Virtual Machines Contract Job Trends in the City of London

Virtual Machine (VM)
Central London > City of London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the City of London requiring Virtual Machines skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 13 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 111 113 108
Rank change year-on-year +2 -5 +37
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 18 8 19
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 0.79% 0.46% 0.88%
As % of the System Software category 11.84% 4.65% 7.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 17 6 17
10th Percentile £356 £494 £347
25th Percentile £413 £538 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £688 £550
Median % change year-on-year -30.96% +25.09% -1.79%
75th Percentile £538 £751 £775
90th Percentile £652 £832 -
Central London median daily rate £475 £688 £565
% change year-on-year -30.96% +21.77% +0.89%

All System Software Skills
City of London

Virtual Machines falls under the System Software category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring system software skills in the City of London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for system software skills 152 172 243
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 6.71% 9.90% 11.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 103 122 179
10th Percentile £222 £246 £250
25th Percentile £411 £369 £383
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £543 £500
Median % change year-on-year -10.14% +8.50% -13.04%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £670
90th Percentile £718 £700 £746
Central London median daily rate £525 £525 £488
% change year-on-year - +7.69% -12.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 2 5
10th Percentile £19.56 £36.05 -
25th Percentile £20.04 £57.13 £21.25
Median hourly rate £22.27 £98.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -77.40% +146.25% -
75th Percentile £41.72 £146.13 -
90th Percentile £52.52 £170.95 £46.15
Central London median hourly rate £22.27 £24.48 £40.00
% change year-on-year -9.03% -38.81% +60.00%

Virtual Machines
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Virtual Machines relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London.

Virtual Machines job vacancy trend in the City of London

Virtual Machines
Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Virtual Machines.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
Daily Rate Histogram in the City of London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Virtual Machines in the City of London over the 6 months to 13 May 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Virtual Machines in the City of London

Virtual Machines
Hourly Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Virtual Machines.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the City of 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 2 (11.11%) Microsoft Exchange
1 2 (11.11%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 1 (5.56%) Adobe Illustrator
1 1 (5.56%) Photoshop
Cloud Services
1 10 (55.56%) Azure
2 5 (27.78%) GitHub
3 3 (16.67%) GitHub Actions
4 2 (11.11%) Azure Monitor
4 2 (11.11%) Entra ID
4 2 (11.11%) GCP
4 2 (11.11%) Microsoft 365
4 2 (11.11%) Power Platform
4 2 (11.11%) Serverless
5 1 (5.56%) AWS
5 1 (5.56%) Azure AKS
5 1 (5.56%) Azure ExpressRoute
5 1 (5.56%) Azure Functions
5 1 (5.56%) Azure Sentinel
5 1 (5.56%) Azure Stack
Communications & Networking
1 5 (27.78%) VPN
2 4 (22.22%) Firewall
3 3 (16.67%) DNS
3 3 (16.67%) Network Security
4 2 (11.11%) DHCP
4 2 (11.11%) VSAN
5 1 (5.56%) BGP
5 1 (5.56%) IPsec
5 1 (5.56%) OSPF
5 1 (5.56%) SAN
5 1 (5.56%) SD-WAN
5 1 (5.56%) SSL
5 1 (5.56%) TCP/IP
5 1 (5.56%) VLAN
5 1 (5.56%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (11.11%) Power BI
2 1 (5.56%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 2 (11.11%) Git
General
1 4 (22.22%) Social Skills
2 3 (16.67%) Finance
3 2 (11.11%) Analytical Skills
3 2 (11.11%) Documentation Skills
4 1 (5.56%) Marketing
4 1 (5.56%) Retail
Job Titles
1 6 (33.33%) Senior
2 4 (22.22%) DevOps Engineer
3 3 (16.67%) Azure Engineer
4 2 (11.11%) 3rd Line Engineer
4 2 (11.11%) Analyst
4 2 (11.11%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 2 (11.11%) Service Desk Engineer
5 1 (5.56%) Administrator
5 1 (5.56%) Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
5 1 (5.56%) Designer
5 1 (5.56%) Migration Engineer
5 1 (5.56%) Network Engineer
5 1 (5.56%) Network Security Engineer
5 1 (5.56%) Security Administrator
5 1 (5.56%) Security Engineer
5 1 (5.56%) Senior DevOps
5 1 (5.56%) Senior VMware Engineer
5 1 (5.56%) Site Engineer
5 1 (5.56%) VMware Engineer
5 1 (5.56%) Vulnerability Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (11.11%) PySpark
2 1 (5.56%) Software Packaging
Miscellaneous
1 3 (16.67%) Cloud Native
1 3 (16.67%) Private Cloud
2 1 (5.56%) Anti-Spyware
2 1 (5.56%) Clustering
2 1 (5.56%) Data Centre
2 1 (5.56%) Linux Command Line
2 1 (5.56%) Public Cloud
2 1 (5.56%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 3 (16.67%) Windows
2 2 (11.11%) VMS
3 1 (5.56%) Linux
3 1 (5.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (5.56%) SUSE
3 1 (5.56%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 9 (50.00%) CI/CD
2 7 (38.89%) Infrastructure as Code
3 6 (33.33%) DevOps
4 3 (16.67%) Change Control
4 3 (16.67%) Change Management
4 3 (16.67%) ITIL
4 3 (16.67%) Mentoring
4 3 (16.67%) Migration
4 3 (16.67%) Root Cause Analysis
4 3 (16.67%) Site Reliability Engineering
4 3 (16.67%) Zero Trust
5 2 (11.11%) Agile
5 2 (11.11%) Cloud Operations
5 2 (11.11%) Cloud Security
5 2 (11.11%) Customer Service
5 2 (11.11%) Data Analysis
5 2 (11.11%) Deployment Automation
5 2 (11.11%) Infrastructure Engineering
5 2 (11.11%) Threat and Vulnerability Management
5 2 (11.11%) Vulnerability Assessment
Programming Languages
1 6 (33.33%) PowerShell
2 4 (22.22%) Python
3 2 (11.11%) SQL
4 1 (5.56%) Bash
4 1 (5.56%) C#
Qualifications
1 5 (27.78%) Security Cleared
2 4 (22.22%) SC Cleared
3 2 (11.11%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
4 1 (5.56%) Azure Certification
4 1 (5.56%) CCNP
4 1 (5.56%) Cisco Certification
4 1 (5.56%) CISSP
4 1 (5.56%) CompTIA Security+
4 1 (5.56%) VCAP
4 1 (5.56%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (16.67%) Cyber Essentials
2 2 (11.11%) GDPR
2 2 (11.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 2 (11.11%) Active Directory
1 2 (11.11%) Hyper-V
1 2 (11.11%) VMware ESXi
1 2 (11.11%) VMware Infrastructure
1 2 (11.11%) vSphere
2 1 (5.56%) Firmware
2 1 (5.56%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 9 (50.00%) Terraform
2 4 (22.22%) Kubernetes
3 3 (16.67%) Microsoft Intune
4 2 (11.11%) Ansible
4 2 (11.11%) vCenter Server
5 1 (5.56%) Failover Clustering
5 1 (5.56%) Microsoft Clustering
5 1 (5.56%) PowerCLI
5 1 (5.56%) QRadar
5 1 (5.56%) VxRail
Vendors
1 5 (27.78%) Microsoft
2 3 (16.67%) VMware
3 2 (11.11%) Databricks
3 2 (11.11%) Foundry
3 2 (11.11%) Palantir
3 2 (11.11%) Palo Alto
3 2 (11.11%) Tenable
4 1 (5.56%) Dell
4 1 (5.56%) Splunk
4 1 (5.56%) Zscaler