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

6 months to
27 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 43 29 36
Rank change year-on-year -14 +7 -8
Contract jobs citing Linux 289 206 202
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 4.71% 6.31% 4.22%
As % of the Operating Systems category 39.48% 38.15% 27.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 193 124 142
10th Percentile £353 £350 £350
25th Percentile £400 £393 £412
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £550 £478
Median % change year-on-year -13.64% +15.18% -9.05%
75th Percentile £538 £625 £582
90th Percentile £650 £750 £636
England median daily rate £518 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -5.91% - -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 3 11
10th Percentile £28.94 £46.44 -
25th Percentile - £55.35 £21.25
Median hourly rate £41.94 £75.40 £48.00
Median % change year-on-year -44.37% +57.07% +21.21%
75th Percentile £47.99 £83.18 £55.88
90th Percentile £62.13 £84.74 £65.00
England median hourly rate £63.14 £65.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year -2.87% +4.00% -3.85%

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 732 540 725
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 11.94% 16.55% 15.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 503 346 492
10th Percentile £143 £161 £165
25th Percentile £203 £210 £275
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £400 £400 £425
Median % change year-on-year - -5.88% -10.53%
75th Percentile £500 £550 £535
90th Percentile £610 £638 £650
England median daily rate £450 £475 £463
% change year-on-year -5.26% +2.70% -10.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 30 18 80
10th Percentile £16.15 £15.28 -
25th Percentile £22.29 £16.69 £10.95
Median hourly rate £41.94 £18.10 £16.00
Median % change year-on-year +131.68% +13.14% -43.06%
75th Percentile £70.00 £19.69 £19.44
90th Percentile £178.75 £53.23 £27.53
England median hourly rate £42.71 £24.66 £22.00
% change year-on-year +73.18% +12.09% -37.24%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 -21 159 £463 -15.91% 27
North West -14 120 £485 -4.88% 32
North East -21 10 £413 -21.43% 19
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 14 (4.84%) Confluence
2 9 (3.11%) CICS
3 8 (2.77%) TPMS
4 5 (1.73%) Apache
5 3 (1.04%) nginx
6 1 (0.35%) Apache Airflow
6 1 (0.35%) CMS
6 1 (0.35%) JBoss
6 1 (0.35%) OpenStack
6 1 (0.35%) Tomcat
Applications
1 10 (3.46%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 1 (0.35%) Cloudability
1 1 (0.35%) Odoo
1 1 (0.35%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 83 (28.72%) AWS
2 51 (17.65%) Azure
3 46 (15.92%) OpenShift
4 35 (12.11%) GCP
5 23 (7.96%) GitHub
6 13 (4.50%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 12 (4.15%) Serverless
8 11 (3.81%) AWS Lambda
9 10 (3.46%) Amazon EC2
9 10 (3.46%) Amazon S3
10 9 (3.11%) Amazon ECS
11 8 (2.77%) Amazon EKS
11 8 (2.77%) AWS CloudFormation
11 8 (2.77%) GitHub Actions
12 7 (2.42%) Google Workspace
13 6 (2.08%) Amazon EventBridge
13 6 (2.08%) IaaS
14 5 (1.73%) Amazon SQS
14 5 (1.73%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 5 (1.73%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 62 (21.45%) Firewall
2 24 (8.30%) DNS
3 22 (7.61%) SAN
4 16 (5.54%) Network Security
4 16 (5.54%) TCP/IP
5 14 (4.84%) SSL
6 10 (3.46%) VSAN
7 8 (2.77%) SNMP
7 8 (2.77%) SSH
7 8 (2.77%) VPN
8 7 (2.42%) NAS
9 6 (2.08%) HTTP
10 4 (1.38%) 3GPP
10 4 (1.38%) DHCP
10 4 (1.38%) iSCSI
10 4 (1.38%) RTP
10 4 (1.38%) Wireshark
11 3 (1.04%) VLAN
12 2 (0.69%) Reverse Proxy
13 1 (0.35%) Intrusion Detection
Database & Business Intelligence
1 21 (7.27%) MongoDB
2 20 (6.92%) PostgreSQL
3 14 (4.84%) NoSQL
4 13 (4.50%) SQL Server
5 9 (3.11%) DataStage
5 9 (3.11%) Oracle Database
6 8 (2.77%) Relational Database
7 7 (2.42%) Elasticsearch
8 6 (2.08%) DB2
8 6 (2.08%) DynamoDB
9 4 (1.38%) Amazon RDS
9 4 (1.38%) Oracle Database 12c
10 3 (1.04%) Amazon Aurora
10 3 (1.04%) RDBMS
11 2 (0.69%) Apache Cassandra
12 1 (0.35%) Azure SQL Database
12 1 (0.35%) Data Lake
12 1 (0.35%) InfluxDB
12 1 (0.35%) Power BI
12 1 (0.35%) Sybase ASE
Development Applications
1 33 (11.42%) Jenkins
2 28 (9.69%) JIRA
3 24 (8.30%) GitLab
4 17 (5.88%) Git
5 12 (4.15%) Mockito
6 9 (3.11%) Jaeger
7 4 (1.38%) TeamCity
8 3 (1.04%) Bitbucket
8 3 (1.04%) CircleCI
8 3 (1.04%) Liquibase
9 2 (0.69%) Octopus Deploy
9 2 (0.69%) Sonatype Nexus
10 1 (0.35%) Gradle
10 1 (0.35%) Hudson
10 1 (0.35%) JUnit
10 1 (0.35%) Maven
General
1 87 (30.10%) Social Skills
2 70 (24.22%) Finance
3 30 (10.38%) Public Sector
4 28 (9.69%) Banking
5 21 (7.27%) Documentation Skills
6 18 (6.23%) Analytical Skills
7 10 (3.46%) Influencing Skills
8 9 (3.11%) Financial Institution
9 7 (2.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 4 (1.38%) Aviation
10 4 (1.38%) Fire and Rescue
10 4 (1.38%) Legal
10 4 (1.38%) Police
11 3 (1.04%) Investment Banking
11 3 (1.04%) Law
12 2 (0.69%) Advertising
13 1 (0.35%) Manufacturing
13 1 (0.35%) Military
13 1 (0.35%) Presentation Skills
13 1 (0.35%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 37 (12.80%) Senior
2 31 (10.73%) Developer
3 21 (7.27%) DevOps Engineer
3 21 (7.27%) Java Developer
4 17 (5.88%) Software Engineer
5 16 (5.54%) Infrastructure Engineer
5 16 (5.54%) Lead
5 16 (5.54%) Security Engineer
6 14 (4.84%) Linux Engineer
6 14 (4.84%) Platform Engineer
7 12 (4.15%) Analyst
8 10 (3.46%) AWS Engineer
8 10 (3.46%) Data Centre Engineer
9 9 (3.11%) Administrator
9 9 (3.11%) Designer
9 9 (3.11%) Infrastructure Designer
10 8 (2.77%) Consultant
10 8 (2.77%) IT Engineer
10 8 (2.77%) Senior Developer
10 8 (2.77%) VMware Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 24 (8.30%) Kafka
2 18 (6.23%) Middleware
3 12 (4.15%) Elastic Stack
3 12 (4.15%) JAX-RS
3 12 (4.15%) OpenTelemetry
4 11 (3.81%) ActiveMQ
5 10 (3.46%) .NET
5 10 (3.46%) LDAP
5 10 (3.46%) REST
6 9 (3.11%) Spring Boot
6 9 (3.11%) YAML
7 8 (2.77%) Redfish
8 4 (1.38%) .NET Core
9 3 (1.04%) Flash
9 3 (1.04%) Lambda Expressions
9 3 (1.04%) RESTful
9 3 (1.04%) SOAP
9 3 (1.04%) WebSockets
9 3 (1.04%) XML
10 2 (0.69%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 35 (12.11%) Data Centre
2 23 (7.96%) Cloud Native
3 17 (5.88%) Linux Command Line
3 17 (5.88%) Security Posture
4 16 (5.54%) Distributed Systems
4 16 (5.54%) Hybrid Cloud
5 13 (4.50%) Management Information System
6 12 (4.15%) Data Protection Act
6 12 (4.15%) Mainframe
7 10 (3.46%) Cloud Security Posture
8 9 (3.11%) BYOD
8 9 (3.11%) Legacy Systems
8 9 (3.11%) Replication
8 9 (3.11%) VSAM
9 6 (2.08%) Onboarding
9 6 (2.08%) Product Ownership
10 5 (1.73%) Enterprise Storage
10 5 (1.73%) FlexPod
10 5 (1.73%) Public Cloud
11 4 (1.38%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 111 (38.41%) Windows
2 72 (24.91%) Unix
3 54 (18.69%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 26 (9.00%) Windows Server
5 24 (8.30%) AIX
6 15 (5.19%) Solaris
6 15 (5.19%) Ubuntu
7 12 (4.15%) Mac OS X
7 12 (4.15%) VMS
8 10 (3.46%) CentOS
9 7 (2.42%) CoreOS
9 7 (2.42%) Oracle Linux
10 5 (1.73%) Data ONTAP
11 4 (1.38%) HPUX
11 4 (1.38%) SUSE
12 3 (1.04%) Amazon Linux
12 3 (1.04%) Mac OS
12 3 (1.04%) zOS
13 1 (0.35%) Embedded Linux
13 1 (0.35%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 87 (30.10%) CI/CD
2 86 (29.76%) DevOps
3 62 (21.45%) Problem-Solving
4 49 (16.96%) Infrastructure as Code
5 48 (16.61%) Observability
6 47 (16.26%) Agile
7 40 (13.84%) Microservices
8 38 (13.15%) Migration
9 37 (12.80%) Containerisation
10 36 (12.46%) Roadmaps
11 35 (12.11%) Test Automation
12 32 (11.07%) Cybersecurity
13 30 (10.38%) Continuous Improvement
14 29 (10.03%) Root Cause Analysis
15 26 (9.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 25 (8.65%) Data Protection
16 25 (8.65%) Infrastructure Automation
17 23 (7.96%) Platform Engineering
18 22 (7.61%) Capacity Planning
18 22 (7.61%) Vulnerability Management
Programming Languages
1 108 (37.37%) Python
2 52 (17.99%) Bash
3 50 (17.30%) Java
3 50 (17.30%) SQL
4 43 (14.88%) PowerShell
5 15 (5.19%) Rust
6 14 (4.84%) Shell Script
7 13 (4.50%) Go
7 13 (4.50%) Ruby
8 12 (4.15%) JavaScript
9 10 (3.46%) C#
9 10 (3.46%) Perl
10 9 (3.11%) COBOL
11 8 (2.77%) TypeScript
12 7 (2.42%) PHP
13 4 (1.38%) Kotlin
14 3 (1.04%) Delphi
14 3 (1.04%) JCL
15 2 (0.69%) Bicep
15 2 (0.69%) C
Qualifications
1 49 (16.96%) Security Cleared
2 34 (11.76%) SC Cleared
3 25 (8.65%) Degree
4 22 (7.61%) CISSP
5 15 (5.19%) RHCE
6 13 (4.50%) CompTIA Security+
7 11 (3.81%) AWS Certification
8 8 (2.77%) BPSS Clearance
8 8 (2.77%) FFIEC
9 7 (2.42%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 6 (2.08%) DV Cleared
10 6 (2.08%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (2.08%) OCP
10 6 (2.08%) Oracle Certification
11 5 (1.73%) Azure Certification
11 5 (1.73%) CISM
11 5 (1.73%) Computer Science Degree
11 5 (1.73%) MCSA
11 5 (1.73%) MCSE
12 2 (0.69%) VCAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (5.19%) GDPR
2 11 (3.81%) NIST
3 10 (3.46%) PCI DSS
4 9 (3.11%) HIPAA
5 8 (2.77%) GLBA
6 7 (2.42%) SLA
7 5 (1.73%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 5 (1.73%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (1.38%) GRC
9 3 (1.04%) QA
9 3 (1.04%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 1 (0.35%) Cyber Essentials
10 1 (0.35%) GxP
10 1 (0.35%) SOC 2
System Software
1 60 (20.76%) Docker
2 46 (15.92%) VMware Infrastructure
3 36 (12.46%) Virtual Machines
4 19 (6.57%) Active Directory
4 19 (6.57%) vSphere
5 18 (6.23%) Hyper-V
5 18 (6.23%) KVM
6 14 (4.84%) NFS
7 13 (4.50%) Firmware
7 13 (4.50%) VMware ESXi
8 8 (2.77%) VMware NSX
9 3 (1.04%) GPFS
9 3 (1.04%) Time Sharing Option
10 2 (0.69%) Ceph
10 2 (0.69%) SRDF
11 1 (0.35%) Oracle RAC
11 1 (0.35%) QEMU
11 1 (0.35%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 1 (0.35%) Veritas Volume Manager
11 1 (0.35%) zsh
Systems Management
1 85 (29.41%) Ansible
2 78 (26.99%) Kubernetes
3 77 (26.64%) Terraform
4 37 (12.80%) Grafana
5 28 (9.69%) Prometheus
6 12 (4.15%) Puppet
6 12 (4.15%) vCenter Server
7 8 (2.77%) Dell DRAC
7 8 (2.77%) Kiali
7 8 (2.77%) Packer
7 8 (2.77%) Progress Chef
8 7 (2.42%) PowerCLI
9 6 (2.08%) IBM BigFix
9 6 (2.08%) Nessus
9 6 (2.08%) vRealize
10 5 (1.73%) CASB
10 5 (1.73%) Oracle RMAN
10 5 (1.73%) Single Sign-On
10 5 (1.73%) SnapMirror
11 4 (1.38%) Argo
Vendors
1 56 (19.38%) VMware
2 38 (13.15%) Red Hat
3 37 (12.80%) Splunk
4 32 (11.07%) Microsoft
5 26 (9.00%) Oracle
6 23 (7.96%) IBM
7 19 (6.57%) Google
8 12 (4.15%) ServiceNow
9 11 (3.81%) CyberArk
10 9 (3.11%) Cisco
11 8 (2.77%) Dell
11 8 (2.77%) HP
11 8 (2.77%) Thales
12 7 (2.42%) Broadcom
12 7 (2.42%) NetApp
13 6 (2.08%) Remedy
13 6 (2.08%) Tenable
14 5 (1.73%) Varonis
15 4 (1.38%) Dynatrace
16 3 (1.04%) AppDynamics