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

6 months to
22 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 426 240 317
Rank change year-on-year -186 +77 -55
Contract jobs citing Open Source 264 352 258
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 1.08% 0.68%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.57% 1.20% 0.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 143 174 136
10th Percentile £413 £363 £331
25th Percentile £458 £430 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.48% - -8.70%
75th Percentile £611 £600 £625
90th Percentile £755 £716 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £493 £500
% change year-on-year +4.11% -1.40% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 1 14
10th Percentile - - £20.12
25th Percentile £13.09 £51.75 £21.25
Median hourly rate £13.34 £56.50 £25.68
Median % change year-on-year -76.39% +120.02% +20.85%
75th Percentile £77.50 £61.25 £27.72
90th Percentile £81.40 - £27.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £13.34 - £25.36

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 46,027 29,389 32,594
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.35% 90.49% 85.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,906 18,237 19,938
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £626 £625 £638
90th Percentile £731 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,152 1,808 1,420
10th Percentile £13.81 £14.24 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £42.69
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.09% -1.10%
75th Percentile £67.25 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.25 £74.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.08 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +79.61% -48.10% +1.18%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 -212 187 £541 +3.10% 850
UK excluding London -113 108 £513 +4.11% 328
Work from Home -92 104 £514 -6.55% 383
London -152 91 £588 -2.08% 597
North of England -76 33 £475 -2.76% 70
South West -19 23 £550 +15.79% 38
Scotland -39 18 £524 +4.75% 42
Yorkshire -46 14 £497 -5.29% 20
East of England -20 13 £552 - 68
South East -71 13 £405 -29.34% 58
West Midlands -48 11 £450 -10.10% 14
Midlands -51 11 £450 -10.10% 18
North West -61 10 £675 +39.61% 36
North East -30 9 £425 -8.60% 14

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 12 (4.55%) Confluence
2 9 (3.41%) Apache
2 9 (3.41%) SharePoint
3 7 (2.65%) Apache Airflow
3 7 (2.65%) Apache Spark
4 6 (2.27%) SAS
5 4 (1.52%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.38%) Apache Pulsar
6 1 (0.38%) CMS
6 1 (0.38%) Drupal
6 1 (0.38%) GeoServer
6 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Exchange
6 1 (0.38%) OpenStack
6 1 (0.38%) WordPress
Applications
1 4 (1.52%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.76%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.76%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.38%) Magento
Cloud Services
1 115 (43.56%) AWS
2 68 (25.76%) Azure
3 52 (19.70%) GCP
4 43 (16.29%) GitHub
5 25 (9.47%) GitHub Actions
6 21 (7.95%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 21 (7.95%) Amazon S3
7 17 (6.44%) Serverless
8 15 (5.68%) Amazon EKS
9 14 (5.30%) Vertex AI
10 13 (4.92%) IaaS
11 11 (4.17%) Amazon EC2
11 11 (4.17%) AWS Lambda
12 9 (3.41%) Anthropic Claude
12 9 (3.41%) Google Gemini
13 8 (3.03%) Amazon Bedrock
14 7 (2.65%) Amazon SQS
14 7 (2.65%) Azure Monitor
14 7 (2.65%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 7 (2.65%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.65%) Intrusion Detection
2 6 (2.27%) HTTPS
2 6 (2.27%) SNMP
3 4 (1.52%) DNS
3 4 (1.52%) Network Security
4 3 (1.14%) Firewall
4 3 (1.14%) SSH
4 3 (1.14%) SSL
5 2 (0.76%) Asterisk PBX
5 2 (0.76%) Broadband
5 2 (0.76%) Cisco IOS
5 2 (0.76%) HTTP
5 2 (0.76%) Internet
5 2 (0.76%) Reverse Proxy
5 2 (0.76%) RTCP
5 2 (0.76%) RTP
5 2 (0.76%) TCP/IP
5 2 (0.76%) VoIP
5 2 (0.76%) Wi-Fi
5 2 (0.76%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (7.20%) PostgreSQL
2 15 (5.68%) Amazon RDS
3 12 (4.55%) DynamoDB
4 10 (3.79%) MongoDB
5 8 (3.03%) Amazon Redshift
5 8 (3.03%) BigQuery
5 8 (3.03%) Data Warehouse
5 8 (3.03%) Relational Database
6 7 (2.65%) Amazon Athena
6 7 (2.65%) Apache Iceberg
6 7 (2.65%) Data Lake
6 7 (2.65%) Trino
7 6 (2.27%) Amazon Aurora
7 6 (2.27%) Amazon QuickSight
7 6 (2.27%) Big Data
8 5 (1.89%) BusinessObjects
8 5 (1.89%) Pentaho
8 5 (1.89%) Power BI
8 5 (1.89%) Redis
9 3 (1.14%) QGIS
Development Applications
1 55 (20.83%) Git
2 25 (9.47%) Jenkins
3 21 (7.95%) GitLab
4 14 (5.30%) JUnit
5 13 (4.92%) JIRA
6 12 (4.55%) SonarQube
7 7 (2.65%) Sonatype Nexus
8 6 (2.27%) Bitbucket Server
8 6 (2.27%) Cucumber
8 6 (2.27%) DbUnit
8 6 (2.27%) IntelliJ
8 6 (2.27%) JMeter
8 6 (2.27%) jMock
8 6 (2.27%) Maven
8 6 (2.27%) Mockito
9 4 (1.52%) CircleCI
9 4 (1.52%) Cypress.io
9 4 (1.52%) MLflow
10 3 (1.14%) Postman
10 3 (1.14%) ScalaTest
General
1 72 (27.27%) Social Skills
2 42 (15.91%) Public Sector
3 38 (14.39%) Finance
4 18 (6.82%) Analytical Skills
5 14 (5.30%) Banking
6 13 (4.92%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 12 (4.55%) Legal
8 10 (3.79%) Law
9 6 (2.27%) Influencing Skills
9 6 (2.27%) Military
9 6 (2.27%) Retail
10 4 (1.52%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
11 3 (1.14%) Front Office
11 3 (1.14%) Publishing
11 3 (1.14%) Telecoms
12 2 (0.76%) Police
12 2 (0.76%) Polish Language
12 2 (0.76%) Public Speaking
13 1 (0.38%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 55 (20.83%) Senior
2 49 (18.56%) Developer
3 42 (15.91%) Architect
4 23 (8.71%) AWS Architect
5 22 (8.33%) Solutions Architect
6 21 (7.95%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 16 (6.06%) AWS Solution Architect
7 16 (6.06%) Software Engineer
8 15 (5.68%) Analyst
8 15 (5.68%) Senior Developer
8 15 (5.68%) Software Developer
9 12 (4.55%) Data Engineer
9 12 (4.55%) Threat Intelligence Analyst
10 11 (4.17%) Cloud Engineer
10 11 (4.17%) Consultant
10 11 (4.17%) Cyber Threat Analyst
10 11 (4.17%) Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst
10 11 (4.17%) Infrastructure Engineer
11 10 (3.79%) Platform Engineer
12 9 (3.41%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 50 (18.94%) Terraform
2 37 (14.02%) Kafka
3 32 (12.12%) REST
4 16 (6.06%) LangChain
5 15 (5.68%) RESTful
6 14 (5.30%) Spring
6 14 (5.30%) Spring Boot
7 13 (4.92%) LangGraph
7 13 (4.92%) PyTorch
7 13 (4.92%) React
8 11 (4.17%) Node.js
8 11 (4.17%) SOAP
9 10 (3.79%) eBPF
9 10 (3.79%) OpenTelemetry
9 10 (3.79%) TensorFlow
10 9 (3.41%) AngularJS
11 8 (3.03%) Android Jetpack
11 8 (3.03%) Jetpack Compose
11 8 (3.03%) Play Framework
11 8 (3.03%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 46 (17.42%) Cloud Native
2 24 (9.09%) AI Agents
2 24 (9.09%) Distributed Systems
3 20 (7.58%) Cyber Threat
4 15 (5.68%) Private Cloud
5 11 (4.17%) Management Information System
6 10 (3.79%) Enterprise Software
7 9 (3.41%) Product Ownership
7 9 (3.41%) Self-Motivation
8 8 (3.03%) Blog
8 8 (3.03%) Data Protection Act
8 8 (3.03%) Mobile App
9 7 (2.65%) Data Structures
9 7 (2.65%) Security Posture
10 6 (2.27%) Legacy Applications
10 6 (2.27%) LIMS
10 6 (2.27%) Linux Command Line
11 5 (1.89%) Replication
11 5 (1.89%) Security Operations Centre
11 5 (1.89%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 61 (23.11%) Linux
2 18 (6.82%) Unix
3 12 (4.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 10 (3.79%) Windows
5 9 (3.41%) Android
6 3 (1.14%) Apple iOS
7 2 (0.76%) Debian
7 2 (0.76%) Rocky
7 2 (0.76%) Ubuntu
8 1 (0.38%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 113 (42.80%) CI/CD
2 70 (26.52%) AI
3 68 (25.76%) Agile
3 68 (25.76%) Software Engineering
4 65 (24.62%) DevOps
5 55 (20.83%) Infrastructure as Code
5 55 (20.83%) Observability
6 47 (17.80%) Containerisation
7 45 (17.05%) Test Automation
8 42 (15.91%) Microservices
9 38 (14.39%) Event-Driven
10 36 (13.64%) LLM
11 35 (13.26%) Stakeholder Management
12 32 (12.12%) Event-Driven Architecture
12 32 (12.12%) Machine Learning
13 30 (11.36%) Cybersecurity
13 30 (11.36%) Data Pipeline
13 30 (11.36%) Platform Engineering
14 29 (10.98%) Problem-Solving
15 28 (10.61%) Continuous Integration
Programming Languages
1 106 (40.15%) Python
2 48 (18.18%) Java
3 32 (12.12%) SQL
4 19 (7.20%) Bash
5 17 (6.44%) Go
6 15 (5.68%) TypeScript
7 14 (5.30%) Perl
8 13 (4.92%) C++
8 13 (4.92%) JavaScript
8 13 (4.92%) Scala
9 11 (4.17%) C
10 9 (3.41%) Kotlin
11 6 (2.27%) MUMPS
12 5 (1.89%) Shell Script
13 3 (1.14%) C#
14 2 (0.76%) Objective-C
14 2 (0.76%) PowerShell
14 2 (0.76%) Ruby
14 2 (0.76%) Rust
14 2 (0.76%) Swift
Qualifications
1 98 (37.12%) Security Cleared
2 72 (27.27%) SC Cleared
3 22 (8.33%) Degree
4 18 (6.82%) DV Cleared
5 13 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.41%) CISSP
7 8 (3.03%) CISM
8 6 (2.27%) AWS Certification
8 6 (2.27%) BPSS Clearance
9 4 (1.52%) Azure Certification
9 4 (1.52%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.76%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.76%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.76%) GIAC
10 2 (0.76%) GSEC
10 2 (0.76%) LFCS
10 2 (0.76%) OSCP
10 2 (0.76%) RHCE
10 2 (0.76%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (6.06%) Accessibility
2 13 (4.92%) QA
3 7 (2.65%) GDPR
3 7 (2.65%) WCAG
4 4 (1.52%) Disclosure Scotland
5 3 (1.14%) Data Quality
5 3 (1.14%) GRC
5 3 (1.14%) NIST
6 2 (0.76%) NCSC
6 2 (0.76%) PMO
7 1 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 62 (23.48%) Docker
2 12 (4.55%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (2.27%) VMware ESXi
4 5 (1.89%) Postfix
5 3 (1.14%) Ceph
5 3 (1.14%) Hyper-V
6 2 (0.76%) Active Directory
6 2 (0.76%) Firmware
6 2 (0.76%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 2 (0.76%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 71 (26.89%) Kubernetes
2 38 (14.39%) Grafana
3 33 (12.50%) Ansible
4 29 (10.98%) Prometheus
5 11 (4.17%) Puppet
6 9 (3.41%) Progress Chef
7 4 (1.52%) Cilium
7 4 (1.52%) Istio
7 4 (1.52%) Salt
8 2 (0.76%) Control-M
8 2 (0.76%) Docker Swarm
8 2 (0.76%) Kibana
8 2 (0.76%) linkerd
8 2 (0.76%) systemd
9 1 (0.38%) Argo
9 1 (0.38%) QRadar
9 1 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.38%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 29 (10.98%) Google
2 22 (8.33%) Microsoft
2 22 (8.33%) Splunk
3 17 (6.44%) Dynatrace
4 16 (6.06%) OpenAI
5 14 (5.30%) SaltStack
6 12 (4.55%) Oracle
6 12 (4.55%) VMware
7 10 (3.79%) Red Hat
8 7 (2.65%) Cribl.io
8 7 (2.65%) Databricks
9 6 (2.27%) Atlassian
9 6 (2.27%) Checkmarx
9 6 (2.27%) Informatica
9 6 (2.27%) InterSystems
9 6 (2.27%) Jaspersoft
10 5 (1.89%) Denodo
11 4 (1.52%) Black Duck
11 4 (1.52%) Foundry
11 4 (1.52%) Mistral