Open Source Development Contract Job Trends

Open Source Software Development
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Open Source Development skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 641 523 582
Rank change year-on-year -118 +59 +90
Contract jobs citing Open Source Development 2 3 6
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.004% 0.010% 0.014%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.005% 0.011% 0.016%
Number of daily rates quoted 1 1 3
10th Percentile - - £515
25th Percentile - £525 £575
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £805 £550 £700
Median % change year-on-year +46.36% -21.43% +100.00%
75th Percentile - £575 £750
90th Percentile - - £765
UK excluding London median daily rate - £550 -

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Open Source Development falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 42,996 27,186 37,276
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.90% 91.05% 84.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,808 17,251 23,716
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.19% -4.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,575 1,262 2,618
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.73
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.82 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.50 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +72.39% -32.00% +7.05%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.19 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +17.29%

Open Source Development
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Open Source Development relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Open Source Development job vacancy trend in the UK

Open Source Development
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Open Source Development.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Open Source Development

Open Source Development
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Open Source Development.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Open Source Development

Open Source Development
Top 5 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Open Source Development within the UK over the 6 months to 20 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
Scotland -8 1 - -
Work from Home -48 1 £805 +46.36% 1
London -73 1 £805 - 2
England -102 1 £805 - 3
UK excluding London -109 1 - - 2

Open Source Development
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 1 (50.00%) Apache
1 1 (50.00%) Apache Superset
Cloud Services
1 1 (50.00%) Asana
1 1 (50.00%) AWS
1 1 (50.00%) Azure
1 1 (50.00%) Cloud Run
1 1 (50.00%) Datadog
1 1 (50.00%) GCP
1 1 (50.00%) GitHub
1 1 (50.00%) GitHub Actions
1 1 (50.00%) Google Gemini
1 1 (50.00%) Google Kubernetes Engine
1 1 (50.00%) Stackdriver
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (50.00%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 1 (50.00%) GitLab
1 1 (50.00%) Jenkins
1 1 (50.00%) JIRA
General
1 1 (50.00%) Finance
1 1 (50.00%) Marketing
1 1 (50.00%) Retail
1 1 (50.00%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 1 (50.00%) Cloud Engineer
1 1 (50.00%) Cloud Native Engineer
1 1 (50.00%) GCP Engineer
1 1 (50.00%) Senior
1 1 (50.00%) Senior Cloud Engineer
1 1 (50.00%) Technical Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (50.00%) AngularJS
1 1 (50.00%) LangChain
1 1 (50.00%) Node.js
1 1 (50.00%) OpenTelemetry
1 1 (50.00%) React
1 1 (50.00%) Spring
1 1 (50.00%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 1 (50.00%) Cloud Native
1 1 (50.00%) Data Protection Act
Processes & Methodologies
1 2 (100.00%) AI
1 2 (100.00%) Open Source
1 2 (100.00%) SDLC
2 1 (50.00%) CI/CD
2 1 (50.00%) Clean Code
2 1 (50.00%) Containerisation
2 1 (50.00%) Data Science
2 1 (50.00%) Deep Learning
2 1 (50.00%) DevOps
2 1 (50.00%) DevSecOps
2 1 (50.00%) Front End Development
2 1 (50.00%) Generative AI
2 1 (50.00%) GitOps
2 1 (50.00%) Infrastructure as Code
2 1 (50.00%) Machine Learning
2 1 (50.00%) MLOps
2 1 (50.00%) Observability
2 1 (50.00%) Resource Allocation
2 1 (50.00%) Site Reliability Engineering
2 1 (50.00%) User Stories
Qualifications
1 1 (50.00%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (50.00%) Data Quality
System Software
1 1 (50.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 1 (50.00%) Argo
1 1 (50.00%) Istio
1 1 (50.00%) Kubernetes
1 1 (50.00%) Terraform
Vendors
1 1 (50.00%) Google