Linux Contract Job Trends in the North of England

Linux
England > North of England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North of England requiring Linux skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 29 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 45 33 37
Rank change year-on-year -12 +4 -6
Contract jobs citing Linux 293 198 189
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 4.48% 5.99% 4.04%
As % of the Operating Systems category 38.40% 37.43% 27.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 191 127 131
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £400 £388 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £525 £500
Median % change year-on-year -9.52% +5.00% -6.32%
75th Percentile £547 £588 £600
90th Percentile £650 £675 £650
England median daily rate £513 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.82% - -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 1 10
10th Percentile £31.54 - £21.25
25th Percentile - - £47.25
Median hourly rate £41.94 £70.00 £48.00
Median % change year-on-year -40.09% +45.83% +28.00%
75th Percentile £49.38 - £60.56
90th Percentile £59.70 - £66.56
England median hourly rate £63.14 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -2.87% - -

All Operating Systems
North of England

Linux falls under the Operating Systems category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring operating system skills in the North of England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for operating system skills 763 529 693
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 11.67% 15.99% 14.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 504 337 472
10th Percentile £150 £177 £165
25th Percentile £295 £250 £275
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £425 £400 £425
Median % change year-on-year +6.25% -5.88% -10.53%
75th Percentile £525 £538 £530
90th Percentile £615 £623 £650
England median daily rate £455 £467 £475
% change year-on-year -2.62% -1.63% -6.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 40 20 77
10th Percentile £16.47 £13.00 -
25th Percentile £18.50 £13.90 £10.95
Median hourly rate £27.08 £17.47 £16.00
Median % change year-on-year +55.01% +9.19% -39.62%
75th Percentile £63.50 £18.91 £19.18
90th Percentile £178.75 £19.75 £48.00
England median hourly rate £37.50 £20.00 £22.50
% change year-on-year +87.50% -11.11% -47.06%

Linux
Job Vacancy Trend in the North of England

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

Linux job vacancy trend in the North of England

Linux
Daily Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Linux.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Linux

Linux
Daily Rate Histogram in the North of England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Linux in the North of England over the 6 months to 29 May 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Linux in the North of England

Linux
Hourly Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Linux.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Linux

Linux
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North of England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Linux in the North of England over the 6 months to 29 May 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Linux in the North of England

Linux
Contract Job Locations in the North of England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Linux within the North of England region over the 6 months to 29 May 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
Yorkshire -16 151 £480 -10.70% 18
North West -13 128 £469 +10.35% 51
North East -24 14 £446 -18.12% 16
Linux
England

Linux
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North of 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 18 (6.14%) Confluence
2 9 (3.07%) CICS
3 5 (1.71%) TPMS
4 3 (1.02%) nginx
5 2 (0.68%) Apache
5 2 (0.68%) Apache Airflow
5 2 (0.68%) Oracle SOA Suite
5 2 (0.68%) WebLogic
6 1 (0.34%) CMS
6 1 (0.34%) JBoss
6 1 (0.34%) Tomcat
Applications
1 7 (2.39%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.34%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.34%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.68%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.34%) Cloudability
2 1 (0.34%) Odoo
2 1 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.34%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 87 (29.69%) AWS
2 59 (20.14%) Azure
3 47 (16.04%) OpenShift
4 42 (14.33%) GCP
5 26 (8.87%) GitHub
6 15 (5.12%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 10 (3.41%) GitHub Actions
8 9 (3.07%) Amazon EC2
8 9 (3.07%) Amazon EKS
8 9 (3.07%) Amazon S3
8 9 (3.07%) Google Kubernetes Engine
8 9 (3.07%) Serverless
9 8 (2.73%) AWS Lambda
10 6 (2.05%) Amazon ECS
10 6 (2.05%) AWS CloudFormation
11 5 (1.71%) Amazon SQS
11 5 (1.71%) Azure DevOps
11 5 (1.71%) IaaS
12 4 (1.37%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 4 (1.37%) AWS KMS
Communications & Networking
1 51 (17.41%) Firewall
2 24 (8.19%) SAN
3 20 (6.83%) DNS
4 16 (5.46%) TCP/IP
5 10 (3.41%) SSL
6 9 (3.07%) VSAN
7 8 (2.73%) Network Security
8 7 (2.39%) NAS
9 6 (2.05%) 3GPP
9 6 (2.05%) RTP
9 6 (2.05%) SNMP
9 6 (2.05%) VPN
9 6 (2.05%) Wireshark
10 5 (1.71%) SSH
11 4 (1.37%) iSCSI
12 3 (1.02%) FTP
13 2 (0.68%) DHCP
13 2 (0.68%) HTTP
13 2 (0.68%) Intrusion Detection
13 2 (0.68%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (6.48%) MongoDB
2 14 (4.78%) PostgreSQL
3 13 (4.44%) NoSQL
4 11 (3.75%) Oracle Database
4 11 (3.75%) SQL Server
5 9 (3.07%) DataStage
6 7 (2.39%) Elasticsearch
7 6 (2.05%) DB2
7 6 (2.05%) Relational Database
8 4 (1.37%) Oracle Database 12c
8 4 (1.37%) RDBMS
9 3 (1.02%) Amazon Aurora
9 3 (1.02%) DynamoDB
10 2 (0.68%) Amazon RDS
10 2 (0.68%) Apache Cassandra
10 2 (0.68%) Azure SQL Database
10 2 (0.68%) Oracle Exadata
10 2 (0.68%) Power BI
11 1 (0.34%) InfluxDB
11 1 (0.34%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 37 (12.63%) Jenkins
2 34 (11.60%) JIRA
3 28 (9.56%) GitLab
4 21 (7.17%) Git
5 10 (3.41%) Mockito
6 9 (3.07%) Jaeger
7 6 (2.05%) TeamCity
8 3 (1.02%) Bitbucket
8 3 (1.02%) CircleCI
8 3 (1.02%) Liquibase
8 3 (1.02%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.68%) Gradle
10 1 (0.34%) Burp Suite
10 1 (0.34%) Cucumber
10 1 (0.34%) Gatling
10 1 (0.34%) Hudson
10 1 (0.34%) JUnit
10 1 (0.34%) LoadRunner
10 1 (0.34%) Maven
10 1 (0.34%) SonarQube
General
1 81 (27.65%) Social Skills
2 66 (22.53%) Finance
3 32 (10.92%) Banking
3 32 (10.92%) Public Sector
4 21 (7.17%) Analytical Skills
5 17 (5.80%) Documentation Skills
6 9 (3.07%) Financial Institution
6 9 (3.07%) Influencing Skills
7 8 (2.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 5 (1.71%) Aviation
8 5 (1.71%) Fire and Rescue
8 5 (1.71%) Legal
8 5 (1.71%) Police
9 4 (1.37%) Law
10 3 (1.02%) Investment Banking
11 2 (0.68%) Advertising
11 2 (0.68%) Military
12 1 (0.34%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.34%) Private Banking
12 1 (0.34%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 41 (13.99%) Senior
2 28 (9.56%) Developer
3 23 (7.85%) DevOps Engineer
4 19 (6.48%) Java Developer
4 19 (6.48%) Linux Engineer
4 19 (6.48%) Security Engineer
5 17 (5.80%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 17 (5.80%) Software Engineer
6 16 (5.46%) Lead
7 14 (4.78%) Consultant
8 13 (4.44%) Analyst
9 12 (4.10%) Platform Engineer
10 11 (3.75%) Data Centre Engineer
11 10 (3.41%) Security Consultant
12 9 (3.07%) AWS Engineer
12 9 (3.07%) DBA
12 9 (3.07%) Designer
12 9 (3.07%) Infrastructure Designer
13 8 (2.73%) Cloud Engineer
13 8 (2.73%) VMware Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 22 (7.51%) Kafka
2 21 (7.17%) Middleware
3 12 (4.10%) Elastic Stack
3 12 (4.10%) OpenTelemetry
3 12 (4.10%) YAML
4 11 (3.75%) LDAP
5 10 (3.41%) JAX-RS
5 10 (3.41%) REST
5 10 (3.41%) Spring Boot
6 9 (3.07%) .NET
6 9 (3.07%) ActiveMQ
6 9 (3.07%) Redfish
7 6 (2.05%) .NET Core
8 4 (1.37%) Flash
8 4 (1.37%) RabbitMQ
8 4 (1.37%) SOAP
9 3 (1.02%) OpenID
9 3 (1.02%) RESTful
9 3 (1.02%) XML
10 2 (0.68%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 39 (13.31%) Data Centre
2 27 (9.22%) Cloud Native
3 24 (8.19%) Linux Command Line
4 23 (7.85%) Security Posture
5 16 (5.46%) Distributed Systems
5 16 (5.46%) Management Information System
6 15 (5.12%) Hybrid Cloud
7 14 (4.78%) Mainframe
8 13 (4.44%) Data Protection Act
9 11 (3.75%) Replication
10 10 (3.41%) Cloud Security Posture
11 9 (3.07%) BYOD
11 9 (3.07%) Legacy Systems
11 9 (3.07%) VSAM
12 7 (2.39%) Onboarding
12 7 (2.39%) PKI
12 7 (2.39%) Product Ownership
13 6 (2.05%) Enterprise Storage
13 6 (2.05%) Public Cloud
14 5 (1.71%) FlexPod
Operating Systems
1 111 (37.88%) Windows
2 68 (23.21%) Unix
3 67 (22.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 27 (9.22%) AIX
4 27 (9.22%) Windows Server
5 16 (5.46%) Ubuntu
6 14 (4.78%) Solaris
7 11 (3.75%) Mac OS X
7 11 (3.75%) VMS
8 10 (3.41%) CentOS
9 7 (2.39%) CoreOS
9 7 (2.39%) Oracle Linux
10 5 (1.71%) Data ONTAP
10 5 (1.71%) zOS
11 4 (1.37%) HPUX
11 4 (1.37%) SUSE
12 3 (1.02%) Mac OS
13 1 (0.34%) Embedded Linux
13 1 (0.34%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
13 1 (0.34%) Windows Server 2003
Processes & Methodologies
1 100 (34.13%) CI/CD
2 92 (31.40%) DevOps
3 55 (18.77%) Agile
4 54 (18.43%) Problem-Solving
5 48 (16.38%) Infrastructure as Code
6 45 (15.36%) Observability
7 40 (13.65%) Migration
8 38 (12.97%) Microservices
9 37 (12.63%) Roadmaps
10 35 (11.95%) Test Automation
11 34 (11.60%) Containerisation
12 31 (10.58%) Continuous Improvement
12 31 (10.58%) Infrastructure Automation
13 30 (10.24%) Cybersecurity
14 29 (9.90%) Performance Tuning
14 29 (9.90%) Root Cause Analysis
15 27 (9.22%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 27 (9.22%) Vulnerability Management
16 26 (8.87%) Cloud Security
16 26 (8.87%) Data Protection
Programming Languages
1 118 (40.27%) Python
2 62 (21.16%) Bash
3 53 (18.09%) Java
4 51 (17.41%) SQL
5 50 (17.06%) PowerShell
6 15 (5.12%) Rust
6 15 (5.12%) Shell Script
7 14 (4.78%) Go
8 13 (4.44%) JavaScript
9 11 (3.75%) Ruby
10 10 (3.41%) Perl
11 9 (3.07%) C#
11 9 (3.07%) COBOL
12 8 (2.73%) TypeScript
13 5 (1.71%) JCL
14 4 (1.37%) Kotlin
15 2 (0.68%) C
15 2 (0.68%) C++
15 2 (0.68%) REXX
15 2 (0.68%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 47 (16.04%) Security Cleared
2 35 (11.95%) Degree
3 31 (10.58%) CISSP
3 31 (10.58%) SC Cleared
4 16 (5.46%) CompTIA Security+
5 15 (5.12%) AWS Certification
5 15 (5.12%) RHCE
6 10 (3.41%) Azure Certification
7 8 (2.73%) CISM
8 7 (2.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 7 (2.39%) DV Cleared
8 7 (2.39%) Microsoft Certification
9 6 (2.05%) Computer Science Degree
9 6 (2.05%) OCP
9 6 (2.05%) Oracle Certification
10 5 (1.71%) BPSS Clearance
10 5 (1.71%) FFIEC
10 5 (1.71%) MCSA
10 5 (1.71%) MCSE
11 3 (1.02%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (3.75%) GDPR
2 9 (3.07%) HIPAA
2 9 (3.07%) NIST
3 8 (2.73%) PCI DSS
3 8 (2.73%) SLA
4 6 (2.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 5 (1.71%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 5 (1.71%) GLBA
6 4 (1.37%) GRC
7 3 (1.02%) QA
7 3 (1.02%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.34%) Cyber Essentials
8 1 (0.34%) GxP
8 1 (0.34%) SOC 2
System Software
1 62 (21.16%) Docker
2 46 (15.70%) VMware Infrastructure
3 43 (14.68%) Virtual Machines
4 19 (6.48%) Active Directory
4 19 (6.48%) NFS
4 19 (6.48%) vSphere
5 18 (6.14%) Hyper-V
6 17 (5.80%) KVM
7 14 (4.78%) Firmware
8 12 (4.10%) VMware ESXi
9 7 (2.39%) VMware NSX
10 5 (1.71%) Time Sharing Option
11 4 (1.37%) GPFS
12 3 (1.02%) Veritas Volume Manager
13 2 (0.68%) Oracle RAC
13 2 (0.68%) SRDF
14 1 (0.34%) Ceph
14 1 (0.34%) Embedded Firmware
14 1 (0.34%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 1 (0.34%) zsh
Systems Management
1 92 (31.40%) Ansible
2 85 (29.01%) Kubernetes
3 80 (27.30%) Terraform
4 33 (11.26%) Grafana
5 28 (9.56%) Prometheus
6 14 (4.78%) Progress Chef
7 13 (4.44%) Puppet
8 11 (3.75%) vCenter Server
9 9 (3.07%) Dell DRAC
10 8 (2.73%) Kiali
10 8 (2.73%) Oracle RMAN
10 8 (2.73%) Packer
10 8 (2.73%) Tivoli Storage Manager
11 7 (2.39%) PowerCLI
11 7 (2.39%) vRealize
12 6 (2.05%) IBM BigFix
12 6 (2.05%) Nessus
13 5 (1.71%) CASB
13 5 (1.71%) SnapMirror
14 4 (1.37%) Argo
Vendors
1 57 (19.45%) VMware
2 47 (16.04%) Red Hat
3 32 (10.92%) Splunk
4 31 (10.58%) Oracle
5 29 (9.90%) IBM
6 25 (8.53%) Microsoft
7 19 (6.48%) Google
8 13 (4.44%) ServiceNow
9 11 (3.75%) CyberArk
10 10 (3.41%) Cisco
11 9 (3.07%) Broadcom
11 9 (3.07%) Dell
12 8 (2.73%) HP
13 7 (2.39%) Tenable
14 6 (2.05%) Dynatrace
14 6 (2.05%) NetApp
14 6 (2.05%) Remedy
15 5 (1.71%) Brocade
15 5 (1.71%) Thales
15 5 (1.71%) Varonis