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 27 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 51 32 33
Rank change year-on-year -19 +1 -8
Contract jobs citing Linux 1,899 1,782 2,292
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.31% 6.14% 5.18%
As % of the Operating Systems category 40.06% 42.77% 38.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,203 1,145 1,522
10th Percentile £325 £374 £317
25th Percentile £401 £450 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -5.98%
75th Percentile £613 £650 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £537 £530
% change year-on-year -8.38% +1.32% -1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 105 51 106
10th Percentile £20.39 £45.00 £25.72
25th Percentile £41.25 £57.82 £48.00
Median hourly rate £63.14 £65.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -2.87% +8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £68.75 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.63 £71.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.14 £65.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year -2.87% +8.33% -7.69%

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 4,740 4,166 5,980
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.75% 14.35% 13.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,102 2,785 3,999
10th Percentile £181 £200 £180
25th Percentile £300 £325 £281
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £475 £457
Median % change year-on-year -5.26% +3.94% -11.26%
75th Percentile £569 £600 £594
90th Percentile £660 £699 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £425 £450 £438
% change year-on-year -5.56% +2.86% -7.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 337 161 409
10th Percentile £15.00 £16.67 £12.84
25th Percentile £17.69 £18.50 £15.50
Median hourly rate £23.50 £25.00 £22.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.00% +13.64% -24.14%
75th Percentile £63.50 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £72.80 £68.75 £68.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.81 £24.66 £20.00
% change year-on-year -7.50% +23.30% -24.53%

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 27 March 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 27 March 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 27 March 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 -19 1,621 £522 -5.05% 832
UK excluding London -11 1,113 £492 -8.38% 721
London -37 578 £550 -7.56% 200
Work from Home -27 482 £500 -4.76% 308
South East -2 319 £500 -9.09% 206
North of England -8 303 £500 -9.09% 125
Midlands -9 174 £475 -9.52% 75
Yorkshire -16 165 £480 -12.73% 41
West Midlands +2 157 £475 -12.04% 41
South West -21 141 £538 -10.42% 144
North West -8 129 £525 +0.05% 58
Scotland -24 85 £419 -10.90% 44
East of England -15 84 £454 -2.89% 117
East Midlands -38 17 £478 +4.03% 34
Northern Ireland +6 15 £425 +30.77% 7
North East -15 11 £550 +4.76% 27
Wales -14 8 £404 -26.59% 23

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 97 (5.11%) Confluence
2 45 (2.37%) nginx
3 42 (2.21%) Apache
4 38 (2.00%) Microsoft Exchange
5 18 (0.95%) OpenStack
6 16 (0.84%) Apache Spark
7 15 (0.79%) Apache Airflow
8 14 (0.74%) SAS
8 14 (0.74%) WebLogic
9 13 (0.68%) SharePoint
10 12 (0.63%) Tomcat
10 12 (0.63%) TPMS
11 10 (0.53%) WebSphere
12 8 (0.42%) CICS
13 6 (0.32%) NetWeaver
13 6 (0.32%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 4 (0.21%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 4 (0.21%) JBoss
15 3 (0.16%) IIS
15 3 (0.16%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 47 (2.47%) Microsoft Office
2 19 (1.00%) Microsoft Excel
3 11 (0.58%) MS Visio
4 6 (0.32%) Weka
5 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 3 (0.16%) Simulink
8 1 (0.053%) Adobe Illustrator
8 1 (0.053%) InDesign
8 1 (0.053%) Microsoft PowerPoint
8 1 (0.053%) Photoshop
Business Applications
1 9 (0.47%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (0.21%) Oracle 11i
3 3 (0.16%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 2 (0.11%) BusinessWorks
4 2 (0.11%) Oracle General Ledger
4 2 (0.11%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
5 1 (0.053%) Cloudability
5 1 (0.053%) Odoo
5 1 (0.053%) Oracle EBS
5 1 (0.053%) Oracle EBS R12
5 1 (0.053%) Oracle FAH
5 1 (0.053%) Oracle Payables
5 1 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
5 1 (0.053%) SAP MDG
5 1 (0.053%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 568 (29.91%) AWS
2 382 (20.12%) Azure
3 182 (9.58%) GitHub
4 136 (7.16%) OpenShift
5 128 (6.74%) GCP
6 101 (5.32%) AWS CloudFormation
7 100 (5.27%) Amazon EC2
8 99 (5.21%) Serverless
9 93 (4.90%) GitHub Actions
10 83 (4.37%) Amazon S3
11 73 (3.84%) Amazon EKS
12 68 (3.58%) Azure DevOps
13 65 (3.42%) AWS Lambda
14 59 (3.11%) Amazon ECS
15 57 (3.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 44 (2.32%) IaaS
17 43 (2.26%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 39 (2.05%) Entra ID
19 38 (2.00%) Microsoft 365
20 32 (1.69%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 209 (11.01%) Firewall
2 131 (6.90%) DNS
3 111 (5.85%) TCP/IP
4 67 (3.53%) VPN
5 66 (3.48%) Network Security
6 52 (2.74%) SAN
7 47 (2.47%) SSH
8 43 (2.26%) VSAN
9 36 (1.90%) WAN
10 34 (1.79%) DHCP
10 34 (1.79%) HTTP
11 33 (1.74%) SSL
12 30 (1.58%) LAN
12 30 (1.58%) SNMP
13 24 (1.26%) BGP
13 24 (1.26%) Ethernet
13 24 (1.26%) Wireless
14 21 (1.11%) Kerberos
15 20 (1.05%) NAS
16 19 (1.00%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 140 (7.37%) PostgreSQL
2 94 (4.95%) SQL Server
3 75 (3.95%) Amazon RDS
4 71 (3.74%) Relational Database
5 68 (3.58%) MySQL
6 67 (3.53%) MongoDB
7 60 (3.16%) Oracle Database
8 49 (2.58%) NoSQL
9 38 (2.00%) Elasticsearch
10 24 (1.26%) Data Warehouse
11 19 (1.00%) DB2
12 18 (0.95%) KDB
13 17 (0.90%) Big Data
13 17 (0.90%) Kdb+
14 15 (0.79%) DynamoDB
15 14 (0.74%) Amazon Aurora
15 14 (0.74%) Data Lake
16 13 (0.68%) Hadoop
16 13 (0.68%) SAP HANA
17 12 (0.63%) Sybase ASE
Development Applications
1 247 (13.01%) Jenkins
2 196 (10.32%) Git
3 189 (9.95%) GitLab
4 155 (8.16%) JIRA
5 41 (2.16%) Bitbucket
6 39 (2.05%) JUnit
7 35 (1.84%) Sonatype Nexus
8 33 (1.74%) Maven
9 30 (1.58%) Eclipse
10 21 (1.11%) Artifactory
10 21 (1.11%) Cucumber
10 21 (1.11%) Mockito
11 20 (1.05%) SonarQube
12 16 (0.84%) Visual Studio
13 13 (0.68%) JMeter
14 12 (0.63%) Liquibase
14 12 (0.63%) Selenium
15 11 (0.58%) Burp Suite
15 11 (0.58%) Jaeger
16 10 (0.53%) Atlassian Bamboo
General
1 473 (24.91%) Social Skills
2 303 (15.96%) Finance
3 194 (10.22%) Public Sector
4 158 (8.32%) Analytical Skills
5 126 (6.64%) Banking
6 59 (3.11%) Documentation Skills
7 46 (2.42%) Military
8 39 (2.05%) Financial Institution
9 32 (1.69%) Presentation Skills
10 26 (1.37%) Front Office
10 26 (1.37%) Investment Banking
11 24 (1.26%) Organisational Skills
12 21 (1.11%) Influencing Skills
12 21 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 19 (1.00%) Retail
14 17 (0.90%) Aerospace
15 16 (0.84%) Law
15 16 (0.84%) Legal
16 14 (0.74%) Manufacturing
17 10 (0.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
Job Titles
1 234 (12.32%) Senior
2 229 (12.06%) Developer
3 172 (9.06%) DevOps Engineer
4 135 (7.11%) Software Engineer
5 131 (6.90%) Architect
6 122 (6.42%) Analyst
7 114 (6.00%) Linux Engineer
8 86 (4.53%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 82 (4.32%) Java Developer
10 81 (4.27%) Lead
11 79 (4.16%) Administrator
12 74 (3.90%) Platform Engineer
13 69 (3.63%) Site Reliability Engineer
14 65 (3.42%) AWS Engineer
15 64 (3.37%) Site Engineer
16 52 (2.74%) AWS DevOps
17 51 (2.69%) Support Engineer
18 50 (2.63%) Security Engineer
19 46 (2.42%) Consultant
20 44 (2.32%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 117 (6.16%) Kafka
2 115 (6.06%) REST
3 104 (5.48%) Elastic Stack
4 70 (3.69%) Node.js
5 68 (3.58%) Middleware
6 54 (2.84%) Spring
7 51 (2.69%) LDAP
8 47 (2.47%) RESTful
9 42 (2.21%) Spring Boot
10 41 (2.16%) Web Services
11 38 (2.00%) JSON
11 38 (2.00%) XML
12 34 (1.79%) YAML
13 33 (1.74%) React
14 30 (1.58%) AngularJS
15 27 (1.42%) SOAP
16 25 (1.32%) .NET
17 20 (1.05%) CSS
17 20 (1.05%) Flash
17 20 (1.05%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 117 (6.16%) Data Centre
2 113 (5.95%) Cloud Native
3 81 (4.27%) Linux Command Line
4 71 (3.74%) Distributed Systems
5 66 (3.48%) Management Information System
5 66 (3.48%) Public Cloud
6 57 (3.00%) PKI
7 54 (2.84%) Onboarding
7 54 (2.84%) Replication
8 48 (2.53%) Hybrid Cloud
9 42 (2.21%) Product Ownership
10 36 (1.90%) Security Operations Centre
11 34 (1.79%) Equities
11 34 (1.79%) Legacy Systems
12 33 (1.74%) Data Protection Act
12 33 (1.74%) Security Posture
13 27 (1.42%) Enterprise Software
13 27 (1.42%) Fixed Income
13 27 (1.42%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 25 (1.32%) Enterprise Storage
Operating Systems
1 704 (37.07%) Windows
2 330 (17.38%) Unix
3 272 (14.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 163 (8.58%) Windows Server
5 89 (4.69%) Ubuntu
6 41 (2.16%) CentOS
7 39 (2.05%) AIX
8 38 (2.00%) Android
9 32 (1.69%) Solaris
9 32 (1.69%) VMS
10 29 (1.53%) Embedded Linux
11 26 (1.37%) Windows Server 2016
12 21 (1.11%) Mac OS
13 20 (1.05%) Windows Server 2019
14 15 (0.79%) Debian
15 12 (0.63%) Mac OS X
16 11 (0.58%) Kali Linux
16 11 (0.58%) SUSE
17 10 (0.53%) Windows 10
17 10 (0.53%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 576 (30.33%) CI/CD
2 485 (25.54%) DevOps
3 429 (22.59%) Agile
4 339 (17.85%) Problem-Solving
5 313 (16.48%) Infrastructure as Code
6 301 (15.85%) Containerisation
7 218 (11.48%) Software Engineering
8 195 (10.27%) Observability
9 162 (8.53%) Continuous Improvement
10 156 (8.21%) Cybersecurity
11 155 (8.16%) Computer Science
12 152 (8.00%) Migration
13 149 (7.85%) Microservices
14 148 (7.79%) Incident Response
15 144 (7.58%) Infrastructure Engineering
16 139 (7.32%) Test Automation
17 135 (7.11%) Platform Engineering
18 130 (6.85%) High Availability
19 129 (6.79%) Site Reliability Engineering
20 126 (6.64%) SIEM
Programming Languages
1 679 (35.76%) Python
2 312 (16.43%) SQL
3 305 (16.06%) Bash
4 297 (15.64%) Java
5 280 (14.74%) PowerShell
6 177 (9.32%) Shell Script
7 146 (7.69%) C++
8 113 (5.95%) JavaScript
9 91 (4.79%) Perl
10 65 (3.42%) C#
11 54 (2.84%) Go
12 51 (2.69%) C
13 40 (2.11%) Ruby
14 34 (1.79%) PL/SQL
15 32 (1.69%) TypeScript
16 25 (1.32%) PHP
16 25 (1.32%) Rust
17 20 (1.05%) Kusto Query Language
18 17 (0.90%) Ada
18 17 (0.90%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 743 (39.13%) Security Cleared
2 543 (28.59%) SC Cleared
3 197 (10.37%) Degree
4 186 (9.79%) DV Cleared
5 95 (5.00%) Computer Science Degree
6 87 (4.58%) BPSS Clearance
7 56 (2.95%) AWS Certification
8 41 (2.16%) Cisco Certification
9 40 (2.11%) CompTIA Security+
10 39 (2.05%) CISSP
11 28 (1.47%) Master's Degree
12 27 (1.42%) RHCE
13 25 (1.32%) Azure Certification
13 25 (1.32%) CCNA
14 24 (1.26%) CCNP
15 21 (1.11%) Oracle Certification
16 20 (1.05%) Microsoft Certification
17 18 (0.95%) CompTIA CySA+
18 17 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 17 (0.90%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 80 (4.21%) NIST
2 58 (3.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 48 (2.53%) QA
4 44 (2.32%) GDPR
5 33 (1.74%) SLA
6 26 (1.37%) Cyber Essentials
7 23 (1.21%) NCSC
8 21 (1.11%) PCI DSS
9 13 (0.68%) Data Quality
10 12 (0.63%) GLBA
11 10 (0.53%) NIST 800
11 10 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 9 (0.47%) HIPAA
13 8 (0.42%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
14 7 (0.37%) Accessibility
15 5 (0.26%) SOC 2
16 4 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 4 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
16 4 (0.21%) GRC
17 3 (0.16%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 389 (20.48%) Docker
2 231 (12.16%) VMware Infrastructure
3 159 (8.37%) Active Directory
4 94 (4.95%) vSphere
5 68 (3.58%) Virtual Machines
6 59 (3.11%) Hyper-V
7 56 (2.95%) VMware ESXi
8 37 (1.95%) VMware NSX
9 34 (1.79%) NFS
10 32 (1.69%) Firmware
11 28 (1.47%) GPFS
12 21 (1.11%) KVM
13 15 (0.79%) Oracle RAC
13 15 (0.79%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 14 (0.74%) Postfix
15 12 (0.63%) Lustre
16 11 (0.58%) Ceph
17 7 (0.37%) Virtual Servers
18 6 (0.32%) BitLocker
18 6 (0.32%) QEMU
Systems Management
1 479 (25.22%) Kubernetes
2 401 (21.12%) Terraform
3 396 (20.85%) Ansible
4 200 (10.53%) Grafana
5 168 (8.85%) Prometheus
6 68 (3.58%) Puppet
7 60 (3.16%) Progress Chef
8 47 (2.47%) vCenter Server
9 39 (2.05%) vRealize
10 38 (2.00%) Packer
11 34 (1.79%) Argo
12 31 (1.63%) Red Hat Satellite
13 30 (1.58%) Podman
14 22 (1.16%) Kibana
14 22 (1.16%) Single Sign-On
14 22 (1.16%) VxRail
15 21 (1.11%) Oracle RMAN
16 20 (1.05%) SCCM
17 17 (0.90%) Consul
17 17 (0.90%) Nessus
Vendors
1 313 (16.48%) VMware
2 287 (15.11%) Microsoft
3 245 (12.90%) Oracle
4 229 (12.06%) Red Hat
5 200 (10.53%) Splunk
6 106 (5.58%) Cisco
7 91 (4.79%) IBM
8 70 (3.69%) ServiceNow
9 52 (2.74%) Dell
9 52 (2.74%) Google
10 41 (2.16%) Palo Alto
11 35 (1.84%) CyberArk
12 34 (1.79%) SolarWinds
13 33 (1.74%) HP
14 29 (1.53%) Atlassian
14 29 (1.53%) Citrix
15 28 (1.47%) NetApp
16 27 (1.42%) NVIDIA
17 25 (1.32%) AppDynamics
17 25 (1.32%) Sybase