Linux Engineer Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Linux Engineer
UK > UK excluding London

The median Linux Engineer daily rate in the UK excluding London is £513, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 14 December 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 359 280 280
Rank change year-on-year -79 0 +73
Contract jobs requiring a Linux Engineer 49 83 130
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.27% 0.55% 0.66%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.30% 0.59% 0.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 36 51 92
10th Percentile £419 £380 £413
25th Percentile £460 £450 £494
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% +16.67%
75th Percentile £557 £538 £626
90th Percentile £700 £600 £673
UK median daily rate £550 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +10.00% -4.76% +5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 3 2
10th Percentile - £61.50 £67.88
25th Percentile - £61.88 £68.44
Median hourly rate £68.00 £62.50 £71.25
Median % change year-on-year +8.80% -12.28% +34.43%
75th Percentile - £65.88 £73.44
90th Percentile - £67.15 £73.63
UK median hourly rate £47.75 £62.50 £72.50
% change year-on-year -23.60% -13.79% +23.93%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK excluding London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the UK excluding London. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK excluding London with a recognized job title 16,166 13,980 18,568
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 90.06% 92.36% 93.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,949 8,317 12,127
10th Percentile £210 £213 £214
25th Percentile £366 £363 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £490 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -
75th Percentile £575 £594 £600
90th Percentile £675 £676 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,625 835 1,208
10th Percentile £13.80 £15.36 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.28 £18.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -27.78% +80.00%
75th Percentile £57.50 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.49 £71.25 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.47 £35.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -27.23% -21.35% +48.33%

Linux Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Linux Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Linux Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Linux Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Linux Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Linux Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London

Linux Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Linux Engineer in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 14 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Linux Engineer in the UK excluding London

Linux Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Linux Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Linux Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London

Linux Engineer
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Linux Engineer within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 14 December 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
North of England -28 15 £525 +16.67%
South East -12 13 £525 +5.00% 13
Yorkshire -35 10 £525 -4.55%
South West -21 9 £700 +33.33% 11
Scotland -6 6 - - 5
North West -21 4 £378 -13.71%
East of England -28 4 £425 -29.17% 10
East Midlands -19 1 £450 +20.00%
Midlands -40 1 £450 +12.50%
North East - 1 £600 -
Northern Ireland - 1 £425 -
Linux Engineer
UK

Linux Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 14 December 2025, Linux Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the UK excluding London region featuring Linux Engineer in the job title.

1 49 (100.00%) Linux
2 22 (44.90%) Red Hat
3 21 (42.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 16 (32.65%) Security Cleared
5 11 (22.45%) DV Cleared
5 11 (22.45%) Kubernetes
5 11 (22.45%) Python
5 11 (22.45%) Windows
6 10 (20.41%) AWS
6 10 (20.41%) CI/CD
6 10 (20.41%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 10 (20.41%) Shell Script
6 10 (20.41%) Software Engineering
7 9 (18.37%) Infrastructure as Code
7 9 (18.37%) Java
7 9 (18.37%) VMware
8 8 (16.33%) Bash
8 8 (16.33%) C++
8 8 (16.33%) Ubuntu
8 8 (16.33%) Unix
9 7 (14.29%) Ansible
9 7 (14.29%) Docker
9 7 (14.29%) Red Hat Satellite
9 7 (14.29%) SC Cleared
9 7 (14.29%) Splunk
9 7 (14.29%) Terraform
10 6 (12.24%) Eclipse
10 6 (12.24%) JavaScript
10 6 (12.24%) User Experience
10 6 (12.24%) VMware Infrastructure

Linux Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 3 (6.12%) Apache
2 1 (2.04%) IIS
2 1 (2.04%) iPlanet
2 1 (2.04%) JBoss
2 1 (2.04%) Microsoft Exchange
2 1 (2.04%) WebSphere
2 1 (2.04%) WebSphere Application Server
Cloud Services
1 10 (20.41%) AWS
2 5 (10.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
2 5 (10.20%) Amazon EC2
2 5 (10.20%) Amazon S3
3 4 (8.16%) Azure
3 4 (8.16%) OpenShift
4 1 (2.04%) Azure DevOps
4 1 (2.04%) GitHub
4 1 (2.04%) GitHub Actions
4 1 (2.04%) IaaS
Communications & Networking
1 5 (10.20%) NFC
1 5 (10.20%) PPP
2 3 (6.12%) TCP/IP
3 2 (4.08%) Firewall
3 2 (4.08%) Kerberos
3 2 (4.08%) SAN
4 1 (2.04%) DHCP
4 1 (2.04%) DNS
4 1 (2.04%) NAS
4 1 (2.04%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 5 (10.20%) MongoDB
2 2 (4.08%) NewSQL
2 2 (4.08%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.04%) CockroachDB
3 1 (2.04%) OLTP
3 1 (2.04%) Oracle Database
3 1 (2.04%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 6 (12.24%) Eclipse
2 5 (10.20%) Valgrind
3 4 (8.16%) Sonatype Nexus
4 3 (6.12%) Git
4 3 (6.12%) Jenkins
5 2 (4.08%) GitLab
6 1 (2.04%) Artifactory
6 1 (2.04%) Bitbucket Server
6 1 (2.04%) CA Release Automation
6 1 (2.04%) GoCD
6 1 (2.04%) Maven
6 1 (2.04%) Subversion
General
1 8 (16.33%) Finance
2 5 (10.20%) Social Skills
3 2 (4.08%) Banking
3 2 (4.08%) Public Sector
4 1 (2.04%) Electronics
4 1 (2.04%) Games
4 1 (2.04%) Manufacturing
4 1 (2.04%) Marketing
4 1 (2.04%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (10.20%) JSON
1 5 (10.20%) REST
1 5 (10.20%) Web Services
1 5 (10.20%) XML
2 2 (4.08%) LDAP
2 2 (4.08%) OAuth
2 2 (4.08%) OpenID
2 2 (4.08%) SAML
3 1 (2.04%) Elastic Stack
3 1 (2.04%) Middleware
3 1 (2.04%) Yocto
Miscellaneous
1 5 (10.20%) Smartcard
2 3 (6.12%) Clustering
2 3 (6.12%) Virtual Team
3 2 (4.08%) Data Centre
3 2 (4.08%) Onboarding
4 1 (2.04%) Data Protection Act
4 1 (2.04%) Embedded Systems
4 1 (2.04%) FPGA
4 1 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
4 1 (2.04%) Linux Command Line
4 1 (2.04%) NHS
4 1 (2.04%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 49 (100.00%) Linux
2 21 (42.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 11 (22.45%) Windows
4 8 (16.33%) Ubuntu
4 8 (16.33%) Unix
5 5 (10.20%) Windows Server
6 2 (4.08%) Debian
7 1 (2.04%) AIX
7 1 (2.04%) CentOS
7 1 (2.04%) Embedded Linux
7 1 (2.04%) Mac OS
7 1 (2.04%) Oracle Linux
7 1 (2.04%) Solaris
7 1 (2.04%) SUSE
7 1 (2.04%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (20.41%) CI/CD
1 10 (20.41%) Infrastructure Engineering
1 10 (20.41%) Software Engineering
2 9 (18.37%) Infrastructure as Code
3 6 (12.24%) User Experience
4 5 (10.20%) Cryptography
4 5 (10.20%) DevOps
4 5 (10.20%) Front End Development
4 5 (10.20%) Memory Management
4 5 (10.20%) Multithreaded Programming
4 5 (10.20%) Multithreading
4 5 (10.20%) Storage Management
5 4 (8.16%) Agile
5 4 (8.16%) High Availability
5 4 (8.16%) Incident Management
5 4 (8.16%) OO
6 3 (6.12%) Containerisation
6 3 (6.12%) Continuous Improvement
6 3 (6.12%) Infrastructure Automation
6 3 (6.12%) Problem-Solving
Programming Languages
1 11 (22.45%) Python
2 10 (20.41%) Shell Script
3 9 (18.37%) Java
4 8 (16.33%) Bash
4 8 (16.33%) C++
5 6 (12.24%) JavaScript
6 5 (10.20%) C#
7 2 (4.08%) C
7 2 (4.08%) Groovy
7 2 (4.08%) Perl
7 2 (4.08%) PowerShell
8 1 (2.04%) Ada
8 1 (2.04%) ANSI SQL
8 1 (2.04%) SQL
Qualifications
1 16 (32.65%) Security Cleared
2 11 (22.45%) DV Cleared
3 7 (14.29%) SC Cleared
4 1 (2.04%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (2.04%) GDPR
1 1 (2.04%) NIST
1 1 (2.04%) QA
System Software
1 7 (14.29%) Docker
2 6 (12.24%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (8.16%) Virtual Desktop
4 3 (6.12%) Active Directory
5 2 (4.08%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 2 (4.08%) vSphere
6 1 (2.04%) Tivoli Directory Server
6 1 (2.04%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 11 (22.45%) Kubernetes
2 7 (14.29%) Ansible
2 7 (14.29%) Red Hat Satellite
2 7 (14.29%) Terraform
3 5 (10.20%) Dell DRAC
4 3 (6.12%) vRealize
5 2 (4.08%) SELinux
5 2 (4.08%) vRealize Orchestrator
6 1 (2.04%) Argo
6 1 (2.04%) CA Single Sign-On
6 1 (2.04%) CA Wily
6 1 (2.04%) FreeIPA
6 1 (2.04%) Grafana
6 1 (2.04%) Istio
6 1 (2.04%) Progress Chef
6 1 (2.04%) Prometheus
6 1 (2.04%) SCOM
6 1 (2.04%) Tivoli
6 1 (2.04%) yum
Vendors
1 22 (44.90%) Red Hat
2 9 (18.37%) VMware
3 7 (14.29%) Splunk
4 5 (10.20%) Citrix
4 5 (10.20%) Dell
5 3 (6.12%) Microsoft
6 2 (4.08%) Broadcom
6 2 (4.08%) Oracle
6 2 (4.08%) SAP
7 1 (2.04%) AppDynamics
7 1 (2.04%) HP
7 1 (2.04%) IBM
7 1 (2.04%) ServiceNow
7 1 (2.04%) SolarWinds
7 1 (2.04%) Symantec
7 1 (2.04%) TOWER Software
7 1 (2.04%) Veritas