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

6 months to
25 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 375 228 304
Rank change year-on-year -147 +76 -43
Contract jobs citing Open Source 282 346 320
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.55% 1.15% 0.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.65% 1.26% 0.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 132 199 213
10th Percentile £425 £395 £363
25th Percentile £499 £448 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £525 £570
Median % change year-on-year +4.76% -7.89% -5.00%
75th Percentile £650 £600 £675
90th Percentile £750 £725 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £514 £470 £585
% change year-on-year +9.36% -19.66% +1.21%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 14
10th Percentile - - £20.12
25th Percentile - - £21.25
Median hourly rate £85.00 - £26.97
75th Percentile - - £57.50
90th Percentile - - £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £37.62

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 43,238 27,425 37,092
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.97% 91.06% 85.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,959 17,371 23,647
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.78% -3.81% -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 2,600 1,291 2,584
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.65
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.70 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.88 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £71.25 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.04 £38.12
% change year-on-year +79.73% -34.32% +17.29%

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 25 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 25 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 -170 208 £550 +1.20% 164
London -131 110 £598 -0.42% 98
Work from Home -89 107 £550 -4.35% 89
UK excluding London -125 105 £514 +9.36% 101
Scotland -23 21 £675 +35.00% 7
North of England -83 20 £506 +9.16% 22
South West -31 19 £550 +11.68% 12
West Midlands -48 18 £472 -5.60% 7
Midlands -58 18 £472 -5.60% 8
South East -69 15 £480 -4.10% 22
East of England -20 13 £550 +52.49% 13
Yorkshire -50 11 £506 - 6
North West -48 8 £450 -2.70% 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 (6.38%) Confluence
2 8 (2.84%) Apache
2 8 (2.84%) SharePoint
3 7 (2.48%) Appian
4 5 (1.77%) SAS
5 3 (1.06%) nginx
5 3 (1.06%) OpenStack
6 2 (0.71%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (0.71%) Apache Spark
7 1 (0.35%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.35%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 3 (1.06%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 141 (50.00%) AWS
2 85 (30.14%) Azure
3 43 (15.25%) GCP
4 34 (12.06%) GitHub
5 33 (11.70%) Amazon S3
6 25 (8.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 25 (8.87%) Serverless
7 22 (7.80%) Amazon EC2
8 18 (6.38%) AWS Lambda
8 18 (6.38%) Azure AI
9 14 (4.96%) Anthropic Claude
10 13 (4.61%) Azure DevOps
10 13 (4.61%) GitHub Actions
10 13 (4.61%) Route 53
11 12 (4.26%) Amazon SQS
12 11 (3.90%) AWS KMS
13 10 (3.55%) Azure Cognitive Services
13 10 (3.55%) Vertex AI
14 9 (3.19%) Amazon Bedrock
14 9 (3.19%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 9 (3.19%) Firewall
2 7 (2.48%) Reverse Proxy
3 6 (2.13%) SNMP
4 5 (1.77%) DNS
4 5 (1.77%) WAN
5 3 (1.06%) Intrusion Detection
5 3 (1.06%) Network Security
6 2 (0.71%) DHCP
6 2 (0.71%) NaaS
7 1 (0.35%) 4G
7 1 (0.35%) 5G
7 1 (0.35%) Cisco IOS
7 1 (0.35%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.35%) LTE
7 1 (0.35%) MQTT
7 1 (0.35%) NAS
7 1 (0.35%) NGFW
7 1 (0.35%) SAN
7 1 (0.35%) SSH
7 1 (0.35%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 43 (15.25%) PostgreSQL
2 28 (9.93%) Apache Cassandra
3 21 (7.45%) Amazon RDS
4 17 (6.03%) DynamoDB
5 14 (4.96%) MongoDB
6 11 (3.90%) Amazon Aurora
7 10 (3.55%) Pinecone
8 9 (3.19%) Amazon Athena
8 9 (3.19%) Amazon Redshift
8 9 (3.19%) BigQuery
8 9 (3.19%) Relational Database
8 9 (3.19%) SQL Server
9 8 (2.84%) Data Warehouse
10 7 (2.48%) Amazon QuickSight
11 6 (2.13%) Big Data
11 6 (2.13%) Data Lake
11 6 (2.13%) Metadata
11 6 (2.13%) NoSQL
12 5 (1.77%) Pentaho
12 5 (1.77%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 59 (20.92%) Git
2 28 (9.93%) GitLab
3 24 (8.51%) JUnit
4 22 (7.80%) Jenkins
5 19 (6.74%) JIRA
6 18 (6.38%) SonarQube
7 14 (4.96%) Sonatype Nexus
8 11 (3.90%) Bitbucket Server
8 11 (3.90%) DbUnit
8 11 (3.90%) jMock
8 11 (3.90%) Maven
8 11 (3.90%) Mockito
9 10 (3.55%) MLflow
10 8 (2.84%) IntelliJ
11 6 (2.13%) CircleCI
11 6 (2.13%) Gradle
12 5 (1.77%) Artifactory
12 5 (1.77%) PowerDesigner
13 2 (0.71%) JMeter
13 2 (0.71%) Liquibase
General
1 67 (23.76%) Social Skills
2 59 (20.92%) Finance
3 44 (15.60%) Public Sector
4 22 (7.80%) Legal
5 21 (7.45%) Banking
6 20 (7.09%) Analytical Skills
7 11 (3.90%) Law
8 7 (2.48%) Military
9 6 (2.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 5 (1.77%) Documentation Skills
10 5 (1.77%) Front Office
11 3 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (1.06%) Retail
12 2 (0.71%) Billing
12 2 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
12 2 (0.71%) Police
12 2 (0.71%) Publishing
12 2 (0.71%) Telecoms
13 1 (0.35%) Automotive
13 1 (0.35%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 69 (24.47%) Developer
2 60 (21.28%) Architect
3 46 (16.31%) Senior
4 31 (10.99%) Solutions Architect
5 27 (9.57%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 26 (9.22%) AWS Architect
6 26 (9.22%) Senior Developer
6 26 (9.22%) Software Engineer
7 22 (7.80%) Data Engineer
8 18 (6.38%) AWS Solution Architect
9 14 (4.96%) Consultant
9 14 (4.96%) Java Developer
10 12 (4.26%) Senior Data Engineer
11 11 (3.90%) AWS Engineer
11 11 (3.90%) Cloud Engineer
12 10 (3.55%) Android Developer
12 10 (3.55%) Cloud Architect
12 10 (3.55%) Lead
13 9 (3.19%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 9 (3.19%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 67 (23.76%) Kafka
2 43 (15.25%) REST
3 30 (10.64%) RESTful
4 29 (10.28%) gRPC
5 24 (8.51%) React
6 19 (6.74%) Spring
6 19 (6.74%) Spring Boot
6 19 (6.74%) Web Services
7 18 (6.38%) Node.js
8 16 (5.67%) .NET
8 16 (5.67%) AngularJS
9 15 (5.32%) Android Jetpack
9 15 (5.32%) Hugging Face
9 15 (5.32%) Jetpack Compose
9 15 (5.32%) LangChain
9 15 (5.32%) PyTorch
9 15 (5.32%) TensorFlow
10 14 (4.96%) SOAP
11 11 (3.90%) ActiveMQ
11 11 (3.90%) Hibernate
Miscellaneous
1 51 (18.09%) Distributed Systems
2 42 (14.89%) Cloud Native
3 16 (5.67%) AI Agents
4 14 (4.96%) Product Ownership
5 9 (3.19%) Enterprise Software
5 9 (3.19%) Legacy Systems
5 9 (3.19%) Mobile App
6 8 (2.84%) Data Protection Act
6 8 (2.84%) Self-Motivation
7 7 (2.48%) Low-Code
7 7 (2.48%) Management Information System
8 6 (2.13%) Data Centre
8 6 (2.13%) Onboarding
8 6 (2.13%) Virtual Team
9 5 (1.77%) Cyber Threat
9 5 (1.77%) Legacy Code
9 5 (1.77%) Security Posture
10 3 (1.06%) Clustering
10 3 (1.06%) Cyber Kill Chain
11 2 (0.71%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 47 (16.67%) Linux
2 17 (6.03%) Android
3 5 (1.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 4 (1.42%) Debian
4 4 (1.42%) Rocky
4 4 (1.42%) Ubuntu
4 4 (1.42%) 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 91 (32.27%) CI/CD
2 78 (27.66%) AI
3 70 (24.82%) Agile
3 70 (24.82%) Software Engineering
4 68 (24.11%) Microservices
5 66 (23.40%) DevOps
6 57 (20.21%) LLM
7 51 (18.09%) Containerisation
8 48 (17.02%) Stakeholder Management
9 43 (15.25%) Machine Learning
10 41 (14.54%) Infrastructure as Code
11 37 (13.12%) Data Pipeline
12 36 (12.77%) Event-Driven
12 36 (12.77%) Observability
13 33 (11.70%) Generative AI
13 33 (11.70%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
14 32 (11.35%) Problem-Solving
15 29 (10.28%) Event-Driven Architecture
16 25 (8.87%) Test Automation
17 24 (8.51%) Continuous Integration
Programming Languages
1 125 (44.33%) Python
2 53 (18.79%) Java
3 40 (14.18%) Go
4 39 (13.83%) SQL
5 22 (7.80%) JavaScript
6 19 (6.74%) TypeScript
7 18 (6.38%) Bash
8 17 (6.03%) Kotlin
9 16 (5.67%) C#
10 6 (2.13%) Shell Script
11 5 (1.77%) C++
11 5 (1.77%) PowerShell
12 3 (1.06%) PL/SQL
12 3 (1.06%) Scala
13 2 (0.71%) Ruby
14 1 (0.35%) Groovy
14 1 (0.35%) Kusto Query Language
14 1 (0.35%) Objective-C
14 1 (0.35%) Rust
14 1 (0.35%) Swift
Qualifications
1 85 (30.14%) Security Cleared
2 68 (24.11%) SC Cleared
3 30 (10.64%) Degree
4 14 (4.96%) Computer Science Degree
5 9 (3.19%) BPSS Clearance
5 9 (3.19%) DV Cleared
6 8 (2.84%) AWS Certification
7 5 (1.77%) Azure Certification
8 4 (1.42%) 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%) CEH
11 1 (0.35%) GCIA
11 1 (0.35%) GIAC
11 1 (0.35%) ISEB
11 1 (0.35%) MPhil
11 1 (0.35%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (5.32%) QA
2 10 (3.55%) Accessibility
3 9 (3.19%) 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 86 (30.50%) Docker
2 9 (3.19%) Postfix
3 7 (2.48%) Active Directory
4 4 (1.42%) 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 78 (27.66%) Kubernetes
2 38 (13.48%) Terraform
3 32 (11.35%) Grafana
4 26 (9.22%) Prometheus
5 18 (6.38%) Ansible
6 4 (1.42%) Istio
6 4 (1.42%) Puppet
6 4 (1.42%) Salt
7 2 (0.71%) Amdocs OSS
7 2 (0.71%) Data Guard
7 2 (0.71%) Oracle RMAN
7 2 (0.71%) Rancher
8 1 (0.35%) Argo
8 1 (0.35%) CASB
8 1 (0.35%) Control-M
8 1 (0.35%) Docker Swarm
8 1 (0.35%) MOM
8 1 (0.35%) QRadar
8 1 (0.35%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.35%) WMI
Vendors
1 32 (11.35%) OpenAI
2 26 (9.22%) Microsoft
3 25 (8.87%) Google
4 17 (6.03%) Dynatrace
5 12 (4.26%) Oracle
6 11 (3.90%) Atlassian
6 11 (3.90%) Jaspersoft
6 11 (3.90%) Splunk
7 7 (2.48%) Automation Anywhere
7 7 (2.48%) Checkmarx
7 7 (2.48%) UiPath
8 5 (1.77%) Black Duck
8 5 (1.77%) Cribl.io
8 5 (1.77%) Denodo
8 5 (1.77%) IBM
8 5 (1.77%) Informatica
8 5 (1.77%) ServiceNow
9 4 (1.42%) Fortinet
10 3 (1.06%) Sonatype
10 3 (1.06%) VMware