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 16 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 298 316 248
Rank change year-on-year +18 -68 -12
Contract jobs citing Open Source 341 241 427
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.93% 0.70% 0.97%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.05% 0.80% 1.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 160 147 255
10th Percentile £347 £325 £250
25th Percentile £413 £450 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £573 £568
Median % change year-on-year -8.30% +0.88% -3.40%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £650
90th Percentile £750 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £501 £550
% change year-on-year -0.12% -8.98% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 6 11
10th Percentile - £25.43 -
25th Percentile £15.25 £25.63 £19.99
Median hourly rate £36.00 £26.25 £21.25
Median % change year-on-year +37.14% +23.53% -59.72%
75th Percentile £61.88 £26.88 £22.52
90th Percentile £63.00 £61.00 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £15.50 £26.50 -
% change year-on-year -41.51% - -

All Process and 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 32,471 30,121 39,108
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.45% 87.99% 88.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,452 18,385 26,091
10th Percentile £300 £306 £308
25th Percentile £406 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £745 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,090 1,000 1,510
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.61 £14.49
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.30 £19.02
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.85
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.88% +25.29%
75th Percentile £48.75 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £74.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.04 £32.39 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.87% -27.21% +39.06%

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 16 December 2025.

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 16 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Open Source in the UK

Open Source
Top 16 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 16 December 2025. 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 +25 293 £525 -8.70% 501
London +24 145 £600 -2.04% 81
UK excluding London -6 129 £500 -0.12% 467
Work from Home +27 116 £469 -14.73% 394
North of England -5 49 £450 -23.40% 94
South East -8 27 £600 +30.43% 129
Yorkshire -27 24 £525 -10.64% 42
North West -11 23 £450 - 46
Scotland +13 21 £556 +11.20% 14
South West -2 14 £350 -41.91% 56
Midlands -30 12 £430 -28.33% 88
West Midlands -24 11 £435 -27.50% 47
East of England -34 4 £553 +50.99% 75
North East -8 3 - - 6
Wales -1 2 £305 - 12
East Midlands - 1 £420 - 35

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 15 (4.40%) Apache
2 11 (3.23%) JBoss
3 10 (2.93%) Apache Spark
3 10 (2.93%) WebLogic
4 6 (1.76%) Confluence
5 5 (1.47%) Appian
6 4 (1.17%) Adobe Experience Manager
7 3 (0.88%) Apache Airflow
7 3 (0.88%) Ethereum
7 3 (0.88%) Hyperledger
8 2 (0.59%) CMS
8 2 (0.59%) OpenStack
8 2 (0.59%) Tomcat
9 1 (0.29%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.29%) Cloud Foundry
9 1 (0.29%) Drupal
9 1 (0.29%) Liferay
9 1 (0.29%) Mattermost
9 1 (0.29%) Oracle Coherence
9 1 (0.29%) Oracle Spatial
Applications
1 2 (0.59%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.29%) Magento
1 1 (0.29%) Oracle EBS
1 1 (0.29%) Oracle EBS R12
1 1 (0.29%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 159 (46.63%) AWS
2 59 (17.30%) Azure
3 26 (7.62%) GitHub
4 25 (7.33%) GCP
5 16 (4.69%) GitHub Actions
6 15 (4.40%) Amazon S3
7 14 (4.11%) CloudFront
8 13 (3.81%) Serverless
9 12 (3.52%) Cloud Computing
10 10 (2.93%) Amazon Bedrock
11 9 (2.64%) Azure AKS
12 8 (2.35%) Azure DevOps
12 8 (2.35%) OpenShift
13 7 (2.05%) Amazon SageMaker
13 7 (2.05%) Vertex AI
14 6 (1.76%) Amazon EKS
15 5 (1.47%) AWS Step Functions
15 5 (1.47%) Azure AI
15 5 (1.47%) SaaS
15 5 (1.47%) Tricentis Tosca
Communications & Networking
1 13 (3.81%) Firewall
2 5 (1.47%) Internet
3 4 (1.17%) DHCP
4 3 (0.88%) Ethernet
4 3 (0.88%) SSH
4 3 (0.88%) TCP/IP
4 3 (0.88%) VLAN
5 2 (0.59%) DNS
6 1 (0.29%) HTTP
6 1 (0.29%) InfiniBand
6 1 (0.29%) iSCSI
6 1 (0.29%) Kerberos
6 1 (0.29%) LAN
6 1 (0.29%) Radio Access Network
6 1 (0.29%) SMTP
6 1 (0.29%) Software-Defined Networking
6 1 (0.29%) Spanning Tree
6 1 (0.29%) STUN
6 1 (0.29%) VXLAN
6 1 (0.29%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 59 (17.30%) Apache Cassandra
2 37 (10.85%) MongoDB
3 35 (10.26%) PostgreSQL
4 34 (9.97%) Relational Database
5 25 (7.33%) DB2
6 20 (5.87%) NoSQL
7 13 (3.81%) Redis
8 7 (2.05%) Pinecone
8 7 (2.05%) RDBMS
8 7 (2.05%) SQL Server
9 6 (1.76%) Couchbase
10 5 (1.47%) DynamoDB
10 5 (1.47%) Metadata
10 5 (1.47%) Weaviate
11 4 (1.17%) Apache Hive
11 4 (1.17%) Hadoop
11 4 (1.17%) Impala
12 3 (0.88%) BigQuery
12 3 (0.88%) GIS
12 3 (0.88%) QGIS
Development Applications
1 37 (10.85%) JUnit
2 32 (9.38%) Git
3 23 (6.74%) Jenkins
4 19 (5.57%) GitLab
5 16 (4.69%) Selenium
6 10 (2.93%) Eclipse
6 10 (2.93%) IntelliJ
6 10 (2.93%) JIRA
7 9 (2.64%) Cucumber
8 8 (2.35%) MLflow
8 8 (2.35%) SonarQube
9 7 (2.05%) Mocha
10 5 (1.47%) Robot Framework
11 4 (1.17%) Subversion
12 3 (0.88%) Cypress.io
12 3 (0.88%) ESLint
12 3 (0.88%) Gradle
12 3 (0.88%) Hudson
12 3 (0.88%) Jasmine
12 3 (0.88%) KGDB
General
1 86 (25.22%) Social Skills
2 69 (20.23%) Finance
3 50 (14.66%) Analytical Skills
4 44 (12.90%) Banking
5 31 (9.09%) Investment Banking
6 26 (7.62%) Public Sector
7 24 (7.04%) Front Office
8 11 (3.23%) Influencing Skills
9 9 (2.64%) Telecoms
10 7 (2.05%) Marketing
10 7 (2.05%) Presentation Skills
11 6 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
11 6 (1.76%) Financial Institution
12 5 (1.47%) Publishing
13 4 (1.17%) Legal
13 4 (1.17%) Organisational Skills
14 2 (0.59%) Electronics
14 2 (0.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 2 (0.59%) Manufacturing
14 2 (0.59%) Military
Job Titles
1 130 (38.12%) Developer
2 90 (26.39%) Senior
3 53 (15.54%) Senior Developer
4 31 (9.09%) Architect
4 31 (9.09%) Software Engineer
5 29 (8.50%) Java Developer
5 29 (8.50%) Platform Engineer
6 24 (7.04%) Investment Banking Java Developer
6 24 (7.04%) SQL Developer
7 18 (5.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 14 (4.11%) Android Developer
8 14 (4.11%) Senior Java Developer
9 13 (3.81%) Solutions Architect
10 12 (3.52%) Lead
10 12 (3.52%) Linux Developer
10 12 (3.52%) Senior Investment Banking Java Developer
10 12 (3.52%) Senior SQL Developer
10 12 (3.52%) Sybase Developer
11 10 (2.93%) Senior Platform Engineer
12 9 (2.64%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 119 (34.90%) Kafka
2 74 (21.70%) gRPC
3 41 (12.02%) Spring
4 30 (8.80%) HTML
4 30 (8.80%) React
4 30 (8.80%) REST
5 25 (7.33%) JMS
6 20 (5.87%) CSS
6 20 (5.87%) PyTorch
7 19 (5.57%) LangChain
7 19 (5.57%) Node.js
8 18 (5.28%) HTML5
9 16 (4.69%) JSON
9 16 (4.69%) TensorFlow
10 15 (4.40%) Hugging Face
10 15 (4.40%) XML
11 14 (4.11%) Android SDK
12 13 (3.81%) Jest
13 12 (3.52%) J2EE
14 11 (3.23%) .NET
Miscellaneous
1 65 (19.06%) Distributed Systems
2 33 (9.68%) Equities
3 26 (7.62%) Data Structures
4 15 (4.40%) Cloud Native
5 13 (3.81%) Distributed Computing
6 11 (3.23%) Onboarding
6 11 (3.23%) PKI
7 10 (2.93%) Fat Client
7 10 (2.93%) Thin Client
8 9 (2.64%) Fixed Income
8 9 (2.64%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
8 9 (2.64%) Product Ownership
9 8 (2.35%) Private Cloud
10 7 (2.05%) AI Agents
10 7 (2.05%) Cyber Threat
10 7 (2.05%) Public Cloud
11 6 (1.76%) Blog
11 6 (1.76%) Derivative
11 6 (1.76%) Hedge funds
11 6 (1.76%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 58 (17.01%) Linux
2 27 (7.92%) Windows
3 20 (5.87%) Android
4 17 (4.99%) Unix
5 10 (2.93%) Windows 7
6 6 (1.76%) Apple iOS
6 6 (1.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 5 (1.47%) Windows Server
8 3 (0.88%) CentOS
9 1 (0.29%) Kali Linux
9 1 (0.29%) Mac OS
9 1 (0.29%) Oracle Linux
9 1 (0.29%) Ubuntu
9 1 (0.29%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 120 (35.19%) Software Engineering
2 93 (27.27%) Problem-Solving
3 90 (26.39%) Agile
4 86 (25.22%) Microservices
5 77 (22.58%) CI/CD
6 65 (19.06%) AI
7 53 (15.54%) DevOps
8 50 (14.66%) Machine Learning
9 45 (13.20%) Infrastructure as Code
10 42 (12.32%) Performance Tuning
11 38 (11.14%) LLM
12 37 (10.85%) Observability
13 32 (9.38%) Clean Code
14 31 (9.09%) Containerisation
14 31 (9.09%) Test Automation
15 30 (8.80%) Generative AI
16 29 (8.50%) Platform Engineering
17 27 (7.92%) Mentoring
18 25 (7.33%) Data Science
18 25 (7.33%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 172 (50.44%) Python
2 95 (27.86%) Java
3 86 (25.22%) Go
4 73 (21.41%) SQL
5 34 (9.97%) JavaScript
6 28 (8.21%) TypeScript
7 24 (7.04%) Shell Script
8 21 (6.16%) C#
9 15 (4.40%) Kotlin
9 15 (4.40%) PowerShell
9 15 (4.40%) Scala
10 14 (4.11%) Bash
11 10 (2.93%) Ruby
12 9 (2.64%) C++
13 7 (2.05%) PHP
14 5 (1.47%) C
15 4 (1.17%) Delphi
15 4 (1.17%) Perl
15 4 (1.17%) Solidity
16 3 (0.88%) SystemVerilog
Qualifications
1 57 (16.72%) Security Cleared
2 30 (8.80%) SC Cleared
3 28 (8.21%) Degree
4 19 (5.57%) DV Cleared
5 14 (4.11%) Computer Science Degree
6 12 (3.52%) Master's Degree
7 6 (1.76%) BPSS Clearance
7 6 (1.76%) PhD
8 3 (0.88%) MCP
8 3 (0.88%) OSCP
9 2 (0.59%) Cisco Certification
9 2 (0.59%) GPEN
9 2 (0.59%) GWAPT
10 1 (0.29%) AWS Certification
10 1 (0.29%) Azure Certification
10 1 (0.29%) CCSAS
10 1 (0.29%) CEH
10 1 (0.29%) GIAC
10 1 (0.29%) GXPN
10 1 (0.29%) OSCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (3.81%) Accessibility
2 10 (2.93%) QA
3 9 (2.64%) WCAG
4 8 (2.35%) NIST
5 6 (1.76%) GDPR
5 6 (1.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (1.47%) Cyber Essentials
6 5 (1.47%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 4 (1.17%) NCSC
8 2 (0.59%) Data Quality
8 2 (0.59%) GPG for Computer-Based Electronic Evidence
8 2 (0.59%) ISO/IEC 17025
8 2 (0.59%) ISO17020
8 2 (0.59%) SLA
9 1 (0.29%) GxP
9 1 (0.29%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.29%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 114 (33.43%) Docker
2 13 (3.81%) Active Directory
3 9 (2.64%) Virtual Machines
4 4 (1.17%) QEMU
5 3 (0.88%) Ceph
5 3 (0.88%) ISA Server
5 3 (0.88%) KVM
6 2 (0.59%) HDFS
6 2 (0.59%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.29%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 1 (0.29%) Firmware
7 1 (0.29%) iptables
7 1 (0.29%) Lustre
7 1 (0.29%) NFS
7 1 (0.29%) Oracle Clusterware
7 1 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.29%) Samba
7 1 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
7 1 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 112 (32.84%) Kubernetes
2 35 (10.26%) Terraform
3 32 (9.38%) Grafana
4 29 (8.50%) Prometheus
5 20 (5.87%) Ansible
6 12 (3.52%) Puppet
7 10 (2.93%) WMI
8 2 (0.59%) Argo
8 2 (0.59%) HAProxy
8 2 (0.59%) Kibana
8 2 (0.59%) Knative
8 2 (0.59%) Progress Chef
9 1 (0.29%) Data Guard
9 1 (0.29%) Kubeflow
9 1 (0.29%) Nessus
9 1 (0.29%) Oracle RMAN
9 1 (0.29%) QRadar
9 1 (0.29%) SCOM
9 1 (0.29%) SELinux
9 1 (0.29%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 37 (10.85%) Microsoft
2 24 (7.04%) Sybase
3 22 (6.45%) Google
4 15 (4.40%) VMware
5 12 (3.52%) Red Hat
5 12 (3.52%) Splunk
6 9 (2.64%) OpenAI
6 9 (2.64%) webMethods
7 7 (2.05%) Cisco
8 6 (1.76%) Atlassian
8 6 (1.76%) Oracle
9 5 (1.47%) Foundry
9 5 (1.47%) SAP
9 5 (1.47%) Veracode
10 4 (1.17%) Adobe
10 4 (1.17%) Databricks
11 3 (0.88%) Computacenter
11 3 (0.88%) Xamarin
12 2 (0.59%) Cloudera
12 2 (0.59%) NVIDIA