objective within the North of England region over the 6 months to 16 March 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 -33 7 £581 - 1
Yorkshire - 7 £495 - 7
Service-Level Objective
England

Service-Level Objective
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 1 (7.14%) Confluence
Cloud Services
1 7 (50.00%) GCP
2 5 (35.71%) Azure
3 4 (28.57%) AWS
3 4 (28.57%) AWS CloudFormation
4 3 (21.43%) Apigee
4 3 (21.43%) GitHub
4 3 (21.43%) GitHub Actions
4 3 (21.43%) Google Kubernetes Engine
5 2 (14.29%) Microsoft 365
5 2 (14.29%) OpenShift
6 1 (7.14%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 2 (14.29%) LAN
1 2 (14.29%) WAN
1 2 (14.29%) Wi-Fi
2 1 (7.14%) Firewall
2 1 (7.14%) Intrusion Detection
2 1 (7.14%) Network Security
2 1 (7.14%) NGFW
Development Applications
1 3 (21.43%) Jenkins
2 1 (7.14%) JIRA
General
1 6 (42.86%) Social Skills
2 2 (14.29%) Banking
2 2 (14.29%) Public Sector
3 1 (7.14%) Finance
3 1 (7.14%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 3 (21.43%) Cloud Platform Engineer
1 3 (21.43%) GCP Engineer
1 3 (21.43%) Platform Engineer
2 2 (14.29%) Apigee Engineer
2 2 (14.29%) Architect
2 2 (14.29%) Enterprise Architect
2 2 (14.29%) IT Engineer
2 2 (14.29%) IT Support
2 2 (14.29%) IT Support Engineer
2 2 (14.29%) Site Reliability Engineer
2 2 (14.29%) Support Engineer
3 1 (7.14%) Cloud Engineer
3 1 (7.14%) Lead
3 1 (7.14%) Lead Architect
3 1 (7.14%) Lead Enterprise Architect
3 1 (7.14%) Product Owner
3 1 (7.14%) Technical Product Owner
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (21.43%) OpenAPI
1 3 (21.43%) REST
1 3 (21.43%) Swagger
2 2 (14.29%) Fluent Bit
2 2 (14.29%) Kafka
2 2 (14.29%) OpenTelemetry
3 1 (7.14%) 802.1X
Miscellaneous
1 4 (28.57%) e-Learning
1 4 (28.57%) Private Cloud
1 4 (28.57%) Virtual Team
2 2 (14.29%) CMDB
2 2 (14.29%) Onboarding
3 1 (7.14%) Cloud Native
3 1 (7.14%) Product Ownership
3 1 (7.14%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 4 (28.57%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 11 (78.57%) Observability
2 9 (64.29%) CI/CD
2 9 (64.29%) Site Reliability Engineering
3 7 (50.00%) Continuous Improvement
4 6 (42.86%) Cloud Security
4 6 (42.86%) DevOps
4 6 (42.86%) Root Cause Analysis
5 5 (35.71%) Agile
5 5 (35.71%) Incident Management
5 5 (35.71%) Infrastructure as Code
5 5 (35.71%) ITIL
5 5 (35.71%) Mentoring
6 4 (28.57%) Agile Coaching
6 4 (28.57%) Coaching
6 4 (28.57%) Content Development
6 4 (28.57%) GAP Analysis
6 4 (28.57%) Incident Response
6 4 (28.57%) Technical Leadership
6 4 (28.57%) Workshop Facilitation
7 3 (21.43%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 3 (21.43%) Bash
1 3 (21.43%) Groovy
1 3 (21.43%) PowerShell
1 3 (21.43%) Python
2 2 (14.29%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 4 (28.57%) AWS Certification
1 4 (28.57%) Azure Certification
1 4 (28.57%) IBM Certification
1 4 (28.57%) ITIL Certification
2 2 (14.29%) Security Cleared
3 1 (7.14%) Computer Science Degree
3 1 (7.14%) Degree
3 1 (7.14%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (14.29%) Data Quality
1 2 (14.29%) SLA
2 1 (7.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 1 (7.14%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
2 1 (7.14%) NIST
2 1 (7.14%) PCI DSS
2 1 (7.14%) SOC 2
System Software
1 2 (14.29%) etcd
Systems Management
1 7 (50.00%) Terraform
2 5 (35.71%) Kubernetes
3 4 (28.57%) Ansible
4 3 (21.43%) Istio
5 2 (14.29%) Fluentd
5 2 (14.29%) Prometheus
6 1 (7.14%) CASB
Vendors
1 7 (50.00%) Google
2 4 (28.57%) IBM
2 4 (28.57%) Microsoft
2 4 (28.57%) ServiceNow
3 3 (21.43%) Dynatrace
4 2 (14.29%) Splunk