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 17 June 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 45 70 61
Rank change year-on-year +25 -9 +7
Permanent jobs citing SC Cleared 2,143 1,199 2,893
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 3.19% 4.03% 3.66%
As % of the Qualifications category 16.64% 9.57% 14.87%
Number of salaries quoted 1,603 824 2,102
10th Percentile £40,000 £35,000 £32,500
25th Percentile £50,000 £47,500 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £65,000 £58,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +12.07% +5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £80,000 £73,750 £67,500
90th Percentile £90,000 £83,750 £79,563
UK median annual salary £65,576 £60,000 £57,500
% change year-on-year +9.29% +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 12,881 12,534 19,450
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 19.14% 42.11% 24.63%
Number of salaries quoted 6,392 5,008 12,300
10th Percentile £28,500 £27,500 £27,334
25th Percentile £38,750 £35,250 £36,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £50,890 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +8.08% +1.78% -4.76%
75th Percentile £72,500 £66,251 £65,000
90th Percentile £85,000 £78,750 £80,000
UK median annual salary £60,000 £55,000 £53,500
% change year-on-year +9.09% +2.80% -10.83%

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 17 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 17 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 +14 583 £70,000 +13.82% 267
South East -7 534 £70,000 +21.74% 384
North of England +104 419 £60,000 +9.09% 260
Midlands +34 309 £58,045 -10.70% 135
North West +106 236 £65,000 +10.17% 148
West Midlands +10 201 £60,000 -11.11% 88
Yorkshire +14 128 £62,500 +35.14% 62
Wales +10 121 £55,000 - 50
East of England +7 109 £65,000 +18.18% 90
East Midlands +27 106 £52,500 +0.96% 47
Scotland +49 67 £75,000 +20.00% 80
North East -3 55 £55,000 -20.73% 51
Northern Ireland -30 6 £60,625 -28.80% 43
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 (5.09%) Microsoft Exchange
2 44 (2.05%) SharePoint
3 21 (0.98%) Apache
4 18 (0.84%) SAS
5 16 (0.75%) Apache Spark
6 13 (0.61%) Apache Airflow
7 10 (0.47%) Jupyter
8 8 (0.37%) Confluence
8 8 (0.37%) Skype for Business
9 7 (0.33%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.093%) Exchange Server 2013
10 2 (0.093%) OpenStack
11 1 (0.047%) Apache Qpid
11 1 (0.047%) Appian
11 1 (0.047%) JBoss
11 1 (0.047%) Site Server
Applications
1 88 (4.11%) Microsoft Office
2 30 (1.40%) Microsoft Excel
3 10 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.37%) Simulink
5 4 (0.19%) Windchill
6 3 (0.14%) Stateflow
7 1 (0.047%) CATIA
7 1 (0.047%) Microsoft Project
7 1 (0.047%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 7 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
2 6 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
3 1 (0.047%) Integrated Workplace Management System
3 1 (0.047%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.047%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.047%) SAP EWM
3 1 (0.047%) SAP GRC
3 1 (0.047%) SAP HCM
3 1 (0.047%) SAP MM
3 1 (0.047%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 492 (22.96%) Azure
2 295 (13.77%) AWS
3 272 (12.69%) Microsoft 365
4 81 (3.78%) Entra ID
5 77 (3.59%) GCP
6 45 (2.10%) GitHub
6 45 (2.10%) Serverless
7 43 (2.01%) Dynamics 365
8 42 (1.96%) Power Platform
8 42 (1.96%) SaaS
9 39 (1.82%) Azure DevOps
10 34 (1.59%) Amazon S3
11 32 (1.49%) AWS CloudFormation
11 32 (1.49%) Azure Sentinel
12 25 (1.17%) Amazon EC2
13 24 (1.12%) AWS Lambda
14 22 (1.03%) Amazon EKS
15 21 (0.98%) Amazon ECS
15 21 (0.98%) PaaS
16 19 (0.89%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 141 (6.58%) DNS
2 129 (6.02%) Firewall
3 117 (5.46%) DHCP
4 69 (3.22%) WAN
5 62 (2.89%) VPN
6 50 (2.33%) LAN
6 50 (2.33%) Network Security
7 49 (2.29%) TCP/IP
8 33 (1.54%) Wi-Fi
9 29 (1.35%) BGP
9 29 (1.35%) Structured Cabling
10 23 (1.07%) VLAN
11 20 (0.93%) SD-WAN
12 19 (0.89%) HTTP
13 18 (0.84%) MPLS
13 18 (0.84%) VoIP
14 16 (0.75%) Cisco Firepower
15 13 (0.61%) Broadband
16 12 (0.56%) ATM
17 10 (0.47%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 84 (3.92%) Amazon RDS
2 38 (1.77%) Power BI
3 31 (1.45%) PostgreSQL
4 23 (1.07%) DynamoDB
5 21 (0.98%) Big Data
6 16 (0.75%) Relational Database
7 15 (0.70%) Amazon Athena
7 15 (0.70%) Data Warehouse
8 14 (0.65%) MongoDB
9 13 (0.61%) NoSQL
10 11 (0.51%) GIS
10 11 (0.51%) SQL Server
11 10 (0.47%) Elasticsearch
11 10 (0.47%) Redis
12 9 (0.42%) Data Lake
13 7 (0.33%) Hadoop
13 7 (0.33%) Metadata
13 7 (0.33%) MySQL
13 7 (0.33%) Pentaho
14 6 (0.28%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 76 (3.55%) Git
2 68 (3.17%) GitLab
3 40 (1.87%) Jenkins
4 30 (1.40%) JIRA
5 22 (1.03%) JUnit
6 17 (0.79%) Maven
6 17 (0.79%) SonarQube
7 15 (0.70%) Cypress.io
7 15 (0.70%) Selenium
8 14 (0.65%) Visual Studio Code
9 13 (0.61%) Mockito
10 8 (0.37%) Burp Suite
10 8 (0.37%) Cucumber
10 8 (0.37%) Metasploit
11 6 (0.28%) JMeter
11 6 (0.28%) Postman
12 5 (0.23%) Artifactory
12 5 (0.23%) Claude Code
12 5 (0.23%) REST Assured
13 3 (0.14%) MSI
General
1 486 (22.68%) Social Skills
2 274 (12.79%) Public Sector
3 219 (10.22%) Analytical Skills
4 132 (6.16%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 125 (5.83%) Finance
6 57 (2.66%) Telecoms
7 42 (1.96%) Manufacturing
8 39 (1.82%) Aerospace
9 36 (1.68%) Back Office
9 36 (1.68%) Law
10 35 (1.63%) Electronics
10 35 (1.63%) Military
11 34 (1.59%) Legal
11 34 (1.59%) Organisational Skills
12 30 (1.40%) Aviation
13 24 (1.12%) Retail
14 18 (0.84%) Documentation Skills
15 12 (0.56%) Influencing Skills
16 11 (0.51%) Games
17 10 (0.47%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 351 (16.38%) Senior
2 203 (9.47%) Architect
3 177 (8.26%) Developer
4 174 (8.12%) Software Engineer
5 163 (7.61%) Consultant
6 161 (7.51%) Analyst
7 125 (5.83%) Systems Engineer
8 99 (4.62%) Support Engineer
9 94 (4.39%) Cloud Engineer
10 89 (4.15%) Data Engineer
11 88 (4.11%) Security Consultant
12 87 (4.06%) Lead
13 81 (3.78%) Network Engineer
14 75 (3.50%) Infrastructure Engineer
15 71 (3.31%) Senior Developer
16 69 (3.22%) IT Engineer
17 68 (3.17%) IT Support
17 68 (3.17%) Java Developer
18 63 (2.94%) Security Architect
19 56 (2.61%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 58 (2.71%) .NET
2 50 (2.33%) REST
3 40 (1.87%) React
3 40 (1.87%) Spring
4 36 (1.68%) Spring Boot
5 27 (1.26%) AngularJS
6 21 (0.98%) Node.js
7 17 (0.79%) Kafka
7 17 (0.79%) RESTful
8 16 (0.75%) PySpark
9 14 (0.65%) HTML
9 14 (0.65%) Playwright
10 13 (0.61%) Elastic Stack
10 13 (0.61%) Jest
11 12 (0.56%) RabbitMQ
11 12 (0.56%) YAML
12 11 (0.51%) CSS
13 10 (0.47%) gRPC
13 10 (0.47%) SOAP
13 10 (0.47%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 100 (4.67%) Legacy Systems
2 77 (3.59%) Data Centre
3 72 (3.36%) Driving Licence
3 72 (3.36%) Onboarding
4 66 (3.08%) Cloud Native
5 47 (2.19%) Security Posture
6 42 (1.96%) Security Operations Centre
7 41 (1.91%) Product Ownership
8 38 (1.77%) Self-Motivation
9 37 (1.73%) Management Information System
10 27 (1.26%) Fibre Optics
11 25 (1.17%) CSOC
12 24 (1.12%) Embedded Systems
13 23 (1.07%) Robotics
14 21 (0.98%) PKI
15 20 (0.93%) Cyber Threat
16 19 (0.89%) Analytical Mindset
17 18 (0.84%) Algorithms
17 18 (0.84%) Distributed Systems
18 17 (0.79%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 291 (13.58%) Windows
2 250 (11.67%) Linux
3 141 (6.58%) Windows Server
4 86 (4.01%) Windows Server 2016
5 69 (3.22%) Windows 10
6 23 (1.07%) Unix
7 20 (0.93%) Android
8 17 (0.79%) Mac OS
9 14 (0.65%) CentOS
10 12 (0.56%) Ubuntu
11 8 (0.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
12 7 (0.33%) Debian
13 6 (0.28%) Apple iOS
14 5 (0.23%) AIX
14 5 (0.23%) Embedded Linux
15 3 (0.14%) Solaris
15 3 (0.14%) VMS
16 2 (0.093%) Mac OS X
16 2 (0.093%) Windows 7
17 1 (0.047%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 307 (14.33%) Cybersecurity
2 299 (13.95%) Problem-Solving
3 290 (13.53%) Agile
4 245 (11.43%) Continuous Improvement
5 242 (11.29%) Software Engineering
6 226 (10.55%) DevOps
7 215 (10.03%) ITIL
8 202 (9.43%) CI/CD
9 155 (7.23%) Mentoring
10 152 (7.09%) Customer Service
11 141 (6.58%) Migration
12 132 (6.16%) Infrastructure as Code
13 123 (5.74%) Customer Experience
14 120 (5.60%) Analytics
15 117 (5.46%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 113 (5.27%) AI
17 108 (5.04%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 103 (4.81%) Vulnerability Remediation
19 100 (4.67%) Kalman Filter
19 100 (4.67%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 238 (11.11%) Python
2 148 (6.91%) Java
3 107 (4.99%) SQL
4 90 (4.20%) C++
5 80 (3.73%) PowerShell
6 67 (3.13%) Bash
7 56 (2.61%) JavaScript
8 53 (2.47%) C#
9 35 (1.63%) TypeScript
10 33 (1.54%) C
11 19 (0.89%) Groovy
12 18 (0.84%) Rust
13 17 (0.79%) PL/SQL
14 14 (0.65%) Kusto Query Language
14 14 (0.65%) MATLAB
15 12 (0.56%) Bicep
15 12 (0.56%) VBA
16 11 (0.51%) Embedded C
16 11 (0.51%) Scala
17 8 (0.37%) Perl
Qualifications
1 2,143 (100.00%) Security Cleared
2 394 (18.39%) DV Cleared
3 214 (9.99%) Degree
4 65 (3.03%) BPSS Clearance
5 48 (2.24%) CISSP
6 46 (2.15%) CTC Cleared
7 44 (2.05%) Cisco Certification
8 34 (1.59%) CISM
9 31 (1.45%) Microsoft Certification
10 30 (1.40%) AWS Certification
11 29 (1.35%) CompTIA Security+
12 28 (1.31%) Azure Certification
13 27 (1.26%) Computer Science Degree
14 26 (1.21%) HNC
15 25 (1.17%) CREST Certified
15 25 (1.17%) Master's Degree
16 22 (1.03%) CCNP
17 18 (0.84%) SANS
18 16 (0.75%) CCNA
18 16 (0.75%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 118 (5.51%) Cyber Essentials
1 118 (5.51%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 106 (4.95%) PCI DSS
3 78 (3.64%) SLA
4 63 (2.94%) NIST
5 58 (2.71%) QA
6 45 (2.10%) GDPR
7 40 (1.87%) NCSC
8 31 (1.45%) Accessibility
9 29 (1.35%) Data Quality
10 28 (1.31%) JSP 440
11 23 (1.07%) GRC
12 21 (0.98%) ISO 9001
13 20 (0.93%) PMO
14 19 (0.89%) ISO/IEC 20000
15 18 (0.84%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
16 17 (0.79%) Def Stans
17 13 (0.61%) Actionable Recommendations
18 12 (0.56%) NIST 800
19 11 (0.51%) WCAG
System Software
1 184 (8.59%) Active Directory
2 115 (5.37%) Docker
3 111 (5.18%) Hyper-V
4 80 (3.73%) Terminal Server
5 52 (2.43%) VMware Infrastructure
6 31 (1.45%) Firmware
7 20 (0.93%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (0.79%) 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 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
14 1 (0.047%) Citrix Hypervisor
14 1 (0.047%) IAG
14 1 (0.047%) Oracle RAC
14 1 (0.047%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 154 (7.19%) Terraform
2 118 (5.51%) Kubernetes
3 82 (3.83%) Ansible
4 38 (1.77%) Microsoft Intune
5 23 (1.07%) Grafana
6 22 (1.03%) Prometheus
7 20 (0.93%) SCCM
8 16 (0.75%) Proxmox
8 16 (0.75%) Puppet
9 14 (0.65%) Kibana
9 14 (0.65%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
10 12 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
11 11 (0.51%) Nessus
11 11 (0.51%) vCenter Server
12 9 (0.42%) Argo
13 8 (0.37%) Nmap
14 7 (0.33%) HP Fortify
14 7 (0.33%) QRadar
15 6 (0.28%) Graylog
15 6 (0.28%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 418 (19.51%) Microsoft
2 160 (7.47%) VMware
3 119 (5.55%) Cisco
4 111 (5.18%) Splunk
5 91 (4.25%) SolarWinds
6 80 (3.73%) Brocade
6 80 (3.73%) Nimble Storage
6 80 (3.73%) Tanium
6 80 (3.73%) Veeam
7 46 (2.15%) Oracle
8 45 (2.10%) ServiceNow
9 31 (1.45%) Google
10 21 (0.98%) HP
10 21 (0.98%) Red Hat
11 19 (0.89%) Fortinet
12 17 (0.79%) CheckPoint
13 16 (0.75%) Juniper
14 14 (0.65%) Aruba
14 14 (0.65%) Citrix
14 14 (0.65%) Tenable