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 19 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 291 290 257
Rank change year-on-year -1 -33 -7
Contract jobs citing Open Source 374 254 393
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.86% 0.87% 0.88%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.00% 0.96% 1.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 170 183 256
10th Percentile £350 £400 £374
25th Percentile £432 £450 £466
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £650 £700 £675
90th Percentile £789 £838 £781
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £580
% change year-on-year -5.00% -13.79% +8.99%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 2 8
10th Percentile - £32.90 -
25th Percentile £15.25 £43.25 £19.99
Median hourly rate £15.50 £60.50 £38.13
Median % change year-on-year -74.38% +58.69% -41.35%
75th Percentile £39.75 £77.75 £72.90
90th Percentile £54.15 £88.10 £74.65
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 37,265 26,485 38,452
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.97% 90.43% 86.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,631 17,037 25,025
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £610 £638 £638
90th Percentile £723 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,203 922 2,327
10th Percentile £14.97 £15.25 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £32.12
Median % change year-on-year -7.69% +1.20% -8.24%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.52 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.50 £70.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £31.76 £30.91
% change year-on-year -13.41% +2.74% -11.68%

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 19 March 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 19 March 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 19 March 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 -21 307 £550 -4.35% 177
London -30 160 £600 -7.69% 99
UK excluding London -28 135 £475 -5.00% 98
Work from Home 0 132 £525 -12.50% 77
North of England -45 39 £450 -2.70% 26
South East -32 30 £463 -7.50% 24
Scotland +8 23 £675 +25.58% 4
South West -6 22 £380 -39.20% 15
North West -18 22 £403 -12.97% 9
Yorkshire -47 14 £525 -1.50% 12
West Midlands -52 14 £475 +10.08% 3
Midlands -68 14 £475 +10.08% 3
East of England -27 7 £550 +52.49% 23
North East -6 3 - - 5

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 (3.74%) Apache
2 13 (3.48%) Confluence
3 11 (2.94%) Apache Spark
4 9 (2.41%) Appian
5 6 (1.60%) JBoss
5 6 (1.60%) WebLogic
6 5 (1.34%) Apache Airflow
6 5 (1.34%) OpenStack
7 4 (1.07%) Adobe Experience Manager
7 4 (1.07%) nginx
7 4 (1.07%) SharePoint
8 3 (0.80%) Ethereum
8 3 (0.80%) Hyperledger
9 2 (0.53%) Liferay
9 2 (0.53%) Tomcat
10 1 (0.27%) ArcGIS
10 1 (0.27%) Cloud Foundry
10 1 (0.27%) GeoServer
10 1 (0.27%) Oracle Coherence
10 1 (0.27%) Oracle Spatial
Applications
1 1 (0.27%) Chatbot
1 1 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (0.53%) Oracle EBS
1 2 (0.53%) Oracle EBS R12
2 1 (0.27%) Magento
2 1 (0.27%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 176 (47.06%) AWS
2 86 (22.99%) Azure
3 43 (11.50%) GitHub
4 33 (8.82%) GCP
5 24 (6.42%) Amazon S3
5 24 (6.42%) GitHub Actions
6 22 (5.88%) Serverless
7 20 (5.35%) Azure AI
8 14 (3.74%) Amazon EC2
9 13 (3.48%) Anthropic Claude
9 13 (3.48%) Azure DevOps
10 11 (2.94%) Azure Cognitive Services
10 11 (2.94%) CloudFront
11 10 (2.67%) Amazon Bedrock
11 10 (2.67%) Amazon SageMaker
11 10 (2.67%) AWS Lambda
11 10 (2.67%) Azure Data Factory
11 10 (2.67%) Google Gemini
12 9 (2.41%) Azure Cognitive Search
13 8 (2.14%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 16 (4.28%) Firewall
2 6 (1.60%) DHCP
2 6 (1.60%) DNS
3 5 (1.34%) Reverse Proxy
3 5 (1.34%) WAN
4 4 (1.07%) Internet
5 3 (0.80%) VLAN
6 2 (0.53%) NaaS
6 2 (0.53%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.27%) 5G
7 1 (0.27%) InfiniBand
7 1 (0.27%) iSCSI
7 1 (0.27%) LTE
7 1 (0.27%) NAS
7 1 (0.27%) Network Security
7 1 (0.27%) NGFW
7 1 (0.27%) RTP
7 1 (0.27%) Software-Defined Networking
7 1 (0.27%) Spanning Tree
7 1 (0.27%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 69 (18.45%) Apache Cassandra
2 49 (13.10%) PostgreSQL
3 23 (6.15%) MongoDB
3 23 (6.15%) NoSQL
4 17 (4.55%) SQL Server
5 14 (3.74%) Pinecone
6 13 (3.48%) BigQuery
6 13 (3.48%) Redis
7 12 (3.21%) Relational Database
8 11 (2.94%) DynamoDB
9 8 (2.14%) Amazon RDS
9 8 (2.14%) Metadata
10 7 (1.87%) Big Data
10 7 (1.87%) DB2
11 6 (1.60%) Couchbase
11 6 (1.60%) Weaviate
12 5 (1.34%) Amazon Aurora
12 5 (1.34%) Flink
12 5 (1.34%) GIS
12 5 (1.34%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 50 (13.37%) Git
2 31 (8.29%) GitLab
3 27 (7.22%) Jenkins
4 24 (6.42%) JUnit
5 18 (4.81%) JIRA
6 14 (3.74%) MLflow
7 8 (2.14%) Gradle
7 8 (2.14%) SonarQube
8 7 (1.87%) CircleCI
9 6 (1.60%) Cucumber
9 6 (1.60%) IntelliJ
9 6 (1.60%) Maven
9 6 (1.60%) Mocha
9 6 (1.60%) Mockito
9 6 (1.60%) Selenium
9 6 (1.60%) Sonatype Nexus
10 5 (1.34%) Bitbucket Server
10 5 (1.34%) DbUnit
10 5 (1.34%) jMock
11 4 (1.07%) ESLint
General
1 75 (20.05%) Social Skills
2 65 (17.38%) Finance
3 50 (13.37%) Public Sector
4 33 (8.82%) Analytical Skills
4 33 (8.82%) Banking
5 14 (3.74%) Front Office
5 14 (3.74%) Legal
6 13 (3.48%) Investment Banking
7 7 (1.87%) Influencing Skills
7 7 (1.87%) Retail
8 6 (1.60%) Financial Institution
8 6 (1.60%) Presentation Skills
8 6 (1.60%) Publishing
8 6 (1.60%) Telecoms
9 5 (1.34%) Organisational Skills
10 4 (1.07%) Documentation Skills
10 4 (1.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 4 (1.07%) Marketing
11 3 (0.80%) Military
12 2 (0.53%) Billing
Job Titles
1 124 (33.16%) Developer
2 90 (24.06%) Senior
3 57 (15.24%) Architect
4 56 (14.97%) Senior Developer
5 38 (10.16%) Software Engineer
6 27 (7.22%) Solutions Architect
7 26 (6.95%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 17 (4.55%) Android Developer
9 15 (4.01%) AWS Architect
10 14 (3.74%) Data Engineer
10 14 (3.74%) Java Developer
11 13 (3.48%) Platform Engineer
11 13 (3.48%) Python Developer
12 11 (2.94%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
12 11 (2.94%) AWS Solution Architect
13 10 (2.67%) Automation Engineer
13 10 (2.67%) Cloud Engineer
13 10 (2.67%) Consultant
13 10 (2.67%) Data Scientist
13 10 (2.67%) Senior Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 112 (29.95%) Kafka
2 74 (19.79%) gRPC
3 53 (14.17%) REST
4 38 (10.16%) React
5 32 (8.56%) Node.js
6 28 (7.49%) RESTful
6 28 (7.49%) Spring
7 26 (6.95%) LangChain
8 22 (5.88%) AngularJS
9 21 (5.61%) .NET
9 21 (5.61%) HTML
9 21 (5.61%) Web Services
10 18 (4.81%) PyTorch
10 18 (4.81%) Spring Boot
11 17 (4.55%) Android Jetpack
11 17 (4.55%) CSS
11 17 (4.55%) Jetpack Compose
12 15 (4.01%) Android SDK
12 15 (4.01%) Faiss
13 14 (3.74%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 79 (21.12%) Distributed Systems
2 29 (7.75%) Cloud Native
3 21 (5.61%) Product Ownership
4 12 (3.21%) Equities
5 10 (2.67%) AI Agents
5 10 (2.67%) Legacy Code
5 10 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
5 10 (2.67%) PKI
6 9 (2.41%) Data Protection Act
6 9 (2.41%) Distributed Computing
6 9 (2.41%) Fat Client
6 9 (2.41%) Thin Client
7 8 (2.14%) Data Centre
7 8 (2.14%) Low-Code
7 8 (2.14%) Mobile App
7 8 (2.14%) Onboarding
7 8 (2.14%) Security Posture
7 8 (2.14%) Virtual Team
8 7 (1.87%) Data Structures
8 7 (1.87%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 52 (13.90%) Linux
2 27 (7.22%) Android
3 20 (5.35%) Windows
4 9 (2.41%) Windows 7
5 8 (2.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 8 (2.14%) Unix
6 7 (1.87%) Apple iOS
7 4 (1.07%) Ubuntu
8 3 (0.80%) Debian
8 3 (0.80%) Rocky
8 3 (0.80%) Windows Server
9 2 (0.53%) CentOS
9 2 (0.53%) VMS
10 1 (0.27%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 118 (31.55%) Software Engineering
2 107 (28.61%) Microservices
3 89 (23.80%) CI/CD
4 86 (22.99%) AI
5 83 (22.19%) Agile
6 62 (16.58%) Problem-Solving
7 60 (16.04%) DevOps
7 60 (16.04%) LLM
8 57 (15.24%) Containerisation
9 50 (13.37%) Machine Learning
10 48 (12.83%) Infrastructure as Code
11 44 (11.76%) Generative AI
12 42 (11.23%) Data Pipeline
13 38 (10.16%) Computer Science
14 36 (9.63%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
15 35 (9.36%) Stakeholder Management
15 35 (9.36%) Test Automation
16 33 (8.82%) Observability
17 32 (8.56%) Clean Code
18 31 (8.29%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 160 (42.78%) Python
2 88 (23.53%) Go
3 78 (20.86%) Java
4 60 (16.04%) SQL
5 34 (9.09%) JavaScript
6 33 (8.82%) TypeScript
7 25 (6.68%) C#
8 23 (6.15%) Kotlin
9 14 (3.74%) Bash
10 11 (2.94%) Ruby
11 10 (2.67%) Scala
12 9 (2.41%) PowerShell
12 9 (2.41%) Shell Script
13 7 (1.87%) PL/SQL
14 5 (1.34%) C++
15 4 (1.07%) Delphi
15 4 (1.07%) PHP
15 4 (1.07%) Solidity
16 2 (0.53%) Kusto Query Language
16 2 (0.53%) Rust
Qualifications
1 88 (23.53%) Security Cleared
2 57 (15.24%) SC Cleared
3 44 (11.76%) Degree
4 23 (6.15%) Computer Science Degree
5 20 (5.35%) DV Cleared
6 16 (4.28%) BPSS Clearance
7 13 (3.48%) Master's Degree
8 8 (2.14%) PhD
9 4 (1.07%) AWS Certification
9 4 (1.07%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 2 (0.53%) GPEN
10 2 (0.53%) GWAPT
10 2 (0.53%) OSCP
11 1 (0.27%) CCIP
11 1 (0.27%) CCSAS
11 1 (0.27%) GXPN
11 1 (0.27%) ISEB
11 1 (0.27%) MPhil
11 1 (0.27%) OSCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (5.35%) Accessibility
2 15 (4.01%) QA
3 11 (2.94%) NIST
4 10 (2.67%) Data Quality
4 10 (2.67%) WCAG
5 8 (2.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 7 (1.87%) GDPR
7 5 (1.34%) Cyber Essentials
7 5 (1.34%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
8 2 (0.53%) GPG for Computer-Based Electronic Evidence
8 2 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 17025
8 2 (0.53%) ISO17020
8 2 (0.53%) NCSC
8 2 (0.53%) SLA
9 1 (0.27%) GRC
9 1 (0.27%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
9 1 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 42001
9 1 (0.27%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.27%) SOC 2
System Software
1 135 (36.10%) Docker
2 16 (4.28%) Active Directory
3 7 (1.87%) Virtual Machines
4 4 (1.07%) Ceph
4 4 (1.07%) Oracle RAC
4 4 (1.07%) Postfix
5 3 (0.80%) ISA Server
5 3 (0.80%) KVM
6 2 (0.53%) Oracle Clusterware
7 1 (0.27%) Firmware
7 1 (0.27%) iptables
7 1 (0.27%) Lustre
7 1 (0.27%) NFS
7 1 (0.27%) QEMU
7 1 (0.27%) Samba
7 1 (0.27%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 128 (34.22%) Kubernetes
2 38 (10.16%) Terraform
3 30 (8.02%) Grafana
4 27 (7.22%) Prometheus
5 12 (3.21%) Ansible
6 9 (2.41%) WMI
7 8 (2.14%) Istio
8 6 (1.60%) Argo
8 6 (1.60%) Puppet
9 4 (1.07%) Data Guard
9 4 (1.07%) Oracle RMAN
10 3 (0.80%) HAProxy
11 2 (0.53%) Amdocs OSS
11 2 (0.53%) Knative
11 2 (0.53%) Rancher
11 2 (0.53%) Salt
12 1 (0.27%) CASB
12 1 (0.27%) MOM
12 1 (0.27%) SELinux
Vendors
1 33 (8.82%) Microsoft
2 27 (7.22%) Google
3 26 (6.95%) OpenAI
4 12 (3.21%) Oracle
5 11 (2.94%) Atlassian
6 10 (2.67%) Splunk
6 10 (2.67%) VMware
7 9 (2.41%) UiPath
8 8 (2.14%) Automation Anywhere
9 6 (1.60%) Dynatrace
9 6 (1.60%) Red Hat
9 6 (1.60%) Sybase
10 5 (1.34%) Databricks
10 5 (1.34%) Jaspersoft
10 5 (1.34%) SAP
10 5 (1.34%) ServiceNow
11 4 (1.07%) Adobe
11 4 (1.07%) webMethods
11 4 (1.07%) Xamarin
12 3 (0.80%) Cloudera