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

6 months to
9 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 38 29 38
Rank change year-on-year -9 +9 -13
Contract jobs citing Linux 294 201 201
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 4.92% 6.31% 4.20%
As % of the Operating Systems category 39.89% 38.88% 27.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 202 123 139
10th Percentile £355 £352 £350
25th Percentile £400 £393 £412
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £550 £485
Median % change year-on-year -10.55% +13.40% -11.82%
75th Percentile £550 £632 £582
90th Percentile £673 £750 £640
England median daily rate £518 £550 £540
% change year-on-year -5.91% +1.85% -10.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 4 10
10th Percentile - £46.17 -
25th Percentile £41.94 £54.67 £21.25
Median hourly rate £45.97 £69.59 £48.00
Median % change year-on-year -33.94% +44.98% +20.60%
75th Percentile £68.20 £81.89 -
90th Percentile £74.26 £84.22 £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 737 517 743
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England 12.32% 16.24% 15.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 511 341 499
10th Percentile £138 £163 £163
25th Percentile £191 £223 £273
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £400 £400 £415
Median % change year-on-year - -3.61% -12.63%
75th Percentile £514 £556 £521
90th Percentile £617 £638 £640
England median daily rate £450 £475 £450
% change year-on-year -5.26% +5.56% -12.62%
Number of hourly rates quoted 28 18 79
10th Percentile £17.40 £16.25 -
25th Percentile £21.33 £17.44 £10.95
Median hourly rate £41.94 £18.36 £16.00
Median % change year-on-year +128.46% +14.73% -43.06%
75th Percentile £65.13 £27.80 £19.63
90th Percentile £105.61 £71.90 £25.25
England median hourly rate £26.00 £28.00 £21.50
% change year-on-year -7.14% +30.23% -25.86%

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 9 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 9 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 9 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 -23 151 £465 -15.45% 41
North West -6 132 £525 +2.49% 58
North East -16 13 £550 +4.76% 27
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 10 (3.40%) Confluence
2 9 (3.06%) CICS
2 9 (3.06%) TPMS
3 6 (2.04%) Microsoft Exchange
3 6 (2.04%) SharePoint
4 5 (1.70%) OpenStack
5 4 (1.36%) Apache
6 3 (1.02%) nginx
7 1 (0.34%) JBoss
7 1 (0.34%) SharePoint Server
7 1 (0.34%) Tomcat
Applications
1 13 (4.42%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.34%) Cloudability
1 1 (0.34%) Odoo
1 1 (0.34%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 78 (26.53%) AWS
2 47 (15.99%) Azure
3 45 (15.31%) OpenShift
4 36 (12.24%) GCP
5 22 (7.48%) GitHub
6 12 (4.08%) Serverless
6 12 (4.08%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 10 (3.40%) Amazon EC2
7 10 (3.40%) Entra ID
7 10 (3.40%) Google Workspace
8 9 (3.06%) Amazon S3
8 9 (3.06%) AWS CloudFormation
8 9 (3.06%) AWS Lambda
9 8 (2.72%) GitHub Actions
10 7 (2.38%) Amazon ECS
10 7 (2.38%) Amazon EKS
11 6 (2.04%) IaaS
12 5 (1.70%) Amazon EventBridge
12 5 (1.70%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 5 (1.70%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 78 (26.53%) Firewall
2 22 (7.48%) Network Security
3 20 (6.80%) DNS
3 20 (6.80%) SAN
4 17 (5.78%) TCP/IP
5 14 (4.76%) SSL
6 13 (4.42%) SNMP
7 11 (3.74%) VPN
8 9 (3.06%) SSH
8 9 (3.06%) VLAN
8 9 (3.06%) VSAN
9 7 (2.38%) BGP
9 7 (2.38%) NAS
10 6 (2.04%) Software-Defined Networking
10 6 (2.04%) WebEx
11 5 (1.70%) HTTP
12 4 (1.36%) DHCP
12 4 (1.36%) iSCSI
13 2 (0.68%) Reverse Proxy
14 1 (0.34%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 20 (6.80%) MongoDB
1 20 (6.80%) PostgreSQL
2 11 (3.74%) NoSQL
2 11 (3.74%) SQL Server
3 10 (3.40%) Oracle Database
4 9 (3.06%) DataStage
5 7 (2.38%) Elasticsearch
5 7 (2.38%) Relational Database
6 6 (2.04%) DB2
7 5 (1.70%) DynamoDB
8 4 (1.36%) Oracle Database 12c
9 3 (1.02%) Amazon RDS
10 2 (0.68%) Amazon Aurora
10 2 (0.68%) MySQL
10 2 (0.68%) RDBMS
11 1 (0.34%) Data Lake
11 1 (0.34%) DocumentDB
11 1 (0.34%) Oracle Reports
11 1 (0.34%) SAP BW
11 1 (0.34%) Sybase ASE
Development Applications
1 34 (11.56%) Jenkins
2 29 (9.86%) GitLab
3 23 (7.82%) JIRA
4 14 (4.76%) Git
5 12 (4.08%) Mockito
6 8 (2.72%) Jaeger
7 4 (1.36%) Liquibase
8 3 (1.02%) CircleCI
9 2 (0.68%) Bitbucket
9 2 (0.68%) Octopus Deploy
9 2 (0.68%) Sonatype Nexus
10 1 (0.34%) Artifactory
10 1 (0.34%) Gradle
10 1 (0.34%) Hudson
10 1 (0.34%) JUnit
10 1 (0.34%) Maven
10 1 (0.34%) TeamCity
General
1 84 (28.57%) Social Skills
2 68 (23.13%) Finance
3 31 (10.54%) Public Sector
4 27 (9.18%) Banking
5 23 (7.82%) Analytical Skills
6 21 (7.14%) Documentation Skills
7 10 (3.40%) Financial Institution
7 10 (3.40%) Influencing Skills
7 10 (3.40%) Legal
8 6 (2.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 3 (1.02%) Law
9 3 (1.02%) Telecoms
10 2 (0.68%) Advertising
10 2 (0.68%) Investment Banking
11 1 (0.34%) Aviation
11 1 (0.34%) Games
11 1 (0.34%) Manufacturing
11 1 (0.34%) Military
11 1 (0.34%) Presentation Skills
11 1 (0.34%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 37 (12.59%) Senior
2 30 (10.20%) Platform Engineer
3 29 (9.86%) Developer
4 22 (7.48%) DevOps Engineer
5 18 (6.12%) Java Developer
5 18 (6.12%) Software Engineer
6 16 (5.44%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 16 (5.44%) Security Engineer
7 14 (4.76%) Lead
8 12 (4.08%) Linux Engineer
9 11 (3.74%) IT Engineer
10 10 (3.40%) Administrator
10 10 (3.40%) AWS Engineer
10 10 (3.40%) IT Support
10 10 (3.40%) IT Support Engineer
10 10 (3.40%) Support Engineer
11 9 (3.06%) Analyst
11 9 (3.06%) Designer
11 9 (3.06%) Infrastructure Designer
11 9 (3.06%) VMware Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (7.82%) Kafka
2 17 (5.78%) Middleware
3 15 (5.10%) Elastic Stack
4 12 (4.08%) JAX-RS
5 11 (3.74%) ActiveMQ
5 11 (3.74%) OpenTelemetry
5 11 (3.74%) REST
6 9 (3.06%) LDAP
6 9 (3.06%) Spring Boot
6 9 (3.06%) YAML
7 6 (2.04%) .NET
7 6 (2.04%) Redfish
7 6 (2.04%) XMPP
8 5 (1.70%) RESTful
9 3 (1.02%) Lambda Expressions
9 3 (1.02%) WebSockets
10 2 (0.68%) Hugging Face
10 2 (0.68%) LangChain
10 2 (0.68%) vLLM
11 1 (0.34%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 36 (12.24%) Data Centre
2 22 (7.48%) Cloud Native
3 18 (6.12%) Product Ownership
4 17 (5.78%) Distributed Systems
5 16 (5.44%) Security Posture
6 15 (5.10%) Hybrid Cloud
7 13 (4.42%) Linux Command Line
8 12 (4.08%) Mainframe
8 12 (4.08%) Management Information System
9 11 (3.74%) Data Protection Act
10 9 (3.06%) BYOD
10 9 (3.06%) Cloud Security Posture
10 9 (3.06%) VSAM
11 7 (2.38%) Public Cloud
11 7 (2.38%) Replication
12 6 (2.04%) Onboarding
13 5 (1.70%) FlexPod
13 5 (1.70%) Legacy Systems
14 4 (1.36%) Analytical Mindset
14 4 (1.36%) EMC VMAX
Operating Systems
1 123 (41.84%) Windows
2 66 (22.45%) Unix
3 61 (20.75%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 33 (11.22%) Windows Server
5 18 (6.12%) AIX
6 14 (4.76%) Ubuntu
7 13 (4.42%) Solaris
8 12 (4.08%) Mac OS X
9 10 (3.40%) CentOS
9 10 (3.40%) VMS
10 5 (1.70%) CoreOS
10 5 (1.70%) Data ONTAP
10 5 (1.70%) Oracle Linux
11 3 (1.02%) Amazon Linux
11 3 (1.02%) zOS
12 2 (0.68%) HPUX
12 2 (0.68%) Mac OS
12 2 (0.68%) SUSE
13 1 (0.34%) Embedded Linux
13 1 (0.34%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 93 (31.63%) DevOps
2 92 (31.29%) CI/CD
3 75 (25.51%) Problem-Solving
4 55 (18.71%) Containerisation
4 55 (18.71%) Infrastructure as Code
5 52 (17.69%) Observability
6 41 (13.95%) Agile
7 40 (13.61%) Cybersecurity
8 39 (13.27%) Platform Engineering
9 38 (12.93%) Microservices
10 35 (11.90%) Migration
10 35 (11.90%) Roadmaps
11 32 (10.88%) Continuous Improvement
11 32 (10.88%) Infrastructure Automation
12 31 (10.54%) Test Automation
13 29 (9.86%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 29 (9.86%) Root Cause Analysis
14 25 (8.50%) Data Protection
15 22 (7.48%) Mentoring
15 22 (7.48%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 123 (41.84%) Python
2 70 (23.81%) Bash
3 55 (18.71%) PowerShell
4 45 (15.31%) Java
5 40 (13.61%) SQL
6 22 (7.48%) Perl
7 15 (5.10%) Rust
8 13 (4.42%) Go
8 13 (4.42%) Ruby
9 12 (4.08%) Shell Script
10 9 (3.06%) COBOL
10 9 (3.06%) JavaScript
11 8 (2.72%) TypeScript
12 7 (2.38%) PHP
13 6 (2.04%) C#
14 3 (1.02%) C
14 3 (1.02%) Delphi
14 3 (1.02%) JCL
15 2 (0.68%) C++
15 2 (0.68%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 65 (22.11%) Security Cleared
2 49 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 25 (8.50%) Degree
4 19 (6.46%) CISSP
5 12 (4.08%) AWS Certification
6 11 (3.74%) CompTIA Security+
6 11 (3.74%) RHCE
7 10 (3.40%) CCNA
7 10 (3.40%) CCNP
7 10 (3.40%) Cisco Certification
8 9 (3.06%) CCDP
8 9 (3.06%) FFIEC
9 8 (2.72%) BPSS Clearance
10 7 (2.38%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 6 (2.04%) DV Cleared
11 6 (2.04%) Microsoft Certification
11 6 (2.04%) OCP
11 6 (2.04%) Oracle Certification
12 5 (1.70%) MCSA
12 5 (1.70%) MCSE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (5.10%) GDPR
2 11 (3.74%) NIST
3 10 (3.40%) PCI DSS
4 9 (3.06%) GLBA
5 8 (2.72%) SLA
6 6 (2.04%) HIPAA
7 4 (1.36%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 3 (1.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (1.02%) QA
9 2 (0.68%) GRC
9 2 (0.68%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 1 (0.34%) Cyber Essentials
10 1 (0.34%) GxP
System Software
1 69 (23.47%) Docker
2 50 (17.01%) VMware Infrastructure
3 32 (10.88%) Virtual Machines
4 26 (8.84%) Active Directory
5 24 (8.16%) vSphere
6 15 (5.10%) Hyper-V
6 15 (5.10%) KVM
7 12 (4.08%) VMware ESXi
8 11 (3.74%) Firmware
9 10 (3.40%) NFS
10 8 (2.72%) VMware NSX
11 3 (1.02%) Time Sharing Option
12 2 (0.68%) SRDF
13 1 (0.34%) Ceph
13 1 (0.34%) Embedded Firmware
13 1 (0.34%) GPFS
13 1 (0.34%) Oracle RAC
13 1 (0.34%) QEMU
13 1 (0.34%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 1 (0.34%) zsh
Systems Management
1 90 (30.61%) Kubernetes
2 83 (28.23%) Terraform
3 82 (27.89%) Ansible
4 37 (12.59%) Grafana
5 28 (9.52%) Prometheus
6 12 (4.08%) Puppet
6 12 (4.08%) vCenter Server
7 8 (2.72%) Kiali
7 8 (2.72%) Progress Chef
8 7 (2.38%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 7 (2.38%) Packer
8 7 (2.38%) PowerCLI
9 6 (2.04%) Dell DRAC
9 6 (2.04%) IBM BigFix
9 6 (2.04%) Nessus
10 5 (1.70%) CASB
10 5 (1.70%) EMC NetWorker
10 5 (1.70%) Oracle RMAN
10 5 (1.70%) SnapMirror
11 4 (1.36%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 65 (22.11%) VMware
2 44 (14.97%) Red Hat
3 40 (13.61%) Splunk
4 37 (12.59%) Microsoft
5 23 (7.82%) Google
6 21 (7.14%) IBM
6 21 (7.14%) Oracle
7 17 (5.78%) Cisco
8 10 (3.40%) Citrix
9 9 (3.06%) CyberArk
9 9 (3.06%) Thales
10 8 (2.72%) Dell
10 8 (2.72%) ServiceNow
11 7 (2.38%) Broadcom
11 7 (2.38%) NetApp
12 6 (2.04%) HP
12 6 (2.04%) Remedy
12 6 (2.04%) Tenable
13 5 (1.70%) F5
13 5 (1.70%) Palo Alto