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

6 months to
29 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 414 243 304
Rank change year-on-year -171 +61 -37
Contract jobs citing Open Source 263 357 298
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 1.09% 0.75%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.59% 1.20% 0.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 135 196 186
10th Percentile £431 £395 £354
25th Percentile £497 £448 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £525 £575
Median % change year-on-year +4.76% -8.70% -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £600 £675
90th Percentile £755 £700 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £520 £485 £600
% change year-on-year +7.11% -19.17% +4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 11
10th Percentile - - £20.12
25th Percentile - - £20.68
Median hourly rate £85.00 - £21.86
75th Percentile - - £27.96
90th Percentile - - £57.50
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 44,620 29,684 34,056
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.91% 90.46% 85.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,627 18,648 21,888
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £734 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,682 1,621 1,980
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £13.69
25th Percentile £19.73 £17.33 £17.74
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.35 £68.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.57 £40.33
% change year-on-year +86.55% -41.56% -

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 29 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 29 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 -183 193 £550 - 322
London -132 106 £608 +1.25% 223
Work from Home -113 96 £550 - 136
UK excluding London -127 96 £520 +7.11% 131
North of England -84 23 £513 +5.67% 25
South West -25 19 £550 +34.15% 30
West Midlands -51 16 £469 -6.20% 6
Midlands -57 16 £469 -6.20% 7
Scotland -39 15 £675 +35.00% 10
Yorkshire -42 14 £505 -1.99% 8
East of England -10 12 £552 +38.00% 22
South East -78 12 £500 - 31
North West -58 8 £538 +9.25% 11

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 18 (6.84%) Confluence
2 10 (3.80%) Apache
3 8 (3.04%) SharePoint
4 6 (2.28%) Apache Airflow
4 6 (2.28%) Apache Spark
4 6 (2.28%) SAS
5 3 (1.14%) Apache Superset
5 3 (1.14%) nginx
6 2 (0.76%) Appian
6 2 (0.76%) OpenStack
7 1 (0.38%) Apache Pulsar
7 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 3 (1.14%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.76%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 123 (46.77%) AWS
2 72 (27.38%) Azure
3 49 (18.63%) GCP
4 29 (11.03%) Amazon S3
5 28 (10.65%) GitHub
6 27 (10.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 23 (8.75%) Serverless
8 19 (7.22%) Amazon EC2
9 15 (5.70%) AWS Lambda
10 12 (4.56%) Amazon SQS
10 12 (4.56%) GitHub Actions
10 12 (4.56%) Vertex AI
11 11 (4.18%) AWS KMS
11 11 (4.18%) Route 53
12 10 (3.80%) Azure DevOps
12 10 (3.80%) SaaS
13 9 (3.42%) Anthropic Claude
13 9 (3.42%) Azure AI
13 9 (3.42%) Google Gemini
14 8 (3.04%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.66%) SNMP
2 6 (2.28%) Reverse Proxy
3 5 (1.90%) Firewall
4 3 (1.14%) Intrusion Detection
4 3 (1.14%) Network Security
4 3 (1.14%) WAN
5 2 (0.76%) 4G
5 2 (0.76%) Cisco IOS
5 2 (0.76%) HTTPS
5 2 (0.76%) NaaS
6 1 (0.38%) 5G
6 1 (0.38%) DNS
6 1 (0.38%) HTTP
6 1 (0.38%) LTE
6 1 (0.38%) MQTT
6 1 (0.38%) NGFW
6 1 (0.38%) SSH
6 1 (0.38%) SSL
6 1 (0.38%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 39 (14.83%) PostgreSQL
2 22 (8.37%) Amazon RDS
3 18 (6.84%) DynamoDB
4 14 (5.32%) Apache Cassandra
5 13 (4.94%) MongoDB
6 11 (4.18%) Amazon Aurora
7 10 (3.80%) BigQuery
7 10 (3.80%) Data Warehouse
8 9 (3.42%) Amazon Redshift
8 9 (3.42%) Big Data
9 8 (3.04%) Amazon Athena
9 8 (3.04%) Data Lake
9 8 (3.04%) Relational Database
10 6 (2.28%) Amazon QuickSight
11 5 (1.90%) Apache Iceberg
11 5 (1.90%) Flink
11 5 (1.90%) NoSQL
11 5 (1.90%) Pentaho
11 5 (1.90%) Pinecone
11 5 (1.90%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 59 (22.43%) Git
2 24 (9.13%) GitLab
3 23 (8.75%) JUnit
4 21 (7.98%) Jenkins
5 19 (7.22%) JIRA
6 18 (6.84%) SonarQube
7 14 (5.32%) Sonatype Nexus
8 11 (4.18%) Bitbucket Server
8 11 (4.18%) DbUnit
8 11 (4.18%) jMock
8 11 (4.18%) Maven
8 11 (4.18%) Mockito
9 8 (3.04%) IntelliJ
10 5 (1.90%) CircleCI
10 5 (1.90%) Cucumber
10 5 (1.90%) Gradle
10 5 (1.90%) MLflow
10 5 (1.90%) PowerDesigner
11 4 (1.52%) Artifactory
11 4 (1.52%) JMeter
General
1 63 (23.95%) Social Skills
2 49 (18.63%) Finance
3 37 (14.07%) Public Sector
4 21 (7.98%) Analytical Skills
4 21 (7.98%) Banking
5 19 (7.22%) Legal
6 11 (4.18%) Law
7 6 (2.28%) Military
8 5 (1.90%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 4 (1.52%) Documentation Skills
9 4 (1.52%) Front Office
10 3 (1.14%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
10 3 (1.14%) Retail
11 2 (0.76%) Billing
11 2 (0.76%) Police
11 2 (0.76%) Public Speaking
11 2 (0.76%) Telecoms
12 1 (0.38%) Automotive
12 1 (0.38%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 59 (22.43%) Architect
2 52 (19.77%) Developer
3 39 (14.83%) Senior
4 31 (11.79%) Solutions Architect
5 26 (9.89%) AWS Architect
6 22 (8.37%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 21 (7.98%) Data Engineer
8 19 (7.22%) AWS Solution Architect
9 18 (6.84%) Software Engineer
10 17 (6.46%) Senior Developer
11 14 (5.32%) Java Developer
12 13 (4.94%) Analyst
12 13 (4.94%) Consultant
13 12 (4.56%) Senior Data Engineer
14 10 (3.80%) Cloud Engineer
14 10 (3.80%) Cyber Threat Analyst
14 10 (3.80%) Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst
14 10 (3.80%) Threat Intelligence Analyst
15 9 (3.42%) AWS Engineer
15 9 (3.42%) Lead
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 56 (21.29%) Kafka
2 40 (15.21%) REST
3 20 (7.60%) RESTful
4 19 (7.22%) Spring
4 19 (7.22%) Spring Boot
5 18 (6.84%) Node.js
6 17 (6.46%) LangChain
7 16 (6.08%) gRPC
7 16 (6.08%) React
8 14 (5.32%) Android Jetpack
8 14 (5.32%) Jetpack Compose
8 14 (5.32%) SOAP
9 13 (4.94%) AngularJS
9 13 (4.94%) PyTorch
9 13 (4.94%) Web Services
10 12 (4.56%) Hugging Face
10 12 (4.56%) TensorFlow
11 11 (4.18%) Bootstrap
11 11 (4.18%) OpenTelemetry
11 11 (4.18%) Spring Batch
Miscellaneous
1 42 (15.97%) Distributed Systems
2 41 (15.59%) Cloud Native
3 18 (6.84%) AI Agents
4 13 (4.94%) Cyber Threat
5 11 (4.18%) Enterprise Software
6 10 (3.80%) Data Protection Act
6 10 (3.80%) Product Ownership
6 10 (3.80%) Self-Motivation
7 9 (3.42%) Mobile App
8 8 (3.04%) Management Information System
9 6 (2.28%) Security Posture
10 5 (1.90%) Legacy Systems
10 5 (1.90%) Onboarding
11 4 (1.52%) Data Centre
11 4 (1.52%) Data Structures
11 4 (1.52%) Virtual Team
12 3 (1.14%) Cyber Kill Chain
12 3 (1.14%) Legacy Code
12 3 (1.14%) LIMS
12 3 (1.14%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 51 (19.39%) Linux
2 15 (5.70%) Android
3 8 (3.04%) Unix
4 6 (2.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 6 (2.28%) Windows
5 3 (1.14%) Debian
5 3 (1.14%) Rocky
5 3 (1.14%) Ubuntu
6 2 (0.76%) Apple iOS
7 1 (0.38%) Mac OS
7 1 (0.38%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 88 (33.46%) CI/CD
2 70 (26.62%) AI
3 62 (23.57%) Agile
4 61 (23.19%) DevOps
5 58 (22.05%) Software Engineering
6 51 (19.39%) Microservices
7 49 (18.63%) LLM
8 45 (17.11%) Stakeholder Management
9 44 (16.73%) Containerisation
10 42 (15.97%) Infrastructure as Code
11 41 (15.59%) Event-Driven
12 39 (14.83%) Observability
13 34 (12.93%) Data Pipeline
13 34 (12.93%) Event-Driven Architecture
13 34 (12.93%) Machine Learning
14 30 (11.41%) Problem-Solving
15 25 (9.51%) Performance Optimisation
15 25 (9.51%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 23 (8.75%) Computer Science
16 23 (8.75%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 115 (43.73%) Python
2 57 (21.67%) Java
3 37 (14.07%) SQL
4 28 (10.65%) Go
5 19 (7.22%) Bash
6 16 (6.08%) Kotlin
7 14 (5.32%) JavaScript
8 12 (4.56%) TypeScript
9 8 (3.04%) C#
9 8 (3.04%) C++
10 6 (2.28%) Shell Script
11 4 (1.52%) Scala
12 3 (1.14%) MUMPS
12 3 (1.14%) PL/SQL
12 3 (1.14%) PowerShell
13 2 (0.76%) C
14 1 (0.38%) Groovy
14 1 (0.38%) Objective-C
14 1 (0.38%) Perl
14 1 (0.38%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 93 (35.36%) Security Cleared
2 67 (25.48%) SC Cleared
3 30 (11.41%) Degree
4 15 (5.70%) DV Cleared
5 14 (5.32%) Computer Science Degree
6 6 (2.28%) AWS Certification
6 6 (2.28%) Azure Certification
7 5 (1.90%) Master's Degree
8 4 (1.52%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (1.14%) CISM
9 3 (1.14%) CISSP
9 3 (1.14%) PhD
10 2 (0.76%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 1 (0.38%) CEH
11 1 (0.38%) GCIA
11 1 (0.38%) GIAC
11 1 (0.38%) ISEB
11 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 1 (0.38%) MPhil
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (5.32%) QA
2 7 (2.66%) Accessibility
3 5 (1.90%) Data Quality
3 5 (1.90%) NIST
4 4 (1.52%) GDPR
4 4 (1.52%) WCAG
5 3 (1.14%) Disclosure Scotland
5 3 (1.14%) GRC
5 3 (1.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 1 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
6 1 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
6 1 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 42001
6 1 (0.38%) NCSC
6 1 (0.38%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.38%) SOC 2
System Software
1 68 (25.86%) Docker
2 9 (3.42%) Postfix
3 3 (1.14%) Active Directory
3 3 (1.14%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (1.14%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (0.76%) Ceph
4 2 (0.76%) Oracle RAC
4 2 (0.76%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 1 (0.38%) Hyper-V
5 1 (0.38%) Squid
Systems Management
1 60 (22.81%) Kubernetes
2 40 (15.21%) Terraform
3 33 (12.55%) Grafana
4 30 (11.41%) Prometheus
5 20 (7.60%) Ansible
6 5 (1.90%) Puppet
7 3 (1.14%) Salt
8 2 (0.76%) Amdocs OSS
8 2 (0.76%) Data Guard
8 2 (0.76%) Docker Swarm
8 2 (0.76%) Istio
8 2 (0.76%) Oracle RMAN
8 2 (0.76%) Progress Chef
8 2 (0.76%) Rancher
9 1 (0.38%) Argo
9 1 (0.38%) CASB
9 1 (0.38%) Cilium
9 1 (0.38%) MOM
9 1 (0.38%) QRadar
9 1 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 25 (9.51%) Google
2 22 (8.37%) Microsoft
3 21 (7.98%) OpenAI
4 19 (7.22%) Dynatrace
5 13 (4.94%) Splunk
6 12 (4.56%) Oracle
7 11 (4.18%) Atlassian
7 11 (4.18%) Jaspersoft
8 7 (2.66%) Checkmarx
9 6 (2.28%) Cribl.io
9 6 (2.28%) Informatica
10 5 (1.90%) Black Duck
10 5 (1.90%) Denodo
10 5 (1.90%) IBM
10 5 (1.90%) ServiceNow
11 3 (1.14%) Confluent
11 3 (1.14%) Fortinet
11 3 (1.14%) InterSystems
11 3 (1.14%) Sonatype
11 3 (1.14%) VMware