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 8 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 505 462 491
Rank change year-on-year -43 +29 +132
Contract jobs citing SSH 55 26 67
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.16% 0.099% 0.17%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 1.59% 0.76% 1.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 35 16 45
10th Percentile £297 £386 £285
25th Percentile £406 £410 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
75th Percentile £688 £573 £650
90th Percentile - £680 £855
UK median daily rate £413 £500 £557
% change year-on-year -17.50% -10.15% +11.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 2
Median hourly rate £72.54 - £78.00
UK median hourly rate £72.54 - £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 3,452 3,412 5,398
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 10.34% 13.03% 14.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,251 1,981 3,266
10th Percentile £204 £213 £205
25th Percentile £350 £360 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £500 £480
Median % change year-on-year -2.50% +4.17% -8.57%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £676 £700
UK median daily rate £475 £500 £490
% change year-on-year -5.00% +2.04% -5.77%
Number of hourly rates quoted 158 104 389
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.22 £14.45
25th Percentile £18.59 £20.64 £21.25
Median hourly rate £29.44 £35.00 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.89% -30.00% +143.90%
75th Percentile £65.00 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £74.26 £70.88 £75.13
UK median hourly rate £29.44 £33.75 £50.00
% change year-on-year -12.77% -32.50% +150.00%

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 8 February 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 8 February 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 -49 26 £625 +48.81% 3
London -23 18 £475 -13.64% 1
Yorkshire -48 16 £675 +62.65% 1
West Midlands -30 14 £475 +11.76%
Midlands -33 14 £475 +11.76%
North West -19 10 £423 -38.33% 2
South West -19 1 - - 1
South East -28 1 - - 2
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 21 (38.18%) Confluence
2 11 (20.00%) TPMS
3 8 (14.55%) SharePoint
4 6 (10.91%) nginx
5 2 (3.64%) Microsoft Exchange
6 1 (1.82%) Apache
Applications
1 6 (10.91%) Mozilla Thunderbird
2 5 (9.09%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (3.64%) Microsoft Excel
4 1 (1.82%) MS Visio
4 1 (1.82%) OmniGraffle
Cloud Services
1 9 (16.36%) AWS
2 8 (14.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
2 8 (14.55%) Amazon EC2
2 8 (14.55%) Amazon ELB
2 8 (14.55%) Amazon S3
2 8 (14.55%) AWS KMS
2 8 (14.55%) Virtual Private Cloud
3 6 (10.91%) Amazon ECS
3 6 (10.91%) Azure
3 6 (10.91%) Microsoft 365
3 6 (10.91%) Route 53
4 2 (3.64%) Amazon Glacier
4 2 (3.64%) GitHub
4 2 (3.64%) SaaS
5 1 (1.82%) Entra ID
5 1 (1.82%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 20 (36.36%) SNMP
2 16 (29.09%) SSL
3 14 (25.45%) FTP
4 12 (21.82%) DNS
5 11 (20.00%) HTTP
5 11 (20.00%) SMTP
6 10 (18.18%) Firewall
7 6 (10.91%) IMAP
7 6 (10.91%) OpenLDAP
8 5 (9.09%) Cisco IOS
8 5 (9.09%) Kerberos
8 5 (9.09%) Spanning Tree
9 4 (7.27%) DHCP
9 4 (7.27%) Ethernet
9 4 (7.27%) TACACS
9 4 (7.27%) TCP/IP
10 3 (5.45%) SD-WAN
10 3 (5.45%) WAN
10 3 (5.45%) Wireshark
11 2 (3.64%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (14.55%) Amazon RDS
2 7 (12.73%) PostgreSQL
3 6 (10.91%) Amazon Aurora
4 2 (3.64%) Apache Hive
4 2 (3.64%) Elasticsearch
4 2 (3.64%) Hadoop
4 2 (3.64%) Impala
5 1 (1.82%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 20 (36.36%) JIRA
2 10 (18.18%) Git
2 10 (18.18%) Jenkins
3 8 (14.55%) Vagrant
4 2 (3.64%) SonarQube
4 2 (3.64%) TeamCity
General
1 18 (32.73%) Finance
2 17 (30.91%) Documentation Skills
3 14 (25.45%) Social Skills
4 10 (18.18%) Presentation Skills
4 10 (18.18%) Public Sector
5 5 (9.09%) Analytical Skills
6 3 (5.45%) Banking
6 3 (5.45%) Telecoms
7 1 (1.82%) Military
Job Titles
1 13 (23.64%) Cryptography Engineer
2 10 (18.18%) Analyst
2 10 (18.18%) Infrastructure Engineer
3 9 (16.36%) Platform Engineer
4 8 (14.55%) AWS Engineer
4 8 (14.55%) Cloud Platform Engineer
4 8 (14.55%) DevOps Engineer
5 6 (10.91%) AWS DevOps
5 6 (10.91%) AWS DevOps Engineer
5 6 (10.91%) AWS Platform Engineer
5 6 (10.91%) Consultant
6 5 (9.09%) DevOps Platform Engineer
7 4 (7.27%) Management Consultant
8 3 (5.45%) Network Engineer
8 3 (5.45%) Test Engineer
9 2 (3.64%) Active Directory Consultant
9 2 (3.64%) Designer
9 2 (3.64%) Developer
9 2 (3.64%) Windows Engineer
10 1 (1.82%) Windows Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (20.00%) LDAP
2 4 (7.27%) OAuth
2 4 (7.27%) SAML
3 2 (3.64%) SailPoint
4 1 (1.82%) LAMP
4 1 (1.82%) LAPP Stack
4 1 (1.82%) libvirt
Miscellaneous
1 9 (16.36%) Replication
2 8 (14.55%) Tandem
3 6 (10.91%) PKI
4 4 (7.27%) Data Protection Act
4 4 (7.27%) Management Information System
5 3 (5.45%) Onboarding
6 2 (3.64%) Algorithms
6 2 (3.64%) Market Risk
6 2 (3.64%) Self-Motivation
7 1 (1.82%) BYOD
7 1 (1.82%) Data Centre
7 1 (1.82%) Enterprise Software
7 1 (1.82%) Linux Command Line
7 1 (1.82%) Machine to Machine
Operating Systems
1 39 (70.91%) Windows
2 28 (50.91%) Linux
3 12 (21.82%) Unix
4 8 (14.55%) Amazon Linux
4 8 (14.55%) VMS
5 6 (10.91%) Ubuntu
5 6 (10.91%) Windows Server
6 4 (7.27%) AIX
6 4 (7.27%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 26 (47.27%) Cryptography
2 21 (38.18%) Stakeholder Management
3 17 (30.91%) Key Management
4 16 (29.09%) Cybersecurity
4 16 (29.09%) Roadmaps
5 15 (27.27%) Change Management
6 14 (25.45%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 13 (23.64%) Observability
8 12 (21.82%) DevOps
8 12 (21.82%) ITIL
9 11 (20.00%) Configuration Management
9 11 (20.00%) Data Security
9 11 (20.00%) OWASP
10 10 (18.18%) Computer Science
10 10 (18.18%) Information Security
11 9 (16.36%) Incident Response
11 9 (16.36%) Platform Engineering
12 8 (14.55%) CI/CD
12 8 (14.55%) Cloud Security
12 8 (14.55%) Data Protection
Programming Languages
1 24 (43.64%) Python
2 14 (25.45%) PowerShell
3 10 (18.18%) SQL
4 8 (14.55%) Groovy
5 6 (10.91%) Bash
6 3 (5.45%) Java
6 3 (5.45%) Perl
Qualifications
1 17 (30.91%) Degree
2 12 (21.82%) Security Cleared
3 11 (20.00%) FFIEC
4 8 (14.55%) Computer Science Degree
4 8 (14.55%) SC Cleared
5 6 (10.91%) AWS Certification
5 6 (10.91%) Azure Certification
6 5 (9.09%) CISSP
6 5 (9.09%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
7 4 (7.27%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (5.45%) CISM
9 2 (3.64%) CEH
9 2 (3.64%) ITIL Certification
9 2 (3.64%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (27.27%) PCI DSS
2 14 (25.45%) NIST
3 11 (20.00%) GDPR
3 11 (20.00%) GLBA
4 2 (3.64%) FIPS 140-2
4 2 (3.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 2 (3.64%) SOC 2
System Software
1 13 (23.64%) Active Directory
2 10 (18.18%) Docker
3 8 (14.55%) DFS Replication
4 6 (10.91%) Dovecot
4 6 (10.91%) Postfix
4 6 (10.91%) Squid
5 2 (3.64%) HDFS
5 2 (3.64%) KVM
6 1 (1.82%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 1 (1.82%) Ceph
6 1 (1.82%) Hyper-V
6 1 (1.82%) iptables
6 1 (1.82%) Lustre
6 1 (1.82%) NFS
6 1 (1.82%) Samba
6 1 (1.82%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 1 (1.82%) Virtual Machines
6 1 (1.82%) VMware Infrastructure
6 1 (1.82%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 9 (16.36%) Terraform
2 8 (14.55%) Grafana
2 8 (14.55%) Prometheus
3 6 (10.91%) Nessus
3 6 (10.91%) Proxmox
4 3 (5.45%) Ansible
5 2 (3.64%) Kibana
5 2 (3.64%) Progress Chef
6 1 (1.82%) Failover Clustering
6 1 (1.82%) FortiGate
6 1 (1.82%) HAProxy
6 1 (1.82%) SELinux
Vendors
1 20 (36.36%) Thales
2 13 (23.64%) Splunk
3 10 (18.18%) Microsoft
3 10 (18.18%) ServiceNow
4 8 (14.55%) Gemalto
4 8 (14.55%) IBM
5 6 (10.91%) CyberArk
5 6 (10.91%) Jaspersoft
6 5 (9.09%) BeyondTrust
6 5 (9.09%) Cisco
7 3 (5.45%) Meraki
8 2 (3.64%) BiZZdesign
8 2 (3.64%) Ciena
9 1 (1.82%) Fortinet
9 1 (1.82%) VMware