Cost Optimisation Contracts with Hybrid/Remote/WFH Options

Cost Optimization
UK > Work from Home

The table below provides summary statistics for remote or hybrid contract work requiring Cost Optimisation skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Cost Optimisation 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 259 311 452
Rank change year-on-year +52 +141 +86
Contract jobs citing Cost Optimisation 45 34 25
As % of all contract jobs with a WFH option 0.45% 0.22% 0.097%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.50% 0.25% 0.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 31 9 11
10th Percentile £409 £445 £425
25th Percentile £463 £500 £466
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £550 £500
Median % change year-on-year -9.00% +10.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £550 £600 £575
90th Percentile £675 £615 £600
UK median daily rate £525 £575 £525
% change year-on-year -8.70% +9.52% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £90.00
UK median hourly rate £36.00 - £90.00

All Process and Methodology Skills
Work from Home

Cost Optimisation falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies with remote or hybrid options requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 9,021 13,483 23,229
As % of all contract jobs with a WFH option 91.08% 87.87% 89.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,191 8,996 16,418
10th Percentile £340 £325 £363
25th Percentile £419 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -2.78% +2.86%
75th Percentile £638 £638 £650
90th Percentile £763 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 224 579 532
10th Percentile £14.20 £15.17 £19.00
25th Percentile £19.56 £25.25 £30.54
Median hourly rate £39.52 £43.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -8.09% -21.82% +57.14%
75th Percentile £66.13 £60.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.25 £80.23
UK median hourly rate £29.00 £35.65 £37.30
% change year-on-year -18.65% -4.42% +49.20%

Cost Optimisation
Trend for Jobs with a WFH Option

Job vacancies with remote working options citing Cost Optimisation as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Cost Optimisation trend for jobs with Hybrid/Remote/WFH options

Cost Optimisation
Daily Rate Trend for Jobs with a WFH Option

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in job vacancies with remote working options citing Cost Optimisation.

Cost Optimisation daily rate for jobs with a WFH option

Cost Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram for Jobs with a WFH Option

Daily rate distribution for jobs with remote working options citing Cost Optimisation over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Cost Optimisation daily rate histogram for jobs with a WFH option

Cost Optimisation
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities with WFH Options 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 (2.22%) Confluence
Cloud Services
1 26 (57.78%) Azure
2 22 (48.89%) AWS
3 11 (24.44%) GitHub
4 10 (22.22%) GCP
5 8 (17.78%) AWS CloudFormation
5 8 (17.78%) Serverless
6 7 (15.56%) Azure DevOps
7 6 (13.33%) GitHub Actions
8 5 (11.11%) Microsoft 365
9 4 (8.89%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 4 (8.89%) Amazon EKS
9 4 (8.89%) Amazon S3
9 4 (8.89%) AWS Lambda
9 4 (8.89%) Azure AKS
9 4 (8.89%) Azure Functions
9 4 (8.89%) Entra ID
9 4 (8.89%) Microsoft Purview
9 4 (8.89%) Power Platform
10 3 (6.67%) Amazon Cognito
10 3 (6.67%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 4 (8.89%) DNS
2 3 (6.67%) TCP/IP
3 2 (4.44%) HTTP
4 1 (2.22%) DHCP
4 1 (2.22%) HTTPS
4 1 (2.22%) Kerberos
4 1 (2.22%) NAS
4 1 (2.22%) Network Security
4 1 (2.22%) SAN
4 1 (2.22%) SSL
4 1 (2.22%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (8.89%) Power BI
2 3 (6.67%) Amazon Athena
2 3 (6.67%) Amazon RDS
2 3 (6.67%) DynamoDB
2 3 (6.67%) MongoDB
2 3 (6.67%) Parquet
2 3 (6.67%) PostgreSQL
3 2 (4.44%) Amazon Aurora
3 2 (4.44%) Azure SQL Database
3 2 (4.44%) BigQuery
3 2 (4.44%) NoSQL
3 2 (4.44%) Oracle Database
3 2 (4.44%) Redis
3 2 (4.44%) SQL Server
4 1 (2.22%) Data Lake
4 1 (2.22%) MySQL
4 1 (2.22%) Oracle Exadata
4 1 (2.22%) RDBMS
4 1 (2.22%) Relational Database
4 1 (2.22%) Sybase ASE
Development Applications
1 11 (24.44%) Jenkins
2 6 (13.33%) GitLab
3 3 (6.67%) Git
4 2 (4.44%) JIRA
5 1 (2.22%) Bitbucket
5 1 (2.22%) TeamCity
General
1 19 (42.22%) Social Skills
2 6 (13.33%) Analytical Skills
2 6 (13.33%) Finance
3 5 (11.11%) Public Sector
4 2 (4.44%) Billing
4 2 (4.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 2 (4.44%) Retail
5 1 (2.22%) Banking
5 1 (2.22%) Digital Health
5 1 (2.22%) Legal
5 1 (2.22%) Local Government
5 1 (2.22%) Marketing
5 1 (2.22%) Organisational Skills
5 1 (2.22%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 16 (35.56%) Senior
2 10 (22.22%) Cloud Engineer
2 10 (22.22%) Senior Cloud Engineer
3 9 (20.00%) DevOps Engineer
4 6 (13.33%) AWS Engineer
4 6 (13.33%) Azure Engineer
4 6 (13.33%) Lead
5 5 (11.11%) Architect
5 5 (11.11%) Developer
5 5 (11.11%) Senior DevOps
5 5 (11.11%) Senior DevOps Engineer
6 4 (8.89%) Microsoft 365 Engineer
6 4 (8.89%) Platform Engineer
7 3 (6.67%) AWS Developer
7 3 (6.67%) AWS DevOps
7 3 (6.67%) AWS DevOps Engineer
7 3 (6.67%) Cloud Developer
7 3 (6.67%) Senior Developer
7 3 (6.67%) Senior Platform Engineer
7 3 (6.67%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (6.67%) AWS CDK
1 3 (6.67%) Elastic Stack
1 3 (6.67%) JSON
2 2 (4.44%) GraphQL
2 2 (4.44%) LDAP
2 2 (4.44%) Middleware
2 2 (4.44%) Prisma
2 2 (4.44%) RESTful
3 1 (2.22%) Keycloak
3 1 (2.22%) OpenTelemetry
3 1 (2.22%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 7 (15.56%) Cloud Native
2 5 (11.11%) Onboarding
3 4 (8.89%) Management Information System
4 3 (6.67%) Replication
5 2 (4.44%) BYOD
5 2 (4.44%) Clustering
5 2 (4.44%) Data Protection Act
6 1 (2.22%) CMDB
6 1 (2.22%) FMCG
6 1 (2.22%) NHS
6 1 (2.22%) Oracle Licensing
Operating Systems
1 6 (13.33%) Linux
2 2 (4.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 2 (4.44%) Windows
3 1 (2.22%) Oracle Linux
3 1 (2.22%) Solaris
3 1 (2.22%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 25 (55.56%) DevOps
2 22 (48.89%) CI/CD
3 18 (40.00%) Problem-Solving
4 14 (31.11%) Infrastructure as Code
5 10 (22.22%) Containerisation
6 9 (20.00%) Agile
6 9 (20.00%) Artificial Intelligence
6 9 (20.00%) Cloud Security
6 9 (20.00%) Identity Access Management
7 8 (17.78%) FinOps
8 7 (15.56%) Cost Management
8 7 (15.56%) High Availability
8 7 (15.56%) Identity Management
9 6 (13.33%) Change Management
9 6 (13.33%) Collaborative Working
9 6 (13.33%) Software Engineering
10 5 (11.11%) Cloud Operations
10 5 (11.11%) DevSecOps
10 5 (11.11%) Infrastructure Automation
10 5 (11.11%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 13 (28.89%) Python
2 7 (15.56%) SQL
3 6 (13.33%) PowerShell
4 5 (11.11%) Bash
5 4 (8.89%) Bicep
5 4 (8.89%) Shell Script
6 3 (6.67%) Java
6 3 (6.67%) JavaScript
7 2 (4.44%) C#
7 2 (4.44%) Go
7 2 (4.44%) Kotlin
7 2 (4.44%) TypeScript
8 1 (2.22%) Groovy
8 1 (2.22%) Scala
Qualifications
1 8 (17.78%) Security Cleared
2 6 (13.33%) AWS Certification
2 6 (13.33%) Azure Certification
2 6 (13.33%) SC Cleared
3 3 (6.67%) Degree
4 2 (4.44%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
4 2 (4.44%) Computer Science Degree
4 2 (4.44%) DV Cleared
4 2 (4.44%) PMI Certification
4 2 (4.44%) PMP
4 2 (4.44%) TOGAF Certification
5 1 (2.22%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
5 1 (2.22%) Cisco Certification
5 1 (2.22%) CRISC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (8.89%) GDPR
2 3 (6.67%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (4.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
4 1 (2.22%) GRC
4 1 (2.22%) NCSC
System Software
1 17 (37.78%) Docker
2 3 (6.67%) Active Directory
3 2 (4.44%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (2.22%) Oracle RAC
4 1 (2.22%) VMware ESXi
4 1 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 17 (37.78%) Kubernetes
2 15 (33.33%) Terraform
3 7 (15.56%) Prometheus
4 6 (13.33%) Ansible
4 6 (13.33%) Grafana
5 2 (4.44%) Progress Chef
5 2 (4.44%) Puppet
6 1 (2.22%) Argo
6 1 (2.22%) Consul
6 1 (2.22%) EMC NetWorker
6 1 (2.22%) Istio
6 1 (2.22%) linkerd
6 1 (2.22%) Netcool
6 1 (2.22%) Opsview
6 1 (2.22%) Oracle RMAN
6 1 (2.22%) Single Sign-On
6 1 (2.22%) Tivoli
6 1 (2.22%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 10 (22.22%) Microsoft
2 7 (15.56%) Google
3 3 (6.67%) Databricks
3 3 (6.67%) Oracle
3 3 (6.67%) Red Hat
3 3 (6.67%) ServiceNow
4 2 (4.44%) Dynatrace
4 2 (4.44%) Qualys
4 2 (4.44%) Splunk
4 2 (4.44%) Sybase
5 1 (2.22%) Cisco
5 1 (2.22%) CyberArk
5 1 (2.22%) EMC
5 1 (2.22%) IBM
5 1 (2.22%) Isilon
5 1 (2.22%) New Relic
5 1 (2.22%) PagerDuty
5 1 (2.22%) Serena
5 1 (2.22%) VMware