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

6 months to
9 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 282 290 265
Rank change year-on-year +8 -25 -37
Contract jobs citing Open Source 360 249 387
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.92% 0.81% 0.86%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.06% 0.90% 0.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 166 166 233
10th Percentile £350 £383 £325
25th Percentile £413 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £533 £575 £570
Median % change year-on-year -7.39% +0.88% -4.04%
75th Percentile £647 £700 £650
90th Percentile £775 £838 £749
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £500 £568
% change year-on-year -10.00% -11.89% +8.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 6 14
10th Percentile - £25.43 -
25th Percentile £15.25 £25.63 £19.99
Median hourly rate £15.50 £26.25 £21.25
Median % change year-on-year -40.95% +23.53% -61.36%
75th Percentile £39.75 £26.88 £22.52
90th Percentile £54.15 £61.00 £68.28
UK excluding London median hourly rate £15.50 £26.50 £71.93
% change year-on-year -41.51% -63.16% -

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 33,920 27,613 39,240
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.99% 89.40% 87.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,498 16,798 25,769
10th Percentile £306 £306 £300
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £718 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £497 £500
% change year-on-year -3.92% -0.60% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,057 854 2,142
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.05 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.66 £34.36
Median % change year-on-year -22.98% -4.95% +5.71%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.75
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.76 £35.00
% change year-on-year -20.81% -9.26% +11.93%

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 9 February 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 9 February 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 9 February 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 +4 306 £550 -4.35% 140
London -17 151 £605 -6.92% 49
UK excluding London -21 131 £450 -10.00% 115
Work from Home +28 128 £500 -20.00% 100
North of England -22 47 £433 -13.11% 35
South East -13 30 £565 +13.00% 28
North West -4 24 £415 -10.27% 15
Yorkshire -44 20 £513 -14.19% 15
Scotland +12 19 £669 +24.37% 10
South West -9 15 £365 -40.89% 15
West Midlands -44 13 £435 -20.91% 4
Midlands -46 13 £435 -13.00% 11
East of England -24 6 £552 +34.29% 11
North East -14 3 - - 5
Wales -5 1 - - 5

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 (4.72%) Apache
2 12 (3.33%) Appian
3 11 (3.06%) JBoss
3 11 (3.06%) WebLogic
4 9 (2.50%) Apache Spark
5 7 (1.94%) Confluence
6 4 (1.11%) Adobe Experience Manager
6 4 (1.11%) Apache Airflow
6 4 (1.11%) nginx
7 3 (0.83%) Ethereum
7 3 (0.83%) Hyperledger
7 3 (0.83%) OpenStack
8 2 (0.56%) Liferay
8 2 (0.56%) Tomcat
9 1 (0.28%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.28%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.28%) Cloud Foundry
9 1 (0.28%) GeoServer
9 1 (0.28%) Oracle Coherence
9 1 (0.28%) Oracle Spatial
Applications
1 1 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (0.56%) Oracle EBS
1 2 (0.56%) Oracle EBS R12
2 1 (0.28%) Magento
2 1 (0.28%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 164 (45.56%) AWS
2 74 (20.56%) Azure
3 40 (11.11%) GitHub
4 28 (7.78%) GCP
5 25 (6.94%) GitHub Actions
6 17 (4.72%) Azure AI
7 16 (4.44%) Serverless
8 15 (4.17%) Amazon S3
9 13 (3.61%) Cloud Computing
10 12 (3.33%) Amazon Bedrock
10 12 (3.33%) CloudFront
11 11 (3.06%) Anthropic Claude
11 11 (3.06%) Azure DevOps
12 10 (2.78%) Google Gemini
13 9 (2.50%) Amazon SageMaker
13 9 (2.50%) Vertex AI
14 8 (2.22%) Azure Data Factory
15 7 (1.94%) Power Automate
16 6 (1.67%) AWS Lambda
16 6 (1.67%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (4.44%) Firewall
2 6 (1.67%) DHCP
2 6 (1.67%) DNS
3 5 (1.39%) Internet
4 4 (1.11%) Reverse Proxy
5 3 (0.83%) Ethernet
5 3 (0.83%) VLAN
5 3 (0.83%) WAN
6 2 (0.56%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.28%) InfiniBand
7 1 (0.28%) iSCSI
7 1 (0.28%) Kerberos
7 1 (0.28%) LAN
7 1 (0.28%) NAS
7 1 (0.28%) Radio Access Network
7 1 (0.28%) RTP
7 1 (0.28%) SAN
7 1 (0.28%) Software-Defined Networking
7 1 (0.28%) Spanning Tree
7 1 (0.28%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 65 (18.06%) Apache Cassandra
2 38 (10.56%) PostgreSQL
3 26 (7.22%) MongoDB
4 22 (6.11%) NoSQL
5 20 (5.56%) Relational Database
6 16 (4.44%) SQL Server
7 14 (3.89%) Redis
8 13 (3.61%) DB2
9 12 (3.33%) Pinecone
10 11 (3.06%) BigQuery
11 7 (1.94%) Metadata
12 6 (1.67%) Couchbase
13 5 (1.39%) DynamoDB
13 5 (1.39%) Weaviate
14 4 (1.11%) Data Hub
14 4 (1.11%) GIS
14 4 (1.11%) RDBMS
15 3 (0.83%) Big Data
15 3 (0.83%) Oracle Database
15 3 (0.83%) Oracle Database 12c
Development Applications
1 40 (11.11%) Git
2 32 (8.89%) GitLab
3 26 (7.22%) JUnit
4 24 (6.67%) Jenkins
5 15 (4.17%) Selenium
6 14 (3.89%) MLflow
7 12 (3.33%) JIRA
8 9 (2.50%) Cucumber
8 9 (2.50%) Eclipse
8 9 (2.50%) IntelliJ
9 7 (1.94%) Mocha
10 6 (1.67%) SonarQube
11 5 (1.39%) CircleCI
11 5 (1.39%) Gradle
11 5 (1.39%) Robot Framework
12 4 (1.11%) Cypress.io
12 4 (1.11%) ESLint
13 3 (0.83%) Hudson
13 3 (0.83%) Jasmine
13 3 (0.83%) KGDB
General
1 83 (23.06%) Social Skills
2 63 (17.50%) Finance
3 43 (11.94%) Public Sector
4 40 (11.11%) Analytical Skills
5 34 (9.44%) Banking
6 19 (5.28%) Investment Banking
7 16 (4.44%) Front Office
8 12 (3.33%) Influencing Skills
9 9 (2.50%) Marketing
9 9 (2.50%) Telecoms
10 7 (1.94%) Presentation Skills
11 6 (1.67%) Financial Institution
11 6 (1.67%) Legal
11 6 (1.67%) Publishing
11 6 (1.67%) Retail
12 5 (1.39%) Documentation Skills
12 5 (1.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 4 (1.11%) Military
13 4 (1.11%) Organisational Skills
14 3 (0.83%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 130 (36.11%) Developer
2 92 (25.56%) Senior
3 57 (15.83%) Senior Developer
4 42 (11.67%) Architect
5 36 (10.00%) Software Engineer
6 24 (6.67%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 18 (5.00%) Solutions Architect
8 16 (4.44%) Android Developer
8 16 (4.44%) Platform Engineer
9 15 (4.17%) Java Developer
10 12 (3.33%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 12 (3.33%) Investment Banking Java Developer
10 12 (3.33%) Lead
10 12 (3.33%) Python Developer
10 12 (3.33%) SQL Developer
11 11 (3.06%) Data Scientist
11 11 (3.06%) Software Developer
12 10 (2.78%) Front-End Developer (Client-Side Developer)
12 10 (2.78%) Senior Platform Engineer
13 9 (2.50%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 106 (29.44%) Kafka
2 73 (20.28%) gRPC
3 41 (11.39%) REST
4 36 (10.00%) React
5 33 (9.17%) Spring
6 29 (8.06%) HTML
7 25 (6.94%) Node.js
8 24 (6.67%) LangChain
9 21 (5.83%) PyTorch
10 20 (5.56%) CSS
10 20 (5.56%) RESTful
11 18 (5.00%) .NET
11 18 (5.00%) HTML5
12 17 (4.72%) Hugging Face
12 17 (4.72%) JSON
12 17 (4.72%) TensorFlow
13 16 (4.44%) AngularJS
13 16 (4.44%) Web Services
14 14 (3.89%) Faiss
14 14 (3.89%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 65 (18.06%) Distributed Systems
2 21 (5.83%) Cloud Native
3 18 (5.00%) Equities
4 15 (4.17%) Product Ownership
5 13 (3.61%) Data Structures
6 12 (3.33%) Distributed Computing
6 12 (3.33%) PKI
7 11 (3.06%) Fat Client
7 11 (3.06%) Thin Client
8 10 (2.78%) AI Agents
9 9 (2.50%) Legacy Systems
9 9 (2.50%) Onboarding
10 7 (1.94%) Data Centre
10 7 (1.94%) Data Protection Act
10 7 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
10 7 (1.94%) Legacy Code
10 7 (1.94%) Low-Code
10 7 (1.94%) Mobile App
10 7 (1.94%) Virtual Team
11 6 (1.67%) Blog
Operating Systems
1 52 (14.44%) Linux
2 24 (6.67%) Windows
3 23 (6.39%) Android
4 17 (4.72%) Unix
5 11 (3.06%) Windows 7
6 8 (2.22%) Apple iOS
7 7 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 3 (0.83%) CentOS
8 3 (0.83%) Windows Server
9 2 (0.56%) Ubuntu
9 2 (0.56%) VMS
10 1 (0.28%) Debian
10 1 (0.28%) Oracle Linux
10 1 (0.28%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 123 (34.17%) Software Engineering
2 105 (29.17%) Microservices
3 88 (24.44%) Agile
3 88 (24.44%) AI
3 88 (24.44%) CI/CD
4 79 (21.94%) Problem-Solving
5 59 (16.39%) Machine Learning
6 57 (15.83%) DevOps
6 57 (15.83%) LLM
7 49 (13.61%) Containerisation
8 47 (13.06%) Infrastructure as Code
9 46 (12.78%) Generative AI
10 40 (11.11%) Test Automation
11 36 (10.00%) Clean Code
12 35 (9.72%) Data Pipeline
13 34 (9.44%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
14 32 (8.89%) Observability
15 30 (8.33%) Data Science
15 30 (8.33%) Performance Tuning
16 29 (8.06%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 163 (45.28%) Python
2 87 (24.17%) Go
3 76 (21.11%) Java
4 63 (17.50%) SQL
5 38 (10.56%) JavaScript
6 32 (8.89%) TypeScript
7 24 (6.67%) C#
8 18 (5.00%) Kotlin
9 16 (4.44%) Bash
10 14 (3.89%) Scala
10 14 (3.89%) Shell Script
11 13 (3.61%) Ruby
12 10 (2.78%) PowerShell
13 4 (1.11%) C
13 4 (1.11%) Delphi
13 4 (1.11%) Perl
13 4 (1.11%) PHP
13 4 (1.11%) PL/SQL
13 4 (1.11%) Solidity
14 3 (0.83%) Assembly Language
Qualifications
1 70 (19.44%) Security Cleared
2 40 (11.11%) SC Cleared
3 36 (10.00%) Degree
4 20 (5.56%) DV Cleared
5 18 (5.00%) Computer Science Degree
6 14 (3.89%) BPSS Clearance
7 13 (3.61%) Master's Degree
8 8 (2.22%) PhD
9 3 (0.83%) AWS Certification
10 2 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.56%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.56%) GPEN
10 2 (0.56%) GWAPT
10 2 (0.56%) OSCP
11 1 (0.28%) CCIP
11 1 (0.28%) CCSAS
11 1 (0.28%) Cisco Certification
11 1 (0.28%) GXPN
11 1 (0.28%) MPhil
11 1 (0.28%) OSCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (5.00%) Accessibility
2 12 (3.33%) QA
3 11 (3.06%) WCAG
4 10 (2.78%) Data Quality
5 9 (2.50%) NIST
6 7 (1.94%) GDPR
7 5 (1.39%) Cyber Essentials
7 5 (1.39%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 5 (1.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 3 (0.83%) NCSC
9 2 (0.56%) GPG for Computer-Based Electronic Evidence
9 2 (0.56%) HIPAA
9 2 (0.56%) ISO/IEC 17025
9 2 (0.56%) ISO17020
9 2 (0.56%) SLA
10 1 (0.28%) GxP
10 1 (0.28%) ISO/IEC 42001
System Software
1 134 (37.22%) Docker
2 17 (4.72%) Active Directory
3 8 (2.22%) Virtual Machines
4 4 (1.11%) QEMU
5 3 (0.83%) Ceph
5 3 (0.83%) ISA Server
5 3 (0.83%) KVM
6 2 (0.56%) Oracle Clusterware
6 2 (0.56%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.28%) Firmware
7 1 (0.28%) iptables
7 1 (0.28%) Lustre
7 1 (0.28%) NFS
7 1 (0.28%) Samba
7 1 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
7 1 (0.28%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 124 (34.44%) Kubernetes
2 36 (10.00%) Terraform
3 26 (7.22%) Prometheus
4 23 (6.39%) Grafana
5 15 (4.17%) Ansible
6 12 (3.33%) Puppet
7 11 (3.06%) WMI
8 8 (2.22%) Istio
9 7 (1.94%) Argo
10 3 (0.83%) HAProxy
11 2 (0.56%) Data Guard
11 2 (0.56%) Knative
11 2 (0.56%) Oracle RMAN
12 1 (0.28%) Rancher
12 1 (0.28%) Salt
12 1 (0.28%) SELinux
Vendors
1 33 (9.17%) Microsoft
2 27 (7.50%) Google
3 22 (6.11%) OpenAI
4 16 (4.44%) VMware
5 12 (3.33%) Sybase
6 10 (2.78%) Oracle
7 9 (2.50%) webMethods
8 8 (2.22%) Red Hat
8 8 (2.22%) UiPath
9 7 (1.94%) Automation Anywhere
9 7 (1.94%) Splunk
10 6 (1.67%) Atlassian
10 6 (1.67%) Cisco
10 6 (1.67%) SAP
11 5 (1.39%) Databricks
11 5 (1.39%) Foundry
11 5 (1.39%) Veracode
12 4 (1.11%) Adobe
12 4 (1.11%) Xamarin
13 3 (0.83%) Computacenter