3rd Line Infrastructure Support Contract Job Trends

Third Line Infrastructure Support
UK

The median Third Line Infrastructure Support daily rate in the UK is £575, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 18 September 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

 6 months to
18 Sep 2025		 Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 555 552 632
Rank change year-on-year -3 +80 +189
Contract jobs requiring a 3rd Line Infrastructure Support 13 7 19
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.039% 0.018% 0.039%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.043% 0.020% 0.041%
Number of daily rates quoted 11 7 10
10th Percentile £450 £314 £274
25th Percentile £563 £351 £284
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £375 £350
Median % change year-on-year +53.33% +7.14% +7.69%
75th Percentile £594 £444 £409
90th Percentile £623 £446 £425
UK excluding London median daily rate £575 £375 £338
% change year-on-year +53.33% +11.11% +25.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £29.00 - -
Median hourly rate £30.00 - -
75th Percentile £31.00 - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - -

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. 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 with a recognized job title 30,003 35,798 46,379
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.06% 92.95% 94.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,960 22,064 31,748
10th Percentile £278 £300 £300
25th Percentile £400 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £623 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,577 1,684 1,483
10th Percentile £13.75 £14.73 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.30 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -41.51% -3.37% +71.15%
75th Percentile £52.50 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £45.00 £43.00
% change year-on-year -44.11% +4.65% +95.45%

3rd Line Infrastructure Support
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured 3rd Line Infrastructure Support in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for 3rd Line Infrastructure Support in the UK

3rd Line Infrastructure Support
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for 3rd Line Infrastructure Support job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for 3rd Line Infrastructure Support job vacancies in the UK

3rd Line Infrastructure Support
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing 3rd Line Infrastructure Support over the 6 months to 18 September 2025.

Daily rate histogram for 3rd Line Infrastructure Support in the UK

3rd Line Infrastructure Support
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for 3rd Line Infrastructure Support job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for 3rd Line Infrastructure Support job vacancies in the UK

3rd Line Infrastructure Support
Top 6 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing 3rd Line Infrastructure Support within the UK over the 6 months to 18 September 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
England +27 13 £575 +70.37%
UK excluding London -4 10 £575 +53.33%
South East +28 9 £575 +53.33%
London - 1 £450 -
Work from Home - 1 - -
East of England - 1 £350 -

3rd Line Infrastructure Support Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 18 September 2025, 3rd Line Infrastructure Support contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring 3rd Line Infrastructure Support in the job title.

1 13 (100.00%) VMware
1 13 (100.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 11 (84.62%) Firewall
2 11 (84.62%) Windows
3 10 (76.92%) DHCP
3 10 (76.92%) DNS
3 10 (76.92%) HP
3 10 (76.92%) VMware Infrastructure
3 10 (76.92%) Hyper-V
4 9 (69.23%) PaaS
4 9 (69.23%) IaaS
4 9 (69.23%) Microsoft
4 9 (69.23%) Active Directory
4 9 (69.23%) Data Centre
4 9 (69.23%) DevOps
5 8 (61.54%) Windows Server
5 8 (61.54%) Linux
5 8 (61.54%) AWS
6 7 (53.85%) PowerShell
6 7 (53.85%) Google
6 7 (53.85%) PKI
6 7 (53.85%) Degree
6 7 (53.85%) DV Cleared
6 7 (53.85%) Security Cleared
6 7 (53.85%) Amazon RDS
6 7 (53.85%) Elasticsearch
6 7 (53.85%) OpenShift
6 7 (53.85%) Ansible
6 7 (53.85%) Docker
6 7 (53.85%) Puppet

3rd Line Infrastructure Support Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities 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 7 (53.85%) Microsoft Exchange
Cloud Services
1 9 (69.23%) IaaS
1 9 (69.23%) PaaS
2 8 (61.54%) AWS
3 7 (53.85%) GCP
3 7 (53.85%) OpenShift
4 4 (30.77%) Azure
Communications & Networking
1 11 (84.62%) Firewall
2 10 (76.92%) DHCP
2 10 (76.92%) DNS
3 7 (53.85%) SMTP
3 7 (53.85%) VPN
4 4 (30.77%) SAN
5 3 (23.08%) WAN
6 2 (15.38%) Fibre Channel
6 2 (15.38%) TCP/IP
6 2 (15.38%) Wi-Fi
7 1 (7.69%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (53.85%) Amazon RDS
1 7 (53.85%) Big Data
1 7 (53.85%) Elasticsearch
General
1 6 (46.15%) Public Sector
2 2 (15.38%) Local Government
3 1 (7.69%) Social Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (15.38%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 9 (69.23%) Data Centre
2 7 (53.85%) Clustering
2 7 (53.85%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 11 (84.62%) Windows
2 8 (61.54%) Linux
2 8 (61.54%) Windows Server
3 2 (15.38%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 13 (100.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 9 (69.23%) DevOps
3 7 (53.85%) Artificial Intelligence
3 7 (53.85%) Machine Learning
3 7 (53.85%) Software Deployment
4 3 (23.08%) Cybersecurity
5 2 (15.38%) Infrastructure as Code
5 2 (15.38%) ITIL
5 2 (15.38%) Performance Optimisation
5 2 (15.38%) Security Patching
6 1 (7.69%) Customer Service
6 1 (7.69%) Digital Transformation Programme
6 1 (7.69%) Migration
6 1 (7.69%) Problem-Solving
6 1 (7.69%) Root Cause Analysis
Programming Languages
1 7 (53.85%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 7 (53.85%) Degree
1 7 (53.85%) DV Cleared
1 7 (53.85%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (15.38%) SLA
System Software
1 10 (76.92%) Hyper-V
1 10 (76.92%) VMware Infrastructure
2 9 (69.23%) Active Directory
3 7 (53.85%) BitLocker
3 7 (53.85%) Docker
3 7 (53.85%) Microsoft App-V
3 7 (53.85%) Terminal Services
3 7 (53.85%) VMware ESXi
4 2 (15.38%) DFS Replication
4 2 (15.38%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 7 (53.85%) Ansible
1 7 (53.85%) Kubernetes
1 7 (53.85%) Nagios
1 7 (53.85%) Puppet
1 7 (53.85%) vCenter Server
1 7 (53.85%) vMotion
2 2 (15.38%) FortiGate
3 1 (7.69%) Microsoft Intune
3 1 (7.69%) Terraform
Vendors
1 13 (100.00%) VMware
2 10 (76.92%) HP
3 9 (69.23%) Microsoft
4 7 (53.85%) Citrix
4 7 (53.85%) Google
4 7 (53.85%) Symantec
5 2 (15.38%) Palo Alto
6 1 (7.69%) Red Hat
6 1 (7.69%) Veritas