Cost Management Contracts

Cost Management
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Cost Management skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Cost Management over the 6 months leading up to 2 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 410 510 564
Rank change year-on-year +100 +54 +117
Contract jobs citing Cost Management 111 88 148
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.38% 0.20% 0.25%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.42% 0.23% 0.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 77 60 82
10th Percentile £363 £374 £319
25th Percentile £413 £407 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £650
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -23.08% +20.93%
75th Percentile £638 £595 £743
90th Percentile £700 £733 £749
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £430 £525
% change year-on-year +13.37% -18.10% +5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 10 0
10th Percentile £39.50 £46.00 -
25th Percentile £46.25 £50.00 -
Median hourly rate £46.30 £52.50 -
Median % change year-on-year -11.81% - -
75th Percentile - £61.25 -
90th Percentile £47.77 £65.15 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £46.30 £52.50 -
% change year-on-year -11.81% - -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Cost Management 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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 26,648 37,562 53,490
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.82% 86.33% 89.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,170 24,188 37,115
10th Percentile £308 £300 £325
25th Percentile £413 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +4.76%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £650
90th Percentile £745 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.50% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,066 2,451 1,742
10th Percentile £14.35 £12.75 £11.00
25th Percentile £18.26 £16.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £29.00 £35.50 £36.42
Median % change year-on-year -18.31% -2.53% +45.69%
75th Percentile £61.50 £59.95 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £36.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year -24.66% +4.29% +75.00%

Cost Management
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Cost Management as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Cost Management in the UK

Cost Management
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Cost Management.

Daily rate trend for Cost Management in the UK

Cost Management
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cost Management over the 6 months to 2 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Cost Management in the UK

Cost Management
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Cost Management.

Hourly rate trend for Cost Management in the UK

Cost Management
Top 14 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Cost Management within the UK over the 6 months to 2 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
England +69 94 £533 +6.50% 192
London +82 60 £525 -19.23% 64
UK excluding London +44 41 £488 +13.37% 153
Work from Home +56 37 £545 +27.49% 66
South East +58 15 £465 -22.50% 41
North of England +4 10 £588 +41.57% 35
Scotland +21 9 £375 +25.00% 16
North West +17 8 £588 +6.82% 22
Midlands +17 3 £380 -30.91% 30
West Midlands +15 3 £380 -36.67% 17
East of England - 3 £550 - 17
Yorkshire -16 1 - - 10
North East - 1 - - 3
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 1

Cost Management
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 6 (5.41%) SharePoint
2 5 (4.50%) Confluence
3 2 (1.80%) CMS
4 1 (0.90%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (0.90%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 10 (9.01%) Microsoft Project
2 5 (4.50%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (4.50%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.90%) Oracle Smart View
3 1 (0.90%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (1.80%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.90%) Dynamics NAV
2 1 (0.90%) SAP CO
Cloud Services
1 40 (36.04%) Azure
2 35 (31.53%) Serverless
3 32 (28.83%) AWS
4 24 (21.62%) Azure AKS
5 23 (20.72%) Azure DevOps
6 21 (18.92%) AWS CloudFormation
7 16 (14.41%) Microsoft 365
8 15 (13.51%) Azure Monitor
8 15 (13.51%) Azure Sentinel
9 14 (12.61%) Amazon EKS
9 14 (12.61%) SaaS
10 13 (11.71%) Amazon EC2
10 13 (11.71%) GCP
10 13 (11.71%) PaaS
11 12 (10.81%) AWS Lambda
12 9 (8.11%) GitHub
12 9 (8.11%) Power Platform
13 8 (7.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 8 (7.21%) Entra ID
13 8 (7.21%) IaaS
Communications & Networking
1 15 (13.51%) Firewall
2 7 (6.31%) DNS
2 7 (6.31%) HTTP
2 7 (6.31%) Internet
2 7 (6.31%) TCP/IP
3 5 (4.50%) VPN
4 1 (0.90%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 13 (11.71%) Amazon RDS
2 11 (9.91%) NoSQL
3 9 (8.11%) Power BI
4 7 (6.31%) Amazon Aurora
5 6 (5.41%) Azure SQL Database
6 4 (3.60%) Data Lake
7 3 (2.70%) PostgreSQL
8 2 (1.80%) BigQuery
8 2 (1.80%) Data Warehouse
8 2 (1.80%) Oracle Database
8 2 (1.80%) Redis
9 1 (0.90%) Amazon QuickSight
9 1 (0.90%) Cloudera CDH
9 1 (0.90%) DocumentDB
9 1 (0.90%) Essbase
9 1 (0.90%) Hadoop
9 1 (0.90%) Looker
9 1 (0.90%) Snowflake Schema
9 1 (0.90%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 17 (15.32%) Jenkins
2 9 (8.11%) JIRA
3 6 (5.41%) GitLab
4 2 (1.80%) Bitbucket
5 1 (0.90%) Git
General
1 40 (36.04%) Finance
2 34 (30.63%) Social Skills
3 12 (10.81%) Banking
4 7 (6.31%) Analytical Skills
4 7 (6.31%) Public Sector
5 5 (4.50%) Marketing
6 3 (2.70%) Legal
6 3 (2.70%) Organisational Skills
7 2 (1.80%) Billing
7 2 (1.80%) Front Office
7 2 (1.80%) Investment Banking
7 2 (1.80%) Pharmaceutical
7 2 (1.80%) Telecoms
8 1 (0.90%) Aerospace
8 1 (0.90%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.90%) General Ledger
8 1 (0.90%) Law
8 1 (0.90%) Police
8 1 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 24 (21.62%) Architect
2 16 (14.41%) Senior
3 15 (13.51%) Cloud Architect
4 14 (12.61%) Project Manager
5 13 (11.71%) Solutions Architect
6 12 (10.81%) Analyst
7 10 (9.01%) DevOps Engineer
8 8 (7.21%) AWS Architect
8 8 (7.21%) Azure Architect
8 8 (7.21%) Lead
9 7 (6.31%) AWS Solution Architect
10 6 (5.41%) Azure Engineer
11 5 (4.50%) Cloud Engineer
11 5 (4.50%) Cloud Solutions Architect
11 5 (4.50%) Senior DevOps
11 5 (4.50%) Senior DevOps Engineer
12 4 (3.60%) Developer
12 4 (3.60%) Technical Manager
12 4 (3.60%) Technical Project Manager
13 3 (2.70%) Senior Project Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (7.21%) Elastic Stack
1 8 (7.21%) REST
2 6 (5.41%) ARM Templates
3 4 (3.60%) Azure Blueprints
4 2 (1.80%) GraphQL
4 2 (1.80%) Middleware
4 2 (1.80%) Prisma
4 2 (1.80%) React
4 2 (1.80%) RESTful
5 1 (0.90%) Akka
5 1 (0.90%) JSON
5 1 (0.90%) Node.js
5 1 (0.90%) Oracle Fusion
5 1 (0.90%) Play Framework
5 1 (0.90%) PyTorch
5 1 (0.90%) SAP Fiori
5 1 (0.90%) SOAP
5 1 (0.90%) TensorFlow
5 1 (0.90%) Web Services
5 1 (0.90%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 18 (16.22%) Cloud Native
2 13 (11.71%) Hybrid Cloud
3 8 (7.21%) Management Information System
4 6 (5.41%) Public Cloud
5 5 (4.50%) Onboarding
6 4 (3.60%) Linux Command Line
6 4 (3.60%) Reinsurance
7 3 (2.70%) BYOD
8 2 (1.80%) CMDB
8 2 (1.80%) Distributed Systems
8 2 (1.80%) Virtual Team
9 1 (0.90%) Analytical Mindset
9 1 (0.90%) CCTV
9 1 (0.90%) Clustering
9 1 (0.90%) Data Centre
9 1 (0.90%) Derivative
9 1 (0.90%) Fixed Income
9 1 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
9 1 (0.90%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 12 (10.81%) Linux
2 4 (3.60%) Windows
2 4 (3.60%) Windows Server
3 1 (0.90%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 46 (41.44%) DevOps
2 41 (36.94%) Infrastructure as Code
3 25 (22.52%) Problem-Solving
4 24 (21.62%) Agile
4 24 (21.62%) Migration
5 22 (19.82%) Cost Optimisation
6 20 (18.02%) CI/CD
7 19 (17.12%) Budgeting
8 17 (15.32%) Project Management
9 16 (14.41%) Configuration Management
9 16 (14.41%) Risk Management
10 15 (13.51%) Stakeholder Management
11 14 (12.61%) Analytics
11 14 (12.61%) Cloud Security
12 13 (11.71%) API Management
12 13 (11.71%) Containerisation
12 13 (11.71%) Microservices
13 11 (9.91%) Continuous Integration
13 11 (9.91%) Deployment Automation
14 10 (9.01%) Project Delivery
Programming Languages
1 21 (18.92%) Bicep
2 17 (15.32%) PowerShell
3 9 (8.11%) Python
3 9 (8.11%) SQL
4 3 (2.70%) Go
4 3 (2.70%) Java
5 2 (1.80%) Scala
5 2 (1.80%) TypeScript
6 1 (0.90%) Groovy
6 1 (0.90%) JCL
6 1 (0.90%) R
6 1 (0.90%) REXX
Qualifications
1 20 (18.02%) Security Cleared
2 19 (17.12%) SC Cleared
3 12 (10.81%) Degree
4 10 (9.01%) AWS Certification
4 10 (9.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 9 (8.11%) Azure Certification
6 5 (4.50%) OCP
6 5 (4.50%) Oracle Certification
7 2 (1.80%) ACCA
7 2 (1.80%) APMP
7 2 (1.80%) CIMA
7 2 (1.80%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.80%) ISEB
7 2 (1.80%) PMI Certification
7 2 (1.80%) PMP
7 2 (1.80%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
8 1 (0.90%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
8 1 (0.90%) Master's Degree
8 1 (0.90%) MRICS
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (9.01%) PMO
2 6 (5.41%) GDPR
3 4 (3.60%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 4 (3.60%) SOC 2
4 2 (1.80%) NIST
4 2 (1.80%) P3O
4 2 (1.80%) QA
5 1 (0.90%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.90%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.90%) Disclosure Scotland
5 1 (0.90%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 19 (17.12%) Docker
2 6 (5.41%) Active Directory
2 6 (5.41%) Virtual Machines
3 1 (0.90%) Microcode
3 1 (0.90%) NFS
3 1 (0.90%) Time Sharing Option
3 1 (0.90%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 41 (36.94%) Terraform
2 31 (27.93%) Kubernetes
3 17 (15.32%) Ansible
4 7 (6.31%) Grafana
4 7 (6.31%) Progress Chef
4 7 (6.31%) Prometheus
4 7 (6.31%) Puppet
5 4 (3.60%) Single Sign-On
6 1 (0.90%) Apache Ranger
6 1 (0.90%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 29 (26.13%) Microsoft
2 12 (10.81%) Google
3 7 (6.31%) Red Hat
4 5 (4.50%) Oracle
5 3 (2.70%) SAP
6 2 (1.80%) Alteryx
7 1 (0.90%) Bloomberg
7 1 (0.90%) Broadcom
7 1 (0.90%) Brocade
7 1 (0.90%) Cloudera
7 1 (0.90%) Databricks
7 1 (0.90%) Dell
7 1 (0.90%) IBM
7 1 (0.90%) Veeam
7 1 (0.90%) VMware