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

6 months to
11 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 297 293 269
Rank change year-on-year -4 -24 -34
Contract jobs citing Open Source 376 253 397
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.88% 0.86% 0.89%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.03% 0.95% 1.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 172 179 253
10th Percentile £350 £400 £363
25th Percentile £425 £456 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £544 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -5.48% - -4.01%
75th Percentile £650 £700 £675
90th Percentile £788 £838 £785
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £500 £575
% change year-on-year -10.00% -13.04% +9.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 2 11
10th Percentile - £32.90 -
25th Percentile £15.25 £43.25 £19.99
Median hourly rate £15.50 £60.50 £21.25
Median % change year-on-year -74.38% +184.71% -67.31%
75th Percentile £39.75 £77.75 £65.20
90th Percentile £54.15 £88.10 £72.90
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 36,632 26,629 38,749
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.08% 90.34% 86.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,216 16,983 25,185
10th Percentile £313 £306 £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 £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £743 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.84% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,179 898 2,347
10th Percentile £14.64 £15.57 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.06
Median hourly rate £29.61 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -8.89% - -7.14%
75th Percentile £64.75 £65.00 £57.50
90th Percentile £74.68 £76.53 £71.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £26.55 £32.00 £31.80
% change year-on-year -17.02% +0.63% -9.14%

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 11 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 11 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Open Source in the UK

Open Source
Top 15 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 11 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 -16 308 £550 -8.33% 189
London -21 158 £625 -3.85% 102
UK excluding London -32 139 £450 -10.00% 113
Work from Home +6 135 £500 -20.00% 84
North of England -36 41 £450 -2.70% 29
South East -30 30 £463 -7.50% 28
Scotland +19 23 £675 +28.57% 7
South West -4 21 £380 -39.20% 17
North West -21 21 £391 -15.41% 13
West Midlands -48 17 £440 +1.97% 8
Yorkshire -53 17 £513 -3.85% 11
Midlands -64 17 £440 +1.97% 8
East of England -32 6 £552 +52.90% 20
North East -10 3 - - 5
Wales -7 1 - - 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 17 (4.52%) Apache
2 12 (3.19%) Confluence
3 11 (2.93%) JBoss
3 11 (2.93%) WebLogic
4 10 (2.66%) Apache Spark
4 10 (2.66%) Appian
5 5 (1.33%) Apache Airflow
5 5 (1.33%) OpenStack
6 4 (1.06%) Adobe Experience Manager
6 4 (1.06%) nginx
7 3 (0.80%) Ethereum
7 3 (0.80%) Hyperledger
7 3 (0.80%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.53%) Liferay
8 2 (0.53%) Tomcat
9 1 (0.27%) Apache Superset
9 1 (0.27%) ArcGIS
9 1 (0.27%) GeoServer
9 1 (0.27%) Oracle Coherence
9 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
1 174 (46.28%) AWS
2 82 (21.81%) Azure
3 41 (10.90%) GitHub
4 28 (7.45%) GCP
5 24 (6.38%) GitHub Actions
6 23 (6.12%) Amazon S3
7 20 (5.32%) Azure AI
7 20 (5.32%) Serverless
8 14 (3.72%) Azure DevOps
9 13 (3.46%) Amazon EC2
9 13 (3.46%) Anthropic Claude
10 11 (2.93%) Azure Cognitive Services
10 11 (2.93%) CloudFront
11 10 (2.66%) Amazon Bedrock
11 10 (2.66%) Amazon SageMaker
11 10 (2.66%) Azure Data Factory
11 10 (2.66%) Cloud Computing
11 10 (2.66%) Google Gemini
12 9 (2.39%) AWS Lambda
12 9 (2.39%) Azure Cognitive Search
Communications & Networking
1 16 (4.26%) Firewall
2 6 (1.60%) DHCP
2 6 (1.60%) DNS
3 5 (1.33%) Reverse Proxy
4 4 (1.06%) Internet
4 4 (1.06%) WAN
5 3 (0.80%) VLAN
6 2 (0.53%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.27%) InfiniBand
7 1 (0.27%) Intrusion Detection
7 1 (0.27%) iSCSI
7 1 (0.27%) Kerberos
7 1 (0.27%) LAN
7 1 (0.27%) LTE
7 1 (0.27%) NAS
7 1 (0.27%) Network Security
7 1 (0.27%) RTP
7 1 (0.27%) SAN
7 1 (0.27%) SNMP
7 1 (0.27%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 68 (18.09%) Apache Cassandra
2 47 (12.50%) PostgreSQL
3 27 (7.18%) MongoDB
4 22 (5.85%) NoSQL
5 17 (4.52%) SQL Server
6 14 (3.72%) Pinecone
6 14 (3.72%) Relational Database
7 13 (3.46%) BigQuery
7 13 (3.46%) Redis
8 11 (2.93%) DynamoDB
9 9 (2.39%) DB2
9 9 (2.39%) Metadata
10 7 (1.86%) Amazon RDS
11 6 (1.60%) Big Data
11 6 (1.60%) Couchbase
11 6 (1.60%) Weaviate
12 5 (1.33%) Amazon Aurora
12 5 (1.33%) GIS
12 5 (1.33%) RDBMS
13 4 (1.06%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 54 (14.36%) Git
2 32 (8.51%) GitLab
3 30 (7.98%) JUnit
4 27 (7.18%) Jenkins
5 17 (4.52%) JIRA
6 14 (3.72%) MLflow
7 13 (3.46%) Selenium
8 10 (2.66%) IntelliJ
9 9 (2.39%) Eclipse
10 8 (2.13%) Gradle
10 8 (2.13%) SonarQube
11 7 (1.86%) CircleCI
11 7 (1.86%) Cucumber
12 6 (1.60%) Maven
12 6 (1.60%) Mocha
12 6 (1.60%) Mockito
13 5 (1.33%) Bitbucket Server
13 5 (1.33%) DbUnit
13 5 (1.33%) jMock
13 5 (1.33%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 82 (21.81%) Social Skills
2 66 (17.55%) Finance
3 51 (13.56%) Public Sector
4 35 (9.31%) Analytical Skills
5 34 (9.04%) Banking
6 15 (3.99%) Front Office
6 15 (3.99%) Investment Banking
7 13 (3.46%) Legal
8 12 (3.19%) Influencing Skills
9 6 (1.60%) Financial Institution
9 6 (1.60%) Presentation Skills
9 6 (1.60%) Publishing
9 6 (1.60%) Retail
9 6 (1.60%) Telecoms
10 5 (1.33%) Documentation Skills
10 5 (1.33%) Organisational Skills
11 4 (1.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 4 (1.06%) Marketing
12 3 (0.80%) Military
13 2 (0.53%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 132 (35.11%) Developer
2 92 (24.47%) Senior
3 58 (15.43%) Senior Developer
4 52 (13.83%) Architect
5 38 (10.11%) Software Engineer
6 27 (7.18%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 23 (6.12%) Solutions Architect
8 19 (5.05%) Android Developer
9 17 (4.52%) Java Developer
10 14 (3.72%) AWS Architect
11 13 (3.46%) Data Engineer
11 13 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
11 13 (3.46%) Python Developer
12 11 (2.93%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
13 10 (2.66%) Automation Engineer
13 10 (2.66%) AWS Solution Architect
13 10 (2.66%) Data Scientist
13 10 (2.66%) Lead
13 10 (2.66%) Senior Platform Engineer
14 9 (2.39%) Cloud Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 110 (29.26%) Kafka
2 73 (19.41%) gRPC
3 56 (14.89%) REST
4 37 (9.84%) React
5 34 (9.04%) Spring
6 31 (8.24%) Node.js
7 30 (7.98%) RESTful
8 28 (7.45%) HTML
9 26 (6.91%) LangChain
10 22 (5.85%) AngularJS
10 22 (5.85%) Web Services
11 21 (5.59%) .NET
12 19 (5.05%) Android Jetpack
12 19 (5.05%) CSS
12 19 (5.05%) Jetpack Compose
12 19 (5.05%) PyTorch
13 18 (4.79%) HTML5
14 17 (4.52%) Android SDK
14 17 (4.52%) JSON
14 17 (4.52%) Spring Boot
Miscellaneous
1 77 (20.48%) Distributed Systems
2 26 (6.91%) Cloud Native
3 19 (5.05%) Product Ownership
4 14 (3.72%) Equities
5 10 (2.66%) AI Agents
5 10 (2.66%) Legacy Code
5 10 (2.66%) Legacy Systems
5 10 (2.66%) PKI
6 9 (2.39%) Data Structures
6 9 (2.39%) Distributed Computing
6 9 (2.39%) Fat Client
6 9 (2.39%) Mobile App
6 9 (2.39%) Onboarding
6 9 (2.39%) Thin Client
6 9 (2.39%) Virtual Team
7 8 (2.13%) Data Protection Act
7 8 (2.13%) Low-Code
7 8 (2.13%) Security Posture
8 7 (1.86%) Data Centre
8 7 (1.86%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 51 (13.56%) Linux
2 29 (7.71%) Android
3 20 (5.32%) Windows
4 13 (3.46%) Unix
5 9 (2.39%) Windows 7
6 8 (2.13%) Apple iOS
7 7 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 3 (0.80%) Ubuntu
8 3 (0.80%) Windows Server
9 2 (0.53%) CentOS
9 2 (0.53%) Debian
9 2 (0.53%) Rocky
9 2 (0.53%) VMS
10 1 (0.27%) Oracle Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 120 (31.91%) Software Engineering
2 112 (29.79%) Microservices
3 92 (24.47%) CI/CD
4 90 (23.94%) Agile
5 85 (22.61%) AI
6 68 (18.09%) Problem-Solving
7 61 (16.22%) DevOps
8 60 (15.96%) LLM
9 56 (14.89%) Containerisation
10 51 (13.56%) Machine Learning
11 50 (13.30%) Infrastructure as Code
12 45 (11.97%) Generative AI
13 41 (10.90%) Data Pipeline
14 36 (9.57%) Computer Science
14 36 (9.57%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
15 35 (9.31%) Test Automation
16 34 (9.04%) Continuous Integration
16 34 (9.04%) Stakeholder Management
17 33 (8.78%) Performance Tuning
18 32 (8.51%) Clean Code
Programming Languages
1 157 (41.76%) Python
2 86 (22.87%) Go
3 83 (22.07%) Java
4 65 (17.29%) SQL
5 35 (9.31%) JavaScript
6 33 (8.78%) TypeScript
7 26 (6.91%) C#
8 25 (6.65%) Kotlin
9 14 (3.72%) Scala
10 13 (3.46%) Bash
11 11 (2.93%) Ruby
11 11 (2.93%) Shell Script
12 8 (2.13%) PowerShell
13 6 (1.60%) PL/SQL
14 4 (1.06%) C++
14 4 (1.06%) Delphi
14 4 (1.06%) PHP
14 4 (1.06%) Solidity
15 3 (0.80%) Swift
16 2 (0.53%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 86 (22.87%) Security Cleared
2 55 (14.63%) SC Cleared
3 42 (11.17%) Degree
4 22 (5.85%) Computer Science Degree
5 20 (5.32%) DV Cleared
6 17 (4.52%) BPSS Clearance
7 13 (3.46%) Master's Degree
8 8 (2.13%) PhD
9 4 (1.06%) AWS Certification
9 4 (1.06%) 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 (5.32%) Accessibility
2 14 (3.72%) QA
3 10 (2.66%) Data Quality
3 10 (2.66%) NIST
3 10 (2.66%) WCAG
4 7 (1.86%) GDPR
4 7 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 5 (1.33%) Cyber Essentials
5 5 (1.33%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
6 2 (0.53%) GPG for Computer-Based Electronic Evidence
6 2 (0.53%) ISO/IEC 17025
6 2 (0.53%) ISO17020
6 2 (0.53%) NCSC
6 2 (0.53%) SLA
7 1 (0.27%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
7 1 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 42001
7 1 (0.27%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.27%) SOC 2
System Software
1 139 (36.97%) Docker
2 16 (4.26%) Active Directory
3 7 (1.86%) Virtual Machines
4 4 (1.06%) Ceph
4 4 (1.06%) Postfix
5 3 (0.80%) ISA Server
5 3 (0.80%) KVM
5 3 (0.80%) Oracle RAC
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
1 127 (33.78%) Kubernetes
2 35 (9.31%) Terraform
3 28 (7.45%) Grafana
4 25 (6.65%) Prometheus
5 12 (3.19%) Ansible
6 11 (2.93%) Puppet
7 9 (2.39%) WMI
8 8 (2.13%) Istio
9 6 (1.60%) Argo
10 3 (0.80%) Data Guard
10 3 (0.80%) HAProxy
10 3 (0.80%) Oracle RMAN
11 2 (0.53%) Knative
11 2 (0.53%) Rancher
11 2 (0.53%) Salt
12 1 (0.27%) Amdocs OSS
12 1 (0.27%) CASB
12 1 (0.27%) MOM
12 1 (0.27%) SELinux
Vendors
1 33 (8.78%) Microsoft
2 28 (7.45%) Google
3 26 (6.91%) OpenAI
4 11 (2.93%) Atlassian
4 11 (2.93%) Oracle
5 10 (2.66%) VMware
6 9 (2.39%) Splunk
6 9 (2.39%) UiPath
6 9 (2.39%) webMethods
7 8 (2.13%) Automation Anywhere
7 8 (2.13%) Sybase
8 6 (1.60%) Red Hat
9 5 (1.33%) Databricks
9 5 (1.33%) Dynatrace
9 5 (1.33%) Jaspersoft
9 5 (1.33%) SAP
10 4 (1.06%) Adobe
10 4 (1.06%) ServiceNow
10 4 (1.06%) Xamarin
11 3 (0.80%) Cisco