Linux Contracts

Linux
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Linux skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Linux over the 6 months leading up to 5 July 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Jul 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 32 33 26
Rank change year-on-year +1 -7 +4
Contract jobs citing Linux 1,819 2,305 3,887
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 5.72% 5.32% 6.88%
As % of the Operating Systems category 41.78% 38.89% 43.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,164 1,486 2,617
10th Percentile £369 £340 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £575
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -6.52% -
75th Percentile £625 £638 £675
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £538 £525
% change year-on-year -6.98% +2.38% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 143 171
10th Percentile £41.25 £48.00 £22.50
25th Percentile £53.63 £57.50 £49.84
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £73.75
90th Percentile - - £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year - - +17.70%

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 4,354 5,927 8,994
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 13.69% 13.67% 15.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,818 3,888 6,226
10th Percentile £200 £190 £190
25th Percentile £313 £313 £340
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £465 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.16% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £580 £588 £638
90th Percentile £675 £700 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £463 £463
% change year-on-year -2.70% - +8.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 224 435 406
10th Percentile £15.50 £12.75 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.44 £16.25 £18.28
Median hourly rate £22.78 £25.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -8.88% -41.18% +88.89%
75th Percentile £42.56 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £65.93 £70.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £19.07 £35.00 £30.00
% change year-on-year -45.51% +16.67% +50.00%

Linux
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Linux as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Linux in the UK

Linux
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Linux.

Daily rate trend for Linux in the UK

Linux
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Linux over the 6 months to 5 July 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Linux in the UK

Linux
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Linux.

Hourly rate trend for Linux in the UK

Linux
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Linux over the 6 months to 5 July 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Linux in the UK

Linux
Top 17 Contract 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 5 July 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
England -1 1,445 £538 -0.69% 4,977
UK excluding London -2 955 £500 -6.98% 2,644
London +4 676 £575 +4.55% 2,634
Work from Home +7 601 £513 -4.21% 2,146
Scotland +14 241 £483 -3.40% 220
North of England +10 224 £500 -2.58% 574
South East -14 191 £525 -0.76% 663
North West +26 115 £402 -15.37% 343
South West -13 111 £575 +4.55% 370
Yorkshire +5 105 £525 +2.14% 193
Midlands -28 87 £475 -13.64% 299
East of England -4 86 £486 -11.59% 412
West Midlands -17 71 £500 -9.09% 185
East Midlands -26 16 £455 -9.10% 114
Northern Ireland -5 10 £350 - 81
Wales -12 10 £283 -48.64% 58
North East -6 7 £478 -20.42% 40

Linux
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 87 (4.78%) Confluence
2 68 (3.74%) Apache
3 48 (2.64%) JBoss
4 34 (1.87%) nginx
5 33 (1.81%) Microsoft Exchange
6 31 (1.70%) Apache Spark
6 31 (1.70%) OpenStack
7 25 (1.37%) Tomcat
8 18 (0.99%) WebSphere
9 17 (0.93%) CMS
9 17 (0.93%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 16 (0.88%) Documentum
10 16 (0.88%) SAS
11 13 (0.71%) FileNet
11 13 (0.71%) SharePoint
11 13 (0.71%) WebLogic
12 12 (0.66%) IIS
13 10 (0.55%) Apache Airflow
13 10 (0.55%) Mattermost
13 10 (0.55%) Skype for Business
Applications
1 22 (1.21%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (0.66%) Microsoft Excel
3 11 (0.60%) MS Visio
4 3 (0.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Project
5 2 (0.11%) Mozilla Thunderbird
6 1 (0.055%) Simulink
Business Applications
1 7 (0.38%) Kondor
1 7 (0.38%) SAP IBP
2 5 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
3 4 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
3 4 (0.22%) Sage X3
4 3 (0.16%) Oracle 11i
4 3 (0.16%) Oracle Applications
4 3 (0.16%) Oracle BPM
4 3 (0.16%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 3 (0.16%) Temenos T24
5 2 (0.11%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
6 1 (0.055%) IBM Planning Analytics
6 1 (0.055%) Oracle Payables
6 1 (0.055%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.055%) SAP HCM
6 1 (0.055%) SAP S/4HANA
6 1 (0.055%) SAP SCM
Cloud Services
1 506 (27.82%) AWS
2 319 (17.54%) Azure
3 115 (6.32%) GitHub
4 113 (6.21%) GCP
5 97 (5.33%) OpenShift
6 94 (5.17%) Amazon EC2
7 81 (4.45%) Amazon S3
8 67 (3.68%) AWS CloudFormation
8 67 (3.68%) IaaS
9 57 (3.13%) Serverless
10 54 (2.97%) Entra ID
11 53 (2.91%) Azure DevOps
12 47 (2.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 47 (2.58%) PaaS
13 44 (2.42%) Microsoft 365
14 40 (2.20%) SaaS
15 37 (2.03%) Amazon EKS
16 36 (1.98%) AWS Lambda
16 36 (1.98%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 30 (1.65%) Cloud Computing
Communications & Networking
1 171 (9.40%) DNS
2 156 (8.58%) Firewall
3 110 (6.05%) TCP/IP
4 93 (5.11%) SAN
5 87 (4.78%) DHCP
6 75 (4.12%) VPN
7 63 (3.46%) HTTP
8 55 (3.02%) LAN
9 51 (2.80%) WAN
10 45 (2.47%) Network Security
11 30 (1.65%) Ethernet
12 29 (1.59%) NAS
13 28 (1.54%) Internet
14 22 (1.21%) Wireless
15 21 (1.15%) SMTP
15 21 (1.15%) SSL
16 20 (1.10%) SSH
16 20 (1.10%) Wireshark
17 17 (0.93%) MPLS
18 16 (0.88%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 140 (7.70%) Relational Database
2 109 (5.99%) SQL Server
3 105 (5.77%) MongoDB
4 72 (3.96%) Oracle Database
5 70 (3.85%) DB2
6 68 (3.74%) PostgreSQL
7 63 (3.46%) Amazon RDS
8 55 (3.02%) MySQL
9 52 (2.86%) Elasticsearch
10 45 (2.47%) Big Data
11 33 (1.81%) NoSQL
11 33 (1.81%) RDBMS
12 24 (1.32%) Data Warehouse
13 22 (1.21%) Amazon Aurora
13 22 (1.21%) Hadoop
13 22 (1.21%) KDB
14 14 (0.77%) DynamoDB
15 13 (0.71%) Kdb+
15 13 (0.71%) SAP HANA
16 12 (0.66%) Redis
Development Applications
1 282 (15.50%) Git
2 267 (14.68%) Jenkins
3 168 (9.24%) JIRA
4 136 (7.48%) GitLab
5 83 (4.56%) JUnit
6 67 (3.68%) Bitbucket
7 44 (2.42%) Sonatype Nexus
8 43 (2.36%) Maven
9 36 (1.98%) Eclipse
10 32 (1.76%) SonarQube
11 29 (1.59%) Bitbucket Server
12 27 (1.48%) TeamCity
13 23 (1.26%) Gradle
13 23 (1.26%) Visual Studio
14 18 (0.99%) Artifactory
15 17 (0.93%) Robot Framework
16 16 (0.88%) GoogleTest
17 15 (0.82%) IntelliJ
17 15 (0.82%) Subversion
18 14 (0.77%) Cucumber
General
1 547 (30.07%) Social Skills
2 405 (22.26%) Finance
3 235 (12.92%) Analytical Skills
4 215 (11.82%) Banking
5 139 (7.64%) Public Sector
6 100 (5.50%) Investment Banking
7 59 (3.24%) Front Office
8 52 (2.86%) Telecoms
9 38 (2.09%) Financial Institution
10 33 (1.81%) Presentation Skills
11 32 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
12 30 (1.65%) Law
13 27 (1.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 21 (1.15%) Military
15 19 (1.04%) Legal
16 17 (0.93%) Manufacturing
16 17 (0.93%) Organisational Skills
17 14 (0.77%) Electronics
18 10 (0.55%) Marketing
19 9 (0.49%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 325 (17.87%) Developer
2 179 (9.84%) Senior
3 148 (8.14%) Linux Engineer
4 147 (8.08%) DevOps Engineer
5 137 (7.53%) Java Developer
6 135 (7.42%) Architect
7 108 (5.94%) Infrastructure Engineer
8 90 (4.95%) Lead
9 81 (4.45%) Analyst
10 78 (4.29%) Administrator
10 78 (4.29%) Software Engineer
11 71 (3.90%) Platform Engineer
12 65 (3.57%) Support Engineer
13 63 (3.46%) Python Developer
14 60 (3.30%) Senior Developer
15 55 (3.02%) Consultant
16 54 (2.97%) Linux Developer
17 53 (2.91%) AWS Engineer
18 46 (2.53%) Network Engineer
19 43 (2.36%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 121 (6.65%) Spring
2 110 (6.05%) Kafka
3 84 (4.62%) Middleware
4 83 (4.56%) REST
5 70 (3.85%) Elastic Stack
6 63 (3.46%) Spring Boot
7 61 (3.35%) SOAP
8 58 (3.19%) AngularJS
9 53 (2.91%) JMS
10 52 (2.86%) Web Services
11 45 (2.47%) RESTful
12 37 (2.03%) HTML
13 36 (1.98%) Node.js
14 35 (1.92%) FIX Protocol
15 33 (1.81%) React
16 31 (1.70%) LDAP
16 31 (1.70%) XML
17 27 (1.48%) CSS
17 27 (1.48%) YAML
18 26 (1.43%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 109 (5.99%) Data Centre
2 82 (4.51%) Data Structures
3 78 (4.29%) Linux Command Line
4 74 (4.07%) Management Information System
5 60 (3.30%) Cloud Native
5 60 (3.30%) Distributed Systems
5 60 (3.30%) Equities
6 54 (2.97%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
7 45 (2.47%) Public Cloud
8 44 (2.42%) Data Protection Act
9 43 (2.36%) Replication
10 39 (2.14%) Virtual Team
11 38 (2.09%) PKI
12 36 (1.98%) Algorithms
13 34 (1.87%) Clustering
14 33 (1.81%) Hedge funds
14 33 (1.81%) Self-Motivation
15 30 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
16 29 (1.59%) Enterprise Storage
17 28 (1.54%) Hybrid Cloud
Operating Systems
1 645 (35.46%) Windows
2 351 (19.30%) Unix
3 293 (16.11%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 190 (10.45%) Windows Server
5 80 (4.40%) Ubuntu
6 59 (3.24%) CentOS
7 44 (2.42%) Solaris
8 39 (2.14%) AIX
9 30 (1.65%) VMS
10 27 (1.48%) Windows Server 2019
11 26 (1.43%) Windows Server 2016
12 22 (1.21%) Mac OS
13 20 (1.10%) Windows 10
14 18 (0.99%) Amazon Linux
15 16 (0.88%) Debian
15 16 (0.88%) Embedded Linux
15 16 (0.88%) Oracle Linux
16 15 (0.82%) Apple iOS
16 15 (0.82%) Rocky
17 14 (0.77%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 438 (24.08%) DevOps
2 423 (23.25%) Agile
3 417 (22.92%) Problem-Solving
4 398 (21.88%) CI/CD
5 234 (12.86%) Containerisation
6 225 (12.37%) Software Engineering
7 204 (11.21%) Infrastructure as Code
8 169 (9.29%) Migration
9 167 (9.18%) High Availability
10 145 (7.97%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 135 (7.42%) Configuration Management
12 129 (7.09%) Microservices
13 128 (7.04%) Performance Tuning
14 123 (6.76%) ITIL
14 123 (6.76%) SDLC
15 120 (6.60%) Test Automation
16 117 (6.43%) Continuous Integration
17 103 (5.66%) Cybersecurity
18 98 (5.39%) Computer Science
19 96 (5.28%) Infrastructure Automation
Programming Languages
1 716 (39.36%) Python
2 397 (21.83%) Java
3 362 (19.90%) SQL
4 268 (14.73%) Bash
5 229 (12.59%) PowerShell
6 187 (10.28%) Shell Script
7 161 (8.85%) C++
8 116 (6.38%) Perl
9 113 (6.21%) JavaScript
10 72 (3.96%) C#
11 65 (3.57%) C
12 61 (3.35%) PL/SQL
13 32 (1.76%) Rust
14 31 (1.70%) Go
15 30 (1.65%) TypeScript
16 27 (1.48%) PHP
17 22 (1.21%) Scala
18 21 (1.15%) Tcl
19 18 (0.99%) Groovy
20 16 (0.88%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 411 (22.59%) Security Cleared
2 322 (17.70%) SC Cleared
3 139 (7.64%) Degree
4 95 (5.22%) DV Cleared
5 70 (3.85%) Cisco Certification
6 54 (2.97%) Computer Science Degree
7 40 (2.20%) CCNP
8 33 (1.81%) CISSP
9 27 (1.48%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
10 26 (1.43%) AWS Certification
11 22 (1.21%) RHCE
12 18 (0.99%) Azure Certification
13 17 (0.93%) BPSS Clearance
13 17 (0.93%) Oracle Certification
14 16 (0.88%) Microsoft Certification
15 15 (0.82%) ISTQB
15 15 (0.82%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 14 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 14 (0.77%) ISEB
16 14 (0.77%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 45 (2.47%) QA
2 33 (1.81%) GDPR
3 23 (1.26%) NIST
4 22 (1.21%) SLA
5 21 (1.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 18 (0.99%) Disclosure Scotland
7 17 (0.93%) PCI DSS
8 11 (0.60%) Data Quality
9 10 (0.55%) HL7
9 10 (0.55%) NCSC
10 9 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 7 (0.38%) Basel III
11 7 (0.38%) MiFID
12 6 (0.33%) Accessibility
13 5 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
13 5 (0.27%) HIPAA
14 4 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 4 (0.22%) GxP
14 4 (0.22%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 4 (0.22%) SOC 2
System Software
1 330 (18.14%) Docker
2 215 (11.82%) Active Directory
3 177 (9.73%) VMware Infrastructure
4 52 (2.86%) VMware ESXi
5 43 (2.36%) Hyper-V
6 39 (2.14%) vSphere
7 32 (1.76%) Virtual Machines
8 22 (1.21%) Veritas Cluster Server
9 19 (1.04%) Oracle RAC
10 16 (0.88%) VMware NSX
11 15 (0.82%) Virtual Servers
12 13 (0.71%) GPFS
12 13 (0.71%) Virtual Desktop
13 12 (0.66%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 12 (0.66%) NFS
13 12 (0.66%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.55%) Microsoft App-V
14 10 (0.55%) Postfix
15 9 (0.49%) Firmware
15 9 (0.49%) Terminal Services
Systems Management
1 432 (23.75%) Kubernetes
2 400 (21.99%) Ansible
3 366 (20.12%) Terraform
4 131 (7.20%) Puppet
5 112 (6.16%) Grafana
6 94 (5.17%) Prometheus
7 85 (4.67%) Progress Chef
8 46 (2.53%) vCenter Server
9 36 (1.98%) Kibana
10 35 (1.92%) Packer
11 26 (1.43%) Nagios
12 25 (1.37%) Argo
13 22 (1.21%) Consul
14 19 (1.04%) Data Guard
14 19 (1.04%) NetBackup
15 17 (0.93%) SCCM
16 16 (0.88%) Podman
16 16 (0.88%) SELinux
17 15 (0.82%) Istio
18 14 (0.77%) Rancher
Vendors
1 291 (16.00%) VMware
2 259 (14.24%) Microsoft
3 253 (13.91%) Red Hat
4 249 (13.69%) Oracle
5 120 (6.60%) Cisco
5 120 (6.60%) Splunk
6 88 (4.84%) IBM
7 71 (3.90%) Sybase
8 63 (3.46%) ServiceNow
9 60 (3.30%) Google
10 49 (2.69%) HP
11 46 (2.53%) Veritas
12 40 (2.20%) SAP
13 38 (2.09%) Citrix
14 37 (2.03%) Dell
15 34 (1.87%) AppDynamics
15 34 (1.87%) Atlassian
16 30 (1.65%) CyberArk
17 26 (1.43%) Dynatrace
18 25 (1.37%) NetApp