Service-Level Objective Contract Job Trends in the South West

Service-Level Objectives (SLO)
England > South West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the South West requiring Service-Level Objective skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 19 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 127 109 -
Rank change year-on-year -18 - -
Contract jobs citing Service-Level Objective 10 3 0
As % of all contract jobs in the South West 0.30% 0.18% -
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.38% 0.20% -
Number of daily rates quoted 6 1 0
10th Percentile £400 - -
25th Percentile £408 £643 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £438 £655 -
Median % change year-on-year -33.21% - -
75th Percentile £444 £668 -
90th Percentile £447 - -
England median daily rate £525 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% +4.76%

All Process & Methodology Skills
South West

Service-Level Objective 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 South West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 2,635 1,536 2,622
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West 78.52% 90.67% 82.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,438 957 1,675
10th Percentile £323 £228 £222
25th Percentile £413 £400 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.46% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £606 £623 £625
90th Percentile £713 £688 £700
England median daily rate £513 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -2.38% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 453 158 343
10th Percentile £16.62 £18.18 £13.88
25th Percentile £25.77 £18.87 £29.75
Median hourly rate £57.50 £58.75 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -2.13% +6.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £65.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £70.00 £77.50
England median hourly rate £45.78 £29.00 £36.50
% change year-on-year +57.86% -20.55% +0.29%

Service-Level Objective
Job Vacancy Trend in the South West

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Service-Level Objective relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South West.

Service-Level Objective job vacancy trend in the South West

Service-Level Objective
Daily Rate Trend in the South West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Service-Level Objective.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing Service-Level Objective

Service-Level Objective
Contract Job Locations in the South West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Service-Level Objective within the South West region over the 6 months to 19 May 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
Somerset - 7 £438 -
Bristol -18 2 - - 3
Dorset - 1 - -
Service-Level Objective
England

Service-Level Objective
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South 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 7 (70.00%) IIS
Cloud Services
1 8 (80.00%) AWS
1 8 (80.00%) Azure
2 7 (70.00%) Azure Monitor
3 3 (30.00%) Azure AKS
3 3 (30.00%) GCP
3 3 (30.00%) Google Kubernetes Engine
4 2 (20.00%) Apigee
5 1 (10.00%) Amazon EKS
5 1 (10.00%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 1 (10.00%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (70.00%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 3 (30.00%) Jenkins
2 2 (20.00%) Git
3 1 (10.00%) GitLab
3 1 (10.00%) Spinnaker
Job Titles
1 9 (90.00%) Site Engineer
1 9 (90.00%) Site Reliability Engineer
2 6 (60.00%) Azure Engineer
3 3 (30.00%) Migration Engineer
3 3 (30.00%) PowerShell Engineer
3 3 (30.00%) Windows Engineer
4 1 (10.00%) Azure DevOps Engineer
4 1 (10.00%) DevOps Engineer
4 1 (10.00%) GCP Engineer
4 1 (10.00%) Windows DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (70.00%) .NET
1 7 (70.00%) .NET Framework
Miscellaneous
1 7 (70.00%) Legacy Systems
2 6 (60.00%) Legacy Code
3 1 (10.00%) Cloud Native
Operating Systems
1 7 (70.00%) Windows
1 7 (70.00%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (100.00%) Site Reliability Engineering
2 9 (90.00%) Incident Management
3 8 (80.00%) Disaster Recovery
3 8 (80.00%) High Availability
4 7 (70.00%) DevOps
4 7 (70.00%) Root Cause Analysis
5 6 (60.00%) Graceful Degradation
5 6 (60.00%) Incident Response
5 6 (60.00%) Runbook
6 3 (30.00%) CI/CD
6 3 (30.00%) Infrastructure as Code
6 3 (30.00%) Migration
6 3 (30.00%) Observability
6 3 (30.00%) Problem-Solving
7 2 (20.00%) API Management
7 2 (20.00%) Cloud Security
7 2 (20.00%) Collaborative Engineering
8 1 (10.00%) Containerisation
8 1 (10.00%) GitOps
8 1 (10.00%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 9 (90.00%) PowerShell
2 3 (30.00%) Bash
2 3 (30.00%) Python
3 2 (20.00%) Groovy
4 1 (10.00%) C#
4 1 (10.00%) Go
Qualifications
1 5 (50.00%) SC Cleared
1 5 (50.00%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (50.00%) QA
System Software
1 1 (10.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 3 (30.00%) Kubernetes
1 3 (30.00%) Terraform
2 1 (10.00%) Argo
2 1 (10.00%) Grafana
2 1 (10.00%) Istio
2 1 (10.00%) Kustomize
2 1 (10.00%) linkerd
2 1 (10.00%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 3 (30.00%) Dynatrace
2 2 (20.00%) Google
3 1 (10.00%) Splunk