SC Cleared Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Security Check (SC) Clearance
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics for permanent job vacancies advertised in the UK excluding London with a requirement for SC Cleared qualifications. It includes a benchmarking guide to the salaries offered over the 6 months leading up to 19 June 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 70 61
Rank change year-on-year +24 -9 +7
Permanent jobs citing SC Cleared 2,164 1,199 2,895
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 3.20% 3.99% 3.65%
As % of the Qualifications category 16.78% 9.52% 14.87%
Number of salaries quoted 1,628 823 2,113
10th Percentile £40,000 £35,000 £32,500
25th Percentile £50,000 £47,500 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £65,000 £59,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +10.17% +7.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £80,000 £73,750 £67,000
90th Percentile £90,000 £83,750 £79,225
UK median annual salary £67,500 £60,000 £57,500
% change year-on-year +12.50% +4.35% -8.00%

All Academic and Professional Certifications
UK excluding London

SC Cleared falls under the Academic Qualifications and Professional Certifications category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications in the UK excluding London.

Permanent vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications 12,893 12,597 19,466
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 19.08% 41.94% 24.54%
Number of salaries quoted 6,417 5,016 12,333
10th Percentile £28,900 £27,500 £27,500
25th Percentile £39,000 £35,000 £36,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £50,500 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +8.91% +1.00% -4.76%
75th Percentile £72,500 £66,253 £65,000
90th Percentile £85,000 £78,750 £80,000
UK median annual salary £60,000 £55,000 £53,263
% change year-on-year +9.09% +3.26% -11.23%

SC Cleared
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing SC Cleared relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

SC Cleared job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

SC Cleared
Salary Trend in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing SC Cleared.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing SC Cleared

SC Cleared
Salary Histogram in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution for jobs citing SC Cleared in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 19 June 2026.

Salary histogram for SC Cleared in the UK excluding London

SC Cleared
Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing SC Cleared within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 19 June 2026. 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
South West +15 585 £70,000 +13.82% 181
South East -8 544 £70,000 +21.74% 294
North of England +104 427 £60,425 +9.86% 160
Midlands +35 307 £57,500 -11.54% 82
North West +109 240 £65,000 +10.17% 88
West Midlands +12 200 £60,000 -11.11% 60
Yorkshire +13 129 £62,500 +38.89% 42
Wales +6 124 £55,000 - 35
East of England +2 109 £65,000 +18.18% 48
East Midlands +30 105 £52,500 +0.96% 22
Scotland +52 67 £75,000 +20.00% 25
North East +7 58 £55,000 -20.73% 33
Northern Ireland -29 7 £63,500 -25.43% 14
SC Cleared
UK

SC Cleared
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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
1 109 (5.04%) Microsoft Exchange
2 46 (2.13%) SharePoint
3 20 (0.92%) Apache
4 18 (0.83%) SAS
5 15 (0.69%) Apache Spark
6 13 (0.60%) Apache Airflow
7 10 (0.46%) Jupyter
8 8 (0.37%) Confluence
8 8 (0.37%) Skype for Business
9 7 (0.32%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.092%) Exchange Server 2013
10 2 (0.092%) OpenStack
11 1 (0.046%) Apache Qpid
11 1 (0.046%) Appian
11 1 (0.046%) JBoss
11 1 (0.046%) Site Server
Applications
1 87 (4.02%) Microsoft Office
2 30 (1.39%) Microsoft Excel
3 10 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 9 (0.42%) Simulink
5 4 (0.18%) Windchill
6 3 (0.14%) Stateflow
7 1 (0.046%) CATIA
7 1 (0.046%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.046%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 7 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
2 6 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.046%) Integrated Workplace Management System
3 1 (0.046%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.046%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.046%) SAP EWM
3 1 (0.046%) SAP GRC
3 1 (0.046%) SAP HCM
3 1 (0.046%) SAP MM
3 1 (0.046%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 496 (22.92%) Azure
2 297 (13.72%) AWS
3 273 (12.62%) Microsoft 365
4 83 (3.84%) Entra ID
5 77 (3.56%) GCP
6 45 (2.08%) GitHub
6 45 (2.08%) Serverless
7 44 (2.03%) SaaS
8 43 (1.99%) Dynamics 365
8 43 (1.99%) Power Platform
9 39 (1.80%) Azure DevOps
10 34 (1.57%) Amazon S3
11 32 (1.48%) Azure Sentinel
12 31 (1.43%) AWS CloudFormation
13 25 (1.16%) Amazon EC2
14 23 (1.06%) AWS Lambda
15 22 (1.02%) PaaS
16 21 (0.97%) Amazon ECS
16 21 (0.97%) Amazon EKS
17 19 (0.88%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 141 (6.52%) DNS
2 130 (6.01%) Firewall
3 117 (5.41%) DHCP
4 69 (3.19%) WAN
5 65 (3.00%) VPN
6 52 (2.40%) Network Security
7 51 (2.36%) LAN
8 50 (2.31%) TCP/IP
9 32 (1.48%) Wi-Fi
10 28 (1.29%) BGP
10 28 (1.29%) Structured Cabling
11 23 (1.06%) VLAN
12 20 (0.92%) HTTP
13 19 (0.88%) SD-WAN
14 18 (0.83%) MPLS
15 17 (0.79%) VoIP
16 16 (0.74%) Cisco Firepower
17 13 (0.60%) Broadband
18 12 (0.55%) ATM
19 11 (0.51%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 84 (3.88%) Amazon RDS
2 38 (1.76%) Power BI
3 31 (1.43%) PostgreSQL
4 23 (1.06%) DynamoDB
5 20 (0.92%) Big Data
6 16 (0.74%) Relational Database
7 15 (0.69%) Amazon Athena
7 15 (0.69%) Data Warehouse
8 14 (0.65%) MongoDB
9 13 (0.60%) NoSQL
10 11 (0.51%) GIS
10 11 (0.51%) SQL Server
11 10 (0.46%) Elasticsearch
11 10 (0.46%) Redis
12 9 (0.42%) Data Lake
13 7 (0.32%) Metadata
13 7 (0.32%) MySQL
13 7 (0.32%) Pentaho
14 6 (0.28%) Hadoop
14 6 (0.28%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 77 (3.56%) Git
2 69 (3.19%) GitLab
3 40 (1.85%) Jenkins
4 30 (1.39%) JIRA
5 22 (1.02%) JUnit
6 17 (0.79%) Maven
6 17 (0.79%) SonarQube
7 15 (0.69%) Cypress.io
7 15 (0.69%) Selenium
7 15 (0.69%) Visual Studio Code
8 13 (0.60%) Mockito
9 8 (0.37%) Burp Suite
9 8 (0.37%) Cucumber
9 8 (0.37%) Metasploit
10 6 (0.28%) JMeter
10 6 (0.28%) Postman
11 5 (0.23%) Artifactory
11 5 (0.23%) Claude Code
11 5 (0.23%) REST Assured
12 3 (0.14%) Bitbucket
General
1 490 (22.64%) Social Skills
2 273 (12.62%) Public Sector
3 221 (10.21%) Analytical Skills
4 131 (6.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 128 (5.91%) Finance
6 55 (2.54%) Telecoms
7 41 (1.89%) Aerospace
7 41 (1.89%) Manufacturing
8 36 (1.66%) Back Office
8 36 (1.66%) Electronics
8 36 (1.66%) Law
9 35 (1.62%) Military
10 34 (1.57%) Legal
10 34 (1.57%) Organisational Skills
11 30 (1.39%) Aviation
12 23 (1.06%) Retail
13 18 (0.83%) Documentation Skills
14 12 (0.55%) Influencing Skills
15 11 (0.51%) Advertising
15 11 (0.51%) Games
Job Titles
1 354 (16.36%) Senior
2 208 (9.61%) Architect
3 182 (8.41%) Developer
4 175 (8.09%) Software Engineer
5 169 (7.81%) Consultant
6 160 (7.39%) Analyst
7 125 (5.78%) Systems Engineer
8 97 (4.48%) Cloud Engineer
8 97 (4.48%) Support Engineer
9 90 (4.16%) Security Consultant
10 89 (4.11%) Data Engineer
11 87 (4.02%) Lead
12 79 (3.65%) Network Engineer
13 75 (3.47%) Infrastructure Engineer
14 72 (3.33%) Senior Developer
15 68 (3.14%) IT Engineer
15 68 (3.14%) Java Developer
16 66 (3.05%) IT Support
16 66 (3.05%) Security Architect
17 56 (2.59%) DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 58 (2.68%) .NET
2 49 (2.26%) REST
3 39 (1.80%) React
3 39 (1.80%) Spring
4 35 (1.62%) Spring Boot
5 26 (1.20%) AngularJS
6 22 (1.02%) Node.js
7 17 (0.79%) HTML
7 17 (0.79%) Kafka
7 17 (0.79%) RESTful
8 16 (0.74%) PySpark
9 14 (0.65%) CSS
9 14 (0.65%) Playwright
10 13 (0.60%) Elastic Stack
10 13 (0.60%) Jest
11 12 (0.55%) YAML
12 11 (0.51%) RabbitMQ
13 10 (0.46%) SOAP
13 10 (0.46%) Web Services
14 9 (0.42%) ModSecurity
Miscellaneous
1 99 (4.57%) Legacy Systems
2 75 (3.47%) Data Centre
3 73 (3.37%) Onboarding
4 72 (3.33%) Driving Licence
5 68 (3.14%) Cloud Native
6 47 (2.17%) Security Posture
7 43 (1.99%) Product Ownership
7 43 (1.99%) Security Operations Centre
8 39 (1.80%) Self-Motivation
9 37 (1.71%) Management Information System
10 26 (1.20%) Fibre Optics
11 25 (1.16%) CSOC
11 25 (1.16%) Embedded Systems
12 23 (1.06%) Robotics
13 21 (0.97%) PKI
14 20 (0.92%) Algorithms
14 20 (0.92%) Cyber Threat
15 19 (0.88%) Analytical Mindset
16 18 (0.83%) Distributed Systems
17 17 (0.79%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 291 (13.45%) Windows
2 251 (11.60%) Linux
3 141 (6.52%) Windows Server
4 86 (3.97%) Windows Server 2016
5 68 (3.14%) Windows 10
6 23 (1.06%) Unix
7 20 (0.92%) Android
8 17 (0.79%) Mac OS
9 13 (0.60%) CentOS
10 11 (0.51%) Ubuntu
11 7 (0.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
12 6 (0.28%) Apple iOS
12 6 (0.28%) Debian
13 5 (0.23%) AIX
13 5 (0.23%) Embedded Linux
14 3 (0.14%) Solaris
14 3 (0.14%) VMS
15 2 (0.092%) Mac OS X
15 2 (0.092%) Windows 7
16 1 (0.046%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 311 (14.37%) Cybersecurity
2 301 (13.91%) Problem-Solving
3 297 (13.72%) Agile
4 247 (11.41%) Continuous Improvement
5 244 (11.28%) Software Engineering
6 231 (10.67%) DevOps
7 214 (9.89%) ITIL
8 207 (9.57%) CI/CD
9 158 (7.30%) Mentoring
10 152 (7.02%) Customer Service
11 141 (6.52%) Migration
12 131 (6.05%) Infrastructure as Code
13 123 (5.68%) Customer Experience
14 121 (5.59%) Analytics
15 117 (5.41%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 116 (5.36%) AI
17 112 (5.18%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 105 (4.85%) Technical Leadership
19 103 (4.76%) Vulnerability Remediation
20 101 (4.67%) Kalman Filter
Programming Languages
1 242 (11.18%) Python
2 150 (6.93%) Java
3 107 (4.94%) SQL
4 95 (4.39%) C++
5 81 (3.74%) PowerShell
6 67 (3.10%) Bash
7 58 (2.68%) JavaScript
8 55 (2.54%) C#
9 36 (1.66%) TypeScript
10 35 (1.62%) C
11 19 (0.88%) Groovy
12 18 (0.83%) Rust
13 17 (0.79%) PL/SQL
14 15 (0.69%) MATLAB
15 14 (0.65%) Kusto Query Language
15 14 (0.65%) Scala
16 13 (0.60%) Bicep
17 12 (0.55%) Embedded C
17 12 (0.55%) VBA
18 8 (0.37%) Embedded C++
Qualifications
1 2,164 (100.00%) Security Cleared
2 397 (18.35%) DV Cleared
3 215 (9.94%) Degree
4 65 (3.00%) BPSS Clearance
5 50 (2.31%) CISSP
6 46 (2.13%) CTC Cleared
7 44 (2.03%) Cisco Certification
8 36 (1.66%) CISM
9 32 (1.48%) Microsoft Certification
10 30 (1.39%) AWS Certification
10 30 (1.39%) CompTIA Security+
11 28 (1.29%) Azure Certification
12 27 (1.25%) Computer Science Degree
13 26 (1.20%) CREST Certified
13 26 (1.20%) HNC
13 26 (1.20%) Master's Degree
14 22 (1.02%) CCNP
15 18 (0.83%) SANS
16 17 (0.79%) OSCP
17 16 (0.74%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 123 (5.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 120 (5.55%) Cyber Essentials
3 106 (4.90%) PCI DSS
4 78 (3.60%) SLA
5 66 (3.05%) NIST
6 60 (2.77%) QA
7 46 (2.13%) GDPR
8 41 (1.89%) NCSC
9 32 (1.48%) Accessibility
10 29 (1.34%) Data Quality
10 29 (1.34%) JSP 440
11 25 (1.16%) GRC
12 21 (0.97%) ISO 9001
13 20 (0.92%) PMO
14 19 (0.88%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 19 (0.88%) ISO/IEC 20000
15 17 (0.79%) Def Stans
16 13 (0.60%) Actionable Recommendations
17 12 (0.55%) NIST 800
18 11 (0.51%) WCAG
System Software
1 185 (8.55%) Active Directory
2 117 (5.41%) Docker
3 111 (5.13%) Hyper-V
4 80 (3.70%) Terminal Server
5 52 (2.40%) VMware Infrastructure
6 31 (1.43%) Firmware
7 20 (0.92%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.74%) VMware NSX
9 14 (0.65%) vSphere
10 9 (0.42%) Embedded Firmware
11 6 (0.28%) BitLocker
12 5 (0.23%) Virtual Machines
13 4 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
14 1 (0.046%) Citrix Hypervisor
14 1 (0.046%) IAG
14 1 (0.046%) Oracle RAC
14 1 (0.046%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 155 (7.16%) Terraform
2 119 (5.50%) Kubernetes
3 81 (3.74%) Ansible
4 38 (1.76%) Microsoft Intune
5 23 (1.06%) Grafana
6 22 (1.02%) Prometheus
7 19 (0.88%) SCCM
8 16 (0.74%) Proxmox
9 15 (0.69%) Puppet
10 14 (0.65%) Kibana
10 14 (0.65%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
11 12 (0.55%) Single Sign-On
12 11 (0.51%) Nessus
12 11 (0.51%) vCenter Server
13 9 (0.42%) Argo
14 8 (0.37%) Nmap
15 7 (0.32%) HP Fortify
15 7 (0.32%) QRadar
16 6 (0.28%) Graylog
16 6 (0.28%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 423 (19.55%) Microsoft
2 160 (7.39%) VMware
3 117 (5.41%) Cisco
4 112 (5.18%) Splunk
5 91 (4.21%) SolarWinds
6 80 (3.70%) Brocade
6 80 (3.70%) Nimble Storage
6 80 (3.70%) Tanium
6 80 (3.70%) Veeam
7 46 (2.13%) Oracle
7 46 (2.13%) ServiceNow
8 31 (1.43%) Google
9 20 (0.92%) HP
9 20 (0.92%) Red Hat
10 19 (0.88%) Fortinet
11 16 (0.74%) Juniper
12 15 (0.69%) CheckPoint
13 14 (0.65%) Citrix
13 14 (0.65%) Tenable
14 13 (0.60%) Databricks