Open Source Contract Job Trends

Open Source
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Open Source skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 30 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 386 231 299
Rank change year-on-year -155 +68 -34
Contract jobs citing Open Source 283 349 313
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.55% 1.14% 0.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.65% 1.25% 0.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 135 198 207
10th Percentile £425 £392 £360
25th Percentile £497 £430 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £525 £570
Median % change year-on-year +4.76% -7.89% -5.00%
75th Percentile £650 £604 £675
90th Percentile £750 £725 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £514 £470 £591
% change year-on-year +9.36% -20.51% +2.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 13
10th Percentile - - £20.12
25th Percentile - - £21.25
Median hourly rate £85.00 - £26.97
75th Percentile - - £57.50
90th Percentile - - £69.82
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £20.24

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Open Source 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 43,613 27,816 36,814
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.98% 90.91% 85.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,139 17,565 23,448
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £504 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.18% -4.00% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,612 1,364 2,554
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.49 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +4.17%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.00% -34.42% +8.91%

Open Source
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Open Source job vacancy trend in the UK

Open Source
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

Open Source
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Open Source over the 6 months to 30 June 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Open Source in the UK

Open Source
Hourly Rate Trend

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

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

Open Source
Top 13 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 within the UK over the 6 months to 30 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 -167 212 £550 -0.63% 166
London -144 112 £600 - 99
Work from Home -90 107 £550 -4.35% 97
UK excluding London -106 106 £514 +9.36% 106
North of England -82 21 £500 +7.53% 22
South West -14 20 £550 +34.15% 11
Scotland -27 19 £675 +35.00% 9
West Midlands -46 18 £472 -5.60% 8
Midlands -59 18 £472 -5.60% 9
South East -73 15 £480 -4.10% 25
East of England -19 14 £550 +52.49% 13
Yorkshire -47 12 £500 - 8
North West -53 8 £450 -2.96% 10

Open Source
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 18 (6.36%) Confluence
2 8 (2.83%) Apache
2 8 (2.83%) SharePoint
3 6 (2.12%) Appian
3 6 (2.12%) SAS
4 3 (1.06%) nginx
4 3 (1.06%) OpenStack
5 2 (0.71%) Apache Airflow
5 2 (0.71%) Apache Spark
6 1 (0.35%) Apache Pulsar
6 1 (0.35%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 3 (1.06%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 140 (49.47%) AWS
2 82 (28.98%) Azure
3 45 (15.90%) GCP
4 34 (12.01%) GitHub
5 32 (11.31%) Amazon S3
6 26 (9.19%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 24 (8.48%) Serverless
8 21 (7.42%) Amazon EC2
9 17 (6.01%) AWS Lambda
10 15 (5.30%) Azure AI
11 13 (4.59%) Anthropic Claude
11 13 (4.59%) GitHub Actions
11 13 (4.59%) Route 53
12 12 (4.24%) Amazon SQS
12 12 (4.24%) Azure DevOps
13 11 (3.89%) AWS KMS
13 11 (3.89%) Vertex AI
14 9 (3.18%) Google Gemini
14 9 (3.18%) SaaS
15 8 (2.83%) Azure Cognitive Services
Communications & Networking
1 9 (3.18%) Firewall
2 7 (2.47%) Reverse Proxy
2 7 (2.47%) SNMP
3 5 (1.77%) DNS
3 5 (1.77%) WAN
4 3 (1.06%) Intrusion Detection
4 3 (1.06%) Network Security
5 2 (0.71%) DHCP
5 2 (0.71%) NaaS
6 1 (0.35%) 4G
6 1 (0.35%) 5G
6 1 (0.35%) Cisco IOS
6 1 (0.35%) HTTPS
6 1 (0.35%) LTE
6 1 (0.35%) MQTT
6 1 (0.35%) NAS
6 1 (0.35%) NGFW
6 1 (0.35%) SAN
6 1 (0.35%) SSH
6 1 (0.35%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 43 (15.19%) PostgreSQL
2 26 (9.19%) Apache Cassandra
3 21 (7.42%) Amazon RDS
4 17 (6.01%) DynamoDB
5 14 (4.95%) MongoDB
6 11 (3.89%) Amazon Aurora
7 10 (3.53%) BigQuery
8 9 (3.18%) Amazon Athena
8 9 (3.18%) Amazon Redshift
8 9 (3.18%) Pinecone
8 9 (3.18%) Relational Database
9 8 (2.83%) Data Warehouse
9 8 (2.83%) SQL Server
10 7 (2.47%) Amazon QuickSight
11 6 (2.12%) Big Data
11 6 (2.12%) Data Lake
11 6 (2.12%) NoSQL
12 5 (1.77%) BusinessObjects
12 5 (1.77%) Pentaho
12 5 (1.77%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 60 (21.20%) Git
2 28 (9.89%) GitLab
3 24 (8.48%) JUnit
4 22 (7.77%) Jenkins
5 19 (6.71%) JIRA
6 18 (6.36%) SonarQube
7 14 (4.95%) Sonatype Nexus
8 11 (3.89%) Bitbucket Server
8 11 (3.89%) DbUnit
8 11 (3.89%) jMock
8 11 (3.89%) Maven
8 11 (3.89%) Mockito
9 9 (3.18%) MLflow
10 8 (2.83%) IntelliJ
11 6 (2.12%) CircleCI
11 6 (2.12%) Gradle
12 5 (1.77%) Artifactory
12 5 (1.77%) PowerDesigner
13 2 (0.71%) Cucumber
13 2 (0.71%) JMeter
General
1 67 (23.67%) Social Skills
2 58 (20.49%) Finance
3 42 (14.84%) Public Sector
4 21 (7.42%) Analytical Skills
4 21 (7.42%) Banking
4 21 (7.42%) Legal
5 11 (3.89%) Law
6 7 (2.47%) Military
7 6 (2.12%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 5 (1.77%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (1.77%) Front Office
9 3 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
9 3 (1.06%) Retail
10 2 (0.71%) Billing
10 2 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (0.71%) Police
10 2 (0.71%) Publishing
10 2 (0.71%) Telecoms
11 1 (0.35%) Automotive
11 1 (0.35%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 67 (23.67%) Developer
2 60 (21.20%) Architect
3 46 (16.25%) Senior
4 31 (10.95%) Solutions Architect
5 27 (9.54%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 26 (9.19%) AWS Architect
7 25 (8.83%) Senior Developer
7 25 (8.83%) Software Engineer
8 22 (7.77%) Data Engineer
9 18 (6.36%) AWS Solution Architect
10 15 (5.30%) Consultant
11 14 (4.95%) Java Developer
12 12 (4.24%) Cloud Engineer
12 12 (4.24%) Senior Data Engineer
13 11 (3.89%) AWS Engineer
14 10 (3.53%) Android Developer
14 10 (3.53%) Cloud Architect
14 10 (3.53%) Lead
15 9 (3.18%) Python Developer
16 7 (2.47%) Software Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 65 (22.97%) Kafka
2 42 (14.84%) REST
3 27 (9.54%) gRPC
3 27 (9.54%) RESTful
4 22 (7.77%) React
5 19 (6.71%) Spring
5 19 (6.71%) Spring Boot
6 18 (6.36%) Node.js
6 18 (6.36%) Web Services
7 16 (5.65%) AngularJS
8 15 (5.30%) Android Jetpack
8 15 (5.30%) Hugging Face
8 15 (5.30%) Jetpack Compose
8 15 (5.30%) LangChain
8 15 (5.30%) PyTorch
8 15 (5.30%) TensorFlow
9 14 (4.95%) SOAP
10 13 (4.59%) .NET
11 11 (3.89%) ActiveMQ
11 11 (3.89%) Hibernate
Miscellaneous
1 49 (17.31%) Distributed Systems
2 43 (15.19%) Cloud Native
3 16 (5.65%) AI Agents
4 13 (4.59%) Product Ownership
5 9 (3.18%) Enterprise Software
5 9 (3.18%) Mobile App
6 8 (2.83%) Data Protection Act
6 8 (2.83%) Legacy Systems
6 8 (2.83%) Self-Motivation
7 7 (2.47%) Cyber Threat
7 7 (2.47%) Management Information System
8 6 (2.12%) Data Centre
8 6 (2.12%) Low-Code
8 6 (2.12%) Onboarding
8 6 (2.12%) Security Posture
8 6 (2.12%) Virtual Team
9 5 (1.77%) Legacy Code
10 3 (1.06%) Clustering
10 3 (1.06%) Cyber Kill Chain
11 2 (0.71%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 47 (16.61%) Linux
2 17 (6.01%) Android
3 5 (1.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 4 (1.41%) Debian
4 4 (1.41%) Rocky
4 4 (1.41%) Ubuntu
4 4 (1.41%) Unix
5 3 (1.06%) Apple iOS
5 3 (1.06%) Windows
6 1 (0.35%) VMS
6 1 (0.35%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 92 (32.51%) CI/CD
2 76 (26.86%) AI
3 70 (24.73%) Agile
4 69 (24.38%) Software Engineering
5 67 (23.67%) DevOps
6 66 (23.32%) Microservices
7 56 (19.79%) LLM
8 51 (18.02%) Containerisation
9 49 (17.31%) Stakeholder Management
10 42 (14.84%) Infrastructure as Code
11 41 (14.49%) Machine Learning
12 38 (13.43%) Observability
13 37 (13.07%) Data Pipeline
14 36 (12.72%) Event-Driven
15 32 (11.31%) Generative AI
15 32 (11.31%) Problem-Solving
15 32 (11.31%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 29 (10.25%) Event-Driven Architecture
17 25 (8.83%) Continuous Integration
18 24 (8.48%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 126 (44.52%) Python
2 53 (18.73%) Java
3 38 (13.43%) Go
3 38 (13.43%) SQL
4 21 (7.42%) JavaScript
5 19 (6.71%) Bash
6 18 (6.36%) TypeScript
7 17 (6.01%) Kotlin
8 13 (4.59%) C#
9 6 (2.12%) Shell Script
10 5 (1.77%) C++
10 5 (1.77%) PowerShell
11 3 (1.06%) PL/SQL
11 3 (1.06%) Scala
12 2 (0.71%) Ruby
13 1 (0.35%) Groovy
13 1 (0.35%) Kusto Query Language
13 1 (0.35%) Objective-C
13 1 (0.35%) Rust
13 1 (0.35%) Swift
Qualifications
1 87 (30.74%) Security Cleared
2 68 (24.03%) SC Cleared
3 30 (10.60%) Degree
4 14 (4.95%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (3.53%) DV Cleared
6 8 (2.83%) AWS Certification
6 8 (2.83%) BPSS Clearance
7 5 (1.77%) Azure Certification
8 4 (1.41%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 3 (1.06%) CISM
9 3 (1.06%) CISSP
10 2 (0.71%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.71%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.71%) PhD
11 1 (0.35%) GCIA
11 1 (0.35%) GIAC
11 1 (0.35%) ISEB
11 1 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 1 (0.35%) MPhil
11 1 (0.35%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (5.30%) QA
2 9 (3.18%) Accessibility
3 8 (2.83%) Data Quality
4 5 (1.77%) NIST
4 5 (1.77%) WCAG
5 3 (1.06%) Disclosure Scotland
5 3 (1.06%) GRC
5 3 (1.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.71%) GDPR
7 1 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.35%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
7 1 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 1 (0.35%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.35%) SOC 2
System Software
1 85 (30.04%) Docker
2 9 (3.18%) Postfix
3 7 (2.47%) Active Directory
4 4 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.71%) Ceph
5 2 (0.71%) Oracle RAC
5 2 (0.71%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 2 (0.71%) VMware Infrastructure
6 1 (0.35%) Hyper-V
6 1 (0.35%) Squid
Systems Management
1 77 (27.21%) Kubernetes
2 39 (13.78%) Terraform
3 34 (12.01%) Grafana
4 29 (10.25%) Prometheus
5 20 (7.07%) Ansible
6 5 (1.77%) Puppet
7 4 (1.41%) Istio
7 4 (1.41%) Salt
8 2 (0.71%) Amdocs OSS
8 2 (0.71%) Data Guard
8 2 (0.71%) Oracle RMAN
8 2 (0.71%) Rancher
9 1 (0.35%) CASB
9 1 (0.35%) Control-M
9 1 (0.35%) Docker Swarm
9 1 (0.35%) MOM
9 1 (0.35%) Progress Chef
9 1 (0.35%) QRadar
9 1 (0.35%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.35%) WMI
Vendors
1 29 (10.25%) OpenAI
2 26 (9.19%) Microsoft
3 25 (8.83%) Google
4 19 (6.71%) Dynatrace
5 13 (4.59%) Splunk
6 12 (4.24%) Oracle
7 11 (3.89%) Atlassian
7 11 (3.89%) Jaspersoft
8 7 (2.47%) Checkmarx
9 6 (2.12%) Automation Anywhere
9 6 (2.12%) Cribl.io
9 6 (2.12%) UiPath
10 5 (1.77%) Black Duck
10 5 (1.77%) Denodo
10 5 (1.77%) IBM
10 5 (1.77%) Informatica
10 5 (1.77%) ServiceNow
11 4 (1.41%) Fortinet
12 3 (1.06%) Sonatype
12 3 (1.06%) VMware