Shell Script Contract Job Trends

Shell Scripting (Shell Programming)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Shell Script skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 408 269 258
Rank change year-on-year -139 -11 +3
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 270 314 362
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 0.96% 0.93%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.92% 2.90% 2.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 188 195 244
10th Percentile £325 £328 £336
25th Percentile £401 £400 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £474 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.25% - -4.76%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £606
90th Percentile £705 £638 £710
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £500 £450
% change year-on-year -10.00% +11.05% -9.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 12 8
10th Percentile £28.30 - £62.98
25th Percentile £32.13 - £63.50
Median hourly rate £39.50 £68.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -41.91% +4.62% -7.14%
75th Percentile £47.13 - £69.88
90th Percentile £51.10 £92.30 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £68.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -41.91% +4.62% -6.31%

All Programming Languages
UK

Shell Script falls under the Programming Languages category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring coding skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 14,055 10,816 12,201
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.27% 32.94% 31.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,153 7,227 8,516
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £503 £535
Median % change year-on-year +2.99% -6.07% -2.73%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 520 288 395
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.23 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £35.00 £43.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% +8.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.55 £80.00 £77.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% +8.33%

Shell Script
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Shell Script job vacancy trend in the UK

Shell Script
Daily Rate Trend

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

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Shell Script

Shell Script
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Shell Script over the 6 months to 20 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Shell Script in the UK

Shell Script
Hourly Rate Trend

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

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Shell Script

Shell Script
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Shell Script over the 6 months to 20 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Shell Script in the UK

Shell Script
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Shell Script within the UK over the 6 months to 20 August 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 -143 223 £475 -5.00% 64
UK excluding London -163 140 £450 -10.00% 53
London -65 110 £550 +4.76% 19
Work from Home -87 73 £470 -1.05% 23
South East -54 33 £424 -29.38% 11
North of England -90 33 £425 -15.00% 19
Scotland -44 26 £425 -13.79% 2
Midlands -50 21 £470 -1.05% 6
Yorkshire -64 20 £425 -15.00% 5
West Midlands -48 18 £470 -6.00% 4
East of England -16 16 £350 +7.69% 4
North West -48 11 £413 +3.13% 11
South West -49 8 £544 +4.32% 8
East Midlands -18 3 £481 +33.61% 2
North East - 3 £463 - 3
Northern Ireland +7 2 £190 - 1
Wales -16 1 £265 -6.19% 2

Shell Script
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 20 (7.41%) Apache
2 14 (5.19%) Apache Airflow
3 9 (3.33%) SAS
4 8 (2.96%) Apache Spark
5 6 (2.22%) CICS
5 6 (2.22%) Oracle Workflow
5 6 (2.22%) WebLogic
6 4 (1.48%) Confluence
6 4 (1.48%) WebSphere
7 3 (1.11%) JBoss
7 3 (1.11%) WebSphere Application Server
8 2 (0.74%) nginx
8 2 (0.74%) OpenStack
8 2 (0.74%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.74%) Tomcat
9 1 (0.37%) IBM HTTP Server
Applications
1 7 (2.59%) Notepad++
Business Applications
1 4 (1.48%) Oracle Assets
1 4 (1.48%) Oracle EBS
1 4 (1.48%) Oracle E-Business Tax
1 4 (1.48%) Oracle FAH
1 4 (1.48%) Oracle General Ledger
1 4 (1.48%) Oracle Internet Expenses
1 4 (1.48%) Oracle iProcurement
1 4 (1.48%) Oracle Payables
1 4 (1.48%) Oracle Receivables
2 3 (1.11%) Oracle Financials
3 1 (0.37%) FLEXCUBE
3 1 (0.37%) Front Arena
3 1 (0.37%) Oracle EBS R12
3 1 (0.37%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.37%) Summit
3 1 (0.37%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 96 (35.56%) AWS
2 64 (23.70%) Azure
3 51 (18.89%) GCP
4 47 (17.41%) GitHub
5 31 (11.48%) Serverless
6 26 (9.63%) GitHub Actions
7 25 (9.26%) AWS Lambda
8 22 (8.15%) Amazon S3
9 16 (5.93%) Amazon EC2
10 15 (5.56%) OpenShift
11 11 (4.07%) dbt
12 10 (3.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 9 (3.33%) Azure DevOps
13 9 (3.33%) Virtual Private Cloud
14 8 (2.96%) AWS CloudFormation
14 8 (2.96%) Power Platform
15 7 (2.59%) Amazon SQS
16 6 (2.22%) Azure Key Vault
16 6 (2.22%) Cloud Composer
16 6 (2.22%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (5.93%) DNS
2 10 (3.70%) SSL
2 10 (3.70%) TCP/IP
3 9 (3.33%) HTTP
4 7 (2.59%) Network Security
4 7 (2.59%) PuTTY
4 7 (2.59%) VPN
4 7 (2.59%) WinSCP
5 6 (2.22%) SAN
6 5 (1.85%) Firewall
6 5 (1.85%) SSH
7 4 (1.48%) MQTT
7 4 (1.48%) Multicast
8 3 (1.11%) 5G
8 3 (1.11%) BGP
8 3 (1.11%) HTTPS
9 2 (0.74%) iSCSI
9 2 (0.74%) OpenVPN
9 2 (0.74%) Reverse Proxy
9 2 (0.74%) tcpdump
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (10.00%) Oracle Database
1 27 (10.00%) SQL Server
2 26 (9.63%) Data Warehouse
3 19 (7.04%) PostgreSQL
3 19 (7.04%) Relational Database
4 17 (6.30%) MySQL
5 16 (5.93%) Db2
6 15 (5.56%) Metadata
6 15 (5.56%) MongoDB
7 12 (4.44%) NoSQL
8 11 (4.07%) Data Lake
9 10 (3.70%) Amazon Aurora
9 10 (3.70%) Amazon RDS
9 10 (3.70%) BusinessObjects
9 10 (3.70%) Oracle Reports
10 9 (3.33%) BigQuery
10 9 (3.33%) Elasticsearch
11 8 (2.96%) DynamoDB
11 8 (2.96%) PowerCenter
11 8 (2.96%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 64 (23.70%) Git
2 57 (21.11%) Jenkins
3 31 (11.48%) GitLab
4 19 (7.04%) Maven
5 13 (4.81%) JUnit
6 11 (4.07%) Claude Code
6 11 (4.07%) JIRA
7 9 (3.33%) Sonatype Nexus
8 8 (2.96%) SonarQube
9 6 (2.22%) Mockito
10 5 (1.85%) Bitbucket
10 5 (1.85%) Gradle
10 5 (1.85%) Oracle Forms
11 4 (1.48%) Artifactory
11 4 (1.48%) JDeveloper
12 3 (1.11%) JMeter
12 3 (1.11%) webpack
12 3 (1.11%) Xcode
13 2 (0.74%) Gatling
13 2 (0.74%) Selenium
General
1 91 (33.70%) Finance
2 59 (21.85%) Banking
3 47 (17.41%) Social Skills
4 23 (8.52%) Analytical Skills
5 20 (7.41%) Public Sector
6 16 (5.93%) Investment Banking
7 7 (2.59%) Documentation Skills
7 7 (2.59%) Front Office
8 5 (1.85%) Telecoms
9 4 (1.48%) Advertising
9 4 (1.48%) Aerospace
9 4 (1.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 4 (1.48%) Retail
10 3 (1.11%) General Ledger
11 2 (0.74%) Prime Brokerage
11 2 (0.74%) Publishing
12 1 (0.37%) Electronics
12 1 (0.37%) Legal
12 1 (0.37%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.37%) Military
Job Titles
1 66 (24.44%) Developer
2 36 (13.33%) Senior
3 35 (12.96%) Data Engineer
4 28 (10.37%) Python Developer
5 18 (6.67%) Java Developer
5 18 (6.67%) Senior Developer
6 17 (6.30%) Architect
7 16 (5.93%) Cloud Engineer
8 15 (5.56%) Support Engineer
9 13 (4.81%) DBA
9 13 (4.81%) DevOps Engineer
9 13 (4.81%) GCP Engineer
10 11 (4.07%) Administrator
10 11 (4.07%) Java Engineer
10 11 (4.07%) Oracle DBA
11 9 (3.33%) Analyst
11 9 (3.33%) Software Engineer
12 8 (2.96%) AWS DevOps
12 8 (2.96%) Linux Administrator
12 8 (2.96%) Senior Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 58 (21.48%) Terraform
2 37 (13.70%) RESTful
3 23 (8.52%) Kafka
3 23 (8.52%) REST
4 20 (7.41%) Spring
5 19 (7.04%) FastAPI
5 19 (7.04%) Flask
5 19 (7.04%) Spring Boot
6 17 (6.30%) Pandas
7 15 (5.56%) JSON
8 13 (4.81%) CSS
8 13 (4.81%) HTML
8 13 (4.81%) Middleware
8 13 (4.81%) Oracle GoldenGate
9 10 (3.70%) Django
9 10 (3.70%) Elastic Stack
9 10 (3.70%) PySpark
9 10 (3.70%) RabbitMQ
10 9 (3.33%) Web Services
11 8 (2.96%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 31 (11.48%) Linux Command Line
2 15 (5.56%) Cloud Native
2 15 (5.56%) Management Information System
3 11 (4.07%) Fixed Income
4 8 (2.96%) Data Centre
4 8 (2.96%) Enterprise Software
4 8 (2.96%) Mainframe
4 8 (2.96%) Replication
5 7 (2.59%) Derivative
5 7 (2.59%) Enterprise Cloud
5 7 (2.59%) Hedge funds
5 7 (2.59%) Self-Motivation
6 6 (2.22%) DataPower
6 6 (2.22%) Distributed Systems
6 6 (2.22%) Legacy Systems
6 6 (2.22%) Market Risk
6 6 (2.22%) Online Banking
6 6 (2.22%) Product Ownership
6 6 (2.22%) Public Cloud
7 4 (1.48%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 149 (55.19%) Linux
2 123 (45.56%) Unix
3 24 (8.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 21 (7.78%) Windows
5 9 (3.33%) Solaris
6 7 (2.59%) zOS
7 5 (1.85%) AIX
7 5 (1.85%) CentOS
7 5 (1.85%) Windows Server
8 3 (1.11%) Apple iOS
9 2 (0.74%) HPUX
9 2 (0.74%) OpenVMS
9 2 (0.74%) Oracle Linux
9 2 (0.74%) Ubuntu
10 1 (0.37%) Amazon Linux
10 1 (0.37%) Embedded Linux
10 1 (0.37%) SUSE
10 1 (0.37%) VMS
10 1 (0.37%) Windows Server 2008
10 1 (0.37%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 112 (41.48%) CI/CD
2 77 (28.52%) DevOps
3 55 (20.37%) Infrastructure as Code
4 53 (19.63%) Containerisation
5 44 (16.30%) Performance Tuning
6 43 (15.93%) AI
7 42 (15.56%) Data Pipeline
7 42 (15.56%) Migration
8 41 (15.19%) Agile
9 39 (14.44%) Performance Optimisation
10 38 (14.07%) Problem-Solving
11 37 (13.70%) Analytics
12 34 (12.59%) ETL
13 32 (11.85%) Code Quality
13 32 (11.85%) Observability
14 31 (11.48%) Root Cause Analysis
15 30 (11.11%) Microservices
16 26 (9.63%) Test Automation
17 25 (9.26%) Configuration Management
17 25 (9.26%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 143 (52.96%) SQL
2 140 (51.85%) Python
3 68 (25.19%) Java
4 45 (16.67%) Bash
5 43 (15.93%) PL/SQL
6 18 (6.67%) PowerShell
7 17 (6.30%) JavaScript
8 14 (5.19%) Groovy
9 13 (4.81%) Korn
10 11 (4.07%) Perl
11 8 (2.96%) C#
12 7 (2.59%) JCL
13 6 (2.22%) Ruby
13 6 (2.22%) Scala
13 6 (2.22%) TypeScript
14 5 (1.85%) Go
15 4 (1.48%) C
15 4 (1.48%) C++
15 4 (1.48%) MATLAB
15 4 (1.48%) Rust
Qualifications
1 81 (30.00%) Security Cleared
2 62 (22.96%) SC Cleared
3 27 (10.00%) Degree
4 14 (5.19%) BPSS Clearance
5 9 (3.33%) Computer Science Degree
6 7 (2.59%) DV Cleared
7 6 (2.22%) Oracle Certification
8 5 (1.85%) Master's Degree
9 4 (1.48%) AWS Certification
9 4 (1.48%) CISSP
10 2 (0.74%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.74%) Cisco Certification
10 2 (0.74%) CISM
10 2 (0.74%) OCP
11 1 (0.37%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 1 (0.37%) GIAC
11 1 (0.37%) ISO 27001 Lead Implementer
11 1 (0.37%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
11 1 (0.37%) MOS
11 1 (0.37%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (10.74%) Data Quality
2 12 (4.44%) QA
3 7 (2.59%) SLA
4 6 (2.22%) Accessibility
5 3 (1.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 3 (1.11%) Disclosure Scotland
5 3 (1.11%) GDPR
5 3 (1.11%) HIPAA
5 3 (1.11%) NIST
6 2 (0.74%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.37%) DICOM
7 1 (0.37%) ISO 15022
7 1 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 1 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.37%) SEPA
System Software
1 62 (22.96%) Docker
2 13 (4.81%) Oracle RAC
3 9 (3.33%) Active Directory
4 6 (2.22%) Virtual Machines
4 6 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
5 5 (1.85%) zsh
6 4 (1.48%) NFS
6 4 (1.48%) Postfix
6 4 (1.48%) Sendmail
6 4 (1.48%) Varnish
7 3 (1.11%) GridGain
8 2 (0.74%) KVM
8 2 (0.74%) SRDF
9 1 (0.37%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 77 (28.52%) Kubernetes
2 49 (18.15%) Ansible
3 23 (8.52%) Grafana
4 20 (7.41%) Prometheus
5 18 (6.67%) Oracle RMAN
6 13 (4.81%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
7 8 (2.96%) Control-M
7 8 (2.96%) Data Guard
7 8 (2.96%) Podman
7 8 (2.96%) Puppet
8 7 (2.59%) Kibana
9 5 (1.85%) Progress Chef
10 4 (1.48%) Check_MK
10 4 (1.48%) HAProxy
10 4 (1.48%) HP ALM
10 4 (1.48%) NetBackup
10 4 (1.48%) Red Hat Satellite
11 3 (1.11%) Consul
11 3 (1.11%) ITRS Geneos
11 3 (1.11%) Packer
Vendors
1 91 (33.70%) Oracle
2 32 (11.85%) Google
3 18 (6.67%) Red Hat
4 17 (6.30%) Informatica
4 17 (6.30%) Splunk
5 14 (5.19%) Microsoft
6 13 (4.81%) IBM
7 12 (4.44%) Sybase
8 11 (4.07%) VMware
9 10 (3.70%) New Relic
10 8 (2.96%) HP
11 7 (2.59%) Dynatrace
11 7 (2.59%) ServiceNow
11 7 (2.59%) Solace
12 6 (2.22%) Murex
12 6 (2.22%) Tenable
13 5 (1.85%) Cisco
13 5 (1.85%) Databricks
13 5 (1.85%) NVIDIA
13 5 (1.85%) SAP