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

6 months to
17 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 43 28 38
Rank change year-on-year -15 +10 -14
Contract jobs citing Linux 284 197 201
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 4.72% 6.13% 4.24%
As % of the Operating Systems category 39.17% 38.10% 26.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 196 122 139
10th Percentile £355 £350 £350
25th Percentile £400 £393 £412
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £550 £500
Median % change year-on-year -10.55% +10.00% -8.05%
75th Percentile £550 £626 £583
90th Percentile £650 £750 £640
England median daily rate £518 £550 £548
% change year-on-year -5.91% +0.46% -8.75%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 3 10
10th Percentile - £46.44 -
25th Percentile £41.94 £55.35 £21.25
Median hourly rate £45.97 £75.40 £48.00
Median % change year-on-year -39.03% +57.07% +20.60%
75th Percentile £68.20 £83.18 -
90th Percentile £74.26 £84.74 £63.88
England median hourly rate £63.14 £65.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year -2.87% +8.33% -7.69%

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 725 517 745
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 12.06% 16.08% 15.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 499 340 505
10th Percentile £141 £163 £163
25th Percentile £201 £213 £275
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £400 £400 £423
Median % change year-on-year - -5.33% -11.05%
75th Percentile £511 £556 £531
90th Percentile £613 £638 £650
England median daily rate £450 £475 £450
% change year-on-year -5.26% +5.56% -12.62%
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 17 79
10th Percentile £17.40 £16.25 -
25th Percentile £21.43 £17.25 £10.95
Median hourly rate £41.94 £18.21 £16.00
Median % change year-on-year +130.38% +13.78% -41.82%
75th Percentile £70.00 £19.75 £19.63
90th Percentile £178.75 £57.14 £25.25
England median hourly rate £32.57 £24.66 £21.00
% change year-on-year +32.06% +17.43% -27.34%

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 17 April 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 17 April 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 17 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
Yorkshire -20 148 £470 -14.55% 40
North West -8 125 £503 -1.85% 38
North East -18 13 £550 +4.76% 24
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 11 (3.87%) Confluence
2 9 (3.17%) CICS
3 8 (2.82%) TPMS
4 6 (2.11%) Microsoft Exchange
4 6 (2.11%) SharePoint
5 4 (1.41%) Apache
6 3 (1.06%) nginx
7 1 (0.35%) JBoss
7 1 (0.35%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.35%) SharePoint Server
7 1 (0.35%) Tomcat
Applications
1 11 (3.87%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.35%) Cloudability
1 1 (0.35%) Odoo
1 1 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 76 (26.76%) AWS
2 45 (15.85%) Azure
3 44 (15.49%) OpenShift
4 32 (11.27%) GCP
5 20 (7.04%) GitHub
6 12 (4.23%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 11 (3.87%) Serverless
8 10 (3.52%) Amazon EC2
8 10 (3.52%) Entra ID
9 9 (3.17%) Amazon S3
9 9 (3.17%) AWS Lambda
10 8 (2.82%) AWS CloudFormation
10 8 (2.82%) Google Workspace
11 7 (2.46%) Amazon ECS
11 7 (2.46%) Amazon EKS
11 7 (2.46%) GitHub Actions
12 6 (2.11%) IaaS
13 5 (1.76%) Amazon EventBridge
13 5 (1.76%) Google Kubernetes Engine
13 5 (1.76%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 68 (23.94%) Firewall
2 22 (7.75%) DNS
3 21 (7.39%) SAN
4 20 (7.04%) Network Security
5 15 (5.28%) TCP/IP
6 13 (4.58%) SSL
7 9 (3.17%) VLAN
7 9 (3.17%) VSAN
8 8 (2.82%) SNMP
8 8 (2.82%) SSH
9 7 (2.46%) BGP
9 7 (2.46%) NAS
9 7 (2.46%) VPN
10 6 (2.11%) Software-Defined Networking
10 6 (2.11%) WebEx
11 5 (1.76%) HTTP
12 4 (1.41%) DHCP
12 4 (1.41%) iSCSI
13 2 (0.70%) Reverse Proxy
13 2 (0.70%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (7.39%) MongoDB
2 20 (7.04%) PostgreSQL
3 12 (4.23%) NoSQL
3 12 (4.23%) SQL Server
4 9 (3.17%) DataStage
4 9 (3.17%) Oracle Database
5 8 (2.82%) Relational Database
6 7 (2.46%) Elasticsearch
7 6 (2.11%) DB2
8 5 (1.76%) DynamoDB
9 4 (1.41%) Oracle Database 12c
10 3 (1.06%) Amazon RDS
10 3 (1.06%) RDBMS
11 2 (0.70%) Amazon Aurora
11 2 (0.70%) Apache Cassandra
12 1 (0.35%) Data Lake
12 1 (0.35%) DocumentDB
12 1 (0.35%) Oracle Exadata
12 1 (0.35%) SAP BW
12 1 (0.35%) Sybase ASE
Development Applications
1 31 (10.92%) Jenkins
2 25 (8.80%) GitLab
3 24 (8.45%) JIRA
4 15 (5.28%) Git
5 12 (4.23%) Mockito
6 8 (2.82%) Jaeger
7 4 (1.41%) Liquibase
8 3 (1.06%) CircleCI
9 2 (0.70%) Octopus Deploy
9 2 (0.70%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (0.70%) TeamCity
10 1 (0.35%) Artifactory
10 1 (0.35%) Bitbucket
10 1 (0.35%) Gradle
10 1 (0.35%) Hudson
10 1 (0.35%) JUnit
10 1 (0.35%) Maven
General
1 85 (29.93%) Social Skills
2 68 (23.94%) Finance
3 29 (10.21%) Public Sector
4 26 (9.15%) Banking
5 23 (8.10%) Analytical Skills
6 21 (7.39%) Documentation Skills
7 10 (3.52%) Financial Institution
7 10 (3.52%) Influencing Skills
7 10 (3.52%) Legal
8 6 (2.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 3 (1.06%) Law
10 2 (0.70%) Advertising
10 2 (0.70%) Aviation
10 2 (0.70%) Fire and Rescue
10 2 (0.70%) Investment Banking
10 2 (0.70%) Police
11 1 (0.35%) Manufacturing
11 1 (0.35%) Military
11 1 (0.35%) Presentation Skills
11 1 (0.35%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 38 (13.38%) Senior
2 28 (9.86%) Developer
3 25 (8.80%) Platform Engineer
4 21 (7.39%) DevOps Engineer
5 19 (6.69%) Software Engineer
6 18 (6.34%) Java Developer
7 16 (5.63%) Security Engineer
8 15 (5.28%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 14 (4.93%) Lead
9 14 (4.93%) Linux Engineer
10 10 (3.52%) Administrator
10 10 (3.52%) AWS Engineer
11 9 (3.17%) Analyst
11 9 (3.17%) Data Centre Engineer
11 9 (3.17%) Designer
11 9 (3.17%) Infrastructure Designer
11 9 (3.17%) IT Engineer
12 8 (2.82%) Cryptography Engineer
12 8 (2.82%) Full-Stack Engineer
12 8 (2.82%) IT Support Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (8.10%) Kafka
2 18 (6.34%) Middleware
3 13 (4.58%) Elastic Stack
4 12 (4.23%) JAX-RS
5 11 (3.87%) ActiveMQ
5 11 (3.87%) OpenTelemetry
6 10 (3.52%) LDAP
6 10 (3.52%) REST
7 9 (3.17%) Spring Boot
7 9 (3.17%) YAML
8 7 (2.46%) .NET
8 7 (2.46%) Redfish
9 6 (2.11%) XMPP
10 4 (1.41%) RESTful
11 3 (1.06%) Lambda Expressions
11 3 (1.06%) WebSockets
11 3 (1.06%) XML
12 2 (0.70%) Hugging Face
12 2 (0.70%) LangChain
12 2 (0.70%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 36 (12.68%) Data Centre
2 23 (8.10%) Cloud Native
3 18 (6.34%) Product Ownership
4 17 (5.99%) Security Posture
5 16 (5.63%) Distributed Systems
6 15 (5.28%) Hybrid Cloud
7 14 (4.93%) Linux Command Line
8 13 (4.58%) Management Information System
9 12 (4.23%) Mainframe
10 11 (3.87%) Data Protection Act
11 10 (3.52%) Cloud Security Posture
12 9 (3.17%) BYOD
12 9 (3.17%) VSAM
13 7 (2.46%) Replication
14 6 (2.11%) Legacy Systems
14 6 (2.11%) Onboarding
14 6 (2.11%) Public Cloud
15 5 (1.76%) FlexPod
16 4 (1.41%) EMC VMAX
16 4 (1.41%) Enterprise Storage
Operating Systems
1 117 (41.20%) Windows
2 69 (24.30%) Unix
3 63 (22.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 35 (12.32%) Windows Server
5 20 (7.04%) AIX
6 14 (4.93%) Solaris
6 14 (4.93%) Ubuntu
7 12 (4.23%) Mac OS X
8 10 (3.52%) CentOS
8 10 (3.52%) VMS
9 6 (2.11%) Oracle Linux
10 5 (1.76%) CoreOS
10 5 (1.76%) Data ONTAP
11 3 (1.06%) Amazon Linux
11 3 (1.06%) HPUX
11 3 (1.06%) Mac OS
11 3 (1.06%) SUSE
11 3 (1.06%) zOS
12 1 (0.35%) Embedded Linux
12 1 (0.35%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 85 (29.93%) DevOps
2 84 (29.58%) CI/CD
3 71 (25.00%) Problem-Solving
4 48 (16.90%) Infrastructure as Code
5 46 (16.20%) Observability
6 44 (15.49%) Containerisation
7 42 (14.79%) Agile
8 39 (13.73%) Cybersecurity
9 37 (13.03%) Microservices
10 36 (12.68%) Migration
11 35 (12.32%) Roadmaps
12 34 (11.97%) Continuous Improvement
12 34 (11.97%) Platform Engineering
13 31 (10.92%) Test Automation
14 28 (9.86%) Infrastructure Engineering
15 27 (9.51%) Root Cause Analysis
16 26 (9.15%) Infrastructure Automation
17 25 (8.80%) Data Protection
18 23 (8.10%) Software Engineering
19 22 (7.75%) Disaster Recovery
Programming Languages
1 114 (40.14%) Python
2 61 (21.48%) Bash
3 54 (19.01%) PowerShell
4 45 (15.85%) Java
5 43 (15.14%) SQL
6 19 (6.69%) Perl
7 15 (5.28%) Rust
8 13 (4.58%) Ruby
8 13 (4.58%) Shell Script
9 11 (3.87%) Go
10 10 (3.52%) JavaScript
11 9 (3.17%) COBOL
12 8 (2.82%) TypeScript
13 7 (2.46%) C#
13 7 (2.46%) PHP
14 3 (1.06%) Delphi
14 3 (1.06%) JCL
15 2 (0.70%) Bicep
15 2 (0.70%) C
16 1 (0.35%) C++
Qualifications
1 60 (21.13%) Security Cleared
2 45 (15.85%) SC Cleared
3 27 (9.51%) Degree
4 21 (7.39%) CISSP
5 13 (4.58%) RHCE
6 12 (4.23%) AWS Certification
6 12 (4.23%) CompTIA Security+
7 10 (3.52%) CCNA
7 10 (3.52%) CCNP
7 10 (3.52%) Cisco Certification
8 9 (3.17%) CCDP
9 8 (2.82%) BPSS Clearance
9 8 (2.82%) FFIEC
10 7 (2.46%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 6 (2.11%) DV Cleared
11 6 (2.11%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (2.11%) OCP
11 6 (2.11%) Oracle Certification
12 5 (1.76%) CISM
12 5 (1.76%) MCSE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (5.28%) GDPR
2 11 (3.87%) NIST
3 9 (3.17%) PCI DSS
4 8 (2.82%) GLBA
4 8 (2.82%) HIPAA
5 7 (2.46%) SLA
6 5 (1.76%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 4 (1.41%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (1.06%) GRC
8 3 (1.06%) QA
8 3 (1.06%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 1 (0.35%) Cyber Essentials
9 1 (0.35%) GxP
System Software
1 59 (20.77%) Docker
2 43 (15.14%) VMware Infrastructure
3 33 (11.62%) Virtual Machines
4 27 (9.51%) Active Directory
5 18 (6.34%) vSphere
6 16 (5.63%) Hyper-V
6 16 (5.63%) KVM
7 12 (4.23%) Firmware
7 12 (4.23%) VMware ESXi
8 11 (3.87%) NFS
9 8 (2.82%) VMware NSX
10 3 (1.06%) Time Sharing Option
11 2 (0.70%) SRDF
12 1 (0.35%) Ceph
12 1 (0.35%) Embedded Firmware
12 1 (0.35%) GPFS
12 1 (0.35%) Oracle RAC
12 1 (0.35%) QEMU
12 1 (0.35%) Veritas Volume Manager
12 1 (0.35%) zsh
Systems Management
1 82 (28.87%) Ansible
2 79 (27.82%) Kubernetes
3 75 (26.41%) Terraform
4 35 (12.32%) Grafana
5 26 (9.15%) Prometheus
6 12 (4.23%) Puppet
6 12 (4.23%) vCenter Server
7 8 (2.82%) Kiali
7 8 (2.82%) Progress Chef
8 7 (2.46%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 7 (2.46%) Dell DRAC
8 7 (2.46%) Packer
8 7 (2.46%) PowerCLI
9 6 (2.11%) IBM BigFix
9 6 (2.11%) Nessus
10 5 (1.76%) CASB
10 5 (1.76%) Oracle RMAN
10 5 (1.76%) SnapMirror
10 5 (1.76%) vRealize
11 4 (1.41%) Tivoli Storage Manager
Vendors
1 58 (20.42%) VMware
2 47 (16.55%) Red Hat
3 36 (12.68%) Microsoft
3 36 (12.68%) Splunk
4 23 (8.10%) Oracle
5 21 (7.39%) IBM
6 20 (7.04%) Google
7 13 (4.58%) Cisco
8 11 (3.87%) CyberArk
9 10 (3.52%) Citrix
9 10 (3.52%) ServiceNow
10 8 (2.82%) Dell
10 8 (2.82%) Thales
11 7 (2.46%) Broadcom
11 7 (2.46%) HP
11 7 (2.46%) NetApp
12 6 (2.11%) Remedy
12 6 (2.11%) Tenable
13 5 (1.76%) Varonis
14 3 (1.06%) AppDynamics