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 18 July 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Jul 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 509 576 650
Rank change year-on-year +67 +74 +179
Contract jobs citing Service-Level Objective 44 20 39
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.13% 0.047% 0.070%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.15% 0.056% 0.078%
Number of daily rates quoted 24 8 29
10th Percentile £267 £513 £473
25th Percentile £411 £550 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £623 £650
Median % change year-on-year -21.69% -4.23% -
75th Percentile £597 £634 £700
90th Percentile £671 - £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £615 £623 £500
% change year-on-year -1.20% +24.50% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 2 0
Median hourly rate - £58.75 -
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 29,453 35,958 49,827
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.33% 85.38% 89.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,495 23,012 34,286
10th Percentile £300 £301 £325
25th Percentile £405 £413 £435
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,557 2,302 1,674
10th Percentile £14.20 £13.00 £13.41
25th Percentile £17.30 £16.71 £17.72
Median hourly rate £25.15 £38.12 £40.25
Median % change year-on-year -34.02% -5.29% +52.81%
75th Percentile £51.25 £62.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £73.48 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.00 £38.20 £40.00
% change year-on-year -37.16% -4.51% +86.05%

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 18 July 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 18 July 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 +74 36 £475 -9.52% 38
London +46 29 £475 -13.64% 25
Work from Home +54 23 £555 +5.71% 16
UK excluding London +30 12 £615 -1.20% 24
Scotland -1 7 £500 -19.68% 4
South West - 4 £655 - 4
North West +7 1 £775 +47.62% 1
North of England +3 1 £775 +47.62% 7

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:

Business Applications
1 1 (2.27%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 21 (47.73%) Azure
2 13 (29.55%) Azure DevOps
3 12 (27.27%) AWS
4 5 (11.36%) PaaS
4 5 (11.36%) Serverless
5 3 (6.82%) Amazon ECS
5 3 (6.82%) Azure AKS
5 3 (6.82%) Azure Monitor
5 3 (6.82%) Azure Sentinel
5 3 (6.82%) Datadog
6 2 (4.55%) Amazon OpenSearch
6 2 (4.55%) GCP
7 1 (2.27%) Cloud Run
7 1 (2.27%) GitHub
7 1 (2.27%) GitHub Actions
7 1 (2.27%) Google Compute Engine
7 1 (2.27%) Google Kubernetes Engine
7 1 (2.27%) IaaS
7 1 (2.27%) SaaS
7 1 (2.27%) Stackdriver
Communications & Networking
1 5 (11.36%) Network Security
2 3 (6.82%) Remote Desktop
2 3 (6.82%) SNMP
2 3 (6.82%) SSH
2 3 (6.82%) Telnet
2 3 (6.82%) WAN
2 3 (6.82%) Wireshark
3 2 (4.55%) BGP
3 2 (4.55%) Firewall
3 2 (4.55%) MPLS
3 2 (4.55%) Multicast
3 2 (4.55%) OSPF
3 2 (4.55%) VPN
4 1 (2.27%) DNS
4 1 (2.27%) DSLAM
4 1 (2.27%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (2.27%) Azure SQL Database
1 1 (2.27%) ClickHouse
1 1 (2.27%) Elasticsearch
1 1 (2.27%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 8 (18.18%) GitLab
2 7 (15.91%) Jenkins
3 2 (4.55%) Bitbucket
3 2 (4.55%) Git
General
1 18 (40.91%) Social Skills
2 17 (38.64%) Finance
3 12 (27.27%) Telecoms
4 9 (20.45%) Public Sector
5 8 (18.18%) Electronics
5 8 (18.18%) Manufacturing
5 8 (18.18%) Marketing
6 4 (9.09%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 4 (9.09%) Law
7 3 (6.82%) Banking
7 3 (6.82%) Presentation Skills
8 2 (4.55%) Analytical Skills
9 1 (2.27%) Investment Banking
9 1 (2.27%) Legal
Job Titles
1 12 (27.27%) Senior
1 12 (27.27%) Site Engineer
1 12 (27.27%) Site Reliability Engineer
2 10 (22.73%) Lead
3 8 (18.18%) .NET Developer
3 8 (18.18%) Architect
3 8 (18.18%) Azure Developer
3 8 (18.18%) C# .NET Developer
3 8 (18.18%) C# Developer
3 8 (18.18%) Developer
3 8 (18.18%) Lead .NET Developer
3 8 (18.18%) Lead C# Developer
3 8 (18.18%) Lead Developer
3 8 (18.18%) Senior .NET Developer
3 8 (18.18%) Senior C# .NET Developer
3 8 (18.18%) Senior C# Developer
3 8 (18.18%) Senior Developer
4 5 (11.36%) Azure Architect
4 5 (11.36%) Solutions Architect
5 4 (9.09%) Cloud Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (29.55%) .NET
2 9 (20.45%) .NET Core
3 6 (13.64%) JSON
3 6 (13.64%) OpenTelemetry
4 3 (6.82%) Spring
4 3 (6.82%) XML
5 2 (4.55%) Elastic Stack
6 1 (2.27%) Kafka
6 1 (2.27%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 13 (29.55%) Product Ownership
2 10 (22.73%) Cloud Native
3 6 (13.64%) Public Cloud
4 3 (6.82%) Replication
5 1 (2.27%) CMDB
5 1 (2.27%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (2.27%) Distributed Systems
5 1 (2.27%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 1 (2.27%) Management Information System
5 1 (2.27%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 10 (22.73%) Linux
2 6 (13.64%) Windows
3 5 (11.36%) Amazon Linux
3 5 (11.36%) Windows Server
4 3 (6.82%) Android
4 3 (6.82%) Unix
5 1 (2.27%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 28 (63.64%) DevOps
2 21 (47.73%) Site Reliability Engineering
3 18 (40.91%) Observability
4 17 (38.64%) Agile
5 15 (34.09%) Mentoring
5 15 (34.09%) Project Delivery
6 14 (31.82%) CI/CD
6 14 (31.82%) Infrastructure as Code
7 13 (29.55%) Continuous Delivery
8 11 (25.00%) Deployment Automation
9 10 (22.73%) OWASP
10 9 (20.45%) BDD
10 9 (20.45%) Containerisation
10 9 (20.45%) Microservices
10 9 (20.45%) OO
10 9 (20.45%) Pair Programming
10 9 (20.45%) SOLID
10 9 (20.45%) TDD
11 8 (18.18%) Business Intelligence
11 8 (18.18%) Cybersecurity
Programming Languages
1 12 (27.27%) SQL
2 11 (25.00%) PowerShell
3 9 (20.45%) C#
4 7 (15.91%) Java
5 6 (13.64%) Python
6 5 (11.36%) JavaScript
7 3 (6.82%) Bicep
7 3 (6.82%) Kusto Query Language
8 2 (4.55%) Bash
9 1 (2.27%) Go
9 1 (2.27%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 2 (4.55%) Degree
2 1 (2.27%) CEH
2 1 (2.27%) CISM
2 1 (2.27%) CISSP
2 1 (2.27%) CompTIA CySA+
2 1 (2.27%) ITIL Certification
2 1 (2.27%) Master's Degree
2 1 (2.27%) SC Cleared
2 1 (2.27%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (9.09%) SLA
2 2 (4.55%) COBIT
2 2 (4.55%) QA
3 1 (2.27%) GRC
3 1 (2.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 1 (2.27%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
3 1 (2.27%) NIST
3 1 (2.27%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 3 (6.82%) FreeRADIUS
1 3 (6.82%) iptables
2 2 (4.55%) Docker
3 1 (2.27%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 21 (47.73%) Terraform
2 14 (31.82%) Kubernetes
3 12 (27.27%) Grafana
3 12 (27.27%) Prometheus
4 11 (25.00%) Ansible
5 3 (6.82%) Cacti
5 3 (6.82%) Nagios
5 3 (6.82%) Netcool
5 3 (6.82%) Proxmox
5 3 (6.82%) Puppet
5 3 (6.82%) ZABBIX
6 1 (2.27%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
6 1 (2.27%) Graylog
6 1 (2.27%) logstash
Vendors
1 18 (40.91%) Microsoft
2 9 (20.45%) Splunk
3 8 (18.18%) SAP
3 8 (18.18%) VMware
4 6 (13.64%) Dynatrace
5 5 (11.36%) Red Hat
5 5 (11.36%) ServiceNow
6 3 (6.82%) Nokia
7 2 (4.55%) PagerDuty
8 1 (2.27%) AppDynamics
8 1 (2.27%) BMC
8 1 (2.27%) Cisco
8 1 (2.27%) Google
8 1 (2.27%) Huawei
8 1 (2.27%) Juniper
8 1 (2.27%) Palo Alto
8 1 (2.27%) Remedy
8 1 (2.27%) Tanium