Performance Optimisation Contracts in the UK excluding London

Performance Optimisation
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Performance Optimisation skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Performance Optimisation 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 238 330 426
Rank change year-on-year +92 +96 +39
Contract jobs citing Performance Optimisation 98 69 36
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 0.77% 0.33% 0.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.85% 0.39% 0.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 77 43 23
10th Percentile £400 £371 £386
25th Percentile £425 £413 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £538 £500
Median % change year-on-year -11.63% +7.50% -16.67%
75th Percentile £545 £597 £675
90th Percentile £621 £680 -
UK median daily rate £504 £565 £520
% change year-on-year -10.80% +8.65% -13.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 2 3
10th Percentile £22.76 £55.49 -
25th Percentile £23.17 £56.22 -
Median hourly rate £24.80 £57.57 £52.13
Median % change year-on-year -56.92% +10.44% +7.48%
75th Percentile £27.36 £59.04 -
90th Percentile £28.34 £59.85 -
UK median hourly rate £24.80 £57.57 £52.13
% change year-on-year -56.92% +10.44% +7.48%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

Performance 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 11,543 17,602 21,544
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 90.42% 84.74% 89.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,249 10,520 14,947
10th Percentile £235 £250 £255
25th Percentile £375 £380 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £483 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.50% - +5.26%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £662 £688 £688
UK median daily rate £520 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 825 2,048 1,307
10th Percentile £14.20 £12.33 £11.00
25th Percentile £17.30 £15.28 £16.00
Median hourly rate £27.50 £37.34 £36.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.35% +3.72% +80.00%
75th Percentile £64.50 £60.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £72.98
UK median hourly rate £29.00 £35.65 £37.30
% change year-on-year -18.65% -4.42% +49.20%

Performance Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

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

Job vacancy trend for Performance Optimisation in the UK excluding London

Performance Optimisation
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

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

Daily rate trend for Performance Optimisation in the UK excluding London

Performance Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Performance Optimisation in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Performance Optimisation in the UK excluding London

Performance Optimisation
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

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

Hourly rate trend for Performance Optimisation in the UK excluding London

Performance 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 Performance Optimisation within the UK excluding London 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
North of England +45 39 £492 +15.76% 81
South East +40 24 £453 -24.58% 82
North West +32 24 £492 +15.76% 57
Yorkshire +17 13 £513 -6.82% 18
Scotland - 13 £440 - 10
South West +34 8 £550 +2.33% 21
Midlands +23 6 £545 -7.23% 36
East of England +34 5 £450 - 22
Northern Ireland - 5 £475 - 4
West Midlands +14 3 £550 +52.78% 22
East Midlands +11 3 £410 -39.82% 10
North East - 1 £430 - 7
Wales - 1 £650 - 5
Performance Optimisation
UK

Performance 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:

Application Platforms
1 5 (5.10%) SharePoint
2 4 (4.08%) Anypoint
2 4 (4.08%) Confluence
2 4 (4.08%) Mule
3 3 (3.06%) Moodle
4 2 (2.04%) Apache
4 2 (2.04%) Apache Airflow
4 2 (2.04%) Apache Spark
4 2 (2.04%) SAS
5 1 (1.02%) CMS
5 1 (1.02%) Gunicorn
5 1 (1.02%) Oracle Service Bus
5 1 (1.02%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 4 (4.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (2.04%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (2.04%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (1.02%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 31 (31.63%) Azure
2 26 (26.53%) AWS
3 16 (16.33%) GCP
4 9 (9.18%) Serverless
5 5 (5.10%) Amazon S3
5 5 (5.10%) Azure AKS
5 5 (5.10%) Azure Data Factory
5 5 (5.10%) Azure DevOps
5 5 (5.10%) Microsoft 365
5 5 (5.10%) Microsoft Purview
5 5 (5.10%) OneDrive
5 5 (5.10%) Power Platform
6 4 (4.08%) AWS Lambda
6 4 (4.08%) Azure Functions
6 4 (4.08%) Google Compute Engine
7 3 (3.06%) CloudFront
7 3 (3.06%) GitHub
8 2 (2.04%) GitHub Actions
8 2 (2.04%) OCI
8 2 (2.04%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 6 (6.12%) 5G
1 6 (6.12%) LTE
1 6 (6.12%) Radio Access Network
2 4 (4.08%) 4G
2 4 (4.08%) Firewall
2 4 (4.08%) HTTPS
3 3 (3.06%) 5G NR
3 3 (3.06%) Network Security
4 2 (2.04%) BGP
4 2 (2.04%) MPLS
4 2 (2.04%) OSPF
4 2 (2.04%) SNA
4 2 (2.04%) TCP/IP
4 2 (2.04%) VLAN
4 2 (2.04%) VPN
5 1 (1.02%) 3GPP
5 1 (1.02%) DWDM
5 1 (1.02%) Kerberos
5 1 (1.02%) SSH
5 1 (1.02%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (9.18%) PostgreSQL
2 5 (5.10%) Data Lake
2 5 (5.10%) Data Warehouse
2 5 (5.10%) DB2
2 5 (5.10%) Power BI
2 5 (5.10%) Redis
2 5 (5.10%) Relational Database
2 5 (5.10%) Tableau
3 4 (4.08%) Amazon Redshift
3 4 (4.08%) Azure SQL Database
3 4 (4.08%) Big Data
3 4 (4.08%) BigQuery
3 4 (4.08%) SQL Server
4 3 (3.06%) Data Mining
4 3 (3.06%) Oracle Database
5 2 (2.04%) Essbase
5 2 (2.04%) Hadoop
5 2 (2.04%) MongoDB
5 2 (2.04%) MySQL
5 2 (2.04%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 9 (9.18%) Git
2 7 (7.14%) JIRA
3 3 (3.06%) Jenkins
3 3 (3.06%) PHPUnit
3 3 (3.06%) Postman
3 3 (3.06%) Storybook
4 2 (2.04%) JUnit
5 1 (1.02%) Appium
5 1 (1.02%) Bitbucket
5 1 (1.02%) Cypress.io
5 1 (1.02%) Flyway
5 1 (1.02%) Gerrit
5 1 (1.02%) GitLab
5 1 (1.02%) Grunt
5 1 (1.02%) gulp
5 1 (1.02%) Liquibase
5 1 (1.02%) Maven
5 1 (1.02%) SonarQube
5 1 (1.02%) Vite
5 1 (1.02%) webpack
General
1 34 (34.69%) Social Skills
2 14 (14.29%) Finance
3 13 (13.27%) Analytical Skills
4 10 (10.20%) Banking
5 9 (9.18%) Telecoms
6 8 (8.16%) Public Sector
7 2 (2.04%) Financial Institution
7 2 (2.04%) Front Office
7 2 (2.04%) Retail
8 1 (1.02%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (1.02%) Influencing Skills
8 1 (1.02%) Organisational Skills
8 1 (1.02%) Presentation Skills
8 1 (1.02%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 26 (26.53%) Developer
2 24 (24.49%) Architect
3 11 (11.22%) Data Engineer
4 8 (8.16%) Senior
5 6 (6.12%) Java Developer
6 5 (5.10%) Data Architect
7 4 (4.08%) Administrator
7 4 (4.08%) Cloud Engineer
7 4 (4.08%) Consultant
7 4 (4.08%) Designer
7 4 (4.08%) DevOps Engineer
7 4 (4.08%) MuleSoft Developer
7 4 (4.08%) React Developer
7 4 (4.08%) Senior Architect
7 4 (4.08%) Solutions Designer
8 3 (3.06%) Backend Developer
8 3 (3.06%) ForgeRock Engineer
8 3 (3.06%) Moodle Developer
8 3 (3.06%) Senior Data Architect
8 3 (3.06%) Subject Matter Expert
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (15.31%) RESTful
2 12 (12.24%) SOAP
3 10 (10.20%) JSON
4 8 (8.16%) REST
4 8 (8.16%) XML
5 7 (7.14%) Kafka
5 7 (7.14%) OAuth
6 5 (5.10%) GraphQL
6 5 (5.10%) React
7 4 (4.08%) OAuth2
7 4 (4.08%) OpenAPI
7 4 (4.08%) OpenID
7 4 (4.08%) Prisma
7 4 (4.08%) RAML
7 4 (4.08%) Spring Boot
7 4 (4.08%) Swagger
8 3 (3.06%) AngularJS
8 3 (3.06%) Behat
8 3 (3.06%) D3.js
8 3 (3.06%) Node.js
Miscellaneous
1 6 (6.12%) Data Protection Act
2 5 (5.10%) Data Structures
2 5 (5.10%) Management Information System
3 4 (4.08%) Team-Oriented Environment
4 3 (3.06%) Cloud Native
4 3 (3.06%) Data Centre
4 3 (3.06%) e-Learning
4 3 (3.06%) Legacy Systems
4 3 (3.06%) Mainframe
4 3 (3.06%) PKI
4 3 (3.06%) Self-Motivation
4 3 (3.06%) Taxonomies
4 3 (3.06%) VLE
5 2 (2.04%) Algorithms
5 2 (2.04%) Device Driver
5 2 (2.04%) Equities
5 2 (2.04%) Greenfield Project
5 2 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
5 2 (2.04%) Mobile App
5 2 (2.04%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 12 (12.24%) Linux
2 6 (6.12%) Unix
3 3 (3.06%) Windows
3 3 (3.06%) zOS
4 2 (2.04%) Embedded Linux
5 1 (1.02%) AIX
5 1 (1.02%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (1.02%) Solaris
5 1 (1.02%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 39 (39.80%) Problem-Solving
2 24 (24.49%) Agile
2 24 (24.49%) DevOps
3 22 (22.45%) CI/CD
4 17 (17.35%) ETL
5 15 (15.31%) Data Pipeline
6 14 (14.29%) Technical Leadership
7 13 (13.27%) Analytics
7 13 (13.27%) Data Governance
7 13 (13.27%) Microservices
8 12 (12.24%) Data Protection
8 12 (12.24%) Mentoring
8 12 (12.24%) Migration
8 12 (12.24%) Software Engineering
9 11 (11.22%) Data Engineering
9 11 (11.22%) Performance Tuning
10 10 (10.20%) Data Science
10 10 (10.20%) High Availability
11 9 (9.18%) Containerisation
11 9 (9.18%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 25 (25.51%) SQL
2 20 (20.41%) Python
3 10 (10.20%) Java
4 9 (9.18%) JavaScript
5 8 (8.16%) PowerShell
6 5 (5.10%) Scala
6 5 (5.10%) Shell Script
6 5 (5.10%) TypeScript
7 4 (4.08%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 4 (4.08%) DataWeave
7 4 (4.08%) PL/SQL
8 3 (3.06%) Bash
8 3 (3.06%) C++
8 3 (3.06%) JCL
8 3 (3.06%) PHP
8 3 (3.06%) REXX
9 2 (2.04%) C
10 1 (1.02%) ActionScript
10 1 (1.02%) C#
10 1 (1.02%) Perl
Qualifications
1 19 (19.39%) Security Cleared
2 15 (15.31%) SC Cleared
3 11 (11.22%) Degree
4 6 (6.12%) Computer Science Degree
5 4 (4.08%) Microsoft Certification
6 3 (3.06%) Master's Degree
7 2 (2.04%) AWS Certification
7 2 (2.04%) Azure Certification
7 2 (2.04%) CCIE
7 2 (2.04%) CCNP
7 2 (2.04%) Cisco Certification
7 2 (2.04%) JNCIE
7 2 (2.04%) TOGAF Certification
8 1 (1.02%) AWS Certified Developer
8 1 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (1.02%) CISSP
8 1 (1.02%) Linux+ Certification
8 1 (1.02%) OCP
8 1 (1.02%) Oracle Certification
8 1 (1.02%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (6.12%) GDPR
2 5 (5.10%) Data Quality
3 4 (4.08%) Accessibility
4 3 (3.06%) Disclosure Scotland
4 3 (3.06%) PCI DSS
5 2 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 2 (2.04%) WCAG
6 1 (1.02%) Government Security Classifications
6 1 (1.02%) HIPAA
6 1 (1.02%) ITGC
6 1 (1.02%) NCSC
6 1 (1.02%) QA
6 1 (1.02%) SOC 2
System Software
1 11 (11.22%) Docker
2 2 (2.04%) Active Directory
2 2 (2.04%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (1.02%) Embedded Firmware
3 1 (1.02%) Firmware
3 1 (1.02%) Job Entry Subsystem
3 1 (1.02%) KVM
3 1 (1.02%) Microcode
3 1 (1.02%) NFS
3 1 (1.02%) QEMU
3 1 (1.02%) Samba
3 1 (1.02%) Time Sharing Option
3 1 (1.02%) VMware Infrastructure
3 1 (1.02%) Xen
Systems Management
1 11 (11.22%) Terraform
2 9 (9.18%) Kubernetes
3 7 (7.14%) Ansible
4 3 (3.06%) Single Sign-On
5 2 (2.04%) BMC PATROL
5 2 (2.04%) Nagios
5 2 (2.04%) Tivoli NetView
6 1 (1.02%) NSN NetAct
6 1 (1.02%) Progress Chef
6 1 (1.02%) Puppet
6 1 (1.02%) SCCM
6 1 (1.02%) SELinux
6 1 (1.02%) yum
6 1 (1.02%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 16 (16.33%) Microsoft
2 11 (11.22%) Oracle
3 7 (7.14%) Databricks
3 7 (7.14%) MuleSoft
4 5 (5.10%) IBM
4 5 (5.10%) SAP
4 5 (5.10%) ServiceNow
5 4 (4.08%) Google
6 3 (3.06%) Cisco
6 3 (3.06%) DocuSign
6 3 (3.06%) ForgeRock
6 3 (3.06%) Ping Identity
6 3 (3.06%) Red Hat
7 2 (2.04%) BMC
7 2 (2.04%) Commvault
7 2 (2.04%) Ericsson
7 2 (2.04%) F5
7 2 (2.04%) Fortinet
7 2 (2.04%) Salesforce
7 2 (2.04%) Sybase