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 4 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 408 262 299
Rank change year-on-year -146 +37 -64
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 247 287 325
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 1.00% 0.76%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.88% 2.92% 2.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 166 166 236
10th Percentile £325 £358 £332
25th Percentile £400 £438 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £466 £520 £501
Median % change year-on-year -10.36% +3.79% -8.03%
75th Percentile £538 £600 £617
90th Percentile £634 £650 £710
UK excluding London median daily rate £457 £500 £460
% change year-on-year -8.60% +8.70% -13.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 14 8
10th Percentile £28.30 £65.90 £59.73
25th Percentile £32.13 - £64.19
Median hourly rate £39.50 £68.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -41.91% +4.62% -2.35%
75th Percentile £47.13 - £67.69
90th Percentile £51.10 £77.13 £76.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.50 £68.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -41.91% +4.62% +0.97%

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 13,144 9,842 12,877
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.86% 34.14% 30.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,599 6,676 9,129
10th Percentile £358 £356 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £626 £650
90th Percentile £713 £758 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 557 229 519
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.00 £31.25
25th Percentile £54.55 £34.48 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -7.26% -0.80%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.85 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.59% +0.40% -

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 4 June 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 4 June 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 4 June 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 -115 214 £471 -10.24% 46
UK excluding London -145 123 £457 -8.60% 34
London -78 96 £518 -5.91% 14
Work from Home -73 62 £500 +2.04% 37
South East -52 34 £400 -33.33% 18
North of England -85 29 £460 -8.00% 7
Midlands -50 27 £467 -0.14% 3
West Midlands -48 26 £466 +1.29% 2
East of England -22 25 £470 +44.62% 5
Yorkshire -70 15 £480 -4.00% 2
North West -33 12 £450 -11.05% 5
Scotland -62 3 - - 1
South West -48 2 £556 +6.71% 1
Northern Ireland - 2 £190 -
Wales -15 1 £345 -
East Midlands -25 1 £525 +10.53% 1
North East - 1 £413 -

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 13 (5.26%) Apache
2 12 (4.86%) Confluence
3 7 (2.83%) Apache Airflow
3 7 (2.83%) Apache Spark
4 6 (2.43%) CICS
5 4 (1.62%) WebLogic
6 3 (1.21%) JBoss
6 3 (1.21%) nginx
6 3 (1.21%) Tomcat
6 3 (1.21%) WebSphere
6 3 (1.21%) WebSphere Application Server
7 2 (0.81%) ArcGIS
7 2 (0.81%) Oracle Spatial
7 2 (0.81%) Oracle Workflow
7 2 (0.81%) SharePoint
8 1 (0.40%) IBM HTTP Server
8 1 (0.40%) SAS
Applications
1 7 (2.83%) Notepad++
2 2 (0.81%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 3 (1.21%) Oracle Applications
2 1 (0.40%) FLEXCUBE
2 1 (0.40%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.40%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.40%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 88 (35.63%) AWS
2 50 (20.24%) Azure
3 42 (17.00%) GitHub
4 36 (14.57%) GitHub Actions
4 36 (14.57%) Serverless
5 25 (10.12%) Amazon S3
5 25 (10.12%) AWS Lambda
6 23 (9.31%) Amazon EC2
7 20 (8.10%) OpenShift
8 16 (6.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 16 (6.48%) GCP
9 15 (6.07%) Amazon EKS
10 13 (5.26%) Azure DevOps
11 12 (4.86%) AWS CloudFormation
12 10 (4.05%) PaaS
13 9 (3.64%) AWS CodePipeline
13 9 (3.64%) Power Platform
14 8 (3.24%) IaaS
14 8 (3.24%) Virtual Private Cloud
15 5 (2.02%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 11 (4.45%) DNS
2 10 (4.05%) SSH
3 8 (3.24%) Network Security
3 8 (3.24%) SAN
4 7 (2.83%) PuTTY
4 7 (2.83%) WinSCP
5 6 (2.43%) TCP/IP
6 5 (2.02%) Firewall
7 3 (1.21%) HTTPS
7 3 (1.21%) MQTT
7 3 (1.21%) NAS
7 3 (1.21%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.81%) AMQP
8 2 (0.81%) HTTP
8 2 (0.81%) iSCSI
8 2 (0.81%) Multicast
8 2 (0.81%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.81%) VPN
9 1 (0.40%) Kerberos
9 1 (0.40%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (10.93%) SQL Server
2 25 (10.12%) Oracle Database
3 20 (8.10%) Relational Database
4 19 (7.69%) PostgreSQL
5 17 (6.88%) MongoDB
6 16 (6.48%) Data Warehouse
7 14 (5.67%) Amazon RDS
8 13 (5.26%) Metadata
9 10 (4.05%) BusinessObjects
9 10 (4.05%) DB2
9 10 (4.05%) MySQL
10 9 (3.64%) DynamoDB
11 8 (3.24%) Data Lake
12 7 (2.83%) Amazon Aurora
12 7 (2.83%) Oracle Reports
13 6 (2.43%) Elasticsearch
13 6 (2.43%) NoSQL
13 6 (2.43%) Power BI
14 5 (2.02%) Apache Cassandra
14 5 (2.02%) Oracle Database 12c
Development Applications
1 63 (25.51%) Jenkins
2 48 (19.43%) Git
2 48 (19.43%) GitLab
3 22 (8.91%) JIRA
4 8 (3.24%) JUnit
5 7 (2.83%) Maven
5 7 (2.83%) SonarQube
6 5 (2.02%) Atlassian Bamboo
6 5 (2.02%) JMeter
6 5 (2.02%) Mockito
6 5 (2.02%) Sonatype Nexus
7 4 (1.62%) Bitbucket
8 3 (1.21%) Artifactory
8 3 (1.21%) CircleCI
8 3 (1.21%) PyCharm
8 3 (1.21%) PyUnit
8 3 (1.21%) Terragrunt
9 2 (0.81%) Gatling
9 2 (0.81%) Gradle
9 2 (0.81%) Xcode
General
1 58 (23.48%) Social Skills
2 55 (22.27%) Finance
3 41 (16.60%) Banking
4 28 (11.34%) Public Sector
5 16 (6.48%) Analytical Skills
6 13 (5.26%) Documentation Skills
7 10 (4.05%) Front Office
7 10 (4.05%) Retail
8 9 (3.64%) Investment Banking
9 8 (3.24%) Aerospace
10 5 (2.02%) Advertising
11 3 (1.21%) Law
11 3 (1.21%) Local Government
12 2 (0.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 2 (0.81%) Organisational Skills
12 2 (0.81%) Telecoms
13 1 (0.40%) Influencing Skills
13 1 (0.40%) International Banking
13 1 (0.40%) Military
13 1 (0.40%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 64 (25.91%) Developer
2 31 (12.55%) Data Engineer
3 24 (9.72%) Administrator
3 24 (9.72%) Java Developer
3 24 (9.72%) Senior
4 19 (7.69%) DBA
4 19 (7.69%) Python Developer
5 17 (6.88%) Linux Administrator
6 16 (6.48%) Oracle DBA
7 15 (6.07%) Support Engineer
8 14 (5.67%) DevOps Engineer
9 12 (4.86%) Analyst
10 11 (4.45%) Consultant
11 10 (4.05%) AWS DevOps
11 10 (4.05%) AWS Engineer
12 9 (3.64%) Database Engineer
12 9 (3.64%) Senior Developer
12 9 (3.64%) Site Engineer
12 9 (3.64%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 9 (3.64%) Support Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 25 (10.12%) RESTful
2 16 (6.48%) Middleware
3 15 (6.07%) JSON
3 15 (6.07%) Kafka
3 15 (6.07%) LDAP
3 15 (6.07%) Oracle GoldenGate
3 15 (6.07%) Spring
4 14 (5.67%) Spring Boot
5 11 (4.45%) Node.js
6 10 (4.05%) Elastic Stack
7 9 (3.64%) FastAPI
7 9 (3.64%) HTML
8 8 (3.24%) AWS CDK
8 8 (3.24%) Django
8 8 (3.24%) Flask
8 8 (3.24%) Pandas
8 8 (3.24%) React
8 8 (3.24%) REST
8 8 (3.24%) Web Services
9 7 (2.83%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 22 (8.91%) Management Information System
2 16 (6.48%) Data Centre
3 15 (6.07%) Cloud Native
4 13 (5.26%) Linux Command Line
5 8 (3.24%) Fixed Income
5 8 (3.24%) Mainframe
6 7 (2.83%) Hedge funds
6 7 (2.83%) Public Cloud
7 6 (2.43%) Data Structures
7 6 (2.43%) DataPower
7 6 (2.43%) Enterprise Software
7 6 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
7 6 (2.43%) Online Banking
8 5 (2.02%) Data Protection Act
8 5 (2.02%) Derivative
8 5 (2.02%) Equities
8 5 (2.02%) Legacy Code
8 5 (2.02%) Product Ownership
8 5 (2.02%) Self-Motivation
8 5 (2.02%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 153 (61.94%) Linux
2 103 (41.70%) Unix
3 38 (15.38%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 24 (9.72%) Windows
5 13 (5.26%) CentOS
6 7 (2.83%) zOS
7 6 (2.43%) Windows Server
8 5 (2.02%) Apple iOS
8 5 (2.02%) Solaris
9 3 (1.21%) Android
10 2 (0.81%) AIX
10 2 (0.81%) OpenVMS
10 2 (0.81%) Oracle Linux
10 2 (0.81%) Ubuntu
10 2 (0.81%) VMS
11 1 (0.40%) Amazon Linux
11 1 (0.40%) Debian
11 1 (0.40%) Rocky
11 1 (0.40%) Windows Server 2016
11 1 (0.40%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 103 (41.70%) CI/CD
2 65 (26.32%) DevOps
3 55 (22.27%) Problem-Solving
4 54 (21.86%) Agile
5 43 (17.41%) Infrastructure as Code
6 42 (17.00%) Performance Tuning
7 39 (15.79%) Containerisation
8 34 (13.77%) Analytics
9 33 (13.36%) Migration
10 29 (11.74%) Microservices
11 24 (9.72%) High Availability
11 24 (9.72%) Observability
11 24 (9.72%) Task Automation
12 23 (9.31%) Performance Optimisation
13 22 (8.91%) Continuous Improvement
13 22 (8.91%) Data Pipeline
13 22 (8.91%) ITIL
14 21 (8.50%) ETL
14 21 (8.50%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 21 (8.50%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 122 (49.39%) SQL
2 107 (43.32%) Python
3 70 (28.34%) Java
4 33 (13.36%) PL/SQL
5 25 (10.12%) Bash
5 25 (10.12%) JavaScript
6 17 (6.88%) Korn
7 12 (4.86%) Perl
7 12 (4.86%) PowerShell
8 11 (4.45%) MATLAB
9 10 (4.05%) TypeScript
10 9 (3.64%) C#
11 8 (3.24%) C++
11 8 (3.24%) Go
12 7 (2.83%) C
13 6 (2.43%) JCL
13 6 (2.43%) Ruby
14 5 (2.02%) Groovy
15 4 (1.62%) ProC
16 3 (1.21%) Rust
Qualifications
1 96 (38.87%) Security Cleared
2 82 (33.20%) SC Cleared
3 22 (8.91%) Degree
4 17 (6.88%) BPSS Clearance
5 10 (4.05%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.64%) Oracle Certification
7 8 (3.24%) DV Cleared
8 5 (2.02%) Master's Degree
8 5 (2.02%) OCP
9 3 (1.21%) Azure Certification
9 3 (1.21%) CISSP
10 1 (0.40%) AWS Certification
10 1 (0.40%) AWS Certified Developer
10 1 (0.40%) CISM
10 1 (0.40%) ITIL Certification
10 1 (0.40%) MOS
10 1 (0.40%) PMI Certification
10 1 (0.40%) RHCA
10 1 (0.40%) RHCE
10 1 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (7.29%) SLA
2 9 (3.64%) Data Quality
3 8 (3.24%) QA
4 6 (2.43%) GDPR
5 3 (1.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 3 (1.21%) FATCA
5 3 (1.21%) HIPAA
5 3 (1.21%) NIST
6 2 (0.81%) Accessibility
7 1 (0.40%) DICOM
7 1 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 52 (21.05%) Docker
2 16 (6.48%) Oracle RAC
3 14 (5.67%) Active Directory
4 8 (3.24%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (2.02%) Postfix
5 5 (2.02%) Varnish
5 5 (2.02%) VMware Infrastructure
6 4 (1.62%) NFS
6 4 (1.62%) Sendmail
7 3 (1.21%) GridGain
8 2 (0.81%) HDFS
8 2 (0.81%) SRDF
9 1 (0.40%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 1 (0.40%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 51 (20.65%) Kubernetes
2 49 (19.84%) Ansible
3 48 (19.43%) Terraform
4 27 (10.93%) Grafana
5 26 (10.53%) Prometheus
6 23 (9.31%) Oracle RMAN
7 17 (6.88%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 14 (5.67%) Podman
9 11 (4.45%) Check_MK
9 11 (4.45%) Red Hat Satellite
10 10 (4.05%) Progress Chef
11 9 (3.64%) Data Guard
11 9 (3.64%) Puppet
12 5 (2.02%) HAProxy
13 4 (1.62%) Docker Swarm
13 4 (1.62%) Kibana
14 2 (0.81%) Argo
14 2 (0.81%) Consul
14 2 (0.81%) Sysdig
14 2 (0.81%) systemd
Vendors
1 91 (36.84%) Oracle
2 37 (14.98%) Red Hat
3 18 (7.29%) VMware
4 13 (5.26%) Microsoft
5 10 (4.05%) Murex
6 9 (3.64%) Informatica
7 8 (3.24%) Splunk
7 8 (3.24%) Sybase
8 6 (2.43%) IBM
8 6 (2.43%) ServiceNow
8 6 (2.43%) Talend
9 5 (2.02%) Cloudera
9 5 (2.02%) Databricks
9 5 (2.02%) Dynatrace
9 5 (2.02%) Google
9 5 (2.02%) Tenable
9 5 (2.02%) Veritas
10 4 (1.62%) New Relic
10 4 (1.62%) NVIDIA
10 4 (1.62%) Solace