NCSC Contracts in the North West

National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in the North West requiring NCSC skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited NCSC over the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 115 132 126
Rank change year-on-year +17 -6 +17
Contract jobs citing NCSC 5 5 31
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the North West 0.25% 0.18% 0.97%
As % of the Quality Assurance & Compliance category 1.85% 1.04% 6.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 2 2 20
10th Percentile £666 - £598
25th Percentile £680 £563 £613
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £706 £575 £650
Median % change year-on-year +22.83% -11.54% +4.00%
75th Percentile £730 £588 -
90th Percentile £742 - £690
England median daily rate £650 £600 £675
% change year-on-year +8.33% -11.11% +8.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
Median hourly rate £83.41 - -
England median hourly rate £78.36 £81.71 £72.98
% change year-on-year -4.09% +11.96% +17.78%

All Quality Assurance and Compliance Skills
North West

NCSC falls under the Quality Assurance and Compliance category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring quality assurance or compliance skills in the North West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for quality assurance or compliance skills 271 480 471
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 13.77% 17.42% 14.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 182 265 293
10th Percentile £271 £325 £289
25th Percentile £375 £425 £391
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £513 £475
Median % change year-on-year -7.32% +7.89% +2.70%
75th Percentile £587 £598 £588
90th Percentile £700 £694 £650
England median daily rate £513 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -2.38% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 71 32
10th Percentile £13.50 - £24.44
25th Percentile £16.20 £10.95 £30.23
Median hourly rate £30.38 £12.84 £38.55
Median % change year-on-year +136.60% -66.69% +114.17%
75th Percentile £65.31 £26.66 £48.38
90th Percentile £84.33 £43.75 £66.05
England median hourly rate £34.75 £22.34 £41.50
% change year-on-year +55.55% -46.17% +50.91%

NCSC
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

Job postings citing NCSC as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the North West.

Job vacancy trend for NCSC in the North West

NCSC
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the North West

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing NCSC in the North West.

Daily rate trend for NCSC in the North West

NCSC
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing NCSC in the North West.

Hourly rate trend for NCSC in the North West

NCSC
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 NCSC within the North West region over the 6 months to 1 May 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 +14 2 £706 +22.83% 9
Cumbria - 2 - - 1
Cheshire - 1 - - 2
NCSC
England

NCSC
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the North West by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 1 (20.00%) Microsoft Exchange
1 1 (20.00%) SharePoint
1 1 (20.00%) SharePoint Server
Applications
1 1 (20.00%) Microsoft Office
Cloud Services
1 2 (40.00%) AWS
2 1 (20.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
2 1 (20.00%) Amazon ECS
2 1 (20.00%) Amazon EKS
2 1 (20.00%) AWS CloudFormation
2 1 (20.00%) AWS Fargate
2 1 (20.00%) Azure
2 1 (20.00%) Entra ID
2 1 (20.00%) Microsoft 365
2 1 (20.00%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 2 (40.00%) DNS
2 1 (20.00%) Firewall
2 1 (20.00%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (20.00%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 1 (20.00%) GitLab
1 1 (20.00%) Jenkins
1 1 (20.00%) JIRA
General
1 2 (40.00%) Public Sector
1 2 (40.00%) Social Skills
2 1 (20.00%) Military
2 1 (20.00%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 3 (60.00%) Architect
2 2 (40.00%) Security Architect
3 1 (20.00%) Azure Architect
3 1 (20.00%) Cybersecurity Architect
3 1 (20.00%) DevOps Engineer
3 1 (20.00%) Microsoft 365 Architect
3 1 (20.00%) Principal Engineer
3 1 (20.00%) Principal Security Engineer
3 1 (20.00%) Security Engineer
3 1 (20.00%) Senior
3 1 (20.00%) Senior DevOps
3 1 (20.00%) Senior DevOps Engineer
3 1 (20.00%) Technical Architect
3 1 (20.00%) Wintel Architect
3 1 (20.00%) Wintel Technical Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (20.00%) cloud-init
1 1 (20.00%) Kafka
1 1 (20.00%) Keycloak
1 1 (20.00%) LDAP
1 1 (20.00%) OAuth
1 1 (20.00%) OAuth2
1 1 (20.00%) OpenID
1 1 (20.00%) SAML
Miscellaneous
1 3 (60.00%) Management Information System
2 2 (40.00%) PKI
3 1 (20.00%) Algorithms
3 1 (20.00%) Cyber Threat
3 1 (20.00%) Hybrid Cloud
3 1 (20.00%) Operational Technology
3 1 (20.00%) Security Posture
3 1 (20.00%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 1 (20.00%) Android
1 1 (20.00%) Apple iOS
1 1 (20.00%) CentOS
1 1 (20.00%) Linux
1 1 (20.00%) Mac OS
1 1 (20.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
1 1 (20.00%) Unix
1 1 (20.00%) Windows
1 1 (20.00%) Windows 10
1 1 (20.00%) Windows Server
1 1 (20.00%) Windows Server 2016
1 1 (20.00%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 2 (40.00%) Cloud Security
1 2 (40.00%) Continuous Improvement
1 2 (40.00%) Data Loss Prevention
1 2 (40.00%) Information Security
2 1 (20.00%) Analytics
2 1 (20.00%) Boundary Protection
2 1 (20.00%) CI/CD
2 1 (20.00%) Cybersecurity
2 1 (20.00%) DevOps
2 1 (20.00%) Dynamic Application Security Testing
2 1 (20.00%) Mentoring
2 1 (20.00%) MITRE ATT&CK
2 1 (20.00%) Observability
2 1 (20.00%) Product Strategy
2 1 (20.00%) RBAC
2 1 (20.00%) Root Cause Analysis
2 1 (20.00%) Secrets Management
2 1 (20.00%) Security Architecture
2 1 (20.00%) SIEM
2 1 (20.00%) Static Application Security Testing
Programming Languages
1 1 (20.00%) Bash
1 1 (20.00%) Go
1 1 (20.00%) PowerShell
1 1 (20.00%) Python
1 1 (20.00%) VB
1 1 (20.00%) VBScript
Qualifications
1 3 (60.00%) Degree
2 1 (20.00%) AWS Certification
2 1 (20.00%) CISM
2 1 (20.00%) CISSP
2 1 (20.00%) MCP
2 1 (20.00%) MCSA
2 1 (20.00%) MCSE
2 1 (20.00%) Microsoft Certification
2 1 (20.00%) SC Cleared
2 1 (20.00%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (40.00%) NIST
2 1 (20.00%) GRC
2 1 (20.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 1 (20.00%) Active Directory
1 1 (20.00%) BitLocker
1 1 (20.00%) Docker
1 1 (20.00%) Microsoft App-V
1 1 (20.00%) Virtual Desktop
1 1 (20.00%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 2 (40.00%) Kubernetes
2 1 (20.00%) Active Directory Federation Services
2 1 (20.00%) Consul
2 1 (20.00%) Grafana
2 1 (20.00%) Istio
2 1 (20.00%) Jamf Pro
2 1 (20.00%) linkerd
2 1 (20.00%) Microsoft Intune
2 1 (20.00%) Packer
2 1 (20.00%) Prometheus
2 1 (20.00%) Rancher
2 1 (20.00%) SCCM
2 1 (20.00%) Single Sign-On
2 1 (20.00%) Terraform
2 1 (20.00%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 1 (20.00%) McAfee
1 1 (20.00%) Microsoft
1 1 (20.00%) Okta
1 1 (20.00%) Splunk
1 1 (20.00%) Symantec
1 1 (20.00%) VMware