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

6 months to
8 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 293 291 259
Rank change year-on-year -2 -32 -14
Contract jobs citing Open Source 375 255 396
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.88% 0.85% 0.89%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.03% 0.94% 1.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 173 179 250
10th Percentile £350 £400 £362
25th Percentile £425 £456 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -7.83% - -4.01%
75th Percentile £648 £719 £675
90th Percentile £788 £838 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £500 £570
% change year-on-year -10.00% -12.28% +8.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 3 13
10th Percentile - £25.60 -
25th Percentile £15.25 £25.75 £19.99
Median hourly rate £15.50 £26.00 £21.25
Median % change year-on-year -40.38% +22.35% -67.31%
75th Percentile £39.75 £60.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £54.15 £81.30 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £15.50 - £71.93

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 36,580 27,136 38,678
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.31% 90.25% 86.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,208 17,123 25,158
10th Percentile £313 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £611 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £743 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.94% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,181 914 2,335
10th Percentile £14.64 £15.50 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £28.50 £32.50 £32.12
Median % change year-on-year -12.31% +1.20% -8.24%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.50 £57.50
90th Percentile £74.26 £76.25 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.46 £31.64 £31.50
% change year-on-year -19.54% +0.44% -10.00%

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 8 March 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 8 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Open Source in the UK

Open Source
Top 15 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 8 March 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 -12 309 £550 -8.33% 179
London -27 156 £605 -6.92% 96
UK excluding London -27 140 £450 -10.00% 107
Work from Home +1 136 £500 -20.00% 79
North of England -26 43 £430 -7.03% 27
South East -29 30 £463 -7.50% 27
North West -16 23 £391 -15.41% 11
Scotland +10 22 £675 +28.57% 5
South West -3 21 £380 -39.20% 16
Yorkshire -46 17 £513 -3.85% 13
West Midlands -47 17 £440 +1.97% 6
Midlands -65 17 £440 +1.97% 6
East of England -34 6 £552 +52.90% 22
North East -7 3 - - 3
Wales -9 1 - - 3

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 (4.53%) Apache
2 12 (3.20%) Confluence
3 11 (2.93%) JBoss
3 11 (2.93%) WebLogic
4 10 (2.67%) Apache Spark
4 10 (2.67%) Appian
5 5 (1.33%) Apache Airflow
5 5 (1.33%) OpenStack
6 4 (1.07%) Adobe Experience Manager
6 4 (1.07%) nginx
7 3 (0.80%) Ethereum
7 3 (0.80%) Hyperledger
7 3 (0.80%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.53%) Liferay
8 2 (0.53%) Tomcat
9 1 (0.27%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.27%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.27%) Cloud Foundry
9 1 (0.27%) GeoServer
9 1 (0.27%) Oracle Spatial
Applications
1 1 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (0.53%) Oracle EBS
1 2 (0.53%) Oracle EBS R12
2 1 (0.27%) Magento
2 1 (0.27%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 169 (45.07%) AWS
2 82 (21.87%) Azure
3 42 (11.20%) GitHub
4 27 (7.20%) GCP
5 24 (6.40%) GitHub Actions
6 22 (5.87%) Amazon S3
7 20 (5.33%) Azure AI
7 20 (5.33%) Serverless
8 15 (4.00%) Azure DevOps
9 13 (3.47%) Amazon EC2
9 13 (3.47%) Anthropic Claude
10 11 (2.93%) Azure Cognitive Services
10 11 (2.93%) Cloud Computing
10 11 (2.93%) CloudFront
11 10 (2.67%) Amazon Bedrock
11 10 (2.67%) Amazon SageMaker
11 10 (2.67%) Azure Data Factory
11 10 (2.67%) Google Gemini
12 9 (2.40%) AWS Lambda
12 9 (2.40%) Azure Cognitive Search
Communications & Networking
1 16 (4.27%) Firewall
2 6 (1.60%) DHCP
2 6 (1.60%) DNS
3 5 (1.33%) Reverse Proxy
4 4 (1.07%) Internet
4 4 (1.07%) WAN
5 3 (0.80%) VLAN
6 2 (0.53%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.27%) Ethernet
7 1 (0.27%) Intrusion Detection
7 1 (0.27%) iSCSI
7 1 (0.27%) Kerberos
7 1 (0.27%) LAN
7 1 (0.27%) LTE
7 1 (0.27%) NAS
7 1 (0.27%) Network Security
7 1 (0.27%) RTP
7 1 (0.27%) SAN
7 1 (0.27%) SNMP
7 1 (0.27%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 66 (17.60%) Apache Cassandra
2 47 (12.53%) PostgreSQL
3 27 (7.20%) MongoDB
4 22 (5.87%) NoSQL
5 17 (4.53%) SQL Server
6 14 (3.73%) Pinecone
6 14 (3.73%) Relational Database
7 13 (3.47%) BigQuery
7 13 (3.47%) Redis
8 11 (2.93%) DynamoDB
9 10 (2.67%) Metadata
10 9 (2.40%) DB2
11 7 (1.87%) Amazon RDS
12 6 (1.60%) Big Data
12 6 (1.60%) Couchbase
12 6 (1.60%) Weaviate
13 5 (1.33%) Amazon Aurora
13 5 (1.33%) GIS
14 4 (1.07%) Oracle Database
14 4 (1.07%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 54 (14.40%) Git
2 32 (8.53%) GitLab
3 30 (8.00%) JUnit
4 27 (7.20%) Jenkins
5 17 (4.53%) JIRA
6 14 (3.73%) MLflow
7 13 (3.47%) Selenium
8 10 (2.67%) IntelliJ
9 9 (2.40%) Eclipse
10 8 (2.13%) Gradle
10 8 (2.13%) SonarQube
11 7 (1.87%) CircleCI
11 7 (1.87%) Cucumber
12 6 (1.60%) Maven
12 6 (1.60%) Mocha
12 6 (1.60%) Mockito
13 5 (1.33%) Bitbucket Server
13 5 (1.33%) DbUnit
13 5 (1.33%) jMock
14 4 (1.07%) Cypress.io
General
1 81 (21.60%) Social Skills
2 66 (17.60%) Finance
3 51 (13.60%) Public Sector
4 36 (9.60%) Analytical Skills
5 34 (9.07%) Banking
6 15 (4.00%) Investment Banking
7 14 (3.73%) Front Office
8 12 (3.20%) Influencing Skills
8 12 (3.20%) Legal
9 6 (1.60%) Financial Institution
9 6 (1.60%) Presentation Skills
9 6 (1.60%) Publishing
9 6 (1.60%) Retail
9 6 (1.60%) Telecoms
10 5 (1.33%) Documentation Skills
10 5 (1.33%) Marketing
11 4 (1.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 4 (1.07%) Organisational Skills
12 3 (0.80%) Military
13 2 (0.53%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 131 (34.93%) Developer
2 92 (24.53%) Senior
3 57 (15.20%) Senior Developer
4 50 (13.33%) Architect
5 39 (10.40%) Software Engineer
6 27 (7.20%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 22 (5.87%) Solutions Architect
8 19 (5.07%) Android Developer
9 17 (4.53%) Java Developer
10 13 (3.47%) AWS Architect
10 13 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
10 13 (3.47%) Python Developer
11 12 (3.20%) Data Engineer
11 12 (3.20%) Lead
12 11 (2.93%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 10 (2.67%) Automation Engineer
13 10 (2.67%) AWS Solution Architect
13 10 (2.67%) Data Scientist
13 10 (2.67%) Senior Platform Engineer
14 9 (2.40%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 108 (28.80%) Kafka
2 71 (18.93%) gRPC
3 55 (14.67%) REST
4 36 (9.60%) React
5 34 (9.07%) Spring
6 31 (8.27%) Node.js
7 30 (8.00%) RESTful
8 28 (7.47%) HTML
9 27 (7.20%) LangChain
10 22 (5.87%) AngularJS
10 22 (5.87%) Web Services
11 21 (5.60%) .NET
12 20 (5.33%) PyTorch
13 19 (5.07%) Android Jetpack
13 19 (5.07%) CSS
13 19 (5.07%) Jetpack Compose
14 18 (4.80%) HTML5
15 17 (4.53%) Android SDK
15 17 (4.53%) JSON
15 17 (4.53%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 75 (20.00%) Distributed Systems
2 26 (6.93%) Cloud Native
3 19 (5.07%) Product Ownership
4 14 (3.73%) Equities
5 10 (2.67%) Distributed Computing
5 10 (2.67%) Legacy Code
5 10 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
5 10 (2.67%) Onboarding
5 10 (2.67%) PKI
6 9 (2.40%) AI Agents
6 9 (2.40%) Data Structures
6 9 (2.40%) Fat Client
6 9 (2.40%) Mobile App
6 9 (2.40%) Thin Client
6 9 (2.40%) Virtual Team
7 8 (2.13%) Low-Code
7 8 (2.13%) Security Posture
8 7 (1.87%) Data Protection Act
8 7 (1.87%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 6 (1.60%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 52 (13.87%) Linux
2 29 (7.73%) Android
3 20 (5.33%) Windows
4 14 (3.73%) Unix
5 9 (2.40%) Windows 7
6 8 (2.13%) Apple iOS
7 7 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 3 (0.80%) Ubuntu
8 3 (0.80%) Windows Server
9 2 (0.53%) CentOS
9 2 (0.53%) Debian
9 2 (0.53%) Rocky
9 2 (0.53%) VMS
10 1 (0.27%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 121 (32.27%) Software Engineering
2 110 (29.33%) Microservices
3 92 (24.53%) CI/CD
4 90 (24.00%) Agile
5 87 (23.20%) AI
6 69 (18.40%) Problem-Solving
7 63 (16.80%) LLM
8 62 (16.53%) DevOps
9 56 (14.93%) Containerisation
10 53 (14.13%) Machine Learning
11 49 (13.07%) Infrastructure as Code
12 47 (12.53%) Generative AI
13 40 (10.67%) Data Pipeline
14 37 (9.87%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
14 37 (9.87%) Test Automation
15 36 (9.60%) Computer Science
16 34 (9.07%) Continuous Integration
17 33 (8.80%) Performance Tuning
18 32 (8.53%) Clean Code
18 32 (8.53%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 159 (42.40%) Python
2 84 (22.40%) Go
3 83 (22.13%) Java
4 66 (17.60%) SQL
5 35 (9.33%) JavaScript
6 32 (8.53%) TypeScript
7 26 (6.93%) C#
8 25 (6.67%) Kotlin
9 14 (3.73%) Bash
9 14 (3.73%) Scala
10 11 (2.93%) Ruby
10 11 (2.93%) Shell Script
11 8 (2.13%) PowerShell
12 6 (1.60%) PL/SQL
13 4 (1.07%) C++
13 4 (1.07%) Delphi
13 4 (1.07%) PHP
13 4 (1.07%) Solidity
14 3 (0.80%) Swift
15 2 (0.53%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 84 (22.40%) Security Cleared
2 54 (14.40%) SC Cleared
3 42 (11.20%) Degree
4 22 (5.87%) Computer Science Degree
5 19 (5.07%) DV Cleared
6 17 (4.53%) BPSS Clearance
7 13 (3.47%) Master's Degree
8 8 (2.13%) PhD
9 4 (1.07%) AWS Certification
9 4 (1.07%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.53%) GPEN
10 2 (0.53%) GWAPT
10 2 (0.53%) OSCP
11 1 (0.27%) CCIP
11 1 (0.27%) CCSAS
11 1 (0.27%) GXPN
11 1 (0.27%) ISEB
11 1 (0.27%) MPhil
11 1 (0.27%) OSCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (5.33%) Accessibility
2 14 (3.73%) QA
3 10 (2.67%) Data Quality
3 10 (2.67%) NIST
3 10 (2.67%) WCAG
4 7 (1.87%) GDPR
4 7 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 5 (1.33%) Cyber Essentials
5 5 (1.33%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 2 (0.53%) GPG for Computer-Based Electronic Evidence
6 2 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 17025
6 2 (0.53%) ISO17020
6 2 (0.53%) NCSC
6 2 (0.53%) SLA
7 1 (0.27%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
7 1 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 1 (0.27%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.27%) SOC 2
System Software
1 137 (36.53%) Docker
2 16 (4.27%) Active Directory
3 7 (1.87%) Virtual Machines
4 4 (1.07%) Ceph
4 4 (1.07%) Postfix
5 3 (0.80%) ISA Server
5 3 (0.80%) KVM
5 3 (0.80%) Oracle RAC
6 2 (0.53%) Oracle Clusterware
6 2 (0.53%) QEMU
7 1 (0.27%) Firmware
7 1 (0.27%) iptables
7 1 (0.27%) Lustre
7 1 (0.27%) NFS
7 1 (0.27%) Samba
7 1 (0.27%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 126 (33.60%) Kubernetes
2 35 (9.33%) Terraform
3 28 (7.47%) Grafana
4 25 (6.67%) Prometheus
5 12 (3.20%) Ansible
6 11 (2.93%) Puppet
7 9 (2.40%) WMI
8 8 (2.13%) Istio
9 6 (1.60%) Argo
10 3 (0.80%) Data Guard
10 3 (0.80%) HAProxy
10 3 (0.80%) Oracle RMAN
11 2 (0.53%) Knative
11 2 (0.53%) Rancher
11 2 (0.53%) Salt
12 1 (0.27%) Amdocs OSS
12 1 (0.27%) CASB
12 1 (0.27%) MOM
12 1 (0.27%) SELinux
Vendors
1 35 (9.33%) Microsoft
2 28 (7.47%) Google
3 25 (6.67%) OpenAI
4 11 (2.93%) Atlassian
4 11 (2.93%) Oracle
5 10 (2.67%) VMware
6 9 (2.40%) Splunk
6 9 (2.40%) UiPath
6 9 (2.40%) webMethods
7 8 (2.13%) Automation Anywhere
7 8 (2.13%) Sybase
8 6 (1.60%) Red Hat
9 5 (1.33%) Databricks
9 5 (1.33%) Dynatrace
9 5 (1.33%) Jaspersoft
9 5 (1.33%) SAP
10 4 (1.07%) Adobe
10 4 (1.07%) ServiceNow
10 4 (1.07%) Xamarin
11 3 (0.80%) Cisco