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 1 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 429 249 326
Rank change year-on-year -180 +77 -78
Contract jobs citing Open Source 266 363 251
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 1.10% 0.66%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.57% 1.21% 0.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 141 171 129
10th Percentile £413 £350 £318
25th Percentile £450 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £525 £501
Median % change year-on-year -0.48% +4.75% -12.84%
75th Percentile £623 £611 £622
90th Percentile £755 £725 £715
UK excluding London median daily rate £514 £500 £488
% change year-on-year +2.80% +2.56% -11.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 1 14
10th Percentile - - £20.12
25th Percentile £13.09 £51.75 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.67 £56.50 £25.68
Median % change year-on-year -22.71% +120.02% +20.85%
75th Percentile £76.75 £61.25 £27.72
90th Percentile £80.80 - £27.96
UK excluding London median hourly rate £13.34 - £25.36

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 46,382 29,970 32,481
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.48% 90.66% 85.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,008 18,622 19,630
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £733 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,245 1,858 1,349
10th Percentile £13.70 £14.32 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.19 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £39.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +55.07% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.64 £65.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.01% -48.10% +1.18%

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 1 October 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 1 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Open Source in the UK

Open Source
Top 14 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 1 October 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 -195 185 £541 +3.10% 1,074
UK excluding London -114 113 £514 +2.80% 435
Work from Home -96 102 £500 - 466
London -155 87 £575 - 730
North of England -78 35 £485 -1.47% 84
South West -18 24 £550 -4.35% 52
Scotland -36 21 £524 +2.20% 66
Yorkshire -43 15 £500 -4.76% 27
East of England -14 13 £552 - 93
South East -72 13 £405 -28.41% 69
North East -28 10 £425 - 11
West Midlands -39 10 £450 -10.10% 22
Midlands -51 10 £450 -10.10% 29
North West -59 10 £675 +43.62% 46

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 12 (4.51%) Confluence
2 9 (3.38%) Apache
2 9 (3.38%) SharePoint
3 8 (3.01%) Apache Airflow
3 8 (3.01%) Apache Spark
4 6 (2.26%) SAS
5 5 (1.88%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.38%) Apache Pulsar
6 1 (0.38%) CMS
6 1 (0.38%) Drupal
6 1 (0.38%) GeoServer
6 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Exchange
6 1 (0.38%) OpenStack
6 1 (0.38%) WordPress
Applications
1 4 (1.50%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (0.75%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.75%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.38%) Magento
Cloud Services
1 114 (42.86%) AWS
2 70 (26.32%) Azure
3 53 (19.92%) GCP
4 42 (15.79%) GitHub
5 25 (9.40%) GitHub Actions
6 20 (7.52%) Amazon S3
7 19 (7.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 17 (6.39%) Serverless
9 15 (5.64%) Amazon EKS
10 14 (5.26%) Vertex AI
11 13 (4.89%) IaaS
12 10 (3.76%) Amazon EC2
12 10 (3.76%) Anthropic Claude
12 10 (3.76%) AWS Lambda
13 9 (3.38%) Google Gemini
14 8 (3.01%) Amazon Bedrock
15 7 (2.63%) Azure Monitor
15 7 (2.63%) Google Kubernetes Engine
15 7 (2.63%) Power Platform
16 6 (2.26%) LangSmith
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.63%) Intrusion Detection
2 6 (2.26%) HTTPS
2 6 (2.26%) SNMP
3 4 (1.50%) DNS
3 4 (1.50%) Network Security
4 3 (1.13%) Firewall
4 3 (1.13%) SSH
4 3 (1.13%) SSL
5 2 (0.75%) 4G
5 2 (0.75%) Asterisk PBX
5 2 (0.75%) Broadband
5 2 (0.75%) Cisco IOS
5 2 (0.75%) HTTP
5 2 (0.75%) Internet
5 2 (0.75%) Reverse Proxy
5 2 (0.75%) RTCP
5 2 (0.75%) RTP
5 2 (0.75%) TCP/IP
5 2 (0.75%) Wi-Fi
5 2 (0.75%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 17 (6.39%) PostgreSQL
2 14 (5.26%) Amazon RDS
3 11 (4.14%) DynamoDB
4 9 (3.38%) MongoDB
5 8 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
5 8 (3.01%) BigQuery
5 8 (3.01%) Data Warehouse
5 8 (3.01%) Relational Database
5 8 (3.01%) Trino
6 7 (2.63%) Amazon Athena
6 7 (2.63%) Apache Iceberg
6 7 (2.63%) Big Data
6 7 (2.63%) Data Lake
7 5 (1.88%) Amazon Aurora
7 5 (1.88%) BusinessObjects
7 5 (1.88%) Pentaho
7 5 (1.88%) Power BI
7 5 (1.88%) Redis
8 4 (1.50%) Amazon QuickSight
9 3 (1.13%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 51 (19.17%) Git
2 25 (9.40%) Jenkins
3 21 (7.89%) GitLab
4 13 (4.89%) JIRA
5 12 (4.51%) JUnit
6 10 (3.76%) SonarQube
7 7 (2.63%) Sonatype Nexus
8 6 (2.26%) Cucumber
8 6 (2.26%) JMeter
9 5 (1.88%) Bitbucket Server
9 5 (1.88%) DbUnit
9 5 (1.88%) IntelliJ
9 5 (1.88%) jMock
9 5 (1.88%) Maven
9 5 (1.88%) Mockito
10 4 (1.50%) CircleCI
10 4 (1.50%) Cypress.io
10 4 (1.50%) MLflow
11 3 (1.13%) Postman
11 3 (1.13%) Selenium
General
1 76 (28.57%) Social Skills
2 40 (15.04%) Finance
2 40 (15.04%) Public Sector
3 16 (6.02%) Analytical Skills
4 14 (5.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 13 (4.89%) Banking
6 12 (4.51%) Legal
7 10 (3.76%) Law
8 6 (2.26%) Influencing Skills
8 6 (2.26%) Military
8 6 (2.26%) Retail
9 5 (1.88%) Telecoms
10 4 (1.50%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (1.13%) Documentation Skills
11 3 (1.13%) Front Office
11 3 (1.13%) Publishing
12 2 (0.75%) Police
12 2 (0.75%) Polish Language
12 2 (0.75%) Public Speaking
13 1 (0.38%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 55 (20.68%) Senior
2 50 (18.80%) Developer
3 40 (15.04%) Architect
4 23 (8.65%) AWS Architect
5 22 (8.27%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 22 (8.27%) Solutions Architect
6 17 (6.39%) Software Developer
6 17 (6.39%) Software Engineer
7 16 (6.02%) AWS Solution Architect
8 14 (5.26%) Senior Developer
9 13 (4.89%) Analyst
9 13 (4.89%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 12 (4.51%) Consultant
10 12 (4.51%) Data Engineer
10 12 (4.51%) Platform Engineer
10 12 (4.51%) Threat Intelligence Analyst
11 11 (4.14%) Cyber Threat Analyst
11 11 (4.14%) Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst
12 10 (3.76%) Cloud Engineer
12 10 (3.76%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 50 (18.80%) Terraform
2 33 (12.41%) Kafka
3 30 (11.28%) REST
4 17 (6.39%) LangChain
5 14 (5.26%) PyTorch
5 14 (5.26%) RESTful
6 13 (4.89%) LangGraph
6 13 (4.89%) React
6 13 (4.89%) Spring
6 13 (4.89%) Spring Boot
7 11 (4.14%) TensorFlow
8 10 (3.76%) eBPF
8 10 (3.76%) SOAP
9 9 (3.38%) Node.js
10 8 (3.01%) Android Jetpack
10 8 (3.01%) AngularJS
10 8 (3.01%) Jetpack Compose
10 8 (3.01%) OpenTelemetry
10 8 (3.01%) Play Framework
10 8 (3.01%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 45 (16.92%) Cloud Native
2 24 (9.02%) AI Agents
2 24 (9.02%) Distributed Systems
3 20 (7.52%) Cyber Threat
4 17 (6.39%) Private Cloud
5 11 (4.14%) Management Information System
6 10 (3.76%) Enterprise Software
7 9 (3.38%) Self-Motivation
8 8 (3.01%) Blog
8 8 (3.01%) Data Protection Act
8 8 (3.01%) Mobile App
8 8 (3.01%) Product Ownership
9 7 (2.63%) Data Structures
9 7 (2.63%) Security Posture
9 7 (2.63%) Virtual Team
10 6 (2.26%) Legacy Applications
10 6 (2.26%) LIMS
10 6 (2.26%) Linux Command Line
11 5 (1.88%) Replication
11 5 (1.88%) Security Operations Centre
Operating Systems
1 61 (22.93%) Linux
2 16 (6.02%) Unix
3 12 (4.51%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 10 (3.76%) Windows
5 9 (3.38%) Android
6 3 (1.13%) Apple iOS
7 2 (0.75%) Debian
7 2 (0.75%) Rocky
7 2 (0.75%) Ubuntu
8 1 (0.38%) Amazon Linux
8 1 (0.38%) CentOS
8 1 (0.38%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 115 (43.23%) CI/CD
2 74 (27.82%) AI
3 72 (27.07%) Software Engineering
4 67 (25.19%) Agile
5 65 (24.44%) DevOps
6 56 (21.05%) Infrastructure as Code
7 55 (20.68%) Observability
8 48 (18.05%) Test Automation
9 46 (17.29%) Containerisation
10 40 (15.04%) Microservices
11 37 (13.91%) LLM
12 36 (13.53%) Event-Driven
13 35 (13.16%) Stakeholder Management
14 34 (12.78%) Machine Learning
15 32 (12.03%) Platform Engineering
16 31 (11.65%) Event-Driven Architecture
17 30 (11.28%) Cybersecurity
17 30 (11.28%) Problem-Solving
18 29 (10.90%) Continuous Integration
18 29 (10.90%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 105 (39.47%) Python
2 46 (17.29%) Java
3 31 (11.65%) SQL
4 19 (7.14%) Bash
5 16 (6.02%) Go
5 16 (6.02%) Perl
6 15 (5.64%) TypeScript
7 14 (5.26%) C++
8 13 (4.89%) JavaScript
9 12 (4.51%) Scala
10 11 (4.14%) C
11 9 (3.38%) Kotlin
12 6 (2.26%) MUMPS
13 3 (1.13%) C#
13 3 (1.13%) Shell Script
14 2 (0.75%) Objective-C
14 2 (0.75%) PowerShell
14 2 (0.75%) Ruby
14 2 (0.75%) Rust
14 2 (0.75%) Swift
Qualifications
1 95 (35.71%) Security Cleared
2 70 (26.32%) SC Cleared
3 22 (8.27%) Degree
4 18 (6.77%) DV Cleared
5 14 (5.26%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.38%) CISSP
7 8 (3.01%) CISM
8 7 (2.63%) AWS Certification
8 7 (2.63%) BPSS Clearance
9 5 (1.88%) Azure Certification
9 5 (1.88%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.75%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.75%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.75%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.75%) GIAC
10 2 (0.75%) GSEC
10 2 (0.75%) LFCS
10 2 (0.75%) OSCP
10 2 (0.75%) RHCE
10 2 (0.75%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (6.02%) Accessibility
2 13 (4.89%) QA
3 7 (2.63%) GDPR
3 7 (2.63%) WCAG
4 4 (1.50%) Data Quality
4 4 (1.50%) Disclosure Scotland
5 3 (1.13%) GRC
5 3 (1.13%) NCSC
5 3 (1.13%) NIST
6 2 (0.75%) PMO
7 1 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
System Software
1 59 (22.18%) Docker
2 13 (4.89%) VMware Infrastructure
3 7 (2.63%) VMware ESXi
4 4 (1.50%) Postfix
5 3 (1.13%) Ceph
5 3 (1.13%) Firmware
5 3 (1.13%) Hyper-V
6 2 (0.75%) Active Directory
6 2 (0.75%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 2 (0.75%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 72 (27.07%) Kubernetes
2 36 (13.53%) Grafana
3 34 (12.78%) Ansible
4 27 (10.15%) Prometheus
5 11 (4.14%) Puppet
6 9 (3.38%) Progress Chef
7 4 (1.50%) Cilium
7 4 (1.50%) Istio
7 4 (1.50%) Salt
8 2 (0.75%) Control-M
8 2 (0.75%) Docker Swarm
8 2 (0.75%) Kibana
8 2 (0.75%) linkerd
8 2 (0.75%) systemd
9 1 (0.38%) Argo
9 1 (0.38%) QRadar
9 1 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (0.38%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 29 (10.90%) Google
2 22 (8.27%) Microsoft
2 22 (8.27%) Splunk
3 17 (6.39%) Dynatrace
3 17 (6.39%) OpenAI
4 16 (6.02%) SaltStack
5 14 (5.26%) VMware
6 12 (4.51%) Oracle
7 10 (3.76%) Red Hat
8 7 (2.63%) Cribl.io
8 7 (2.63%) Databricks
9 6 (2.26%) Informatica
9 6 (2.26%) InterSystems
10 5 (1.88%) Atlassian
10 5 (1.88%) Checkmarx
10 5 (1.88%) Denodo
10 5 (1.88%) Jaspersoft
11 4 (1.50%) Black Duck
11 4 (1.50%) Foundry
11 4 (1.50%) Mistral