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

6 months to
1 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 389 230 307
Rank change year-on-year -159 +77 -50
Contract jobs citing Open Source 280 351 313
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.54% 1.14% 0.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.64% 1.26% 0.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 135 199 207
10th Percentile £425 £393 £360
25th Percentile £497 £436 £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 £718 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £514 £473 £591
% change year-on-year +8.78% -20.08% +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 43,674 27,949 36,811
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.97% 90.88% 85.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,163 17,650 23,450
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.79% -4.57% -4.55%
75th Percentile £621 £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 2,623 1,373 2,554
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.61 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +3.81%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.86 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +75.84% -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 1 July 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 1 July 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 -170 209 £550 - 213
London -136 110 £600 - 118
UK excluding London -110 106 £514 +8.78% 147
Work from Home -92 105 £550 -4.35% 128
North of England -82 21 £500 +7.53% 29
South West -15 20 £550 +34.15% 21
Scotland -21 19 £675 +35.00% 11
West Midlands -43 18 £472 -5.60% 9
Midlands -57 18 £472 -5.60% 10
South East -71 15 £480 -4.10% 30
East of England -14 14 £550 +52.49% 17
Yorkshire -45 12 £500 - 9
North West -47 8 £450 -3.23% 15

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 17 (6.07%) Confluence
2 8 (2.86%) SharePoint
3 7 (2.50%) Apache
4 6 (2.14%) Appian
4 6 (2.14%) SAS
5 3 (1.07%) nginx
5 3 (1.07%) OpenStack
6 2 (0.71%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (0.71%) Apache Spark
7 1 (0.36%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.36%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 3 (1.07%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 138 (49.29%) AWS
2 82 (29.29%) Azure
3 45 (16.07%) GCP
4 34 (12.14%) GitHub
5 32 (11.43%) Amazon S3
6 26 (9.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 24 (8.57%) Serverless
8 21 (7.50%) Amazon EC2
9 17 (6.07%) AWS Lambda
10 15 (5.36%) Azure AI
11 13 (4.64%) Anthropic Claude
11 13 (4.64%) GitHub Actions
11 13 (4.64%) Route 53
12 12 (4.29%) Amazon SQS
12 12 (4.29%) Azure DevOps
13 11 (3.93%) AWS KMS
14 10 (3.57%) SaaS
14 10 (3.57%) Vertex AI
15 8 (2.86%) Amazon Bedrock
15 8 (2.86%) Azure Cognitive Services
Communications & Networking
1 9 (3.21%) Firewall
2 7 (2.50%) Reverse Proxy
2 7 (2.50%) SNMP
3 5 (1.79%) DNS
3 5 (1.79%) WAN
4 3 (1.07%) Intrusion Detection
4 3 (1.07%) Network Security
5 2 (0.71%) DHCP
5 2 (0.71%) NaaS
6 1 (0.36%) 4G
6 1 (0.36%) 5G
6 1 (0.36%) Cisco IOS
6 1 (0.36%) HTTPS
6 1 (0.36%) LTE
6 1 (0.36%) MQTT
6 1 (0.36%) NAS
6 1 (0.36%) NGFW
6 1 (0.36%) SAN
6 1 (0.36%) SSH
6 1 (0.36%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 42 (15.00%) PostgreSQL
2 24 (8.57%) Apache Cassandra
3 21 (7.50%) Amazon RDS
4 17 (6.07%) DynamoDB
5 14 (5.00%) MongoDB
6 11 (3.93%) Amazon Aurora
7 9 (3.21%) Amazon Athena
7 9 (3.21%) Amazon Redshift
7 9 (3.21%) BigQuery
7 9 (3.21%) Pinecone
7 9 (3.21%) Relational Database
8 8 (2.86%) Data Warehouse
8 8 (2.86%) SQL Server
9 7 (2.50%) Amazon QuickSight
10 6 (2.14%) Big Data
10 6 (2.14%) Data Lake
11 5 (1.79%) BusinessObjects
11 5 (1.79%) NoSQL
11 5 (1.79%) Pentaho
11 5 (1.79%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 59 (21.07%) Git
2 28 (10.00%) GitLab
3 24 (8.57%) JUnit
4 22 (7.86%) Jenkins
5 18 (6.43%) JIRA
5 18 (6.43%) SonarQube
6 14 (5.00%) Sonatype Nexus
7 11 (3.93%) Bitbucket Server
7 11 (3.93%) DbUnit
7 11 (3.93%) jMock
7 11 (3.93%) Maven
7 11 (3.93%) Mockito
8 9 (3.21%) MLflow
9 8 (2.86%) IntelliJ
10 6 (2.14%) CircleCI
10 6 (2.14%) Gradle
11 5 (1.79%) Artifactory
11 5 (1.79%) PowerDesigner
12 2 (0.71%) Cypress.io
12 2 (0.71%) JMeter
General
1 67 (23.93%) Social Skills
2 57 (20.36%) Finance
3 42 (15.00%) Public Sector
4 22 (7.86%) Analytical Skills
5 21 (7.50%) Banking
5 21 (7.50%) Legal
6 11 (3.93%) Law
7 7 (2.50%) Military
8 6 (2.14%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 5 (1.79%) Documentation Skills
9 5 (1.79%) Front Office
10 3 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
10 3 (1.07%) Retail
11 2 (0.71%) Billing
11 2 (0.71%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (0.71%) Police
11 2 (0.71%) Publishing
11 2 (0.71%) Telecoms
12 1 (0.36%) Automotive
12 1 (0.36%) Games
Job Titles
1 66 (23.57%) Developer
2 60 (21.43%) Architect
3 45 (16.07%) Senior
4 31 (11.07%) Solutions Architect
5 26 (9.29%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 26 (9.29%) AWS Architect
6 24 (8.57%) Senior Developer
6 24 (8.57%) Software Engineer
7 22 (7.86%) Data Engineer
8 18 (6.43%) AWS Solution Architect
9 15 (5.36%) Consultant
10 14 (5.00%) Java Developer
11 12 (4.29%) Cloud Engineer
11 12 (4.29%) Senior Data Engineer
12 11 (3.93%) AWS Engineer
13 10 (3.57%) Android Developer
13 10 (3.57%) Cloud Architect
13 10 (3.57%) Lead
14 9 (3.21%) Python Developer
15 7 (2.50%) Software Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 63 (22.50%) Kafka
2 42 (15.00%) REST
3 27 (9.64%) RESTful
4 25 (8.93%) gRPC
5 22 (7.86%) React
6 19 (6.79%) Spring
6 19 (6.79%) Spring Boot
7 18 (6.43%) Node.js
7 18 (6.43%) Web Services
8 16 (5.71%) AngularJS
9 15 (5.36%) Android Jetpack
9 15 (5.36%) Hugging Face
9 15 (5.36%) Jetpack Compose
9 15 (5.36%) LangChain
9 15 (5.36%) PyTorch
9 15 (5.36%) TensorFlow
10 14 (5.00%) SOAP
11 13 (4.64%) .NET
12 11 (3.93%) ActiveMQ
12 11 (3.93%) Hibernate
Miscellaneous
1 47 (16.79%) Distributed Systems
2 43 (15.36%) Cloud Native
3 15 (5.36%) AI Agents
4 12 (4.29%) Product Ownership
5 9 (3.21%) Data Protection Act
5 9 (3.21%) Enterprise Software
5 9 (3.21%) Mobile App
6 8 (2.86%) Legacy Systems
6 8 (2.86%) Self-Motivation
7 7 (2.50%) Cyber Threat
7 7 (2.50%) Management Information System
8 6 (2.14%) Data Centre
8 6 (2.14%) Low-Code
8 6 (2.14%) Onboarding
8 6 (2.14%) Security Posture
8 6 (2.14%) Virtual Team
9 5 (1.79%) Legacy Code
10 3 (1.07%) Clustering
10 3 (1.07%) Cyber Kill Chain
11 2 (0.71%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 48 (17.14%) Linux
2 18 (6.43%) Android
3 5 (1.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 4 (1.43%) Apple iOS
4 4 (1.43%) Debian
4 4 (1.43%) Rocky
4 4 (1.43%) Ubuntu
4 4 (1.43%) Unix
4 4 (1.43%) Windows
5 1 (0.36%) Mac OS
5 1 (0.36%) VMS
5 1 (0.36%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 91 (32.50%) CI/CD
2 75 (26.79%) AI
3 69 (24.64%) Agile
4 67 (23.93%) DevOps
4 67 (23.93%) Software Engineering
5 63 (22.50%) Microservices
6 55 (19.64%) LLM
7 50 (17.86%) Containerisation
8 49 (17.50%) Stakeholder Management
9 42 (15.00%) Infrastructure as Code
10 40 (14.29%) Machine Learning
11 38 (13.57%) Observability
12 36 (12.86%) Data Pipeline
12 36 (12.86%) Event-Driven
13 31 (11.07%) Generative AI
13 31 (11.07%) Problem-Solving
13 31 (11.07%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
14 29 (10.36%) Event-Driven Architecture
15 25 (8.93%) Continuous Integration
16 24 (8.57%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 125 (44.64%) Python
2 53 (18.93%) Java
3 38 (13.57%) SQL
4 36 (12.86%) Go
5 21 (7.50%) JavaScript
6 19 (6.79%) Bash
7 18 (6.43%) TypeScript
8 17 (6.07%) Kotlin
9 13 (4.64%) C#
10 6 (2.14%) C++
10 6 (2.14%) Shell Script
11 5 (1.79%) PowerShell
12 3 (1.07%) PL/SQL
12 3 (1.07%) Scala
13 2 (0.71%) Ruby
14 1 (0.36%) Groovy
14 1 (0.36%) Kusto Query Language
14 1 (0.36%) Objective-C
14 1 (0.36%) Rust
14 1 (0.36%) Swift
Qualifications
1 87 (31.07%) Security Cleared
2 68 (24.29%) SC Cleared
3 30 (10.71%) Degree
4 14 (5.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 10 (3.57%) DV Cleared
6 8 (2.86%) AWS Certification
6 8 (2.86%) BPSS Clearance
7 5 (1.79%) Azure Certification
8 4 (1.43%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 3 (1.07%) CISM
9 3 (1.07%) CISSP
10 2 (0.71%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.71%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.71%) PhD
11 1 (0.36%) GCIA
11 1 (0.36%) GIAC
11 1 (0.36%) ISEB
11 1 (0.36%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 1 (0.36%) MPhil
11 1 (0.36%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (5.36%) QA
2 9 (3.21%) Accessibility
3 8 (2.86%) Data Quality
4 5 (1.79%) NIST
4 5 (1.79%) WCAG
5 3 (1.07%) Disclosure Scotland
5 3 (1.07%) GRC
5 3 (1.07%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.71%) GDPR
7 1 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.36%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
7 1 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 1 (0.36%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.36%) SOC 2
System Software
1 82 (29.29%) Docker
2 9 (3.21%) Postfix
3 7 (2.50%) Active Directory
4 4 (1.43%) 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 (0.36%) Hyper-V
6 1 (0.36%) Squid
Systems Management
1 74 (26.43%) Kubernetes
2 39 (13.93%) Terraform
3 34 (12.14%) Grafana
4 28 (10.00%) Prometheus
5 20 (7.14%) Ansible
6 5 (1.79%) Puppet
7 4 (1.43%) Salt
8 3 (1.07%) Istio
9 2 (0.71%) Amdocs OSS
9 2 (0.71%) Data Guard
9 2 (0.71%) Oracle RMAN
9 2 (0.71%) Rancher
10 1 (0.36%) CASB
10 1 (0.36%) Control-M
10 1 (0.36%) Docker Swarm
10 1 (0.36%) MOM
10 1 (0.36%) Progress Chef
10 1 (0.36%) QRadar
10 1 (0.36%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.36%) WMI
Vendors
1 29 (10.36%) OpenAI
2 26 (9.29%) Microsoft
3 25 (8.93%) Google
4 18 (6.43%) Dynatrace
5 13 (4.64%) Splunk
6 11 (3.93%) Atlassian
6 11 (3.93%) Jaspersoft
6 11 (3.93%) Oracle
7 7 (2.50%) Checkmarx
8 6 (2.14%) Automation Anywhere
8 6 (2.14%) Cribl.io
8 6 (2.14%) UiPath
9 5 (1.79%) Black Duck
9 5 (1.79%) Denodo
9 5 (1.79%) IBM
9 5 (1.79%) Informatica
9 5 (1.79%) ServiceNow
10 4 (1.43%) Fortinet
11 3 (1.07%) Sonatype
11 3 (1.07%) VMware