GCP Contract Job Trends in the North West

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North West requiring GCP skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 3 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 41 78 101
Rank change year-on-year +37 +23 -4
Contract jobs citing GCP 125 38 38
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 4.99% 1.79% 1.42%
As % of the Cloud Services category 14.43% 5.73% 3.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 92 24 30
10th Percentile £358 £356 £396
25th Percentile £431 £375 £434
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £563 £525
Median % change year-on-year -7.91% +7.14% -16.00%
75th Percentile £591 £641 £597
90th Percentile £688 £700 £639
England median daily rate £527 £600 £600
% change year-on-year -12.10% - -7.69%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £59.75 £72.50 -
Median hourly rate £64.50 £75.00 -
Median % change year-on-year -14.00% - -
75th Percentile £69.25 £77.50 -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £64.50 £57.50 £62.00
% change year-on-year +12.17% -7.26% +77.14%

All Cloud Computing Skills
North West

GCP falls under the Cloud Services category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring cloud computing skills in the North West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for cloud computing skills 866 663 966
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 34.57% 31.32% 36.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 647 437 719
10th Percentile £214 £250 £265
25th Percentile £358 £375 £392
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £445 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -6.32% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £538 £564 £582
90th Percentile £629 £647 £650
England median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 37 13 51
10th Percentile £15.50 £18.16 £15.75
25th Percentile £18.87 £21.05 £17.72
Median hourly rate £40.00 £29.00 £23.61
Median % change year-on-year +37.93% +22.83% -52.78%
75th Percentile £69.25 £58.00 £46.18
90th Percentile £72.37 £75.95 £52.00
England median hourly rate £27.36 £28.50 £23.22
% change year-on-year -4.02% +22.77% +1.75%

GCP
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

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

GCP job vacancy trend in the North West

GCP
Daily Rate Trend in the North West

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

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

GCP
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing GCP in the North West over the 6 months to 3 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for GCP in the North West

GCP
Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

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

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

GCP
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 GCP within the North West region over the 6 months to 3 January 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 +34 82 £528 -8.26% 56
Cheshire +9 36 £500 +40.45% 35
Lancashire - 3 £388 - 23
Merseyside -10 2 - - 16
GCP
England

GCP
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 7 (5.60%) SAS
2 4 (3.20%) OpenStack
3 2 (1.60%) Apache
3 2 (1.60%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.80%) Apache Spark
4 1 (0.80%) Confluence
4 1 (0.80%) IIS
Applications
1 8 (6.40%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 5 (4.00%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.80%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 93 (74.40%) Azure
2 90 (72.00%) AWS
3 17 (13.60%) GitHub
4 14 (11.20%) Power Platform
5 13 (10.40%) Datadog
6 11 (8.80%) Apigee
7 10 (8.00%) Google Tag Manager
8 9 (7.20%) AWS CloudFormation
8 9 (7.20%) Google Analytics
9 8 (6.40%) Amazon SQS
9 8 (6.40%) Serverless
10 7 (5.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 7 (5.60%) Amazon ECS
10 7 (5.60%) AWS Lambda
10 7 (5.60%) GitHub Actions
11 6 (4.80%) Amazon EC2
11 6 (4.80%) Amazon EventBridge
11 6 (4.80%) OpenShift
11 6 (4.80%) SaaS
12 5 (4.00%) Route 53
Communications & Networking
1 9 (7.20%) Firewall
2 4 (3.20%) HTTP
2 4 (3.20%) HTTPS
2 4 (3.20%) VPN
3 3 (2.40%) Internet
4 2 (1.60%) VoIP
4 2 (1.60%) Wireshark
5 1 (0.80%) TCP/IP
5 1 (0.80%) VLAN
5 1 (0.80%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (20.80%) BigQuery
2 13 (10.40%) Looker
2 13 (10.40%) Power BI
3 12 (9.60%) Data Warehouse
4 9 (7.20%) PostgreSQL
5 8 (6.40%) DynamoDB
5 8 (6.40%) NoSQL
5 8 (6.40%) Relational Database
6 6 (4.80%) Amazon Aurora
6 6 (4.80%) Amazon RDS
6 6 (4.80%) MySQL
6 6 (4.80%) Redis
7 5 (4.00%) RDBMS
7 5 (4.00%) Tableau
8 4 (3.20%) Metadata
9 2 (1.60%) Data Lake
9 2 (1.60%) Snowflake Schema
10 1 (0.80%) Azure SQL Database
10 1 (0.80%) Big Data
10 1 (0.80%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 26 (20.80%) Jenkins
2 15 (12.00%) Git
2 15 (12.00%) GitLab
3 7 (5.60%) SonarQube
4 5 (4.00%) Gradle
4 5 (4.00%) Maven
4 5 (4.00%) SonarLint
5 4 (3.20%) Postman
6 3 (2.40%) CircleCI
7 2 (1.60%) Fiddler
7 2 (1.60%) JIRA
7 2 (1.60%) Selenium
8 1 (0.80%) Bitbucket
8 1 (0.80%) Cucumber
8 1 (0.80%) Cypress.io
8 1 (0.80%) Gatling
8 1 (0.80%) JMeter
8 1 (0.80%) REST Assured
8 1 (0.80%) Snyk
8 1 (0.80%) Spinnaker
General
1 51 (40.80%) Social Skills
2 32 (25.60%) Finance
3 23 (18.40%) Public Sector
4 22 (17.60%) Banking
5 19 (15.20%) Analytical Skills
6 5 (4.00%) Marketing
7 4 (3.20%) Games
7 4 (3.20%) Retail
7 4 (3.20%) Telecoms
8 2 (1.60%) Automotive
8 2 (1.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 2 (1.60%) Influencing Skills
8 2 (1.60%) Manufacturing
8 2 (1.60%) Military
9 1 (0.80%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (0.80%) Electronics
9 1 (0.80%) Presentation Skills
9 1 (0.80%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 44 (35.20%) Architect
2 13 (10.40%) Analyst
2 13 (10.40%) Solutions Architect
3 11 (8.80%) Platform Engineer
4 10 (8.00%) Senior
5 9 (7.20%) Data Scientist
5 9 (7.20%) Java Architect
6 8 (6.40%) Developer
6 8 (6.40%) Java Technical Architect
6 8 (6.40%) Technical Architect
7 6 (4.80%) Data Architect
7 6 (4.80%) GCP Architect
7 6 (4.80%) GCP Engineer
7 6 (4.80%) Performance Analyst
8 5 (4.00%) Governance Manager
8 5 (4.00%) Security Engineer
9 4 (3.20%) Cloud Architect
9 4 (3.20%) Data Analyst
9 4 (3.20%) Java Developer
9 4 (3.20%) Security Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (14.40%) Spring Boot
2 12 (9.60%) RESTful
2 12 (9.60%) Spring
3 10 (8.00%) JWT
4 8 (6.40%) Kafka
5 6 (4.80%) Dropwizard
5 6 (4.80%) Elastic Stack
5 6 (4.80%) J2EE
5 6 (4.80%) Micronaut
6 5 (4.00%) Celery
6 5 (4.00%) OAuth
6 5 (4.00%) OAuth2
6 5 (4.00%) REST
7 4 (3.20%) GraphQL
7 4 (3.20%) Hibernate
7 4 (3.20%) JAX-RS
7 4 (3.20%) JSON
7 4 (3.20%) React
7 4 (3.20%) XGBoost
7 4 (3.20%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 13 (10.40%) Cloud Native
2 8 (6.40%) Distributed Systems
2 8 (6.40%) Product Ownership
3 7 (5.60%) Credit Risk
4 6 (4.80%) N-Tier
5 4 (3.20%) Data Protection Act
5 4 (3.20%) Distributed Computing
5 4 (3.20%) Private Cloud
6 3 (2.40%) Clustering
6 3 (2.40%) e-Learning
6 3 (2.40%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (2.40%) NHS
6 3 (2.40%) Synthetic Data
6 3 (2.40%) Virtual Team
7 2 (1.60%) Onboarding
7 2 (1.60%) Public Cloud
7 2 (1.60%) Replication
8 1 (0.80%) Data Structures
8 1 (0.80%) IBM XIV
8 1 (0.80%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 8 (6.40%) Linux
2 5 (4.00%) Windows
3 4 (3.20%) Mac OS
4 3 (2.40%) Windows 10
5 1 (0.80%) Android
5 1 (0.80%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 47 (37.60%) CI/CD
2 37 (29.60%) Containerisation
2 37 (29.60%) DevOps
3 36 (28.80%) Analytics
4 34 (27.20%) Agile
5 27 (21.60%) Microservices
6 25 (20.00%) Infrastructure as Code
7 23 (18.40%) Problem-Solving
8 21 (16.80%) Machine Learning
9 20 (16.00%) Data Science
10 18 (14.40%) AI
10 18 (14.40%) Data Modelling
10 18 (14.40%) Observability
11 17 (13.60%) Stakeholder Management
12 16 (12.80%) API Design
12 16 (12.80%) Data Analysis
12 16 (12.80%) Mentoring
13 15 (12.00%) User Experience
14 14 (11.20%) Event-Driven
14 14 (11.20%) Incident Response
Programming Languages
1 48 (38.40%) Python
2 28 (22.40%) Java
3 15 (12.00%) SQL
4 14 (11.20%) Bash
5 7 (5.60%) JavaScript
5 7 (5.60%) R
6 6 (4.80%) PowerShell
7 4 (3.20%) Go
8 3 (2.40%) C#
8 3 (2.40%) TypeScript
9 2 (1.60%) PHP
10 1 (0.80%) Bicep
10 1 (0.80%) C
10 1 (0.80%) C++
10 1 (0.80%) LookML
10 1 (0.80%) Scala
Qualifications
1 18 (14.40%) Security Cleared
2 11 (8.80%) Azure Certification
3 10 (8.00%) Computer Science Degree
3 10 (8.00%) Degree
3 10 (8.00%) SC Cleared
4 9 (7.20%) AWS Certification
5 5 (4.00%) BPSS Clearance
5 5 (4.00%) CISM
5 5 (4.00%) CISSP
6 4 (3.20%) ITIL Certification
7 3 (2.40%) IBM Certification
7 3 (2.40%) TOGAF Certification
8 1 (0.80%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.80%) DV Cleared
8 1 (0.80%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (14.40%) Data Quality
2 15 (12.00%) QA
3 9 (7.20%) Accessibility
3 9 (7.20%) GDPR
4 8 (6.40%) ISO 20022
4 8 (6.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 5 (4.00%) NIST
5 5 (4.00%) PCI DSS
6 2 (1.60%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 1 (0.80%) GRC
7 1 (0.80%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.80%) PERC
7 1 (0.80%) PSD2
7 1 (0.80%) WCAG
System Software
1 39 (31.20%) Docker
2 8 (6.40%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (4.00%) vSphere
4 4 (3.20%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 44 (35.20%) Kubernetes
2 33 (26.40%) Terraform
3 9 (7.20%) Ansible
4 6 (4.80%) Grafana
4 6 (4.80%) Prometheus
5 5 (4.00%) Fluentd
6 4 (3.20%) SCCM
7 3 (2.40%) Istio
7 3 (2.40%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 45 (36.00%) Google
2 20 (16.00%) Microsoft
3 11 (8.80%) Splunk
4 9 (7.20%) VMware
5 7 (5.60%) Pega
6 6 (4.80%) Gigya
7 5 (4.00%) Cribl.io
8 4 (3.20%) Citrix
8 4 (3.20%) Confluent
8 4 (3.20%) F5
8 4 (3.20%) IBM
8 4 (3.20%) Palo Alto
9 2 (1.60%) Hitachi
10 1 (0.80%) Checkmarx
10 1 (0.80%) Dynatrace
10 1 (0.80%) Facebook
10 1 (0.80%) OpenAI
10 1 (0.80%) SAP
10 1 (0.80%) ServiceNow
10 1 (0.80%) Veracode