SSH Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Secure Shell (SSH)
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring SSH skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 347 338 355
Rank change year-on-year -9 +17 +108
Contract jobs citing SSH 58 19 46
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.32% 0.13% 0.23%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 2.61% 0.79% 1.31%
Number of daily rates quoted 36 13 31
10th Percentile £294 £380 -
25th Percentile £405 £404 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £425 £405
Median % change year-on-year +11.76% +4.94% -20.39%
75th Percentile £522 £500 £625
90th Percentile £688 £670 £675
UK median daily rate £430 £463 £450
% change year-on-year -7.03% +2.78% -15.49%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 2
Median hourly rate - - £78.00
UK median hourly rate - - £78.00

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
UK excluding London

SSH falls under the Communications and Computer Networking category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring communications or computer networking skills in the UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 2,224 2,395 3,513
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 12.32% 15.97% 17.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,473 1,350 2,093
10th Percentile £200 £195 £205
25th Percentile £300 £319 £340
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £475 £475
Median % change year-on-year -5.26% - +5.56%
75th Percentile £563 £579 £600
90th Percentile £642 £650 £680
UK median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 137 124 279
10th Percentile £15.43 £17.75 £17.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.46 £24.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £39.25 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year +8.28% -30.52% +25.53%
75th Percentile £67.84 £65.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £83.30 £73.75 £75.33
UK median hourly rate £34.50 £37.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year -8.00% -31.82% +34.05%

SSH
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SSH relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

SSH job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

SSH
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing SSH.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing SSH

SSH
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SSH in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 18 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SSH in the UK excluding London

SSH
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing SSH.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing SSH

SSH
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 SSH within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 18 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
Midlands -10 30 £475 +11.76% 3
West Midlands -6 27 £475 +11.76% 3
North of England -34 27 £484 +17.57% 1
North West -5 14 £438 -36.14% 1
Yorkshire -37 13 £675 +65.64%
East Midlands - 3 £134 -
South East -21 1 £384 -25.07% 2
SSH
UK

SSH
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 31 (53.45%) Confluence
2 11 (18.97%) SharePoint
3 10 (17.24%) nginx
4 6 (10.34%) TPMS
5 3 (5.17%) Apache Airflow
5 3 (5.17%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 10 (17.24%) Microsoft Office
1 10 (17.24%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Cloud Services
1 21 (36.21%) Amazon S3
2 18 (31.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
2 18 (31.03%) Amazon EC2
2 18 (31.03%) Amazon ELB
2 18 (31.03%) AWS
2 18 (31.03%) AWS KMS
2 18 (31.03%) Virtual Private Cloud
3 10 (17.24%) Amazon ECS
3 10 (17.24%) Azure
3 10 (17.24%) Microsoft 365
3 10 (17.24%) Route 53
4 8 (13.79%) Amazon Glacier
5 3 (5.17%) GCP
5 3 (5.17%) GitHub
6 2 (3.45%) GitHub Actions
7 1 (1.72%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 21 (36.21%) DNS
2 19 (32.76%) Firewall
2 19 (32.76%) FTP
3 18 (31.03%) HTTP
3 18 (31.03%) SMTP
4 10 (17.24%) IMAP
4 10 (17.24%) OpenLDAP
5 9 (15.52%) SSL
6 8 (13.79%) SNMP
7 5 (8.62%) Kerberos
8 4 (6.90%) TCP/IP
9 3 (5.17%) PuTTY
9 3 (5.17%) Telnet
10 2 (3.45%) Cisco IOS
10 2 (3.45%) Ethernet
10 2 (3.45%) Spanning Tree
10 2 (3.45%) TACACS
11 1 (1.72%) IPsec
11 1 (1.72%) VLAN
11 1 (1.72%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 18 (31.03%) Amazon RDS
2 13 (22.41%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (17.24%) Amazon Aurora
4 3 (5.17%) Big Data
4 3 (5.17%) Delta Lake
4 3 (5.17%) Hadoop
4 3 (5.17%) NoSQL
4 3 (5.17%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 31 (53.45%) JIRA
2 21 (36.21%) Jenkins
3 20 (34.48%) Git
4 18 (31.03%) Vagrant
5 3 (5.17%) MLflow
5 3 (5.17%) SonarQube
6 2 (3.45%) Poetry
6 2 (3.45%) PyCharm
6 2 (3.45%) Sonatype Nexus
6 2 (3.45%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 23 (39.66%) Social Skills
2 19 (32.76%) Public Sector
3 15 (25.86%) Finance
3 15 (25.86%) Presentation Skills
4 11 (18.97%) Documentation Skills
5 5 (8.62%) Analytical Skills
6 3 (5.17%) Banking
7 1 (1.72%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 17 (29.31%) AWS Engineer
1 17 (29.31%) Cloud Platform Engineer
1 17 (29.31%) DevOps Engineer
1 17 (29.31%) Platform Engineer
2 15 (25.86%) AWS DevOps
2 15 (25.86%) AWS DevOps Engineer
3 13 (22.41%) Analyst
4 10 (17.24%) AWS Platform Engineer
5 8 (13.79%) DevOps Platform Engineer
6 7 (12.07%) Consultant
7 6 (10.34%) Cryptography Engineer
7 6 (10.34%) Management Consultant
8 4 (6.90%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 3 (5.17%) Data Engineer
10 2 (3.45%) Break Fix Engineer
10 2 (3.45%) Network Engineer
10 2 (3.45%) Technical Engineer
11 1 (1.72%) Designer
11 1 (1.72%) IT Support
11 1 (1.72%) Network Support
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (29.31%) LDAP
2 5 (8.62%) OAuth
2 5 (8.62%) SAML
3 3 (5.17%) Apache Avro
3 3 (5.17%) Elastic Stack
3 3 (5.17%) Flask
3 3 (5.17%) NumPy
3 3 (5.17%) Pandas
Miscellaneous
1 18 (31.03%) Replication
2 11 (18.97%) Tandem
3 5 (8.62%) Data Protection Act
4 2 (3.45%) Enterprise Software
4 2 (3.45%) Machine to Machine
4 2 (3.45%) Management Information System
4 2 (3.45%) PKI
5 1 (1.72%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 45 (77.59%) Windows
2 37 (63.79%) Linux
3 18 (31.03%) Amazon Linux
3 18 (31.03%) VMS
4 11 (18.97%) Unix
5 10 (17.24%) Ubuntu
6 7 (12.07%) AIX
6 7 (12.07%) Solaris
7 3 (5.17%) Windows 10
7 3 (5.17%) Windows 7
7 3 (5.17%) Windows 8
Processes & Methodologies
1 29 (50.00%) Change Management
2 25 (43.10%) Cryptography
3 23 (39.66%) Key Management
4 21 (36.21%) Configuration Management
4 21 (36.21%) DevOps
5 19 (32.76%) Stakeholder Management
6 18 (31.03%) Cloud Security
6 18 (31.03%) Patch Management
6 18 (31.03%) Platform Engineering
7 13 (22.41%) Computer Science
7 13 (22.41%) Information Security
7 13 (22.41%) ITIL
8 12 (20.69%) CI/CD
8 12 (20.69%) Data Protection
8 12 (20.69%) Privileged Access Management
8 12 (20.69%) Roadmaps
9 10 (17.24%) Incident Response
9 10 (17.24%) Performance Tuning
10 9 (15.52%) Cybersecurity
10 9 (15.52%) Release Management
Programming Languages
1 33 (56.90%) Python
2 21 (36.21%) Groovy
2 21 (36.21%) PowerShell
3 13 (22.41%) SQL
4 8 (13.79%) Java
4 8 (13.79%) Perl
5 7 (12.07%) Bash
Qualifications
1 23 (39.66%) Degree
2 20 (34.48%) Security Cleared
3 17 (29.31%) SC Cleared
4 11 (18.97%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (17.24%) AWS Certification
5 10 (17.24%) Azure Certification
6 6 (10.34%) FFIEC
7 5 (8.62%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
8 3 (5.17%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (5.17%) CISM
8 3 (5.17%) CISSP
9 2 (3.45%) ITIL Certification
9 2 (3.45%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (18.97%) NIST
2 9 (15.52%) PCI DSS
3 6 (10.34%) GDPR
3 6 (10.34%) GLBA
4 3 (5.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 3 (5.17%) SOC 2
5 2 (3.45%) SLA
6 1 (1.72%) FIPS 140-2
System Software
1 21 (36.21%) Docker
2 18 (31.03%) Active Directory
2 18 (31.03%) DFS Replication
3 10 (17.24%) Dovecot
3 10 (17.24%) Postfix
3 10 (17.24%) Squid
4 3 (5.17%) BitLocker
4 3 (5.17%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 18 (31.03%) Grafana
1 18 (31.03%) Prometheus
1 18 (31.03%) Terraform
2 10 (17.24%) Nessus
2 10 (17.24%) Proxmox
3 3 (5.17%) Argo
3 3 (5.17%) Istio
3 3 (5.17%) Kubernetes
3 3 (5.17%) SCCM
4 1 (1.72%) Failover Clustering
4 1 (1.72%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 18 (31.03%) ServiceNow
2 13 (22.41%) Thales
3 11 (18.97%) IBM
4 10 (17.24%) Jaspersoft
5 8 (13.79%) Gemalto
6 7 (12.07%) BeyondTrust
6 7 (12.07%) CyberArk
7 6 (10.34%) Microsoft
7 6 (10.34%) Splunk
8 5 (8.62%) Cisco
9 3 (5.17%) Cloudera
9 3 (5.17%) Dell
9 3 (5.17%) Draytek
9 3 (5.17%) McAfee
10 2 (3.45%) BiZZdesign
10 2 (3.45%) Red Hat
11 1 (1.72%) Ciena
11 1 (1.72%) Fortinet
11 1 (1.72%) Meraki