SOC 2 Contract Job Trends

System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring SOC 2 skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 19 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 525 519 564
Rank change year-on-year -6 +45 +200
Contract jobs citing SOC 2 59 25 41
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.16% 0.073% 0.093%
As % of the Quality Assurance & Compliance category 0.93% 0.52% 0.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 38 10 26
10th Percentile £400 £481 £432
25th Percentile £413 £516 £563
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £600 £650
Median % change year-on-year -16.67% -7.69% +4.00%
75th Percentile £647 £648 £700
90th Percentile £873 £721 -
UK excluding London median daily rate £496 £575 £700
% change year-on-year -13.83% -17.86% +86.67%

All Quality Assurance and Compliance Skills
UK

SOC 2 falls under the Quality Assurance and Compliance category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring quality assurance or compliance skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for quality assurance or compliance skills 6,357 4,834 6,418
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 17.26% 14.14% 14.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,103 2,845 4,280
10th Percentile £313 £263 £313
25th Percentile £405 £378 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £600 £623 £645
90th Percentile £700 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £486 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +2.32% -5.00% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 318 187 233
10th Percentile £13.98 £15.00 £14.20
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.75 £19.47
Median hourly rate £25.63 £27.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.80% -21.43% +55.87%
75th Percentile £60.00 £62.24 £64.50
90th Percentile £73.75 £70.00 £82.49
UK excluding London median hourly rate £20.60 £27.35 £35.25
% change year-on-year -24.70% -22.41% +70.95%

SOC 2
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SOC 2 relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

SOC 2 job vacancy trend in the UK

SOC 2
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SOC 2.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SOC 2

SOC 2
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SOC 2 over the 6 months to 19 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SOC 2 in the UK

SOC 2
Top 13 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SOC 2 within the UK over the 6 months to 19 December 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 -2 49 £500 -16.67% 174
London -2 24 £513 -20.39% 26
UK excluding London -23 19 £496 -13.83% 164
Work from Home +9 17 £513 +2.50% 55
North of England -41 9 £497 +60.20% 26
Yorkshire - 6 £550 - 12
South East - 6 £563 - 44
Midlands -37 4 £450 -10.00% 36
West Midlands - 4 £450 - 21
South West - 2 - - 25
North East - 2 £466 - 2
East of England -23 1 £525 -12.50% 25
North West -26 1 £420 +35.48% 12

SOC 2
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 1 (1.69%) Apache Airflow
1 1 (1.69%) Confluence
Applications
1 1 (1.69%) Microsoft Office
1 1 (1.69%) MS Visio
Cloud Services
1 35 (59.32%) Azure
2 26 (44.07%) AWS
3 19 (32.20%) GCP
4 8 (13.56%) Entra ID
5 7 (11.86%) SaaS
6 6 (10.17%) GitHub
6 6 (10.17%) GitHub Actions
7 5 (8.47%) Microsoft 365
8 4 (6.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 4 (6.78%) Amazon GuardDuty
8 4 (6.78%) AWS CloudFormation
8 4 (6.78%) Azure Sentinel
8 4 (6.78%) IaaS
8 4 (6.78%) PaaS
8 4 (6.78%) Power Platform
9 3 (5.08%) Amazon EC2
9 3 (5.08%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (5.08%) Google Kubernetes Engine
10 2 (3.39%) Amazon EKS
10 2 (3.39%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 6 (10.17%) Firewall
1 6 (10.17%) Network Security
2 4 (6.78%) SSH
3 3 (5.08%) Kerberos
3 3 (5.08%) VPN
4 1 (1.69%) BGP
4 1 (1.69%) DMZ
4 1 (1.69%) DNS
4 1 (1.69%) HTTPS
4 1 (1.69%) OSPF
4 1 (1.69%) SD-WAN
4 1 (1.69%) SNMP
4 1 (1.69%) SSL
4 1 (1.69%) TCP/IP
4 1 (1.69%) Telnet
4 1 (1.69%) VLAN
4 1 (1.69%) WAN
4 1 (1.69%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (3.39%) Amazon RDS
2 1 (1.69%) BigQuery
2 1 (1.69%) Data Vault
2 1 (1.69%) Looker
2 1 (1.69%) Pinecone
2 1 (1.69%) Power BI
2 1 (1.69%) Snowflake Schema
2 1 (1.69%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 2 (3.39%) GitLab
1 2 (3.39%) Jenkins
2 1 (1.69%) SonarQube
General
1 16 (27.12%) Social Skills
2 14 (23.73%) Finance
3 7 (11.86%) Analytical Skills
4 6 (10.17%) Banking
5 4 (6.78%) Documentation Skills
6 3 (5.08%) Financial Institution
6 3 (5.08%) Legal
6 3 (5.08%) Presentation Skills
6 3 (5.08%) Public Sector
7 2 (3.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 2 (3.39%) Investment Banking
8 1 (1.69%) Law
Job Titles
1 7 (11.86%) Architect
1 7 (11.86%) Consultant
2 6 (10.17%) Analyst
2 6 (10.17%) Senior
3 5 (8.47%) Security Engineer
4 4 (6.78%) Lead
4 4 (6.78%) Platform Engineer
5 3 (5.08%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 3 (5.08%) Enterprise Architect
5 3 (5.08%) Management Consultant
5 3 (5.08%) Senior Architect
5 3 (5.08%) Senior Enterprise Architect
6 2 (3.39%) Administrator
6 2 (3.39%) Business Analyst
6 2 (3.39%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 2 (3.39%) Lead DevOps Engineer
6 2 (3.39%) Network Engineer
6 2 (3.39%) Network Security Engineer
6 2 (3.39%) SOC Analyst
6 2 (3.39%) Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (16.95%) OAuth
1 10 (16.95%) SAML
2 6 (10.17%) LDAP
2 6 (10.17%) OpenID
3 3 (5.08%) ARM Templates
3 3 (5.08%) OAuth2
4 2 (3.39%) AWS CDK
4 2 (3.39%) Elastic Stack
4 2 (3.39%) Flash
4 2 (3.39%) GraphQL
4 2 (3.39%) Microsoft Graph
4 2 (3.39%) RESTful
4 2 (3.39%) Smart Contracts
5 1 (1.69%) Faiss
5 1 (1.69%) FastAPI
5 1 (1.69%) Kafka
5 1 (1.69%) LangChain
5 1 (1.69%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 7 (11.86%) Onboarding
2 5 (8.47%) Hybrid Cloud
3 4 (6.78%) Cloud Native
3 4 (6.78%) Management Information System
3 4 (6.78%) Security Posture
4 3 (5.08%) Data Protection Act
4 3 (5.08%) Security Operations Centre
5 2 (3.39%) Blockchain
5 2 (3.39%) Cloud Security Posture
5 2 (3.39%) Cyber Kill Chain
5 2 (3.39%) Data Centre
5 2 (3.39%) Enterprise Cloud
5 2 (3.39%) Greenfield Project
5 2 (3.39%) Operational Technology
6 1 (1.69%) AI Agents
6 1 (1.69%) Cyber Threat
6 1 (1.69%) Cyberattack
6 1 (1.69%) MISP
6 1 (1.69%) PMI
6 1 (1.69%) YARA
Operating Systems
1 9 (15.25%) Linux
2 4 (6.78%) AIX
2 4 (6.78%) Solaris
2 4 (6.78%) Unix
2 4 (6.78%) Windows
3 2 (3.39%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 21 (35.59%) Cybersecurity
2 16 (27.12%) CI/CD
2 16 (27.12%) Cloud Security
2 16 (27.12%) Incident Response
2 16 (27.12%) Infrastructure as Code
3 15 (25.42%) DevOps
4 11 (18.64%) AI
5 10 (16.95%) RBAC
6 9 (15.25%) SIEM
6 9 (15.25%) Zero Trust
7 8 (13.56%) DevSecOps
7 8 (13.56%) Problem-Solving
7 8 (13.56%) Risk Management
7 8 (13.56%) Security Monitoring
8 7 (11.86%) Containerisation
8 7 (11.86%) Continuous Improvement
8 7 (11.86%) Data Loss Prevention
8 7 (11.86%) Identity Access Management
8 7 (11.86%) Infrastructure Automation
8 7 (11.86%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 16 (27.12%) Python
2 14 (23.73%) PowerShell
3 12 (20.34%) Bash
4 6 (10.17%) Bicep
5 4 (6.78%) Search Processing Language
5 4 (6.78%) SQL
6 2 (3.39%) Java
6 2 (3.39%) Rust
6 2 (3.39%) Solidity
7 1 (1.69%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 8 (13.56%) CISM
1 8 (13.56%) CISSP
2 7 (11.86%) AWS Certification
3 5 (8.47%) Azure Certification
4 4 (6.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
4 4 (6.78%) Degree
5 3 (5.08%) (ISC)2 CCSP
5 3 (5.08%) Cisco Certification
5 3 (5.08%) MCP
5 3 (5.08%) Microsoft Certification
5 3 (5.08%) Security Cleared
6 2 (3.39%) CCSK
6 2 (3.39%) CEH
6 2 (3.39%) CISA
6 2 (3.39%) GCIH
6 2 (3.39%) OSCP
6 2 (3.39%) SC Cleared
7 1 (1.69%) CAPM
7 1 (1.69%) GCIA
7 1 (1.69%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 34 (57.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 23 (38.98%) GDPR
3 21 (35.59%) NIST
4 14 (23.73%) PCI DSS
5 11 (18.64%) HIPAA
6 5 (8.47%) GRC
7 4 (6.78%) EU AI Act
8 3 (5.08%) Cyber Essentials
9 2 (3.39%) FedRAMP
9 2 (3.39%) ISO 22301
9 2 (3.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 1 (1.69%) Data Quality
10 1 (1.69%) ITGC
10 1 (1.69%) NCSC
10 1 (1.69%) QA
10 1 (1.69%) SOC 1
System Software
1 10 (16.95%) Active Directory
2 6 (10.17%) Docker
3 1 (1.69%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 20 (33.90%) Terraform
2 8 (13.56%) Kubernetes
2 8 (13.56%) Single Sign-On
3 5 (8.47%) Ansible
4 3 (5.08%) Argo
4 3 (5.08%) Grafana
4 3 (5.08%) Prometheus
5 2 (3.39%) PingFederate
5 2 (3.39%) QRadar
6 1 (1.69%) CSIRT
6 1 (1.69%) Kustomize
6 1 (1.69%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 9 (15.25%) Microsoft
2 8 (13.56%) Splunk
3 7 (11.86%) Google
4 5 (8.47%) CrowdStrike
5 3 (5.08%) BeyondTrust
5 3 (5.08%) CyberArk
5 3 (5.08%) Databricks
6 2 (3.39%) Optimizely
6 2 (3.39%) Ping Identity
6 2 (3.39%) Salesforce
6 2 (3.39%) ServiceNow
6 2 (3.39%) Tenable
6 2 (3.39%) Zscaler
7 1 (1.69%) LogRhythm
7 1 (1.69%) Okta
7 1 (1.69%) OpenAI
7 1 (1.69%) Qualys
7 1 (1.69%) Rapid7
7 1 (1.69%) Tanium
7 1 (1.69%) VirusTotal