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

6 months to
7 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 413 251 320
Rank change year-on-year -162 +69 -71
Contract jobs citing Open Source 273 359 247
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 1.09% 0.66%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.59% 1.20% 0.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 146 166 127
10th Percentile £413 £361 £319
25th Percentile £458 £426 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £522 £501
Median % change year-on-year +0.57% +4.15% -12.84%
75th Percentile £617 £613 £622
90th Percentile £755 £725 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £524 £500 £500
% change year-on-year +4.75% - -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 1 14
10th Percentile - - £20.12
25th Percentile £13.09 £51.75 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.67 £56.50 £25.68
Median % change year-on-year -22.71% +120.02% +20.85%
75th Percentile £76.75 £61.25 £27.72
90th Percentile £80.80 - £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 46,438 29,893 32,352
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.57% 90.54% 85.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,948 18,567 19,512
10th Percentile £325 £295 £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 £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £736 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,331 1,864 1,314
10th Percentile £13.65 £14.35 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.08 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £37.87 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +50.56% -39.40% -2.92%
75th Percentile £65.00 £43.20 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.00 £65.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.13 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +70.85% -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 7 October 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 7 October 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 7 October 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 -201 189 £550 +4.76% 1,290
UK excluding London -122 115 £524 +4.75% 435
Work from Home -90 106 £500 - 509
London -150 90 £575 +1.23% 930
North of England -72 36 £495 +0.51% 91
South West -25 24 £550 -4.35% 46
Scotland -34 22 £525 - 65
Yorkshire -37 15 £500 -4.76% 28
East of England -13 14 £561 +1.45% 93
South East -78 13 £405 -28.41% 76
North East -29 11 £425 - 17
North West -50 10 £675 +43.62% 46
Midlands -48 9 £450 -10.10% 31
West Midlands -50 9 £450 -10.10% 23

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 (4.40%) Confluence
2 10 (3.66%) SharePoint
3 9 (3.30%) Apache
4 8 (2.93%) Apache Airflow
4 8 (2.93%) Apache Spark
5 6 (2.20%) SAS
6 5 (1.83%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.37%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.37%) CMS
7 1 (0.37%) Drupal
7 1 (0.37%) GeoServer
7 1 (0.37%) IIS
7 1 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
7 1 (0.37%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.37%) WordPress
Applications
1 4 (1.47%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.73%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.37%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.73%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.37%) Magento
Cloud Services
1 117 (42.86%) AWS
2 75 (27.47%) Azure
3 53 (19.41%) GCP
4 45 (16.48%) GitHub
5 25 (9.16%) GitHub Actions
6 19 (6.96%) Amazon S3
7 18 (6.59%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 17 (6.23%) Serverless
9 15 (5.49%) Amazon EKS
10 14 (5.13%) IaaS
10 14 (5.13%) Vertex AI
11 11 (4.03%) Anthropic Claude
12 10 (3.66%) AWS Lambda
12 10 (3.66%) Google Gemini
13 9 (3.30%) Amazon Bedrock
13 9 (3.30%) Amazon EC2
14 7 (2.56%) Azure Monitor
14 7 (2.56%) Google Kubernetes Engine
14 7 (2.56%) Power Platform
15 6 (2.20%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.56%) Intrusion Detection
2 6 (2.20%) HTTPS
2 6 (2.20%) SNMP
3 4 (1.47%) DNS
3 4 (1.47%) Network Security
4 3 (1.10%) SSH
4 3 (1.10%) SSL
5 2 (0.73%) Asterisk PBX
5 2 (0.73%) Broadband
5 2 (0.73%) Cisco IOS
5 2 (0.73%) Firewall
5 2 (0.73%) HTTP
5 2 (0.73%) Internet
5 2 (0.73%) Reverse Proxy
5 2 (0.73%) RTCP
5 2 (0.73%) RTP
5 2 (0.73%) TCP/IP
5 2 (0.73%) VoIP
5 2 (0.73%) Wi-Fi
5 2 (0.73%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (5.86%) PostgreSQL
2 13 (4.76%) Amazon RDS
3 10 (3.66%) DynamoDB
4 9 (3.30%) MongoDB
5 8 (2.93%) Amazon Redshift
5 8 (2.93%) BigQuery
5 8 (2.93%) Data Warehouse
5 8 (2.93%) Relational Database
5 8 (2.93%) Trino
6 7 (2.56%) Amazon Athena
6 7 (2.56%) Apache Iceberg
6 7 (2.56%) Big Data
6 7 (2.56%) Data Lake
7 5 (1.83%) BusinessObjects
7 5 (1.83%) Pentaho
7 5 (1.83%) Power BI
7 5 (1.83%) Redis
8 4 (1.47%) Amazon Aurora
8 4 (1.47%) Amazon QuickSight
9 3 (1.10%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 50 (18.32%) Git
2 27 (9.89%) Jenkins
3 21 (7.69%) GitLab
4 13 (4.76%) JIRA
5 10 (3.66%) JUnit
6 9 (3.30%) JMeter
7 8 (2.93%) SonarQube
8 7 (2.56%) Cypress.io
8 7 (2.56%) Sonatype Nexus
9 6 (2.20%) Cucumber
9 6 (2.20%) Postman
10 4 (1.47%) Bitbucket Server
10 4 (1.47%) CircleCI
10 4 (1.47%) DbUnit
10 4 (1.47%) IntelliJ
10 4 (1.47%) jMock
10 4 (1.47%) Maven
10 4 (1.47%) MLflow
10 4 (1.47%) Mockito
11 3 (1.10%) Selenium
General
1 77 (28.21%) Social Skills
2 41 (15.02%) Finance
2 41 (15.02%) Public Sector
3 15 (5.49%) Analytical Skills
3 15 (5.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 14 (5.13%) Banking
5 13 (4.76%) Legal
6 10 (3.66%) Law
7 7 (2.56%) Telecoms
8 6 (2.20%) Influencing Skills
8 6 (2.20%) Military
8 6 (2.20%) Retail
9 5 (1.83%) Presentation Skills
10 3 (1.10%) Front Office
10 3 (1.10%) Publishing
11 2 (0.73%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (0.73%) Police
11 2 (0.73%) Polish Language
11 2 (0.73%) Public Speaking
12 1 (0.37%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 57 (20.88%) Senior
2 52 (19.05%) Developer
3 39 (14.29%) Architect
4 23 (8.42%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 22 (8.06%) AWS Architect
5 22 (8.06%) Solutions Architect
6 19 (6.96%) Software Developer
7 18 (6.59%) Software Engineer
8 16 (5.86%) AWS Solution Architect
9 14 (5.13%) Analyst
10 13 (4.76%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 13 (4.76%) Senior Developer
10 13 (4.76%) Threat Intelligence Analyst
11 12 (4.40%) Consultant
11 12 (4.40%) Data Engineer
11 12 (4.40%) Platform Engineer
12 11 (4.03%) Cyber Threat Analyst
12 11 (4.03%) Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst
12 11 (4.03%) Lead
13 10 (3.66%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 51 (18.68%) Terraform
2 33 (12.09%) Kafka
3 30 (10.99%) REST
4 18 (6.59%) LangChain
5 14 (5.13%) PyTorch
6 13 (4.76%) LangGraph
6 13 (4.76%) React
6 13 (4.76%) RESTful
7 11 (4.03%) Playwright
7 11 (4.03%) Spring
7 11 (4.03%) Spring Boot
7 11 (4.03%) TensorFlow
8 10 (3.66%) eBPF
9 9 (3.30%) LlamaIndex
9 9 (3.30%) SOAP
10 8 (2.93%) Android Jetpack
10 8 (2.93%) Jetpack Compose
10 8 (2.93%) Node.js
10 8 (2.93%) OpenTelemetry
10 8 (2.93%) Play Framework
Miscellaneous
1 45 (16.48%) Cloud Native
2 25 (9.16%) AI Agents
3 24 (8.79%) Distributed Systems
4 21 (7.69%) Cyber Threat
5 18 (6.59%) Private Cloud
6 12 (4.40%) Management Information System
7 11 (4.03%) Enterprise Software
8 9 (3.30%) Self-Motivation
9 8 (2.93%) Blog
9 8 (2.93%) Data Protection Act
9 8 (2.93%) Mobile App
9 8 (2.93%) Product Ownership
9 8 (2.93%) Security Posture
10 7 (2.56%) Data Structures
10 7 (2.56%) Virtual Team
11 6 (2.20%) Legacy Applications
11 6 (2.20%) LIMS
11 6 (2.20%) Linux Command Line
12 5 (1.83%) Onboarding
12 5 (1.83%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 62 (22.71%) Linux
2 16 (5.86%) Unix
3 12 (4.40%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 11 (4.03%) Windows
5 9 (3.30%) Android
6 3 (1.10%) Apple iOS
7 2 (0.73%) Debian
7 2 (0.73%) Rocky
7 2 (0.73%) Ubuntu
8 1 (0.37%) Amazon Linux
8 1 (0.37%) CentOS
8 1 (0.37%) Mac OS
8 1 (0.37%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 119 (43.59%) CI/CD
2 75 (27.47%) AI
3 74 (27.11%) Software Engineering
4 69 (25.27%) Agile
5 67 (24.54%) DevOps
6 57 (20.88%) Infrastructure as Code
6 57 (20.88%) Observability
7 52 (19.05%) Test Automation
8 46 (16.85%) Containerisation
9 39 (14.29%) LLM
9 39 (14.29%) Microservices
10 36 (13.19%) Event-Driven
11 35 (12.82%) Machine Learning
12 34 (12.45%) Platform Engineering
12 34 (12.45%) Stakeholder Management
13 32 (11.72%) Cybersecurity
14 31 (11.36%) Continuous Integration
14 31 (11.36%) Event-Driven Architecture
15 30 (10.99%) Problem-Solving
16 29 (10.62%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 106 (38.83%) Python
2 46 (16.85%) Java
3 30 (10.99%) SQL
4 20 (7.33%) Bash
5 17 (6.23%) Perl
6 16 (5.86%) JavaScript
7 15 (5.49%) Go
7 15 (5.49%) TypeScript
8 14 (5.13%) C++
9 12 (4.40%) Scala
10 11 (4.03%) C
11 9 (3.30%) Kotlin
12 6 (2.20%) MUMPS
13 4 (1.47%) C#
13 4 (1.47%) Shell Script
14 3 (1.10%) PowerShell
15 2 (0.73%) Bicep
15 2 (0.73%) Objective-C
15 2 (0.73%) Ruby
15 2 (0.73%) Rust
Qualifications
1 96 (35.16%) Security Cleared
2 72 (26.37%) SC Cleared
3 22 (8.06%) Degree
4 18 (6.59%) DV Cleared
5 14 (5.13%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.30%) CISSP
7 8 (2.93%) AWS Certification
7 8 (2.93%) BPSS Clearance
7 8 (2.93%) CISM
8 6 (2.20%) Azure Certification
9 5 (1.83%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.73%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.73%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.73%) CEH
10 2 (0.73%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.73%) GIAC
10 2 (0.73%) GSEC
10 2 (0.73%) LFCS
10 2 (0.73%) OSCP
10 2 (0.73%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (6.59%) Accessibility
2 12 (4.40%) QA
3 7 (2.56%) GDPR
3 7 (2.56%) WCAG
4 4 (1.47%) Data Quality
4 4 (1.47%) Disclosure Scotland
4 4 (1.47%) NCSC
5 3 (1.10%) GRC
5 3 (1.10%) NIST
6 2 (0.73%) Actionable Recommendations
6 2 (0.73%) PMO
7 1 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 59 (21.61%) Docker
2 14 (5.13%) VMware Infrastructure
3 8 (2.93%) VMware ESXi
4 3 (1.10%) Ceph
4 3 (1.10%) Firmware
4 3 (1.10%) Hyper-V
4 3 (1.10%) Postfix
4 3 (1.10%) Virtual Servers
5 2 (0.73%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.73%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 73 (26.74%) Kubernetes
2 35 (12.82%) Ansible
2 35 (12.82%) Grafana
3 26 (9.52%) Prometheus
4 11 (4.03%) Puppet
5 9 (3.30%) Progress Chef
6 4 (1.47%) Cilium
6 4 (1.47%) Istio
6 4 (1.47%) Salt
7 2 (0.73%) Control-M
7 2 (0.73%) Docker Swarm
7 2 (0.73%) Kibana
7 2 (0.73%) linkerd
7 2 (0.73%) systemd
8 1 (0.37%) Argo
8 1 (0.37%) QRadar
8 1 (0.37%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.37%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 29 (10.62%) Google
2 22 (8.06%) Microsoft
2 22 (8.06%) Splunk
3 18 (6.59%) OpenAI
4 17 (6.23%) Dynatrace
4 17 (6.23%) SaltStack
5 15 (5.49%) VMware
6 12 (4.40%) Oracle
7 10 (3.66%) Red Hat
8 7 (2.56%) Cribl.io
8 7 (2.56%) Databricks
9 6 (2.20%) Informatica
9 6 (2.20%) InterSystems
10 5 (1.83%) Denodo
11 4 (1.47%) Atlassian
11 4 (1.47%) Black Duck
11 4 (1.47%) Checkmarx
11 4 (1.47%) Foundry
11 4 (1.47%) Jaspersoft
11 4 (1.47%) Mistral