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

6 months to
21 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 1,822 2,148
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.86% 5.58% 5.60%
As % of the Operating Systems category 39.43% 41.32% 39.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,305 1,098 1,308
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -1.43% -2.33% -2.27%
75th Percentile £613 £631 £638
90th Percentile £715 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £508 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +1.60% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 74 114
10th Percentile £43.81 £41.25 £51.25
25th Percentile £52.81 £53.73 £65.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year - -3.70% +8.57%
75th Percentile £69.75 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.25 £68.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year - -3.70% +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 5,326 4,409 5,439
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.80% 13.50% 14.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,347 2,817 3,466
10th Percentile £190 £188 £200
25th Percentile £313 £300 £330
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £450 £475
Median % change year-on-year +4.44% -5.26% -5.00%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £575
90th Percentile £675 £673 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £435 £450
% change year-on-year +3.45% -3.33% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 403 284 268
10th Percentile £14.17 £15.50 £15.89
25th Percentile £17.25 £18.86 £20.50
Median hourly rate £28.00 £25.15 £51.25
Median % change year-on-year +11.33% -50.93% +11.70%
75th Percentile £67.25 £58.75 £68.75
90th Percentile £74.94 £67.00 £70.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.50 £25.15 £55.00
% change year-on-year +29.22% -54.27% +25.71%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 1,769 £525 - 3,404
UK excluding London -21 1,200 £508 +1.60% 1,664
London -33 688 £525 -8.70% 1,848
Work from Home -25 554 £500 -4.76% 1,410
South East -17 338 £525 +10.53% 459
North of England -18 287 £500 +5.26% 231
South West +4 186 £575 +4.55% 294
North West -14 144 £497 +23.63% 141
Scotland -14 132 £450 -10.00% 101
Midlands -49 121 £471 -5.75% 173
East of England -13 118 £483 -1.78% 318
Yorkshire -28 117 £518 +3.50% 50
West Midlands -45 104 £471 -5.75% 114
North East -14 34 £475 -11.63% 41
Wales +9 27 £465 +3.33% 29
East Midlands -11 14 £481 +14.52% 59
Northern Ireland -4 2 - - 72

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 63 (3.00%) Confluence
2 44 (2.10%) Apache
3 32 (1.52%) nginx
4 26 (1.24%) Apache Airflow
5 25 (1.19%) WebLogic
6 24 (1.14%) OpenStack
6 24 (1.14%) SharePoint
7 21 (1.00%) Apache Spark
7 21 (1.00%) Microsoft Exchange
8 18 (0.86%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 16 (0.76%) SAS
10 15 (0.71%) JBoss
11 14 (0.67%) Tomcat
12 12 (0.57%) WebSphere
13 10 (0.48%) IIS
14 6 (0.29%) CMS
14 6 (0.29%) MTS
14 6 (0.29%) WebLogic Portal
15 5 (0.24%) Apache Solr
15 5 (0.24%) WordPress
Applications
1 26 (1.24%) Microsoft Office
2 9 (0.43%) Microsoft Excel
3 8 (0.38%) Microsoft Project
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
7 1 (0.048%) Chatbot
7 1 (0.048%) CINEMA 4D
7 1 (0.048%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 1 (0.048%) Simulink
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 4 (0.19%) Actimize
3 4 (0.19%) SAP S/4HANA
4 3 (0.14%) FLEXCUBE
4 3 (0.14%) Oracle Applications
5 2 (0.095%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.048%) Bloomberg TOMS
6 1 (0.048%) Fidessa
6 1 (0.048%) Magento
6 1 (0.048%) Oracle FAH
6 1 (0.048%) Oracle Financials
6 1 (0.048%) Oracle General Ledger
6 1 (0.048%) Oracle iProcurement
6 1 (0.048%) Oracle Payables
6 1 (0.048%) Payment Gateway
6 1 (0.048%) SAP ERP
6 1 (0.048%) SunGard Martini
6 1 (0.048%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 608 (28.95%) AWS
2 514 (24.48%) Azure
3 187 (8.90%) GCP
4 159 (7.57%) GitHub
5 110 (5.24%) OpenShift
6 108 (5.14%) Entra ID
7 99 (4.71%) GitHub Actions
8 93 (4.43%) Amazon S3
9 90 (4.29%) Azure DevOps
10 82 (3.90%) Amazon EC2
11 72 (3.43%) Serverless
12 66 (3.14%) AWS CloudFormation
13 65 (3.10%) AWS Lambda
14 63 (3.00%) Microsoft 365
15 62 (2.95%) Amazon EKS
16 59 (2.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 54 (2.57%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 50 (2.38%) IaaS
19 44 (2.10%) Datadog
19 44 (2.10%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 227 (10.81%) DNS
2 221 (10.52%) Firewall
3 163 (7.76%) TCP/IP
4 130 (6.19%) DHCP
5 88 (4.19%) VPN
6 87 (4.14%) Network Security
7 79 (3.76%) SAN
8 52 (2.48%) SSL
9 50 (2.38%) WAN
10 46 (2.19%) HTTP
11 43 (2.05%) SSH
12 41 (1.95%) VLAN
13 35 (1.67%) LAN
13 35 (1.67%) VSAN
14 28 (1.33%) Kerberos
15 26 (1.24%) BGP
16 24 (1.14%) Wi-Fi
16 24 (1.14%) Wireless
17 23 (1.10%) SNMP
18 22 (1.05%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 118 (5.62%) PostgreSQL
2 109 (5.19%) SQL Server
3 103 (4.90%) Oracle Database
4 71 (3.38%) Relational Database
5 63 (3.00%) MySQL
6 56 (2.67%) Amazon RDS
7 50 (2.38%) MongoDB
8 45 (2.14%) NoSQL
9 35 (1.67%) Amazon Aurora
10 34 (1.62%) Data Warehouse
10 34 (1.62%) Elasticsearch
11 28 (1.33%) RDBMS
12 26 (1.24%) Big Data
13 23 (1.10%) DynamoDB
14 21 (1.00%) Power BI
15 20 (0.95%) Data Lake
16 19 (0.90%) Oracle Database 11g
16 19 (0.90%) Oracle Database 12c
17 18 (0.86%) Redis
18 17 (0.81%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 275 (13.10%) Git
2 243 (11.57%) Jenkins
3 216 (10.29%) GitLab
4 155 (7.38%) JIRA
5 37 (1.76%) Maven
6 35 (1.67%) SonarQube
7 31 (1.48%) Bitbucket
8 24 (1.14%) Selenium
8 24 (1.14%) Sonatype Nexus
9 23 (1.10%) Artifactory
9 23 (1.10%) Mockito
10 19 (0.90%) JUnit
11 18 (0.86%) Eclipse
12 17 (0.81%) Gradle
13 15 (0.71%) Cucumber
14 13 (0.62%) Visual Studio
15 12 (0.57%) Atlassian Bamboo
16 11 (0.52%) TeamCity
17 10 (0.48%) Rational Rhapsody
18 9 (0.43%) LoadRunner
General
1 445 (21.19%) Social Skills
2 318 (15.14%) Finance
3 250 (11.90%) Analytical Skills
4 170 (8.10%) Public Sector
5 165 (7.86%) Banking
6 91 (4.33%) Documentation Skills
7 51 (2.43%) Telecoms
8 38 (1.81%) Investment Banking
9 34 (1.62%) Military
10 33 (1.57%) Front Office
11 30 (1.43%) Legal
12 29 (1.38%) Aerospace
13 22 (1.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 21 (1.00%) Law
15 17 (0.81%) Presentation Skills
15 17 (0.81%) Retail
16 14 (0.67%) Manufacturing
17 10 (0.48%) Aviation
18 9 (0.43%) Organisational Skills
19 8 (0.38%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 315 (15.00%) Senior
2 244 (11.62%) Linux Engineer
3 211 (10.05%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 192 (9.14%) Developer
5 181 (8.62%) DevOps Engineer
6 103 (4.90%) Architect
7 102 (4.86%) Software Engineer
8 101 (4.81%) Platform Engineer
9 81 (3.86%) Cloud Engineer
9 81 (3.86%) Support Engineer
10 76 (3.62%) Lead
11 75 (3.57%) Analyst
12 73 (3.48%) Consultant
13 70 (3.33%) Java Developer
14 67 (3.19%) AWS Engineer
14 67 (3.19%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
15 66 (3.14%) Administrator
16 59 (2.81%) Systems Engineer
17 58 (2.76%) Network Engineer
18 51 (2.43%) DBA
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 501 (23.86%) Terraform
2 139 (6.62%) Kafka
3 124 (5.90%) REST
4 79 (3.76%) Middleware
5 71 (3.38%) Elastic Stack
6 68 (3.24%) .NET
7 56 (2.67%) Spring
8 54 (2.57%) RESTful
9 51 (2.43%) Spring Boot
10 46 (2.19%) Web Services
11 45 (2.14%) LDAP
12 38 (1.81%) JSON
13 35 (1.67%) XML
14 33 (1.57%) SOAP
15 32 (1.52%) HTML
16 30 (1.43%) YAML
17 29 (1.38%) Node.js
18 28 (1.33%) Django
18 28 (1.33%) Flask
18 28 (1.33%) React
Miscellaneous
1 154 (7.33%) Onboarding
2 136 (6.48%) Cloud Native
3 134 (6.38%) Data Centre
4 110 (5.24%) PKI
5 108 (5.14%) Linux Command Line
6 92 (4.38%) Replication
7 86 (4.10%) Distributed Systems
8 70 (3.33%) Hybrid Cloud
9 67 (3.19%) Management Information System
10 65 (3.10%) Public Cloud
11 48 (2.29%) Enterprise Software
11 48 (2.29%) Security Posture
12 41 (1.95%) Legacy Systems
13 40 (1.90%) Embedded Systems
13 40 (1.90%) Operational Technology
13 40 (1.90%) Private Cloud
14 39 (1.86%) Clustering
15 36 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
15 36 (1.71%) Enterprise Storage
15 36 (1.71%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 796 (37.90%) Windows
2 435 (20.71%) Unix
3 373 (17.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 252 (12.00%) Windows Server
5 113 (5.38%) Ubuntu
6 62 (2.95%) CentOS
7 58 (2.76%) AIX
8 55 (2.62%) Solaris
9 38 (1.81%) Embedded Linux
10 31 (1.48%) VMS
11 30 (1.43%) SUSE
11 30 (1.43%) Windows 10
12 21 (1.00%) Rocky
13 19 (0.90%) Mac OS
14 18 (0.86%) Windows Server 2019
15 15 (0.71%) Debian
15 15 (0.71%) Oracle Linux
15 15 (0.71%) Windows Server 2016
16 13 (0.62%) Windows Server 2012
17 12 (0.57%) Android
Processes & Methodologies
1 640 (30.48%) CI/CD
2 550 (26.19%) DevOps
3 444 (21.14%) Infrastructure as Code
4 382 (18.19%) Agile
5 333 (15.86%) Problem-Solving
6 323 (15.38%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 294 (14.00%) Containerisation
8 255 (12.14%) Continuous Improvement
9 243 (11.57%) Observability
10 233 (11.10%) Migration
10 233 (11.10%) Platform Engineering
11 213 (10.14%) Software Engineering
12 211 (10.05%) Root Cause Analysis
13 199 (9.48%) High Availability
14 177 (8.43%) Configuration Management
15 174 (8.29%) Test Automation
16 172 (8.19%) ITIL
17 169 (8.05%) Performance Tuning
18 161 (7.67%) Stakeholder Management
19 159 (7.57%) Cybersecurity
Programming Languages
1 755 (35.95%) Python
2 429 (20.43%) Bash
3 405 (19.29%) PowerShell
4 370 (17.62%) SQL
5 249 (11.86%) Java
6 151 (7.19%) Shell Script
7 122 (5.81%) C++
8 79 (3.76%) Perl
9 78 (3.71%) C#
10 77 (3.67%) JavaScript
11 73 (3.48%) C
12 64 (3.05%) PL/SQL
13 58 (2.76%) Go
14 40 (1.90%) Bicep
15 29 (1.38%) Groovy
16 22 (1.05%) Search Processing Language
17 18 (0.86%) TypeScript
18 16 (0.76%) Ada
18 16 (0.76%) Rust
19 15 (0.71%) Korn
Qualifications
1 808 (38.48%) Security Cleared
2 572 (27.24%) SC Cleared
3 251 (11.95%) DV Cleared
4 180 (8.57%) Degree
5 73 (3.48%) AWS Certification
6 60 (2.86%) CISSP
7 59 (2.81%) Azure Certification
7 59 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
8 58 (2.76%) Cisco Certification
9 56 (2.67%) Computer Science Degree
10 27 (1.29%) CISM
11 24 (1.14%) CCNP
11 24 (1.14%) RHCE
12 21 (1.00%) CCNA
12 21 (1.00%) Microsoft Certification
13 19 (0.90%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
14 18 (0.86%) ISTQB
15 16 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 15 (0.71%) CompTIA Security+
17 14 (0.67%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 77 (3.67%) NIST
2 74 (3.52%) QA
3 72 (3.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 32 (1.52%) SLA
5 23 (1.10%) Data Quality
6 21 (1.00%) GDPR
7 19 (0.90%) Disclosure Scotland
8 17 (0.81%) Cyber Essentials
9 16 (0.76%) GRC
9 16 (0.76%) ISO 20022
10 15 (0.71%) NCSC
11 12 (0.57%) PCI DSS
12 10 (0.48%) ISO 31000
13 9 (0.43%) HIPAA
14 8 (0.38%) ISO 15022
14 8 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 7 (0.33%) SOC 2
16 5 (0.24%) JSP 440
16 5 (0.24%) MISRA
16 5 (0.24%) NIST 800
System Software
1 364 (17.33%) Docker
2 283 (13.48%) Active Directory
3 243 (11.57%) VMware Infrastructure
4 87 (4.14%) Hyper-V
5 85 (4.05%) vSphere
6 75 (3.57%) VMware ESXi
7 73 (3.48%) Virtual Machines
8 57 (2.71%) VMware NSX
9 43 (2.05%) Firmware
10 39 (1.86%) Oracle RAC
11 34 (1.62%) NFS
12 26 (1.24%) KVM
13 22 (1.05%) Virtual Servers
14 14 (0.67%) Ceph
14 14 (0.67%) Embedded Firmware
14 14 (0.67%) Postfix
15 13 (0.62%) Slurm Workload Manager
16 11 (0.52%) GPFS
17 8 (0.38%) Squid
18 6 (0.29%) Microsoft Virtual Server
Systems Management
1 463 (22.05%) Ansible
1 463 (22.05%) Kubernetes
2 190 (9.05%) Grafana
3 171 (8.14%) Prometheus
4 87 (4.14%) Puppet
5 60 (2.86%) Progress Chef
6 52 (2.48%) Oracle RMAN
7 48 (2.29%) SCCM
8 40 (1.90%) Data Guard
9 38 (1.81%) vCenter Server
10 31 (1.48%) Kibana
11 30 (1.43%) Microsoft Intune
11 30 (1.43%) Nagios
11 30 (1.43%) VxRail
12 28 (1.33%) Red Hat Satellite
13 26 (1.24%) NetBackup
13 26 (1.24%) Podman
14 24 (1.14%) Packer
15 21 (1.00%) Failover Clustering
16 20 (0.95%) Istio
Vendors
1 348 (16.57%) VMware
2 339 (16.14%) Microsoft
3 294 (14.00%) Oracle
4 227 (10.81%) Red Hat
5 171 (8.14%) Splunk
6 125 (5.95%) Cisco
7 112 (5.33%) ServiceNow
8 93 (4.43%) IBM
9 88 (4.19%) Google
10 80 (3.81%) CyberArk
11 48 (2.29%) SolarWinds
12 46 (2.19%) NetApp
13 45 (2.14%) BeyondTrust
14 41 (1.95%) Dell
14 41 (1.95%) F5
15 40 (1.90%) Palo Alto
16 36 (1.71%) SAP
17 34 (1.62%) Dynatrace
18 31 (1.48%) Tenable
19 30 (1.43%) Citrix