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 13 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 340 249 288
Rank change year-on-year -91 +39 -32
Contract jobs citing Open Source 307 307 329
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.65% 1.06% 0.77%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.77% 1.16% 0.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 147 204 217
10th Percentile £400 £400 £363
25th Percentile £472 £456 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £570
Median % change year-on-year - -3.51% -5.00%
75th Percentile £647 £652 £675
90th Percentile £793 £838 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £588
% change year-on-year +5.26% -19.15% +2.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 8
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £61.25 - £25.99
Median hourly rate £62.50 £95.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -34.21% +72.73% -26.67%
75th Percentile £63.75 - £72.90
90th Percentile - - £74.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £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 39,805 26,361 36,876
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.33% 90.96% 86.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,996 16,941 23,723
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £516 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.13% -1.71% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £626 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £479 £500
% change year-on-year +2.71% -4.20% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,368 1,073 2,431
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.41 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.90 £18.38 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.60 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +48.60% -21.64% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.31 £60.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.78 £38.00
% change year-on-year +74.59% -32.17% +8.57%

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 13 May 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 13 May 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 -117 244 £550 -8.33% 161
London -94 130 £600 - 90
Work from Home -67 115 £550 -8.33% 73
UK excluding London -80 110 £500 +5.26% 86
North of England -71 28 £450 -3.23% 14
West Midlands -47 18 £475 +10.08% 3
South East -49 18 £400 -20.00% 31
Midlands -51 18 £475 +10.08% 5
Scotland -5 17 £675 +28.57% 3
South West -17 17 £550 -12.00% 16
North West -34 17 £450 -2.70% 8
East of England -24 13 £550 +37.50% 15
Yorkshire -46 10 £485 - 4

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 (5.54%) Confluence
2 9 (2.93%) Apache
3 8 (2.61%) Appian
3 8 (2.61%) SharePoint
4 5 (1.63%) SAS
5 4 (1.30%) Apache Airflow
5 4 (1.30%) nginx
5 4 (1.30%) OpenStack
6 3 (0.98%) Adobe Experience Manager
6 3 (0.98%) Apache Spark
7 2 (0.65%) JBoss
7 2 (0.65%) Liferay
7 2 (0.65%) Tomcat
7 2 (0.65%) WebLogic
8 1 (0.33%) Apache Superset
Applications
1 3 (0.98%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.65%) Oracle EBS
1 2 (0.65%) Oracle EBS R12
Cloud Services
1 157 (51.14%) AWS
2 81 (26.38%) Azure
3 42 (13.68%) GitHub
4 40 (13.03%) GCP
5 36 (11.73%) Amazon S3
6 30 (9.77%) Serverless
7 22 (7.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 20 (6.51%) Amazon EC2
8 20 (6.51%) Azure AI
9 18 (5.86%) GitHub Actions
10 17 (5.54%) AWS Lambda
11 14 (4.56%) Google Gemini
12 13 (4.23%) Anthropic Claude
12 13 (4.23%) Azure DevOps
13 11 (3.58%) Route 53
14 10 (3.26%) Amazon SQS
14 10 (3.26%) Azure Cognitive Services
15 9 (2.93%) Amazon SageMaker
15 9 (2.93%) AWS KMS
15 9 (2.93%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 13 (4.23%) Firewall
2 7 (2.28%) Reverse Proxy
3 6 (1.95%) DNS
3 6 (1.95%) SNMP
3 6 (1.95%) WAN
4 4 (1.30%) DHCP
5 3 (0.98%) Network Security
6 2 (0.65%) Intrusion Detection
6 2 (0.65%) NaaS
6 2 (0.65%) SSH
6 2 (0.65%) TCP/IP
6 2 (0.65%) VLAN
7 1 (0.33%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.33%) iSCSI
7 1 (0.33%) Kerberos
7 1 (0.33%) LTE
7 1 (0.33%) NAS
7 1 (0.33%) NGFW
7 1 (0.33%) SAN
7 1 (0.33%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 48 (15.64%) PostgreSQL
2 42 (13.68%) Apache Cassandra
3 20 (6.51%) DynamoDB
4 17 (5.54%) Amazon RDS
5 15 (4.89%) BigQuery
5 15 (4.89%) SQL Server
6 13 (4.23%) MongoDB
6 13 (4.23%) Pinecone
7 10 (3.26%) NoSQL
8 9 (2.93%) Amazon Athena
8 9 (2.93%) Amazon Aurora
8 9 (2.93%) Amazon Redshift
8 9 (2.93%) Data Warehouse
9 7 (2.28%) Amazon QuickSight
9 7 (2.28%) Relational Database
10 6 (1.95%) Data Lake
10 6 (1.95%) Metadata
10 6 (1.95%) RDBMS
10 6 (1.95%) Redis
11 5 (1.63%) Apache Iceberg
Development Applications
1 57 (18.57%) Git
2 30 (9.77%) GitLab
3 23 (7.49%) Jenkins
4 22 (7.17%) JUnit
5 21 (6.84%) JIRA
6 17 (5.54%) SonarQube
7 12 (3.91%) Sonatype Nexus
8 11 (3.58%) MLflow
9 9 (2.93%) Bitbucket Server
9 9 (2.93%) DbUnit
9 9 (2.93%) jMock
9 9 (2.93%) Maven
9 9 (2.93%) Mockito
10 8 (2.61%) IntelliJ
11 6 (1.95%) CircleCI
11 6 (1.95%) Gradle
12 5 (1.63%) Artifactory
13 4 (1.30%) PowerDesigner
14 3 (0.98%) Cucumber
14 3 (0.98%) Jasmine
General
1 67 (21.82%) Social Skills
2 62 (20.20%) Finance
3 44 (14.33%) Public Sector
4 22 (7.17%) Analytical Skills
5 19 (6.19%) Banking
5 19 (6.19%) Legal
6 8 (2.61%) Retail
7 7 (2.28%) Front Office
7 7 (2.28%) Law
8 5 (1.63%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (1.63%) Military
9 3 (0.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 3 (0.98%) Publishing
9 3 (0.98%) Telecoms
10 2 (0.65%) Billing
10 2 (0.65%) Investment Banking
10 2 (0.65%) Marketing
10 2 (0.65%) Police
10 2 (0.65%) Presentation Skills
11 1 (0.33%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 81 (26.38%) Developer
2 58 (18.89%) Senior
3 56 (18.24%) Architect
4 34 (11.07%) Software Engineer
5 31 (10.10%) Senior Developer
6 28 (9.12%) Solutions Architect
7 27 (8.79%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 22 (7.17%) Data Engineer
9 21 (6.84%) AWS Architect
10 15 (4.89%) Cloud Engineer
10 15 (4.89%) Consultant
11 14 (4.56%) AWS Solution Architect
12 13 (4.23%) Python Developer
13 12 (3.91%) Java Developer
13 12 (3.91%) Senior Data Engineer
14 11 (3.58%) Lead
15 10 (3.26%) AWS Engineer
15 10 (3.26%) Cloud Architect
15 10 (3.26%) GCP Engineer
16 9 (2.93%) Android Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 76 (24.76%) Kafka
2 45 (14.66%) gRPC
3 43 (14.01%) REST
4 31 (10.10%) RESTful
5 29 (9.45%) Node.js
6 28 (9.12%) React
7 27 (8.79%) Spring
7 27 (8.79%) Spring Boot
8 24 (7.82%) AngularJS
9 23 (7.49%) LangChain
10 22 (7.17%) Web Services
11 20 (6.51%) .NET
12 17 (5.54%) Hugging Face
12 17 (5.54%) PyTorch
13 15 (4.89%) OpenTelemetry
13 15 (4.89%) TensorFlow
14 13 (4.23%) Android Jetpack
14 13 (4.23%) Jetpack Compose
15 12 (3.91%) Django
16 11 (3.58%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 62 (20.20%) Distributed Systems
2 43 (14.01%) Cloud Native
3 21 (6.84%) Product Ownership
4 10 (3.26%) Legacy Systems
5 9 (2.93%) AI Agents
5 9 (2.93%) Legacy Code
5 9 (2.93%) Onboarding
6 8 (2.61%) Enterprise Software
6 8 (2.61%) Low-Code
7 7 (2.28%) Data Protection Act
8 6 (1.95%) Virtual Team
9 5 (1.63%) Data Centre
10 4 (1.30%) Cyber Threat
10 4 (1.30%) Fat Client
10 4 (1.30%) Management Information System
10 4 (1.30%) Mobile App
10 4 (1.30%) PKI
10 4 (1.30%) Self-Motivation
10 4 (1.30%) Thin Client
11 3 (0.98%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 49 (15.96%) Linux
2 15 (4.89%) Android
3 11 (3.58%) Windows
4 6 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 5 (1.63%) Unix
6 4 (1.30%) Debian
6 4 (1.30%) Rocky
6 4 (1.30%) Ubuntu
6 4 (1.30%) Windows 7
7 3 (0.98%) Apple iOS
8 2 (0.65%) VMS
8 2 (0.65%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 88 (28.66%) CI/CD
1 88 (28.66%) Software Engineering
2 82 (26.71%) Microservices
3 80 (26.06%) AI
4 71 (23.13%) Agile
5 67 (21.82%) DevOps
6 62 (20.20%) Containerisation
7 56 (18.24%) LLM
8 47 (15.31%) Stakeholder Management
9 44 (14.33%) Generative AI
9 44 (14.33%) Machine Learning
10 42 (13.68%) Data Pipeline
10 42 (13.68%) Infrastructure as Code
11 40 (13.03%) Observability
12 38 (12.38%) Problem-Solving
13 36 (11.73%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
14 28 (9.12%) Prompt Engineering
14 28 (9.12%) TDD
15 27 (8.79%) SDLC
16 26 (8.47%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 134 (43.65%) Python
2 58 (18.89%) Go
3 56 (18.24%) Java
4 50 (16.29%) SQL
5 23 (7.49%) TypeScript
6 22 (7.17%) C#
7 21 (6.84%) Bash
8 20 (6.51%) JavaScript
9 14 (4.56%) Kotlin
10 7 (2.28%) PowerShell
10 7 (2.28%) Ruby
11 6 (1.95%) PL/SQL
11 6 (1.95%) Shell Script
12 4 (1.30%) C++
12 4 (1.30%) Delphi
12 4 (1.30%) PHP
13 2 (0.65%) Kusto Query Language
13 2 (0.65%) Scala
14 1 (0.33%) Bicep
14 1 (0.33%) R
Qualifications
1 89 (28.99%) Security Cleared
2 68 (22.15%) SC Cleared
3 27 (8.79%) Degree
4 12 (3.91%) BPSS Clearance
4 12 (3.91%) Computer Science Degree
5 11 (3.58%) DV Cleared
6 4 (1.30%) AWS Certification
6 4 (1.30%) Azure Certification
6 4 (1.30%) Master's Degree
7 3 (0.98%) PhD
8 2 (0.65%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 2 (0.65%) CISM
8 2 (0.65%) CISSP
9 1 (0.33%) CEH
9 1 (0.33%) GCIA
9 1 (0.33%) GIAC
9 1 (0.33%) ISEB
9 1 (0.33%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 1 (0.33%) MPhil
9 1 (0.33%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (5.54%) QA
2 10 (3.26%) Data Quality
3 9 (2.93%) Accessibility
4 4 (1.30%) NIST
4 4 (1.30%) WCAG
5 3 (0.98%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 1 (0.33%) GDPR
6 1 (0.33%) GRC
6 1 (0.33%) HIPAA
6 1 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
6 1 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 42001
6 1 (0.33%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.33%) SLA
6 1 (0.33%) SOC 2
System Software
1 104 (33.88%) Docker
2 11 (3.58%) Active Directory
3 8 (2.61%) Postfix
4 5 (1.63%) Virtual Machines
5 4 (1.30%) Ceph
5 4 (1.30%) Oracle RAC
6 3 (0.98%) ISA Server
7 2 (0.65%) KVM
7 2 (0.65%) Oracle Clusterware
8 1 (0.33%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.33%) iptables
8 1 (0.33%) Lustre
8 1 (0.33%) NFS
8 1 (0.33%) Samba
8 1 (0.33%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 1 (0.33%) Squid
8 1 (0.33%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 93 (30.29%) Kubernetes
2 41 (13.36%) Terraform
3 36 (11.73%) Grafana
4 30 (9.77%) Prometheus
5 16 (5.21%) Ansible
6 10 (3.26%) Istio
7 6 (1.95%) Argo
8 4 (1.30%) Data Guard
8 4 (1.30%) Oracle RMAN
8 4 (1.30%) Puppet
8 4 (1.30%) Salt
8 4 (1.30%) WMI
9 2 (0.65%) Amdocs OSS
9 2 (0.65%) HAProxy
9 2 (0.65%) Knative
9 2 (0.65%) Rancher
10 1 (0.33%) CASB
10 1 (0.33%) MOM
10 1 (0.33%) QRadar
10 1 (0.33%) SELinux
Vendors
1 26 (8.47%) Google
1 26 (8.47%) OpenAI
2 23 (7.49%) Microsoft
3 19 (6.19%) Dynatrace
4 13 (4.23%) Splunk
5 12 (3.91%) Oracle
6 9 (2.93%) Atlassian
6 9 (2.93%) Jaspersoft
6 9 (2.93%) UiPath
7 8 (2.61%) Automation Anywhere
8 7 (2.28%) Checkmarx
9 6 (1.95%) VMware
10 5 (1.63%) Cribl.io
10 5 (1.63%) Denodo
10 5 (1.63%) Informatica
11 4 (1.30%) Databricks
11 4 (1.30%) Fortinet
11 4 (1.30%) IBM
11 4 (1.30%) Red Hat
11 4 (1.30%) ServiceNow