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 18 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 259 331 256
Rank change year-on-year +72 -75 -13
Contract jobs citing Open Source 348 250 470
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.05% 0.67% 0.97%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.15% 0.78% 1.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 151 134 294
10th Percentile £363 £319 £252
25th Percentile £426 £425 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £575
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -13.04% -2.13%
75th Percentile £626 £636 £674
90th Percentile £738 £738 £771
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +2.60% -9.09% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 13 11
10th Percentile £18.90 £20.12 -
25th Percentile £24.38 £21.25 £19.99
Median hourly rate £36.00 £25.36 £21.25
Median % change year-on-year +41.96% +19.34% -64.58%
75th Percentile £49.88 £26.50 £22.52
90th Percentile £56.70 £27.76 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £15.50 £25.36 -
% change year-on-year -38.88% - -

All Process and 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 30,143 32,200 42,922
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.54% 86.02% 88.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,739 19,348 29,122
10th Percentile £300 £310 £313
25th Percentile £405 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -2.27%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,926 1,223 1,608
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.00 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.12 £18.93
Median hourly rate £25.08 £40.00 £44.25
Median % change year-on-year -37.31% -9.60% +35.03%
75th Percentile £42.50 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £65.25 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.27 £40.00 £43.83
% change year-on-year -44.34% -8.73% +62.37%

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 18 October 2025.

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 18 October 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Open Source in the UK

Open Source
Top 16 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 18 October 2025. 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 +75 298 £525 +5.00% 561
London +56 157 £568 +13.60% 186
UK excluding London +24 127 £513 +2.60% 439
Work from Home +68 122 £488 -2.50% 502
North of England -6 41 £507 -11.44% 64
Scotland +24 30 £525 +5.00% 7
South East +12 29 £565 +21.51% 232
Yorkshire -12 23 £525 -13.19% 22
North West -2 15 £433 -8.95% 40
Midlands -5 12 £500 -16.67% 21
West Midlands -8 11 £500 -23.08% 4
South West +15 7 £575 +3.96% 38
East of England -16 5 £553 +73.35% 63
North East 0 4 - - 2
Wales -1 3 £403 -59.75% 15
East Midlands -9 1 £420 +16.67% 17

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 9 (2.59%) Apache Spark
2 7 (2.01%) Apache
2 7 (2.01%) Confluence
3 5 (1.44%) Appian
3 5 (1.44%) JBoss
3 5 (1.44%) OpenStack
3 5 (1.44%) WebLogic
4 4 (1.15%) ArcGIS
4 4 (1.15%) Oracle Spatial
5 3 (0.86%) Ethereum
5 3 (0.86%) Hyperledger
5 3 (0.86%) Smallworld
6 2 (0.57%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (0.57%) Camunda
6 2 (0.57%) Cloud Foundry
6 2 (0.57%) CMS
6 2 (0.57%) Drupal
6 2 (0.57%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.29%) GeoServer
7 1 (0.29%) Oracle Coherence
Applications
1 2 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
Cloud Services
1 162 (46.55%) AWS
2 66 (18.97%) Azure
3 32 (9.20%) GCP
4 18 (5.17%) GitHub
5 16 (4.60%) Amazon S3
6 13 (3.74%) GitHub Actions
7 9 (2.59%) Amazon SQS
7 9 (2.59%) Azure AKS
7 9 (2.59%) Azure DevOps
8 8 (2.30%) Azure Sentinel
8 8 (2.30%) Cloud Computing
9 7 (2.01%) Amazon Bedrock
9 7 (2.01%) Amazon EC2
9 7 (2.01%) Amazon EKS
9 7 (2.01%) AWS KMS
9 7 (2.01%) CloudFront
9 7 (2.01%) OpenShift
10 6 (1.72%) Azure AI
10 6 (1.72%) Route 53
10 6 (1.72%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 9 (2.59%) Firewall
2 5 (1.44%) Internet
3 3 (0.86%) Ethernet
3 3 (0.86%) SSH
4 2 (0.57%) Bluetooth
4 2 (0.57%) DNS
4 2 (0.57%) TCP/IP
4 2 (0.57%) Wi-Fi
4 2 (0.57%) Wireless
5 1 (0.29%) DHCP
5 1 (0.29%) HTTP
5 1 (0.29%) Intrusion Detection
5 1 (0.29%) NAS
5 1 (0.29%) Network Security
5 1 (0.29%) Radio Access Network
5 1 (0.29%) RTP
5 1 (0.29%) SAN
5 1 (0.29%) SMTP
5 1 (0.29%) SSL
5 1 (0.29%) STUN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 59 (16.95%) Apache Cassandra
2 50 (14.37%) Relational Database
3 49 (14.08%) MongoDB
4 38 (10.92%) DB2
5 37 (10.63%) PostgreSQL
6 19 (5.46%) NoSQL
7 11 (3.16%) Redis
8 10 (2.87%) RDBMS
9 8 (2.30%) DynamoDB
10 7 (2.01%) Data Lake
11 6 (1.72%) Amazon Aurora
11 6 (1.72%) Amazon RDS
12 5 (1.44%) GIS
12 5 (1.44%) Pinecone
12 5 (1.44%) Spatial Data
12 5 (1.44%) SQL Server
13 4 (1.15%) Couchbase
13 4 (1.15%) Elasticsearch
14 3 (0.86%) Big Data
14 3 (0.86%) QGIS
Development Applications
1 54 (15.52%) JUnit
2 34 (9.77%) Git
3 28 (8.05%) Jenkins
4 19 (5.46%) GitLab
5 14 (4.02%) Selenium
6 13 (3.74%) SonarQube
7 9 (2.59%) Maven
8 8 (2.30%) Cucumber
8 8 (2.30%) MLflow
9 7 (2.01%) JIRA
9 7 (2.01%) Mocha
9 7 (2.01%) Mockito
10 6 (1.72%) Bitbucket Server
10 6 (1.72%) DbUnit
10 6 (1.72%) Eclipse
10 6 (1.72%) IntelliJ
10 6 (1.72%) jMock
11 5 (1.44%) KGDB
11 5 (1.44%) Robot Framework
12 3 (0.86%) Gradle
General
1 94 (27.01%) Social Skills
2 70 (20.11%) Finance
3 62 (17.82%) Analytical Skills
4 51 (14.66%) Banking
5 40 (11.49%) Investment Banking
6 34 (9.77%) Public Sector
7 26 (7.47%) Front Office
8 15 (4.31%) Telecoms
9 7 (2.01%) Influencing Skills
10 6 (1.72%) Documentation Skills
10 6 (1.72%) Marketing
10 6 (1.72%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (1.15%) Organisational Skills
12 3 (0.86%) French Language
12 3 (0.86%) Publishing
13 2 (0.57%) Games
13 2 (0.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 2 (0.57%) Legal
13 2 (0.57%) Military
13 2 (0.57%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 135 (38.79%) Developer
2 88 (25.29%) Senior
3 48 (13.79%) Java Developer
4 46 (13.22%) Senior Developer
5 39 (11.21%) Architect
6 36 (10.34%) Investment Banking Java Developer
6 36 (10.34%) SQL Developer
7 24 (6.90%) Platform Engineer
8 22 (6.32%) Lead
9 21 (6.03%) Senior Java Developer
10 19 (5.46%) Software Engineer
11 18 (5.17%) Linux Developer
11 18 (5.17%) Senior Investment Banking Java Developer
11 18 (5.17%) Senior SQL Developer
11 18 (5.17%) Sybase Developer
12 13 (3.74%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 12 (3.45%) Analyst
13 12 (3.45%) Solutions Architect
14 9 (2.59%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
14 9 (2.59%) Front-End Developer (Client-Side Developer)
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 128 (36.78%) Kafka
2 71 (20.40%) gRPC
3 52 (14.94%) Spring
4 38 (10.92%) JMS
5 31 (8.91%) REST
6 27 (7.76%) React
7 21 (6.03%) PyTorch
8 20 (5.75%) HTML
9 19 (5.46%) TensorFlow
10 17 (4.89%) Hugging Face
11 16 (4.60%) RESTful
12 15 (4.31%) Node.js
13 14 (4.02%) CSS
14 13 (3.74%) JSON
14 13 (3.74%) LangChain
15 12 (3.45%) Hibernate
16 11 (3.16%) Middleware
16 11 (3.16%) SOAP
16 11 (3.16%) XML
17 10 (2.87%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 67 (19.25%) Distributed Systems
2 42 (12.07%) Equities
3 40 (11.49%) Data Structures
4 17 (4.89%) Cloud Native
5 10 (2.87%) Virtual Team
6 8 (2.30%) Cyber Threat
6 8 (2.30%) Data Centre
6 8 (2.30%) Onboarding
6 8 (2.30%) Public Cloud
7 7 (2.01%) PKI
7 7 (2.01%) Private Cloud
8 6 (1.72%) Distributed Computing
8 6 (1.72%) Product Ownership
9 5 (1.44%) Cyber Kill Chain
9 5 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
9 5 (1.44%) Fat Client
9 5 (1.44%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 5 (1.44%) Market Risk
9 5 (1.44%) Security Posture
9 5 (1.44%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 84 (24.14%) Linux
2 24 (6.90%) Windows
3 17 (4.89%) Unix
4 13 (3.74%) Android
5 5 (1.44%) Windows 7
6 3 (0.86%) Apple iOS
6 3 (0.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 3 (0.86%) Windows Server
7 2 (0.57%) CentOS
8 1 (0.29%) Kali Linux
8 1 (0.29%) Mac OS
8 1 (0.29%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 108 (31.03%) Software Engineering
2 104 (29.89%) Agile
3 98 (28.16%) Problem-Solving
4 89 (25.57%) Microservices
5 73 (20.98%) CI/CD
6 68 (19.54%) DevOps
7 56 (16.09%) AI
8 44 (12.64%) Machine Learning
9 43 (12.36%) Performance Tuning
10 39 (11.21%) SDLC
11 38 (10.92%) Containerisation
12 37 (10.63%) Database Tuning
12 37 (10.63%) Infrastructure as Code
12 37 (10.63%) Multithreading
13 35 (10.06%) Mentoring
14 32 (9.20%) Observability
15 29 (8.33%) Test Automation
16 28 (8.05%) LLM
17 26 (7.47%) Data Science
17 26 (7.47%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 163 (46.84%) Python
2 92 (26.44%) Java
3 81 (23.28%) SQL
4 77 (22.13%) Go
5 37 (10.63%) JavaScript
5 37 (10.63%) Shell Script
6 24 (6.90%) TypeScript
7 16 (4.60%) Bash
8 14 (4.02%) C#
8 14 (4.02%) PowerShell
9 11 (3.16%) Kotlin
9 11 (3.16%) Scala
10 9 (2.59%) C++
11 5 (1.44%) C
11 5 (1.44%) Kusto Query Language
12 4 (1.15%) Solidity
13 3 (0.86%) Magik
13 3 (0.86%) Perl
13 3 (0.86%) PHP
13 3 (0.86%) SystemVerilog
Qualifications
1 55 (15.80%) Security Cleared
2 36 (10.34%) SC Cleared
3 26 (7.47%) Degree
4 18 (5.17%) DV Cleared
5 11 (3.16%) Computer Science Degree
6 8 (2.30%) Master's Degree
7 4 (1.15%) BPSS Clearance
7 4 (1.15%) CISSP
7 4 (1.15%) PhD
8 3 (0.86%) GCIH
8 3 (0.86%) OSCP
9 2 (0.57%) CASP
9 2 (0.57%) Cisco Certification
9 2 (0.57%) CompTIA CySA+
9 2 (0.57%) GCIA
9 2 (0.57%) GPEN
9 2 (0.57%) GWAPT
9 2 (0.57%) MCP
10 1 (0.29%) GIAC
10 1 (0.29%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (3.16%) Accessibility
2 8 (2.30%) NIST
2 8 (2.30%) WCAG
3 7 (2.01%) GDPR
4 6 (1.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 6 (1.72%) QA
5 5 (1.44%) Cyber Essentials
5 5 (1.44%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 4 (1.15%) NCSC
7 3 (0.86%) HIPAA
8 2 (0.57%) Data Quality
8 2 (0.57%) HL7
9 1 (0.29%) GPG for Computer-Based Electronic Evidence
9 1 (0.29%) GxP
9 1 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 17025
9 1 (0.29%) ISO17020
9 1 (0.29%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.29%) SLA
System Software
1 116 (33.33%) Docker
2 11 (3.16%) Active Directory
3 8 (2.30%) Virtual Machines
4 6 (1.72%) Postfix
5 5 (1.44%) vSphere
6 4 (1.15%) OpenAM
7 3 (0.86%) QEMU
8 2 (0.57%) HDFS
8 2 (0.57%) VMware Infrastructure
9 1 (0.29%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 1 (0.29%) Firmware
9 1 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 128 (36.78%) Kubernetes
2 31 (8.91%) Grafana
2 31 (8.91%) Prometheus
3 29 (8.33%) Terraform
4 24 (6.90%) Ansible
5 8 (2.30%) Puppet
6 5 (1.44%) Single Sign-On
6 5 (1.44%) WMI
7 4 (1.15%) Kibana
7 4 (1.15%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
8 3 (0.86%) Argo
8 3 (0.86%) Kubeflow
9 2 (0.57%) logstash
9 2 (0.57%) Progress Chef
10 1 (0.29%) HAProxy
10 1 (0.29%) Nessus
10 1 (0.29%) Packer
10 1 (0.29%) QRadar
10 1 (0.29%) SCOM
10 1 (0.29%) yum
Vendors
1 38 (10.92%) Microsoft
2 37 (10.63%) Sybase
3 24 (6.90%) Google
4 10 (2.87%) Atlassian
4 10 (2.87%) VMware
5 9 (2.59%) OpenAI
5 9 (2.59%) Oracle
6 8 (2.30%) Cisco
6 8 (2.30%) Red Hat
7 7 (2.01%) Splunk
8 6 (1.72%) Jaspersoft
9 5 (1.44%) Databricks
9 5 (1.44%) ESRI
9 5 (1.44%) Foundry
9 5 (1.44%) Veracode
9 5 (1.44%) webMethods
10 4 (1.15%) ArcSight
10 4 (1.15%) SAP
11 3 (0.86%) Computacenter
12 2 (0.57%) Cerner