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 7 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 277 309 255
Rank change year-on-year +32 -54 -18
Contract jobs citing Open Source 350 236 406
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.95% 0.73% 0.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.08% 0.83% 1.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 163 150 249
10th Percentile £327 £325 £262
25th Percentile £411 £449 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £570
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -3.51% -5.00%
75th Percentile £641 £675 £650
90th Percentile £771 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £468 £500 £563
% change year-on-year -6.50% -11.11% +7.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 6 14
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 £68.28
UK excluding London median hourly rate £15.50 £26.50 £71.93
% change year-on-year -41.51% -63.16% +294.14%

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 32,541 28,533 37,398
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.91% 88.47% 87.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,569 17,345 24,861
10th Percentile £304 £308 £305
25th Percentile £406 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £720 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,000 921 1,535
10th Percentile £14.74 £15.62 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.30 £18.93
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -23.53% +21.43%
75th Percentile £55.00 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.65 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.45 £45.00
% change year-on-year -21.76% -32.33% +55.17%

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 7 January 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 7 January 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 7 January 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 +28 300 £525 -6.46% 287
London +7 151 £600 -4.00% 104
UK excluding London -10 125 £468 -6.50% 222
Work from Home +18 117 £478 -20.29% 135
North of England -15 47 £450 -21.40% 33
South East -7 28 £565 +21.51% 87
North West -4 24 £433 -6.49% 18
Yorkshire -36 21 £525 -10.64% 11
Scotland +6 20 £556 +6.92% 5
South West +1 13 £350 -42.15% 27
West Midlands -30 12 £435 -20.91% 8
Midlands -34 12 £435 -20.91% 28
East of England -30 4 £553 +50.99% 37
North East -11 3 - - 4
Wales -3 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 15 (4.29%) Apache
2 11 (3.14%) JBoss
2 11 (3.14%) WebLogic
3 9 (2.57%) Apache Spark
4 8 (2.29%) Appian
5 7 (2.00%) Confluence
6 4 (1.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
6 4 (1.14%) Apache Airflow
7 3 (0.86%) Ethereum
7 3 (0.86%) Hyperledger
8 2 (0.57%) Liferay
8 2 (0.57%) OpenStack
8 2 (0.57%) Tomcat
9 1 (0.29%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.29%) Cloud Foundry
9 1 (0.29%) CMS
9 1 (0.29%) Mattermost
9 1 (0.29%) nginx
9 1 (0.29%) Oracle Coherence
9 1 (0.29%) Oracle Spatial
Applications
1 1 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (0.57%) Oracle EBS
1 2 (0.57%) Oracle EBS R12
2 1 (0.29%) Magento
2 1 (0.29%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 161 (46.00%) AWS
2 65 (18.57%) Azure
3 32 (9.14%) GitHub
4 30 (8.57%) GCP
5 22 (6.29%) GitHub Actions
6 16 (4.57%) Serverless
7 15 (4.29%) Amazon S3
8 14 (4.00%) CloudFront
9 12 (3.43%) Cloud Computing
10 11 (3.14%) Amazon Bedrock
11 10 (2.86%) Azure AI
12 9 (2.57%) Amazon SageMaker
12 9 (2.57%) Google Gemini
12 9 (2.57%) Vertex AI
13 8 (2.29%) Azure DevOps
14 7 (2.00%) Anthropic Claude
15 6 (1.71%) AWS Lambda
15 6 (1.71%) Azure AKS
15 6 (1.71%) OpenShift
16 5 (1.43%) Stackdriver
Communications & Networking
1 13 (3.71%) Firewall
2 5 (1.43%) Internet
3 4 (1.14%) DHCP
4 3 (0.86%) Ethernet
4 3 (0.86%) SSH
4 3 (0.86%) VLAN
5 2 (0.57%) DNS
5 2 (0.57%) TCP/IP
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%) RTP
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 65 (18.57%) Apache Cassandra
2 33 (9.43%) MongoDB
2 33 (9.43%) PostgreSQL
3 28 (8.00%) Relational Database
4 22 (6.29%) NoSQL
5 21 (6.00%) DB2
6 15 (4.29%) Redis
7 11 (3.14%) SQL Server
8 10 (2.86%) BigQuery
8 10 (2.86%) Pinecone
9 6 (1.71%) Couchbase
9 6 (1.71%) Metadata
10 5 (1.43%) DynamoDB
10 5 (1.43%) RDBMS
10 5 (1.43%) Weaviate
11 4 (1.14%) Apache Hive
11 4 (1.14%) Hadoop
11 4 (1.14%) Impala
12 3 (0.86%) Big Data
12 3 (0.86%) GIS
Development Applications
1 35 (10.00%) Git
1 35 (10.00%) JUnit
2 26 (7.43%) Jenkins
3 23 (6.57%) GitLab
4 15 (4.29%) Selenium
5 11 (3.14%) JIRA
5 11 (3.14%) MLflow
6 9 (2.57%) Cucumber
6 9 (2.57%) Eclipse
6 9 (2.57%) IntelliJ
7 8 (2.29%) SonarQube
8 7 (2.00%) Mocha
9 5 (1.43%) Gradle
9 5 (1.43%) Robot Framework
10 4 (1.14%) CircleCI
11 3 (0.86%) Cypress.io
11 3 (0.86%) ESLint
11 3 (0.86%) Hardhat
11 3 (0.86%) Hudson
11 3 (0.86%) KGDB
General
1 83 (23.71%) Social Skills
2 65 (18.57%) Finance
3 45 (12.86%) Analytical Skills
4 39 (11.14%) Banking
5 34 (9.71%) Public Sector
6 27 (7.71%) Investment Banking
7 20 (5.71%) Front Office
8 11 (3.14%) Influencing Skills
9 9 (2.57%) Telecoms
10 8 (2.29%) Marketing
11 7 (2.00%) Presentation Skills
12 6 (1.71%) Documentation Skills
12 6 (1.71%) Financial Institution
12 6 (1.71%) Legal
13 5 (1.43%) Retail
14 4 (1.14%) Organisational Skills
14 4 (1.14%) Publishing
15 3 (0.86%) Electronics
15 3 (0.86%) Manufacturing
16 2 (0.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
Job Titles
1 132 (37.71%) Developer
2 96 (27.43%) Senior
3 58 (16.57%) Senior Developer
4 35 (10.00%) Software Engineer
5 33 (9.43%) Architect
6 24 (6.86%) Platform Engineer
7 23 (6.57%) Java Developer
8 20 (5.71%) Investment Banking Java Developer
8 20 (5.71%) SQL Developer
9 18 (5.14%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 16 (4.57%) Android Developer
11 13 (3.71%) Lead
11 13 (3.71%) Solutions Architect
12 11 (3.14%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
12 11 (3.14%) Senior Java Developer
13 10 (2.86%) Front-End Developer (Client-Side Developer)
13 10 (2.86%) Senior Investment Banking Java Developer
13 10 (2.86%) Senior SQL Developer
13 10 (2.86%) Software Developer
13 10 (2.86%) Sybase Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 115 (32.86%) Kafka
2 77 (22.00%) gRPC
3 40 (11.43%) Spring
4 35 (10.00%) REST
5 33 (9.43%) React
6 29 (8.29%) HTML
7 25 (7.14%) LangChain
8 24 (6.86%) Node.js
9 20 (5.71%) CSS
9 20 (5.71%) JMS
10 18 (5.14%) HTML5
10 18 (5.14%) PyTorch
11 16 (4.57%) .NET
11 16 (4.57%) JSON
12 14 (4.00%) Android SDK
12 14 (4.00%) Hugging Face
12 14 (4.00%) RESTful
12 14 (4.00%) TensorFlow
12 14 (4.00%) XML
13 13 (3.71%) Jetpack Compose
Miscellaneous
1 64 (18.29%) Distributed Systems
2 27 (7.71%) Equities
3 22 (6.29%) Data Structures
4 19 (5.43%) Cloud Native
5 13 (3.71%) Product Ownership
6 12 (3.43%) Distributed Computing
7 11 (3.14%) PKI
8 10 (2.86%) Fat Client
8 10 (2.86%) Thin Client
9 9 (2.57%) AI Agents
10 7 (2.00%) Cyber Threat
10 7 (2.00%) Fixed Income
10 7 (2.00%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 7 (2.00%) Onboarding
10 7 (2.00%) Virtual Team
11 6 (1.71%) Derivative
11 6 (1.71%) Hedge funds
11 6 (1.71%) Mobile App
11 6 (1.71%) Private Cloud
11 6 (1.71%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 55 (15.71%) Linux
2 26 (7.43%) Windows
3 23 (6.57%) Android
4 17 (4.86%) Unix
5 10 (2.86%) Windows 7
6 6 (1.71%) Apple iOS
6 6 (1.71%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 5 (1.43%) Windows Server
8 3 (0.86%) 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
1 126 (36.00%) Software Engineering
2 100 (28.57%) Microservices
3 86 (24.57%) Problem-Solving
4 85 (24.29%) Agile
5 83 (23.71%) CI/CD
6 75 (21.43%) AI
7 54 (15.43%) DevOps
8 51 (14.57%) Machine Learning
9 47 (13.43%) Infrastructure as Code
10 44 (12.57%) LLM
11 41 (11.71%) Containerisation
12 39 (11.14%) Generative AI
13 38 (10.86%) Observability
13 38 (10.86%) Performance Tuning
14 35 (10.00%) Clean Code
15 32 (9.14%) Test Automation
16 29 (8.29%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
17 28 (8.00%) Data Pipeline
17 28 (8.00%) SDLC
18 27 (7.71%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 164 (46.86%) Python
2 88 (25.14%) Go
3 86 (24.57%) Java
4 72 (20.57%) SQL
5 34 (9.71%) JavaScript
6 27 (7.71%) TypeScript
7 22 (6.29%) C#
8 20 (5.71%) Shell Script
9 18 (5.14%) Kotlin
10 14 (4.00%) Bash
10 14 (4.00%) Scala
11 13 (3.71%) PowerShell
12 12 (3.43%) Ruby
13 5 (1.43%) C++
13 5 (1.43%) PHP
14 4 (1.14%) C
14 4 (1.14%) Delphi
14 4 (1.14%) Perl
14 4 (1.14%) PL/SQL
14 4 (1.14%) Solidity
Qualifications
1 60 (17.14%) Security Cleared
2 33 (9.43%) SC Cleared
3 29 (8.29%) Degree
4 19 (5.43%) DV Cleared
5 16 (4.57%) Computer Science Degree
6 12 (3.43%) BPSS Clearance
7 11 (3.14%) Master's Degree
8 6 (1.71%) PhD
9 4 (1.14%) MCP
10 3 (0.86%) OSCP
11 2 (0.57%) GPEN
11 2 (0.57%) GWAPT
12 1 (0.29%) AWS Certification
12 1 (0.29%) CCIP
12 1 (0.29%) CEH
12 1 (0.29%) Cisco Certification
12 1 (0.29%) CISSP
12 1 (0.29%) GIAC
12 1 (0.29%) GXPN
12 1 (0.29%) OSCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (4.86%) Accessibility
2 12 (3.43%) QA
3 10 (2.86%) WCAG
4 8 (2.29%) NIST
5 6 (1.71%) GDPR
5 6 (1.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (1.43%) Cyber Essentials
6 5 (1.43%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 5 (1.43%) Data Quality
7 3 (0.86%) NCSC
8 2 (0.57%) GPG for Computer-Based Electronic Evidence
8 2 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 17025
8 2 (0.57%) ISO17020
8 2 (0.57%) SLA
9 1 (0.29%) GxP
9 1 (0.29%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.29%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 128 (36.57%) Docker
2 13 (3.71%) Active Directory
3 6 (1.71%) Virtual Machines
4 4 (1.14%) QEMU
5 3 (0.86%) Ceph
5 3 (0.86%) ISA Server
5 3 (0.86%) KVM
6 2 (0.57%) HDFS
6 2 (0.57%) Oracle Clusterware
6 2 (0.57%) Oracle RAC
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%) Samba
7 1 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
7 1 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 120 (34.29%) Kubernetes
2 36 (10.29%) Terraform
3 29 (8.29%) Prometheus
4 28 (8.00%) Grafana
5 17 (4.86%) Ansible
6 11 (3.14%) Puppet
7 10 (2.86%) WMI
8 7 (2.00%) Argo
8 7 (2.00%) Istio
9 3 (0.86%) HAProxy
10 2 (0.57%) Data Guard
10 2 (0.57%) Kibana
10 2 (0.57%) Knative
10 2 (0.57%) Oracle RMAN
10 2 (0.57%) Progress Chef
11 1 (0.29%) Kubeflow
11 1 (0.29%) Nessus
11 1 (0.29%) QRadar
11 1 (0.29%) SCOM
11 1 (0.29%) SELinux
Vendors
1 34 (9.71%) Microsoft
2 27 (7.71%) Google
3 20 (5.71%) Sybase
4 15 (4.29%) OpenAI
4 15 (4.29%) VMware
5 10 (2.86%) Red Hat
5 10 (2.86%) Splunk
6 9 (2.57%) Oracle
6 9 (2.57%) webMethods
7 6 (1.71%) Atlassian
7 6 (1.71%) Cisco
7 6 (1.71%) SAP
8 5 (1.43%) Databricks
8 5 (1.43%) Veracode
9 4 (1.14%) Adobe
9 4 (1.14%) Dynatrace
9 4 (1.14%) Foundry
9 4 (1.14%) UiPath
10 3 (0.86%) Computacenter
10 3 (0.86%) Xamarin