Cost Optimisation Contracts

Cost Optimization
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies 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 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 379 517 650
Rank change year-on-year +138 +133 +48
Contract jobs citing Cost Optimisation 144 65 68
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.49% 0.15% 0.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.54% 0.17% 0.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 76 29 33
10th Percentile £375 £370 £425
25th Percentile £461 £500 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £525
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +9.52% -12.50%
75th Percentile £628 £650 £600
90th Percentile £700 £738 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £663 £538
% change year-on-year -20.75% +23.26% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £35.00 - -
Median hourly rate £36.00 - £90.00
75th Percentile £37.00 - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £36.00 - -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 26,594 37,597 53,655
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.84% 86.31% 89.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,149 24,227 37,238
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 £743 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.50% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,071 2,443 1,746
10th Percentile £14.41 £12.75 £11.00
25th Percentile £18.21 £16.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £29.00 £35.65 £37.30
Median % change year-on-year -18.65% -4.42% +49.20%
75th Percentile £60.38 £59.98 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £37.34 £36.00
% change year-on-year -26.35% +3.72% +80.00%

Cost Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for Cost Optimisation in the UK

Cost Optimisation
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for Cost Optimisation in the UK

Cost Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Cost Optimisation over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Cost Optimisation in the UK

Cost Optimisation
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

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

Hourly rate trend for Cost Optimisation in the UK

Cost Optimisation
Top 15 Contract Locations

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 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
England +118 121 £525 -7.89% 191
London +78 88 £525 -4.55% 108
Work from Home +52 45 £501 -9.00% 107
UK excluding London +95 44 £525 -20.75% 106
Scotland +23 11 £525 - 11
North of England +23 11 £525 -20.75% 28
Midlands +29 10 £537 +53.43% 12
North West +19 8 £525 -22.22% 16
West Midlands +19 8 £537 +53.43% 7
South East +51 6 £409 -39.41% 39
East of England - 4 £638 - 6
Yorkshire +10 3 £463 -26.00% 10
South West - 3 £625 - 11
East Midlands - 2 £588 - 5
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 1

Cost Optimisation
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 8 (5.56%) Confluence
2 2 (1.39%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.69%) Apache
3 1 (0.69%) SharePoint
Applications
1 8 (5.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.69%) CATIA
2 1 (0.69%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (1.39%) assyst
1 2 (1.39%) Shopify
2 1 (0.69%) Cloudability
2 1 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 65 (45.14%) AWS
2 58 (40.28%) Azure
3 37 (25.69%) GCP
4 27 (18.75%) Serverless
5 26 (18.06%) GitHub
6 20 (13.89%) AWS CloudFormation
7 17 (11.81%) GitHub Actions
8 16 (11.11%) Azure DevOps
9 14 (9.72%) Amazon S3
9 14 (9.72%) SaaS
10 13 (9.03%) Amazon EC2
10 13 (9.03%) IaaS
11 12 (8.33%) AWS Lambda
11 12 (8.33%) PaaS
12 11 (7.64%) Amazon EKS
13 9 (6.25%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 9 (6.25%) Microsoft 365
14 8 (5.56%) Azure AKS
15 7 (4.86%) Azure Functions
16 6 (4.17%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 11 (7.64%) VPN
2 10 (6.94%) Firewall
3 5 (3.47%) DNS
3 5 (3.47%) TCP/IP
4 4 (2.78%) HTTP
5 3 (2.08%) Kerberos
5 3 (2.08%) NAS
5 3 (2.08%) SAN
5 3 (2.08%) VLAN
6 2 (1.39%) DSL
6 2 (1.39%) SNMP
7 1 (0.69%) BGP
7 1 (0.69%) DHCP
7 1 (0.69%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.69%) MPLS
7 1 (0.69%) Network Security
7 1 (0.69%) OSPF
7 1 (0.69%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (8.33%) Amazon RDS
2 10 (6.94%) Data Warehouse
3 9 (6.25%) Data Lake
4 8 (5.56%) Oracle Database
4 8 (5.56%) PostgreSQL
5 7 (4.86%) MongoDB
6 6 (4.17%) Power BI
7 4 (2.78%) NoSQL
7 4 (2.78%) Redis
7 4 (2.78%) SQL Server
8 3 (2.08%) Amazon Athena
8 3 (2.08%) BigQuery
8 3 (2.08%) DynamoDB
8 3 (2.08%) Parquet
9 2 (1.39%) Amazon Aurora
9 2 (1.39%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (1.39%) Looker
9 2 (1.39%) Snowflake Schema
9 2 (1.39%) Sybase ASE
9 2 (1.39%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 20 (13.89%) Jenkins
2 9 (6.25%) GitLab
2 9 (6.25%) JIRA
3 4 (2.78%) Git
4 3 (2.08%) Bitbucket
4 3 (2.08%) TeamCity
5 2 (1.39%) CircleCI
5 2 (1.39%) JMeter
5 2 (1.39%) Terragrunt
6 1 (0.69%) Serena SBM
6 1 (0.69%) Subversion
General
1 57 (39.58%) Social Skills
2 43 (29.86%) Finance
3 28 (19.44%) Analytical Skills
4 11 (7.64%) Public Sector
5 10 (6.94%) Banking
6 9 (6.25%) Marketing
6 9 (6.25%) Retail
7 7 (4.86%) Financial Institution
8 5 (3.47%) Legal
9 4 (2.78%) Telecoms
10 3 (2.08%) Billing
10 3 (2.08%) Manufacturing
11 2 (1.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 2 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (1.39%) Organisational Skills
11 2 (1.39%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.69%) Automotive
12 1 (0.69%) Digital Health
12 1 (0.69%) Documentation Skills
12 1 (0.69%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 24 (16.67%) Architect
1 24 (16.67%) Senior
2 17 (11.81%) Developer
3 15 (10.42%) Cloud Engineer
4 14 (9.72%) DevOps Engineer
5 12 (8.33%) Azure Engineer
6 11 (7.64%) Senior Cloud Engineer
7 9 (6.25%) Analyst
7 9 (6.25%) Lead
8 8 (5.56%) Cloud Architect
8 8 (5.56%) Project Manager
8 8 (5.56%) Solutions Architect
9 7 (4.86%) Technical Manager
10 6 (4.17%) AWS Engineer
10 6 (4.17%) SailPoint Developer
10 6 (4.17%) Senior Developer
10 6 (4.17%) Senior DevOps
10 6 (4.17%) Technical Project Manager
11 5 (3.47%) AWS Developer
11 5 (3.47%) Site Reliability Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (6.25%) Kafka
2 6 (4.17%) GraphQL
2 6 (4.17%) SailPoint
3 5 (3.47%) ARM Templates
3 5 (3.47%) RESTful
4 4 (2.78%) AWS CDK
4 4 (2.78%) Elastic Stack
4 4 (2.78%) JSON
4 4 (2.78%) OAuth
4 4 (2.78%) OAuth2
4 4 (2.78%) OpenID
4 4 (2.78%) Prisma
4 4 (2.78%) SAML
5 3 (2.08%) LDAP
5 3 (2.08%) Middleware
5 3 (2.08%) Node.js
5 3 (2.08%) REST
5 3 (2.08%) SOAP
5 3 (2.08%) YAML
6 2 (1.39%) VML
Miscellaneous
1 17 (11.81%) Cloud Native
2 8 (5.56%) Management Information System
2 8 (5.56%) Onboarding
3 7 (4.86%) Hybrid Cloud
4 6 (4.17%) Replication
5 5 (3.47%) Data Protection Act
5 5 (3.47%) Public Cloud
6 4 (2.78%) CMDB
6 4 (2.78%) Data Centre
7 3 (2.08%) BYOD
7 3 (2.08%) Clustering
7 3 (2.08%) FMCG
7 3 (2.08%) Oracle Licensing
8 2 (1.39%) Analytical Mindset
8 2 (1.39%) Enterprise Cloud
8 2 (1.39%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.39%) Private Cloud
9 1 (0.69%) Culture of Ownership
9 1 (0.69%) Product Ownership
9 1 (0.69%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 12 (8.33%) Linux
2 7 (4.86%) Windows
3 5 (3.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 4 (2.78%) Windows Server
5 2 (1.39%) Solaris
6 1 (0.69%) Oracle Linux
6 1 (0.69%) Unix
6 1 (0.69%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 53 (36.81%) DevOps
2 48 (33.33%) CI/CD
3 47 (32.64%) Infrastructure as Code
4 38 (26.39%) Problem-Solving
5 29 (20.14%) Agile
6 28 (19.44%) Containerisation
6 28 (19.44%) Migration
7 25 (17.36%) Artificial Intelligence
7 25 (17.36%) FinOps
8 23 (15.97%) Cost Management
9 22 (15.28%) Analytics
10 20 (13.89%) Stakeholder Management
11 18 (12.50%) ETL
11 18 (12.50%) High Availability
11 18 (12.50%) RBAC
12 17 (11.81%) Cloud Security
13 16 (11.11%) Disaster Recovery
14 15 (10.42%) Software Engineering
15 14 (9.72%) Collaborative Working
15 14 (9.72%) Identity Access Management
Programming Languages
1 29 (20.14%) Python
2 12 (8.33%) Bicep
2 12 (8.33%) Java
2 12 (8.33%) SQL
3 9 (6.25%) Bash
3 9 (6.25%) JavaScript
4 8 (5.56%) PowerShell
5 6 (4.17%) BeanShell
5 6 (4.17%) Shell Script
6 4 (2.78%) C#
6 4 (2.78%) TypeScript
7 3 (2.08%) Go
8 2 (1.39%) Kotlin
8 2 (1.39%) Scala
9 1 (0.69%) Groovy
9 1 (0.69%) Perl
9 1 (0.69%) PL/SQL
9 1 (0.69%) Ruby
9 1 (0.69%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 21 (14.58%) Security Cleared
2 18 (12.50%) Degree
3 16 (11.11%) Azure Certification
4 15 (10.42%) AWS Certification
4 15 (10.42%) SC Cleared
5 9 (6.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 7 (4.86%) Computer Science Degree
6 7 (4.86%) Master's Degree
7 2 (1.39%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
7 2 (1.39%) Cisco Certification
7 2 (1.39%) DV Cleared
7 2 (1.39%) PMI Certification
7 2 (1.39%) PMP
7 2 (1.39%) SnowPro
7 2 (1.39%) Tableau Certification
7 2 (1.39%) TOGAF Certification
8 1 (0.69%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
8 1 (0.69%) CCNA
8 1 (0.69%) CCNP
8 1 (0.69%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (6.25%) Data Quality
1 9 (6.25%) GDPR
2 6 (4.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 5 (3.47%) QA
4 3 (2.08%) PCI DSS
4 3 (2.08%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 2 (1.39%) Disclosure Scotland
5 2 (1.39%) HIPAA
6 1 (0.69%) GRC
6 1 (0.69%) NCSC
System Software
1 30 (20.83%) Docker
2 7 (4.86%) Active Directory
3 5 (3.47%) VMware Infrastructure
4 4 (2.78%) Oracle RAC
4 4 (2.78%) Virtual Machines
4 4 (2.78%) VMware ESXi
5 2 (1.39%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 41 (28.47%) Terraform
2 40 (27.78%) Kubernetes
3 14 (9.72%) Ansible
4 7 (4.86%) Prometheus
4 7 (4.86%) Single Sign-On
5 6 (4.17%) Grafana
6 4 (2.78%) Progress Chef
6 4 (2.78%) Puppet
7 3 (2.08%) Opsview
7 3 (2.08%) Oracle RMAN
8 2 (1.39%) Dell DRAC
8 2 (1.39%) EMC NetWorker
8 2 (1.39%) Salt
8 2 (1.39%) Tivoli
8 2 (1.39%) Tivoli Storage Manager
9 1 (0.69%) Apache Ranger
9 1 (0.69%) Argo
9 1 (0.69%) Istio
9 1 (0.69%) Microsoft Intune
9 1 (0.69%) QRadar
Vendors
1 22 (15.28%) Microsoft
2 19 (13.19%) Google
3 10 (6.94%) Oracle
3 10 (6.94%) ServiceNow
4 6 (4.17%) Databricks
4 6 (4.17%) VMware
5 4 (2.78%) Cisco
5 4 (2.78%) Red Hat
5 4 (2.78%) SAP
5 4 (2.78%) Splunk
6 3 (2.08%) IBM
6 3 (2.08%) New Relic
6 3 (2.08%) PagerDuty
6 3 (2.08%) Qualys
6 3 (2.08%) Sybase
7 2 (1.39%) Adobe
7 2 (1.39%) Dell
7 2 (1.39%) EMC
7 2 (1.39%) Salesforce
7 2 (1.39%) Sitecore