Linux Contract Job Trends

Linux
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Linux skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 49 31 34
Rank change year-on-year -18 +3 -8
Contract jobs citing Linux 1,906 1,763 2,199
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.03% 6.02% 5.05%
As % of the Operating Systems category 40.52% 43.17% 37.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,204 1,115 1,445
10th Percentile £325 £374 £328
25th Percentile £402 £440 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £650 £646
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £484 £525 £540
% change year-on-year -7.81% -2.78% +0.37%
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 53 107
10th Percentile £30.24 £40.50 £28.88
25th Percentile £43.81 £55.00 £48.00
Median hourly rate £62.82 £65.00 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year -3.36% +7.44% -6.92%
75th Percentile £68.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £74.71 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £65.25 £60.50
% change year-on-year -3.24% +7.85% -6.92%

All Operating Systems
UK

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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for operating system skills 4,704 4,084 5,803
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.95% 13.96% 13.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,064 2,692 3,912
10th Percentile £185 £200 £185
25th Percentile £313 £320 £300
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £475 £469
Median % change year-on-year -5.26% +1.28% -7.13%
75th Percentile £575 £594 £588
90th Percentile £658 £699 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £425 £450 £450
% change year-on-year -5.56% - -5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 325 179 396
10th Percentile £16.01 £16.22 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.32 £18.11 £15.44
Median hourly rate £42.50 £24.18 £22.00
Median % change year-on-year +75.77% +9.91% -44.02%
75th Percentile £67.25 £62.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £68.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £22.94 £22.00
% change year-on-year +107.08% +4.26% -29.60%

Linux
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Linux job vacancy trend in the UK

Linux
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

Linux
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Linux over the 6 months to 1 May 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Linux in the UK

Linux
Hourly Rate Trend

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

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

Linux
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Linux over the 6 months to 1 May 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Linux in the UK

Linux
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Linux within the UK over the 6 months to 1 May 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 -23 1,599 £513 -6.82% 701
UK excluding London -11 1,135 £484 -7.81% 573
London -43 550 £550 -6.78% 190
Work from Home -29 485 £500 -4.76% 254
South East -2 317 £500 -9.09% 193
North of England -14 287 £475 -11.63% 91
South West -11 159 £550 -8.33% 94
Midlands -15 157 £500 +0.05% 65
Yorkshire -20 157 £460 -16.36% 30
West Midlands -3 137 £493 -8.29% 28
North West -18 120 £485 -4.98% 42
Scotland -19 95 £438 -6.42% 30
East of England -4 94 £470 -4.08% 96
East Midlands -30 18 £525 +15.51% 37
Wales -1 17 £465 -20.65% 16
Northern Ireland +13 15 £425 +30.77% 5
North East -22 10 £413 -21.43% 19

Linux
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 86 (4.51%) Confluence
2 49 (2.57%) Apache
3 35 (1.84%) nginx
4 28 (1.47%) Microsoft Exchange
5 26 (1.36%) Apache Spark
6 22 (1.15%) Apache Airflow
7 17 (0.89%) Tomcat
8 16 (0.84%) WebLogic
9 15 (0.79%) SAS
10 14 (0.73%) OpenStack
11 13 (0.68%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.58%) CICS
13 10 (0.52%) TPMS
14 6 (0.31%) JBoss
14 6 (0.31%) NetWeaver
14 6 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 6 (0.31%) SharePoint
14 6 (0.31%) WebSphere Application Server
15 4 (0.21%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 4 (0.21%) CMS
Applications
1 29 (1.52%) Microsoft Office
2 13 (0.68%) Microsoft Excel
3 7 (0.37%) MS Visio
4 6 (0.31%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
5 4 (0.21%) Weka
6 3 (0.16%) Simulink
7 1 (0.052%) Adobe Illustrator
7 1 (0.052%) InDesign
7 1 (0.052%) Photoshop
Business Applications
1 8 (0.42%) SAP S/4HANA
2 5 (0.26%) Remedy ITSM
3 4 (0.21%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 3 (0.16%) Oracle 11i
5 2 (0.10%) BusinessWorks
5 2 (0.10%) Oracle General Ledger
5 2 (0.10%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
6 1 (0.052%) Actimize
6 1 (0.052%) Cloudability
6 1 (0.052%) Odoo
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle Applications
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle EBS R12
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle FAH
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle Payables
6 1 (0.052%) Oracle Receivables
6 1 (0.052%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 545 (28.59%) AWS
2 372 (19.52%) Azure
3 177 (9.29%) GitHub
4 124 (6.51%) OpenShift
5 108 (5.67%) GCP
6 97 (5.09%) Amazon EC2
7 94 (4.93%) GitHub Actions
8 89 (4.67%) Amazon S3
9 83 (4.35%) AWS CloudFormation
10 79 (4.14%) Serverless
11 75 (3.93%) Amazon EKS
12 67 (3.52%) AWS Lambda
12 67 (3.52%) Azure DevOps
13 60 (3.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 59 (3.10%) Amazon ECS
15 45 (2.36%) IaaS
16 42 (2.20%) Microsoft 365
17 41 (2.15%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 39 (2.05%) SaaS
19 38 (1.99%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 191 (10.02%) Firewall
2 130 (6.82%) DNS
3 101 (5.30%) TCP/IP
4 74 (3.88%) VPN
5 67 (3.52%) Network Security
6 54 (2.83%) SAN
7 46 (2.41%) WAN
8 38 (1.99%) DHCP
8 38 (1.99%) HTTP
8 38 (1.99%) LAN
8 38 (1.99%) SSH
9 35 (1.84%) VSAN
10 32 (1.68%) SNMP
10 32 (1.68%) SSL
11 24 (1.26%) Ethernet
12 21 (1.10%) Wireless
13 20 (1.05%) NAS
14 18 (0.94%) BGP
15 17 (0.89%) Kerberos
16 15 (0.79%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 130 (6.82%) PostgreSQL
2 111 (5.82%) SQL Server
3 74 (3.88%) MySQL
4 68 (3.57%) Relational Database
5 67 (3.52%) Amazon RDS
6 66 (3.46%) MongoDB
7 64 (3.36%) Oracle Database
8 43 (2.26%) Elasticsearch
9 36 (1.89%) NoSQL
10 33 (1.73%) Amazon Aurora
11 25 (1.31%) Big Data
11 25 (1.31%) DynamoDB
12 21 (1.10%) Data Warehouse
13 19 (1.00%) KDB
14 18 (0.94%) Kdb+
15 16 (0.84%) DB2
15 16 (0.84%) Hadoop
15 16 (0.84%) SAP HANA
16 14 (0.73%) Data Lake
17 11 (0.58%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 213 (11.18%) Jenkins
2 178 (9.34%) Git
3 169 (8.87%) GitLab
4 145 (7.61%) JIRA
5 32 (1.68%) Maven
6 28 (1.47%) Bitbucket
6 28 (1.47%) Sonatype Nexus
7 27 (1.42%) JUnit
8 25 (1.31%) Eclipse
8 25 (1.31%) Mockito
8 25 (1.31%) SonarQube
9 17 (0.89%) Artifactory
10 16 (0.84%) Visual Studio
11 15 (0.79%) Cucumber
12 13 (0.68%) Jaeger
12 13 (0.68%) Rational Rhapsody
13 11 (0.58%) DbUnit
13 11 (0.58%) jMock
14 10 (0.52%) Atlassian Bamboo
15 9 (0.47%) Selenium
General
1 413 (21.67%) Social Skills
2 279 (14.64%) Finance
3 190 (9.97%) Public Sector
4 151 (7.92%) Analytical Skills
5 108 (5.67%) Banking
6 73 (3.83%) Documentation Skills
7 48 (2.52%) Military
8 27 (1.42%) Financial Institution
9 25 (1.31%) Presentation Skills
10 21 (1.10%) Aerospace
10 21 (1.10%) Telecoms
11 20 (1.05%) Front Office
11 20 (1.05%) Influencing Skills
12 19 (1.00%) Investment Banking
12 19 (1.00%) Retail
13 17 (0.89%) Law
14 14 (0.73%) Manufacturing
15 13 (0.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 13 (0.68%) Organisational Skills
16 12 (0.63%) Legal
Job Titles
1 228 (11.96%) Senior
2 222 (11.65%) Developer
3 173 (9.08%) DevOps Engineer
4 138 (7.24%) Linux Engineer
5 135 (7.08%) Software Engineer
6 118 (6.19%) Architect
7 108 (5.67%) Analyst
8 102 (5.35%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 96 (5.04%) Lead
10 87 (4.56%) Java Developer
11 80 (4.20%) Administrator
12 74 (3.88%) Site Reliability Engineer
13 68 (3.57%) AWS Engineer
13 68 (3.57%) Site Engineer
14 62 (3.25%) Platform Engineer
15 53 (2.78%) Consultant
15 53 (2.78%) Security Engineer
16 49 (2.57%) AWS DevOps
17 45 (2.36%) Support Engineer
18 44 (2.31%) Embedded Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 113 (5.93%) Kafka
2 89 (4.67%) REST
3 78 (4.09%) Elastic Stack
4 70 (3.67%) Middleware
5 60 (3.15%) Node.js
6 51 (2.68%) Spring
7 50 (2.62%) LDAP
8 47 (2.47%) Spring Boot
9 41 (2.15%) Web Services
10 36 (1.89%) .NET
10 36 (1.89%) RESTful
11 32 (1.68%) XML
12 31 (1.63%) YAML
13 28 (1.47%) JSON
14 26 (1.36%) AngularJS
15 24 (1.26%) ActiveMQ
15 24 (1.26%) SOAP
16 23 (1.21%) React
17 22 (1.15%) CSS
18 20 (1.05%) Flash
Miscellaneous
1 127 (6.66%) Data Centre
2 101 (5.30%) Cloud Native
3 74 (3.88%) Linux Command Line
4 70 (3.67%) Onboarding
5 68 (3.57%) Management Information System
6 63 (3.31%) Distributed Systems
7 55 (2.89%) PKI
8 53 (2.78%) Replication
9 49 (2.57%) Hybrid Cloud
10 47 (2.47%) Public Cloud
11 41 (2.15%) Legacy Systems
12 36 (1.89%) Product Ownership
13 33 (1.73%) Security Posture
14 30 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
15 29 (1.52%) Enterprise Storage
15 29 (1.52%) Security Operations Centre
16 27 (1.42%) Embedded Systems
17 24 (1.26%) Clustering
18 22 (1.15%) Equities
19 21 (1.10%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 722 (37.88%) Windows
2 373 (19.57%) Unix
3 273 (14.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 171 (8.97%) Windows Server
5 86 (4.51%) Ubuntu
6 51 (2.68%) AIX
7 41 (2.15%) CentOS
8 38 (1.99%) Solaris
9 35 (1.84%) VMS
10 33 (1.73%) Embedded Linux
11 31 (1.63%) Android
12 25 (1.31%) Windows Server 2016
13 21 (1.10%) Mac OS
13 21 (1.10%) Windows Server 2019
14 20 (1.05%) Debian
15 13 (0.68%) Mac OS X
15 13 (0.68%) SUSE
16 11 (0.58%) Oracle Linux
17 9 (0.47%) Windows 10
17 9 (0.47%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 544 (28.54%) CI/CD
2 447 (23.45%) DevOps
3 383 (20.09%) Agile
4 314 (16.47%) Problem-Solving
5 291 (15.27%) Infrastructure as Code
6 262 (13.75%) Containerisation
7 216 (11.33%) Software Engineering
8 184 (9.65%) Observability
9 167 (8.76%) Migration
10 158 (8.29%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 145 (7.61%) SIEM
12 143 (7.50%) Computer Science
13 142 (7.45%) Continuous Improvement
13 142 (7.45%) Microservices
14 141 (7.40%) High Availability
15 136 (7.14%) Performance Tuning
16 134 (7.03%) Incident Response
17 133 (6.98%) Platform Engineering
18 132 (6.93%) Cybersecurity
19 131 (6.87%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 650 (34.10%) Python
2 321 (16.84%) SQL
3 288 (15.11%) Java
4 264 (13.85%) Bash
5 259 (13.59%) PowerShell
6 166 (8.71%) Shell Script
7 127 (6.66%) C++
8 108 (5.67%) JavaScript
9 73 (3.83%) Perl
10 63 (3.31%) C#
11 56 (2.94%) C
12 45 (2.36%) Go
13 42 (2.20%) PL/SQL
14 36 (1.89%) Ruby
15 29 (1.52%) TypeScript
16 27 (1.42%) PHP
17 21 (1.10%) Ada
17 21 (1.10%) Rust
18 19 (1.00%) MATLAB
19 18 (0.94%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 749 (39.30%) Security Cleared
2 549 (28.80%) SC Cleared
3 211 (11.07%) DV Cleared
4 181 (9.50%) Degree
5 90 (4.72%) BPSS Clearance
6 83 (4.35%) Computer Science Degree
7 50 (2.62%) AWS Certification
8 45 (2.36%) Cisco Certification
9 42 (2.20%) CISSP
9 42 (2.20%) CompTIA Security+
10 34 (1.78%) RHCE
11 28 (1.47%) Azure Certification
12 25 (1.31%) CCNA
13 21 (1.10%) Oracle Certification
14 18 (0.94%) CCNP
14 18 (0.94%) Microsoft Certification
14 18 (0.94%) OCP
15 17 (0.89%) CompTIA CySA+
16 15 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 13 (0.68%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 81 (4.25%) NIST
2 70 (3.67%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 54 (2.83%) QA
4 40 (2.10%) SLA
5 34 (1.78%) GDPR
6 28 (1.47%) Cyber Essentials
7 24 (1.26%) NCSC
8 20 (1.05%) PCI DSS
9 13 (0.68%) Data Quality
10 11 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 10 (0.52%) Disclosure Scotland
11 10 (0.52%) GLBA
11 10 (0.52%) HIPAA
11 10 (0.52%) NIST 800
12 9 (0.47%) GRC
13 8 (0.42%) Accessibility
14 5 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 5 (0.26%) DICOM
15 4 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
15 4 (0.21%) HL7
System Software
1 332 (17.42%) Docker
2 220 (11.54%) VMware Infrastructure
3 173 (9.08%) Active Directory
4 80 (4.20%) Virtual Machines
5 70 (3.67%) Hyper-V
6 69 (3.62%) vSphere
7 60 (3.15%) VMware ESXi
8 40 (2.10%) NFS
9 39 (2.05%) Firmware
10 38 (1.99%) VMware NSX
11 26 (1.36%) GPFS
11 26 (1.36%) KVM
12 19 (1.00%) Oracle RAC
12 19 (1.00%) Postfix
13 17 (0.89%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 11 (0.58%) Ceph
15 10 (0.52%) Lustre
16 8 (0.42%) Embedded Firmware
17 7 (0.37%) BitLocker
17 7 (0.37%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 413 (21.67%) Kubernetes
2 378 (19.83%) Ansible
3 375 (19.67%) Terraform
4 183 (9.60%) Grafana
5 142 (7.45%) Prometheus
6 74 (3.88%) Puppet
7 50 (2.62%) Progress Chef
8 42 (2.20%) vCenter Server
9 30 (1.57%) Kibana
9 30 (1.57%) vRealize
10 29 (1.52%) Oracle RMAN
11 28 (1.47%) Podman
12 27 (1.42%) Packer
13 26 (1.36%) Red Hat Satellite
14 23 (1.21%) Nagios
14 23 (1.21%) ZABBIX
15 22 (1.15%) Argo
16 21 (1.10%) Single Sign-On
17 20 (1.05%) Tivoli
18 19 (1.00%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 297 (15.58%) VMware
2 273 (14.32%) Microsoft
3 259 (13.59%) Oracle
4 212 (11.12%) Red Hat
5 187 (9.81%) Splunk
6 103 (5.40%) Cisco
7 97 (5.09%) IBM
8 73 (3.83%) ServiceNow
9 46 (2.41%) Dell
10 45 (2.36%) CyberArk
11 43 (2.26%) Palo Alto
12 38 (1.99%) Google
13 35 (1.84%) HP
14 33 (1.73%) SolarWinds
15 28 (1.47%) Atlassian
16 26 (1.36%) BeyondTrust
16 26 (1.36%) NVIDIA
17 25 (1.31%) NetApp
18 24 (1.26%) SAP
19 23 (1.21%) F5