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

6 months to
16 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 424 251 331
Rank change year-on-year -173 +80 -75
Contract jobs citing Open Source 279 359 246
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 1.08% 0.65%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.59% 1.19% 0.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 152 159 129
10th Percentile £366 £363 £320
25th Percentile £431 £426 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £525 £501
Median % change year-on-year -1.29% +4.75% -12.84%
75th Percentile £623 £619 £625
90th Percentile £735 £738 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £518 £504 £500
% change year-on-year +2.93% +0.70% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 1 13
10th Percentile - - £20.12
25th Percentile £13.09 £51.75 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.67 £56.50 £25.36
Median % change year-on-year -22.71% +122.79% +19.34%
75th Percentile £76.75 £61.25 £27.00
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 46,911 30,121 32,352
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.81% 90.54% 86.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,189 18,721 19,488
10th Percentile £325 £296 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.42%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,476 1,911 1,239
10th Percentile £13.51 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £16.75 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £37.24 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +48.07% -37.13% -10.11%
75th Percentile £65.00 £42.79 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £66.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.24 £22.27 £40.00
% change year-on-year +67.26% -44.34% -8.88%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 -216 194 £525 - 790
UK excluding London -106 119 £518 +2.93% 313
Work from Home -99 105 £500 +2.04% 390
London -151 93 £565 +2.26% 518
North of England -69 38 £510 +2.00% 72
South West -16 26 £550 -4.35% 34
Scotland -35 23 £525 - 38
Yorkshire -38 17 £513 -2.38% 18
South East -71 16 £350 -38.05% 61
East of England -21 11 £551 -0.36% 58
North East -31 11 £425 - 15
North West -52 10 £675 +55.17% 39
West Midlands -48 8 £450 -10.10% 18
Midlands -52 8 £450 -10.10% 23

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 (5.02%) Confluence
2 10 (3.58%) Apache
2 10 (3.58%) SharePoint
3 8 (2.87%) Apache Spark
4 7 (2.51%) Apache Airflow
5 6 (2.15%) SAS
6 5 (1.79%) Apache Superset
7 2 (0.72%) CMS
8 1 (0.36%) Apache Pulsar
8 1 (0.36%) Drupal
8 1 (0.36%) GeoServer
8 1 (0.36%) IIS
8 1 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
8 1 (0.36%) OpenStack
8 1 (0.36%) WordPress
Applications
1 4 (1.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.36%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (0.72%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.36%) Magento
Cloud Services
1 116 (41.58%) AWS
2 78 (27.96%) Azure
3 47 (16.85%) GitHub
4 46 (16.49%) GCP
5 30 (10.75%) GitHub Actions
6 18 (6.45%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 16 (5.73%) Amazon EKS
7 16 (5.73%) IaaS
8 15 (5.38%) Amazon S3
8 15 (5.38%) Serverless
9 12 (4.30%) Anthropic Claude
9 12 (4.30%) Vertex AI
10 10 (3.58%) Amazon Bedrock
11 8 (2.87%) AWS Lambda
11 8 (2.87%) Azure Monitor
12 7 (2.51%) Google Gemini
12 7 (2.51%) Google Kubernetes Engine
12 7 (2.51%) Power Platform
13 6 (2.15%) Azure DevOps
13 6 (2.15%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.51%) Intrusion Detection
2 6 (2.15%) HTTPS
2 6 (2.15%) SNMP
3 4 (1.43%) DNS
3 4 (1.43%) Network Security
4 3 (1.08%) SSH
4 3 (1.08%) SSL
5 2 (0.72%) 4G
5 2 (0.72%) Asterisk PBX
5 2 (0.72%) Broadband
5 2 (0.72%) Cisco IOS
5 2 (0.72%) HTTP
5 2 (0.72%) Internet
5 2 (0.72%) RTCP
5 2 (0.72%) RTP
5 2 (0.72%) TCP/IP
5 2 (0.72%) VoIP
5 2 (0.72%) Wi-Fi
5 2 (0.72%) Wireshark
6 1 (0.36%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (5.02%) PostgreSQL
2 12 (4.30%) Amazon RDS
3 9 (3.23%) DynamoDB
3 9 (3.23%) MongoDB
4 8 (2.87%) Relational Database
4 8 (2.87%) Trino
5 7 (2.51%) Apache Iceberg
5 7 (2.51%) Big Data
5 7 (2.51%) Data Lake
5 7 (2.51%) Data Warehouse
6 6 (2.15%) Amazon Redshift
7 5 (1.79%) Amazon Athena
7 5 (1.79%) BusinessObjects
7 5 (1.79%) Pentaho
7 5 (1.79%) Power BI
8 4 (1.43%) BigQuery
8 4 (1.43%) Redis
9 3 (1.08%) Geospatial Data
9 3 (1.08%) QGIS
9 3 (1.08%) Spatial Data
Development Applications
1 43 (15.41%) Git
2 28 (10.04%) Jenkins
3 20 (7.17%) GitLab
4 15 (5.38%) JIRA
5 9 (3.23%) CircleCI
5 9 (3.23%) JMeter
6 8 (2.87%) Sonatype Nexus
7 7 (2.51%) Cypress.io
7 7 (2.51%) JUnit
8 6 (2.15%) Cucumber
8 6 (2.15%) Postman
8 6 (2.15%) XCTest
8 6 (2.15%) XCUITest
9 5 (1.79%) Claude Code
9 5 (1.79%) Gradle
10 4 (1.43%) MLflow
11 3 (1.08%) Bitbucket Server
11 3 (1.08%) Maven
11 3 (1.08%) ScalaTest
11 3 (1.08%) SonarQube
General
1 81 (29.03%) Social Skills
2 46 (16.49%) Finance
3 38 (13.62%) Public Sector
4 15 (5.38%) Analytical Skills
4 15 (5.38%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 13 (4.66%) Banking
5 13 (4.66%) Legal
6 8 (2.87%) Law
6 8 (2.87%) Telecoms
7 6 (2.15%) Influencing Skills
7 6 (2.15%) Retail
8 5 (1.79%) Presentation Skills
9 4 (1.43%) Military
10 3 (1.08%) Publishing
11 2 (0.72%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (0.72%) Front Office
11 2 (0.72%) Polish Language
11 2 (0.72%) Public Speaking
12 1 (0.36%) Games
12 1 (0.36%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 59 (21.15%) Senior
2 52 (18.64%) Developer
3 40 (14.34%) Architect
4 24 (8.60%) Solutions Architect
5 22 (7.89%) AWS Architect
6 20 (7.17%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 20 (7.17%) Software Developer
7 18 (6.45%) Software Engineer
8 16 (5.73%) AWS Solution Architect
9 14 (5.02%) Analyst
9 14 (5.02%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 13 (4.66%) Platform Engineer
10 13 (4.66%) Senior Developer
10 13 (4.66%) Threat Intelligence Analyst
11 12 (4.30%) Consultant
12 11 (3.94%) Cyber Threat Analyst
12 11 (3.94%) Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst
12 11 (3.94%) Integration Engineer
12 11 (3.94%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
13 10 (3.58%) Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 51 (18.28%) Terraform
2 34 (12.19%) Kafka
2 34 (12.19%) REST
3 18 (6.45%) LangChain
4 15 (5.38%) RESTful
5 14 (5.02%) LangGraph
6 12 (4.30%) React
7 11 (3.94%) Android Jetpack
7 11 (3.94%) Jetpack Compose
7 11 (3.94%) Playwright
7 11 (3.94%) PyTorch
8 10 (3.58%) eBPF
8 10 (3.58%) LlamaIndex
9 9 (3.23%) OpenTelemetry
10 8 (2.87%) Node.js
10 8 (2.87%) Play Framework
10 8 (2.87%) RAML
10 8 (2.87%) SOAP
10 8 (2.87%) TensorFlow
11 7 (2.51%) .NET
Miscellaneous
1 47 (16.85%) Cloud Native
2 28 (10.04%) Distributed Systems
3 27 (9.68%) AI Agents
4 21 (7.53%) Cyber Threat
5 19 (6.81%) Private Cloud
6 15 (5.38%) Mobile App
7 12 (4.30%) Management Information System
7 12 (4.30%) Virtual Team
8 11 (3.94%) Product Ownership
9 10 (3.58%) Self-Motivation
10 9 (3.23%) Data Protection Act
10 9 (3.23%) Enterprise Software
10 9 (3.23%) Security Posture
11 8 (2.87%) Blog
12 7 (2.51%) Data Structures
12 7 (2.51%) Linux Command Line
13 6 (2.15%) Legacy Applications
13 6 (2.15%) LIMS
14 5 (1.79%) Legacy Systems
14 5 (1.79%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 65 (23.30%) Linux
2 16 (5.73%) Unix
3 13 (4.66%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 12 (4.30%) Android
5 11 (3.94%) Windows
6 7 (2.51%) Apple iOS
7 2 (0.72%) CentOS
7 2 (0.72%) Debian
7 2 (0.72%) Rocky
7 2 (0.72%) Ubuntu
8 1 (0.36%) Amazon Linux
8 1 (0.36%) macOS
8 1 (0.36%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 119 (42.65%) CI/CD
2 77 (27.60%) AI
3 73 (26.16%) Agile
3 73 (26.16%) Software Engineering
4 67 (24.01%) DevOps
5 59 (21.15%) Test Automation
6 57 (20.43%) Observability
7 53 (19.00%) Infrastructure as Code
8 43 (15.41%) Containerisation
9 37 (13.26%) LLM
9 37 (13.26%) Platform Engineering
10 36 (12.90%) Event-Driven
11 35 (12.54%) Microservices
12 34 (12.19%) Continuous Integration
13 33 (11.83%) Continuous Improvement
13 33 (11.83%) Cybersecurity
13 33 (11.83%) Problem-Solving
13 33 (11.83%) Stakeholder Management
14 32 (11.47%) Machine Learning
15 31 (11.11%) Event-Driven Architecture
Programming Languages
1 105 (37.63%) Python
2 48 (17.20%) Java
3 29 (10.39%) SQL
4 18 (6.45%) JavaScript
4 18 (6.45%) Perl
5 17 (6.09%) Bash
5 17 (6.09%) Go
6 15 (5.38%) C++
7 14 (5.02%) Kotlin
7 14 (5.02%) Scala
7 14 (5.02%) TypeScript
8 11 (3.94%) C
9 6 (2.15%) C#
9 6 (2.15%) MUMPS
9 6 (2.15%) Objective-C
9 6 (2.15%) Swift
10 4 (1.43%) PowerShell
10 4 (1.43%) Shell Script
11 2 (0.72%) Bicep
11 2 (0.72%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 93 (33.33%) Security Cleared
2 70 (25.09%) SC Cleared
3 28 (10.04%) Degree
4 20 (7.17%) Computer Science Degree
5 18 (6.45%) DV Cleared
6 9 (3.23%) CISSP
7 8 (2.87%) AWS Certification
7 8 (2.87%) BPSS Clearance
7 8 (2.87%) CISM
8 6 (2.15%) Azure Certification
9 5 (1.79%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.72%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.72%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.72%) CEH
10 2 (0.72%) DBS Check
10 2 (0.72%) GIAC
10 2 (0.72%) GSEC
10 2 (0.72%) LFCS
10 2 (0.72%) OSCP
10 2 (0.72%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (6.45%) Accessibility
2 14 (5.02%) QA
3 7 (2.51%) GDPR
3 7 (2.51%) WCAG
4 4 (1.43%) Disclosure Scotland
4 4 (1.43%) NCSC
5 3 (1.08%) Data Quality
5 3 (1.08%) GRC
5 3 (1.08%) NIST
6 2 (0.72%) Actionable Recommendations
6 2 (0.72%) PMO
7 1 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.36%) SOC 2
System Software
1 57 (20.43%) Docker
2 15 (5.38%) VMware Infrastructure
3 9 (3.23%) VMware ESXi
4 4 (1.43%) Virtual Servers
5 3 (1.08%) Ceph
5 3 (1.08%) Firmware
5 3 (1.08%) Hyper-V
6 2 (0.72%) Postfix
6 2 (0.72%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 74 (26.52%) Kubernetes
2 36 (12.90%) Ansible
3 34 (12.19%) Grafana
4 22 (7.89%) Prometheus
5 9 (3.23%) Progress Chef
5 9 (3.23%) Puppet
6 4 (1.43%) Cilium
7 2 (0.72%) Argo
7 2 (0.72%) Control-M
7 2 (0.72%) Docker Swarm
7 2 (0.72%) Istio
7 2 (0.72%) Kibana
7 2 (0.72%) linkerd
7 2 (0.72%) Salt
7 2 (0.72%) Single Sign-On
7 2 (0.72%) systemd
8 1 (0.36%) QRadar
8 1 (0.36%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 27 (9.68%) Google
2 23 (8.24%) Microsoft
3 22 (7.89%) Splunk
4 18 (6.45%) OpenAI
4 18 (6.45%) SaltStack
5 17 (6.09%) VMware
6 14 (5.02%) Dynatrace
7 12 (4.30%) Oracle
8 11 (3.94%) Red Hat
9 7 (2.51%) Cribl.io
9 7 (2.51%) Databricks
10 6 (2.15%) Informatica
10 6 (2.15%) InterSystems
11 5 (1.79%) Denodo
11 5 (1.79%) Foundry
12 4 (1.43%) Black Duck
12 4 (1.43%) Mistral
13 3 (1.08%) Jaspersoft
13 3 (1.08%) ServiceNow
13 3 (1.08%) Sonatype