SDLC Contracts in the North West

Systems or Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in the North West requiring SDLC skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited SDLC 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 61 74 86
Rank change year-on-year +13 +12 +5
Contract jobs citing SDLC 60 63 74
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the North West 3.05% 2.29% 2.32%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.38% 2.65% 2.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 51 42 47
10th Percentile £358 £158 £405
25th Percentile £385 £336 £448
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £466 £450 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.56% -14.29% +10.53%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £606
90th Percentile £700 £649 £688
England median daily rate £550 £600 £600
% change year-on-year -8.33% - +4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 7 8
10th Percentile £68.93 £31.03 £39.55
25th Percentile £71.06 £43.20 £41.88
Median hourly rate £76.75 £48.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.90% -26.15% +52.94%
75th Percentile £82.06 - -
90th Percentile £83.98 £48.80 -
England median hourly rate £61.25 £48.00 £58.50
% change year-on-year +27.60% -17.95% +6.58%

All Process and Methodology Skills
North West

SDLC 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 1,776 2,377 2,894
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 90.24% 86.28% 90.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,147 1,519 2,058
10th Percentile £300 £306 £313
25th Percentile £393 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - +5.26%
75th Percentile £575 £593 £588
90th Percentile £661 £688 £675
England median daily rate £525 £525 £550
% change year-on-year - -4.55% +2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 108 244 144
10th Percentile £15.97 £10.95 £16.85
25th Percentile £22.66 £13.30 £21.25
Median hourly rate £31.88 £21.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +51.81% -40.00% +70.82%
75th Percentile £60.00 £45.22 £48.91
90th Percentile £83.96 £57.50 £65.00
England median hourly rate £29.07 £36.00 £37.50
% change year-on-year -19.25% -4.00% +53.06%

SDLC
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

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

Job vacancy trend for SDLC in the North West

SDLC
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the North West

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

Daily rate trend for SDLC in the North West

SDLC
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SDLC in the North West over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SDLC in the North West

SDLC
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

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

Hourly rate trend for SDLC in the North West

SDLC
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 SDLC 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
Cheshire +5 33 £402 +3.08% 52
Manchester +12 16 £488 -11.36% 129
Merseyside +7 5 £600 +33.33% 25
SDLC
England

SDLC
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 5 (8.33%) JBoss
1 5 (8.33%) Tomcat
1 5 (8.33%) WebSphere
2 4 (6.67%) NetWeaver
2 4 (6.67%) WebLogic
3 3 (5.00%) Apache
3 3 (5.00%) CICS
4 2 (3.33%) Apache Spark
4 2 (3.33%) FactoryTalk
5 1 (1.67%) Adobe Experience Manager
5 1 (1.67%) Appian
5 1 (1.67%) Camunda
5 1 (1.67%) CMS
5 1 (1.67%) Confluence
5 1 (1.67%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 2 (3.33%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (1.67%) SAP APO
1 1 (1.67%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 20 (33.33%) AWS
2 8 (13.33%) AWS Lambda
2 8 (13.33%) Azure
2 8 (13.33%) Serverless
3 5 (8.33%) GCP
4 4 (6.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 4 (6.67%) Amazon Glacier
4 4 (6.67%) Amazon Kinesis
4 4 (6.67%) Amazon S3
4 4 (6.67%) Anthropic Claude
4 4 (6.67%) Azure AI
4 4 (6.67%) Cloud Computing
4 4 (6.67%) Google Gemini
5 2 (3.33%) Amazon EC2
6 1 (1.67%) Amazon Cognito
6 1 (1.67%) Amazon ECS
6 1 (1.67%) Amazon EKS
6 1 (1.67%) AWS CloudFormation
6 1 (1.67%) GitHub
6 1 (1.67%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 5 (8.33%) HTTP
2 1 (1.67%) DHCP
2 1 (1.67%) DNS
2 1 (1.67%) TCP/IP
2 1 (1.67%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 5 (8.33%) DynamoDB
1 5 (8.33%) Siebel EIM
2 4 (6.67%) DB2
2 4 (6.67%) Neo4j
3 3 (5.00%) Amazon RDS
3 3 (5.00%) PostgreSQL
4 2 (3.33%) Delta Lake
4 2 (3.33%) Easytrieve
4 2 (3.33%) MongoDB
4 2 (3.33%) NoSQL
4 2 (3.33%) Relational Database
4 2 (3.33%) SQL Server
5 1 (1.67%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 11 (18.33%) Git
2 7 (11.67%) JIRA
3 5 (8.33%) Bitbucket
3 5 (8.33%) Jenkins
4 1 (1.67%) Cucumber
4 1 (1.67%) GitLab
4 1 (1.67%) Hudson
4 1 (1.67%) Selenium
4 1 (1.67%) TeamCity
4 1 (1.67%) Zephyr
General
1 22 (36.67%) Finance
2 17 (28.33%) Banking
3 15 (25.00%) Social Skills
4 10 (16.67%) Analytical Skills
5 7 (11.67%) Public Sector
6 6 (10.00%) Manufacturing
6 6 (10.00%) Pharmaceutical
7 4 (6.67%) Legal
7 4 (6.67%) Presentation Skills
8 1 (1.67%) Billing
8 1 (1.67%) Games
8 1 (1.67%) Investment Banking
8 1 (1.67%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 16 (26.67%) Developer
2 10 (16.67%) Architect
3 7 (11.67%) Scrum Master
3 7 (11.67%) Senior
3 7 (11.67%) Solutions Architect
4 6 (10.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 4 (6.67%) Analyst
5 4 (6.67%) Consultant
5 4 (6.67%) Integration Developer
5 4 (6.67%) SAP Developer
5 4 (6.67%) Siebel Developer
5 4 (6.67%) Tester
6 3 (5.00%) Full-Stack Developer
6 3 (5.00%) Java Developer
6 3 (5.00%) Security Consultant
7 2 (3.33%) AWS Architect
7 2 (3.33%) Designer
7 2 (3.33%) Java Solutions Architect
7 2 (3.33%) Mainframe Designer
7 2 (3.33%) Principal Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (23.33%) SOAP
2 12 (20.00%) REST
2 12 (20.00%) Web Services
3 10 (16.67%) JMS
4 9 (15.00%) RESTful
4 9 (15.00%) Spring
5 8 (13.33%) Middleware
5 8 (13.33%) Spring Boot
6 5 (8.33%) AngularJS
6 5 (8.33%) JSP
6 5 (8.33%) Kafka
6 5 (8.33%) Servlets
7 4 (6.67%) EDI
7 4 (6.67%) J2EE
7 4 (6.67%) JDBC
7 4 (6.67%) RAML
7 4 (6.67%) SAP PI
7 4 (6.67%) TensorFlow
7 4 (6.67%) XML
7 4 (6.67%) XSLT
Miscellaneous
1 10 (16.67%) Product Ownership
2 6 (10.00%) Algorithms
2 6 (10.00%) Private Cloud
2 6 (10.00%) Virtual Team
3 4 (6.67%) Legacy Applications
3 4 (6.67%) Public Cloud
4 3 (5.00%) Distributed Systems
4 3 (5.00%) Mainframe
4 3 (5.00%) Onboarding
5 2 (3.33%) Data Protection Act
5 2 (3.33%) Management Information System
5 2 (3.33%) Manufacturing Execution System
5 2 (3.33%) SCADA
5 2 (3.33%) VSAM
6 1 (1.67%) Cloud Native
6 1 (1.67%) Data Centre
6 1 (1.67%) Data Structures
6 1 (1.67%) Distributed Applications
6 1 (1.67%) Enterprise Cloud
6 1 (1.67%) Team-Oriented Environment
Operating Systems
1 7 (11.67%) Linux
2 3 (5.00%) Unix
2 3 (5.00%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 42 (70.00%) Agile
2 20 (33.33%) Problem-Solving
3 19 (31.67%) CI/CD
4 15 (25.00%) Containerisation
4 15 (25.00%) Scrum
5 12 (20.00%) System Integration Testing
6 11 (18.33%) Budget Control
6 11 (18.33%) Continuous Improvement
7 10 (16.67%) Backlog Prioritisation
7 10 (16.67%) User Acceptance Testing
8 9 (15.00%) Microservices
8 9 (15.00%) Service Delivery
9 8 (13.33%) Artificial Intelligence
9 8 (13.33%) Backlog Management
9 8 (13.33%) Migration
9 8 (13.33%) Risk Management
10 7 (11.67%) Decision-Making
10 7 (11.67%) Test Automation
11 6 (10.00%) Machine Learning
11 6 (10.00%) Natural Language Processing
Programming Languages
1 24 (40.00%) Java
2 17 (28.33%) SQL
3 10 (16.67%) Python
4 9 (15.00%) JavaScript
5 5 (8.33%) PL/SQL
6 4 (6.67%) ABAP
7 3 (5.00%) JCL
7 3 (5.00%) Scala
8 2 (3.33%) COBOL
9 1 (1.67%) Perl
9 1 (1.67%) R
9 1 (1.67%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 9 (15.00%) Security Cleared
2 7 (11.67%) SC Cleared
3 6 (10.00%) Degree
4 4 (6.67%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (3.33%) BPSS Clearance
5 2 (3.33%) CISM
5 2 (3.33%) CISSP
6 1 (1.67%) AWS Certification
6 1 (1.67%) ISTQB
6 1 (1.67%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
6 1 (1.67%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (11.67%) QA
2 2 (3.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 2 (3.33%) NIST
2 2 (3.33%) PCI DSS
3 1 (1.67%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 15 (25.00%) Docker
2 1 (1.67%) Time Sharing Option
Systems Management
1 8 (13.33%) Kubernetes
2 2 (3.33%) Terraform
3 1 (1.67%) CA Endevor
3 1 (1.67%) HP ALM
3 1 (1.67%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 12 (20.00%) Oracle
2 6 (10.00%) SAP
3 5 (8.33%) ServiceNow
3 5 (8.33%) Siebel
4 4 (6.67%) Microsoft
5 2 (3.33%) AVEVA
5 2 (3.33%) Databricks
5 2 (3.33%) IBM
5 2 (3.33%) Rockwell
5 2 (3.33%) Siemens
6 1 (1.67%) Adobe
6 1 (1.67%) Ariba
6 1 (1.67%) HP
6 1 (1.67%) TIBCO