Virtual Machines Contract Job Trends in England

Virtual Machine (VM)
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring Virtual Machines skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 361 314 306
Rank change year-on-year -47 -8 +39
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 209 182 270
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.60% 0.71% 0.72%
As % of the System Software category 4.99% 5.65% 6.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 146 118 182
10th Percentile £321 £350 £300
25th Percentile £413 £425 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £500
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +5.00% -9.09%
75th Percentile £579 £625 £608
90th Percentile £650 £750 £698
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £500
% change year-on-year -4.76% +5.00% -6.32%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 11 21
10th Percentile £66.03 £33.25 -
25th Percentile - £57.25 £14.06
Median hourly rate £70.00 £63.00 £25.12
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% +150.85% -61.95%
75th Percentile - £66.00 £84.36
90th Percentile - - £88.75
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £63.00 £25.12
% change year-on-year +11.11% +150.85% -61.95%

All System Software Skills
England

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 England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for system software skills 4,189 3,220 4,319
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 12.11% 12.47% 11.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,856 2,113 2,970
10th Percentile £201 £200 £188
25th Percentile £400 £375 £313
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £480
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +9.38% -8.57%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £600
90th Percentile £694 £738 £700
UK median daily rate £500 £516 £480
% change year-on-year -3.15% +7.55% -8.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 137 78 222
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.44 £14.06
25th Percentile £20.00 £21.05 £17.29
Median hourly rate £31.86 £29.00 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +9.86% -27.50% +1.91%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.88 £65.74
90th Percentile £81.00 £79.00 £76.53
UK median hourly rate £34.00 £29.00 £43.75
% change year-on-year +17.24% -33.71% +9.38%

Virtual Machines
Job Vacancy Trend in England

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

Virtual Machines job vacancy trend in England

Virtual Machines
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Virtual Machines.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Virtual Machines in England over the 6 months to 18 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Virtual Machines in England

Virtual Machines
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Virtual Machines.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Virtual Machines in England over the 6 months to 18 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Virtual Machines in England

Virtual Machines
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 Virtual Machines within the England region over the 6 months to 18 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
London -35 85 £505 -15.83% 8
North of England -28 56 £475 +24.84% 16
Yorkshire -26 37 £488 +28.29% 6
South West -11 22 £550 +2.33% 2
South East -27 19 £525 +50.00% 12
North West -24 18 £460 +20.73% 10
East of England -36 12 £475 -8.43% 7
West Midlands -53 5 £475 -11.63% 6
Midlands -62 5 £475 -11.63% 9
North East -14 1 £400 +10.34%
Virtual Machines
UK

Virtual Machines
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 13 (6.22%) Microsoft Exchange
2 6 (2.87%) IIS
3 5 (2.39%) SharePoint
4 4 (1.91%) Apache
4 4 (1.91%) Confluence
4 4 (1.91%) OpenStack
5 3 (1.44%) SharePoint Server
6 2 (0.96%) Ethereum
6 2 (0.96%) Hyperledger
6 2 (0.96%) nginx
6 2 (0.96%) Palantir Foundry
7 1 (0.48%) Apache Spark
7 1 (0.48%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.48%) Skype for Business
Applications
1 1 (0.48%) Adobe Illustrator
1 1 (0.48%) MS Visio
1 1 (0.48%) OmniGraffle
1 1 (0.48%) Photoshop
Business Applications
1 1 (0.48%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 79 (37.80%) Azure
2 34 (16.27%) AWS
2 34 (16.27%) GitHub
3 22 (10.53%) Azure DevOps
4 21 (10.05%) OpenShift
5 20 (9.57%) GitHub Actions
6 14 (6.70%) GCP
7 11 (5.26%) Microsoft 365
8 10 (4.78%) Azure Monitor
8 10 (4.78%) Serverless
9 9 (4.31%) Azure AKS
9 9 (4.31%) Entra ID
10 8 (3.83%) Azure Storage
10 8 (3.83%) Cloud Computing
11 6 (2.87%) AWS CodePipeline
12 5 (2.39%) Amazon ECS
12 5 (2.39%) AWS Lambda
12 5 (2.39%) Azure Key Vault
12 5 (2.39%) IaaS
12 5 (2.39%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 28 (13.40%) DNS
1 28 (13.40%) Firewall
2 11 (5.26%) TCP/IP
2 11 (5.26%) VPN
3 10 (4.78%) DHCP
3 10 (4.78%) Network Security
4 9 (4.31%) WAN
5 6 (2.87%) Reverse Proxy
5 6 (2.87%) Skype
5 6 (2.87%) Wi-Fi
6 4 (1.91%) SAN
6 4 (1.91%) VLAN
7 2 (0.96%) Intrusion Detection
7 2 (0.96%) SSH
7 2 (0.96%) SSL
7 2 (0.96%) Wireless
8 1 (0.48%) Cisco IOS
8 1 (0.48%) IPsec
8 1 (0.48%) MQTT
8 1 (0.48%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (5.74%) SQL Server
2 7 (3.35%) PostgreSQL
3 6 (2.87%) DB2
4 5 (2.39%) Azure SQL Database
5 4 (1.91%) Data Lake
5 4 (1.91%) OLTP
6 3 (1.44%) Amazon RDS
6 3 (1.44%) Data Mining
6 3 (1.44%) Oracle Database
6 3 (1.44%) Oracle Reports
7 2 (0.96%) Data Hub
7 2 (0.96%) Data Vault
7 2 (0.96%) ImageNet
7 2 (0.96%) Power BI
8 1 (0.48%) Big Data
8 1 (0.48%) NoSQL
8 1 (0.48%) Relational Database
8 1 (0.48%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 28 (13.40%) Git
2 22 (10.53%) JIRA
3 14 (6.70%) Jenkins
4 12 (5.74%) GitLab
5 8 (3.83%) PVCS
5 8 (3.83%) Rational DOORS
6 4 (1.91%) RStudio
7 2 (0.96%) Hardhat
7 2 (0.96%) JMeter
7 2 (0.96%) Postman
7 2 (0.96%) Selenium
7 2 (0.96%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.48%) Artifactory
8 1 (0.48%) Gradle
8 1 (0.48%) SonarQube
General
1 38 (18.18%) Social Skills
2 15 (7.18%) Analytical Skills
3 11 (5.26%) Finance
3 11 (5.26%) Public Sector
4 9 (4.31%) Electronics
5 8 (3.83%) Banking
6 6 (2.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 6 (2.87%) Legal
6 6 (2.87%) Spanish Language
7 5 (2.39%) Documentation Skills
8 4 (1.91%) Social Science
9 3 (1.44%) Telecoms
10 1 (0.48%) Aerospace
10 1 (0.48%) Back Office
10 1 (0.48%) Front Office
10 1 (0.48%) Italian Language
10 1 (0.48%) Law
10 1 (0.48%) Marketing
10 1 (0.48%) Police
10 1 (0.48%) Retail
Job Titles
1 34 (16.27%) DevOps Engineer
2 19 (9.09%) Azure Engineer
3 17 (8.13%) Senior
4 16 (7.66%) Security Engineer
5 15 (7.18%) Platform Engineer
6 14 (6.70%) Software Engineer
7 13 (6.22%) Architect
8 12 (5.74%) C++ Software Engineer
8 12 (5.74%) Embedded C++ Engineer
8 12 (5.74%) Embedded C++ Software Engineer
8 12 (5.74%) Embedded Engineer
8 12 (5.74%) Embedded Software Engineer
8 12 (5.74%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 11 (5.26%) Cloud Engineer
9 11 (5.26%) Data Engineer
10 10 (4.78%) Azure DevOps Engineer
10 10 (4.78%) Wintel Engineer
11 9 (4.31%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 7 (3.35%) Embedded C/C++ Engineer
12 7 (3.35%) Kubernetes Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (4.78%) ARM Templates
2 5 (2.39%) Middleware
3 4 (1.91%) Hugging Face
3 4 (1.91%) Kafka
3 4 (1.91%) OpenTelemetry
3 4 (1.91%) TensorFlow
4 3 (1.44%) .NET
4 3 (1.44%) Elastic Stack
4 3 (1.44%) OpenCV
4 3 (1.44%) PyTorch
4 3 (1.44%) Regular Expression
4 3 (1.44%) SpaCy
5 2 (0.96%) PySpark
5 2 (0.96%) Smart Contracts
5 2 (0.96%) Truffle
5 2 (0.96%) web3js
5 2 (0.96%) YAML
6 1 (0.48%) LangChain
6 1 (0.48%) LangGraph
6 1 (0.48%) SwiftUI
Miscellaneous
1 24 (11.48%) Data Centre
2 16 (7.66%) Private Cloud
3 14 (6.70%) Cloud Native
4 13 (6.22%) Replication
5 10 (4.78%) Clustering
5 10 (4.78%) Linux Command Line
6 8 (3.83%) Hybrid Cloud
7 6 (2.87%) CAN bus
7 6 (2.87%) Onboarding
7 6 (2.87%) Public Cloud
8 5 (2.39%) Cyber Threat
9 4 (1.91%) PKI
9 4 (1.91%) Self-Motivation
10 3 (1.44%) Algorithms
10 3 (1.44%) Analytical Mindset
10 3 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
10 3 (1.44%) Enterprise Software
10 3 (1.44%) NHS
10 3 (1.44%) Product Ownership
11 2 (0.96%) Blockchain
Operating Systems
1 64 (30.62%) Linux
2 62 (29.67%) Windows
3 32 (15.31%) Windows Server
4 26 (12.44%) VMS
5 10 (4.78%) Windows 10
6 8 (3.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 7 (3.35%) Windows Server 2016
8 6 (2.87%) AIX
8 6 (2.87%) Unix
9 3 (1.44%) Windows Server 2012
10 2 (0.96%) Apple iOS
10 2 (0.96%) CoreOS
10 2 (0.96%) Data ONTAP
10 2 (0.96%) Windows Server 2019
11 1 (0.48%) Android
11 1 (0.48%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 74 (35.41%) DevOps
2 68 (32.54%) CI/CD
3 49 (23.44%) Infrastructure as Code
4 32 (15.31%) Migration
5 31 (14.83%) Agile
6 30 (14.35%) High Availability
7 25 (11.96%) Cybersecurity
8 24 (11.48%) Continuous Improvement
9 23 (11.00%) Containerisation
10 22 (10.53%) Disaster Recovery
11 21 (10.05%) Platform Engineering
11 21 (10.05%) Technical Leadership
12 20 (9.57%) Problem-Solving
13 19 (9.09%) Network Virtualisation
14 18 (8.61%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 17 (8.13%) Analytics
16 15 (7.18%) AI
16 15 (7.18%) Root Cause Analysis
16 15 (7.18%) Runbook
17 14 (6.70%) Site Reliability Engineering
Programming Languages
1 50 (23.92%) Python
2 47 (22.49%) PowerShell
3 28 (13.40%) Bash
3 28 (13.40%) SQL
4 14 (6.70%) C++
5 13 (6.22%) Embedded C++
6 10 (4.78%) C
7 9 (4.31%) C#
7 9 (4.31%) Java
7 9 (4.31%) Shell Script
8 7 (3.35%) Embedded C
9 5 (2.39%) Ruby
10 4 (1.91%) Bicep
10 4 (1.91%) Scala
11 2 (0.96%) PHP
11 2 (0.96%) Solidity
12 1 (0.48%) Go
12 1 (0.48%) JavaScript
12 1 (0.48%) Korn
12 1 (0.48%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 61 (29.19%) Security Cleared
2 50 (23.92%) SC Cleared
3 13 (6.22%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
4 11 (5.26%) VCAP
5 10 (4.78%) DV Cleared
5 10 (4.78%) OCP
5 10 (4.78%) Oracle Certification
6 8 (3.83%) MCSA
6 8 (3.83%) MCSE
6 8 (3.83%) Microsoft Certification
7 6 (2.87%) Azure Certification
8 4 (1.91%) Degree
9 2 (0.96%) BPSS Clearance
9 2 (0.96%) Computer Science Degree
9 2 (0.96%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
9 2 (0.96%) Master's Degree
10 1 (0.48%) AWS Certification
10 1 (0.48%) CompTIA Security+
10 1 (0.48%) RHCE
10 1 (0.48%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (2.87%) QA
2 5 (2.39%) GDPR
3 4 (1.91%) Cyber Essentials
4 3 (1.44%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 2 (0.96%) Accessibility
5 2 (0.96%) SLA
6 1 (0.48%) Data Quality
6 1 (0.48%) GRC
6 1 (0.48%) NIST
System Software
1 55 (26.32%) VMware Infrastructure
2 29 (13.88%) Active Directory
3 26 (12.44%) vSphere
4 20 (9.57%) Hyper-V
4 20 (9.57%) VMware ESXi
5 18 (8.61%) Docker
5 18 (8.61%) KVM
6 10 (4.78%) Virtual Desktop
7 7 (3.35%) VMware NSX
8 6 (2.87%) Firmware
9 2 (0.96%) NFS
9 2 (0.96%) Xen
10 1 (0.48%) Ceph
10 1 (0.48%) NLBS
Systems Management
1 62 (29.67%) Terraform
2 46 (22.01%) Kubernetes
3 41 (19.62%) Ansible
4 36 (17.22%) vCenter Server
5 12 (5.74%) SCCM
6 11 (5.26%) WSUS
7 9 (4.31%) Microsoft Intune
8 6 (2.87%) CASB
8 6 (2.87%) IBM BigFix
8 6 (2.87%) SCOrch
9 5 (2.39%) PowerCLI
9 5 (2.39%) Rancher
10 4 (1.91%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 4 (1.91%) vMotion
11 3 (1.44%) Data Guard
11 3 (1.44%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
11 3 (1.44%) Oracle RMAN
11 3 (1.44%) vRealize
12 2 (0.96%) Grafana
12 2 (0.96%) NetApp OnCommand
Vendors
1 64 (30.62%) Microsoft
2 61 (29.19%) VMware
3 21 (10.05%) Cisco
4 15 (7.18%) IBM
5 8 (3.83%) ANSYS
5 8 (3.83%) Red Hat
6 7 (3.35%) NetApp
6 7 (3.35%) Oracle
7 6 (2.87%) Databricks
7 6 (2.87%) Google
8 5 (2.39%) OpenAI
8 5 (2.39%) SolarWinds
8 5 (2.39%) Sophos
8 5 (2.39%) Veeam
9 4 (1.91%) Dell
9 4 (1.91%) Pure Storage
9 4 (1.91%) Tenable
10 3 (1.44%) Alibaba
10 3 (1.44%) Remedy
11 2 (0.96%) Foundry