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 24 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 320 258 274
Rank change year-on-year -62 +16 -13
Contract jobs citing Open Source 341 292 363
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.73% 0.99% 0.83%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.87% 1.09% 0.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 164 206 237
10th Percentile £359 £400 £375
25th Percentile £450 £456 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £644 £675 £675
90th Percentile £775 £838 £759
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £470 £595
% change year-on-year +5.21% -21.01% +8.18%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 1 6
10th Percentile £19.85 - £25.99
25th Percentile £26.75 - £32.61
Median hourly rate £39.00 £95.00 £63.47
Median % change year-on-year -58.95% +49.69% -15.38%
75th Percentile £51.75 - £72.90
90th Percentile £58.95 - £75.82
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 39,397 26,809 37,691
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.78% 90.76% 86.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,864 17,328 24,353
10th Percentile £319 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £523 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.31% -0.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £739 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £485 £500
% change year-on-year - -3.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,354 1,060 2,429
10th Percentile £14.96 £14.83 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.51 £16.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £29.07 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +37.60% -16.94% -6.67%
75th Percentile £65.60 £62.24 £58.75
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £71.98
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.56 £28.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year +48.41% -20.00% -6.17%

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 24 April 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 24 April 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Open Source in the UK

Open Source
Top 13 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 24 April 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 -75 275 £550 -8.33% 88
London -83 149 £600 - 46
Work from Home -45 122 £550 -8.33% 57
UK excluding London -56 120 £495 +5.21% 54
North of England -57 33 £450 -3.23% 12
North West -32 20 £450 -2.96% 7
Scotland +1 19 £663 +33.17% 3
South West -16 19 £500 -20.00% 7
West Midlands -46 18 £475 +12.56% 5
South East -50 18 £338 -32.50% 17
Midlands -53 18 £475 +12.56% 5
East of England -28 13 £550 +37.50% 9
Yorkshire -43 12 £485 - 3

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 (4.11%) Apache
2 11 (3.23%) Confluence
3 8 (2.35%) Apache Spark
3 8 (2.35%) Appian
4 7 (2.05%) SharePoint
5 6 (1.76%) JBoss
5 6 (1.76%) WebLogic
6 5 (1.47%) OpenStack
7 4 (1.17%) Apache Airflow
7 4 (1.17%) nginx
8 3 (0.88%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 2 (0.59%) Liferay
9 2 (0.59%) Tomcat
10 1 (0.29%) Apache Superset
Applications
1 3 (0.88%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (0.59%) Oracle EBS
1 2 (0.59%) Oracle EBS R12
2 1 (0.29%) Magento
2 1 (0.29%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 171 (50.15%) AWS
2 82 (24.05%) Azure
3 42 (12.32%) GitHub
4 41 (12.02%) GCP
5 31 (9.09%) Amazon S3
6 26 (7.62%) Serverless
7 20 (5.87%) Amazon EC2
7 20 (5.87%) Azure AI
8 18 (5.28%) GitHub Actions
9 16 (4.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 14 (4.11%) Google Gemini
11 13 (3.81%) Anthropic Claude
11 13 (3.81%) AWS Lambda
11 13 (3.81%) Azure DevOps
12 11 (3.23%) Amazon SageMaker
12 11 (3.23%) Route 53
13 10 (2.93%) Amazon SQS
13 10 (2.93%) Azure Cognitive Services
13 10 (2.93%) Azure Data Factory
14 9 (2.64%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 14 (4.11%) Firewall
2 7 (2.05%) Reverse Proxy
3 6 (1.76%) DNS
3 6 (1.76%) WAN
4 5 (1.47%) DHCP
4 5 (1.47%) SNMP
5 3 (0.88%) VLAN
6 2 (0.59%) NaaS
6 2 (0.59%) Network Security
6 2 (0.59%) SSH
6 2 (0.59%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.29%) 5G
7 1 (0.29%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.29%) InfiniBand
7 1 (0.29%) iSCSI
7 1 (0.29%) Kerberos
7 1 (0.29%) LTE
7 1 (0.29%) NAS
7 1 (0.29%) Spanning Tree
7 1 (0.29%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 50 (14.66%) Apache Cassandra
2 49 (14.37%) PostgreSQL
3 17 (4.99%) MongoDB
4 16 (4.69%) SQL Server
5 15 (4.40%) BigQuery
5 15 (4.40%) DynamoDB
6 13 (3.81%) Pinecone
7 12 (3.52%) Amazon RDS
8 11 (3.23%) NoSQL
9 9 (2.64%) Amazon Aurora
10 8 (2.35%) Metadata
10 8 (2.35%) Redis
11 7 (2.05%) Amazon QuickSight
11 7 (2.05%) Big Data
11 7 (2.05%) Relational Database
12 6 (1.76%) RDBMS
13 5 (1.47%) Amazon Redshift
13 5 (1.47%) Flink
13 5 (1.47%) Weaviate
14 4 (1.17%) Data Hub
Development Applications
1 61 (17.89%) Git
2 26 (7.62%) GitLab
2 26 (7.62%) JUnit
3 24 (7.04%) Jenkins
4 17 (4.99%) SonarQube
5 16 (4.69%) JIRA
6 12 (3.52%) IntelliJ
7 11 (3.23%) MLflow
7 11 (3.23%) Sonatype Nexus
8 9 (2.64%) Bitbucket Server
8 9 (2.64%) DbUnit
8 9 (2.64%) jMock
8 9 (2.64%) Maven
8 9 (2.64%) Mockito
9 6 (1.76%) CircleCI
9 6 (1.76%) Gradle
10 5 (1.47%) Artifactory
10 5 (1.47%) Selenium
11 4 (1.17%) Eclipse
11 4 (1.17%) PowerDesigner
General
1 72 (21.11%) Social Skills
2 67 (19.65%) Finance
3 48 (14.08%) Public Sector
4 26 (7.62%) Banking
5 25 (7.33%) Analytical Skills
6 19 (5.57%) Legal
7 9 (2.64%) Front Office
8 8 (2.35%) Retail
9 6 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
9 6 (1.76%) Law
9 6 (1.76%) Publishing
10 5 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
10 5 (1.47%) Military
11 4 (1.17%) Investment Banking
12 3 (0.88%) Financial Institution
12 3 (0.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 3 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
12 3 (0.88%) Telecoms
13 2 (0.59%) Marketing
13 2 (0.59%) Police
Job Titles
1 97 (28.45%) Developer
2 65 (19.06%) Senior
3 62 (18.18%) Architect
4 40 (11.73%) Senior Developer
5 36 (10.56%) Software Engineer
6 29 (8.50%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 29 (8.50%) Solutions Architect
7 22 (6.45%) AWS Architect
8 17 (4.99%) Data Engineer
9 15 (4.40%) AWS Solution Architect
9 15 (4.40%) Cloud Engineer
9 15 (4.40%) Consultant
9 15 (4.40%) Python Developer
10 13 (3.81%) Java Developer
11 12 (3.52%) Android Developer
12 11 (3.23%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
12 11 (3.23%) Lead
13 10 (2.93%) Automation Engineer
13 10 (2.93%) Cloud Architect
13 10 (2.93%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 90 (26.39%) Kafka
2 56 (16.42%) gRPC
3 48 (14.08%) REST
4 32 (9.38%) React
5 31 (9.09%) RESTful
5 31 (9.09%) Spring
6 30 (8.80%) Node.js
7 27 (7.92%) Spring Boot
8 25 (7.33%) LangChain
9 24 (7.04%) AngularJS
9 24 (7.04%) Web Services
10 21 (6.16%) .NET
11 18 (5.28%) PyTorch
12 17 (4.99%) Hugging Face
13 16 (4.69%) TensorFlow
14 14 (4.11%) OpenTelemetry
14 14 (4.11%) SOAP
15 13 (3.81%) Hibernate
16 12 (3.52%) Django
16 12 (3.52%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 72 (21.11%) Distributed Systems
2 39 (11.44%) Cloud Native
3 21 (6.16%) Product Ownership
4 12 (3.52%) AI Agents
5 10 (2.93%) Legacy Systems
6 9 (2.64%) Enterprise Software
6 9 (2.64%) Legacy Code
7 8 (2.35%) Low-Code
7 8 (2.35%) Onboarding
8 7 (2.05%) Data Protection Act
9 6 (1.76%) Data Centre
9 6 (1.76%) Distributed Computing
9 6 (1.76%) Mobile App
9 6 (1.76%) Virtual Team
10 5 (1.47%) Fat Client
10 5 (1.47%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 5 (1.47%) PKI
10 5 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
10 5 (1.47%) Thin Client
11 4 (1.17%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 48 (14.08%) Linux
2 21 (6.16%) Android
3 12 (3.52%) Windows
4 9 (2.64%) Unix
5 6 (1.76%) Apple iOS
5 6 (1.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (1.47%) Windows 7
7 4 (1.17%) Ubuntu
8 3 (0.88%) Debian
8 3 (0.88%) Rocky
9 2 (0.59%) VMS
9 2 (0.59%) Windows Server
10 1 (0.29%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 102 (29.91%) Software Engineering
2 95 (27.86%) CI/CD
2 95 (27.86%) Microservices
3 88 (25.81%) AI
4 75 (21.99%) Agile
5 69 (20.23%) DevOps
6 64 (18.77%) Containerisation
7 61 (17.89%) LLM
8 51 (14.96%) Machine Learning
9 50 (14.66%) Infrastructure as Code
10 48 (14.08%) Problem-Solving
11 47 (13.78%) Generative AI
12 44 (12.90%) Stakeholder Management
13 42 (12.32%) Data Pipeline
14 37 (10.85%) Observability
15 36 (10.56%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
16 29 (8.50%) TDD
16 29 (8.50%) Test Automation
17 28 (8.21%) Prompt Engineering
18 27 (7.92%) Data Science
Programming Languages
1 144 (42.23%) Python
2 71 (20.82%) Java
3 68 (19.94%) Go
4 51 (14.96%) SQL
5 26 (7.62%) TypeScript
6 23 (6.74%) C#
7 22 (6.45%) JavaScript
8 21 (6.16%) Bash
9 17 (4.99%) Kotlin
10 11 (3.23%) Ruby
11 9 (2.64%) Scala
12 6 (1.76%) PL/SQL
12 6 (1.76%) PowerShell
12 6 (1.76%) Shell Script
13 4 (1.17%) C++
13 4 (1.17%) Delphi
13 4 (1.17%) PHP
14 2 (0.59%) Kusto Query Language
15 1 (0.29%) Bicep
15 1 (0.29%) R
Qualifications
1 88 (25.81%) Security Cleared
2 65 (19.06%) SC Cleared
3 30 (8.80%) Degree
4 14 (4.11%) BPSS Clearance
5 13 (3.81%) Computer Science Degree
5 13 (3.81%) DV Cleared
6 8 (2.35%) Master's Degree
7 5 (1.47%) AWS Certification
7 5 (1.47%) Azure Certification
7 5 (1.47%) PhD
8 2 (0.59%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 1 (0.29%) ISEB
9 1 (0.29%) Microsoft Certified Professional
9 1 (0.29%) MPhil
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 19 (5.57%) QA
2 12 (3.52%) Accessibility
3 11 (3.23%) Data Quality
4 7 (2.05%) WCAG
5 4 (1.17%) NIST
6 3 (0.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.59%) GDPR
8 1 (0.29%) GPG for Computer-Based Electronic Evidence
8 1 (0.29%) GRC
8 1 (0.29%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 17025
8 1 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
8 1 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 42001
8 1 (0.29%) ISO17020
8 1 (0.29%) PCI DSS
8 1 (0.29%) SLA
8 1 (0.29%) SOC 2
System Software
1 118 (34.60%) Docker
2 13 (3.81%) Active Directory
3 8 (2.35%) Postfix
4 5 (1.47%) Ceph
4 5 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
5 4 (1.17%) Oracle RAC
6 3 (0.88%) ISA Server
6 3 (0.88%) KVM
7 2 (0.59%) Oracle Clusterware
8 1 (0.29%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.29%) iptables
8 1 (0.29%) Lustre
8 1 (0.29%) NFS
8 1 (0.29%) QEMU
8 1 (0.29%) Samba
8 1 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 1 (0.29%) Squid
8 1 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 106 (31.09%) Kubernetes
2 42 (12.32%) Terraform
3 34 (9.97%) Grafana
4 33 (9.68%) Prometheus
5 17 (4.99%) Ansible
6 10 (2.93%) Istio
7 8 (2.35%) Puppet
8 6 (1.76%) Argo
9 5 (1.47%) WMI
10 4 (1.17%) Data Guard
10 4 (1.17%) Oracle RMAN
10 4 (1.17%) Salt
11 2 (0.59%) Amdocs OSS
11 2 (0.59%) HAProxy
11 2 (0.59%) Knative
11 2 (0.59%) Rancher
12 1 (0.29%) CASB
12 1 (0.29%) MOM
12 1 (0.29%) SELinux
Vendors
1 29 (8.50%) Google
2 26 (7.62%) OpenAI
3 24 (7.04%) Microsoft
4 13 (3.81%) Dynatrace
5 12 (3.52%) Splunk
6 9 (2.64%) Atlassian
6 9 (2.64%) Jaspersoft
6 9 (2.64%) UiPath
7 8 (2.35%) Automation Anywhere
8 7 (2.05%) Checkmarx
8 7 (2.05%) Oracle
8 7 (2.05%) VMware
9 5 (1.47%) Databricks
10 4 (1.17%) Cribl.io
10 4 (1.17%) Fortinet
10 4 (1.17%) IBM
10 4 (1.17%) Red Hat
10 4 (1.17%) ServiceNow
10 4 (1.17%) webMethods
10 4 (1.17%) Xamarin