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 13 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 51 31 33
Rank change year-on-year -20 +2 -7
Contract jobs citing Linux 1,900 1,717 2,235
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.80% 5.82% 5.12%
As % of the Operating Systems category 39.77% 41.67% 38.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,166 1,111 1,456
10th Percentile £346 £374 £340
25th Percentile £413 £432 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £530 £546
Median % change year-on-year -5.66% -2.97% -5.00%
75th Percentile £600 £626 £638
90th Percentile £688 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £494 £500 £539
% change year-on-year -1.20% -7.19% +2.62%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 37 126
10th Percentile £35.18 £46.34 £46.63
25th Percentile £43.81 £55.00 £55.31
Median hourly rate £62.50 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% - -
75th Percentile £68.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £71.13 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -3.85% - -

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 4,777 4,120 5,874
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.55% 13.96% 13.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,043 2,694 3,894
10th Percentile £188 £200 £188
25th Percentile £316 £313 £310
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £460 £465 £475
Median % change year-on-year -1.08% -2.11% -5.00%
75th Percentile £575 £585 £588
90th Percentile £650 £675 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £450 £450
% change year-on-year - - -2.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 338 198 413
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.19 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.00 £17.36 £15.76
Median hourly rate £27.94 £21.95 £23.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.29% -4.57% -50.80%
75th Percentile £63.75 £41.93 £62.50
90th Percentile £70.07 £68.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £18.87 £24.18
% change year-on-year +45.73% -21.96% -40.43%

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 13 June 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 13 June 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 13 June 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 -26 1,594 £510 -7.27% 605
UK excluding London -16 1,131 £494 -1.20% 508
London -47 559 £528 -8.26% 149
Work from Home -35 483 £500 -4.76% 247
South East -7 299 £513 -2.38% 187
North of England -15 297 £478 -8.13% 88
South West -5 164 £538 -10.42% 94
Yorkshire -19 152 £500 -6.98% 17
Midlands -18 145 £474 -5.25% 52
North West -19 131 £468 +10.06% 54
West Midlands -15 125 £469 -6.20% 24
Scotland -23 98 £500 +5.26% 18
East of England -12 96 £475 +0.53% 68
Wales +1 26 £465 -20.65% 10
East Midlands -20 17 £530 +17.78% 28
North East -28 15 £446 -6.54% 17
Northern Ireland +3 12 £425 +30.77% 5

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 85 (4.47%) Confluence
2 48 (2.53%) Apache
3 31 (1.63%) nginx
4 27 (1.42%) Microsoft Exchange
5 22 (1.16%) Tomcat
6 19 (1.00%) Apache Airflow
7 18 (0.95%) WebLogic
8 16 (0.84%) Apache Spark
9 12 (0.63%) SAS
9 12 (0.63%) WebSphere
10 11 (0.58%) CICS
11 10 (0.53%) OpenStack
12 9 (0.47%) NetWeaver
13 8 (0.42%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 7 (0.37%) IIS
14 7 (0.37%) JBoss
14 7 (0.37%) SharePoint
15 6 (0.32%) TPMS
15 6 (0.32%) WebSphere Application Server
16 5 (0.26%) CMS
Applications
1 19 (1.00%) Microsoft Office
2 9 (0.47%) Microsoft Excel
3 4 (0.21%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 4 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
4 3 (0.16%) Simulink
5 2 (0.11%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.053%) Adobe Illustrator
6 1 (0.053%) InDesign
6 1 (0.053%) Photoshop
6 1 (0.053%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.053%) Weka
Business Applications
1 11 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
2 6 (0.32%) Remedy ITSM
3 4 (0.21%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 3 (0.16%) Actimize
5 2 (0.11%) BusinessWorks
5 2 (0.11%) FLEXCUBE
5 2 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
5 2 (0.11%) Oracle General Ledger
5 2 (0.11%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
6 1 (0.053%) Cloudability
6 1 (0.053%) Odoo
6 1 (0.053%) Oracle Applications
6 1 (0.053%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.053%) Oracle FAH
6 1 (0.053%) Oracle Payables
6 1 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
6 1 (0.053%) Shopify
6 1 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 540 (28.42%) AWS
2 392 (20.63%) Azure
3 163 (8.58%) GitHub
4 126 (6.63%) GCP
5 105 (5.53%) OpenShift
6 93 (4.89%) GitHub Actions
7 81 (4.26%) Amazon S3
8 79 (4.16%) Amazon EC2
9 68 (3.58%) Azure DevOps
10 66 (3.47%) Amazon EKS
11 61 (3.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 58 (3.05%) Serverless
13 56 (2.95%) Entra ID
14 48 (2.53%) AWS CloudFormation
14 48 (2.53%) AWS Lambda
14 48 (2.53%) Microsoft 365
15 44 (2.32%) IaaS
15 44 (2.32%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 40 (2.11%) PaaS
17 37 (1.95%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 188 (9.89%) Firewall
2 148 (7.79%) DNS
3 95 (5.00%) TCP/IP
4 80 (4.21%) VPN
5 68 (3.58%) Network Security
6 66 (3.47%) SAN
7 52 (2.74%) DHCP
8 49 (2.58%) WAN
9 40 (2.11%) LAN
10 39 (2.05%) SSL
11 36 (1.89%) SNMP
12 33 (1.74%) SSH
13 31 (1.63%) VSAN
14 29 (1.53%) HTTP
15 26 (1.37%) NAS
16 23 (1.21%) Ethernet
17 21 (1.11%) VLAN
18 19 (1.00%) BGP
18 19 (1.00%) IPsec
19 17 (0.89%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 117 (6.16%) SQL Server
2 114 (6.00%) PostgreSQL
3 74 (3.89%) Oracle Database
4 72 (3.79%) MySQL
5 67 (3.53%) Relational Database
6 63 (3.32%) MongoDB
7 48 (2.53%) Amazon RDS
8 42 (2.21%) Elasticsearch
9 37 (1.95%) Amazon Aurora
10 26 (1.37%) DynamoDB
10 26 (1.37%) NoSQL
11 20 (1.05%) SAP HANA
12 19 (1.00%) Big Data
13 18 (0.95%) Data Warehouse
13 18 (0.95%) RDBMS
14 17 (0.89%) Db2
14 17 (0.89%) KDB
15 14 (0.74%) Kdb+
15 14 (0.74%) Power BI
15 14 (0.74%) Sybase ASE
Development Applications
1 212 (11.16%) Jenkins
2 180 (9.47%) GitLab
3 167 (8.79%) Git
4 151 (7.95%) JIRA
5 32 (1.68%) Maven
6 31 (1.63%) SonarQube
7 26 (1.37%) Mockito
8 22 (1.16%) Eclipse
9 20 (1.05%) JUnit
10 19 (1.00%) Bitbucket
10 19 (1.00%) Sonatype Nexus
11 17 (0.89%) Artifactory
12 14 (0.74%) DbUnit
12 14 (0.74%) Rational Rhapsody
12 14 (0.74%) Visual Studio
13 13 (0.68%) jMock
14 11 (0.58%) Bitbucket Server
14 11 (0.58%) Jaeger
15 9 (0.47%) Atlassian Bamboo
16 8 (0.42%) Cucumber
General
1 384 (20.21%) Social Skills
2 275 (14.47%) Finance
3 197 (10.37%) Public Sector
4 164 (8.63%) Analytical Skills
5 132 (6.95%) Banking
6 81 (4.26%) Documentation Skills
7 43 (2.26%) Military
8 26 (1.37%) Front Office
9 24 (1.26%) Retail
9 24 (1.26%) Telecoms
10 23 (1.21%) Investment Banking
10 23 (1.21%) Law
11 22 (1.16%) Aerospace
11 22 (1.16%) Financial Institution
12 20 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
13 19 (1.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 17 (0.89%) Influencing Skills
14 17 (0.89%) Legal
15 15 (0.79%) Manufacturing
16 12 (0.63%) Police
Job Titles
1 251 (13.21%) Senior
2 196 (10.32%) Developer
3 186 (9.79%) Linux Engineer
4 178 (9.37%) DevOps Engineer
5 132 (6.95%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 130 (6.84%) Software Engineer
7 108 (5.68%) Analyst
8 97 (5.11%) Architect
9 96 (5.05%) Lead
10 75 (3.95%) Java Developer
11 70 (3.68%) AWS Engineer
12 69 (3.63%) Administrator
13 64 (3.37%) Consultant
14 57 (3.00%) Platform Engineer
15 54 (2.84%) Site Reliability Engineer
15 54 (2.84%) Support Engineer
16 52 (2.74%) Security Engineer
17 50 (2.63%) AWS DevOps
18 48 (2.53%) Senior Developer
19 47 (2.47%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 88 (4.63%) Kafka
2 84 (4.42%) REST
3 80 (4.21%) Middleware
4 68 (3.58%) Elastic Stack
5 51 (2.68%) Spring
5 51 (2.68%) Spring Boot
6 50 (2.63%) LDAP
7 46 (2.42%) Web Services
8 45 (2.37%) Node.js
9 44 (2.32%) RESTful
10 42 (2.21%) .NET
11 30 (1.58%) YAML
12 27 (1.42%) SOAP
13 26 (1.37%) ActiveMQ
13 26 (1.37%) AngularJS
13 26 (1.37%) JSON
14 24 (1.26%) XML
15 23 (1.21%) React
16 20 (1.05%) Flash
17 19 (1.00%) SAML
Miscellaneous
1 152 (8.00%) Data Centre
2 109 (5.74%) Cloud Native
3 84 (4.42%) Onboarding
4 80 (4.21%) Linux Command Line
5 72 (3.79%) Management Information System
6 69 (3.63%) PKI
7 67 (3.53%) Distributed Systems
8 60 (3.16%) Replication
9 50 (2.63%) Hybrid Cloud
9 50 (2.63%) Public Cloud
10 49 (2.58%) Security Posture
11 48 (2.53%) Legacy Systems
12 37 (1.95%) Product Ownership
13 33 (1.74%) Security Operations Centre
14 31 (1.63%) Enterprise Storage
15 30 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
16 29 (1.53%) Cyber Threat
16 29 (1.53%) Embedded Systems
17 25 (1.32%) Enterprise Software
17 25 (1.32%) Operational Technology
Operating Systems
1 731 (38.47%) Windows
2 384 (20.21%) Unix
3 293 (15.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 188 (9.89%) Windows Server
5 104 (5.47%) Ubuntu
6 58 (3.05%) AIX
7 50 (2.63%) Solaris
8 43 (2.26%) CentOS
9 33 (1.74%) Embedded Linux
10 27 (1.42%) VMS
11 25 (1.32%) Windows Server 2019
12 22 (1.16%) Android
13 21 (1.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 19 (1.00%) Debian
15 18 (0.95%) Mac OS
15 18 (0.95%) SUSE
16 13 (0.68%) Mac OS X
16 13 (0.68%) Windows 10
17 12 (0.63%) Oracle Linux
17 12 (0.63%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 526 (27.68%) CI/CD
2 455 (23.95%) DevOps
3 357 (18.79%) Agile
4 288 (15.16%) Infrastructure as Code
5 284 (14.95%) Problem-Solving
6 243 (12.79%) Containerisation
7 202 (10.63%) Software Engineering
8 194 (10.21%) Migration
9 191 (10.05%) Infrastructure Engineering
10 180 (9.47%) Observability
11 163 (8.58%) Continuous Improvement
12 156 (8.21%) High Availability
13 154 (8.11%) SIEM
14 152 (8.00%) Performance Tuning
15 146 (7.68%) Root Cause Analysis
16 134 (7.05%) ITIL
17 132 (6.95%) Cybersecurity
17 132 (6.95%) Incident Response
18 131 (6.89%) Test Automation
19 125 (6.58%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 623 (32.79%) Python
2 322 (16.95%) SQL
3 281 (14.79%) PowerShell
4 280 (14.74%) Bash
5 249 (13.11%) Java
6 152 (8.00%) Shell Script
7 121 (6.37%) C++
8 93 (4.89%) JavaScript
9 63 (3.32%) Perl
10 58 (3.05%) C
10 58 (3.05%) C#
11 51 (2.68%) PL/SQL
12 48 (2.53%) Go
13 23 (1.21%) Rust
14 22 (1.16%) TypeScript
15 21 (1.11%) Ada
16 20 (1.05%) MATLAB
17 19 (1.00%) Ruby
17 19 (1.00%) Search Processing Language
18 15 (0.79%) PHP
Qualifications
1 729 (38.37%) Security Cleared
2 540 (28.42%) SC Cleared
3 207 (10.89%) DV Cleared
4 189 (9.95%) Degree
5 69 (3.63%) BPSS Clearance
6 68 (3.58%) Computer Science Degree
7 64 (3.37%) AWS Certification
8 61 (3.21%) CISSP
9 54 (2.84%) Cisco Certification
10 47 (2.47%) CompTIA Security+
11 39 (2.05%) Azure Certification
12 35 (1.84%) RHCE
13 25 (1.32%) CCNP
14 23 (1.21%) CCNA
15 22 (1.16%) CISM
16 21 (1.11%) Microsoft Certification
17 19 (1.00%) CompTIA CySA+
18 16 (0.84%) GIAC
19 15 (0.79%) Oracle Certification
20 14 (0.74%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 90 (4.74%) NIST
2 81 (4.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 56 (2.95%) QA
4 49 (2.58%) SLA
5 27 (1.42%) Cyber Essentials
6 26 (1.37%) GDPR
7 22 (1.16%) NCSC
8 19 (1.00%) PCI DSS
9 14 (0.74%) Disclosure Scotland
10 12 (0.63%) HIPAA
11 11 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 10 (0.53%) Data Quality
12 10 (0.53%) GRC
13 9 (0.47%) SOC 2
14 7 (0.37%) NIST 800
15 6 (0.32%) GLBA
15 6 (0.32%) ISO 31000
16 5 (0.26%) California Consumer Privacy Act
16 5 (0.26%) DICOM
16 5 (0.26%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 316 (16.63%) Docker
2 223 (11.74%) VMware Infrastructure
3 203 (10.68%) Active Directory
4 77 (4.05%) Virtual Machines
5 66 (3.47%) Hyper-V
5 66 (3.47%) vSphere
6 63 (3.32%) VMware ESXi
7 52 (2.74%) NFS
8 48 (2.53%) VMware NSX
9 37 (1.95%) Firmware
10 30 (1.58%) KVM
11 27 (1.42%) Oracle RAC
12 21 (1.11%) GPFS
12 21 (1.11%) Postfix
13 11 (0.58%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 10 (0.53%) Ceph
14 10 (0.53%) Microsoft App-V
15 8 (0.42%) BitLocker
15 8 (0.42%) Squid
16 7 (0.37%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 396 (20.84%) Ansible
2 370 (19.47%) Kubernetes
3 356 (18.74%) Terraform
4 171 (9.00%) Grafana
5 143 (7.53%) Prometheus
6 75 (3.95%) Puppet
7 49 (2.58%) Progress Chef
8 41 (2.16%) vCenter Server
9 37 (1.95%) Oracle RMAN
10 30 (1.58%) Podman
11 27 (1.42%) Packer
12 26 (1.37%) Nagios
12 26 (1.37%) Red Hat Satellite
13 25 (1.32%) ZABBIX
14 24 (1.26%) vRealize
15 23 (1.21%) Data Guard
15 23 (1.21%) Kibana
16 22 (1.16%) Argo
16 22 (1.16%) Tivoli
17 20 (1.05%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 297 (15.63%) VMware
2 278 (14.63%) Oracle
3 254 (13.37%) Microsoft
4 218 (11.47%) Red Hat
5 178 (9.37%) Splunk
6 120 (6.32%) Cisco
7 105 (5.53%) IBM
8 90 (4.74%) ServiceNow
9 55 (2.89%) CyberArk
10 54 (2.84%) Google
10 54 (2.84%) Palo Alto
11 39 (2.05%) F5
11 39 (2.05%) SolarWinds
12 37 (1.95%) SAP
13 34 (1.79%) Citrix
13 34 (1.79%) NVIDIA
14 33 (1.74%) BeyondTrust
14 33 (1.74%) Dell
14 33 (1.74%) HP
15 28 (1.47%) Sybase