RHCE Contract Job Trends

Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies with a requirement for RHCE qualifications. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered over the 6 months leading up to 7 September 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 656 542 554
Rank change year-on-year -114 +12 +69
Contract jobs citing RHCE 22 12 15
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.041% 0.037% 0.039%
As % of the Qualifications category 0.13% 0.12% 0.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 17 8 11
10th Percentile £480 £344 £193
25th Percentile £494 £460 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £340
Median % change year-on-year -3.80% +52.87% -32.00%
75th Percentile £526 £529 £435
90th Percentile £635 £584 £575
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £520 £340
% change year-on-year -3.80% +52.87% -38.18%

All Academic and Professional Certifications
UK

RHCE falls under the Academic Qualifications and Professional Certifications category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications.

Contract vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications 17,023 10,195 11,367
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 31.45% 31.15% 29.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 11,406 6,322 7,098
10th Percentile £350 £300 £313
25th Percentile £438 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.55%
75th Percentile £627 £621 £638
90th Percentile £715 £700 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,278 804 701
10th Percentile £17.25 £18.04 £16.00
25th Percentile £25.77 £18.87 £24.00
Median hourly rate £47.54 £25.15 £49.00
Median % change year-on-year +89.03% -48.67% -10.91%
75th Percentile £72.54 £49.06 £67.81
90th Percentile £87.16 £71.39 £75.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £25.15 £52.50
% change year-on-year +88.87% -52.10% +1.18%

RHCE
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing RHCE relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

RHCE job vacancy trend in the UK

RHCE
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing RHCE.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing RHCE

RHCE
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing RHCE over the 6 months to 7 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for RHCE in the UK

RHCE
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing RHCE.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing RHCE

RHCE
Top 10 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing RHCE within the UK over the 6 months to 7 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 -95 20 £500 -3.80% 12
UK excluding London -82 19 £500 -3.80% 7
South East - 10 £500 - 2
North of England -67 6 £494 -4.95% 1
North West -53 5 £494 -4.95% 1
Work from Home -56 4 £615 +5.35% 4
London -76 3 £635 +69.20% 6
Scotland -26 2 £450 - 1
South West -44 1 - - 1
Yorkshire - 1 - -

RHCE
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:

Cloud Services
1 9 (40.91%) OpenShift
2 3 (13.64%) AWS
2 3 (13.64%) Azure
3 2 (9.09%) GCP
4 1 (4.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 1 (4.55%) AWS CloudFormation
4 1 (4.55%) Azure DevOps
4 1 (4.55%) GitHub
4 1 (4.55%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 2 (9.09%) DNS
1 2 (9.09%) HTTPS
1 2 (9.09%) SSH
1 2 (9.09%) SSL
2 1 (4.55%) Firewall
Development Applications
1 5 (22.73%) Jenkins
2 2 (9.09%) GitLab
General
1 6 (27.27%) Finance
2 5 (22.73%) Banking
3 4 (18.18%) Social Skills
4 3 (13.64%) Public Sector
5 2 (9.09%) Analytical Skills
Job Titles
1 7 (31.82%) Linux Engineer
2 5 (22.73%) Platform Engineer
2 5 (22.73%) Senior
2 5 (22.73%) Unix Engineer
3 4 (18.18%) Senior Linux Engineer
4 1 (4.55%) Administrator
4 1 (4.55%) Architect
4 1 (4.55%) Lead
4 1 (4.55%) Migration Engineer
4 1 (4.55%) Optimisation Engineer
4 1 (4.55%) Senior Unix Engineer
4 1 (4.55%) Technology Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (9.09%) Terraform
2 1 (4.55%) LDAP
2 1 (4.55%) Software Packaging
Miscellaneous
1 5 (22.73%) Data Centre
1 5 (22.73%) Legacy Systems
2 2 (9.09%) Analytical Mindset
2 2 (9.09%) Virtual Team
3 1 (4.55%) CMDB
3 1 (4.55%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (4.55%) Hybrid Cloud
3 1 (4.55%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 22 (100.00%) Linux
2 15 (68.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 5 (22.73%) AIX
3 5 (22.73%) HPUX
3 5 (22.73%) Oracle Linux
3 5 (22.73%) Solaris
3 5 (22.73%) SUSE
3 5 (22.73%) Unix
4 3 (13.64%) Windows
5 1 (4.55%) CoreOS
5 1 (4.55%) Mac OS
5 1 (4.55%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 12 (54.55%) Runbook
2 9 (40.91%) DevOps
3 7 (31.82%) CI/CD
3 7 (31.82%) Containerisation
3 7 (31.82%) Migration
3 7 (31.82%) Security Hardening
4 6 (27.27%) Change Management
4 6 (27.27%) Continuous Improvement
4 6 (27.27%) Platform Engineering
4 6 (27.27%) Root Cause Analysis
5 5 (22.73%) ITIL
5 5 (22.73%) Performance Management
5 5 (22.73%) RBAC
5 5 (22.73%) Site Reliability Engineering
5 5 (22.73%) Storage Management
5 5 (22.73%) Vulnerability Management
5 5 (22.73%) Vulnerability Remediation
6 4 (18.18%) Infrastructure as Code
7 3 (13.64%) Service Management
7 3 (13.64%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 6 (27.27%) Bash
1 6 (27.27%) Python
2 5 (22.73%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 13 (59.09%) Security Cleared
2 10 (45.45%) RHCSA
3 9 (40.91%) SC Cleared
4 6 (27.27%) LFCS
5 5 (22.73%) CISSP
5 5 (22.73%) CompTIA Security+
6 4 (18.18%) DV Cleared
7 3 (13.64%) LPIC
8 2 (9.09%) Degree
8 2 (9.09%) RHCA
9 1 (4.55%) Computer Science Degree
9 1 (4.55%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (22.73%) GRC
2 1 (4.55%) Disclosure Scotland
2 1 (4.55%) OpenSCAP
System Software
1 3 (13.64%) VMware Infrastructure
2 2 (9.09%) Ceph
2 2 (9.09%) Hyper-V
3 1 (4.55%) Active Directory
3 1 (4.55%) Docker
3 1 (4.55%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 8 (36.36%) Ansible
2 7 (31.82%) Kubernetes
3 1 (4.55%) Argo
3 1 (4.55%) FreeIPA
3 1 (4.55%) Grafana
3 1 (4.55%) Packer
3 1 (4.55%) Podman
3 1 (4.55%) Progress Chef
3 1 (4.55%) Prometheus
3 1 (4.55%) Red Hat Satellite
3 1 (4.55%) SELinux
3 1 (4.55%) yum
Vendors
1 20 (90.91%) Red Hat
2 5 (22.73%) HP
2 5 (22.73%) Oracle
3 4 (18.18%) Microsoft
4 3 (13.64%) VMware
5 1 (4.55%) ServiceNow
5 1 (4.55%) Splunk