Linux Contract Job Trends in the South East

Linux
England > South East

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the South East requiring Linux skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 26 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 31 30 22
Rank change year-on-year -1 -8 +7
Contract jobs citing Linux 267 260 397
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 6.48% 6.36% 7.56%
As % of the Operating Systems category 38.25% 37.25% 39.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 189 162 264
10th Percentile £204 £204 £305
25th Percentile £358 £413 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £538 £608 £613
90th Percentile £600 £674 £673
England median daily rate £514 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.59% - -6.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 17 35
10th Percentile - £57.55 £41.84
25th Percentile £12.50 £62.50 £55.00
Median hourly rate £13.00 £67.50 £66.50
Median % change year-on-year -80.74% +1.50% +20.91%
75th Percentile £38.63 £70.00 £70.95
90th Percentile £83.60 £72.75 £76.53
England median hourly rate £65.00 £66.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year -2.26% +6.40% -3.85%

All Operating Systems
South East

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 South East.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for operating system skills 698 698 1,011
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 16.94% 17.08% 19.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 469 463 665
10th Percentile £190 £200 £163
25th Percentile £231 £304 £209
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £435 £450 £410
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% +9.76% -13.68%
75th Percentile £538 £582 £565
90th Percentile £600 £660 £638
England median daily rate £450 £475 £480
% change year-on-year -5.26% -1.04% -5.88%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 33 81
10th Percentile £12.50 £17.50 £18.95
25th Percentile £15.50 £38.00 £24.34
Median hourly rate £20.00 £60.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -66.94% +10.00% +193.33%
75th Percentile £25.15 £70.00 £68.63
90th Percentile £75.00 £71.00 £76.53
England median hourly rate £23.00 £60.00 £34.75
% change year-on-year -61.67% +72.66% +39.00%

Linux
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Linux relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East.

Linux job vacancy trend in the South East

Linux
Daily Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Linux.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Linux

Linux
Daily Rate Histogram in the South East

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Linux in the South East over the 6 months to 26 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Linux in the South East

Linux
Hourly Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Linux.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Linux

Linux
Hourly Rate Histogram in the South East

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Linux in the South East over the 6 months to 26 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Linux in the South East

Linux
Contract Job Locations in the South East

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Linux within the South East region over the 6 months to 26 November 2025. 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
Thames Valley +10 118 £475 -7.32% 81
Berkshire +18 100 £425 -19.05% 43
Hampshire -10 76 £500 -13.04% 60
Surrey +2 51 £208 -53.89% 22
Buckinghamshire -1 11 £550 +1.85% 10
Sussex - 8 - - 4
Oxfordshire -13 7 £375 -23.08% 31
West Sussex -12 5 £500 -24.53% 8
Middlesex - 5 - - 3
East Sussex - 3 - - 3
Linux
England

Linux
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East 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 7 (2.62%) Mattermost
1 7 (2.62%) Skype for Business
2 4 (1.50%) Microsoft Exchange
3 3 (1.12%) Apache
4 2 (0.75%) JBoss
4 2 (0.75%) OpenStack
5 1 (0.37%) Anypoint
5 1 (0.37%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.37%) Apache Spark
5 1 (0.37%) Gunicorn
5 1 (0.37%) nginx
Applications
1 21 (7.87%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.37%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 7 (2.62%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.37%) SAP MDG
2 1 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 69 (25.84%) AWS
2 49 (18.35%) Azure
3 31 (11.61%) OpenShift
4 29 (10.86%) GitHub
5 19 (7.12%) SaaS
6 18 (6.74%) Sauce Labs
7 14 (5.24%) GCP
8 13 (4.87%) Google Workspace
9 12 (4.49%) AWS CloudFormation
10 11 (4.12%) GitHub Actions
11 10 (3.75%) IaaS
12 8 (3.00%) Amazon ECR
12 8 (3.00%) Cloud Computing
13 7 (2.62%) AWS Lambda
13 7 (2.62%) OCI
13 7 (2.62%) Serverless
14 3 (1.12%) Azure DevOps
14 3 (1.12%) Entra ID
14 3 (1.12%) Microsoft 365
15 2 (0.75%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 31 (11.61%) DNS
2 24 (8.99%) TCP/IP
3 20 (7.49%) DHCP
3 20 (7.49%) SAN
3 20 (7.49%) Wireless
4 19 (7.12%) Firewall
5 13 (4.87%) VLAN
6 8 (3.00%) NFC
6 8 (3.00%) PPP
7 7 (2.62%) NAS
7 7 (2.62%) Skype
7 7 (2.62%) Wireshark
8 5 (1.87%) Network Security
9 4 (1.50%) LAN
9 4 (1.50%) VSAN
9 4 (1.50%) WAN
10 3 (1.12%) SSL
11 2 (0.75%) Cisco IOS
11 2 (0.75%) HTTP
11 2 (0.75%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (10.49%) Relational Database
2 26 (9.74%) MySQL
3 20 (7.49%) PostgreSQL
4 13 (4.87%) NoSQL
5 9 (3.37%) SQL Server
6 7 (2.62%) Amazon RDS
6 7 (2.62%) Redis
7 6 (2.25%) Amazon Redshift
7 6 (2.25%) Couchbase
8 5 (1.87%) Oracle Database
9 3 (1.12%) Oracle Exadata
9 3 (1.12%) RDBMS
9 3 (1.12%) SAP HANA
10 2 (0.75%) Elasticsearch
10 2 (0.75%) MongoDB
10 2 (0.75%) SQL Server Reporting Services
11 1 (0.37%) Big Data
11 1 (0.37%) Hadoop
11 1 (0.37%) Oracle Database 12c
11 1 (0.37%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 32 (11.99%) Jenkins
2 26 (9.74%) Eclipse
3 19 (7.12%) Browser DevTools
4 18 (6.74%) Android Studio
4 18 (6.74%) Xcode
5 15 (5.62%) Git
6 13 (4.87%) GitLab
7 12 (4.49%) Sonatype Nexus
8 10 (3.75%) JMeter
9 9 (3.37%) Burp Suite
9 9 (3.37%) Cucumber
9 9 (3.37%) JUnit
10 8 (3.00%) JIRA
10 8 (3.00%) Valgrind
11 7 (2.62%) Artifactory
11 7 (2.62%) Metasploit
12 3 (1.12%) MSI
12 3 (1.12%) Robot Framework
13 2 (0.75%) Subversion
13 2 (0.75%) Visual Studio
General
1 114 (42.70%) Social Skills
2 29 (10.86%) Analytical Skills
3 24 (8.99%) Finance
4 19 (7.12%) Public Sector
5 12 (4.49%) Organisational Skills
6 9 (3.37%) Legal
7 8 (3.00%) Military
8 6 (2.25%) Documentation Skills
9 5 (1.87%) Banking
10 3 (1.12%) Aerospace
11 2 (0.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 2 (0.75%) Investment Banking
11 2 (0.75%) Retail
11 2 (0.75%) Telecoms
12 1 (0.37%) Back Office
12 1 (0.37%) Electronics
12 1 (0.37%) French Language
12 1 (0.37%) Front Office
12 1 (0.37%) German Language
12 1 (0.37%) Law
Job Titles
1 42 (15.73%) Support Engineer
2 33 (12.36%) Senior
3 30 (11.24%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 29 (10.86%) Technical Support
5 21 (7.87%) Architect
5 21 (7.87%) Technical Engineer
5 21 (7.87%) Technical Support Engineer
6 19 (7.12%) Developer
6 19 (7.12%) UX Engineer
7 18 (6.74%) Analyst
7 18 (6.74%) Front-End Engineer (Client-Side Engineer)
8 17 (6.37%) DevOps Engineer
8 17 (6.37%) Infrastructure Support
8 17 (6.37%) Infrastructure Support Engineer
9 14 (5.24%) Software Engineer
10 13 (4.87%) Administrator
10 13 (4.87%) C++ Software Engineer
10 13 (4.87%) IT Support
11 12 (4.49%) Linux Engineer
12 11 (4.12%) Support Officer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (8.61%) Kafka
2 19 (7.12%) Ajax
2 19 (7.12%) AngularJS
2 19 (7.12%) CSS
2 19 (7.12%) GraphQL
2 19 (7.12%) React
3 17 (6.37%) Elastic Stack
4 12 (4.49%) REST
5 11 (4.12%) JSON
6 9 (3.37%) Spring
6 9 (3.37%) Web Services
6 9 (3.37%) XML
7 8 (3.00%) Hibernate
7 8 (3.00%) Loki
7 8 (3.00%) Middleware
8 7 (2.62%) YAML
9 6 (2.25%) Keycloak
10 3 (1.12%) Oracle GoldenGate
10 3 (1.12%) Swagger
11 2 (0.75%) Jinja
Miscellaneous
1 19 (7.12%) Mobile App
2 16 (5.99%) PKI
3 14 (5.24%) Enterprise Software
3 14 (5.24%) Replication
4 11 (4.12%) Analytical Mindset
4 11 (4.12%) Cloud Native
5 10 (3.75%) Management Information System
6 8 (3.00%) Security Operations Centre
6 8 (3.00%) Smartcard
6 8 (3.00%) Virtual Team
7 7 (2.62%) Enterprise Storage
8 6 (2.25%) Onboarding
8 6 (2.25%) Security Posture
9 5 (1.87%) CAN bus
9 5 (1.87%) Cyber Threat
9 5 (1.87%) Data Centre
10 4 (1.50%) Clustering
11 3 (1.12%) HP Storage
11 3 (1.12%) Private Cloud
12 2 (0.75%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 135 (50.56%) Windows
2 54 (20.22%) Unix
3 42 (15.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 21 (7.87%) Ubuntu
5 19 (7.12%) Windows Server
6 18 (6.74%) Android
7 13 (4.87%) Windows Server 2016
8 12 (4.49%) Windows Server 2019
9 11 (4.12%) CentOS
10 9 (3.37%) Kali Linux
11 5 (1.87%) Debian
12 4 (1.50%) Mac OS
12 4 (1.50%) Windows Server 2012
13 2 (0.75%) SUSE
13 2 (0.75%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
14 1 (0.37%) Rocky
14 1 (0.37%) Solaris
14 1 (0.37%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 72 (26.97%) CI/CD
2 53 (19.85%) DevOps
3 52 (19.48%) Problem-Solving
4 50 (18.73%) ITIL
5 49 (18.35%) Agile
6 38 (14.23%) Infrastructure as Code
7 34 (12.73%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 33 (12.36%) Containerisation
9 27 (10.11%) Continuous Improvement
9 27 (10.11%) User Experience
10 26 (9.74%) OO
11 25 (9.36%) Observability
12 23 (8.61%) Platform Engineering
13 22 (8.24%) Disaster Recovery
14 21 (7.87%) Software Engineering
14 21 (7.87%) Test Automation
15 20 (7.49%) High Availability
15 20 (7.49%) Incident Response
16 19 (7.12%) Cybersecurity
16 19 (7.12%) SIEM
Programming Languages
1 116 (43.45%) Python
2 55 (20.60%) Bash
3 53 (19.85%) PowerShell
4 52 (19.48%) Java
5 38 (14.23%) JavaScript
6 37 (13.86%) SQL
7 33 (12.36%) Perl
8 18 (6.74%) Shell Script
9 17 (6.37%) C#
10 16 (5.99%) C++
11 5 (1.87%) Embedded C++
12 4 (1.50%) C
12 4 (1.50%) PHP
12 4 (1.50%) PL/SQL
12 4 (1.50%) Search Processing Language
13 3 (1.12%) Go
14 2 (0.75%) Ada
14 2 (0.75%) Assembly Language
14 2 (0.75%) MATLAB
14 2 (0.75%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 113 (42.32%) Security Cleared
2 70 (26.22%) SC Cleared
3 39 (14.61%) DV Cleared
4 18 (6.74%) Degree
5 14 (5.24%) CISSP
6 12 (4.49%) GCIH
6 12 (4.49%) Microsoft Certification
7 11 (4.12%) Azure Certification
7 11 (4.12%) Computer Science Degree
7 11 (4.12%) GCFA
7 11 (4.12%) Network+ Certification
7 11 (4.12%) Server+ Certification
8 9 (3.37%) GCIA
9 8 (3.00%) CEH
9 8 (3.00%) CFCE
9 8 (3.00%) OSCP
10 7 (2.62%) AWS Certification
10 7 (2.62%) GPEN
10 7 (2.62%) ITIL Certification
11 6 (2.25%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (5.99%) NIST
2 11 (4.12%) GDPR
2 11 (4.12%) HIPAA
3 10 (3.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 7 (2.62%) QA
5 4 (1.50%) SOC 2
6 1 (0.37%) Accessibility
6 1 (0.37%) Actionable Recommendations
6 1 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
6 1 (0.37%) Def Stans
6 1 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 17025
6 1 (0.37%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 53 (19.85%) VMware Infrastructure
2 31 (11.61%) Docker
3 25 (9.36%) Active Directory
4 22 (8.24%) vSphere
5 17 (6.37%) Hyper-V
6 11 (4.12%) Virtual Machines
7 8 (3.00%) VMware NSX
8 4 (1.50%) VMware ESXi
9 3 (1.12%) Oracle RAC
10 2 (0.75%) GPFS
10 2 (0.75%) KVM
11 1 (0.37%) Firmware
11 1 (0.37%) NDS
11 1 (0.37%) NetIQ eDirectory
11 1 (0.37%) NFS
Systems Management
1 66 (24.72%) Ansible
2 57 (21.35%) Kubernetes
3 48 (17.98%) Terraform
4 24 (8.99%) Grafana
5 23 (8.61%) Prometheus
6 15 (5.62%) Argo
7 12 (4.49%) Progress Chef
8 9 (3.37%) Nmap
8 9 (3.37%) Red Hat Satellite
8 9 (3.37%) SCOM
9 8 (3.00%) Kustomize
10 7 (2.62%) HP SiteScope
10 7 (2.62%) Sysdig
10 7 (2.62%) vCenter Server
11 6 (2.25%) NetBackup
11 6 (2.25%) Packer
11 6 (2.25%) Proxmox
12 5 (1.87%) Computer Emergency Response Teams
13 4 (1.50%) Podman
13 4 (1.50%) Puppet
Vendors
1 86 (32.21%) Microsoft
2 82 (30.71%) VMware
3 54 (20.22%) Red Hat
4 49 (18.35%) Splunk
5 33 (12.36%) Oracle
6 22 (8.24%) ServiceNow
7 12 (4.49%) NetApp
8 11 (4.12%) Cisco
9 10 (3.75%) HP
10 9 (3.37%) ArcSight
10 9 (3.37%) CrowdStrike
10 9 (3.37%) IBM
11 8 (3.00%) Remedy
11 8 (3.00%) Veritas
12 7 (2.62%) 3PAR
12 7 (2.62%) Dell
12 7 (2.62%) LogRhythm
13 6 (2.25%) Confluent
13 6 (2.25%) Nimble Storage
13 6 (2.25%) Pure Storage