Microservices Contract Job Trends in the North West

Microservices
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North West requiring Microservices skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 24 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 44 65 76
Rank change year-on-year +21 +11 -45
Contract jobs citing Microservices 120 56 65
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 4.96% 2.39% 2.38%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.63% 2.83% 2.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 93 33 48
10th Percentile £333 £426 £399
25th Percentile £367 £455 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £430 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year -14.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £550 £575 £625
90th Percentile £648 £626 £688
England median daily rate £525 £575 £600
% change year-on-year -8.70% -4.17% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 2 2
10th Percentile - £61.70 £38.38
25th Percentile - £65.17 £39.63
Median hourly rate £74.26 £74.39 £43.10
Median % change year-on-year -0.18% +72.59% -
75th Percentile - £82.67 £45.19
90th Percentile - £85.57 £45.60
England median hourly rate £67.50 £46.83 £75.77
% change year-on-year +44.15% -38.19% +3.79%

All Process and Methodology Skills
North West

Microservices 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 2,131 1,976 2,415
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 88.02% 84.48% 88.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,415 1,064 1,658
10th Percentile £213 £294 £270
25th Percentile £358 £390 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £575 £575 £600
90th Percentile £675 £651 £675
England median daily rate £505 £525 £545
% change year-on-year -3.81% -3.67% -0.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 187 119 157
10th Percentile £15.37 £16.21 £16.15
25th Percentile £19.07 £22.94 £18.00
Median hourly rate £29.60 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.43% - +48.27%
75th Percentile £46.29 £51.89 £46.18
90th Percentile £70.68 £69.98 £64.25
England median hourly rate £25.15 £36.00 £45.00
% change year-on-year -30.14% -20.00% +25.00%

Microservices
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

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

Microservices job vacancy trend in the North West

Microservices
Daily Rate Trend in the North West

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

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

Microservices
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Microservices in the North West over the 6 months to 24 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Microservices in the North West

Microservices
Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

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

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

Microservices
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 Microservices within the North West region over the 6 months to 24 November 2025. 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 +21 63 £525 -4.55% 44
Cheshire +7 50 £390 -14.75% 10
Merseyside +3 6 £510 +7.37% 4
Lancashire -8 1 - - 37
Microservices
England

Microservices
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 11 (9.17%) JBoss
2 9 (7.50%) Confluence
3 8 (6.67%) Tomcat
4 3 (2.50%) WebSphere
5 2 (1.67%) Mule
5 2 (1.67%) Mule ESB
6 1 (0.83%) Anypoint
6 1 (0.83%) Apache Spark
6 1 (0.83%) nginx
6 1 (0.83%) OpenStack
6 1 (0.83%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (0.83%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 5 (4.17%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.83%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 74 (61.67%) AWS
2 32 (26.67%) Azure
3 28 (23.33%) Serverless
4 26 (21.67%) GCP
5 25 (20.83%) AWS Lambda
6 23 (19.17%) GitHub
7 20 (16.67%) Amazon SQS
8 17 (14.17%) Amazon ECS
9 14 (11.67%) OpenShift
10 12 (10.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 12 (10.00%) Amazon EventBridge
10 12 (10.00%) Apigee
11 10 (8.33%) Amazon EC2
11 10 (8.33%) Datadog
11 10 (8.33%) SaaS
12 9 (7.50%) Amazon EKS
13 8 (6.67%) AWS CloudFormation
14 7 (5.83%) GitHub Actions
14 7 (5.83%) PaaS
15 6 (5.00%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 3 (2.50%) Firewall
1 3 (2.50%) HTTP
1 3 (2.50%) HTTPS
1 3 (2.50%) SAN
2 2 (1.67%) X.509
3 1 (0.83%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 17 (14.17%) MongoDB
1 17 (14.17%) NoSQL
1 17 (14.17%) PostgreSQL
2 15 (12.50%) MySQL
3 14 (11.67%) DynamoDB
3 14 (11.67%) Relational Database
4 10 (8.33%) Amazon Aurora
4 10 (8.33%) Redis
5 9 (7.50%) Amazon RDS
5 9 (7.50%) RDBMS
6 7 (5.83%) DocumentDB
7 5 (4.17%) BigQuery
8 4 (3.33%) Apache Cassandra
8 4 (3.33%) SQL Server
9 3 (2.50%) Elasticsearch
10 2 (1.67%) Hadoop
11 1 (0.83%) Big Data
11 1 (0.83%) Data Warehouse
11 1 (0.83%) DataStage
11 1 (0.83%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 38 (31.67%) Git
2 34 (28.33%) Jenkins
3 27 (22.50%) JIRA
4 20 (16.67%) JUnit
5 19 (15.83%) GitLab
6 17 (14.17%) SonarQube
7 15 (12.50%) Sonatype Nexus
8 14 (11.67%) Maven
9 11 (9.17%) Gradle
10 10 (8.33%) Cucumber
11 8 (6.67%) Mockito
12 7 (5.83%) Postman
13 6 (5.00%) Bitbucket
14 5 (4.17%) SonarLint
15 4 (3.33%) Selenium
15 4 (3.33%) TeamCity
16 3 (2.50%) Bitbucket Server
16 3 (2.50%) CA Release Automation
17 2 (1.67%) Artifactory
17 2 (1.67%) SpecFlow
General
1 33 (27.50%) Social Skills
2 28 (23.33%) Public Sector
3 26 (21.67%) Finance
4 21 (17.50%) Banking
5 16 (13.33%) Analytical Skills
6 4 (3.33%) Military
7 2 (1.67%) Influencing Skills
7 2 (1.67%) Retail
8 1 (0.83%) Automotive
8 1 (0.83%) Digital Healthcare
8 1 (0.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 1 (0.83%) Manufacturing
8 1 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
8 1 (0.83%) Wholesale Banking
Job Titles
1 49 (40.83%) Developer
2 34 (28.33%) Java Developer
3 24 (20.00%) Architect
4 18 (15.00%) Senior
4 18 (15.00%) Software Engineer
5 14 (11.67%) Lead
6 11 (9.17%) Solutions Architect
7 9 (7.50%) Java Architect
7 9 (7.50%) Technical Architect
8 8 (6.67%) Java Technical Architect
8 8 (6.67%) Senior Developer
9 7 (5.83%) Lead Software Engineer
9 7 (5.83%) Senior Java Developer
10 6 (5.00%) AWS Developer
10 6 (5.00%) AWS Engineer
10 6 (5.00%) Cloud Engineer
11 5 (4.17%) Analyst
11 5 (4.17%) Business Analyst
12 4 (3.33%) Infrastructure Architect
12 4 (3.33%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 60 (50.00%) Spring Boot
2 48 (40.00%) Spring
3 36 (30.00%) Kafka
3 36 (30.00%) RESTful
4 28 (23.33%) React
5 25 (20.83%) REST
6 18 (15.00%) Node.js
7 14 (11.67%) JSON
8 13 (10.83%) JWT
9 12 (10.00%) AngularJS
9 12 (10.00%) Hibernate
10 10 (8.33%) SOAP
11 9 (7.50%) .NET
11 9 (7.50%) OAuth
11 9 (7.50%) XML
12 8 (6.67%) J2EE
12 8 (6.67%) JAX-RS
13 7 (5.83%) Spring Security
14 6 (5.00%) OAuth2
14 6 (5.00%) Spring MVC
Miscellaneous
1 19 (15.83%) Cloud Native
2 18 (15.00%) Distributed Systems
3 9 (7.50%) Product Ownership
4 7 (5.83%) Onboarding
5 6 (5.00%) Data Protection Act
5 6 (5.00%) N-Tier
6 3 (2.50%) Greenfield Project
6 3 (2.50%) Legacy Applications
6 3 (2.50%) Private Cloud
7 2 (1.67%) Algorithms
7 2 (1.67%) Data Structures
7 2 (1.67%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (1.67%) PKI
8 1 (0.83%) Enterprise Software
8 1 (0.83%) Hybrid Cloud
8 1 (0.83%) Low-Code
8 1 (0.83%) Mobile App
8 1 (0.83%) Mobile Banking
8 1 (0.83%) SWIFT Messaging Network
8 1 (0.83%) Tandem
Operating Systems
1 22 (18.33%) Linux
2 15 (12.50%) Unix
3 8 (6.67%) Windows
4 7 (5.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 3 (2.50%) Windows Server
6 2 (1.67%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 60 (50.00%) Agile
2 58 (48.33%) CI/CD
3 41 (34.17%) Containerisation
4 39 (32.50%) DevOps
5 36 (30.00%) TDD
6 34 (28.33%) Problem-Solving
7 27 (22.50%) Software Engineering
8 22 (18.33%) Mentoring
9 20 (16.67%) API Development
10 19 (15.83%) Design Patterns
10 19 (15.83%) Stakeholder Management
11 17 (14.17%) API Design
11 17 (14.17%) Event-Driven
12 16 (13.33%) AI
12 16 (13.33%) Test Automation
13 15 (12.50%) BDD
13 15 (12.50%) SDLC
13 15 (12.50%) Technical Leadership
14 14 (11.67%) Architectural Patterns
14 14 (11.67%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 81 (67.50%) Java
2 30 (25.00%) SQL
3 26 (21.67%) Python
4 8 (6.67%) JavaScript
4 8 (6.67%) TypeScript
5 7 (5.83%) Shell Script
6 6 (5.00%) Bash
6 6 (5.00%) C#
6 6 (5.00%) Perl
7 3 (2.50%) PL/SQL
7 3 (2.50%) PowerShell
8 2 (1.67%) PHP
8 2 (1.67%) Ruby
9 1 (0.83%) Go
Qualifications
1 17 (14.17%) Security Cleared
2 14 (11.67%) Degree
3 12 (10.00%) Computer Science Degree
4 11 (9.17%) BPSS Clearance
5 5 (4.17%) AWS Certification
6 4 (3.33%) SC Cleared
7 2 (1.67%) CBAP
7 2 (1.67%) CSPO
7 2 (1.67%) TOGAF Certification
8 1 (0.83%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (7.50%) ISO 20022
1 9 (7.50%) QA
2 7 (5.83%) PCI DSS
3 4 (3.33%) Accessibility
4 2 (1.67%) GDPR
5 1 (0.83%) Actionable Recommendations
5 1 (0.83%) Cyber Essentials
5 1 (0.83%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 1 (0.83%) NIST
5 1 (0.83%) SEPA
System Software
1 50 (41.67%) Docker
2 5 (4.17%) Active Directory
3 2 (1.67%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 45 (37.50%) Kubernetes
2 23 (19.17%) Terraform
3 4 (3.33%) Kibana
3 4 (3.33%) Progress Chef
4 3 (2.50%) Prometheus
5 1 (0.83%) Ansible
5 1 (0.83%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 17 (14.17%) Oracle
2 10 (8.33%) Splunk
3 9 (7.50%) Microsoft
4 8 (6.67%) Google
5 7 (5.83%) AppDynamics
5 7 (5.83%) Red Hat
6 6 (5.00%) Gigya
7 5 (4.17%) IBM
7 5 (4.17%) Ping Identity
8 4 (3.33%) Cloudera
8 4 (3.33%) Dynatrace
8 4 (3.33%) MuleSoft
9 3 (2.50%) Citrix
9 3 (2.50%) F5
9 3 (2.50%) HP
9 3 (2.50%) Veracode
9 3 (2.50%) Virgin Media
9 3 (2.50%) VMware
10 2 (1.67%) Atlassian
10 2 (1.67%) IBM Sterling