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

6 months to
2 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 425 254 324
Rank change year-on-year -171 +70 -64
Contract jobs citing Open Source 258 348 280
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 1.07% 0.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.57% 1.18% 0.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 139 172 167
10th Percentile £424 £364 £313
25th Percentile £475 £425 £416
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £522 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.36% -0.57% -12.50%
75th Percentile £611 £600 £648
90th Percentile £755 £675 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £493 £573
% change year-on-year +6.49% -13.89% +2.23%
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 45,329 29,411 32,997
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.42% 85.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,714 18,306 20,733
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% -3.54%
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 2,913 1,754 1,602
10th Percentile £14.07 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.75 £17.30 £18.79
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.89 £47.09 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.56 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +92.49% -47.37% +14.67%

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 2 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 2 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 2 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 -194 181 £550 +4.76% 1,144
Work from Home -99 99 £514 -6.55% 478
London -147 96 £600 - 876
UK excluding London -119 95 £525 +6.49% 380
North of England -86 27 £497 +1.79% 56
South West -21 24 £550 +46.67% 48
Scotland -40 16 £525 +5.00% 63
Yorkshire -37 15 £500 -1.77% 17
East of England -12 12 £552 - 89
West Midlands -43 11 £459 -8.20% 21
Midlands -53 11 £459 -8.20% 26
South East -77 8 £680 +35.90% 67
North West -61 7 £638 +29.57% 32
North East -44 5 £425 -8.60% 7

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 (5.81%) Confluence
2 11 (4.26%) Apache
3 7 (2.71%) Apache Airflow
3 7 (2.71%) Apache Spark
3 7 (2.71%) SharePoint
4 6 (2.33%) SAS
5 4 (1.55%) Apache Superset
6 1 (0.39%) Apache Pulsar
6 1 (0.39%) CMS
6 1 (0.39%) Drupal
6 1 (0.39%) GeoServer
6 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
6 1 (0.39%) WordPress
Applications
1 3 (1.16%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.39%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 2 (0.78%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.39%) Magento
Cloud Services
1 119 (46.12%) AWS
2 69 (26.74%) Azure
3 53 (20.54%) GCP
4 40 (15.50%) GitHub
5 22 (8.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 22 (8.53%) Amazon S3
6 21 (8.14%) GitHub Actions
7 20 (7.75%) Serverless
8 14 (5.43%) Vertex AI
9 12 (4.65%) Amazon EC2
9 12 (4.65%) AWS Lambda
9 12 (4.65%) IaaS
10 11 (4.26%) Amazon EKS
11 9 (3.49%) Google Gemini
12 8 (3.10%) Amazon Bedrock
12 8 (3.10%) SaaS
13 7 (2.71%) Amazon SQS
13 7 (2.71%) Anthropic Claude
13 7 (2.71%) Azure Monitor
13 7 (2.71%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.71%) Intrusion Detection
2 6 (2.33%) HTTPS
2 6 (2.33%) SNMP
3 5 (1.94%) DNS
4 4 (1.55%) SSH
4 4 (1.55%) SSL
5 3 (1.16%) Firewall
5 3 (1.16%) Network Security
6 2 (0.78%) 4G
6 2 (0.78%) Cisco IOS
6 2 (0.78%) HTTP
6 2 (0.78%) Reverse Proxy
6 2 (0.78%) TCP/IP
6 2 (0.78%) WAN
7 1 (0.39%) Broadband
7 1 (0.39%) MQTT
7 1 (0.39%) NaaS
7 1 (0.39%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (9.30%) PostgreSQL
2 16 (6.20%) Amazon RDS
3 12 (4.65%) DynamoDB
4 11 (4.26%) MongoDB
5 9 (3.49%) Data Warehouse
6 8 (3.10%) Amazon Redshift
6 8 (3.10%) Big Data
6 8 (3.10%) BigQuery
6 8 (3.10%) Data Lake
7 7 (2.71%) Amazon Athena
7 7 (2.71%) Amazon QuickSight
7 7 (2.71%) Relational Database
8 6 (2.33%) Amazon Aurora
8 6 (2.33%) Apache Cassandra
9 5 (1.94%) Apache Iceberg
9 5 (1.94%) BusinessObjects
9 5 (1.94%) Pentaho
9 5 (1.94%) Power BI
9 5 (1.94%) Redis
9 5 (1.94%) Trino
Development Applications
1 55 (21.32%) Git
2 24 (9.30%) Jenkins
3 20 (7.75%) GitLab
4 16 (6.20%) JIRA
5 15 (5.81%) JUnit
6 13 (5.04%) SonarQube
7 11 (4.26%) Sonatype Nexus
8 7 (2.71%) IntelliJ
9 6 (2.33%) Bitbucket Server
9 6 (2.33%) DbUnit
9 6 (2.33%) JMeter
9 6 (2.33%) jMock
9 6 (2.33%) Maven
9 6 (2.33%) Mockito
10 5 (1.94%) Cucumber
11 4 (1.55%) Cypress.io
12 3 (1.16%) CircleCI
12 3 (1.16%) MLflow
12 3 (1.16%) Postman
12 3 (1.16%) Selenium
General
1 65 (25.19%) Social Skills
2 40 (15.50%) Finance
3 35 (13.57%) Public Sector
4 19 (7.36%) Analytical Skills
5 15 (5.81%) Banking
5 15 (5.81%) Legal
6 10 (3.88%) Law
7 9 (3.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 5 (1.94%) Influencing Skills
8 5 (1.94%) Military
9 4 (1.55%) Front Office
9 4 (1.55%) Presentation Skills
9 4 (1.55%) Retail
10 3 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.16%) Publishing
11 2 (0.78%) Organisational Skills
11 2 (0.78%) Police
11 2 (0.78%) Polish Language
11 2 (0.78%) Public Speaking
12 1 (0.39%) Billing
Job Titles
1 51 (19.77%) Architect
2 46 (17.83%) Developer
2 46 (17.83%) Senior
3 28 (10.85%) Solutions Architect
4 25 (9.69%) AWS Architect
5 20 (7.75%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 18 (6.98%) AWS Solution Architect
7 16 (6.20%) Software Engineer
8 15 (5.81%) Analyst
8 15 (5.81%) Senior Developer
9 14 (5.43%) Consultant
10 13 (5.04%) Data Engineer
11 12 (4.65%) Threat Intelligence Analyst
12 11 (4.26%) Cyber Threat Analyst
12 11 (4.26%) Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst
12 11 (4.26%) Software Developer
13 10 (3.88%) AWS Engineer
13 10 (3.88%) Cloud Engineer
13 10 (3.88%) Platform Engineer
14 9 (3.49%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 47 (18.22%) Terraform
2 44 (17.05%) Kafka
3 31 (12.02%) REST
4 15 (5.81%) LangChain
4 15 (5.81%) Spring
4 15 (5.81%) Spring Boot
5 14 (5.43%) React
6 13 (5.04%) RESTful
7 12 (4.65%) Node.js
7 12 (4.65%) PyTorch
8 11 (4.26%) LangGraph
8 11 (4.26%) SOAP
9 10 (3.88%) OpenTelemetry
9 10 (3.88%) TensorFlow
10 9 (3.49%) eBPF
11 8 (3.10%) Android Jetpack
11 8 (3.10%) gRPC
11 8 (3.10%) Jetpack Compose
11 8 (3.10%) Playwright
12 7 (2.71%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 46 (17.83%) Cloud Native
2 23 (8.91%) AI Agents
2 23 (8.91%) Distributed Systems
3 20 (7.75%) Cyber Threat
4 11 (4.26%) Enterprise Software
5 10 (3.88%) Private Cloud
6 9 (3.49%) Data Protection Act
6 9 (3.49%) Management Information System
7 8 (3.10%) Product Ownership
7 8 (3.10%) Self-Motivation
8 7 (2.71%) Data Structures
8 7 (2.71%) Mobile App
9 6 (2.33%) Legacy Applications
9 6 (2.33%) LIMS
9 6 (2.33%) Linux Command Line
10 5 (1.94%) Blog
10 5 (1.94%) Security Operations Centre
10 5 (1.94%) Security Posture
11 4 (1.55%) Replication
11 4 (1.55%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 56 (21.71%) Linux
2 18 (6.98%) Unix
3 12 (4.65%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 10 (3.88%) Windows
5 9 (3.49%) Android
6 3 (1.16%) Debian
6 3 (1.16%) Rocky
6 3 (1.16%) Ubuntu
7 2 (0.78%) Apple iOS
8 1 (0.39%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 100 (38.76%) CI/CD
2 69 (26.74%) Agile
3 64 (24.81%) AI
3 64 (24.81%) Software Engineering
4 61 (23.64%) DevOps
5 47 (18.22%) Infrastructure as Code
6 44 (17.05%) Observability
7 42 (16.28%) Containerisation
8 39 (15.12%) Event-Driven
9 38 (14.73%) Microservices
10 37 (14.34%) Stakeholder Management
11 35 (13.57%) Test Automation
12 34 (13.18%) LLM
13 33 (12.79%) Event-Driven Architecture
14 29 (11.24%) Data Pipeline
14 29 (11.24%) Machine Learning
15 28 (10.85%) Cybersecurity
16 27 (10.47%) Problem-Solving
17 25 (9.69%) Platform Engineering
18 23 (8.91%) Continuous Integration
Programming Languages
1 105 (40.70%) Python
2 46 (17.83%) Java
3 32 (12.40%) SQL
4 20 (7.75%) Bash
4 20 (7.75%) Go
5 14 (5.43%) JavaScript
5 14 (5.43%) TypeScript
6 13 (5.04%) C++
7 10 (3.88%) C
7 10 (3.88%) Scala
8 9 (3.49%) Kotlin
8 9 (3.49%) Perl
9 6 (2.33%) MUMPS
9 6 (2.33%) Shell Script
10 4 (1.55%) C#
11 3 (1.16%) PowerShell
12 2 (0.78%) Rust
13 1 (0.39%) Objective-C
13 1 (0.39%) Ruby
13 1 (0.39%) Swift
Qualifications
1 100 (38.76%) Security Cleared
2 73 (28.29%) SC Cleared
3 21 (8.14%) Degree
4 18 (6.98%) DV Cleared
5 12 (4.65%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.49%) CISSP
7 8 (3.10%) CISM
8 5 (1.94%) AWS Certification
9 3 (1.16%) Azure Certification
9 3 (1.16%) BPSS Clearance
9 3 (1.16%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.78%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.78%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.78%) CEH
10 2 (0.78%) GIAC
10 2 (0.78%) GSEC
10 2 (0.78%) LFCS
10 2 (0.78%) OSCP
10 2 (0.78%) RHCE
10 2 (0.78%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (5.04%) QA
2 12 (4.65%) Accessibility
3 7 (2.71%) GDPR
4 5 (1.94%) WCAG
5 4 (1.55%) Disclosure Scotland
6 3 (1.16%) Data Quality
6 3 (1.16%) GRC
6 3 (1.16%) NIST
7 1 (0.39%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.39%) NCSC
System Software
1 58 (22.48%) Docker
2 8 (3.10%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (1.94%) Postfix
4 4 (1.55%) Hyper-V
5 3 (1.16%) Ceph
6 2 (0.78%) Active Directory
6 2 (0.78%) Firmware
6 2 (0.78%) Slurm Workload Manager
6 2 (0.78%) VMware ESXi
7 1 (0.39%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.39%) Squid
7 1 (0.39%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 59 (22.87%) Kubernetes
2 34 (13.18%) Grafana
3 28 (10.85%) Prometheus
4 26 (10.08%) Ansible
5 10 (3.88%) Puppet
6 8 (3.10%) Progress Chef
7 4 (1.55%) Istio
7 4 (1.55%) Salt
8 3 (1.16%) Cilium
9 2 (0.78%) Docker Swarm
9 2 (0.78%) Kibana
9 2 (0.78%) linkerd
10 1 (0.39%) Amdocs OSS
10 1 (0.39%) Argo
10 1 (0.39%) Control-M
10 1 (0.39%) Data Guard
10 1 (0.39%) Oracle RMAN
10 1 (0.39%) QRadar
10 1 (0.39%) Single Sign-On
10 1 (0.39%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 26 (10.08%) Google
2 20 (7.75%) Microsoft
3 18 (6.98%) Splunk
4 17 (6.59%) Dynatrace
4 17 (6.59%) OpenAI
5 11 (4.26%) Oracle
6 10 (3.88%) Red Hat
7 9 (3.49%) SaltStack
8 8 (3.10%) VMware
9 7 (2.71%) Checkmarx
9 7 (2.71%) Cribl.io
10 6 (2.33%) Atlassian
10 6 (2.33%) Databricks
10 6 (2.33%) Informatica
10 6 (2.33%) InterSystems
10 6 (2.33%) Jaspersoft
11 5 (1.94%) Black Duck
11 5 (1.94%) Denodo
12 3 (1.16%) Confluent
12 3 (1.16%) Mistral