DDaT Rate Card & Day Rates

DDaT Rate Card & Day Rates

Conversational knowledge about the G-Cloud 15 Lot 3 rate card: its job families, roles and role levels, the rules for pricing them, and what suppliers actually charge.

Purpose

On G-Cloud 15, every Lot 3 (Cloud Support) supplier has one rate card, shown in full on each of its Lot 3 services. Suppliers give a maximum day rate, UK and offshore, for each role level they offer, chosen from a fixed list of 9 job families, 58 roles and 222 role levels. The list follows the government's Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) profession capability framework. SFIA rate cards, used on G-Cloud 14, are no longer part of the framework.

When to Use

Activate when users ask about:

• Which roles and levels the Lot 3 rate card offers
• What day rate to set for a role level, or what the market charges
• UK versus offshore rates
• The pricing rules for Lot 3
• How a role maps to SFIA skills (still useful for describing a team)

Quick Reference: Rate Card Rules

These come from the G-Cloud 15 pricing schedule (Framework Schedule 3) and How to tender (Attachment 2):

Rule	Detail
What you price	A maximum day rate per role level, UK (onshore) and optionally offshore
Scope	One card per supplier for all its Lot 3 services; every Lot 3 listing shows the whole card. The overlay keeps it in the supplier-wide ARC-000-RATE document, written by /arckit:pricing
Day length	7.5 hours
Minimum rate	£50 a day
Travel and subsistence	Included in the rate within the M25
Changing rates	Rates can be reduced during the framework, never increased
Risk	No uplift for risk or contingency may be built into a rate
Levels you can't provide	Leave them blank
Evaluation	Lot 3 price is 80% of the score. Your average day rate is every rate you enter, UK and offshore, added up and divided by how many there are (ignoring any under £50 or over £10,000). The lowest average in the tender scores the full 80%; others score in proportion
Where rates go	GCA's Digital Platform; the rate card then shows on every Lot 3 listing you have

Quick Reference: Job Families

Job family	Roles
Architecture roles	7 (business, data, enterprise, network, security, solution, technical architect)
Chief digital and data roles	3 (chief data officer, CISO, CTO)
Cyber security roles	8 (audit and assurance, digital forensics, governance and risk, incident response, monitoring, secure design, testing, vulnerability management)
Data roles	8 (analytics engineer, data analyst, data engineer, data ethicist, data governance manager, data scientist, ML engineer, performance analyst)
IT operations roles	12 (application operations, change and release, incident, problem, service desk, IT service manager, infrastructure and more)
Product and delivery roles	6 (business analyst, delivery manager, digital portfolio manager, product manager, programme delivery manager, service owner)
Quality assurance testing (QAT) roles	3 (QAT analyst, test engineer, test manager)
Software development roles	3 (DevOps engineer, frontend developer, software developer)
User-centred design roles	8 (accessibility specialist, content designer, content strategist, graphic designer, interaction designer, service designer, technical writer, user researcher)

Levels run from Apprentice, Trainee or Junior through Associate, the role itself, Senior and Lead, to Principal or Head. Each role has its own set; see references/lot-3-rate-card.md.

Quick Reference: What Suppliers Charge

Maximum UK day rates on live G-Cloud 15 listings, across suppliers (each supplier counted once). Snapshot of 42,893 services scraped on 7 October 2026.

Role level	Suppliers	Middle half (p25–p75)	Median	Offshore median
Junior developer	719	£500–£800	£650	£500
Developer	828	£654–£990	£800	£600
Senior developer	814	£800–£1,200	£950	£745
Lead developer	776	£900–£1,360	£1,100	£850
DevOps engineer	786	£690–£998	£800	£600
Data engineer	825	£650–£995	£800	£600
Lead data engineer	794	£925–£1,374	£1,100	£850
Solution architect	1,029	£800–£1,170	£950	£750
Principal solution architect	955	£1,150–£1,680	£1,400	£1,100
Business analyst	965	£660–£1,000	£800	£650
Delivery manager	1,016	£750–£1,080	£900	£700
User researcher	664	£650–£950	£800	£600

These are maximum rates; call-off prices are often lower. This overlay doesn't bundle the full benchmark table for all 222 role levels. For a role level not listed here, compare the rate cards on rival Lot 3 listings (/arckit:gcloud-competitors), and say how many listings the comparison rests on.

Answering Questions

1. Name roles and levels exactly as the rate card does: buyers filter on them, and only the listed levels can be priced.
2. Quote benchmarks as a range with their date and supplier count, and say they are maximum rates from live listings, not contract prices.
3. One card per supplier: every Lot 3 listing shows the supplier's whole card, and only 2 of the 1,135 suppliers with more than one live Lot 3 service show different cards on different services. Price is scored on the average of every rate on it, UK and offshore alike, so senior levels and offshore rates both move the score. Offer the levels the supplier can staff at that rate across all its Lot 3 services.
4. Roles outside DDaT (procurement and commercial advisers, trainers): price them at the nearest DDaT role and level by the work and seniority, and say so in the service definition document. Live Lot 3 procurement listings price such people mostly as architects, IT service managers, delivery managers and business analysts.
5. Use SFIA only to describe skills, not to price: references/sfia-skills.md maps roles to SFIA skill codes and suggests team compositions.

Related Commands

These ArcKit commands use the rate card:

Command	Use
/arckit:sdd-lot3	Lists the role levels that deliver a service, named from these families, roles and levels
/arckit:pricing	Owns the supplier's one Lot 3 rate card (projects/000-global/supplier/ARC-000-RATE-v*.md): sets day rates against the pricing rules and the market
/arckit:lot-questions	Lot 3 mandatory award criteria

Additional Resources

Reference Files

• references/lot-3-rate-card.md — Every job family, role and role level, in GCA's order, generated from GCA's Lot 3 rate card document (RM1557.15).
• references/sfia-skills.md — SFIA 8 skill codes, levels, DDaT-to-SFIA mappings, team compositions for common Lot 3 service types, and the UK Government AI Skills Framework. Use it to describe what a team does, not to price it.