Data Centre Contract Job Trends

Data Center
UK

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term Data Centre in contract job vacancies. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Data Centre over the 6 months leading up to 23 March 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 117 125 102
Rank change year-on-year +8 -23 -6
Contract jobs citing Data Centre 960 606 945
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.19% 2.05% 2.13%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 6.63% 6.08% 7.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 593 396 613
10th Percentile £301 £337 £280
25th Percentile £400 £413 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £517 £520
Median % change year-on-year -7.20% -0.53% -5.45%
75th Percentile £588 £613 £638
90th Percentile £688 £675 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £475 £513
% change year-on-year -1.26% -7.32% +2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 40 21 46
10th Percentile £16.01 - £17.13
25th Percentile £19.02 £24.18 £21.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £24.66 £24.87
Median % change year-on-year +1.99% -0.84% +14.77%
75th Percentile £70.49 £41.25 £40.00
90th Percentile £74.78 £43.75 £61.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £19.34 £24.18 £24.00
% change year-on-year -20.02% +0.75% +10.75%

All Generic Skills
UK

Data Centre falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring generic IT skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 14,484 9,973 13,415
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.09% 33.75% 30.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,115 6,336 8,580
10th Percentile £300 £288 £255
25th Percentile £408 £409 £412
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £738 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 678 370 876
10th Percentile £15.60 £16.95 £12.43
25th Percentile £18.87 £22.33 £15.39
Median hourly rate £37.50 £32.50 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.38% +18.18% +22.22%
75th Percentile £68.75 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £85.00 £83.20 £67.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.94 £31.76 £25.39
% change year-on-year +32.05% +25.10% +14.56%

Data Centre
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Data Centre relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Data Centre job vacancy trend in the UK

Data Centre
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Centre.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Centre

Data Centre
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Centre over the 6 months to 23 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Data Centre in the UK

Data Centre
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Centre.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Data Centre

Data Centre
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Centre over the 6 months to 23 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Centre in the UK

Data Centre
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Data Centre within the UK over the 6 months to 23 March 2026. 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 +13 796 £481 -8.33% 466
UK excluding London +8 541 £469 -1.26% 331
London +9 295 £550 +4.76% 192
Work from Home +22 254 £475 -11.21% 139
North of England +18 184 £460 +8.24% 56
South East +11 158 £458 +3.98% 138
North West +22 97 £499 -0.25% 30
Yorkshire -17 72 £365 -4.33% 18
Midlands -29 69 £470 -22.57% 33
West Midlands -31 56 £474 -23.05% 12
Scotland +16 50 £488 +8.33% 28
East of England -17 33 £478 +13.14% 51
South West -43 32 £550 -0.90% 30
Wales +4 28 £350 -12.50% 10
North East -2 17 £175 +59.09% 8
East Midlands -27 12 £158 -65.00% 21
Northern Ireland - 3 £425 - 4

Data Centre
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 22 (2.29%) SharePoint
2 17 (1.77%) Confluence
2 17 (1.77%) Microsoft Exchange
3 8 (0.83%) CICS
4 4 (0.42%) nginx
4 4 (0.42%) OpenStack
4 4 (0.42%) WebLogic
5 3 (0.31%) GeoServer
5 3 (0.31%) Smallworld
6 2 (0.21%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (0.21%) HCL Notes
6 2 (0.21%) Oracle Coherence
6 2 (0.21%) Tomcat
7 1 (0.10%) Mendix
Applications
1 45 (4.69%) Microsoft Office
2 22 (2.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 22 (2.29%) MS Visio
3 17 (1.77%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 14 (1.46%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.31%) Adobe Illustrator
5 3 (0.31%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 6 (0.63%) Remedy ITSM
2 3 (0.31%) Primavera
2 3 (0.31%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.21%) DELMIA
3 2 (0.21%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.10%) Epicor iScala
4 1 (0.10%) Maximo
4 1 (0.10%) Oracle Financials
4 1 (0.10%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 180 (18.75%) Azure
2 141 (14.69%) AWS
3 67 (6.98%) GCP
4 64 (6.67%) Microsoft 365
5 22 (2.29%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 17 (1.77%) SaaS
7 16 (1.67%) Azure ExpressRoute
7 16 (1.67%) Entra ID
8 15 (1.56%) IaaS
9 14 (1.46%) Power Platform
10 12 (1.25%) Azure DevOps
11 11 (1.15%) Amazon GuardDuty
11 11 (1.15%) AWS CloudFormation
11 11 (1.15%) AWS Direct Connect
11 11 (1.15%) GitHub
11 11 (1.15%) PaaS
12 9 (0.94%) Amazon S3
12 9 (0.94%) OpenShift
13 8 (0.83%) Nutanix
14 7 (0.73%) AWS KMS
Communications & Networking
1 278 (28.96%) Firewall
2 169 (17.60%) WAN
3 139 (14.48%) BGP
4 104 (10.83%) LAN
5 102 (10.63%) OSPF
6 99 (10.31%) VPN
7 98 (10.21%) Network Security
8 75 (7.81%) Structured Cabling
9 70 (7.29%) Wireless
10 69 (7.19%) DNS
11 68 (7.08%) VXLAN
12 67 (6.98%) SAN
13 60 (6.25%) VLAN
14 55 (5.73%) DHCP
15 48 (5.00%) SD-WAN
16 45 (4.69%) Ethernet VPN
17 42 (4.38%) Cisco ISE
17 42 (4.38%) Wi-Fi
18 34 (3.54%) Cisco Nexus
19 33 (3.44%) NX-OS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (0.94%) Power BI
2 8 (0.83%) DataStage
3 7 (0.73%) Relational Database
3 7 (0.73%) SQL Server
4 5 (0.52%) GIS
4 5 (0.52%) PostgreSQL
5 4 (0.42%) Big Data
5 4 (0.42%) MongoDB
5 4 (0.42%) Power Query
5 4 (0.42%) PowerPivot
6 3 (0.31%) Amazon RDS
6 3 (0.31%) Geospatial Data
6 3 (0.31%) InfluxDB
6 3 (0.31%) QGIS
6 3 (0.31%) SAP Data Services
7 2 (0.21%) Oracle Database
7 2 (0.21%) RDBMS
8 1 (0.10%) Data Lake
8 1 (0.10%) Elasticsearch
8 1 (0.10%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 31 (3.23%) Git
2 30 (3.13%) JIRA
3 19 (1.98%) Jenkins
4 16 (1.67%) GitLab
5 9 (0.94%) Maven
6 7 (0.73%) Sonatype Nexus
7 5 (0.52%) JMeter
8 4 (0.42%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 4 (0.42%) Eclipse
8 4 (0.42%) Subversion
9 3 (0.31%) Bitbucket
9 3 (0.31%) ScriptRunner
10 2 (0.21%) Rational DOORS
11 1 (0.10%) AppScan
11 1 (0.10%) Burp Suite
11 1 (0.10%) LoadRunner
11 1 (0.10%) Metasploit
11 1 (0.10%) Postman
General
1 250 (26.04%) Social Skills
2 155 (16.15%) Finance
3 114 (11.88%) Analytical Skills
4 98 (10.21%) Public Sector
5 54 (5.63%) Documentation Skills
6 53 (5.52%) Telecoms
7 44 (4.58%) Manufacturing
8 43 (4.48%) Banking
9 30 (3.13%) Marketing
10 28 (2.92%) Legal
11 23 (2.40%) Electronics
12 20 (2.08%) Influencing Skills
13 18 (1.88%) Retail
14 17 (1.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 16 (1.67%) Presentation Skills
16 12 (1.25%) Organisational Skills
17 11 (1.15%) Investment Banking
18 9 (0.94%) Law
18 9 (0.94%) Military
19 6 (0.63%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 159 (16.56%) Network Engineer
2 157 (16.35%) Architect
3 81 (8.44%) Project Manager
4 80 (8.33%) Senior
5 58 (6.04%) Data Centre Engineer
6 52 (5.42%) Analyst
7 50 (5.21%) Solutions Architect
8 48 (5.00%) Network Architect
9 43 (4.48%) Data Centre Manager
10 40 (4.17%) Lead
11 37 (3.85%) IT Support
12 36 (3.75%) Infrastructure Manager
12 36 (3.75%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
13 35 (3.65%) Infrastructure Engineer
14 30 (3.13%) IT Engineer
15 29 (3.02%) Consultant
15 29 (3.02%) Field Engineer
16 28 (2.92%) Cisco Engineer
16 28 (2.92%) Field Service Engineer
17 27 (2.81%) Cisco Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 32 (3.33%) 802.1X
2 31 (3.23%) Middleware
3 9 (0.94%) LDAP
4 6 (0.63%) Elastic Stack
4 6 (0.63%) Spring
5 4 (0.42%) ADO
5 4 (0.42%) ARM Templates
5 4 (0.42%) Jinja
5 4 (0.42%) NETCONF
5 4 (0.42%) OpenConfig
5 4 (0.42%) Redfish
5 4 (0.42%) RESTCONF
5 4 (0.42%) Spring Boot
5 4 (0.42%) VML
5 4 (0.42%) XML
5 4 (0.42%) YANG
6 3 (0.31%) REST
6 3 (0.31%) RFC 2544
6 3 (0.31%) Yocto
7 2 (0.21%) OpenLayers
Miscellaneous
1 43 (4.48%) Hybrid Cloud
2 34 (3.54%) Analytical Mindset
3 26 (2.71%) PKI
4 25 (2.60%) Clustering
5 22 (2.29%) Driving Licence
6 21 (2.19%) Fibre Optics
7 20 (2.08%) Management Information System
7 20 (2.08%) Onboarding
8 19 (1.98%) Self-Motivation
9 18 (1.88%) Cloud Native
10 17 (1.77%) Replication
11 16 (1.67%) Public Cloud
12 14 (1.46%) CMDB
12 14 (1.46%) NHS
13 12 (1.25%) Data Protection Act
13 12 (1.25%) Enterprise Storage
13 12 (1.25%) SCADA
14 10 (1.04%) Mainframe
14 10 (1.04%) Private Cloud
15 8 (0.83%) BYOD
Operating Systems
1 123 (12.81%) Windows
2 116 (12.08%) Linux
3 44 (4.58%) Windows Server
4 33 (3.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 31 (3.23%) Android
5 31 (3.23%) Mac OS
6 16 (1.67%) Unix
7 13 (1.35%) AIX
8 10 (1.04%) Solaris
9 9 (0.94%) CentOS
10 7 (0.73%) VMS
10 7 (0.73%) Windows Server 2019
11 5 (0.52%) Ubuntu
12 3 (0.31%) Embedded Linux
12 3 (0.31%) Windows 10
13 2 (0.21%) Windows Server 2008
13 2 (0.21%) Windows Server 2016
14 1 (0.10%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 161 (16.77%) Migration
1 161 (16.77%) Problem-Solving
2 112 (11.67%) Stakeholder Management
3 85 (8.85%) ITIL
4 77 (8.02%) High Availability
4 77 (8.02%) Roadmaps
5 74 (7.71%) Project Management
6 69 (7.19%) Continuous Improvement
7 67 (6.98%) Agile
8 66 (6.88%) Infrastructure as Code
9 65 (6.77%) Load Balancing
10 63 (6.56%) Change Management
10 63 (6.56%) Project Delivery
11 62 (6.46%) CI/CD
12 53 (5.52%) DevOps
13 50 (5.21%) Data Centre Operations
13 50 (5.21%) Stakeholder Engagement
14 49 (5.10%) Customer Service
15 47 (4.90%) Break/Fix
15 47 (4.90%) Infrastructure Engineering
Programming Languages
1 90 (9.38%) Python
2 53 (5.52%) PowerShell
3 29 (3.02%) SQL
4 28 (2.92%) Bash
5 22 (2.29%) Java
6 18 (1.88%) Perl
7 12 (1.25%) Shell Script
8 9 (0.94%) COBOL
9 7 (0.73%) Bicep
9 7 (0.73%) Lisp
9 7 (0.73%) MATLAB
10 5 (0.52%) VBA
11 4 (0.42%) C
11 4 (0.42%) C++
11 4 (0.42%) JavaScript
12 3 (0.31%) Korn
12 3 (0.31%) PL/SQL
13 1 (0.10%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 1 (0.10%) Groovy
13 1 (0.10%) SystemVerilog
Qualifications
1 312 (32.50%) Security Cleared
2 240 (25.00%) SC Cleared
3 176 (18.33%) Cisco Certification
4 124 (12.92%) CCNP
5 72 (7.50%) CCNA
6 68 (7.08%) Degree
7 64 (6.67%) DV Cleared
8 32 (3.33%) Network+ Certification
9 27 (2.81%) CCIE
9 27 (2.81%) Microsoft Certification
10 26 (2.71%) A+ Certification
10 26 (2.71%) MCSE
11 24 (2.50%) PMP
12 22 (2.29%) PMI Certification
13 20 (2.08%) AWS Certification
14 17 (1.77%) Azure Certification
15 16 (1.67%) JNCIS
16 14 (1.46%) JNCIP
17 12 (1.25%) JNCIA
17 12 (1.25%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 28 (2.92%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 25 (2.60%) NIST
2 25 (2.60%) PMO
2 25 (2.60%) SLA
3 22 (2.29%) GDPR
4 17 (1.77%) PCI DSS
5 14 (1.46%) QA
6 11 (1.15%) NCSC
7 5 (0.52%) Actionable Recommendations
7 5 (0.52%) Data Quality
8 4 (0.42%) Cyber Essentials
8 4 (0.42%) Disclosure Scotland
8 4 (0.42%) GRC
9 3 (0.31%) NIST 800
9 3 (0.31%) RMADS
10 2 (0.21%) Government Security Classifications
10 2 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 1 (0.10%) ISO 22301
11 1 (0.10%) SOC 1
11 1 (0.10%) SOC 2
System Software
1 84 (8.75%) VMware Infrastructure
2 62 (6.46%) Active Directory
3 46 (4.79%) VMware NSX
4 23 (2.40%) Virtual Machines
5 21 (2.19%) Firmware
6 20 (2.08%) vSphere
7 18 (1.88%) Docker
8 16 (1.67%) Hyper-V
9 14 (1.46%) VMware ESXi
10 10 (1.04%) KVM
11 3 (0.31%) PowerHA
11 3 (0.31%) SRDF
12 2 (0.21%) Ceph
12 2 (0.21%) Lustre
12 2 (0.21%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 2 (0.21%) vCloud
12 2 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
12 2 (0.21%) VMware Workstation
13 1 (0.10%) BitLocker
13 1 (0.10%) RHEV
Systems Management
1 90 (9.38%) Ansible
2 76 (7.92%) Terraform
3 51 (5.31%) FortiGate
4 40 (4.17%) Kubernetes
5 32 (3.33%) Grafana
6 22 (2.29%) Prometheus
7 18 (1.88%) SCCM
8 14 (1.46%) Microsoft Intune
9 8 (0.83%) Check_MK
10 7 (0.73%) Podman
10 7 (0.73%) Red Hat Satellite
10 7 (0.73%) SCOM
10 7 (0.73%) vCenter Server
11 6 (0.63%) PowerCLI
12 5 (0.52%) CASB
12 5 (0.52%) vMotion
13 4 (0.42%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 4 (0.42%) Endace
13 4 (0.42%) SCOrch
13 4 (0.42%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 289 (30.10%) Cisco
2 119 (12.40%) VMware
3 118 (12.29%) Palo Alto
4 94 (9.79%) Dell
4 94 (9.79%) Microsoft
5 83 (8.65%) Juniper
6 65 (6.77%) F5
7 45 (4.69%) Aruba
8 44 (4.58%) HP
9 43 (4.48%) CheckPoint
10 41 (4.27%) ServiceNow
11 39 (4.06%) Arista
11 39 (4.06%) Fortinet
12 38 (3.96%) Meraki
13 34 (3.54%) SolarWinds
14 33 (3.44%) Google
15 31 (3.23%) Apple
16 29 (3.02%) IBM
16 29 (3.02%) SAP
17 28 (2.92%) Citrix