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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 422 255 322
Rank change year-on-year -167 +67 -60
Contract jobs citing Open Source 257 351 281
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 1.07% 0.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.57% 1.19% 0.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 138 175 168
10th Percentile £418 £368 £313
25th Percentile £471 £425 £417
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £519 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.97% -1.14% -12.50%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £650
90th Percentile £755 £675 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £514 £492 £574
% change year-on-year +4.47% -14.25% +2.46%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 1 10
10th Percentile £30.76 - £20.12
25th Percentile £57.27 £51.75 £20.40
Median hourly rate £76.50 £56.50 £21.68
Median % change year-on-year +35.40% +160.61% +2.02%
75th Percentile £80.50 £61.25 £27.96
90th Percentile £83.20 - £30.91
UK excluding London median hourly rate £74.00 - £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 45,369 29,617 32,996
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.56% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,730 18,446 20,728
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,902 1,758 1,607
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.78 £17.30 £18.82
Median hourly rate £41.09 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.39% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.88 £47.09 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.56 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +92.49% -47.37% +14.67%

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 1 September 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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Open Source over the 6 months to 1 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Open Source in the UK

Open Source
Top 14 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 1 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 -206 180 £550 +5.36% 1,073
Work from Home -87 99 £507 -7.82% 463
London -150 96 £600 - 809
UK excluding London -114 94 £514 +4.47% 372
North of England -79 25 £485 -0.77% 60
South West -20 23 £550 +40.13% 48
Scotland -38 16 £525 +5.00% 60
Yorkshire -34 15 £500 -1.77% 17
East of England -12 12 £552 +38.00% 86
West Midlands -45 11 £459 -8.20% 20
Midlands -52 11 £459 -8.20% 25
South East -72 8 £680 +35.90% 62
North East -44 5 £425 -8.60% 10
North West -69 5 £575 +16.87% 33

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 16 (6.23%) Confluence
2 11 (4.28%) Apache
3 7 (2.72%) Apache Airflow
3 7 (2.72%) Apache Spark
3 7 (2.72%) SharePoint
4 6 (2.33%) SAS
5 4 (1.56%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.39%) Apache Pulsar
6 1 (0.39%) CMS
6 1 (0.39%) Drupal
6 1 (0.39%) GeoServer
6 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
6 1 (0.39%) WordPress
Applications
1 3 (1.17%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 2 (0.78%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.39%) Magento
Cloud Services
1 117 (45.53%) AWS
2 69 (26.85%) Azure
3 54 (21.01%) GCP
4 38 (14.79%) GitHub
5 22 (8.56%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 22 (8.56%) Amazon S3
6 20 (7.78%) Serverless
7 19 (7.39%) GitHub Actions
8 14 (5.45%) Vertex AI
9 12 (4.67%) Amazon EC2
9 12 (4.67%) AWS Lambda
9 12 (4.67%) IaaS
10 11 (4.28%) Amazon EKS
11 9 (3.50%) Google Gemini
11 9 (3.50%) SaaS
12 8 (3.11%) Amazon Bedrock
13 7 (2.72%) Amazon SQS
13 7 (2.72%) Azure Monitor
13 7 (2.72%) Power Platform
14 6 (2.33%) Route 53
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.72%) Intrusion Detection
2 6 (2.33%) HTTPS
2 6 (2.33%) SNMP
3 5 (1.95%) DNS
4 4 (1.56%) SSH
4 4 (1.56%) SSL
5 3 (1.17%) Firewall
5 3 (1.17%) Network Security
6 2 (0.78%) 4G
6 2 (0.78%) Cisco IOS
6 2 (0.78%) HTTP
6 2 (0.78%) Reverse Proxy
6 2 (0.78%) TCP/IP
6 2 (0.78%) WAN
7 1 (0.39%) Broadband
7 1 (0.39%) MQTT
7 1 (0.39%) NaaS
7 1 (0.39%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (9.34%) PostgreSQL
2 16 (6.23%) Amazon RDS
3 12 (4.67%) DynamoDB
4 11 (4.28%) MongoDB
5 9 (3.50%) BigQuery
5 9 (3.50%) Data Warehouse
6 8 (3.11%) Amazon Redshift
6 8 (3.11%) Big Data
6 8 (3.11%) Data Lake
7 7 (2.72%) Amazon Athena
7 7 (2.72%) Relational Database
8 6 (2.33%) Amazon Aurora
8 6 (2.33%) Apache Cassandra
9 5 (1.95%) Amazon QuickSight
9 5 (1.95%) Apache Iceberg
9 5 (1.95%) BusinessObjects
9 5 (1.95%) Pentaho
9 5 (1.95%) Power BI
9 5 (1.95%) Redis
9 5 (1.95%) Trino
Development Applications
1 53 (20.62%) Git
2 25 (9.73%) Jenkins
3 21 (8.17%) GitLab
4 17 (6.61%) JIRA
5 16 (6.23%) JUnit
6 13 (5.06%) SonarQube
7 12 (4.67%) Sonatype Nexus
8 8 (3.11%) IntelliJ
9 7 (2.72%) JMeter
10 6 (2.33%) Bitbucket Server
10 6 (2.33%) Cucumber
10 6 (2.33%) DbUnit
10 6 (2.33%) jMock
10 6 (2.33%) Maven
10 6 (2.33%) Mockito
11 4 (1.56%) Cypress.io
11 4 (1.56%) Postman
11 4 (1.56%) Selenium
12 3 (1.17%) CircleCI
12 3 (1.17%) LoadRunner
General
1 64 (24.90%) Social Skills
2 40 (15.56%) Finance
3 34 (13.23%) Public Sector
4 18 (7.00%) Analytical Skills
5 15 (5.84%) Banking
5 15 (5.84%) Legal
6 10 (3.89%) Law
7 9 (3.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 5 (1.95%) Influencing Skills
8 5 (1.95%) Military
9 4 (1.56%) Front Office
9 4 (1.56%) Presentation Skills
9 4 (1.56%) Retail
10 3 (1.17%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.17%) Publishing
11 2 (0.78%) Organisational Skills
11 2 (0.78%) Police
11 2 (0.78%) Polish Language
11 2 (0.78%) Public Speaking
12 1 (0.39%) Games
Job Titles
1 51 (19.84%) Architect
2 45 (17.51%) Developer
2 45 (17.51%) Senior
3 28 (10.89%) Solutions Architect
4 25 (9.73%) AWS Architect
5 19 (7.39%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 18 (7.00%) AWS Solution Architect
7 16 (6.23%) Software Engineer
8 15 (5.84%) Analyst
9 14 (5.45%) Consultant
10 13 (5.06%) Data Engineer
10 13 (5.06%) Senior Developer
11 12 (4.67%) Threat Intelligence Analyst
12 11 (4.28%) Cyber Threat Analyst
12 11 (4.28%) Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst
12 11 (4.28%) Software Developer
13 10 (3.89%) AWS Engineer
13 10 (3.89%) Cloud Engineer
13 10 (3.89%) Java Developer
13 10 (3.89%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 47 (18.29%) Terraform
2 44 (17.12%) Kafka
3 31 (12.06%) REST
4 15 (5.84%) Spring
4 15 (5.84%) Spring Boot
5 14 (5.45%) LangChain
5 14 (5.45%) React
5 14 (5.45%) RESTful
6 13 (5.06%) Node.js
7 11 (4.28%) PyTorch
7 11 (4.28%) SOAP
8 10 (3.89%) LangGraph
8 10 (3.89%) OpenTelemetry
8 10 (3.89%) TensorFlow
9 9 (3.50%) Android Jetpack
9 9 (3.50%) eBPF
9 9 (3.50%) Jetpack Compose
10 8 (3.11%) gRPC
10 8 (3.11%) Playwright
11 7 (2.72%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 47 (18.29%) Cloud Native
2 23 (8.95%) Distributed Systems
3 22 (8.56%) AI Agents
4 18 (7.00%) Cyber Threat
5 11 (4.28%) Enterprise Software
6 10 (3.89%) Private Cloud
7 9 (3.50%) Data Protection Act
7 9 (3.50%) Management Information System
8 8 (3.11%) Product Ownership
8 8 (3.11%) Self-Motivation
9 7 (2.72%) Mobile App
10 6 (2.33%) Data Structures
11 5 (1.95%) Blog
11 5 (1.95%) Legacy Applications
11 5 (1.95%) LIMS
11 5 (1.95%) Linux Command Line
11 5 (1.95%) Security Operations Centre
11 5 (1.95%) Security Posture
12 4 (1.56%) Virtual Team
13 3 (1.17%) Cyber Kill Chain
Operating Systems
1 54 (21.01%) Linux
2 15 (5.84%) Unix
3 12 (4.67%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 10 (3.89%) Android
5 9 (3.50%) Windows
6 3 (1.17%) Debian
6 3 (1.17%) Rocky
6 3 (1.17%) Ubuntu
7 2 (0.78%) Apple iOS
8 1 (0.39%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 99 (38.52%) CI/CD
2 67 (26.07%) Agile
3 64 (24.90%) Software Engineering
4 63 (24.51%) AI
5 61 (23.74%) DevOps
6 45 (17.51%) Infrastructure as Code
6 45 (17.51%) Observability
7 41 (15.95%) Containerisation
8 39 (15.18%) Event-Driven
8 39 (15.18%) Microservices
9 37 (14.40%) Stakeholder Management
10 36 (14.01%) Test Automation
11 33 (12.84%) Event-Driven Architecture
11 33 (12.84%) LLM
12 30 (11.67%) Data Pipeline
13 29 (11.28%) Machine Learning
14 27 (10.51%) Problem-Solving
15 26 (10.12%) Cybersecurity
16 25 (9.73%) Platform Engineering
17 23 (8.95%) Continuous Integration
Programming Languages
1 103 (40.08%) Python
2 48 (18.68%) Java
3 32 (12.45%) SQL
4 20 (7.78%) Bash
4 20 (7.78%) Go
5 15 (5.84%) JavaScript
6 14 (5.45%) TypeScript
7 13 (5.06%) C++
8 10 (3.89%) C
8 10 (3.89%) Kotlin
9 9 (3.50%) Perl
9 9 (3.50%) Scala
10 5 (1.95%) MUMPS
11 4 (1.56%) C#
11 4 (1.56%) Shell Script
12 3 (1.17%) PowerShell
13 2 (0.78%) PL/SQL
13 2 (0.78%) Rust
14 1 (0.39%) Objective-C
14 1 (0.39%) Swift
Qualifications
1 99 (38.52%) Security Cleared
2 72 (28.02%) SC Cleared
3 20 (7.78%) Degree
4 18 (7.00%) DV Cleared
5 12 (4.67%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.50%) CISSP
7 8 (3.11%) CISM
8 5 (1.95%) AWS Certification
9 4 (1.56%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (1.17%) Azure Certification
10 3 (1.17%) Master's Degree
11 2 (0.78%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 2 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 2 (0.78%) CEH
11 2 (0.78%) GIAC
11 2 (0.78%) GSEC
11 2 (0.78%) LFCS
11 2 (0.78%) OSCP
11 2 (0.78%) RHCE
11 2 (0.78%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (5.45%) QA
2 13 (5.06%) Accessibility
3 6 (2.33%) GDPR
4 5 (1.95%) WCAG
5 4 (1.56%) Disclosure Scotland
6 3 (1.17%) Data Quality
6 3 (1.17%) GRC
6 3 (1.17%) NIST
7 1 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.39%) NCSC
System Software
1 55 (21.40%) Docker
2 8 (3.11%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (1.95%) Postfix
4 4 (1.56%) Hyper-V
5 3 (1.17%) Ceph
6 2 (0.78%) Active Directory
6 2 (0.78%) Firmware
6 2 (0.78%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 2 (0.78%) VMware ESXi
7 1 (0.39%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.39%) Squid
7 1 (0.39%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 59 (22.96%) Kubernetes
2 35 (13.62%) Grafana
3 28 (10.89%) Prometheus
4 26 (10.12%) Ansible
5 10 (3.89%) Puppet
6 8 (3.11%) Progress Chef
7 4 (1.56%) Istio
7 4 (1.56%) Salt
8 3 (1.17%) Cilium
9 2 (0.78%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.78%) Kibana
9 2 (0.78%) linkerd
10 1 (0.39%) Amdocs OSS
10 1 (0.39%) Argo
10 1 (0.39%) Control-M
10 1 (0.39%) Data Guard
10 1 (0.39%) Oracle RMAN
10 1 (0.39%) QRadar
10 1 (0.39%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.39%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 28 (10.89%) Google
2 21 (8.17%) Microsoft
3 19 (7.39%) Splunk
4 18 (7.00%) Dynatrace
5 16 (6.23%) OpenAI
6 11 (4.28%) Oracle
7 10 (3.89%) Red Hat
8 9 (3.50%) SaltStack
9 8 (3.11%) VMware
10 7 (2.72%) Checkmarx
10 7 (2.72%) Cribl.io
11 6 (2.33%) Atlassian
11 6 (2.33%) Informatica
11 6 (2.33%) Jaspersoft
12 5 (1.95%) Black Duck
12 5 (1.95%) Databricks
12 5 (1.95%) Denodo
12 5 (1.95%) InterSystems
13 4 (1.56%) ServiceNow
14 3 (1.17%) Sonatype