SMS Contracts with Hybrid/Remote/WFH Options

Short Message Service (SMS)
UK > Work from Home

The table below provides summary statistics for remote or hybrid contract work requiring SMS skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited SMS over the 6 months leading up to 7 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 301 338 466
Rank change year-on-year +37 +128 +99
Contract jobs citing SMS 4 6 8
As % of all contract jobs with a WFH option 0.041% 0.039% 0.031%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 0.38% 0.38% 0.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 3 2 7
10th Percentile £576 £563 £400
25th Percentile £578 £573 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £594 £600
Median % change year-on-year +1.05% -1.04% -
75th Percentile £675 £611 -
90th Percentile £705 £619 -
UK median daily rate £580 £450 £563
% change year-on-year +28.89% -20.00% -6.25%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
Work from Home

SMS falls under the Communications and Computer Networking category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies with remote or hybrid options requiring communications or computer networking skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 1,048 1,573 2,949
As % of all contract jobs with a WFH option 10.63% 10.33% 11.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 676 1,022 1,962
10th Percentile £325 £300 £350
25th Percentile £400 £410 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £511 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.20% -2.62% +5.00%
75th Percentile £600 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £725
UK median daily rate £488 £500 £520
% change year-on-year -2.50% -3.85% +4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 77 95
10th Percentile £13.78 £12.75 £23.30
25th Percentile £14.20 £14.27 £42.50
Median hourly rate £41.00 £24.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +67.35% -59.17% +20.00%
75th Percentile £64.69 £65.00 £72.63
90th Percentile £73.88 £87.46 £80.25
UK median hourly rate £30.70 £40.00 £18.88
% change year-on-year -23.25% +111.92% -31.36%

SMS
Trend for Jobs with a WFH Option

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

SMS trend for jobs with Hybrid/Remote/WFH options

SMS
Daily Rate Trend for Jobs with a WFH Option

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

SMS daily rate for jobs with a WFH option

SMS
Daily Rate Histogram for Jobs with a WFH Option

Daily rate distribution for jobs with remote working options citing SMS over the 6 months to 7 May 2025.

SMS daily rate histogram for jobs with a WFH option

SMS
Hourly Rate Trend for Jobs with a WFH Option

3-month moving average hourly rate quoted in job vacancies with remote working options citing SMS.

SMS hourly rate for jobs with a WFH option

SMS
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 (25.00%) Jupyter
Cloud Services
1 2 (50.00%) Amazon S3
1 2 (50.00%) Amazon SQS
1 2 (50.00%) AWS
1 2 (50.00%) AWS Lambda
1 2 (50.00%) Serverless
2 1 (25.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
2 1 (25.00%) Amazon EC2
2 1 (25.00%) Amazon ECS
2 1 (25.00%) Amazon EKS
2 1 (25.00%) Amazon EMR
2 1 (25.00%) AWS CloudFormation
2 1 (25.00%) AWS CloudTrail
2 1 (25.00%) AWS CodeBuild
2 1 (25.00%) AWS CodePipeline
2 1 (25.00%) AWS Fargate
2 1 (25.00%) AWS Step Functions
2 1 (25.00%) Azure
2 1 (25.00%) Virtual Private Cloud
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (25.00%) Amazon RDS
1 1 (25.00%) Data Lake
1 1 (25.00%) DynamoDB
1 1 (25.00%) Metadata
1 1 (25.00%) Metadata Repository
Development Applications
1 1 (25.00%) GitLab
1 1 (25.00%) Jenkins
General
1 1 (25.00%) Finance
1 1 (25.00%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 2 (50.00%) Developer
1 2 (50.00%) Lead
1 2 (50.00%) Lead Developer
1 2 (50.00%) ServiceNow Developer
2 1 (25.00%) AWS Engineer
2 1 (25.00%) Data Engineer
2 1 (25.00%) Migration Engineer
2 1 (25.00%) Senior
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (50.00%) AngularJS
1 2 (50.00%) CSS
1 2 (50.00%) HTML
1 2 (50.00%) JSON
1 2 (50.00%) REST
1 2 (50.00%) SOAP
1 2 (50.00%) Web Services
1 2 (50.00%) XML
2 1 (25.00%) AWS CDK
2 1 (25.00%) Kafka
2 1 (25.00%) Node.js
2 1 (25.00%) PySpark
2 1 (25.00%) ServiceStack
2 1 (25.00%) Spring
2 1 (25.00%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 1 (25.00%) Cloud Native
Processes & Methodologies
1 2 (50.00%) Business Development
1 2 (50.00%) CI/CD
1 2 (50.00%) ITIL
1 2 (50.00%) ITSM
1 2 (50.00%) Security Operations
1 2 (50.00%) Task Automation
2 1 (25.00%) Architectural Patterns
2 1 (25.00%) Containerisation
2 1 (25.00%) Cost Optimisation
2 1 (25.00%) Data Development
2 1 (25.00%) Data Integration
2 1 (25.00%) DevOps
2 1 (25.00%) High Availability
2 1 (25.00%) Infrastructure as Code
2 1 (25.00%) Infrastructure Automation
2 1 (25.00%) Mentoring
2 1 (25.00%) Migration
2 1 (25.00%) Problem-Solving
2 1 (25.00%) Runbook
2 1 (25.00%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 2 (50.00%) Java
1 2 (50.00%) JavaScript
1 2 (50.00%) Python
Qualifications
1 2 (50.00%) SC Cleared
1 2 (50.00%) Security Cleared
2 1 (25.00%) AWS Certification
2 1 (25.00%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
2 1 (25.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (50.00%) ISO/IEC 20000
System Software
1 1 (25.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 2 (50.00%) Terraform
2 1 (25.00%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 2 (50.00%) ServiceNow
2 1 (25.00%) Databricks