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

6 months to
30 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 298 278 266
Rank change year-on-year -20 -12 -9
Contract jobs citing Open Source 359 267 383
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.81% 0.91% 0.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.94% 1.01% 1.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 162 196 250
10th Percentile £351 £400 £362
25th Percentile £443 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £678 £675
90th Percentile £803 £838 £776
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £585
% change year-on-year -2.50% -14.53% +9.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 2 4
10th Percentile - £32.90 £58.04
25th Percentile £15.25 £43.25 £66.35
Median hourly rate £15.50 £60.50 £71.93
Median % change year-on-year -74.38% -15.89% -4.09%
75th Percentile £39.75 £77.75 £74.36
90th Percentile £54.15 £88.10 £76.99
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 38,014 26,489 38,263
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.62% 90.44% 86.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,062 17,216 24,858
10th Percentile £313 £308 £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 £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £484 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.72% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,249 972 2,349
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.00 £12.84
25th Percentile £18.87 £20.26 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.50 £31.88 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.36% -1.91% -9.72%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.25 £70.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £32.50 £31.50 £31.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% - -12.26%

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 30 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 30 March 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 30 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 -56 293 £553 -7.83% 149
London -43 155 £625 - 78
UK excluding London -45 128 £488 -2.50% 93
Work from Home -16 127 £550 -8.33% 59
North of England -52 35 £450 -2.70% 21
South East -38 27 £463 -7.50% 20
Scotland +8 22 £663 +26.19% 10
South West -14 20 £365 -41.60% 12
North West -29 20 £450 -2.70% 9
West Midlands -48 15 £475 +10.08% 5
Midlands -67 15 £475 +10.08% 6
Yorkshire -55 12 £525 -1.50% 8
East of England -32 9 £550 +37.50% 21
North East -13 3 - - 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 15 (4.18%) Apache
2 13 (3.62%) Confluence
3 11 (3.06%) Apache Spark
4 8 (2.23%) Appian
5 6 (1.67%) JBoss
5 6 (1.67%) WebLogic
6 5 (1.39%) OpenStack
6 5 (1.39%) SharePoint
7 4 (1.11%) nginx
8 3 (0.84%) Adobe Experience Manager
8 3 (0.84%) Apache Airflow
9 2 (0.56%) Liferay
9 2 (0.56%) Tomcat
10 1 (0.28%) Apache Superset
10 1 (0.28%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.28%) Ethereum
10 1 (0.28%) GeoServer
10 1 (0.28%) Hyperledger
10 1 (0.28%) Oracle Coherence
10 1 (0.28%) Oracle Spatial
Applications
1 1 (0.28%) Chatbot
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
1 176 (49.03%) AWS
2 85 (23.68%) Azure
3 42 (11.70%) GitHub
4 33 (9.19%) GCP
5 25 (6.96%) Amazon S3
6 24 (6.69%) Serverless
7 22 (6.13%) GitHub Actions
8 20 (5.57%) Azure AI
9 15 (4.18%) Amazon EC2
10 13 (3.62%) Anthropic Claude
10 13 (3.62%) Azure DevOps
11 11 (3.06%) AWS Lambda
11 11 (3.06%) Azure Cognitive Services
12 10 (2.79%) Amazon SageMaker
12 10 (2.79%) Azure Data Factory
12 10 (2.79%) CloudFront
12 10 (2.79%) Google Gemini
13 9 (2.51%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 9 (2.51%) Azure Cognitive Search
14 8 (2.23%) Route 53
Communications & Networking
1 15 (4.18%) Firewall
2 7 (1.95%) DNS
3 6 (1.67%) DHCP
4 5 (1.39%) Reverse Proxy
4 5 (1.39%) WAN
5 3 (0.84%) VLAN
6 2 (0.56%) Internet
6 2 (0.56%) NaaS
6 2 (0.56%) SSH
6 2 (0.56%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.28%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.28%) InfiniBand
7 1 (0.28%) iSCSI
7 1 (0.28%) Kerberos
7 1 (0.28%) LTE
7 1 (0.28%) NAS
7 1 (0.28%) Network Security
7 1 (0.28%) SAN
7 1 (0.28%) SNMP
7 1 (0.28%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 63 (17.55%) Apache Cassandra
2 49 (13.65%) PostgreSQL
3 21 (5.85%) MongoDB
3 21 (5.85%) NoSQL
4 17 (4.74%) SQL Server
5 12 (3.34%) DynamoDB
5 12 (3.34%) Pinecone
5 12 (3.34%) Redis
6 11 (3.06%) BigQuery
7 10 (2.79%) Relational Database
8 9 (2.51%) Amazon RDS
9 8 (2.23%) Metadata
10 7 (1.95%) Big Data
11 6 (1.67%) Amazon Aurora
11 6 (1.67%) Flink
12 5 (1.39%) Amazon QuickSight
12 5 (1.39%) DB2
12 5 (1.39%) GIS
12 5 (1.39%) Oracle Database
12 5 (1.39%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 52 (14.48%) Git
2 27 (7.52%) GitLab
3 26 (7.24%) Jenkins
4 22 (6.13%) JUnit
5 18 (5.01%) JIRA
6 12 (3.34%) MLflow
7 9 (2.51%) SonarQube
8 7 (1.95%) Gradle
8 7 (1.95%) IntelliJ
8 7 (1.95%) Maven
8 7 (1.95%) Sonatype Nexus
9 6 (1.67%) Bitbucket Server
9 6 (1.67%) CircleCI
9 6 (1.67%) DbUnit
9 6 (1.67%) jMock
9 6 (1.67%) Mocha
9 6 (1.67%) Mockito
10 5 (1.39%) Cucumber
10 5 (1.39%) Selenium
11 4 (1.11%) Cypress.io
General
1 72 (20.06%) Social Skills
2 67 (18.66%) Finance
3 51 (14.21%) Public Sector
4 30 (8.36%) Analytical Skills
5 29 (8.08%) Banking
6 15 (4.18%) Legal
7 13 (3.62%) Front Office
8 11 (3.06%) Investment Banking
9 7 (1.95%) Retail
10 6 (1.67%) Financial Institution
10 6 (1.67%) Influencing Skills
10 6 (1.67%) Presentation Skills
10 6 (1.67%) Publishing
11 5 (1.39%) Organisational Skills
11 5 (1.39%) Telecoms
12 4 (1.11%) Documentation Skills
12 4 (1.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 4 (1.11%) Marketing
13 3 (0.84%) Military
14 2 (0.56%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 114 (31.75%) Developer
2 85 (23.68%) Senior
3 59 (16.43%) Architect
4 54 (15.04%) Senior Developer
5 38 (10.58%) Software Engineer
6 27 (7.52%) Solutions Architect
7 24 (6.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 17 (4.74%) AWS Architect
9 15 (4.18%) Python Developer
10 14 (3.90%) Android Developer
10 14 (3.90%) Data Engineer
11 13 (3.62%) Java Developer
12 12 (3.34%) AWS Solution Architect
12 12 (3.34%) Platform Engineer
13 11 (3.06%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 11 (3.06%) Cloud Engineer
13 11 (3.06%) Consultant
14 10 (2.79%) Automation Engineer
14 10 (2.79%) Senior Platform Engineer
15 9 (2.51%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 108 (30.08%) Kafka
2 69 (19.22%) gRPC
3 50 (13.93%) REST
4 36 (10.03%) React
5 34 (9.47%) Node.js
6 28 (7.80%) RESTful
7 27 (7.52%) Spring
8 22 (6.13%) .NET
8 22 (6.13%) AngularJS
8 22 (6.13%) LangChain
9 21 (5.85%) Web Services
10 20 (5.57%) HTML
11 19 (5.29%) Spring Boot
12 16 (4.46%) CSS
12 16 (4.46%) PyTorch
13 14 (3.90%) Android Jetpack
13 14 (3.90%) Hugging Face
13 14 (3.90%) Jetpack Compose
13 14 (3.90%) TensorFlow
14 13 (3.62%) Android SDK
Miscellaneous
1 81 (22.56%) Distributed Systems
2 32 (8.91%) Cloud Native
3 21 (5.85%) Product Ownership
4 10 (2.79%) AI Agents
4 10 (2.79%) Equities
4 10 (2.79%) Legacy Systems
5 9 (2.51%) Distributed Computing
5 9 (2.51%) Legacy Code
6 8 (2.23%) Fat Client
6 8 (2.23%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 8 (2.23%) Low-Code
6 8 (2.23%) Onboarding
6 8 (2.23%) PKI
6 8 (2.23%) Security Posture
6 8 (2.23%) Thin Client
7 7 (1.95%) Data Centre
7 7 (1.95%) Data Protection Act
7 7 (1.95%) Enterprise Software
7 7 (1.95%) Mobile App
8 6 (1.67%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 52 (14.48%) Linux
2 23 (6.41%) Android
3 19 (5.29%) Windows
4 10 (2.79%) Unix
5 8 (2.23%) Windows 7
6 7 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 6 (1.67%) Apple iOS
8 4 (1.11%) Ubuntu
9 3 (0.84%) Debian
9 3 (0.84%) Rocky
9 3 (0.84%) Windows Server
10 2 (0.56%) CentOS
10 2 (0.56%) VMS
11 1 (0.28%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 110 (30.64%) Software Engineering
2 103 (28.69%) Microservices
3 89 (24.79%) CI/CD
4 83 (23.12%) Agile
4 83 (23.12%) AI
5 61 (16.99%) DevOps
6 58 (16.16%) Containerisation
7 57 (15.88%) LLM
8 56 (15.60%) Problem-Solving
9 49 (13.65%) Infrastructure as Code
9 49 (13.65%) Machine Learning
10 43 (11.98%) Generative AI
11 41 (11.42%) Data Pipeline
12 38 (10.58%) Stakeholder Management
13 34 (9.47%) Computer Science
14 33 (9.19%) Observability
14 33 (9.19%) Test Automation
15 32 (8.91%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 30 (8.36%) Clean Code
17 29 (8.08%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 155 (43.18%) Python
2 81 (22.56%) Go
3 74 (20.61%) Java
4 58 (16.16%) SQL
5 32 (8.91%) JavaScript
6 30 (8.36%) TypeScript
7 25 (6.96%) C#
8 19 (5.29%) Kotlin
9 15 (4.18%) Bash
10 11 (3.06%) Ruby
10 11 (3.06%) Scala
11 10 (2.79%) Shell Script
12 9 (2.51%) PowerShell
13 7 (1.95%) PL/SQL
14 4 (1.11%) C++
14 4 (1.11%) Delphi
14 4 (1.11%) PHP
15 2 (0.56%) Kusto Query Language
15 2 (0.56%) Solidity
16 1 (0.28%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 88 (24.51%) Security Cleared
2 58 (16.16%) SC Cleared
3 39 (10.86%) Degree
4 18 (5.01%) Computer Science Degree
5 17 (4.74%) DV Cleared
6 15 (4.18%) BPSS Clearance
7 12 (3.34%) Master's Degree
8 8 (2.23%) PhD
9 4 (1.11%) AWS Certification
9 4 (1.11%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 1 (0.28%) CCIP
11 1 (0.28%) Cisco Certification
11 1 (0.28%) GPEN
11 1 (0.28%) GWAPT
11 1 (0.28%) ISEB
11 1 (0.28%) MPhil
11 1 (0.28%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (4.74%) Accessibility
2 16 (4.46%) QA
3 11 (3.06%) NIST
4 10 (2.79%) Data Quality
4 10 (2.79%) WCAG
5 8 (2.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 7 (1.95%) GDPR
7 5 (1.39%) Cyber Essentials
7 5 (1.39%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
8 2 (0.56%) GPG for Computer-Based Electronic Evidence
8 2 (0.56%) ISO/IEC 17025
8 2 (0.56%) ISO17020
8 2 (0.56%) SLA
9 1 (0.28%) GRC
9 1 (0.28%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.28%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
9 1 (0.28%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 1 (0.28%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.28%) SOC 2
System Software
1 129 (35.93%) Docker
2 15 (4.18%) Active Directory
3 6 (1.67%) Virtual Machines
4 5 (1.39%) Ceph
4 5 (1.39%) Postfix
5 4 (1.11%) Oracle RAC
6 3 (0.84%) ISA Server
6 3 (0.84%) KVM
7 2 (0.56%) Oracle Clusterware
8 1 (0.28%) Firmware
8 1 (0.28%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.28%) iptables
8 1 (0.28%) Lustre
8 1 (0.28%) NFS
8 1 (0.28%) QEMU
8 1 (0.28%) Samba
8 1 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 1 (0.28%) Squid
8 1 (0.28%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 118 (32.87%) Kubernetes
2 39 (10.86%) Terraform
3 30 (8.36%) Grafana
4 27 (7.52%) Prometheus
5 12 (3.34%) Ansible
6 8 (2.23%) Istio
6 8 (2.23%) WMI
7 6 (1.67%) Argo
7 6 (1.67%) Puppet
8 4 (1.11%) Data Guard
8 4 (1.11%) Oracle RMAN
9 3 (0.84%) HAProxy
10 2 (0.56%) Amdocs OSS
10 2 (0.56%) Knative
10 2 (0.56%) Rancher
10 2 (0.56%) Salt
11 1 (0.28%) CASB
11 1 (0.28%) MOM
11 1 (0.28%) SELinux
Vendors
1 30 (8.36%) Microsoft
2 26 (7.24%) Google
3 24 (6.69%) OpenAI
4 11 (3.06%) Oracle
5 10 (2.79%) Atlassian
5 10 (2.79%) Splunk
5 10 (2.79%) VMware
6 9 (2.51%) UiPath
7 8 (2.23%) Automation Anywhere
8 6 (1.67%) Dynatrace
8 6 (1.67%) Jaspersoft
9 5 (1.39%) Confluent
9 5 (1.39%) Databricks
9 5 (1.39%) Red Hat
9 5 (1.39%) ServiceNow
10 4 (1.11%) Cloudera
10 4 (1.11%) SAP
10 4 (1.11%) Sybase
10 4 (1.11%) webMethods
10 4 (1.11%) Xamarin