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 4 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 435 248 323
Rank change year-on-year -187 +75 -62
Contract jobs citing Open Source 261 346 262
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.49% 1.07% 0.69%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.57% 1.18% 0.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 142 171 152
10th Percentile £413 £363 £350
25th Percentile £464 £441 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £544 £525 £544
Median % change year-on-year +3.57% -3.45% -9.38%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £639
90th Percentile £755 £688 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £523 £497 £581
% change year-on-year +5.24% -14.58% +3.79%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 1 10
10th Percentile £30.76 - £20.12
25th Percentile £57.27 £51.75 £20.40
Median hourly rate £76.50 £56.50 £21.68
Median % change year-on-year +35.40% +160.61% +2.02%
75th Percentile £80.50 £61.25 £27.96
90th Percentile £83.20 - £30.91
UK excluding London median hourly rate £74.00 - £20.24

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 45,398 29,222 32,553
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.44% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,773 18,158 20,413
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,911 1,744 1,558
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.20 £14.41
25th Percentile £17.72 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.84 £46.01 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.18 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +87.80% -47.37% +12.13%

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 4 September 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 4 September 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 4 September 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 -189 183 £550 +2.42% 1,142
Work from Home -96 100 £514 -6.55% 479
UK excluding London -107 99 £523 +5.24% 378
London -161 96 £600 - 871
North of England -84 28 £495 +1.23% 59
South West -25 24 £550 +46.67% 48
Scotland -37 18 £525 +5.00% 61
Yorkshire -40 15 £500 -1.77% 16
East of England -7 12 £552 - 88
West Midlands -43 11 £459 -8.20% 20
Midlands -45 11 £459 -8.20% 24
South East -83 9 £459 -16.16% 64
North West -58 7 £638 +29.57% 35
North East -35 6 £425 -8.60% 9

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 14 (5.36%) Confluence
2 11 (4.21%) Apache
3 7 (2.68%) Apache Airflow
3 7 (2.68%) Apache Spark
3 7 (2.68%) SharePoint
4 6 (2.30%) SAS
5 4 (1.53%) 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 3 (1.15%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.38%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 2 (0.77%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.38%) Magento
Cloud Services
1 122 (46.74%) AWS
2 70 (26.82%) Azure
3 54 (20.69%) GCP
4 42 (16.09%) GitHub
5 23 (8.81%) Amazon S3
6 22 (8.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 22 (8.43%) GitHub Actions
7 20 (7.66%) Serverless
8 14 (5.36%) Vertex AI
9 13 (4.98%) IaaS
10 12 (4.60%) Amazon EC2
10 12 (4.60%) Amazon EKS
10 12 (4.60%) AWS Lambda
11 9 (3.45%) Google Gemini
12 8 (3.07%) Amazon Bedrock
12 8 (3.07%) Anthropic Claude
12 8 (3.07%) SaaS
13 7 (2.68%) Amazon SQS
13 7 (2.68%) Azure Monitor
13 7 (2.68%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.68%) Intrusion Detection
2 6 (2.30%) HTTPS
2 6 (2.30%) SNMP
3 5 (1.92%) DNS
4 4 (1.53%) SSH
4 4 (1.53%) SSL
5 3 (1.15%) Firewall
5 3 (1.15%) Network Security
6 2 (0.77%) 4G
6 2 (0.77%) Cisco IOS
6 2 (0.77%) HTTP
6 2 (0.77%) Reverse Proxy
6 2 (0.77%) TCP/IP
6 2 (0.77%) WAN
7 1 (0.38%) Asterisk PBX
7 1 (0.38%) Broadband
7 1 (0.38%) MQTT
7 1 (0.38%) VoIP
7 1 (0.38%) Wi-Fi
7 1 (0.38%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (9.20%) PostgreSQL
2 16 (6.13%) Amazon RDS
3 12 (4.60%) DynamoDB
3 12 (4.60%) MongoDB
4 9 (3.45%) Data Warehouse
5 8 (3.07%) Amazon Redshift
5 8 (3.07%) Big Data
5 8 (3.07%) BigQuery
5 8 (3.07%) Data Lake
6 7 (2.68%) Amazon Athena
6 7 (2.68%) Amazon QuickSight
6 7 (2.68%) Relational Database
7 6 (2.30%) Amazon Aurora
7 6 (2.30%) Apache Cassandra
8 5 (1.92%) Apache Iceberg
8 5 (1.92%) BusinessObjects
8 5 (1.92%) Pentaho
8 5 (1.92%) Power BI
8 5 (1.92%) Redis
8 5 (1.92%) Trino
Development Applications
1 56 (21.46%) Git
2 24 (9.20%) Jenkins
3 21 (8.05%) GitLab
4 15 (5.75%) JIRA
4 15 (5.75%) JUnit
5 13 (4.98%) SonarQube
6 10 (3.83%) Sonatype Nexus
7 7 (2.68%) IntelliJ
8 6 (2.30%) Bitbucket Server
8 6 (2.30%) DbUnit
8 6 (2.30%) JMeter
8 6 (2.30%) jMock
8 6 (2.30%) Maven
8 6 (2.30%) Mockito
9 5 (1.92%) Cucumber
10 4 (1.53%) Cypress.io
11 3 (1.15%) LoadRunner
11 3 (1.15%) Postman
11 3 (1.15%) PowerDesigner
11 3 (1.15%) Selenium
General
1 67 (25.67%) Social Skills
2 41 (15.71%) Finance
3 36 (13.79%) Public Sector
4 19 (7.28%) Analytical Skills
5 15 (5.75%) Banking
6 13 (4.98%) Legal
7 10 (3.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 10 (3.83%) Law
8 5 (1.92%) Influencing Skills
8 5 (1.92%) Military
9 4 (1.53%) Front Office
9 4 (1.53%) Presentation Skills
9 4 (1.53%) Retail
10 3 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.15%) Publishing
11 2 (0.77%) Organisational Skills
11 2 (0.77%) Police
11 2 (0.77%) Polish Language
11 2 (0.77%) Public Speaking
11 2 (0.77%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 49 (18.77%) Architect
2 48 (18.39%) Developer
2 48 (18.39%) Senior
3 27 (10.34%) Solutions Architect
4 24 (9.20%) AWS Architect
5 19 (7.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 17 (6.51%) AWS Solution Architect
7 16 (6.13%) Senior Developer
7 16 (6.13%) Software Engineer
8 15 (5.75%) Analyst
9 13 (4.98%) Consultant
9 13 (4.98%) Data Engineer
10 12 (4.60%) Software Developer
10 12 (4.60%) Threat Intelligence Analyst
11 11 (4.21%) Cyber Threat Analyst
11 11 (4.21%) Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst
12 10 (3.83%) AWS Engineer
12 10 (3.83%) Cloud Engineer
12 10 (3.83%) Platform Engineer
13 9 (3.45%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 48 (18.39%) Terraform
2 43 (16.48%) Kafka
3 31 (11.88%) REST
4 15 (5.75%) Spring
4 15 (5.75%) Spring Boot
5 14 (5.36%) LangChain
6 13 (4.98%) React
6 13 (4.98%) RESTful
7 12 (4.60%) Node.js
7 12 (4.60%) PyTorch
8 11 (4.21%) LangGraph
8 11 (4.21%) SOAP
9 10 (3.83%) OpenTelemetry
9 10 (3.83%) TensorFlow
10 9 (3.45%) eBPF
11 8 (3.07%) Android Jetpack
11 8 (3.07%) gRPC
11 8 (3.07%) Jetpack Compose
11 8 (3.07%) Playwright
12 7 (2.68%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 48 (18.39%) Cloud Native
2 25 (9.58%) Distributed Systems
3 23 (8.81%) AI Agents
4 20 (7.66%) Cyber Threat
5 12 (4.60%) Private Cloud
6 11 (4.21%) Enterprise Software
7 9 (3.45%) Data Protection Act
7 9 (3.45%) Management Information System
7 9 (3.45%) Product Ownership
8 8 (3.07%) Self-Motivation
9 7 (2.68%) Data Structures
9 7 (2.68%) Mobile App
10 6 (2.30%) Blog
10 6 (2.30%) Legacy Applications
10 6 (2.30%) LIMS
10 6 (2.30%) Linux Command Line
11 5 (1.92%) Security Operations Centre
11 5 (1.92%) Security Posture
12 4 (1.53%) Replication
12 4 (1.53%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 59 (22.61%) Linux
2 18 (6.90%) Unix
3 12 (4.60%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 10 (3.83%) Windows
5 9 (3.45%) Android
6 3 (1.15%) Debian
6 3 (1.15%) Rocky
6 3 (1.15%) Ubuntu
7 2 (0.77%) Apple iOS
8 1 (0.38%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 104 (39.85%) CI/CD
2 71 (27.20%) Agile
3 66 (25.29%) Software Engineering
4 64 (24.52%) AI
5 62 (23.75%) DevOps
6 50 (19.16%) Infrastructure as Code
7 47 (18.01%) Observability
8 43 (16.48%) Containerisation
9 39 (14.94%) Microservices
9 39 (14.94%) Test Automation
10 38 (14.56%) Event-Driven
11 36 (13.79%) Stakeholder Management
12 34 (13.03%) LLM
13 32 (12.26%) Event-Driven Architecture
14 29 (11.11%) Cybersecurity
14 29 (11.11%) Data Pipeline
15 28 (10.73%) Machine Learning
15 28 (10.73%) Problem-Solving
16 27 (10.34%) Platform Engineering
17 25 (9.58%) Continuous Integration
Programming Languages
1 107 (41.00%) Python
2 48 (18.39%) Java
3 32 (12.26%) SQL
4 20 (7.66%) Bash
4 20 (7.66%) Go
5 14 (5.36%) C++
5 14 (5.36%) JavaScript
5 14 (5.36%) TypeScript
6 11 (4.21%) Perl
6 11 (4.21%) Scala
7 10 (3.83%) C
8 9 (3.45%) Kotlin
9 6 (2.30%) MUMPS
9 6 (2.30%) Shell Script
10 3 (1.15%) C#
10 3 (1.15%) PowerShell
11 2 (0.77%) Rust
12 1 (0.38%) PL/SQL
12 1 (0.38%) Ruby
12 1 (0.38%) Swift
Qualifications
1 99 (37.93%) Security Cleared
2 72 (27.59%) SC Cleared
3 21 (8.05%) Degree
4 18 (6.90%) DV Cleared
5 12 (4.60%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.45%) CISSP
7 8 (3.07%) CISM
8 5 (1.92%) AWS Certification
9 3 (1.15%) Azure Certification
9 3 (1.15%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (1.15%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.77%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.77%) CEH
10 2 (0.77%) GIAC
10 2 (0.77%) GSEC
10 2 (0.77%) LFCS
10 2 (0.77%) OSCP
10 2 (0.77%) RHCE
10 2 (0.77%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (5.36%) Accessibility
2 13 (4.98%) QA
3 7 (2.68%) GDPR
4 6 (2.30%) WCAG
5 4 (1.53%) Disclosure Scotland
6 3 (1.15%) Data Quality
6 3 (1.15%) GRC
6 3 (1.15%) NIST
7 1 (0.38%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.38%) NCSC
System Software
1 59 (22.61%) Docker
2 10 (3.83%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (1.92%) Postfix
4 4 (1.53%) Ceph
4 4 (1.53%) Hyper-V
4 4 (1.53%) VMware ESXi
5 2 (0.77%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.77%) Firmware
5 2 (0.77%) Slurm Workload Manager
5 2 (0.77%) Virtual Servers
6 1 (0.38%) Oracle RAC
6 1 (0.38%) Squid
Systems Management
1 63 (24.14%) Kubernetes
2 36 (13.79%) Grafana
3 29 (11.11%) Prometheus
4 28 (10.73%) Ansible
5 10 (3.83%) Puppet
6 8 (3.07%) Progress Chef
7 4 (1.53%) Istio
7 4 (1.53%) Salt
8 3 (1.15%) Cilium
9 2 (0.77%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.77%) Kibana
9 2 (0.77%) linkerd
10 1 (0.38%) Amdocs OSS
10 1 (0.38%) Argo
10 1 (0.38%) Control-M
10 1 (0.38%) Data Guard
10 1 (0.38%) Oracle RMAN
10 1 (0.38%) QRadar
10 1 (0.38%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.38%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 27 (10.34%) Google
2 20 (7.66%) Microsoft
3 19 (7.28%) Splunk
4 17 (6.51%) Dynatrace
5 16 (6.13%) OpenAI
6 12 (4.60%) Oracle
7 11 (4.21%) SaltStack
8 10 (3.83%) Red Hat
8 10 (3.83%) VMware
9 7 (2.68%) Checkmarx
9 7 (2.68%) Cribl.io
10 6 (2.30%) Atlassian
10 6 (2.30%) Databricks
10 6 (2.30%) Informatica
10 6 (2.30%) InterSystems
10 6 (2.30%) Jaspersoft
11 5 (1.92%) Black Duck
11 5 (1.92%) Denodo
12 3 (1.15%) Mistral
12 3 (1.15%) Sonatype