SSH Contract Job Trends in England

Secure Shell (SSH)
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring SSH skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 12 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 468 451 476
Rank change year-on-year -17 +25 +146
Contract jobs citing SSH 73 27 67
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.24% 0.10% 0.18%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 2.23% 0.79% 1.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 47 15 50
10th Percentile £302 £384 £299
25th Percentile £421 £404 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £425 £450
Median % change year-on-year +11.76% -5.56% -11.55%
75th Percentile £650 £587 £645
90th Percentile £688 £681 £768
UK median daily rate £458 £463 £475
% change year-on-year -1.03% -2.63% -8.21%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 2
Median hourly rate - - £78.00
UK median hourly rate - - £78.00

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
England

SSH falls under the Communications and Computer Networking category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring communications or computer networking skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 3,272 3,417 5,109
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 10.55% 12.79% 14.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,108 1,989 3,169
10th Percentile £204 £220 £206
25th Percentile £356 £375 £356
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.60% - -2.44%
75th Percentile £588 £606 £600
90th Percentile £681 £688 £700
UK median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -1.96%
Number of hourly rates quoted 159 99 315
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.99 £18.93
25th Percentile £19.50 £20.30 £24.13
Median hourly rate £35.00 £35.00 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year - -38.04% +125.96%
75th Percentile £65.00 £62.50 £65.98
90th Percentile £74.41 £71.75 £75.50
UK median hourly rate £35.00 £32.50 £56.49
% change year-on-year +7.69% -42.47% +125.96%

SSH
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SSH relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

SSH job vacancy trend in England

SSH
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SSH.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SSH

SSH
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SSH in England over the 6 months to 12 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for SSH in England

SSH
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SSH.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing SSH

SSH
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SSH within the England region over the 6 months to 12 January 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
North of England -31 29 £538 +30.70% 1
London +5 26 £525 -17.97% 1
Midlands -20 25 £475 +11.76%
West Midlands -13 22 £475 +11.76%
Yorkshire -33 16 £675 +65.64% 1
North West -19 13 £452 -34.10%
East Midlands - 3 £134 -
South East -17 1 £384 -25.07% 1
SSH
UK

SSH
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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 33 (45.21%) Confluence
2 12 (16.44%) SharePoint
3 9 (12.33%) nginx
3 9 (12.33%) TPMS
4 1 (1.37%) Apache
4 1 (1.37%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (1.37%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 11 (15.07%) Microsoft Office
2 9 (12.33%) Mozilla Thunderbird
3 2 (2.74%) Microsoft Excel
4 1 (1.37%) MS Visio
4 1 (1.37%) OmniGraffle
Cloud Services
1 16 (21.92%) Amazon S3
1 16 (21.92%) AWS
2 15 (20.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
2 15 (20.55%) Amazon EC2
2 15 (20.55%) Amazon ELB
2 15 (20.55%) AWS KMS
2 15 (20.55%) Virtual Private Cloud
3 9 (12.33%) Amazon ECS
3 9 (12.33%) Azure
3 9 (12.33%) Microsoft 365
3 9 (12.33%) Route 53
4 6 (8.22%) Amazon Glacier
5 3 (4.11%) GitHub
6 2 (2.74%) SaaS
7 1 (1.37%) GCP
7 1 (1.37%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 19 (26.03%) FTP
2 18 (24.66%) DNS
3 17 (23.29%) Firewall
4 16 (21.92%) HTTP
4 16 (21.92%) SMTP
5 15 (20.55%) SNMP
6 14 (19.18%) SSL
7 9 (12.33%) IMAP
7 9 (12.33%) OpenLDAP
8 7 (9.59%) Kerberos
9 5 (6.85%) Cisco IOS
9 5 (6.85%) Spanning Tree
10 4 (5.48%) Ethernet
10 4 (5.48%) TACACS
10 4 (5.48%) TCP/IP
11 3 (4.11%) PuTTY
11 3 (4.11%) SD-WAN
11 3 (4.11%) Telnet
11 3 (4.11%) WAN
11 3 (4.11%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (20.55%) Amazon RDS
2 11 (15.07%) PostgreSQL
3 9 (12.33%) Amazon Aurora
4 3 (4.11%) Hadoop
5 2 (2.74%) Apache Hive
5 2 (2.74%) Elasticsearch
5 2 (2.74%) Impala
6 1 (1.37%) Big Data
6 1 (1.37%) Delta Lake
6 1 (1.37%) MySQL
6 1 (1.37%) NoSQL
6 1 (1.37%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 33 (45.21%) JIRA
2 19 (26.03%) Git
3 18 (24.66%) Jenkins
4 15 (20.55%) Vagrant
5 3 (4.11%) SonarQube
6 2 (2.74%) TeamCity
7 1 (1.37%) Bitbucket
7 1 (1.37%) MLflow
7 1 (1.37%) Poetry
7 1 (1.37%) PyCharm
7 1 (1.37%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 27 (36.99%) Social Skills
2 21 (28.77%) Finance
3 16 (21.92%) Documentation Skills
3 16 (21.92%) Public Sector
4 14 (19.18%) Presentation Skills
5 6 (8.22%) Analytical Skills
6 3 (4.11%) Banking
6 3 (4.11%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 16 (21.92%) DevOps Engineer
1 16 (21.92%) Platform Engineer
2 15 (20.55%) AWS Engineer
2 15 (20.55%) Cloud Platform Engineer
3 14 (19.18%) Analyst
4 13 (17.81%) AWS DevOps
4 13 (17.81%) AWS DevOps Engineer
5 11 (15.07%) Cryptography Engineer
6 9 (12.33%) AWS Platform Engineer
6 9 (12.33%) Consultant
7 8 (10.96%) DevOps Platform Engineer
8 7 (9.59%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 6 (8.22%) Management Consultant
10 3 (4.11%) Network Engineer
10 3 (4.11%) Support Engineer
10 3 (4.11%) Technical Engineer
10 3 (4.11%) Test Engineer
11 2 (2.74%) Active Directory Consultant
11 2 (2.74%) Break Fix Engineer
11 2 (2.74%) Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (23.29%) LDAP
2 5 (6.85%) OAuth
2 5 (6.85%) SAML
3 2 (2.74%) SailPoint
4 1 (1.37%) Apache Avro
4 1 (1.37%) Elastic Stack
4 1 (1.37%) Flask
4 1 (1.37%) Kafka
4 1 (1.37%) LAMP
4 1 (1.37%) LAPP Stack
4 1 (1.37%) libvirt
4 1 (1.37%) Middleware
4 1 (1.37%) NumPy
4 1 (1.37%) Pandas
4 1 (1.37%) TIBCO EMS
Miscellaneous
1 17 (23.29%) Replication
2 12 (16.44%) Tandem
3 5 (6.85%) Data Protection Act
3 5 (6.85%) PKI
4 3 (4.11%) Linux Command Line
4 3 (4.11%) Management Information System
5 2 (2.74%) Algorithms
5 2 (2.74%) Enterprise Software
5 2 (2.74%) Machine to Machine
5 2 (2.74%) Market Risk
5 2 (2.74%) Onboarding
5 2 (2.74%) Self-Motivation
6 1 (1.37%) BYOD
6 1 (1.37%) Data Centre
6 1 (1.37%) Virtual Team
6 1 (1.37%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 52 (71.23%) Windows
2 42 (57.53%) Linux
3 16 (21.92%) Unix
4 15 (20.55%) Amazon Linux
4 15 (20.55%) VMS
5 9 (12.33%) Ubuntu
6 7 (9.59%) AIX
6 7 (9.59%) Solaris
7 3 (4.11%) Windows 10
7 3 (4.11%) Windows 7
7 3 (4.11%) Windows 8
7 3 (4.11%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 32 (43.84%) Cryptography
2 30 (41.10%) Key Management
3 27 (36.99%) Change Management
4 23 (31.51%) Stakeholder Management
5 20 (27.40%) DevOps
6 18 (24.66%) Configuration Management
7 17 (23.29%) Patch Management
8 16 (21.92%) Information Security
8 16 (21.92%) Platform Engineering
8 16 (21.92%) Roadmaps
9 15 (20.55%) Cloud Security
9 15 (20.55%) Computer Science
9 15 (20.55%) Cybersecurity
10 14 (19.18%) ITIL
11 13 (17.81%) Data Protection
11 13 (17.81%) Incident Response
12 12 (16.44%) Privileged Access Management
13 11 (15.07%) CI/CD
13 11 (15.07%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 11 (15.07%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 33 (45.21%) Python
2 22 (30.14%) PowerShell
3 16 (21.92%) Groovy
4 14 (19.18%) SQL
5 8 (10.96%) Bash
6 7 (9.59%) Java
6 7 (9.59%) Perl
Qualifications
1 24 (32.88%) Degree
2 17 (23.29%) Security Cleared
3 14 (19.18%) SC Cleared
4 12 (16.44%) Computer Science Degree
5 9 (12.33%) AWS Certification
5 9 (12.33%) Azure Certification
5 9 (12.33%) FFIEC
6 6 (8.22%) CISSP
7 5 (6.85%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
8 4 (5.48%) BPSS Clearance
8 4 (5.48%) CISM
9 2 (2.74%) CEH
9 2 (2.74%) ITIL Certification
9 2 (2.74%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (19.18%) NIST
1 14 (19.18%) PCI DSS
2 9 (12.33%) GDPR
2 9 (12.33%) GLBA
3 3 (4.11%) FIPS 140-2
3 3 (4.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 3 (4.11%) SOC 2
4 2 (2.74%) SLA
System Software
1 20 (27.40%) Active Directory
2 18 (24.66%) Docker
3 15 (20.55%) DFS Replication
4 9 (12.33%) Dovecot
4 9 (12.33%) Postfix
4 9 (12.33%) Squid
5 3 (4.11%) BitLocker
5 3 (4.11%) Firmware
6 2 (2.74%) HDFS
7 1 (1.37%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 1 (1.37%) Ceph
7 1 (1.37%) iptables
7 1 (1.37%) KVM
7 1 (1.37%) Lustre
7 1 (1.37%) NFS
7 1 (1.37%) Samba
7 1 (1.37%) Slurm Workload Manager
7 1 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
7 1 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (1.37%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 16 (21.92%) Terraform
2 15 (20.55%) Grafana
2 15 (20.55%) Prometheus
3 9 (12.33%) Nessus
3 9 (12.33%) Proxmox
4 6 (8.22%) Ansible
5 3 (4.11%) SCCM
6 2 (2.74%) Kibana
6 2 (2.74%) Progress Chef
7 1 (1.37%) Argo
7 1 (1.37%) Failover Clustering
7 1 (1.37%) FortiGate
7 1 (1.37%) HAProxy
7 1 (1.37%) Istio
7 1 (1.37%) Kubernetes
7 1 (1.37%) SELinux
Vendors
1 18 (24.66%) Thales
2 17 (23.29%) ServiceNow
3 12 (16.44%) IBM
3 12 (16.44%) Microsoft
4 11 (15.07%) CyberArk
4 11 (15.07%) Splunk
5 9 (12.33%) Jaspersoft
6 8 (10.96%) Cisco
6 8 (10.96%) Gemalto
7 7 (9.59%) BeyondTrust
8 3 (4.11%) BiZZdesign
8 3 (4.11%) Dell
8 3 (4.11%) Draytek
8 3 (4.11%) McAfee
8 3 (4.11%) Meraki
9 2 (2.74%) Ciena
10 1 (1.37%) Cloudera
10 1 (1.37%) Fortinet
10 1 (1.37%) Solace
10 1 (1.37%) VMware