Distributed Systems Contract Job Trends in the North West

Distributed Systems
England > North West

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Distributed Systems in contract job vacancies in the North West. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Distributed Systems over the 6 months leading up to 21 May 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 130 119 122
Rank change year-on-year -11 +3 +24
Contract jobs citing Distributed Systems 32 5 11
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 0.97% 0.26% 0.41%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 3.21% 0.90% 1.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 19 5 7
10th Percentile £400 £380 £450
25th Percentile £462 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £537 £525
Median % change year-on-year -6.89% +2.29% +1.94%
75th Percentile £611 £551 £650
90th Percentile £650 £582 £660
England median daily rate £534 £625 £640
% change year-on-year -14.64% -2.34% +2.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 0 0
10th Percentile £68.38 - -
25th Percentile £72.50 - -
Median hourly rate £85.00 - -
75th Percentile £95.00 - -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £75.00 £55.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +36.36% - -34.59%

All Generic Skills
North West

Distributed Systems falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring generic IT skills in the North West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 998 555 691
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 30.38% 28.32% 26.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 641 376 454
10th Percentile £312 £203 £284
25th Percentile £375 £360 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £464 £456 £495
Median % change year-on-year +1.81% -7.98% -1.00%
75th Percentile £575 £553 £575
90th Percentile £638 £650 £688
England median daily rate £515 £538 £550
% change year-on-year -4.19% -2.27% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 79 37 78
10th Percentile £19.69 £22.72 £13.00
25th Percentile £25.49 £24.25 £15.00
Median hourly rate £52.78 £29.27 £25.25
Median % change year-on-year +80.30% +15.92% -19.82%
75th Percentile £76.75 £59.30 £37.44
90th Percentile £98.23 £74.50 £57.50
England median hourly rate £45.00 £33.91 £34.11
% change year-on-year +32.70% -0.57% +51.68%

Distributed Systems
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

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

Distributed Systems job vacancy trend in the North West

Distributed Systems
Daily Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Distributed Systems.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Distributed Systems

Distributed Systems
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Distributed Systems in the North West over the 6 months to 21 May 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Distributed Systems in the North West

Distributed Systems
Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Distributed Systems.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Distributed Systems

Distributed Systems
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North West

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Distributed Systems in the North West over the 6 months to 21 May 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Distributed Systems in the North West

Distributed Systems
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 Distributed Systems within the North West region over the 6 months to 21 May 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 -16 22 £560 +2.94% 28
Cheshire -5 8 £388 +8.24% 6
Cumbria - 2 £525 -
Distributed Systems
England

Distributed Systems
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:

Application Platforms
1 5 (15.63%) Confluence
2 2 (6.25%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (6.25%) Microsoft Office
Cloud Services
1 22 (68.75%) AWS
2 7 (21.88%) Serverless
3 6 (18.75%) Amazon EKS
3 6 (18.75%) Azure
4 4 (12.50%) Amazon EventBridge
4 4 (12.50%) Amazon SQS
4 4 (12.50%) AWS Lambda
4 4 (12.50%) GCP
5 3 (9.38%) Amazon ECS
5 3 (9.38%) GitHub
5 3 (9.38%) GitHub Actions
5 3 (9.38%) IaaS
5 3 (9.38%) PaaS
6 2 (6.25%) Azure Monitor
7 1 (3.13%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 2 (6.25%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (25.00%) DynamoDB
2 6 (18.75%) NoSQL
3 3 (9.38%) Amazon Aurora
3 3 (9.38%) DocumentDB
3 3 (9.38%) PostgreSQL
4 1 (3.13%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 5 (15.63%) JIRA
2 3 (9.38%) GitLab
2 3 (9.38%) Jenkins
3 1 (3.13%) Cucumber
General
1 11 (34.38%) Social Skills
2 8 (25.00%) Finance
3 4 (12.50%) Analytical Skills
3 4 (12.50%) Public Sector
4 3 (9.38%) Influencing Skills
5 2 (6.25%) Banking
6 1 (3.13%) Retail
Job Titles
1 7 (21.88%) Architect
2 6 (18.75%) Senior
3 5 (15.63%) Principal Engineer
4 4 (12.50%) AWS Architect
4 4 (12.50%) AWS Engineer
4 4 (12.50%) Full-Stack Engineer
4 4 (12.50%) Product Manager
5 3 (9.38%) AWS DevOps
5 3 (9.38%) Senior Manager
5 3 (9.38%) Senior Product Manager
6 2 (6.25%) Applications Architect
6 2 (6.25%) Cloud Architect
6 2 (6.25%) Lead
6 2 (6.25%) Senior Architect
6 2 (6.25%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 2 (6.25%) Technical Manager
6 2 (6.25%) Technical Product Manager
7 1 (3.13%) AWS Solution Architect
7 1 (3.13%) Kubernetes Engineer
7 1 (3.13%) Senior Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (15.63%) .NET
1 5 (15.63%) React
2 4 (12.50%) AngularJS
2 4 (12.50%) Node.js
3 3 (9.38%) Kafka
3 3 (9.38%) REST
3 3 (9.38%) RESTful
3 3 (9.38%) Vue
4 2 (6.25%) ARM Templates
4 2 (6.25%) Spring
4 2 (6.25%) Spring Boot
5 1 (3.13%) Hibernate
5 1 (3.13%) JSF
5 1 (3.13%) Lambda Expressions
5 1 (3.13%) OpenAPI
5 1 (3.13%) Struts
5 1 (3.13%) Swagger
Miscellaneous
1 16 (50.00%) Cloud Native
2 9 (28.13%) Legacy Systems
3 3 (9.38%) Management Information System
4 2 (6.25%) Enterprise Software
4 2 (6.25%) Onboarding
4 2 (6.25%) PKI
4 2 (6.25%) Product Ownership
4 2 (6.25%) Tandem
4 2 (6.25%) Virtual Team
5 1 (3.13%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (3.13%) Clustering
5 1 (3.13%) Culture of Ownership
5 1 (3.13%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (3.13%) Data Structures
5 1 (3.13%) Distributed Architecture
5 1 (3.13%) Mobile Banking
5 1 (3.13%) Online Banking
Operating Systems
1 3 (9.38%) Linux
2 2 (6.25%) Unix
2 2 (6.25%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 18 (56.25%) Microservices
2 16 (50.00%) Event-Driven
3 15 (46.88%) CI/CD
4 14 (43.75%) Event-Driven Architecture
5 11 (34.38%) Agile
6 9 (28.13%) Architectural Patterns
6 9 (28.13%) DevOps
6 9 (28.13%) Observability
6 9 (28.13%) Roadmaps
7 8 (25.00%) Containerisation
7 8 (25.00%) Technical Leadership
8 7 (21.88%) Decision-Making
8 7 (21.88%) Infrastructure as Code
9 6 (18.75%) Data Modelling
9 6 (18.75%) Full-Stack Development
9 6 (18.75%) Mentoring
9 6 (18.75%) Problem-Solving
9 6 (18.75%) Software Engineering
9 6 (18.75%) Technology Roadmap
10 5 (15.63%) Customer Experience
Programming Languages
1 7 (21.88%) Java
1 7 (21.88%) Python
2 5 (15.63%) C#
2 5 (15.63%) TypeScript
3 3 (9.38%) SQL
4 2 (6.25%) Go
Qualifications
1 5 (15.63%) BPSS Clearance
2 4 (12.50%) Security Cleared
3 3 (9.38%) AWS Certification
3 3 (9.38%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
3 3 (9.38%) SC Cleared
4 2 (6.25%) Computer Science Degree
4 2 (6.25%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (3.13%) QA
System Software
1 12 (37.50%) Docker
Systems Management
1 11 (34.38%) Terraform
2 8 (25.00%) Kubernetes
3 1 (3.13%) Ansible
3 1 (3.13%) Grafana
Vendors
1 2 (6.25%) Atlassian
1 2 (6.25%) Gemalto
1 2 (6.25%) IBM
1 2 (6.25%) Thales
2 1 (3.13%) Google