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 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 67 59 73
Rank change year-on-year -8 +14 +28
Contract jobs citing GCP 130 76 52
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 3.29% 3.51% 2.17%
As % of the Cloud Services category 10.61% 10.94% 7.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 81 47 31
10th Percentile £422 £401 £356
25th Percentile £463 £463 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.76% -4.55% -0.90%
75th Percentile £618 £611 £656
90th Percentile £662 £743 £750
England median daily rate £550 £550 £612
% change year-on-year - -10.13% -0.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 1 0
10th Percentile £52.57 - -
25th Percentile - £67.50 -
Median hourly rate £77.00 £70.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% - -
75th Percentile - £72.50 -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £77.00 £52.50 £37.50
% change year-on-year +46.67% +40.00% -51.61%

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 1,225 695 718
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 31.03% 32.06% 29.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 788 519 490
10th Percentile £247 £313 £300
25th Percentile £400 £375 £385
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £450 £475
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -5.26% -5.00%
75th Percentile £608 £525 £575
90th Percentile £692 £626 £650
England median daily rate £525 £502 £525
% change year-on-year +4.69% -4.48% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 83 26 14
10th Percentile £17.65 £12.82 £13.63
25th Percentile £25.88 £17.75 £18.08
Median hourly rate £50.00 £44.09 £33.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.40% +31.61% +34.73%
75th Percentile £76.00 £67.25 £55.05
90th Percentile £85.75 £75.00 £70.98
England median hourly rate £34.23 £26.30 £30.00
% change year-on-year +30.15% -12.33% -9.09%

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 September 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
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North West

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing GCP in the North West over the 6 months to 3 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for GCP in the North West

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 September 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 -9 94 £530 -3.64% 174
Cheshire +11 33 £617 +29.79% 11
Cumbria - 2 £525 -
Merseyside -20 1 £525 +10.53% 10
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 5 (3.85%) Apache
1 5 (3.85%) Apache Spark
2 4 (3.08%) Microsoft Exchange
2 4 (3.08%) SharePoint
3 1 (0.77%) Apache Airflow
3 1 (0.77%) Confluence
3 1 (0.77%) nginx
Business Applications
1 2 (1.54%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.77%) Cloudability
Cloud Services
1 109 (83.85%) Azure
2 103 (79.23%) AWS
3 22 (16.92%) Google Kubernetes Engine
4 16 (12.31%) AWS CloudFormation
5 14 (10.77%) Serverless
6 11 (8.46%) Entra ID
7 10 (7.69%) AWS Lambda
7 10 (7.69%) Vertex AI
8 9 (6.92%) Azure Sentinel
9 8 (6.15%) Amazon ECS
9 8 (6.15%) Amazon EKS
9 8 (6.15%) Azure AKS
9 8 (6.15%) Azure DevOps
9 8 (6.15%) Microsoft 365
10 7 (5.38%) Amazon SageMaker
10 7 (5.38%) AWS KMS
10 7 (5.38%) Azure Machine Learning
11 6 (4.62%) Virtual Private Cloud
12 5 (3.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 5 (3.85%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 20 (15.38%) Firewall
2 8 (6.15%) Network Security
3 5 (3.85%) VPN
4 4 (3.08%) BGP
4 4 (3.08%) DNS
4 4 (3.08%) OSPF
4 4 (3.08%) VLAN
5 3 (2.31%) DKIM
5 3 (2.31%) DMARC
5 3 (2.31%) NAS
5 3 (2.31%) SAN
5 3 (2.31%) SSL
5 3 (2.31%) Wireless
6 2 (1.54%) Cisco ASA
6 2 (1.54%) Junos
6 2 (1.54%) WAN
7 1 (0.77%) BIG-IP
7 1 (0.77%) Intrusion Detection
7 1 (0.77%) LAN
7 1 (0.77%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (5.38%) BigQuery
1 7 (5.38%) Data Lake
2 3 (2.31%) NoSQL
3 2 (1.54%) Amazon Redshift
3 2 (1.54%) Snowflake Schema
3 2 (1.54%) SQL Server
4 1 (0.77%) Amazon RDS
4 1 (0.77%) Big Data
4 1 (0.77%) Data Warehouse
4 1 (0.77%) DynamoDB
4 1 (0.77%) Flink
4 1 (0.77%) Looker
4 1 (0.77%) PostgreSQL
4 1 (0.77%) Power BI
4 1 (0.77%) Relational Database
4 1 (0.77%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 10 (7.69%) Git
2 9 (6.92%) Jenkins
3 7 (5.38%) Cucumber
4 6 (4.62%) Selenium
4 6 (4.62%) SonarQube
5 5 (3.85%) Postman
5 5 (3.85%) Sonatype Nexus
6 4 (3.08%) JIRA
6 4 (3.08%) JUnit
6 4 (3.08%) REST Assured
7 2 (1.54%) Burp Suite
7 2 (1.54%) Gatling
7 2 (1.54%) GitLab
7 2 (1.54%) Gradle
7 2 (1.54%) LoadRunner
8 1 (0.77%) Cypress.io
8 1 (0.77%) Maven
8 1 (0.77%) MLflow
8 1 (0.77%) Robot Framework
8 1 (0.77%) TestNG
General
1 37 (28.46%) Finance
2 25 (19.23%) Social Skills
3 12 (9.23%) Banking
4 8 (6.15%) Public Sector
5 7 (5.38%) Analytical Skills
5 7 (5.38%) Retail
6 5 (3.85%) Games
6 5 (3.85%) Manufacturing
7 2 (1.54%) Financial Institution
7 2 (1.54%) Influencing Skills
8 1 (0.77%) Billing
8 1 (0.77%) Digital Health
8 1 (0.77%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.77%) Military
8 1 (0.77%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 31 (23.85%) Cloud Engineer
1 31 (23.85%) Security Engineer
2 30 (23.08%) Architect
3 19 (14.62%) Cloud Security Engineer
4 13 (10.00%) Solutions Architect
5 10 (7.69%) Senior
6 8 (6.15%) Analyst
7 7 (5.38%) Data Engineer
8 6 (4.62%) DevOps Engineer
8 6 (4.62%) Lead
8 6 (4.62%) Technical Analyst
9 5 (3.85%) Administrator
9 5 (3.85%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 5 (3.85%) Systems Analyst
9 5 (3.85%) Technical Architect
10 4 (3.08%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 4 (3.08%) Data Analytics Engineer
10 4 (3.08%) GCP Engineer
10 4 (3.08%) Lead Architect
11 3 (2.31%) GCP DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 44 (33.85%) Terraform
2 9 (6.92%) OAuth
2 9 (6.92%) PySpark
3 6 (4.62%) Kafka
3 6 (4.62%) Node.js
3 6 (4.62%) React
4 5 (3.85%) Langfuse
4 5 (3.85%) OpenID
4 5 (3.85%) REST
4 5 (3.85%) Spring
4 5 (3.85%) Spring Boot
5 4 (3.08%) ARM Templates
5 4 (3.08%) Azure Blueprints
6 3 (2.31%) Playwright
6 3 (2.31%) SAML
7 2 (1.54%) GraphQL
7 2 (1.54%) Next.js
7 2 (1.54%) Nunjucks
7 2 (1.54%) OAuth2
7 2 (1.54%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 31 (23.85%) Cloud Native
2 19 (14.62%) Security Posture
3 13 (10.00%) Management Information System
4 10 (7.69%) AI Agents
5 9 (6.92%) Enterprise Cloud
6 7 (5.38%) Legacy Systems
7 6 (4.62%) Cloud Security Posture
7 6 (4.62%) PKI
7 6 (4.62%) Public Cloud
8 5 (3.85%) Animation
8 5 (3.85%) Data Protection Act
8 5 (3.85%) Product Ownership
9 3 (2.31%) Distributed Systems
9 3 (2.31%) Enterprise Software
9 3 (2.31%) Freedom of Information
9 3 (2.31%) Private Cloud
10 2 (1.54%) Data Centre
10 2 (1.54%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
10 2 (1.54%) Hybrid Cloud
10 2 (1.54%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 27 (20.77%) Windows
2 26 (20.00%) Linux
3 17 (13.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 7 (5.38%) Windows Server
5 1 (0.77%) CentOS
5 1 (0.77%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 53 (40.77%) CI/CD
2 50 (38.46%) DevOps
3 43 (33.08%) Infrastructure as Code
4 39 (30.00%) Cloud Security
5 37 (28.46%) Agile
6 26 (20.00%) AI
6 26 (20.00%) Change Management
7 22 (16.92%) Observability
8 21 (16.15%) Infrastructure Automation
8 21 (16.15%) Roadmaps
9 20 (15.38%) Microservices
9 20 (15.38%) Scrum
10 19 (14.62%) SIEM
10 19 (14.62%) Threat Modelling
11 17 (13.08%) Cybersecurity
12 16 (12.31%) Machine Learning
13 15 (11.54%) Analytics
13 15 (11.54%) Problem-Solving
13 15 (11.54%) Stakeholder Management
13 15 (11.54%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 47 (36.15%) Python
2 27 (20.77%) Java
3 26 (20.00%) Bash
4 25 (19.23%) PowerShell
5 18 (13.85%) Bicep
6 12 (9.23%) SQL
7 5 (3.85%) JavaScript
8 3 (2.31%) Go
9 1 (0.77%) Google Apps Script
9 1 (0.77%) Scala
9 1 (0.77%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 20 (15.38%) Degree
2 19 (14.62%) CISSP
3 18 (13.85%) Azure Certification
4 17 (13.08%) AWS Certification
5 15 (11.54%) Security Cleared
6 9 (6.92%) SC Cleared
7 8 (6.15%) Cisco Certification
8 4 (3.08%) (ISC)2 CCSP
8 4 (3.08%) TOGAF Certification
9 3 (2.31%) BC Cleared
9 3 (2.31%) CCNP
9 3 (2.31%) CEH
9 3 (2.31%) Microsoft Certification
10 2 (1.54%) CCNA
10 2 (1.54%) CISM
10 2 (1.54%) GIAC
10 2 (1.54%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 1 (0.77%) CCSP
11 1 (0.77%) DV Cleared
11 1 (0.77%) SANS
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (8.46%) Data Quality
2 8 (6.15%) NIST
3 7 (5.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 6 (4.62%) QA
5 4 (3.08%) PCI DSS
6 2 (1.54%) Accessibility
6 2 (1.54%) GDPR
7 1 (0.77%) CDISC
7 1 (0.77%) COBIT
7 1 (0.77%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.77%) NCSC
7 1 (0.77%) PSD2
7 1 (0.77%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.77%) SEPA
System Software
1 30 (23.08%) Docker
2 17 (13.08%) Active Directory
3 4 (3.08%) VMware Infrastructure
4 3 (2.31%) Hyper-V
5 2 (1.54%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 46 (35.38%) Kubernetes
2 14 (10.77%) Progress Chef
3 10 (7.69%) Ansible
4 8 (6.15%) Prometheus
5 7 (5.38%) Istio
5 7 (5.38%) Single Sign-On
6 6 (4.62%) Grafana
7 3 (2.31%) Microsoft Intune
8 2 (1.54%) Argo
9 1 (0.77%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 1 (0.77%) Nagios
9 1 (0.77%) Network Intrusion Detection System
9 1 (0.77%) QRadar
Vendors
1 48 (36.92%) Google
2 22 (16.92%) Microsoft
3 16 (12.31%) Red Hat
4 8 (6.15%) Databricks
5 7 (5.38%) Salesforce
6 6 (4.62%) Dynatrace
6 6 (4.62%) OpenAI
6 6 (4.62%) Palo Alto
6 6 (4.62%) Perforce
7 5 (3.85%) Fortinet
8 4 (3.08%) Aruba
8 4 (3.08%) ServiceNow
8 4 (3.08%) VMware
9 3 (2.31%) Arista
9 3 (2.31%) CheckPoint
9 3 (2.31%) Cisco
9 3 (2.31%) Juniper
10 2 (1.54%) Confluent
10 2 (1.54%) F5
10 2 (1.54%) Oracle