UK contract demand for IFS skills has more than doubled in two years, and permanent salaries are up nearly 20% in twelve months. A look at the numbers behind the ERP platform that runs Britain's dockyards — and whether it's worth specialising in.
When ERP people talk about platforms, the conversation runs SAP, Oracle, Dynamics 365, then trails off. IFS rarely gets a mention. Yet walk into a UK naval dockyard, a submarine base or an aerospace maintenance hangar and there's a fair chance the ERP underneath is IFS. The platform has spent twenty years embedding itself in British defence — and the job market is starting to show it.
What the job market shows
The demand numbers are small next to SAP, but the direction is hard to ignore. All figures below are from IT Jobs Watch, checked on 4 November 2026.
— Contract demand has more than doubled in two years. 98 UK contract ads cited IFS in the six months to 4 November 2026, against 73 in the same period of 2025 and 42 in 2024.
— The median IFS contract day rate is £575, broadly flat year on year. London contracts run at a £625 median.— Permanent demand jumped this year. 117 permanent ads cited IFS in the six months to 24 October 2026, against 46 in the same period of 2025. Demand dipped in 2025 — 104 ads in 2024 — then rebounded past it.
— Permanent salaries moved sharply. The UK median is £68,750, up 19.6% from £57,500 a year earlier. London sits at £80,000 and the South West — Babcock country — at £70,000.
A platform with a hundred-odd ads per period is a niche. But that's the point. ERP careers are made in niches where demand grows faster than the pool of people who can do the work. On that measure, IFS looks better than platforms ten times its size.
Why defence keeps choosing IFS
IFS is project-centric ERP with asset management and maintenance, repair and overhaul built into the same product. That combination matches how defence actually works: build complex things over years, then maintain them for decades. The big generalist platforms treat long-cycle projects and through-life asset support as extensions; for IFS they're the core design.Babcock International is the reference case. The defence and marine group has run IFS for around twenty years and has deployed 90% of the suite across its defence and maritime operations — roughly 12,000 users in its Marine division across Rosyth, Bristol, Faslane and Devonport. Its aircraft carrier programme alone was split into nearly 500 projects generating some 600,000 work orders, all managed in IFS. More than 4,630 projects have been delivered on the platform to date.
The vendor has momentum too. IFS attracted a valuation above €15 billion in April 2025, with annual recurring revenue passing €1 billion and growing 23% in FY2025. Collins Aerospace was among its FY2025 customer wins. This matters for career risk: specialising in a platform is a bet that the vendor will still be investing in it in ten years, and the evidence currently points that way.
The money behind the demand
UK defence spending was 2.3% of GDP in 2024. The June 2025 spending review set it at 2.6% by 2027/28, and at the July 2025 NATO summit members committed to 3.5% of GDP on core defence by 2035 — around £40 billion a year of additional UK spending on OBR estimates. Equipment programmes at that scale drag systems work along behind them: new facilities, new supply chains, and ERP estates that need consolidating, upgrading and supporting.There's a platform-specific driver as well. Much of the installed base still runs older versions of IFS Applications, and the vendor's push to IFS Cloud means a migration wave is working through exactly the organisations that can least afford disruption. Upgrade programmes need functional consultants, data migration specialists and project managers who know both ends of the move.
One more scarcity factor: much of this work sits behind security clearance. An IFS consultant is already rare; an IFS consultant who holds SC clearance, or can get it, is rarer still — and defence programmes can't simply offshore the gap.
What the work looks like
IFS programmes need the same delivery team as any ERP project — functional consultants across finance, supply chain and maintenance, project and programme managers, business analysts, data migration leads, integration specialists and support analysts. If you're mapping where you'd fit, our guide to the roles on an ERP project applies to IFS as much as to SAP.
Geographically, the work clusters where the installed base sits: the South West around Bristol and Plymouth, Scotland around Rosyth and the Clyde, plus a growing remote component — a quarter of recent contract ads offer work from home. So should you specialise in IFS?
The honest trade-off: fewer roles than the big three, concentrated in fewer sectors and places. If you want maximum optionality, the platform-choice argument still favours SAP or Dynamics 365.
But if you're coming from defence, aerospace, shipbuilding or asset-heavy manufacturing — or you already hold clearance — IFS is one of the strongest asymmetric bets in ERP right now: demand doubling, salaries up nearly a fifth in a year, a customer base that can't easily leave, and a thin field of specialists. The same logic we set out in ERP support deadlines 2026–2031 applies here: the work goes where the installed base and the money meet.
Live IFS and other ERP implementation roles are on the board now — or set up a job alert and let the matching roles come to you.