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 16 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 42 30 44
Rank change year-on-year -12 +14 -13
Contract jobs citing Linux 300 216 184
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 4.39% 6.26% 3.79%
As % of the Operating Systems category 39.11% 38.43% 27.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 187 140 126
10th Percentile £358 £350 £350
25th Percentile £400 £375 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £520 £504
Median % change year-on-year -7.65% +3.18% -4.95%
75th Percentile £550 £588 £609
90th Percentile £650 £675 £650
England median daily rate £510 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -7.27% - -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% +81.13%
75th Percentile £49.38 - £60.56
90th Percentile £59.70 - £66.56
England median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 767 562 675
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 11.23% 16.29% 13.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 505 356 455
10th Percentile £166 £180 £167
25th Percentile £300 £263 £262
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £443 £400 £425
Median % change year-on-year +10.75% -5.88% -10.53%
75th Percentile £537 £538 £544
90th Percentile £617 £624 £656
England median daily rate £455 £465 £475
% change year-on-year -2.15% -2.11% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 35 22 80
10th Percentile £16.30 £13.00 -
25th Percentile £17.41 £14.71 £10.95
Median hourly rate £24.00 £17.50 £16.00
Median % change year-on-year +37.14% +9.38% -28.89%
75th Percentile £45.35 £18.87 £19.39
90th Percentile £178.75 £19.73 £48.00
England median hourly rate £32.50 £19.14 £23.00
% change year-on-year +69.85% -16.80% -51.58%

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 16 June 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 16 June 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 16 June 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 -20 153 £500 -6.98% 26
North West -20 133 £469 +10.35% 73
North East -27 15 £446 -6.54% 23
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 20 (6.67%) Confluence
2 9 (3.00%) CICS
3 5 (1.67%) TPMS
4 3 (1.00%) Microsoft Exchange
4 3 (1.00%) nginx
5 2 (0.67%) Apache
5 2 (0.67%) Apache Airflow
5 2 (0.67%) Oracle SOA Suite
5 2 (0.67%) WebLogic
6 1 (0.33%) CMS
6 1 (0.33%) JBoss
6 1 (0.33%) Tomcat
Applications
1 7 (2.33%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.33%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.67%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.33%) Cloudability
2 1 (0.33%) Odoo
2 1 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.33%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 86 (28.67%) AWS
2 61 (20.33%) Azure
3 43 (14.33%) GCP
4 39 (13.00%) OpenShift
5 26 (8.67%) GitHub
6 18 (6.00%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 13 (4.33%) Google Kubernetes Engine
8 9 (3.00%) Amazon EC2
8 9 (3.00%) Amazon EKS
8 9 (3.00%) Amazon S3
9 8 (2.67%) GitHub Actions
10 7 (2.33%) Serverless
11 6 (2.00%) AWS Lambda
11 6 (2.00%) Azure DevOps
11 6 (2.00%) Microsoft 365
12 5 (1.67%) Amazon SQS
12 5 (1.67%) IaaS
12 5 (1.67%) OCI
13 4 (1.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 4 (1.33%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 52 (17.33%) Firewall
2 25 (8.33%) SAN
3 18 (6.00%) DNS
4 15 (5.00%) TCP/IP
5 10 (3.33%) Network Security
5 10 (3.33%) SSL
6 9 (3.00%) VSAN
7 7 (2.33%) NAS
8 6 (2.00%) 3GPP
8 6 (2.00%) RTP
8 6 (2.00%) SNMP
8 6 (2.00%) VPN
8 6 (2.00%) Wireshark
9 5 (1.67%) SSH
10 4 (1.33%) iSCSI
11 3 (1.00%) FTP
12 2 (0.67%) BIG-IP
12 2 (0.67%) DHCP
12 2 (0.67%) HTTP
12 2 (0.67%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 17 (5.67%) MongoDB
2 16 (5.33%) Oracle Database
3 13 (4.33%) NoSQL
3 13 (4.33%) PostgreSQL
4 12 (4.00%) SQL Server
5 9 (3.00%) DataStage
5 9 (3.00%) Relational Database
6 7 (2.33%) Elasticsearch
6 7 (2.33%) RDBMS
7 6 (2.00%) Db2
8 4 (1.33%) Oracle Database 12c
8 4 (1.33%) Oracle Exadata
9 3 (1.00%) Amazon Aurora
9 3 (1.00%) BusinessObjects
9 3 (1.00%) DynamoDB
9 3 (1.00%) Sybase ASE
10 2 (0.67%) Amazon RDS
10 2 (0.67%) Azure SQL Database
10 2 (0.67%) Oracle Reports
10 2 (0.67%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 36 (12.00%) Jenkins
2 35 (11.67%) JIRA
3 27 (9.00%) GitLab
4 22 (7.33%) Git
5 10 (3.33%) Mockito
6 7 (2.33%) Jaeger
7 6 (2.00%) TeamCity
8 4 (1.33%) Sonatype Nexus
9 3 (1.00%) Bitbucket
9 3 (1.00%) Gradle
9 3 (1.00%) Liquibase
10 2 (0.67%) Burp Suite
10 2 (0.67%) Cucumber
10 2 (0.67%) Gatling
10 2 (0.67%) LoadRunner
10 2 (0.67%) REST Assured
10 2 (0.67%) SonarQube
11 1 (0.33%) CircleCI
11 1 (0.33%) JUnit
11 1 (0.33%) Maven
General
1 81 (27.00%) Social Skills
2 70 (23.33%) Finance
3 33 (11.00%) Banking
4 28 (9.33%) Public Sector
5 23 (7.67%) Analytical Skills
6 17 (5.67%) Documentation Skills
7 9 (3.00%) Influencing Skills
8 8 (2.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 7 (2.33%) Financial Institution
10 6 (2.00%) Legal
11 5 (1.67%) Aviation
11 5 (1.67%) Fire and Rescue
11 5 (1.67%) Police
12 3 (1.00%) Investment Banking
12 3 (1.00%) Military
12 3 (1.00%) Organisational Skills
13 2 (0.67%) Advertising
13 2 (0.67%) Law
13 2 (0.67%) Telecoms
14 1 (0.33%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 41 (13.67%) Senior
2 29 (9.67%) Developer
3 24 (8.00%) DevOps Engineer
4 21 (7.00%) Linux Engineer
5 20 (6.67%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 20 (6.67%) Security Engineer
6 19 (6.33%) Java Developer
7 17 (5.67%) Consultant
7 17 (5.67%) Software Engineer
8 14 (4.67%) Lead
9 13 (4.33%) Analyst
10 12 (4.00%) Data Centre Engineer
10 12 (4.00%) DBA
10 12 (4.00%) Platform Engineer
11 11 (3.67%) Security Consultant
12 10 (3.33%) Cloud Engineer
13 9 (3.00%) Designer
13 9 (3.00%) Infrastructure Designer
14 8 (2.67%) Oracle DBA
14 8 (2.67%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 20 (6.67%) Middleware
2 18 (6.00%) Kafka
3 12 (4.00%) YAML
4 11 (3.67%) LDAP
5 10 (3.33%) JAX-RS
5 10 (3.33%) OpenTelemetry
5 10 (3.33%) Redfish
5 10 (3.33%) REST
6 9 (3.00%) .NET
6 9 (3.00%) ActiveMQ
6 9 (3.00%) Spring Boot
7 8 (2.67%) Elastic Stack
8 6 (2.00%) .NET Core
8 6 (2.00%) RabbitMQ
9 4 (1.33%) Flash
9 4 (1.33%) Oracle GoldenGate
9 4 (1.33%) SOAP
10 3 (1.00%) OpenID
10 3 (1.00%) Spring
10 3 (1.00%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 40 (13.33%) Data Centre
2 31 (10.33%) Cloud Native
3 28 (9.33%) Linux Command Line
4 25 (8.33%) Security Posture
5 17 (5.67%) Management Information System
6 15 (5.00%) Mainframe
7 14 (4.67%) Distributed Systems
7 14 (4.67%) Replication
8 13 (4.33%) Data Protection Act
9 12 (4.00%) Hybrid Cloud
10 10 (3.33%) Cloud Security Posture
10 10 (3.33%) Legacy Systems
10 10 (3.33%) PKI
11 9 (3.00%) BYOD
11 9 (3.00%) VSAM
12 8 (2.67%) Public Cloud
13 7 (2.33%) Enterprise Storage
13 7 (2.33%) Onboarding
14 5 (1.67%) FlexPod
14 5 (1.67%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 118 (39.33%) Windows
2 74 (24.67%) Unix
3 72 (24.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 29 (9.67%) AIX
4 29 (9.67%) Windows Server
5 17 (5.67%) Solaris
6 16 (5.33%) Ubuntu
7 11 (3.67%) Mac OS X
7 11 (3.67%) VMS
8 10 (3.33%) CentOS
9 7 (2.33%) CoreOS
9 7 (2.33%) Oracle Linux
10 5 (1.67%) Data ONTAP
10 5 (1.67%) zOS
11 4 (1.33%) HPUX
11 4 (1.33%) SUSE
12 3 (1.00%) Mac OS
13 1 (0.33%) Embedded Linux
13 1 (0.33%) OpenVMS
13 1 (0.33%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 96 (32.00%) CI/CD
2 92 (30.67%) DevOps
3 58 (19.33%) Agile
4 47 (15.67%) Problem-Solving
5 45 (15.00%) Infrastructure as Code
6 44 (14.67%) Observability
7 41 (13.67%) Migration
8 37 (12.33%) Continuous Improvement
8 37 (12.33%) Roadmaps
8 37 (12.33%) Test Automation
9 33 (11.00%) Microservices
10 31 (10.33%) Containerisation
10 31 (10.33%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 30 (10.00%) Performance Tuning
12 29 (9.67%) Change Management
12 29 (9.67%) Cloud Security
12 29 (9.67%) Infrastructure Automation
13 28 (9.33%) ITIL
13 28 (9.33%) Vulnerability Management
14 26 (8.67%) SIEM
Programming Languages
1 119 (39.67%) Python
2 63 (21.00%) Bash
3 59 (19.67%) PowerShell
4 53 (17.67%) Java
5 52 (17.33%) SQL
6 18 (6.00%) Shell Script
7 13 (4.33%) JavaScript
7 13 (4.33%) Rust
8 12 (4.00%) Go
9 11 (3.67%) Perl
10 9 (3.00%) C#
10 9 (3.00%) COBOL
10 9 (3.00%) Ruby
11 8 (2.67%) TypeScript
12 5 (1.67%) JCL
13 4 (1.33%) Kotlin
14 2 (0.67%) C
14 2 (0.67%) C++
14 2 (0.67%) REXX
14 2 (0.67%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 47 (15.67%) Security Cleared
2 36 (12.00%) Degree
3 34 (11.33%) CISSP
4 32 (10.67%) SC Cleared
5 18 (6.00%) AWS Certification
6 16 (5.33%) CompTIA Security+
7 15 (5.00%) RHCE
8 13 (4.33%) Azure Certification
9 8 (2.67%) CISM
10 7 (2.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 7 (2.33%) DV Cleared
10 7 (2.33%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (2.00%) Computer Science Degree
11 6 (2.00%) OCP
11 6 (2.00%) Oracle Certification
12 5 (1.67%) BPSS Clearance
12 5 (1.67%) FFIEC
12 5 (1.67%) MCSA
12 5 (1.67%) MCSE
13 3 (1.00%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (3.67%) GDPR
2 9 (3.00%) HIPAA
2 9 (3.00%) NIST
3 8 (2.67%) PCI DSS
4 6 (2.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 6 (2.00%) SLA
5 5 (1.67%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 5 (1.67%) GLBA
6 4 (1.33%) GRC
7 3 (1.00%) QA
7 3 (1.00%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.33%) Cyber Essentials
8 1 (0.33%) GxP
8 1 (0.33%) SOC 2
System Software
1 65 (21.67%) Docker
2 46 (15.33%) VMware Infrastructure
3 44 (14.67%) Virtual Machines
4 19 (6.33%) Active Directory
4 19 (6.33%) KVM
4 19 (6.33%) NFS
4 19 (6.33%) vSphere
5 17 (5.67%) Hyper-V
6 15 (5.00%) Firmware
7 12 (4.00%) VMware ESXi
8 7 (2.33%) VMware NSX
9 5 (1.67%) Oracle RAC
9 5 (1.67%) Time Sharing Option
10 4 (1.33%) GPFS
11 3 (1.00%) Veritas Volume Manager
12 2 (0.67%) SRDF
13 1 (0.33%) Ceph
13 1 (0.33%) Embedded Firmware
13 1 (0.33%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 1 (0.33%) zsh
Systems Management
1 90 (30.00%) Ansible
2 76 (25.33%) Kubernetes
3 74 (24.67%) Terraform
4 26 (8.67%) Grafana
5 24 (8.00%) Prometheus
6 17 (5.67%) Progress Chef
7 12 (4.00%) Puppet
8 11 (3.67%) vCenter Server
9 10 (3.33%) Dell DRAC
9 10 (3.33%) Oracle RMAN
10 8 (2.67%) Packer
10 8 (2.67%) Tivoli Storage Manager
11 7 (2.33%) PowerCLI
11 7 (2.33%) vRealize
12 6 (2.00%) Data Guard
12 6 (2.00%) IBM BigFix
12 6 (2.00%) Kiali
12 6 (2.00%) Nessus
13 5 (1.67%) CASB
13 5 (1.67%) SnapMirror
Vendors
1 55 (18.33%) VMware
2 51 (17.00%) Red Hat
3 35 (11.67%) Oracle
4 30 (10.00%) IBM
5 29 (9.67%) Splunk
6 27 (9.00%) Microsoft
7 23 (7.67%) Google
8 11 (3.67%) Cisco
8 11 (3.67%) ServiceNow
9 10 (3.33%) CyberArk
10 9 (3.00%) Broadcom
10 9 (3.00%) Dell
11 8 (2.67%) Dynatrace
11 8 (2.67%) HP
12 7 (2.33%) Tenable
13 6 (2.00%) NetApp
13 6 (2.00%) Remedy
14 5 (1.67%) Brocade
14 5 (1.67%) Thales
14 5 (1.67%) Varonis