The PM Index

Market intelligence for project professionals

Issue 1. Tuesday 15 September 2026. Data from the preceding 7 days. By James J Bailey.

The number

191 project roles advertised this week. ▲ Average project manager pay up 8.9% on a year ago.

191 project support, PMO, project manager and programme manager posts went up on Reed in the last 7 days. That is the baseline. From next week the arrow shows whether it moved.

The pay figure is the one to notice. Across every sector, the average advertised salary for a project manager was £57,136 last September. It has risen in 9 of the last 10 months and reached £62,207 in August, up 8.9% in a year. In the technology sector alone, the same measure fell 2.4%. Engineering, construction, utilities and the public sector are paying project managers more. Technology is paying them less. If your CV says "IT project manager" and nothing else, you are standing in the only part of the market that is shrinking.

One warning before the tables. 90 of the adverts with a project title on Reed this week were not jobs. They were training courses dressed as vacancies: "Trainee Project Manager, no experience needed". That is 32.0% of everything with a project title. They are stripped from every figure below, and if you are applying, they should be stripped from your search too.

Movement

Permanent, posted this week

Only project manager has enough adverts to call a fact. The other 3 rungs are signals this week and will firm up as weeks accumulate. The jump from project support to PMO is the largest step on the ladder: the median nearly doubles. That is where the career money is.

Contract, posted this week

Under 30 adverts, so a signal. For comparison, the technology-only contract project manager rate is £545 a day, up 3.8% on last year and the first movement in 3 years. Technology contract rates sit well above the cross-sector median because that is where the day-rate market still lives.

Where the roles are

Adzuna counts 37,517 live project manager adverts across the UK today. London has 11,910 of them, 31.7%. The South East has 4,810, the North West 3,743, the South West 2,977 and the West Midlands 2,915. The 3 nations outside England together have 3,886, 10.4%.

Who is hiring

The 5 largest advertisers of project manager roles in the country are AECOM with 1,380 live adverts, AtkinsRéalis 643, Stantec 575, WSP 479 and Amazon 471. 4 of the 5 are engineering consultancies. The UK project manager market is an infrastructure market first and a technology market second.

Hybrid and remote

29.8% of this week's adverts name hybrid working. 6.3% name remote. 5 years ago remote was the majority. It is now 1 advert in 16.

Training adverts posing as vacancies

90 this week, 32.0% of adverts with a project title. Excluded from every figure in this issue. This row runs every week.

Applications

The median advert on Reed had received 8 applications by Tuesday. 7 adverts had more than 50. The 3 most applied for were all contract transformation roles between £430 and £600 a day, each with over 60 applicants. The contract market is small and crowded; the permanent market is larger and quieter.

Signal

What the 191 adverts ask for, as a share of adverts.

Methods and qualifications

PRINCE2 is the most named qualification in the private market. APM is the most named in the Civil Service, where it appears in nearly 1 vacancy in 5 and PMP in 1 in 50. PMP holds its share in the private market because contract roles and multinationals ask for it. If you are aiming at government, APM is the letters that matter. If you are aiming at consultancies, PRINCE2 still is.

What is climbing

Stakeholder management is named in 73.8% of adverts, more than any method, tool or qualification, and in 90 of the 100 live Civil Service project vacancies. Budget ownership is in 47.1%. Construction words appear in 28.3% of all project adverts and 37.7% of project manager adverts: mechanical and electrical, fit out, NEC contracts, RIBA stages. The word "delivery" is doing more work in job titles than it did a year ago: 3 of the 7 most applied-for roles were titled delivery manager or delivery lead.

Business case skills split the market. 4.7% of private adverts name a business case. 25.0% of Civil Service project vacancies do, and 3 name the Treasury Five Case Model by name. Benefits management shows the same pattern: 2.6% private, 15.0% Civil Service. Anyone moving from the private sector into government will be asked for 2 skills their previous adverts never mentioned.

AI appears in 4.2% of this week's private adverts and 9.0% of Civil Service ones. Still small. Both numbers were close to zero 18 months ago.

What is not moving

Tooling. Microsoft Project is named in 8.4% of adverts, Jira in 3.7%, Power BI in 1.0%. Excel is named in 40.7% of project support adverts and 3.8% of project manager adverts, which tells you what the first rung is actually for. Security clearance appears in 1.6% of private adverts this week, against 10.2% of technology contract roles over 6 months. Clearance is a technology and defence requirement, not a general one.

The Civil Service this week

100 live vacancies with "project" in the title, covering 124 posts. Ministry of Defence has 15, the Forestry Commission 8, UK Health Security Agency 6, Defra 6, the Government Property Agency 4. By grade: SEO 32, Grade 7 27, HEO 20, Grade 6 3, SCS 4. Grade 7 project roles are advertised at £59,207 to £67,243 outside London; SEO at £44,294 to £48,354. 4 Deputy Director project posts are open at SCS Pay Band 1, £86,000, at HMRC, Defra, Ofgem and the Ministry of Defence.

Pipeline

Find a Tender notices from the last 7 days that will need project people. Awarded work hires 3 to 6 months later. Open tenders hire on award. Planning notices hire in a year.

Awarded

Tower Hamlets, St George's new build. £72m over 3 years from August 2026. Demolition, RIBA Stage 4 design completion, a new leisure centre and 29 homes. Principal contractor Guildmore. Quarterly reporting on cost variance and social value is written into the contract, so there is a governance post on both sides of it, and the contractor's site team will be recruiting now.

Open for bids

Eastern Procurement, heating, electrical, mechanical and decarbonisation framework. £1.06bn. Deadline 21 October. Every housing association in the East of England will call work off this, and each call-off is a project.

Brighton and Hove City Council, Brighton Centre ticketing system 2027. £73.5m. Deadline 12 October. A systems replacement with a hard go-live.

City of London, Barbican Renewal Programme, MEP programme. £50m. Full mechanical and electrical renewal of a Grade II listed estate. This will be a programme office job for a decade.

NHS Blood and Transplant, technical implementation partner and business change partner. £9.2m. Deadline 6 October. The title is the vacancy: the winning supplier will need to staff a change team from November.

Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Futures Procurement Framework. £9m. Deadline 12 October. Small in value, but it is the route through which DSIT buys foresight and horizon-scanning work, and framework suppliers hire on award.

Coming

North East Procurement Organisation, NEPRO Four. £6bn planning notice. This is the neutral-vendor framework through which councils and NHS bodies buy interim project and programme people. Its renewal sets the terms of the public sector contract market for 4 years.

South East Water, network maintenance and capital works. £1.35bn planning notice. The AMP8 capital programme is being packaged now.

Fusion21, construction and refurbishment framework 2027 to 2031. £750m planning notice. The next generation of the framework that most housing providers in the North and Midlands build through.

London Borough of Camden, redevelopment of the Wendling Estate and St Stephen's Close. £500m planning notice. A single estate regeneration at this value will need a client-side programme team, a development partner team and a resident engagement team.

Transport for Wales, bus franchising dynamic market for the South West. £400m. The first Welsh bus franchising round, with a programme office behind it in Cardiff.

Network Rail, Turbostar onboard ETCS fleet fitment framework. £166m. Digital signalling fitment across a fleet, which is a multi-year programme with a dedicated delivery team.

The pipeline section is the part of this publication that job boards cannot give you. A job advert tells you a post exists today. A planning notice tells you a post will exist next year, and roughly where.

The move

One thing to do this week.

Open your CV and find the word "budget". 47.1% of this week's project adverts name it, and the ones that pay above the median nearly all do. If the word is there, put a number next to it: the size of the budget you held, and what it was for. If the word is not there, the adverts are describing a role your CV does not claim. Add it, with a figure, this week.

Method

Salary history, regional counts and top employers come from Adzuna, a job search engine that collects adverts from most UK job boards and employer career sites and removes the duplicates. It is the source the Office for National Statistics uses for its own vacancy estimates. Figures in this issue: 12 months to August 2026 for salary history; live counts as of 15 September 2026.

Advert content, the skills and qualifications employers ask for, comes from Reed.co.uk, one of the largest UK job boards, where the full text of each advert is available. Adverts posted 9 to 15 September 2026. 191 adverts across the 4 rungs after training adverts are excluded.

Technology-sector comparisons come from IT Jobs Watch, which has tracked UK technology job adverts since 2004. 6 months to 15 September 2026, reused under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. IT Jobs Watch covers technology roles only.

Civil Service figures come from Civil Service Jobs, the government's own recruitment site. Live project vacancies on 15 September 2026. 100 vacancies, 124 posts.

Pipeline figures come from Find a Tender, the government's official register of public contracts above threshold across all 4 nations. Notices published 9 to 15 September 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Notices under £1m are excluded.

Percentages are rounded to 1 decimal place. Under 30 adverts is a signal, not a fact, and is marked as such.

The PM Index is free, and so are these.

Would you pass PRINCE2 today? 4 official timed papers tell you in an hour. https://jamesbailey.uk/exams

Bold, italic and bullets for LinkedIn, with the real character count. https://jamesbailey.uk/format

Education, experience, skills or exposure: 14 questions tell you which one is blocking your next move. https://jamesbailey.uk/check

Get every issue by email, free