Cost Optimisation Contracts in the UK excluding London

Cost Optimization
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Cost Optimisation skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Cost Optimisation over the 6 months leading up to 28 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 297 377 430
Rank change year-on-year +80 +53 +52
Contract jobs citing Cost Optimisation 44 16 10
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 0.34% 0.078% 0.043%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.38% 0.093% 0.049%
Number of daily rates quoted 25 10 5
10th Percentile £459 £350 £463
25th Percentile £500 £394 £519
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £563 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% +2.27% -2.22%
75th Percentile £638 £684 £836
90th Percentile £700 £888 £842
UK median daily rate £525 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -4.55% - -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £35.00 - -
Median hourly rate £36.00 - -
75th Percentile £37.00 - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK median hourly rate £40.50 - £90.00

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

Cost Optimisation 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 UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 11,611 17,183 20,563
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 90.67% 83.60% 89.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,236 10,256 14,118
10th Percentile £235 £250 £260
25th Percentile £375 £378 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - +3.09%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £650 £688 £688
UK median daily rate £513 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -2.38% -4.55% +2.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 836 2,100 1,244
10th Percentile £13.85 £12.38 £10.63
25th Percentile £16.95 £15.38 £15.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £37.75 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -33.38% +7.86% +75.00%
75th Percentile £62.24 £61.30 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £27.50 £36.02 £36.40
% change year-on-year -23.66% -1.02% +41.73%

Cost Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings citing Cost Optimisation as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Cost Optimisation in the UK excluding London

Cost Optimisation
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Cost Optimisation in the UK excluding London.

Daily rate trend for Cost Optimisation in the UK excluding London

Cost Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cost Optimisation in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 28 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Cost Optimisation in the UK excluding London

Cost Optimisation
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Cost Optimisation in the UK excluding London.

Hourly rate trend for Cost Optimisation in the UK excluding London

Cost Optimisation
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 Cost Optimisation within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 28 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
North of England +20 15 £525 -6.67% 189
Scotland +15 11 £525 - 35
Midlands +23 10 £539 +53.86% 158
West Midlands +13 8 £539 +53.86% 87
North West +5 8 £525 -22.22% 91
Yorkshire +15 7 £466 +3.56% 77
South East +49 3 £578 -14.44% 228
East of England +31 3 £638 - 114
South West - 3 £625 - 105
East Midlands - 2 £588 - 61
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 10
Cost Optimisation
UK

Cost Optimisation
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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:

Applications
1 1 (2.27%) CATIA
Cloud Services
1 31 (70.45%) AWS
2 17 (38.64%) GitHub
3 12 (27.27%) Amazon S3
3 12 (27.27%) Azure
3 12 (27.27%) GitHub Actions
3 12 (27.27%) Serverless
4 11 (25.00%) AWS Lambda
5 10 (22.73%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 10 (22.73%) GCP
6 9 (20.45%) Amazon EC2
6 9 (20.45%) Amazon EKS
7 8 (18.18%) AWS CloudFormation
8 6 (13.64%) AWS CloudTrail
9 4 (9.09%) Amazon Cognito
9 4 (9.09%) Amazon GuardDuty
9 4 (9.09%) Microsoft 365
9 4 (9.09%) Virtual Private Cloud
10 3 (6.82%) Amazon ECS
10 3 (6.82%) Amazon SQS
10 3 (6.82%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 4 (9.09%) Firewall
1 4 (9.09%) Network Security
1 4 (9.09%) VPN
2 3 (6.82%) DNS
3 2 (4.55%) SSL
3 2 (4.55%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (22.73%) Amazon RDS
2 7 (15.91%) Data Warehouse
3 6 (13.64%) Oracle Database
4 5 (11.36%) DynamoDB
5 3 (6.82%) Amazon Athena
5 3 (6.82%) Parquet
6 2 (4.55%) BigQuery
7 1 (2.27%) Amazon Redshift
7 1 (2.27%) Data Lake
7 1 (2.27%) MongoDB
7 1 (2.27%) Oracle Reports
7 1 (2.27%) PostgreSQL
7 1 (2.27%) Redis
Development Applications
1 11 (25.00%) Jenkins
2 7 (15.91%) GitLab
3 4 (9.09%) Git
4 2 (4.55%) Bitbucket
General
1 18 (40.91%) Social Skills
2 9 (20.45%) Finance
2 9 (20.45%) Public Sector
3 3 (6.82%) Analytical Skills
4 2 (4.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 2 (4.55%) Telecoms
5 1 (2.27%) Automotive
5 1 (2.27%) Banking
5 1 (2.27%) Billing
5 1 (2.27%) Influencing Skills
5 1 (2.27%) Legal
5 1 (2.27%) Manufacturing
5 1 (2.27%) Military
5 1 (2.27%) Organisational Skills
5 1 (2.27%) Retail
Job Titles
1 8 (18.18%) DevOps Engineer
2 7 (15.91%) Architect
2 7 (15.91%) Cloud Engineer
3 6 (13.64%) Developer
3 6 (13.64%) Senior
4 5 (11.36%) AWS Developer
5 4 (9.09%) AWS Engineer
5 4 (9.09%) Data Architect
5 4 (9.09%) Lead
5 4 (9.09%) Senior Cloud Engineer
5 4 (9.09%) Senior Developer
6 3 (6.82%) Cloud Architect
6 3 (6.82%) Cloud Developer
6 3 (6.82%) DBA
6 3 (6.82%) Lead DevOps
6 3 (6.82%) Lead DevOps Engineer
6 3 (6.82%) Oracle DBA
7 2 (4.55%) Operations Engineer
7 2 (4.55%) Platform Engineer
7 2 (4.55%) Product Owner
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (9.09%) AWS CDK
1 4 (9.09%) Kafka
1 4 (9.09%) OAuth
1 4 (9.09%) OAuth2
1 4 (9.09%) OpenID
1 4 (9.09%) SAML
2 3 (6.82%) Elastic Stack
2 3 (6.82%) JSON
3 2 (4.55%) Node.js
4 1 (2.27%) AWS Amplify
4 1 (2.27%) GraphQL
4 1 (2.27%) Prisma
4 1 (2.27%) React
4 1 (2.27%) RESTful
4 1 (2.27%) TanStack
4 1 (2.27%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 9 (20.45%) Cloud Native
2 3 (6.82%) Oracle Licensing
2 3 (6.82%) Replication
3 2 (4.55%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
3 2 (4.55%) Hybrid Cloud
3 2 (4.55%) Product Ownership
4 1 (2.27%) Culture of Ownership
4 1 (2.27%) Data Structures
4 1 (2.27%) FMCG
4 1 (2.27%) Management Information System
4 1 (2.27%) Microsoft Licensing
4 1 (2.27%) Onboarding
4 1 (2.27%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 5 (11.36%) Linux
2 3 (6.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 3 (6.82%) Windows
3 2 (4.55%) Windows Server
4 1 (2.27%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 25 (56.82%) CI/CD
2 23 (52.27%) DevOps
3 22 (50.00%) Infrastructure as Code
4 16 (36.36%) Problem-Solving
5 11 (25.00%) Agile
6 10 (22.73%) Containerisation
7 9 (20.45%) Cost Management
7 9 (20.45%) Infrastructure Automation
8 8 (18.18%) High Availability
8 8 (18.18%) Identity Access Management
9 7 (15.91%) Analytics
9 7 (15.91%) Continuous Integration
9 7 (15.91%) Migration
9 7 (15.91%) RBAC
9 7 (15.91%) Software Engineering
9 7 (15.91%) Stakeholder Management
10 6 (13.64%) Architectural Design
10 6 (13.64%) Change Management
10 6 (13.64%) Disaster Recovery
10 6 (13.64%) FinOps
Programming Languages
1 13 (29.55%) Python
2 6 (13.64%) Shell Script
3 4 (9.09%) Bash
3 4 (9.09%) SQL
4 2 (4.55%) Java
4 2 (4.55%) JavaScript
4 2 (4.55%) Kotlin
4 2 (4.55%) PowerShell
5 1 (2.27%) Bicep
5 1 (2.27%) Groovy
5 1 (2.27%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 13 (29.55%) AWS Certification
1 13 (29.55%) Security Cleared
2 8 (18.18%) SC Cleared
3 7 (15.91%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
3 7 (15.91%) Degree
4 5 (11.36%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (6.82%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
6 1 (2.27%) ACCA
6 1 (2.27%) Azure Certification
6 1 (2.27%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (9.09%) GDPR
1 4 (9.09%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (6.82%) Data Quality
2 3 (6.82%) NIST
2 3 (6.82%) SOC 2
3 2 (4.55%) Actionable Recommendations
3 2 (4.55%) Disclosure Scotland
4 1 (2.27%) HIPAA
4 1 (2.27%) NCSC
4 1 (2.27%) QA
System Software
1 12 (27.27%) Docker
2 3 (6.82%) Oracle RAC
3 1 (2.27%) Active Directory
3 1 (2.27%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 18 (40.91%) Terraform
2 16 (36.36%) Kubernetes
3 10 (22.73%) Ansible
4 6 (13.64%) Prometheus
5 5 (11.36%) Grafana
6 3 (6.82%) Opsview
6 3 (6.82%) Oracle RMAN
7 2 (4.55%) Kustomize
7 2 (4.55%) Puppet
8 1 (2.27%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 6 (13.64%) Google
1 6 (13.64%) Microsoft
1 6 (13.64%) Oracle
2 5 (11.36%) Cisco
3 3 (6.82%) PagerDuty
3 3 (6.82%) Splunk
4 2 (4.55%) Salesforce
5 1 (2.27%) Apple
5 1 (2.27%) Broadcom
5 1 (2.27%) Databricks
5 1 (2.27%) Dynatrace
5 1 (2.27%) MobileIron
5 1 (2.27%) Spotify
5 1 (2.27%) VMware