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 16 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 57 36 30
Rank change year-on-year -21 -6 -3
Contract jobs citing Linux 2,100 1,865 2,137
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.87% 5.66% 5.59%
As % of the Operating Systems category 39.48% 41.80% 39.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,308 1,131 1,312
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -2.33% -2.27%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £715 £725 £749
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 113 68 113
10th Percentile £43.81 £41.25 £51.25
25th Percentile £53.00 £54.08 £65.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year - -3.70% +8.57%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.50 £68.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year - -3.70% +4.35%

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 5,319 4,462 5,414
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.80% 13.55% 14.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,352 2,854 3,463
10th Percentile £190 £188 £200
25th Percentile £313 £300 £330
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £469 £450 £475
Median % change year-on-year +4.32% -5.26% -5.00%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £579
90th Percentile £675 £672 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £438 £450
% change year-on-year +2.86% -2.78% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 394 274 274
10th Percentile £14.21 £15.50 £15.53
25th Percentile £17.25 £18.87 £20.07
Median hourly rate £26.66 £25.15 £49.25
Median % change year-on-year +6.00% -48.93% +5.48%
75th Percentile £65.22 £58.44 £68.75
90th Percentile £74.57 £67.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.50 £25.15 £52.50
% change year-on-year +29.22% -52.10% +14.43%

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 16 September 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 16 September 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 16 September 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 -22 1,763 £525 - 3,467
UK excluding London -21 1,198 £500 - 1,725
London -38 687 £535 -6.96% 1,843
Work from Home -27 560 £500 -4.76% 1,261
South East -13 337 £525 +8.81% 479
North of England -19 287 £500 +5.26% 257
South West +3 189 £575 +4.55% 301
North West -19 140 £500 +24.38% 158
Scotland -18 135 £450 -10.00% 105
Yorkshire -31 124 £508 +1.50% 60
Midlands -43 122 £470 -6.00% 184
East of England -10 110 £500 +1.78% 328
West Midlands -46 102 £470 -6.00% 124
North East -15 30 £475 -17.39% 40
Wales +7 27 £465 +3.33% 30
East Midlands -5 17 £491 +16.79% 60
Northern Ireland -5 2 - - 57

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 65 (3.10%) Confluence
2 46 (2.19%) Apache
3 32 (1.52%) nginx
4 26 (1.24%) Apache Airflow
5 25 (1.19%) WebLogic
6 24 (1.14%) OpenStack
7 23 (1.10%) Microsoft Exchange
7 23 (1.10%) SharePoint
8 20 (0.95%) Apache Spark
9 18 (0.86%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 18 (0.86%) SAS
10 15 (0.71%) JBoss
10 15 (0.71%) Tomcat
11 12 (0.57%) WebSphere
12 9 (0.43%) IIS
13 6 (0.29%) CMS
13 6 (0.29%) MTS
13 6 (0.29%) WebLogic Portal
14 5 (0.24%) Apache Solr
14 5 (0.24%) WordPress
Applications
1 26 (1.24%) Microsoft Office
2 9 (0.43%) Microsoft Project
3 8 (0.38%) Microsoft Excel
4 7 (0.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 3 (0.14%) Houdini
5 3 (0.14%) NUKE
6 2 (0.095%) Adobe Creative Suite
6 2 (0.095%) MS Visio
6 2 (0.095%) Simulink
7 1 (0.048%) Chatbot
7 1 (0.048%) CINEMA 4D
7 1 (0.048%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 1 (0.048%) Spreadsheet
7 1 (0.048%) Weka
Business Applications
1 10 (0.48%) Oracle EBS
2 7 (0.33%) Oracle EBS R12
2 7 (0.33%) Remedy ITSM
3 6 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.19%) Actimize
5 3 (0.14%) FLEXCUBE
5 3 (0.14%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.095%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.048%) Bloomberg TOMS
7 1 (0.048%) Fidessa
7 1 (0.048%) Magento
7 1 (0.048%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.048%) Oracle E-Business Tax
7 1 (0.048%) Oracle Financials
7 1 (0.048%) Oracle Internet Expenses
7 1 (0.048%) Oracle iProcurement
7 1 (0.048%) Oracle Payables
7 1 (0.048%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.048%) Oracle Receivables
7 1 (0.048%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 610 (29.05%) AWS
2 518 (24.67%) Azure
3 186 (8.86%) GCP
4 163 (7.76%) GitHub
5 109 (5.19%) OpenShift
6 106 (5.05%) Entra ID
7 101 (4.81%) GitHub Actions
8 91 (4.33%) Amazon S3
8 91 (4.33%) Azure DevOps
9 84 (4.00%) Amazon EC2
10 70 (3.33%) Serverless
11 66 (3.14%) Microsoft 365
12 64 (3.05%) AWS CloudFormation
13 62 (2.95%) AWS Lambda
14 61 (2.90%) Amazon EKS
15 55 (2.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 53 (2.52%) Virtual Private Cloud
17 50 (2.38%) IaaS
18 43 (2.05%) Datadog
18 43 (2.05%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 226 (10.76%) DNS
2 215 (10.24%) Firewall
3 154 (7.33%) TCP/IP
4 128 (6.10%) DHCP
5 86 (4.10%) VPN
6 80 (3.81%) Network Security
6 80 (3.81%) SAN
7 51 (2.43%) SSL
8 50 (2.38%) WAN
9 44 (2.10%) SSH
10 41 (1.95%) HTTP
11 40 (1.90%) VLAN
12 38 (1.81%) VSAN
13 33 (1.57%) LAN
14 27 (1.29%) Kerberos
15 25 (1.19%) SNMP
16 23 (1.10%) HTTPS
16 23 (1.10%) NAS
17 22 (1.05%) Wireless
18 21 (1.00%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 123 (5.86%) PostgreSQL
2 115 (5.48%) SQL Server
3 102 (4.86%) Oracle Database
4 74 (3.52%) Relational Database
5 65 (3.10%) MySQL
6 57 (2.71%) Amazon RDS
7 55 (2.62%) MongoDB
8 45 (2.14%) NoSQL
9 35 (1.67%) Amazon Aurora
9 35 (1.67%) Data Warehouse
10 34 (1.62%) Elasticsearch
11 29 (1.38%) RDBMS
12 27 (1.29%) Big Data
13 20 (0.95%) DynamoDB
13 20 (0.95%) Power BI
14 19 (0.90%) Data Lake
14 19 (0.90%) Oracle Database 11g
14 19 (0.90%) Oracle Database 12c
15 18 (0.86%) Redis
16 17 (0.81%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 272 (12.95%) Git
2 247 (11.76%) Jenkins
3 212 (10.10%) GitLab
4 155 (7.38%) JIRA
5 38 (1.81%) Maven
6 37 (1.76%) SonarQube
7 31 (1.48%) Bitbucket
8 27 (1.29%) Sonatype Nexus
9 26 (1.24%) Artifactory
10 21 (1.00%) Mockito
11 20 (0.95%) Selenium
12 18 (0.86%) Eclipse
13 17 (0.81%) Gradle
13 17 (0.81%) JUnit
14 13 (0.62%) Visual Studio
15 11 (0.52%) TeamCity
16 10 (0.48%) Atlassian Bamboo
16 10 (0.48%) Rational Rhapsody
17 9 (0.43%) Cucumber
17 9 (0.43%) LoadRunner
General
1 448 (21.33%) Social Skills
2 321 (15.29%) Finance
3 246 (11.71%) Analytical Skills
4 174 (8.29%) Public Sector
5 168 (8.00%) Banking
6 88 (4.19%) Documentation Skills
7 50 (2.38%) Telecoms
8 39 (1.86%) Investment Banking
9 35 (1.67%) Front Office
10 34 (1.62%) Military
11 29 (1.38%) Legal
12 28 (1.33%) Aerospace
13 21 (1.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 19 (0.90%) Law
15 18 (0.86%) Retail
16 17 (0.81%) Presentation Skills
17 16 (0.76%) Manufacturing
18 10 (0.48%) Aviation
18 10 (0.48%) Financial Institution
19 9 (0.43%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 323 (15.38%) Senior
2 242 (11.52%) Linux Engineer
3 208 (9.90%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 195 (9.29%) Developer
5 187 (8.90%) DevOps Engineer
6 104 (4.95%) Architect
7 103 (4.90%) Software Engineer
8 101 (4.81%) Platform Engineer
9 82 (3.90%) Cloud Engineer
10 81 (3.86%) Support Engineer
11 80 (3.81%) Lead
12 77 (3.67%) Consultant
13 73 (3.48%) Analyst
13 73 (3.48%) Java Developer
14 68 (3.24%) Administrator
15 67 (3.19%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
16 66 (3.14%) AWS Engineer
17 59 (2.81%) Systems Engineer
18 55 (2.62%) DBA
19 53 (2.52%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 502 (23.90%) Terraform
2 136 (6.48%) Kafka
3 123 (5.86%) REST
4 79 (3.76%) Middleware
5 76 (3.62%) Elastic Stack
6 68 (3.24%) .NET
7 55 (2.62%) Spring
8 54 (2.57%) RESTful
9 50 (2.38%) Spring Boot
10 45 (2.14%) Web Services
11 43 (2.05%) LDAP
12 38 (1.81%) JSON
13 36 (1.71%) XML
14 32 (1.52%) HTML
15 31 (1.48%) SOAP
16 30 (1.43%) YAML
17 29 (1.38%) Node.js
17 29 (1.38%) React
18 28 (1.33%) Django
18 28 (1.33%) Keycloak
Miscellaneous
1 149 (7.10%) Onboarding
2 138 (6.57%) Cloud Native
3 133 (6.33%) Data Centre
4 109 (5.19%) PKI
5 108 (5.14%) Linux Command Line
6 95 (4.52%) Replication
7 86 (4.10%) Distributed Systems
8 73 (3.48%) Hybrid Cloud
9 67 (3.19%) Public Cloud
10 64 (3.05%) Management Information System
11 47 (2.24%) Security Posture
12 46 (2.19%) Enterprise Software
13 41 (1.95%) Private Cloud
14 40 (1.90%) Legacy Systems
15 39 (1.86%) Clustering
15 39 (1.86%) Embedded Systems
15 39 (1.86%) Product Ownership
16 38 (1.81%) Data Protection Act
17 37 (1.76%) Enterprise Storage
17 37 (1.76%) Operational Technology
Operating Systems
1 789 (37.57%) Windows
2 440 (20.95%) Unix
3 365 (17.38%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 246 (11.71%) Windows Server
5 112 (5.33%) Ubuntu
6 60 (2.86%) CentOS
7 58 (2.76%) AIX
8 54 (2.57%) Solaris
9 38 (1.81%) Embedded Linux
10 29 (1.38%) VMS
10 29 (1.38%) Windows 10
11 28 (1.33%) SUSE
12 23 (1.10%) Rocky
13 19 (0.90%) Mac OS
13 19 (0.90%) Windows Server 2019
14 16 (0.76%) Debian
14 16 (0.76%) Oracle Linux
14 16 (0.76%) Windows Server 2016
15 13 (0.62%) Windows Server 2012
16 12 (0.57%) Android
Processes & Methodologies
1 643 (30.62%) CI/CD
2 553 (26.33%) DevOps
3 445 (21.19%) Infrastructure as Code
4 390 (18.57%) Agile
5 331 (15.76%) Problem-Solving
6 315 (15.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 293 (13.95%) Containerisation
8 255 (12.14%) Continuous Improvement
9 241 (11.48%) Observability
10 230 (10.95%) Migration
10 230 (10.95%) Platform Engineering
11 215 (10.24%) Software Engineering
12 207 (9.86%) Root Cause Analysis
13 204 (9.71%) High Availability
14 175 (8.33%) Performance Tuning
15 173 (8.24%) Configuration Management
16 171 (8.14%) ITIL
17 170 (8.10%) Test Automation
18 156 (7.43%) AI
18 156 (7.43%) Cybersecurity
Programming Languages
1 758 (36.10%) Python
2 427 (20.33%) Bash
3 401 (19.10%) PowerShell
4 379 (18.05%) SQL
5 247 (11.76%) Java
6 149 (7.10%) Shell Script
7 123 (5.86%) C++
8 79 (3.76%) JavaScript
9 78 (3.71%) Perl
10 76 (3.62%) C#
11 74 (3.52%) C
12 66 (3.14%) PL/SQL
13 56 (2.67%) Go
14 42 (2.00%) Bicep
15 27 (1.29%) Groovy
16 21 (1.00%) Search Processing Language
17 18 (0.86%) TypeScript
18 16 (0.76%) Ada
18 16 (0.76%) Rust
19 15 (0.71%) Korn
Qualifications
1 805 (38.33%) Security Cleared
2 579 (27.57%) SC Cleared
3 251 (11.95%) DV Cleared
4 186 (8.86%) Degree
5 73 (3.48%) AWS Certification
6 62 (2.95%) BPSS Clearance
7 60 (2.86%) Computer Science Degree
8 58 (2.76%) Azure Certification
9 57 (2.71%) CISSP
10 55 (2.62%) Cisco Certification
11 25 (1.19%) RHCE
12 24 (1.14%) CISM
13 22 (1.05%) CCNP
14 21 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
15 19 (0.90%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
16 18 (0.86%) CCNA
17 17 (0.81%) ISTQB
18 16 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
19 15 (0.71%) CompTIA Security+
20 14 (0.67%) VCAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 75 (3.57%) NIST
2 71 (3.38%) QA
3 69 (3.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 33 (1.57%) SLA
5 23 (1.10%) Data Quality
6 21 (1.00%) GDPR
7 19 (0.90%) Disclosure Scotland
8 17 (0.81%) Cyber Essentials
8 17 (0.81%) NCSC
9 16 (0.76%) ISO 20022
10 15 (0.71%) GRC
11 11 (0.52%) PCI DSS
12 9 (0.43%) HIPAA
12 9 (0.43%) ISO 31000
13 8 (0.38%) ISO 15022
13 8 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 7 (0.33%) SOC 2
15 5 (0.24%) JSP 440
15 5 (0.24%) MISRA
15 5 (0.24%) NIST 800
System Software
1 365 (17.38%) Docker
2 277 (13.19%) Active Directory
3 247 (11.76%) VMware Infrastructure
4 91 (4.33%) Hyper-V
5 81 (3.86%) vSphere
6 75 (3.57%) Virtual Machines
7 73 (3.48%) VMware ESXi
8 59 (2.81%) VMware NSX
9 41 (1.95%) Firmware
10 39 (1.86%) Oracle RAC
11 35 (1.67%) NFS
12 26 (1.24%) KVM
13 19 (0.90%) Virtual Servers
14 17 (0.81%) Ceph
15 14 (0.67%) Embedded Firmware
15 14 (0.67%) Postfix
16 13 (0.62%) Slurm Workload Manager
17 11 (0.52%) GPFS
18 10 (0.48%) Squid
19 6 (0.29%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 473 (22.52%) Ansible
2 464 (22.10%) Kubernetes
3 190 (9.05%) Grafana
4 170 (8.10%) Prometheus
5 89 (4.24%) Puppet
6 62 (2.95%) Progress Chef
7 52 (2.48%) Oracle RMAN
8 48 (2.29%) SCCM
9 40 (1.90%) Data Guard
10 39 (1.86%) vCenter Server
11 31 (1.48%) Kibana
12 30 (1.43%) Microsoft Intune
13 28 (1.33%) Red Hat Satellite
14 27 (1.29%) Nagios
14 27 (1.29%) VxRail
15 26 (1.24%) Packer
15 26 (1.24%) Podman
16 24 (1.14%) NetBackup
17 22 (1.05%) Istio
18 21 (1.00%) Failover Clustering
Vendors
1 350 (16.67%) VMware
2 342 (16.29%) Microsoft
3 305 (14.52%) Oracle
4 226 (10.76%) Red Hat
5 168 (8.00%) Splunk
6 121 (5.76%) Cisco
7 113 (5.38%) ServiceNow
8 95 (4.52%) IBM
9 87 (4.14%) Google
10 79 (3.76%) CyberArk
11 46 (2.19%) NetApp
12 45 (2.14%) BeyondTrust
12 45 (2.14%) SolarWinds
13 40 (1.90%) F5
13 40 (1.90%) Palo Alto
14 39 (1.86%) Dell
15 38 (1.81%) SAP
16 32 (1.52%) Dynatrace
17 29 (1.38%) Citrix
17 29 (1.38%) HP