Service-Level Objective Contracts

Service-Level Objectives (SLO)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Service-Level Objective skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Service-Level Objective 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 479 567 679
Rank change year-on-year +88 +112 +108
Contract jobs citing Service-Level Objective 41 15 39
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.14% 0.034% 0.065%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.15% 0.040% 0.073%
Number of daily rates quoted 26 9 24
10th Percentile £278 £411 £441
25th Percentile £423 £513 £484
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £623 £525
Median % change year-on-year -19.68% +18.57% -25.00%
75th Percentile £644 £634 £631
90th Percentile £713 - £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £655 £623 £500
% change year-on-year +5.22% +24.50% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 0
Median hourly rate - £67.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £67.50 -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Service-Level Objective 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%

Service-Level Objective
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Service-Level Objective as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Service-Level Objective in the UK

Service-Level Objective
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Service-Level Objective.

Daily rate trend for Service-Level Objective in the UK

Service-Level Objective
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Service-Level Objective over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Service-Level Objective in the UK

Service-Level Objective
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Service-Level Objective.

Hourly rate trend for Service-Level Objective in the UK

Service-Level Objective
Top 8 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Service-Level Objective 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 +84 34 £500 -9.09% 38
London +61 28 £500 -13.04% 15
Work from Home +59 20 £555 +5.71% 11
UK excluding London +63 10 £655 +5.22% 29
Scotland +11 6 £425 -31.73% 4
North of England +19 2 £775 +47.62% 8
North West +17 2 £775 +47.62% 5
South West - 2 £655 - 4

Service-Level Objective
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 1 (2.44%) Confluence
Business Applications
1 1 (2.44%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 19 (46.34%) Azure
2 13 (31.71%) AWS
3 8 (19.51%) Azure DevOps
4 6 (14.63%) PaaS
5 5 (12.20%) Serverless
6 4 (9.76%) Azure AKS
6 4 (9.76%) GCP
7 3 (7.32%) Amazon ECS
7 3 (7.32%) Azure Monitor
7 3 (7.32%) Azure Sentinel
7 3 (7.32%) Datadog
8 2 (4.88%) Amazon OpenSearch
8 2 (4.88%) IaaS
8 2 (4.88%) SaaS
9 1 (2.44%) Cloud Computing
9 1 (2.44%) GitHub
9 1 (2.44%) Google Compute Engine
9 1 (2.44%) Google Kubernetes Engine
9 1 (2.44%) Stackdriver
9 1 (2.44%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 6 (14.63%) Network Security
2 4 (9.76%) BGP
2 4 (9.76%) MPLS
2 4 (9.76%) OSPF
2 4 (9.76%) VPN
2 4 (9.76%) WAN
3 3 (7.32%) Remote Desktop
3 3 (7.32%) SNMP
3 3 (7.32%) SSH
3 3 (7.32%) Telnet
3 3 (7.32%) Wireshark
4 2 (4.88%) DNS
4 2 (4.88%) HSRP
4 2 (4.88%) LAN
4 2 (4.88%) Multicast
4 2 (4.88%) Software-Defined Networking
4 2 (4.88%) VXLAN
5 1 (2.44%) DHCP
5 1 (2.44%) Kerberos
5 1 (2.44%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (4.88%) SQL Server
2 1 (2.44%) Azure SQL Database
2 1 (2.44%) ClickHouse
2 1 (2.44%) Data Lake
2 1 (2.44%) Data Warehouse
2 1 (2.44%) Elasticsearch
2 1 (2.44%) Metadata
2 1 (2.44%) MongoDB
2 1 (2.44%) Sybase ASE
Development Applications
1 8 (19.51%) GitLab
2 6 (14.63%) Jenkins
3 3 (7.32%) Git
4 1 (2.44%) JIRA
4 1 (2.44%) TeamCity
General
1 15 (36.59%) Finance
1 15 (36.59%) Social Skills
2 6 (14.63%) Telecoms
3 4 (9.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 4 (9.76%) Law
3 4 (9.76%) Public Sector
4 3 (7.32%) Banking
4 3 (7.32%) Electronics
4 3 (7.32%) Manufacturing
4 3 (7.32%) Marketing
4 3 (7.32%) Presentation Skills
5 2 (4.88%) Analytical Skills
6 1 (2.44%) Fire and Rescue
6 1 (2.44%) Investment Banking
6 1 (2.44%) Police
Job Titles
1 13 (31.71%) Site Engineer
1 13 (31.71%) Site Reliability Engineer
2 8 (19.51%) Architect
3 6 (14.63%) Senior
4 5 (12.20%) Azure Architect
4 5 (12.20%) Lead
4 5 (12.20%) Solutions Architect
5 4 (9.76%) Cloud Architect
5 4 (9.76%) Cloud Solutions Architect
5 4 (9.76%) Network Engineer
5 4 (9.76%) Server Engineer
6 3 (7.32%) .NET Developer
6 3 (7.32%) C# Developer
6 3 (7.32%) Implementation Engineer
6 3 (7.32%) Lead C# Developer
6 3 (7.32%) Lead Developer
6 3 (7.32%) Linux Engineer
6 3 (7.32%) Senior .NET Developer
6 3 (7.32%) Senior C# Developer
6 3 (7.32%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (19.51%) .NET
2 6 (14.63%) JSON
3 4 (9.76%) .NET Core
3 4 (9.76%) OpenTelemetry
4 3 (7.32%) Elastic Stack
4 3 (7.32%) Spring
4 3 (7.32%) XML
5 1 (2.44%) Kafka
5 1 (2.44%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 10 (24.39%) Cloud Native
2 8 (19.51%) Product Ownership
3 6 (14.63%) Public Cloud
4 4 (9.76%) Replication
5 3 (7.32%) Data Protection Act
6 2 (4.88%) Data Centre
7 1 (2.44%) Clustering
7 1 (2.44%) Distributed Systems
7 1 (2.44%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 1 (2.44%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 10 (24.39%) Linux
2 7 (17.07%) Windows
3 6 (14.63%) Windows Server
4 5 (12.20%) Amazon Linux
5 3 (7.32%) Android
6 2 (4.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 1 (2.44%) Oracle Linux
7 1 (2.44%) Solaris
7 1 (2.44%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 22 (53.66%) Site Reliability Engineering
2 21 (51.22%) DevOps
3 16 (39.02%) Infrastructure as Code
4 15 (36.59%) Observability
5 13 (31.71%) CI/CD
6 12 (29.27%) Agile
7 11 (26.83%) Project Delivery
8 9 (21.95%) Containerisation
8 9 (21.95%) ITIL
8 9 (21.95%) Mentoring
8 9 (21.95%) Microservices
8 9 (21.95%) Technical Debt
9 8 (19.51%) Continuous Delivery
9 8 (19.51%) Migration
9 8 (19.51%) Service Management
10 7 (17.07%) Deployment Automation
10 7 (17.07%) ITSM
10 7 (17.07%) Software Engineering
11 6 (14.63%) Cost Optimisation
11 6 (14.63%) Problem Management
Programming Languages
1 10 (24.39%) Python
2 8 (19.51%) Java
3 7 (17.07%) PowerShell
3 7 (17.07%) SQL
4 5 (12.20%) C#
4 5 (12.20%) JavaScript
5 3 (7.32%) Bicep
5 3 (7.32%) Kusto Query Language
6 2 (4.88%) Bash
6 2 (4.88%) Go
7 1 (2.44%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 4 (9.76%) Degree
2 2 (4.88%) SC Cleared
2 2 (4.88%) Security Cleared
3 1 (2.44%) ITIL Certification
3 1 (2.44%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (7.32%) SLA
2 1 (2.44%) COBIT
2 1 (2.44%) Data Quality
2 1 (2.44%) GDPR
2 1 (2.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 4 (9.76%) Docker
2 3 (7.32%) FreeRADIUS
2 3 (7.32%) iptables
3 2 (4.88%) VMware Infrastructure
4 1 (2.44%) Active Directory
4 1 (2.44%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 18 (43.90%) Terraform
2 17 (41.46%) Kubernetes
3 14 (34.15%) Ansible
4 11 (26.83%) Grafana
4 11 (26.83%) Prometheus
5 4 (9.76%) Netcool
6 3 (7.32%) Cacti
6 3 (7.32%) Nagios
6 3 (7.32%) Proxmox
6 3 (7.32%) Puppet
6 3 (7.32%) ZABBIX
7 1 (2.44%) EMC NetWorker
7 1 (2.44%) Graylog
7 1 (2.44%) logstash
7 1 (2.44%) Tivoli
7 1 (2.44%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 16 (39.02%) Microsoft
2 9 (21.95%) VMware
3 8 (19.51%) Splunk
4 6 (14.63%) Dynatrace
5 5 (12.20%) Red Hat
5 5 (12.20%) ServiceNow
6 4 (9.76%) Cisco
7 3 (7.32%) IBM
7 3 (7.32%) Juniper
7 3 (7.32%) Nokia
7 3 (7.32%) Palo Alto
7 3 (7.32%) SAP
8 2 (4.88%) Arista
8 2 (4.88%) Fortinet
8 2 (4.88%) Google
8 2 (4.88%) Solace
8 2 (4.88%) TIBCO
9 1 (2.44%) Huawei
9 1 (2.44%) Remedy
9 1 (2.44%) Serena