Cost Optimisation Contract Job Trends in the North West

Cost Optimization
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North West requiring Cost Optimisation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 13 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 151 117 139
Rank change year-on-year -34 +22 -
Contract jobs citing Cost Optimisation 6 7 1
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 0.22% 0.33% 0.036%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.25% 0.37% 0.041%
Number of daily rates quoted 4 6 1
10th Percentile £324 - -
25th Percentile £346 - £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £372 £525 £400
Median % change year-on-year -29.24% +31.25% -
75th Percentile £429 £609 £425
90th Percentile £476 £638 -
England median daily rate £520 £500 £500
% change year-on-year +4.00% - -

All Process & Methodology Skills
North West

Cost Optimisation 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 West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 2,365 1,867 2,448
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 86.82% 88.65% 86.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,532 1,115 1,624
10th Percentile £213 £265 £307
25th Percentile £358 £380 £405
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £550 £570 £588
90th Percentile £650 £656 £675
England median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 205 99 218
10th Percentile £16.15 £16.21 £12.50
25th Percentile £22.85 £22.72 £15.50
Median hourly rate £42.69 £31.52 £29.22
Median % change year-on-year +35.42% +7.87% -22.08%
75th Percentile £61.25 £55.59 £46.18
90th Percentile £75.18 £75.30 £53.75
England median hourly rate £25.77 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -26.37% - -

Cost Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Cost Optimisation relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West.

Cost Optimisation job vacancy trend in the North West

Cost Optimisation
Daily Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Cost Optimisation.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Cost Optimisation

Cost Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cost Optimisation in the North West over the 6 months to 13 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Cost Optimisation in the North West

Cost Optimisation
Contract Job Locations in the North West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Cost Optimisation within the North West region over the 6 months to 13 February 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
Manchester -19 4 £445 -15.24% 6
Cheshire - 2 £339 - 1
Cost Optimisation
England

Cost Optimisation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North West 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 3 (50.00%) AWS
1 3 (50.00%) Azure
2 2 (33.33%) AWS CloudFormation
2 2 (33.33%) Datadog
2 2 (33.33%) GCP
3 1 (16.67%) Serverless
Development Applications
1 2 (33.33%) CircleCI
1 2 (33.33%) GitLab
1 2 (33.33%) Jenkins
General
1 3 (50.00%) Analytical Skills
2 2 (33.33%) Social Skills
3 1 (16.67%) Documentation Skills
3 1 (16.67%) Finance
Job Titles
1 2 (33.33%) DevOps Engineer
2 1 (16.67%) Analyst
2 1 (16.67%) Architect
2 1 (16.67%) Asset Management Analyst
2 1 (16.67%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (33.33%) Elastic Stack
Miscellaneous
1 3 (50.00%) CMDB
2 1 (16.67%) Cloud Native
Processes & Methodologies
1 4 (66.67%) Problem-Solving
2 3 (50.00%) Agile
2 3 (50.00%) Asset Management
2 3 (50.00%) Configuration Management
2 3 (50.00%) Data Governance
3 2 (33.33%) Change Control
3 2 (33.33%) CI/CD
3 2 (33.33%) DevOps
3 2 (33.33%) DevSecOps
3 2 (33.33%) High Availability
3 2 (33.33%) Incident Response
3 2 (33.33%) Infrastructure as Code
3 2 (33.33%) IT Asset Management
3 2 (33.33%) Root Cause Analysis
3 2 (33.33%) Task Automation
3 2 (33.33%) Test Automation
3 2 (33.33%) Vulnerability Scanning
4 1 (16.67%) Impact Assessments
4 1 (16.67%) Records Management
4 1 (16.67%) Technology Strategy
Programming Languages
1 3 (50.00%) SQL
2 2 (33.33%) Bash
2 2 (33.33%) PowerShell
2 2 (33.33%) Python
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (33.33%) QA
Systems Management
1 3 (50.00%) SCCM
2 2 (33.33%) Ansible
2 2 (33.33%) Grafana
2 2 (33.33%) Prometheus
2 2 (33.33%) Terraform
Vendors
1 3 (50.00%) ServiceNow