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 19 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 370 307 287
Rank change year-on-year -63 -20 +33
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 225 179 269
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.57% 0.73% 0.72%
As % of the System Software category 5.23% 5.68% 6.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 154 119 185
10th Percentile £334 £350 £289
25th Percentile £413 £438 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £500
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +5.00% -9.09%
75th Percentile £575 £625 £608
90th Percentile £650 £750 £675
UK median daily rate £500 £523 £500
% change year-on-year -4.40% +4.60% -7.88%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 11 26
10th Percentile - £33.25 -
25th Percentile - £57.25 £14.06
Median hourly rate £70.00 £63.00 £14.63
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% +330.77% -77.84%
75th Percentile - £66.00 £15.19
90th Percentile - - £88.75
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £63.00 £14.63
% change year-on-year +11.11% +330.77% -77.84%

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 4,299 3,152 4,052
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 10.89% 12.87% 10.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,938 2,191 2,807
10th Percentile £213 £213 £190
25th Percentile £400 £400 £313
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £488
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +7.69% -7.14%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £600
90th Percentile £694 £725 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £488
% change year-on-year -4.76% +7.69% -7.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 152 77 208
10th Percentile £17.09 £15.05 £14.06
25th Percentile £25.47 £19.97 £14.48
Median hourly rate £56.25 £28.41 £21.00
Median % change year-on-year +97.99% +35.29% -49.85%
75th Percentile £74.07 £65.00 £54.69
90th Percentile £85.78 £86.95 £70.20
UK median hourly rate £52.75 £28.41 £22.50
% change year-on-year +85.67% +26.27% -55.00%

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 19 April 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
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 19 April 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 -48 93 £525 -8.70% 21
North of England -23 77 £479 +26.59% 13
Yorkshire -17 45 £500 +14.29% 3
North West -28 31 £458 +20.21% 9
South East -43 19 £488 -15.22% 15
Midlands -68 14 £425 -15.00% 5
West Midlands -64 11 £375 -18.92% 3
East of England -39 10 £550 +2.33% 7
South West -25 8 £538 +0.47%
North East -17 1 £400 +10.34% 1
East Midlands -31 1 £500 -13.04% 2
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 5 (2.22%) Microsoft Exchange
2 4 (1.78%) OpenStack
3 3 (1.33%) Palantir Foundry
4 2 (0.89%) SharePoint
5 1 (0.44%) Apache
5 1 (0.44%) ArcGIS
5 1 (0.44%) CMS
5 1 (0.44%) nginx
5 1 (0.44%) Umbraco
5 1 (0.44%) WebLogic
Applications
1 2 (0.89%) Adobe Illustrator
1 2 (0.89%) Chatbot
1 2 (0.89%) Photoshop
Business Applications
1 1 (0.44%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 101 (44.89%) Azure
2 37 (16.44%) AWS
3 32 (14.22%) OpenShift
4 30 (13.33%) GitHub
5 24 (10.67%) Azure DevOps
6 22 (9.78%) GitHub Actions
7 18 (8.00%) GCP
8 17 (7.56%) Azure Monitor
8 17 (7.56%) Entra ID
9 15 (6.67%) Serverless
10 12 (5.33%) Azure AKS
11 11 (4.89%) Azure Storage
11 11 (4.89%) Microsoft 365
12 8 (3.56%) Azure Key Vault
13 7 (3.11%) Azure Functions
14 6 (2.67%) Azure Logic Apps
15 5 (2.22%) Amazon ECS
15 5 (2.22%) AWS CodePipeline
15 5 (2.22%) Azure ExpressRoute
15 5 (2.22%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 32 (14.22%) Firewall
2 27 (12.00%) DNS
3 16 (7.11%) VPN
4 15 (6.67%) VSAN
5 13 (5.78%) Network Security
6 12 (5.33%) DHCP
7 10 (4.44%) SSL
8 9 (4.00%) SAN
8 9 (4.00%) VLAN
9 8 (3.56%) TCP/IP
10 7 (3.11%) Reverse Proxy
10 7 (3.11%) WAN
11 5 (2.22%) FTP
12 4 (1.78%) SD-WAN
13 3 (1.33%) LAN
13 3 (1.33%) NAS
13 3 (1.33%) Wi-Fi
14 2 (0.89%) Cisco Nexus
14 2 (0.89%) IPsec
14 2 (0.89%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (4.89%) SQL Server
2 8 (3.56%) PostgreSQL
3 7 (3.11%) Azure SQL Database
4 6 (2.67%) DB2
5 5 (2.22%) Oracle Database
5 5 (2.22%) Power BI
6 4 (1.78%) Oracle Reports
7 3 (1.33%) Amazon RDS
7 3 (1.33%) Data Lake
7 3 (1.33%) Data Warehouse
8 2 (0.89%) Data Hub
8 2 (0.89%) Data Vault
8 2 (0.89%) ImageNet
9 1 (0.44%) Oracle Exadata
9 1 (0.44%) Power Query
9 1 (0.44%) Relational Database
9 1 (0.44%) SQL Server Integration Services
9 1 (0.44%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 29 (12.89%) Git
2 10 (4.44%) GitLab
3 9 (4.00%) JIRA
4 8 (3.56%) Jenkins
4 8 (3.56%) PVCS
4 8 (3.56%) Rational DOORS
5 2 (0.89%) JMeter
5 2 (0.89%) Postman
5 2 (0.89%) RStudio
5 2 (0.89%) Selenium
5 2 (0.89%) Sonatype Nexus
6 1 (0.44%) Gradle
6 1 (0.44%) Team Foundation Server
6 1 (0.44%) Terragrunt
General
1 30 (13.33%) Social Skills
2 17 (7.56%) Finance
3 11 (4.89%) Analytical Skills
3 11 (4.89%) Public Sector
4 9 (4.00%) Banking
4 9 (4.00%) Legal
5 8 (3.56%) Electronics
6 7 (3.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 4 (1.78%) Retail
8 2 (0.89%) Documentation Skills
8 2 (0.89%) Front Office
8 2 (0.89%) Marketing
8 2 (0.89%) Social Science
8 2 (0.89%) Spanish Language
9 1 (0.44%) Advertising
9 1 (0.44%) Back Office
9 1 (0.44%) Influencing Skills
9 1 (0.44%) Italian Language
9 1 (0.44%) Law
9 1 (0.44%) Police
Job Titles
1 27 (12.00%) DevOps Engineer
2 25 (11.11%) Azure Engineer
3 22 (9.78%) Senior
4 16 (7.11%) Architect
5 13 (5.78%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 12 (5.33%) VMware Engineer
7 11 (4.89%) Cloud Engineer
8 10 (4.44%) Analyst
8 10 (4.44%) Azure DevOps Engineer
9 9 (4.00%) Security Engineer
9 9 (4.00%) Site Reliability Engineer
9 9 (4.00%) Wintel Engineer
10 8 (3.56%) Lead
10 8 (3.56%) Platform Engineer
10 8 (3.56%) Software Engineer
11 7 (3.11%) C/C++ Embedded Software Engineer
11 7 (3.11%) C/C++ Software Engineer
11 7 (3.11%) Data Engineer
11 7 (3.11%) Embedded Engineer
11 7 (3.11%) Site Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (3.56%) ARM Templates
1 8 (3.56%) YAML
2 7 (3.11%) REST
3 4 (1.78%) Middleware
4 3 (1.33%) Hugging Face
4 3 (1.33%) JSON
5 2 (0.89%) .NET
5 2 (0.89%) Kafka
5 2 (0.89%) OpenCV
5 2 (0.89%) PySpark
5 2 (0.89%) PyTorch
5 2 (0.89%) Regular Expression
5 2 (0.89%) SpaCy
5 2 (0.89%) TensorFlow
6 1 (0.44%) Elastic Stack
6 1 (0.44%) Node.js
6 1 (0.44%) Oracle GoldenGate
6 1 (0.44%) Pandas
6 1 (0.44%) Retrofit
6 1 (0.44%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 21 (9.33%) Data Centre
2 15 (6.67%) Replication
3 14 (6.22%) Cloud Native
3 14 (6.22%) Clustering
4 12 (5.33%) Linux Command Line
4 12 (5.33%) Private Cloud
5 11 (4.89%) Hybrid Cloud
6 9 (4.00%) Product Ownership
7 5 (2.22%) Cyber Threat
7 5 (2.22%) FlexPod
8 4 (1.78%) Onboarding
9 3 (1.33%) Data Protection Act
9 3 (1.33%) Public Cloud
9 3 (1.33%) SCADA
10 2 (0.89%) Celerra
10 2 (0.89%) EMC Centera
10 2 (0.89%) Mainframe
10 2 (0.89%) PACS
10 2 (0.89%) PKI
10 2 (0.89%) Symmetrix
Operating Systems
1 63 (28.00%) Linux
2 54 (24.00%) Windows
3 34 (15.11%) VMS
4 31 (13.78%) Windows Server
5 21 (9.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 7 (3.11%) AIX
6 7 (3.11%) Unix
7 6 (2.67%) CoreOS
7 6 (2.67%) Data ONTAP
8 4 (1.78%) SUSE
9 3 (1.33%) Apple iOS
10 2 (0.89%) Ubuntu
10 2 (0.89%) Windows Server 2019
11 1 (0.44%) Android
11 1 (0.44%) Windows Server 2012
11 1 (0.44%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 65 (28.89%) DevOps
2 60 (26.67%) CI/CD
3 50 (22.22%) Migration
4 46 (20.44%) Infrastructure as Code
5 35 (15.56%) High Availability
6 33 (14.67%) Disaster Recovery
7 30 (13.33%) Performance Tuning
8 28 (12.44%) Network Virtualisation
9 25 (11.11%) Containerisation
9 25 (11.11%) Continuous Improvement
10 23 (10.22%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 21 (9.33%) Platform Engineering
12 20 (8.89%) Capacity Planning
12 20 (8.89%) Technical Leadership
13 19 (8.44%) Cybersecurity
14 18 (8.00%) Deployment Automation
15 17 (7.56%) Problem-Solving
16 16 (7.11%) AI
16 16 (7.11%) Root Cause Analysis
17 15 (6.67%) Change Management
Programming Languages
1 58 (25.78%) PowerShell
1 58 (25.78%) Python
2 37 (16.44%) Bash
3 33 (14.67%) SQL
4 10 (4.44%) C
5 9 (4.00%) Shell Script
6 8 (3.56%) Bicep
6 8 (3.56%) C++
7 7 (3.11%) Embedded C
7 7 (3.11%) Embedded C++
8 6 (2.67%) Java
9 5 (2.22%) Ruby
10 4 (1.78%) PL/SQL
11 2 (0.89%) C#
11 2 (0.89%) Go
11 2 (0.89%) Korn
11 2 (0.89%) PHP
12 1 (0.44%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 1 (0.44%) JavaScript
12 1 (0.44%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 51 (22.67%) Security Cleared
2 40 (17.78%) SC Cleared
3 15 (6.67%) Azure Certification
3 15 (6.67%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
4 14 (6.22%) OCP
4 14 (6.22%) Oracle Certification
5 12 (5.33%) VCAP
6 9 (4.00%) Microsoft Certification
7 8 (3.56%) MCSA
7 8 (3.56%) MCSE
8 6 (2.67%) DV Cleared
9 4 (1.78%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (1.33%) Degree
11 2 (0.89%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
12 1 (0.44%) CompTIA Security+
12 1 (0.44%) Master's Degree
12 1 (0.44%) PMP
12 1 (0.44%) RHCA
12 1 (0.44%) RHCE
12 1 (0.44%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (2.67%) GDPR
1 6 (2.67%) QA
2 3 (1.33%) Cyber Essentials
2 3 (1.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (0.89%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.44%) Data Quality
4 1 (0.44%) HIPAA
4 1 (0.44%) NIST
4 1 (0.44%) PCI DSS
4 1 (0.44%) SOC 2
4 1 (0.44%) WCAG
System Software
1 67 (29.78%) VMware Infrastructure
2 38 (16.89%) vSphere
3 33 (14.67%) VMware ESXi
4 29 (12.89%) Active Directory
5 24 (10.67%) Hyper-V
6 17 (7.56%) KVM
7 13 (5.78%) Docker
8 10 (4.44%) VMware NSX
9 9 (4.00%) Firmware
10 7 (3.11%) Ceph
10 7 (3.11%) NFS
11 5 (2.22%) Virtual Desktop
12 2 (0.89%) EMC RecoverPoint
12 2 (0.89%) Xen
13 1 (0.44%) BitLocker
13 1 (0.44%) NLBS
13 1 (0.44%) Oracle RAC
13 1 (0.44%) Veritas Volume Manager
Systems Management
1 64 (28.44%) Terraform
2 54 (24.00%) Ansible
3 48 (21.33%) Kubernetes
4 32 (14.22%) vCenter Server
5 13 (5.78%) PowerCLI
6 8 (3.56%) SCCM
7 7 (3.11%) Microsoft Intune
8 6 (2.67%) IBM BigFix
8 6 (2.67%) SnapMirror
8 6 (2.67%) VxRail
9 5 (2.22%) Grafana
9 5 (2.22%) WSUS
10 4 (1.78%) Data Guard
10 4 (1.78%) Failover Clustering
10 4 (1.78%) Oracle RMAN
10 4 (1.78%) Prometheus
11 3 (1.33%) Argo
11 3 (1.33%) Microsoft Clustering
11 3 (1.33%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
11 3 (1.33%) systemd
Vendors
1 70 (31.11%) VMware
2 65 (28.89%) Microsoft
3 18 (8.00%) IBM
4 15 (6.67%) Cisco
4 15 (6.67%) Red Hat
5 11 (4.89%) Oracle
6 10 (4.44%) Dell
7 9 (4.00%) Google
7 9 (4.00%) NetApp
8 8 (3.56%) ANSYS
9 7 (3.11%) Veeam
10 6 (2.67%) OpenAI
10 6 (2.67%) Tenable
11 5 (2.22%) Databricks
12 4 (1.78%) OpenText
12 4 (1.78%) Pure Storage
12 4 (1.78%) Qualys
12 4 (1.78%) Sophos
13 3 (1.33%) Alibaba
13 3 (1.33%) Palo Alto