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 31 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 41 64 99
Rank change year-on-year +23 +35 -68
Contract jobs citing Microservices 112 58 48
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 4.72% 2.48% 1.70%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.35% 2.97% 1.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 84 34 34
10th Percentile £334 £427 £340
25th Percentile £385 £455 £416
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £443 £550 £488
Median % change year-on-year -19.55% +12.82% -15.84%
75th Percentile £576 £597 £624
90th Percentile £665 £638 £688
England median daily rate £525 £570 £600
% change year-on-year -7.89% -5.00% -
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 £67.00 £41.50 £75.77
% change year-on-year +61.45% -45.23% +4.50%

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 2,094 1,950 2,494
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 88.28% 83.48% 88.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,374 1,054 1,721
10th Percentile £215 £294 £270
25th Percentile £363 £392 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.26% -5.00% +1.01%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £593
90th Percentile £678 £656 £675
England median daily rate £508 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 186 108 173
10th Percentile £15.18 £17.75 £15.80
25th Percentile £19.07 £26.03 £18.00
Median hourly rate £28.72 £40.33 £35.50
Median % change year-on-year -28.79% +13.59% +36.00%
75th Percentile £49.84 £59.13 £46.18
90th Percentile £70.81 £71.08 £64.75
England median hourly rate £25.15 £39.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -36.33% -11.24% +27.14%

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 31 October 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 31 October 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 +16 61 £500 -9.09% 54
Cheshire +3 44 £425 -7.61% 13
Merseyside +2 6 £510 +27.50% 2
Lancashire -6 1 - - 29
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 16 (14.29%) Confluence
2 12 (10.71%) JBoss
3 9 (8.04%) Tomcat
4 3 (2.68%) Mule
4 3 (2.68%) WebSphere
5 2 (1.79%) Mule ESB
6 1 (0.89%) Anypoint
6 1 (0.89%) nginx
6 1 (0.89%) OpenStack
6 1 (0.89%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (0.89%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 4 (3.57%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.89%) Finacle
Cloud Services
1 62 (55.36%) AWS
2 29 (25.89%) Azure
3 24 (21.43%) Serverless
4 21 (18.75%) AWS Lambda
4 21 (18.75%) GCP
4 21 (18.75%) GitHub
5 19 (16.96%) Amazon SQS
6 15 (13.39%) Amazon ECS
6 15 (13.39%) OpenShift
7 13 (11.61%) Amazon EventBridge
8 10 (8.93%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 10 (8.93%) Amazon EC2
8 10 (8.93%) SaaS
9 8 (7.14%) Datadog
9 8 (7.14%) GitHub Actions
10 7 (6.25%) Amazon EKS
10 7 (6.25%) Amazon MSK
10 7 (6.25%) Apigee
10 7 (6.25%) AWS Step Functions
10 7 (6.25%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 3 (2.68%) Firewall
1 3 (2.68%) SAN
2 2 (1.79%) X.509
3 1 (0.89%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (16.96%) MongoDB
2 18 (16.07%) NoSQL
3 15 (13.39%) DynamoDB
4 13 (11.61%) PostgreSQL
5 11 (9.82%) Amazon Aurora
5 11 (9.82%) MySQL
6 10 (8.93%) Relational Database
7 9 (8.04%) Amazon RDS
7 9 (8.04%) RDBMS
8 8 (7.14%) Redis
9 6 (5.36%) DocumentDB
10 5 (4.46%) BigQuery
11 4 (3.57%) Apache Cassandra
11 4 (3.57%) SQL Server
12 3 (2.68%) Elasticsearch
13 1 (0.89%) Hadoop
13 1 (0.89%) MariaDB
13 1 (0.89%) Oracle Database
13 1 (0.89%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 35 (31.25%) JIRA
2 32 (28.57%) Jenkins
3 31 (27.68%) Git
4 21 (18.75%) JUnit
5 16 (14.29%) SonarQube
5 16 (14.29%) Sonatype Nexus
6 15 (13.39%) GitLab
6 15 (13.39%) Maven
7 12 (10.71%) Gradle
8 10 (8.93%) Cucumber
9 7 (6.25%) Bitbucket
9 7 (6.25%) Mockito
10 5 (4.46%) SonarLint
11 4 (3.57%) Bitbucket Server
11 4 (3.57%) Postman
11 4 (3.57%) TeamCity
12 3 (2.68%) CA Release Automation
12 3 (2.68%) Selenium
13 2 (1.79%) Artifactory
13 2 (1.79%) SpecFlow
General
1 33 (29.46%) Social Skills
2 21 (18.75%) Public Sector
3 20 (17.86%) Banking
4 19 (16.96%) Finance
5 14 (12.50%) Analytical Skills
6 4 (3.57%) Military
7 1 (0.89%) Automotive
7 1 (0.89%) Digital Healthcare
7 1 (0.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 1 (0.89%) Influencing Skills
7 1 (0.89%) Manufacturing
7 1 (0.89%) Retail
7 1 (0.89%) Wholesale Banking
Job Titles
1 41 (36.61%) Developer
2 28 (25.00%) Java Developer
3 21 (18.75%) Architect
3 21 (18.75%) Software Engineer
4 17 (15.18%) Senior
5 15 (13.39%) Lead
6 9 (8.04%) Solutions Architect
6 9 (8.04%) Technical Architect
7 8 (7.14%) Engineering Manager
7 8 (7.14%) Java Architect
7 8 (7.14%) Java Technical Architect
7 8 (7.14%) Lead Software Engineer
7 8 (7.14%) Senior Developer
8 7 (6.25%) Senior Java Developer
9 6 (5.36%) AWS Developer
10 5 (4.46%) AWS Engineer
10 5 (4.46%) Senior Software Engineer
11 4 (3.57%) Cloud Engineer
11 4 (3.57%) DevOps Engineer
11 4 (3.57%) Infrastructure Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 53 (47.32%) Spring Boot
2 41 (36.61%) Spring
3 36 (32.14%) Kafka
4 29 (25.89%) RESTful
5 27 (24.11%) React
6 18 (16.07%) REST
7 15 (13.39%) Node.js
8 11 (9.82%) AngularJS
9 10 (8.93%) .NET
10 9 (8.04%) J2EE
11 8 (7.14%) JSON
11 8 (7.14%) SOAP
11 8 (7.14%) Spring Cloud
12 7 (6.25%) JWT
13 6 (5.36%) Dropwizard
13 6 (5.36%) GraphQL
13 6 (5.36%) Micronaut
14 5 (4.46%) ActiveMQ
14 5 (4.46%) Celery
14 5 (4.46%) Hibernate
Miscellaneous
1 20 (17.86%) Cloud Native
2 15 (13.39%) Distributed Systems
3 9 (8.04%) Product Ownership
4 6 (5.36%) N-Tier
4 6 (5.36%) Onboarding
5 5 (4.46%) Data Protection Act
6 3 (2.68%) Greenfield Project
6 3 (2.68%) Legacy Applications
6 3 (2.68%) Private Cloud
7 2 (1.79%) Algorithms
7 2 (1.79%) Data Structures
7 2 (1.79%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (1.79%) PKI
8 1 (0.89%) Data Centre
8 1 (0.89%) Enterprise Software
8 1 (0.89%) Hybrid Cloud
8 1 (0.89%) Low-Code
8 1 (0.89%) Mobile App
8 1 (0.89%) SWIFT Messaging Network
8 1 (0.89%) Tandem
Operating Systems
1 22 (19.64%) Linux
2 14 (12.50%) Unix
3 8 (7.14%) Windows
4 7 (6.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 3 (2.68%) Windows Server
6 1 (0.89%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 57 (50.89%) Agile
2 48 (42.86%) CI/CD
3 41 (36.61%) DevOps
4 36 (32.14%) Containerisation
5 32 (28.57%) TDD
6 30 (26.79%) Software Engineering
7 27 (24.11%) Problem-Solving
8 24 (21.43%) Mentoring
9 20 (17.86%) Scrum
10 19 (16.96%) Design Patterns
11 18 (16.07%) Event-Driven
12 17 (15.18%) API Development
13 16 (14.29%) Coaching
13 16 (14.29%) Stakeholder Management
14 14 (12.50%) BDD
14 14 (12.50%) Full-Stack Development
14 14 (12.50%) SDLC
14 14 (12.50%) Technical Leadership
15 13 (11.61%) Architectural Patterns
15 13 (11.61%) Continuous Integration
Programming Languages
1 79 (70.54%) Java
2 29 (25.89%) SQL
3 23 (20.54%) Python
4 10 (8.93%) JavaScript
5 8 (7.14%) TypeScript
6 7 (6.25%) Shell Script
7 6 (5.36%) C#
7 6 (5.36%) Perl
8 5 (4.46%) Bash
9 3 (2.68%) PL/SQL
9 3 (2.68%) PowerShell
10 2 (1.79%) PHP
10 2 (1.79%) Ruby
11 1 (0.89%) Go
Qualifications
1 12 (10.71%) Security Cleared
2 8 (7.14%) BPSS Clearance
3 5 (4.46%) AWS Certification
4 4 (3.57%) Degree
5 3 (2.68%) SC Cleared
6 2 (1.79%) CBAP
6 2 (1.79%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (1.79%) CSPO
6 2 (1.79%) TOGAF Certification
7 1 (0.89%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (8.04%) QA
2 7 (6.25%) ISO 20022
2 7 (6.25%) PCI DSS
3 4 (3.57%) Accessibility
4 2 (1.79%) GDPR
5 1 (0.89%) Actionable Recommendations
5 1 (0.89%) Cyber Essentials
5 1 (0.89%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 1 (0.89%) NIST
5 1 (0.89%) SEPA
System Software
1 41 (36.61%) Docker
2 5 (4.46%) Active Directory
3 2 (1.79%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 36 (32.14%) Kubernetes
2 23 (20.54%) Terraform
3 4 (3.57%) Kibana
3 4 (3.57%) Progress Chef
4 2 (1.79%) Prometheus
5 1 (0.89%) Ansible
5 1 (0.89%) Grafana
Vendors
1 15 (13.39%) Oracle
2 10 (8.93%) Microsoft
3 7 (6.25%) AppDynamics
3 7 (6.25%) Google
3 7 (6.25%) Red Hat
3 7 (6.25%) Splunk
4 6 (5.36%) Gigya
5 5 (4.46%) IBM
6 4 (3.57%) Cloudera
6 4 (3.57%) Dynatrace
7 3 (2.68%) Citrix
7 3 (2.68%) F5
7 3 (2.68%) HP
7 3 (2.68%) Ping Identity
7 3 (2.68%) Veracode
7 3 (2.68%) Virgin Media
7 3 (2.68%) VMware
8 2 (1.79%) Atlassian
8 2 (1.79%) IBM Sterling
9 1 (0.89%) Pega