Load Balancing Contract Job Trends

Load Balancing
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Load Balancing skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 2 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 333 332 307
Rank change year-on-year -1 -25 +38
Contract jobs citing Load Balancing 292 194 311
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.71% 0.64% 0.70%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.82% 0.71% 0.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 136 113 199
10th Percentile £379 £392 £363
25th Percentile £427 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £516 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year +8.58% -5.00% -9.09%
75th Percentile £587 £588 £600
90th Percentile £691 £672 £657
UK excluding London median daily rate £516 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +8.58% -5.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 5
10th Percentile £44.28 - -
25th Percentile £48.68 - -
Median hourly rate £57.02 - £45.88
75th Percentile £65.01 - £60.00
90th Percentile £69.20 - £64.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.02 - £45.88

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Load Balancing 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 35,800 27,183 38,766
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.50% 90.06% 86.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,707 16,972 25,287
10th Percentile £313 £305 £300
25th Percentile £412 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £723 £740 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -2.13% -1.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,144 882 2,256
10th Percentile £14.65 £15.62 £13.25
25th Percentile £18.24 £21.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £27.61 £32.50 £33.03
Median % change year-on-year -15.06% -1.61% -5.62%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.50 £59.44
90th Percentile £73.46 £75.48 £72.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.00 £34.36
% change year-on-year -21.41% -6.85% -1.84%

Load Balancing
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Load Balancing job vacancy trend in the UK

Load Balancing
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Load Balancing.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Load Balancing

Load Balancing
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Load Balancing over the 6 months to 2 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Load Balancing in the UK

Load Balancing
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Load Balancing.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Load Balancing

Load Balancing
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Load Balancing over the 6 months to 2 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Load Balancing in the UK

Load Balancing
Top 14 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Load Balancing within the UK over the 6 months to 2 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 +6 275 £525 +5.00% 109
UK excluding London +5 205 £516 +8.58% 101
North of England -13 113 £500 +1.27% 25
North West 0 92 £500 +3.90% 15
Work from Home +5 75 £500 +6.38% 46
London -26 75 £525 -10.26% 16
Midlands +1 70 £500 +37.93% 19
West Midlands +9 69 £500 +37.93% 12
South East -22 38 £531 +6.20% 36
Yorkshire -38 29 £507 +12.67% 9
South West -20 16 £708 +68.45% 5
Scotland +10 7 £425 -5.56% 4
East of England -24 6 £495 - 11
East Midlands -33 1 - - 7

Load Balancing
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 3 (1.03%) Apache
1 3 (1.03%) Confluence
1 3 (1.03%) Microsoft Exchange
1 3 (1.03%) SharePoint
2 2 (0.68%) CMS
2 2 (0.68%) Oracle HTTP Server
2 2 (0.68%) Tomcat
2 2 (0.68%) WebLogic
3 1 (0.34%) Adobe Experience Manager
3 1 (0.34%) IIS
3 1 (0.34%) nginx
Cloud Services
1 76 (26.03%) Azure
2 56 (19.18%) AWS
3 50 (17.12%) GitHub
4 37 (12.67%) GCP
5 33 (11.30%) GitHub Actions
6 20 (6.85%) OpenShift
7 19 (6.51%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 12 (4.11%) Google Kubernetes Engine
9 11 (3.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 10 (3.42%) Amazon S3
10 10 (3.42%) Microsoft 365
10 10 (3.42%) Route 53
11 9 (3.08%) Amazon EC2
11 9 (3.08%) Amazon EKS
11 9 (3.08%) AWS CloudFormation
11 9 (3.08%) AWS Lambda
11 9 (3.08%) Azure DevOps
11 9 (3.08%) Entra ID
11 9 (3.08%) IaaS
11 9 (3.08%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 160 (54.79%) DNS
2 132 (45.21%) Firewall
3 62 (21.23%) BGP
4 56 (19.18%) BIG-IP
5 54 (18.49%) WAN
6 53 (18.15%) VPN
7 47 (16.10%) Network Security
7 47 (16.10%) TCP/IP
8 44 (15.07%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
9 43 (14.73%) DHCP
10 41 (14.04%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
11 38 (13.01%) SSL
12 36 (12.33%) DMZ
13 35 (11.99%) HTTP
14 34 (11.64%) OSPF
15 33 (11.30%) LAN
16 32 (10.96%) Wireshark
17 27 (9.25%) Cisco ISE
18 24 (8.22%) Multicast
19 23 (7.88%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (2.40%) Amazon RDS
2 5 (1.71%) PostgreSQL
3 4 (1.37%) DynamoDB
4 3 (1.03%) Relational Database
4 3 (1.03%) SQL Server
5 2 (0.68%) BusinessObjects
5 2 (0.68%) BusinessObjects Web Intelligence
5 2 (0.68%) Oracle Exadata
5 2 (0.68%) SAP Data Services
6 1 (0.34%) Elasticsearch
6 1 (0.34%) MongoDB
6 1 (0.34%) Oracle Reports
6 1 (0.34%) Qlik Sense
6 1 (0.34%) Redis
Development Applications
1 46 (15.75%) Jenkins
2 30 (10.27%) Fiddler
3 10 (3.42%) Git
3 10 (3.42%) GitLab
4 7 (2.40%) JIRA
5 4 (1.37%) Terragrunt
6 3 (1.03%) Maven
6 3 (1.03%) Spinnaker
7 2 (0.68%) Artifactory
7 2 (0.68%) SonarQube
8 1 (0.34%) Gatling
8 1 (0.34%) gulp
8 1 (0.34%) JMeter
8 1 (0.34%) LoadRunner
8 1 (0.34%) Moq
8 1 (0.34%) NUnit
8 1 (0.34%) Oracle Forms
8 1 (0.34%) Serilog
8 1 (0.34%) Sonatype Nexus
8 1 (0.34%) webpack
General
1 62 (21.23%) Social Skills
2 41 (14.04%) Banking
3 36 (12.33%) Investment Banking
4 28 (9.59%) Finance
5 17 (5.82%) Documentation Skills
6 16 (5.48%) Public Sector
7 15 (5.14%) Analytical Skills
8 9 (3.08%) Influencing Skills
9 7 (2.40%) Financial Institution
10 6 (2.05%) Telecoms
11 5 (1.71%) Military
12 4 (1.37%) Retail
13 2 (0.68%) Advertising
13 2 (0.68%) Presentation Skills
13 2 (0.68%) Publishing
14 1 (0.34%) Billing
14 1 (0.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 1 (0.34%) Legal
Job Titles
1 106 (36.30%) Network Engineer
2 58 (19.86%) Architect
3 37 (12.67%) Web Engineer
4 23 (7.88%) Security Engineer
5 21 (7.19%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 20 (6.85%) Platform Engineer
7 18 (6.16%) Network Security Engineer
8 17 (5.82%) Blue Coat Engineer
8 17 (5.82%) IP Network Engineer
9 16 (5.48%) Cisco Engineer
9 16 (5.48%) Cisco Network Engineer
9 16 (5.48%) Cisco Security Engineer
9 16 (5.48%) Data Engineer
9 16 (5.48%) Data Network Engineer
9 16 (5.48%) Network Architect
9 16 (5.48%) Solutions Architect
10 15 (5.14%) Senior
11 13 (4.45%) Lead
12 12 (4.11%) DevOps Engineer
12 12 (4.11%) Junior Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 25 (8.56%) 802.1X
2 16 (5.48%) OAuth
3 15 (5.14%) OAuth2
3 15 (5.14%) SAML
4 14 (4.79%) OpenID
5 11 (3.77%) OpenTelemetry
6 7 (2.40%) LDAP
7 6 (2.05%) Elastic Stack
7 6 (2.05%) Middleware
7 6 (2.05%) REST
8 5 (1.71%) Node.js
8 5 (1.71%) OpenAPI
8 5 (1.71%) Swagger
9 4 (1.37%) VML
10 3 (1.03%) ARM Templates
10 3 (1.03%) JSON
10 3 (1.03%) Lambda Expressions
10 3 (1.03%) React
11 2 (0.68%) Kafka
11 2 (0.68%) Loki
Miscellaneous
1 56 (19.18%) Data Centre
2 31 (10.62%) Cloud Native
3 29 (9.93%) Management Information System
4 27 (9.25%) PKI
5 18 (6.16%) Clustering
6 15 (5.14%) Public Cloud
7 12 (4.11%) Hybrid Cloud
8 9 (3.08%) Onboarding
8 9 (3.08%) Replication
9 8 (2.74%) Private Cloud
10 6 (2.05%) Data Protection Act
10 6 (2.05%) Virtual Team
11 5 (1.71%) Product Ownership
12 4 (1.37%) Enterprise Storage
12 4 (1.37%) SCADA
13 3 (1.03%) Distributed Architecture
13 3 (1.03%) Security Posture
13 3 (1.03%) Self-Motivation
14 2 (0.68%) Cyber Threat
14 2 (0.68%) Distributed Systems
Operating Systems
1 66 (22.60%) Windows
2 37 (12.67%) Linux
3 32 (10.96%) Windows Server
4 13 (4.45%) VMS
5 11 (3.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 8 (2.74%) Windows Server 2019
7 7 (2.40%) CentOS
7 7 (2.40%) Windows Server 2012
8 6 (2.05%) Ubuntu
9 4 (1.37%) Unix
9 4 (1.37%) Windows Server 2016
10 3 (1.03%) Amazon Linux
11 2 (0.68%) Android
11 2 (0.68%) Apple iOS
12 1 (0.34%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 72 (24.66%) DevOps
2 71 (24.32%) CI/CD
3 65 (22.26%) High Availability
4 60 (20.55%) Migration
5 57 (19.52%) Problem-Solving
6 52 (17.81%) Infrastructure as Code
7 37 (12.67%) Containerisation
8 36 (12.33%) Observability
9 32 (10.96%) RBAC
10 31 (10.62%) Identity Access Management
11 30 (10.27%) Data Loss Prevention
12 28 (9.59%) Malware Detection/Protection
13 27 (9.25%) Mentoring
13 27 (9.25%) Network Design
14 26 (8.90%) Agile
15 24 (8.22%) Site Reliability Engineering
16 22 (7.53%) Change Management
16 22 (7.53%) Disaster Recovery
16 22 (7.53%) Infrastructure Engineering
17 21 (7.19%) ITIL
Programming Languages
1 80 (27.40%) Python
2 45 (15.41%) PowerShell
3 44 (15.07%) Bash
4 9 (3.08%) SQL
5 8 (2.74%) Java
6 7 (2.40%) Bicep
7 5 (1.71%) Perl
8 4 (1.37%) Groovy
9 3 (1.03%) C#
10 2 (0.68%) JavaScript
11 1 (0.34%) BeanShell
11 1 (0.34%) Ruby
11 1 (0.34%) Shell Script
11 1 (0.34%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 91 (31.16%) Security Cleared
2 54 (18.49%) SC Cleared
3 35 (11.99%) Cisco Certification
4 26 (8.90%) DV Cleared
5 20 (6.85%) CCNP
6 16 (5.48%) AWS Certification
7 15 (5.14%) Azure Certification
8 14 (4.79%) Degree
8 14 (4.79%) Microsoft Certification
9 10 (3.42%) CCIE
10 9 (3.08%) JNCIP
11 6 (2.05%) CISSP
11 6 (2.05%) JNCIA
11 6 (2.05%) JNCIS
12 5 (1.71%) BPSS Clearance
12 5 (1.71%) CCNA
13 4 (1.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 4 (1.37%) Computer Science Degree
14 3 (1.03%) CCIE Security
14 3 (1.03%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (2.05%) SLA
2 5 (1.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 5 (1.71%) NIST
3 4 (1.37%) GDPR
3 4 (1.37%) NCSC
3 4 (1.37%) PCI DSS
4 2 (0.68%) Accessibility
4 2 (0.68%) Disclosure Scotland
4 2 (0.68%) QA
5 1 (0.34%) Cyber Essentials
5 1 (0.34%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.34%) Government Security Classifications
5 1 (0.34%) WCAG
System Software
1 66 (22.60%) VMware Infrastructure
2 45 (15.41%) VMware NSX
3 40 (13.70%) Active Directory
3 40 (13.70%) Docker
4 23 (7.88%) vSphere
5 18 (6.16%) Firmware
6 7 (2.40%) Virtual Machines
7 5 (1.71%) Hyper-V
7 5 (1.71%) Postfix
7 5 (1.71%) Virtual Desktop
8 3 (1.03%) VMware ESXi
9 1 (0.34%) NFS
9 1 (0.34%) Sendmail
9 1 (0.34%) Varnish
9 1 (0.34%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.34%) XenApp
9 1 (0.34%) XenDesktop
Systems Management
1 80 (27.40%) Terraform
2 71 (24.32%) Ansible
3 66 (22.60%) Kubernetes
4 26 (8.90%) FortiGate
5 20 (6.85%) Argo
6 19 (6.51%) vCenter Server
7 18 (6.16%) Single Sign-On
8 17 (5.82%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 14 (4.79%) Grafana
10 11 (3.77%) Microsoft Intune
10 11 (3.77%) SCCM
11 7 (2.40%) Prometheus
12 6 (2.05%) Istio
13 5 (1.71%) HAProxy
13 5 (1.71%) Progress Chef
14 4 (1.37%) Kibana
14 4 (1.37%) SCOM
15 3 (1.03%) Karpenter
15 3 (1.03%) Packer
15 3 (1.03%) Stealthwatch
Vendors
1 137 (46.92%) F5
2 97 (33.22%) VMware
3 85 (29.11%) Cisco
4 39 (13.36%) Blue Coat
4 39 (13.36%) Juniper
4 39 (13.36%) McAfee
4 39 (13.36%) Microsoft
5 32 (10.96%) Palo Alto
5 32 (10.96%) Splunk
6 22 (7.53%) SolarWinds
7 20 (6.85%) NetApp
8 19 (6.51%) Pure Storage
8 19 (6.51%) Red Hat
9 18 (6.16%) Google
9 18 (6.16%) Meraki
10 15 (5.14%) Extreme Networks
10 15 (5.14%) Fortinet
11 10 (3.42%) Arista
11 10 (3.42%) CheckPoint
12 9 (3.08%) Oracle