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 27 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 421 252 302
Rank change year-on-year -169 +50 -37
Contract jobs citing Open Source 260 346 284
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 1.06% 0.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.57% 1.17% 0.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 139 175 175
10th Percentile £424 £368 £331
25th Percentile £475 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.76% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £611 £600 £656
90th Percentile £755 £675 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £493 £595
% change year-on-year +6.49% -17.14% +8.18%
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% -60.14%
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 45,399 29,629 33,143
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.55% 90.46% 85.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,782 18,436 20,950
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 2,881 1,773 1,687
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £13.86
25th Percentile £17.87 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +6.25%

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 27 August 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 27 August 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 27 August 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 -182 185 £550 +4.76% 130
Work from Home -96 98 £514 -6.55% 70
UK excluding London -110 98 £525 +6.49% 107
London -142 97 £600 - 64
North of England -78 26 £495 +0.51% 19
South West -23 24 £550 +40.13% 33
Scotland -32 17 £663 +29.27% 15
Yorkshire -47 15 £500 -1.77% 6
East of England -12 12 £552 +38.00% 12
West Midlands -45 11 £459 -8.20% 8
Midlands -51 11 £459 -8.20% 11
South East -66 9 £550 +10.00% 13
North West -57 6 £550 +11.79% 9
North East -40 5 £425 -8.60% 4

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 (6.15%) Confluence
2 11 (4.23%) Apache
3 7 (2.69%) Apache Airflow
3 7 (2.69%) Apache Spark
3 7 (2.69%) SharePoint
4 6 (2.31%) SAS
5 4 (1.54%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.38%) Apache Pulsar
6 1 (0.38%) GeoServer
6 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 3 (1.15%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 2 (0.77%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 118 (45.38%) AWS
2 69 (26.54%) Azure
3 54 (20.77%) GCP
4 36 (13.85%) GitHub
5 22 (8.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 22 (8.46%) Amazon S3
6 21 (8.08%) Serverless
7 19 (7.31%) GitHub Actions
8 14 (5.38%) Vertex AI
9 12 (4.62%) Amazon EC2
9 12 (4.62%) AWS Lambda
9 12 (4.62%) IaaS
10 11 (4.23%) Amazon EKS
11 9 (3.46%) Google Gemini
11 9 (3.46%) SaaS
12 8 (3.08%) Amazon Bedrock
12 8 (3.08%) Azure Monitor
13 7 (2.69%) Amazon SQS
13 7 (2.69%) Power Platform
14 6 (2.31%) Amazon Kinesis
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.69%) Intrusion Detection
2 6 (2.31%) HTTPS
2 6 (2.31%) SNMP
3 4 (1.54%) DNS
3 4 (1.54%) SSH
3 4 (1.54%) SSL
4 3 (1.15%) Firewall
4 3 (1.15%) Network Security
5 2 (0.77%) 4G
5 2 (0.77%) Cisco IOS
5 2 (0.77%) HTTP
5 2 (0.77%) Reverse Proxy
5 2 (0.77%) TCP/IP
5 2 (0.77%) WAN
6 1 (0.38%) MQTT
6 1 (0.38%) NaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (10.38%) PostgreSQL
2 16 (6.15%) Amazon RDS
3 13 (5.00%) MongoDB
4 12 (4.62%) DynamoDB
5 9 (3.46%) Big Data
5 9 (3.46%) BigQuery
5 9 (3.46%) Data Warehouse
6 8 (3.08%) Amazon Redshift
6 8 (3.08%) Apache Cassandra
6 8 (3.08%) Data Lake
7 7 (2.69%) Amazon Athena
7 7 (2.69%) Relational Database
8 6 (2.31%) Amazon Aurora
9 5 (1.92%) Amazon QuickSight
9 5 (1.92%) Apache Iceberg
9 5 (1.92%) Pentaho
9 5 (1.92%) Power BI
9 5 (1.92%) Redis
9 5 (1.92%) Spatial Data
9 5 (1.92%) Trino
Development Applications
1 56 (21.54%) Git
2 23 (8.85%) Jenkins
3 21 (8.08%) GitLab
4 17 (6.54%) JIRA
5 16 (6.15%) JUnit
6 13 (5.00%) SonarQube
7 12 (4.62%) Sonatype Nexus
8 8 (3.08%) IntelliJ
9 6 (2.31%) Bitbucket Server
9 6 (2.31%) Cucumber
9 6 (2.31%) DbUnit
9 6 (2.31%) jMock
9 6 (2.31%) Maven
9 6 (2.31%) Mockito
10 5 (1.92%) JMeter
11 4 (1.54%) PowerDesigner
11 4 (1.54%) Selenium
12 3 (1.15%) Artifactory
12 3 (1.15%) CircleCI
12 3 (1.15%) LoadRunner
General
1 65 (25.00%) Social Skills
2 42 (16.15%) Finance
3 35 (13.46%) Public Sector
4 18 (6.92%) Analytical Skills
5 16 (6.15%) Banking
6 15 (5.77%) Legal
7 10 (3.85%) Law
8 9 (3.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 5 (1.92%) Influencing Skills
9 5 (1.92%) Military
10 4 (1.54%) Front Office
10 4 (1.54%) Presentation Skills
10 4 (1.54%) Retail
11 3 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
11 3 (1.15%) Publishing
12 2 (0.77%) Organisational Skills
12 2 (0.77%) Police
12 2 (0.77%) Polish Language
12 2 (0.77%) Public Speaking
13 1 (0.38%) Billing
Job Titles
1 53 (20.38%) Architect
2 49 (18.85%) Developer
3 44 (16.92%) Senior
4 29 (11.15%) Solutions Architect
5 25 (9.62%) AWS Architect
6 18 (6.92%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 18 (6.92%) AWS Solution Architect
7 15 (5.77%) Analyst
7 15 (5.77%) Data Engineer
8 14 (5.38%) Consultant
8 14 (5.38%) Senior Developer
8 14 (5.38%) Software Engineer
9 12 (4.62%) Threat Intelligence Analyst
10 11 (4.23%) Cyber Threat Analyst
10 11 (4.23%) Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst
10 11 (4.23%) Software Developer
11 10 (3.85%) Cloud Engineer
11 10 (3.85%) Java Developer
12 9 (3.46%) AWS Engineer
12 9 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 47 (18.08%) Kafka
2 44 (16.92%) Terraform
3 33 (12.69%) REST
4 15 (5.77%) React
4 15 (5.77%) Spring
4 15 (5.77%) Spring Boot
5 14 (5.38%) LangChain
5 14 (5.38%) Node.js
5 14 (5.38%) RESTful
6 12 (4.62%) SOAP
7 10 (3.85%) gRPC
7 10 (3.85%) LangGraph
7 10 (3.85%) OpenTelemetry
8 9 (3.46%) Android Jetpack
8 9 (3.46%) eBPF
8 9 (3.46%) Jetpack Compose
8 9 (3.46%) PyTorch
9 8 (3.08%) AngularJS
9 8 (3.08%) TensorFlow
10 7 (2.69%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 44 (16.92%) Cloud Native
2 26 (10.00%) Distributed Systems
3 21 (8.08%) AI Agents
4 18 (6.92%) Cyber Threat
5 11 (4.23%) Data Protection Act
5 11 (4.23%) Enterprise Software
6 10 (3.85%) Private Cloud
7 9 (3.46%) Management Information System
7 9 (3.46%) Product Ownership
8 7 (2.69%) Mobile App
8 7 (2.69%) Self-Motivation
9 6 (2.31%) Data Structures
10 5 (1.92%) Blog
10 5 (1.92%) Legacy Applications
10 5 (1.92%) LIMS
10 5 (1.92%) Linux Command Line
10 5 (1.92%) Security Operations Centre
10 5 (1.92%) Security Posture
11 4 (1.54%) Replication
11 4 (1.54%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 53 (20.38%) Linux
2 15 (5.77%) Unix
3 12 (4.62%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 10 (3.85%) Android
5 9 (3.46%) Windows
6 3 (1.15%) Debian
6 3 (1.15%) Rocky
6 3 (1.15%) Ubuntu
7 2 (0.77%) Apple iOS
8 1 (0.38%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 95 (36.54%) CI/CD
2 64 (24.62%) Agile
2 64 (24.62%) Software Engineering
3 62 (23.85%) AI
3 62 (23.85%) DevOps
4 45 (17.31%) Observability
5 43 (16.54%) Infrastructure as Code
6 41 (15.77%) Microservices
7 40 (15.38%) Containerisation
7 40 (15.38%) Event-Driven
8 39 (15.00%) Stakeholder Management
9 35 (13.46%) LLM
10 33 (12.69%) Event-Driven Architecture
11 32 (12.31%) Data Pipeline
11 32 (12.31%) Test Automation
12 28 (10.77%) Machine Learning
13 26 (10.00%) Cybersecurity
13 26 (10.00%) Problem-Solving
14 22 (8.46%) Continuous Improvement
14 22 (8.46%) CRM
Programming Languages
1 106 (40.77%) Python
2 49 (18.85%) Java
3 32 (12.31%) SQL
4 23 (8.85%) Go
5 20 (7.69%) Bash
6 14 (5.38%) TypeScript
7 13 (5.00%) C++
7 13 (5.00%) JavaScript
8 10 (3.85%) Kotlin
9 9 (3.46%) C
9 9 (3.46%) Perl
9 9 (3.46%) Scala
10 5 (1.92%) MUMPS
11 4 (1.54%) C#
12 3 (1.15%) PL/SQL
12 3 (1.15%) PowerShell
12 3 (1.15%) Shell Script
13 2 (0.77%) Rust
14 1 (0.38%) Bicep
14 1 (0.38%) Swift
Qualifications
1 99 (38.08%) Security Cleared
2 70 (26.92%) SC Cleared
3 21 (8.08%) Degree
4 20 (7.69%) DV Cleared
5 12 (4.62%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.46%) CISSP
7 8 (3.08%) CISM
8 5 (1.92%) AWS Certification
9 4 (1.54%) Azure Certification
9 4 (1.54%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (1.15%) Master's Degree
11 2 (0.77%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 2 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 2 (0.77%) CEH
11 2 (0.77%) GIAC
11 2 (0.77%) GSEC
11 2 (0.77%) LFCS
11 2 (0.77%) OSCP
11 2 (0.77%) RHCE
11 2 (0.77%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (5.00%) QA
2 12 (4.62%) Accessibility
3 6 (2.31%) GDPR
4 5 (1.92%) WCAG
5 4 (1.54%) Disclosure Scotland
6 3 (1.15%) Data Quality
6 3 (1.15%) GRC
6 3 (1.15%) NIST
7 1 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.38%) NCSC
System Software
1 57 (21.92%) Docker
2 8 (3.08%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (1.92%) Postfix
4 4 (1.54%) Hyper-V
5 3 (1.15%) Ceph
6 2 (0.77%) Active Directory
6 2 (0.77%) Firmware
6 2 (0.77%) Oracle RAC
6 2 (0.77%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 2 (0.77%) VMware ESXi
7 1 (0.38%) Squid
7 1 (0.38%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 58 (22.31%) Kubernetes
2 35 (13.46%) Grafana
3 28 (10.77%) Prometheus
4 26 (10.00%) Ansible
5 10 (3.85%) Puppet
6 8 (3.08%) Progress Chef
7 4 (1.54%) Istio
7 4 (1.54%) Salt
8 3 (1.15%) Cilium
9 2 (0.77%) Data Guard
9 2 (0.77%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.77%) Kibana
9 2 (0.77%) linkerd
9 2 (0.77%) Oracle RMAN
10 1 (0.38%) Amdocs OSS
10 1 (0.38%) Argo
10 1 (0.38%) QRadar
10 1 (0.38%) Rancher
10 1 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.38%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 26 (10.00%) Google
2 22 (8.46%) Microsoft
3 18 (6.92%) Dynatrace
3 18 (6.92%) Splunk
4 17 (6.54%) OpenAI
5 12 (4.62%) Oracle
6 10 (3.85%) Red Hat
7 9 (3.46%) SaltStack
8 8 (3.08%) VMware
9 7 (2.69%) Checkmarx
9 7 (2.69%) Cribl.io
10 6 (2.31%) Atlassian
10 6 (2.31%) Informatica
10 6 (2.31%) Jaspersoft
11 5 (1.92%) Black Duck
11 5 (1.92%) Databricks
11 5 (1.92%) Denodo
11 5 (1.92%) InterSystems
12 4 (1.54%) IBM
12 4 (1.54%) ServiceNow