Senior Systems Engineer Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Senior System Engineer
UK > UK excluding London

The median Senior System Engineer daily rate in the UK excluding London is £70, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 11 February 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 400 332 386
Rank change year-on-year -68 +54 +61
Contract jobs requiring a Senior Systems Engineer 12 9 27
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.061% 0.067% 0.13%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.067% 0.072% 0.14%
Number of daily rates quoted 4 1 9
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £70 £438 £525
Median % change year-on-year -84.00% -16.67% +5.00%
75th Percentile £166 £456 £563
90th Percentile £339 - £574
UK median daily rate £262 £424 £525
% change year-on-year -38.13% -19.33% +5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 3 7
10th Percentile £42.57 - £42.93
25th Percentile £57.17 £37.40 £43.75
Median hourly rate £81.50 £38.85 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +109.78% -40.23% +36.58%
75th Percentile - £54.53 £70.66
90th Percentile - £63.06 £74.31
UK median hourly rate £58.74 £38.85 £65.00
% change year-on-year +51.18% -40.23% +23.81%

All Contract IT Job Roles
UK excluding London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the UK excluding London. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK excluding London with a recognized job title 18,012 12,438 19,502
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.85% 92.50% 93.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,920 7,471 12,259
10th Percentile £219 £210 £213
25th Percentile £375 £363 £368
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £479 £489
Median % change year-on-year -0.84% -2.04% -2.20%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £595
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,906 641 1,904
10th Percentile £14.25 £15.22 £12.86
25th Percentile £18.26 £20.30 £16.00
Median hourly rate £29.60 £31.76 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.80% -9.26% -
75th Percentile £62.50 £64.50 £61.66
90th Percentile £70.00 £74.44 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £30.00 £33.54 £35.00
% change year-on-year -10.55% -4.17% -2.51%

Senior Systems Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Senior Systems Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Senior Systems Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Senior Systems Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Senior Systems Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Senior Systems Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London

Senior Systems Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Senior Systems Engineer in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 11 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Senior Systems Engineer in the UK excluding London

Senior Systems Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Senior Systems Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Senior Systems Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London

Senior Systems Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Senior Systems Engineer in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 11 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Senior Systems Engineer in the UK excluding London

Senior Systems Engineer
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Senior Systems Engineer within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 11 February 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
North of England -55 6 £70 - 12
Scotland - 5 £70 - 1
North West -25 4 - - 11
North East - 2 £70 -
East of England -21 1 £454 +3.77% 9
Senior Systems Engineer
UK

Senior Systems Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 11 February 2026, Senior Systems Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the UK excluding London region featuring Senior Systems Engineer in the job title.

1 5 (41.67%) SC Cleared
1 5 (41.67%) Security Cleared
2 3 (25.00%) Validation
2 3 (25.00%) Verification and Validation
3 2 (16.67%) IBM
3 2 (16.67%) Incident Management
4 1 (8.33%) Amazon EC2
4 1 (8.33%) Amazon RDS
4 1 (8.33%) Amazon S3
4 1 (8.33%) Ansible
4 1 (8.33%) AWS
4 1 (8.33%) C#
4 1 (8.33%) CI/CD
4 1 (8.33%) ClearCase
4 1 (8.33%) Configuration Management
4 1 (8.33%) Containerisation
4 1 (8.33%) Data Engineering
4 1 (8.33%) Docker
4 1 (8.33%) ETL
4 1 (8.33%) Functional Testing
4 1 (8.33%) Git
4 1 (8.33%) Groovy
4 1 (8.33%) IBM Sterling
4 1 (8.33%) Incident Response
4 1 (8.33%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1 (8.33%) Java
4 1 (8.33%) Jenkins
4 1 (8.33%) Kubernetes
4 1 (8.33%) Linux
4 1 (8.33%) Mac OS

Senior Systems Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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:

Cloud Services
1 1 (8.33%) Amazon EC2
1 1 (8.33%) Amazon S3
1 1 (8.33%) AWS
Communications & Networking
1 1 (8.33%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (8.33%) Amazon RDS
1 1 (8.33%) Pentaho
Development Applications
1 1 (8.33%) ClearCase
1 1 (8.33%) Git
1 1 (8.33%) Jenkins
1 1 (8.33%) Rational DOORS
General
1 4 (33.33%) Social Skills
2 3 (25.00%) Aerospace
2 3 (25.00%) Banking
2 3 (25.00%) Electronics
2 3 (25.00%) Influencing Skills
2 3 (25.00%) Retail Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (8.33%) Middleware
1 1 (8.33%) RabbitMQ
1 1 (8.33%) XML
1 1 (8.33%) XSD
Miscellaneous
1 2 (16.67%) SCADA
2 1 (8.33%) Clustering
2 1 (8.33%) Data Centre
2 1 (8.33%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 1 (8.33%) Linux
1 1 (8.33%) Mac OS
1 1 (8.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3 (25.00%) Validation
1 3 (25.00%) Verification and Validation
2 2 (16.67%) Incident Management
3 1 (8.33%) CI/CD
3 1 (8.33%) Configuration Management
3 1 (8.33%) Containerisation
3 1 (8.33%) Data Engineering
3 1 (8.33%) ETL
3 1 (8.33%) Functional Testing
3 1 (8.33%) Incident Response
3 1 (8.33%) Infrastructure as Code
3 1 (8.33%) Migration
3 1 (8.33%) Performance Monitoring
3 1 (8.33%) Process Improvement
3 1 (8.33%) Product Strategy
3 1 (8.33%) Project Planning
3 1 (8.33%) Requirements Analysis
3 1 (8.33%) Service Delivery
3 1 (8.33%) Service Management
3 1 (8.33%) UML
Programming Languages
1 1 (8.33%) C#
1 1 (8.33%) Groovy
1 1 (8.33%) Java
1 1 (8.33%) PowerShell
1 1 (8.33%) Python
1 1 (8.33%) SQL
Qualifications
1 5 (41.67%) SC Cleared
1 5 (41.67%) Security Cleared
System Software
1 1 (8.33%) Docker
1 1 (8.33%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1 (8.33%) Ansible
1 1 (8.33%) Kubernetes
1 1 (8.33%) Terraform
Vendors
1 2 (16.67%) IBM
2 1 (8.33%) IBM Sterling
2 1 (8.33%) Oracle
2 1 (8.33%) Red Hat
2 1 (8.33%) ServiceNow