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 28 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 42 38 42
Rank change year-on-year -4 +4 -22
Contract jobs citing Linux 295 176 196
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 5.46% 5.31% 4.03%
As % of the Operating Systems category 38.56% 32.35% 27.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 213 102 127
10th Percentile £351 £351 £316
25th Percentile £400 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £495
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% +11.11% -10.00%
75th Percentile £550 £625 £574
90th Percentile £687 £750 £623
England median daily rate £513 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.82% - -6.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 5 11
10th Percentile - £43.10 -
25th Percentile - £47.00 £21.25
Median hourly rate £41.94 £63.79 £48.00
Median % change year-on-year -34.25% +32.89% +7.43%
75th Percentile £66.18 £80.59 £55.88
90th Percentile £74.26 £83.70 £63.75
England median hourly rate £63.14 £66.50 £60.00
% change year-on-year -5.06% +10.83% -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 765 544 719
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 14.16% 16.42% 14.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 537 329 482
10th Percentile £137 £169 £160
25th Percentile £185 £243 £231
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £385 £400 £400
Median % change year-on-year -3.75% - -15.79%
75th Percentile £500 £550 £500
90th Percentile £618 £628 £586
England median daily rate £450 £475 £450
% change year-on-year -5.26% +5.56% -12.62%
Number of hourly rates quoted 33 20 57
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.12 £14.90
25th Percentile £19.00 £16.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £22.81 £20.42 £17.72
Median % change year-on-year +11.70% +15.24% -38.90%
75th Percentile £41.94 £32.13 £25.25
90th Percentile £68.70 £69.42 £63.75
England median hourly rate £22.81 £44.50 £25.00
% change year-on-year -48.74% +78.00% -9.09%

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 28 February 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 28 February 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 28 February 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 -11 162 £500 -13.04% 31
North West -11 124 £492 -1.60% 57
North East -17 12 £550 +12.82% 22
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 (3.73%) Apache
2 10 (3.39%) TPMS
3 8 (2.71%) CICS
4 7 (2.37%) Confluence
4 7 (2.37%) JBoss
5 6 (2.03%) Microsoft Exchange
5 6 (2.03%) SharePoint
6 5 (1.69%) IIS
6 5 (1.69%) iPlanet
6 5 (1.69%) OpenStack
6 5 (1.69%) WebSphere
6 5 (1.69%) WebSphere Application Server
7 3 (1.02%) nginx
8 1 (0.34%) SharePoint Server
8 1 (0.34%) Tomcat
Applications
1 11 (3.73%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.34%) Cloudability
Cloud Services
1 101 (34.24%) AWS
2 58 (19.66%) GCP
3 47 (15.93%) Azure
4 43 (14.58%) OpenShift
5 32 (10.85%) Serverless
6 26 (8.81%) GitHub
7 14 (4.75%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 13 (4.41%) Amazon EC2
9 12 (4.07%) AWS CloudFormation
9 12 (4.07%) GitHub Actions
10 11 (3.73%) Google Workspace
11 10 (3.39%) Entra ID
12 9 (3.05%) Amazon S3
12 9 (3.05%) AWS KMS
12 9 (3.05%) AWS Lambda
13 7 (2.37%) Amazon ECS
13 7 (2.37%) Amazon EKS
14 6 (2.03%) SaaS
15 5 (1.69%) IaaS
15 5 (1.69%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 84 (28.47%) Firewall
2 21 (7.12%) Network Security
3 19 (6.44%) DNS
4 18 (6.10%) TCP/IP
5 17 (5.76%) SSL
6 14 (4.75%) SNMP
7 11 (3.73%) VPN
8 10 (3.39%) SAN
8 10 (3.39%) SSH
9 9 (3.05%) VLAN
10 7 (2.37%) BGP
11 6 (2.03%) Kerberos
11 6 (2.03%) Software-Defined Networking
11 6 (2.03%) WebEx
12 4 (1.36%) DHCP
12 4 (1.36%) HTTP
12 4 (1.36%) NAS
13 2 (0.68%) iSCSI
13 2 (0.68%) Reverse Proxy
13 2 (0.68%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 30 (10.17%) PostgreSQL
2 29 (9.83%) NoSQL
3 20 (6.78%) MongoDB
4 13 (4.41%) SQL Server
5 10 (3.39%) Oracle Database
6 8 (2.71%) DataStage
7 7 (2.37%) Elasticsearch
7 7 (2.37%) Relational Database
8 6 (2.03%) DB2
9 5 (1.69%) Amazon RDS
10 3 (1.02%) Apache Cassandra
10 3 (1.02%) DynamoDB
10 3 (1.02%) MySQL
11 1 (0.34%) Data Lake
11 1 (0.34%) DocumentDB
11 1 (0.34%) Oracle Reports
11 1 (0.34%) RDBMS
11 1 (0.34%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 68 (23.05%) Jenkins
2 51 (17.29%) GitLab
3 22 (7.46%) Git
4 19 (6.44%) JIRA
5 17 (5.76%) Liquibase
6 13 (4.41%) Mockito
7 10 (3.39%) Sonatype Nexus
8 8 (2.71%) Jaeger
9 6 (2.03%) CircleCI
10 5 (1.69%) Bitbucket Server
10 5 (1.69%) CA Release Automation
11 4 (1.36%) Bitbucket
12 2 (0.68%) Gradle
12 2 (0.68%) Maven
12 2 (0.68%) Octopus Deploy
13 1 (0.34%) Artifactory
13 1 (0.34%) JUnit
General
1 95 (32.20%) Social Skills
2 84 (28.47%) Finance
3 44 (14.92%) Banking
4 34 (11.53%) Public Sector
5 27 (9.15%) Financial Institution
6 22 (7.46%) Analytical Skills
6 22 (7.46%) Documentation Skills
7 9 (3.05%) Influencing Skills
8 8 (2.71%) Legal
9 6 (2.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 3 (1.02%) Law
11 2 (0.68%) Games
11 2 (0.68%) Organisational Skills
11 2 (0.68%) Telecoms
12 1 (0.34%) Advertising
12 1 (0.34%) Investment Banking
12 1 (0.34%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.34%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 48 (16.27%) Senior
2 35 (11.86%) Developer
3 33 (11.19%) DevOps Engineer
4 29 (9.83%) Software Engineer
5 28 (9.49%) Platform Engineer
6 25 (8.47%) Cloud Engineer
7 24 (8.14%) Java Developer
8 19 (6.44%) AWS Engineer
9 18 (6.10%) GCP Engineer
9 18 (6.10%) Lead
10 17 (5.76%) Infrastructure Engineer
11 14 (4.75%) Security Engineer
12 13 (4.41%) Senior DevOps
12 13 (4.41%) Senior DevOps Engineer
13 12 (4.07%) Administrator
14 11 (3.73%) IT Engineer
14 11 (3.73%) IT Support
14 11 (3.73%) IT Support Engineer
14 11 (3.73%) Senior Software Engineer
14 11 (3.73%) Support Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 37 (12.54%) Elastic Stack
2 33 (11.19%) REST
3 25 (8.47%) Kafka
4 24 (8.14%) RESTful
5 17 (5.76%) Middleware
6 13 (4.41%) JAX-RS
7 12 (4.07%) ActiveMQ
7 12 (4.07%) OpenTelemetry
8 11 (3.73%) LDAP
9 10 (3.39%) Spring Boot
10 9 (3.05%) YAML
11 6 (2.03%) OAuth
11 6 (2.03%) XMPP
12 5 (1.69%) OpenID
12 5 (1.69%) SAML
13 4 (1.36%) Node.js
13 4 (1.36%) Spring
14 3 (1.02%) .NET
14 3 (1.02%) Lambda Expressions
14 3 (1.02%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 36 (12.20%) Cloud Native
2 34 (11.53%) Distributed Systems
3 28 (9.49%) Data Centre
4 26 (8.81%) Public Cloud
5 18 (6.10%) Product Ownership
6 16 (5.42%) Security Posture
7 13 (4.41%) Hybrid Cloud
8 12 (4.07%) Management Information System
9 11 (3.73%) Linux Command Line
10 10 (3.39%) Onboarding
11 9 (3.05%) Cloud Security Posture
12 8 (2.71%) BYOD
12 8 (2.71%) Mainframe
12 8 (2.71%) VSAM
13 6 (2.03%) Data Protection Act
14 5 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
14 5 (1.69%) NHS
15 4 (1.36%) Cyber Threat
15 4 (1.36%) FlexPod
16 3 (1.02%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 116 (39.32%) Windows
2 72 (24.41%) Unix
3 47 (15.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 34 (11.53%) Windows Server
5 18 (6.10%) Mac OS X
6 14 (4.75%) AIX
7 10 (3.39%) Solaris
7 10 (3.39%) Ubuntu
8 9 (3.05%) CentOS
9 7 (2.37%) VMS
10 4 (1.36%) CoreOS
10 4 (1.36%) Data ONTAP
11 3 (1.02%) Amazon Linux
11 3 (1.02%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 125 (42.37%) DevOps
2 121 (41.02%) CI/CD
3 78 (26.44%) Containerisation
4 73 (24.75%) Problem-Solving
5 71 (24.07%) Infrastructure as Code
6 60 (20.34%) Microservices
7 56 (18.98%) Cybersecurity
8 55 (18.64%) Agile
9 54 (18.31%) Observability
10 45 (15.25%) Infrastructure Automation
11 41 (13.90%) Root Cause Analysis
11 41 (13.90%) Test Automation
12 36 (12.20%) Software Engineering
13 34 (11.53%) Computer Science
13 34 (11.53%) Data Security
14 33 (11.19%) Cryptography
15 32 (10.85%) Platform Engineering
15 32 (10.85%) Roadmaps
16 31 (10.51%) High Availability
17 28 (9.49%) Continuous Improvement
Programming Languages
1 144 (48.81%) Python
2 73 (24.75%) Bash
3 58 (19.66%) Java
4 52 (17.63%) PowerShell
5 37 (12.54%) SQL
6 33 (11.19%) Go
7 24 (8.14%) Perl
8 17 (5.76%) Shell Script
9 15 (5.08%) Ruby
9 15 (5.08%) Rust
10 8 (2.71%) COBOL
10 8 (2.71%) Groovy
10 8 (2.71%) JavaScript
10 8 (2.71%) PHP
10 8 (2.71%) TypeScript
11 4 (1.36%) C#
12 3 (1.02%) Delphi
13 2 (0.68%) C
13 2 (0.68%) Search Processing Language
14 1 (0.34%) C++
Qualifications
1 65 (22.03%) Security Cleared
2 46 (15.59%) SC Cleared
3 39 (13.22%) Degree
4 22 (7.46%) Computer Science Degree
4 22 (7.46%) Master's Degree
5 20 (6.78%) AWS Certification
6 15 (5.08%) CISSP
7 11 (3.73%) BPSS Clearance
8 10 (3.39%) CCNA
8 10 (3.39%) CCNP
8 10 (3.39%) Cisco Certification
8 10 (3.39%) CompTIA Security+
8 10 (3.39%) FFIEC
9 9 (3.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 9 (3.05%) CCDP
9 9 (3.05%) RHCE
10 7 (2.37%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (2.03%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 6 (2.03%) CISM
12 5 (1.69%) MCSE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (5.42%) GDPR
2 11 (3.73%) NIST
3 10 (3.39%) GLBA
3 10 (3.39%) PCI DSS
4 7 (2.37%) SLA
5 5 (1.69%) HIPAA
6 4 (1.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 2 (0.68%) Cyber Essentials
8 1 (0.34%) GxP
8 1 (0.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.34%) SOC 2
System Software
1 96 (32.54%) Docker
2 39 (13.22%) VMware Infrastructure
3 28 (9.49%) Active Directory
4 21 (7.12%) Virtual Machines
5 15 (5.08%) KVM
5 15 (5.08%) vSphere
6 13 (4.41%) Hyper-V
7 6 (2.03%) Firmware
8 5 (1.69%) NFS
8 5 (1.69%) Tivoli Directory Server
9 4 (1.36%) VMware ESXi
10 2 (0.68%) SRDF
10 2 (0.68%) Virtual Servers
11 1 (0.34%) Ceph
11 1 (0.34%) QEMU
11 1 (0.34%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 118 (40.00%) Kubernetes
2 101 (34.24%) Terraform
3 90 (30.51%) Ansible
4 59 (20.00%) Grafana
5 50 (16.95%) Prometheus
6 14 (4.75%) Progress Chef
7 12 (4.07%) Puppet
8 9 (3.05%) Single Sign-On
9 8 (2.71%) Kiali
9 8 (2.71%) vCenter Server
10 7 (2.37%) Packer
11 6 (2.03%) Active Directory Federation Services
11 6 (2.03%) CA Single Sign-On
11 6 (2.03%) IBM BigFix
12 5 (1.69%) CA Wily
12 5 (1.69%) CASB
12 5 (1.69%) EMC NetWorker
12 5 (1.69%) Nessus
12 5 (1.69%) Tivoli
13 4 (1.36%) SnapMirror
Vendors
1 67 (22.71%) Splunk
2 54 (18.31%) VMware
3 42 (14.24%) Microsoft
4 40 (13.56%) Red Hat
5 36 (12.20%) Google
6 23 (7.80%) Oracle
7 20 (6.78%) IBM
8 14 (4.75%) Cisco
9 10 (3.39%) AppDynamics
9 10 (3.39%) Citrix
9 10 (3.39%) Thales
10 9 (3.05%) CyberArk
11 7 (2.37%) Broadcom
12 6 (2.03%) NetApp
12 6 (2.03%) Remedy
12 6 (2.03%) ServiceNow
13 5 (1.69%) F5
13 5 (1.69%) Palo Alto
13 5 (1.69%) Tenable
14 4 (1.36%) Varonis