CentOS Contract Job Trends

CentOS Linux
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring CentOS skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 624 491 516
Rank change year-on-year -133 +25 +3
Contract jobs citing CentOS 40 61 80
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.076% 0.19% 0.19%
As % of the Operating Systems category 0.78% 1.39% 1.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 31 40 59
10th Percentile £340 £333 £312
25th Percentile £456 £400 £453
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £500
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +10.00% -12.28%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £538
90th Percentile - £664 £589
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £550 £463
% change year-on-year -4.55% +18.92% -15.91%

All Operating Systems
UK

CentOS 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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for operating system skills 5,104 4,390 5,797
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.65% 13.49% 13.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,242 2,834 3,795
10th Percentile £191 £200 £190
25th Percentile £319 £313 £320
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £465 £463 £475
Median % change year-on-year +0.54% -2.63% -5.00%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £588
90th Percentile £650 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £450 £465
% change year-on-year - -3.23% +3.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 347 245 418
10th Percentile £15.79 £15.50 £12.75
25th Percentile £18.50 £18.10 £16.25
Median hourly rate £26.00 £23.00 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -41.18%
75th Percentile £63.75 £54.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £67.60 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £26.47 £21.95 £31.25
% change year-on-year +20.59% -29.76% +6.66%

CentOS
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing CentOS relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

CentOS job vacancy trend in the UK

CentOS
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing CentOS.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing CentOS

CentOS
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing CentOS over the 6 months to 18 July 2026.

Daily rate histogram for CentOS in the UK

CentOS
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing CentOS.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing CentOS

CentOS
Top 13 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing CentOS within the UK over the 6 months to 18 July 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
England -138 39 £525 -4.55% 19
UK excluding London -110 34 £525 -4.55% 19
East of England -16 11 £600 +50.00% 2
Work from Home -64 8 £481 -3.80% 1
South East -61 7 £525 -4.55% 7
North of England -76 7 £481 +20.10% 5
South West -36 5 £458 -16.82% 4
North West -48 5 £480 +12.94% 3
Midlands -53 4 £530 - 1
East Midlands -10 3 £530 -
London -78 3 £525 - 1
Yorkshire -42 2 £594 +55.06% 1
West Midlands -60 1 - - 1

CentOS
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 5 (12.50%) Apache
2 4 (10.00%) nginx
2 4 (10.00%) Tomcat
3 3 (7.50%) IIS
3 3 (7.50%) SharePoint
4 1 (2.50%) Microsoft Exchange
Cloud Services
1 12 (30.00%) AWS
2 11 (27.50%) Azure
3 3 (7.50%) Cloudflare
3 3 (7.50%) GitHub
3 3 (7.50%) OpenShift
4 2 (5.00%) Entra ID
4 2 (5.00%) GCP
4 2 (5.00%) Microsoft 365
4 2 (5.00%) SaaS
5 1 (2.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 1 (2.50%) Amazon EC2
5 1 (2.50%) Amazon S3
5 1 (2.50%) Azure Sentinel
5 1 (2.50%) Azure Stack
5 1 (2.50%) Sentry
5 1 (2.50%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 14 (35.00%) DNS
2 10 (25.00%) Firewall
2 10 (25.00%) SAN
3 5 (12.50%) VLAN
4 3 (7.50%) NAS
4 3 (7.50%) TCP/IP
5 2 (5.00%) BIG-IP
5 2 (5.00%) DHCP
5 2 (5.00%) SSH
6 1 (2.50%) Cisco IOS
6 1 (2.50%) DNSSEC
6 1 (2.50%) Ethernet
6 1 (2.50%) InfiniBand
6 1 (2.50%) iSCSI
6 1 (2.50%) Kerberos
6 1 (2.50%) LAN
6 1 (2.50%) Remote Desktop
6 1 (2.50%) VPN
6 1 (2.50%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (10.00%) MySQL
1 4 (10.00%) SQL Server
2 1 (2.50%) Amazon RDS
2 1 (2.50%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 8 (20.00%) GitLab
2 6 (15.00%) Git
3 5 (12.50%) Jenkins
4 2 (5.00%) Robot Framework
General
1 8 (20.00%) Documentation Skills
2 6 (15.00%) Social Skills
3 3 (7.50%) Aerospace
4 2 (5.00%) Public Sector
5 1 (2.50%) Finance
5 1 (2.50%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 10 (25.00%) Linux Engineer
2 8 (20.00%) Senior
3 7 (17.50%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 4 (10.00%) Administrator
4 4 (10.00%) Backup Specialist
4 4 (10.00%) Linux Administrator
4 4 (10.00%) NetApp Specialist
4 4 (10.00%) Senior Data Warehouse Specialist
4 4 (10.00%) Senior Technical Specialist
4 4 (10.00%) Senior Unix Technical Specialist
4 4 (10.00%) Site Engineer
4 4 (10.00%) Site Reliability Engineer
4 4 (10.00%) Technical Specialist
4 4 (10.00%) Unix Engineer
4 4 (10.00%) Unix Linux Engineer
5 3 (7.50%) Automation Specialist
5 3 (7.50%) Backup Engineer
5 3 (7.50%) Backup Infrastructure Engineer
5 3 (7.50%) Cloud Engineer
6 2 (5.00%) Storage and Backup Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 6 (15.00%) LDAP
1 6 (15.00%) Middleware
2 5 (12.50%) YAML
3 3 (7.50%) LAMP
3 3 (7.50%) LEMP Stack
4 1 (2.50%) ActiveMQ
4 1 (2.50%) Elastic Stack
4 1 (2.50%) JSON
4 1 (2.50%) Kafka
4 1 (2.50%) OAuth
4 1 (2.50%) OAuth2
4 1 (2.50%) OpenID
4 1 (2.50%) RabbitMQ
4 1 (2.50%) REST
4 1 (2.50%) SailPoint
4 1 (2.50%) SAML
Miscellaneous
1 6 (15.00%) Replication
2 4 (10.00%) Data Centre
2 4 (10.00%) Legacy Systems
2 4 (10.00%) Management Information System
3 3 (7.50%) Onboarding
3 3 (7.50%) Public Cloud
4 2 (5.00%) Cloud Native
4 2 (5.00%) Hybrid Cloud
4 2 (5.00%) PKI
5 1 (2.50%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (2.50%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
5 1 (2.50%) Grid Computing
5 1 (2.50%) NHS
5 1 (2.50%) Operational Technology
5 1 (2.50%) SCADA
5 1 (2.50%) Video Conferencing
Operating Systems
1 40 (100.00%) Linux
2 34 (85.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 19 (47.50%) Windows
4 18 (45.00%) Ubuntu
5 15 (37.50%) Windows Server
6 9 (22.50%) Rocky
7 5 (12.50%) Unix
8 4 (10.00%) Solaris
9 2 (5.00%) Mac OS
9 2 (5.00%) Windows Server 2012
9 2 (5.00%) Windows Server 2019
10 1 (2.50%) Android
10 1 (2.50%) SUSE
10 1 (2.50%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 13 (32.50%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 8 (20.00%) DevOps
3 7 (17.50%) CI/CD
3 7 (17.50%) Problem-Solving
4 6 (15.00%) Infrastructure as Code
4 6 (15.00%) Migration
5 5 (12.50%) Agile
5 5 (12.50%) Configuration Management
6 4 (10.00%) High Availability
6 4 (10.00%) Incident Response
6 4 (10.00%) Information Management
6 4 (10.00%) Infrastructure Monitoring
6 4 (10.00%) Site Reliability Engineering
7 3 (7.50%) Analytics
7 3 (7.50%) Containerisation
7 3 (7.50%) Cybersecurity
7 3 (7.50%) Knowledge Transfer
7 3 (7.50%) Platform Engineering
7 3 (7.50%) Root Cause Analysis
7 3 (7.50%) User Stories
Programming Languages
1 16 (40.00%) PowerShell
2 14 (35.00%) Python
3 10 (25.00%) Bash
4 4 (10.00%) MATLAB
4 4 (10.00%) Shell Script
5 1 (2.50%) Java
5 1 (2.50%) Perl
5 1 (2.50%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 27 (67.50%) Security Cleared
2 23 (57.50%) SC Cleared
3 5 (12.50%) DV Cleared
4 2 (5.00%) Degree
4 2 (5.00%) RHCE
5 1 (2.50%) AWS Certification
5 1 (2.50%) Azure Certification
5 1 (2.50%) CISM
5 1 (2.50%) CISSP
5 1 (2.50%) CompTIA Security+
5 1 (2.50%) CRISC
5 1 (2.50%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (10.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 4 (10.00%) SLA
2 2 (5.00%) NCSC
2 2 (5.00%) NIST
3 1 (2.50%) HMG Security Policy Framework
3 1 (2.50%) PCI DSS
3 1 (2.50%) SOC 2
System Software
1 16 (40.00%) Active Directory
2 7 (17.50%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (15.00%) Docker
4 3 (7.50%) Dovecot
4 3 (7.50%) Postfix
5 2 (5.00%) Hyper-V
6 1 (2.50%) Citrix Hypervisor
6 1 (2.50%) GPFS
6 1 (2.50%) KVM
6 1 (2.50%) Lustre
6 1 (2.50%) NFS
6 1 (2.50%) Samba
6 1 (2.50%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 1 (2.50%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 27 (67.50%) Ansible
2 13 (32.50%) Terraform
3 7 (17.50%) NetBackup
4 4 (10.00%) Check_MK
4 4 (10.00%) Oracle ZFS
4 4 (10.00%) Podman
4 4 (10.00%) Puppet
4 4 (10.00%) Red Hat Satellite
5 3 (7.50%) Active Directory Federation Services
5 3 (7.50%) HAProxy
5 3 (7.50%) Kubernetes
6 2 (5.00%) Grafana
7 1 (2.50%) Jamf Pro
7 1 (2.50%) Nagios
7 1 (2.50%) Progress Chef
7 1 (2.50%) Prometheus
7 1 (2.50%) vCenter Server
7 1 (2.50%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 12 (30.00%) Microsoft
1 12 (30.00%) Red Hat
2 11 (27.50%) VMware
3 7 (17.50%) NetApp
3 7 (17.50%) Veeam
4 4 (10.00%) Cisco
5 3 (7.50%) F5
5 3 (7.50%) Juniper
6 2 (5.00%) Splunk
7 1 (2.50%) Apple
7 1 (2.50%) Atlassian
7 1 (2.50%) CrowdStrike
7 1 (2.50%) CyberArk
7 1 (2.50%) D-Link
7 1 (2.50%) Google
7 1 (2.50%) Infoblox
7 1 (2.50%) Okta
7 1 (2.50%) Ping Identity
7 1 (2.50%) ServiceNow