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 6 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 393 281 324
Rank change year-on-year -112 +43 -82
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 252 265 288
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.53% 0.90% 0.67%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.95% 2.65% 2.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 174 150 208
10th Percentile £331 £382 £350
25th Percentile £400 £444 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £466 £525 £510
Median % change year-on-year -11.25% +2.94% -5.56%
75th Percentile £538 £600 £625
90th Percentile £624 £676 £710
UK excluding London median daily rate £459 £500 £475
% change year-on-year -8.20% +5.26% -11.71%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 16 8
10th Percentile £46.75 £64.25 £59.73
25th Percentile £47.50 - £64.19
Median hourly rate £50.00 £68.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.47% +4.62% +0.97%
75th Percentile £52.50 £70.06 £67.69
90th Percentile £53.25 £85.63 £76.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £68.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -26.47% +4.62% +5.58%

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 12,892 10,011 12,769
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 27.07% 34.15% 29.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,507 6,800 9,080
10th Percentile £355 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £418 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £713 £775 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 563 252 487
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.55 £31.70
25th Percentile £54.55 £33.91 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +1.46% +2.67%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £79.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +2.40% +3.09%

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 6 May 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
Top 16 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 6 May 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 -87 213 £475 -11.46% 55
UK excluding London -137 119 £459 -8.20% 32
London -46 99 £510 -13.19% 22
Work from Home -64 70 £488 -9.72% 18
Midlands -51 35 £471 +2.45% 4
West Midlands -37 34 £470 +2.17% 2
South East -46 29 £392 -34.67% 17
North of England -62 27 £455 -10.76% 9
East of England -27 20 £473 +45.38% 2
Yorkshire -62 13 £480 -4.00% 4
North West -41 12 £450 -13.42% 4
Scotland -51 4 - -
Wales -14 2 £305 -
South West -50 2 £638 +22.30%
East Midlands -29 1 £525 +10.53% 2
North East - 1 £413 - 1

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 (5.16%) Apache
2 11 (4.37%) Confluence
3 8 (3.17%) Apache Spark
4 6 (2.38%) Apache Airflow
5 4 (1.59%) CICS
5 4 (1.59%) WebLogic
6 3 (1.19%) JBoss
6 3 (1.19%) nginx
6 3 (1.19%) Oracle Workflow
6 3 (1.19%) SharePoint
6 3 (1.19%) Tomcat
6 3 (1.19%) WebSphere
6 3 (1.19%) WebSphere Application Server
7 2 (0.79%) ArcGIS
7 2 (0.79%) Oracle Spatial
8 1 (0.40%) IBM HTTP Server
8 1 (0.40%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 1 (0.40%) SAS
Applications
1 7 (2.78%) Notepad++
2 4 (1.59%) Microsoft Excel
3 2 (0.79%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.79%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (1.19%) Oracle 11i
1 3 (1.19%) Oracle Applications
2 2 (0.79%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.40%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.40%) Oracle Cash Management
3 1 (0.40%) Oracle EBS R12
3 1 (0.40%) Oracle Payables
3 1 (0.40%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.40%) Oracle Receivables
3 1 (0.40%) Oracle Retail
Cloud Services
1 96 (38.10%) AWS
2 52 (20.63%) Azure
3 41 (16.27%) GitHub
4 36 (14.29%) Serverless
5 34 (13.49%) GitHub Actions
6 28 (11.11%) Amazon S3
6 28 (11.11%) OpenShift
7 27 (10.71%) Amazon EC2
7 27 (10.71%) AWS Lambda
8 20 (7.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 16 (6.35%) Amazon EKS
10 14 (5.56%) AWS CloudFormation
10 14 (5.56%) Azure DevOps
11 10 (3.97%) GCP
12 9 (3.57%) AWS CodePipeline
12 9 (3.57%) PaaS
13 8 (3.17%) IaaS
14 7 (2.78%) Azure AKS
14 7 (2.78%) Pulumi
14 7 (2.78%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 13 (5.16%) SSH
2 10 (3.97%) DNS
3 9 (3.57%) SAN
4 8 (3.17%) Network Security
5 7 (2.78%) PuTTY
5 7 (2.78%) TCP/IP
5 7 (2.78%) WinSCP
6 5 (1.98%) Firewall
7 4 (1.59%) HTTP
8 3 (1.19%) HTTPS
8 3 (1.19%) NAS
8 3 (1.19%) Reverse Proxy
9 2 (0.79%) AMQP
9 2 (0.79%) iSCSI
9 2 (0.79%) Multicast
9 2 (0.79%) OpenVPN
10 1 (0.40%) BIG-IP
10 1 (0.40%) SSL
10 1 (0.40%) VLAN
10 1 (0.40%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (9.92%) SQL Server
2 24 (9.52%) Oracle Database
2 24 (9.52%) Relational Database
3 20 (7.94%) PostgreSQL
4 19 (7.54%) Amazon RDS
5 16 (6.35%) Data Warehouse
5 16 (6.35%) MongoDB
6 13 (5.16%) Metadata
7 9 (3.57%) DynamoDB
8 8 (3.17%) NoSQL
9 7 (2.78%) BusinessObjects
9 7 (2.78%) MySQL
10 6 (2.38%) Amazon Aurora
10 6 (2.38%) Data Mart
10 6 (2.38%) DB2
10 6 (2.38%) InfluxDB
10 6 (2.38%) Oracle Reports
11 5 (1.98%) Data Lake
11 5 (1.98%) KDB
11 5 (1.98%) Kdb+
Development Applications
1 62 (24.60%) Jenkins
2 47 (18.65%) GitLab
3 37 (14.68%) Git
4 23 (9.13%) JIRA
5 8 (3.17%) Maven
6 6 (2.38%) JUnit
6 6 (2.38%) Mockito
7 5 (1.98%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 5 (1.98%) JMeter
7 5 (1.98%) Sonatype Nexus
8 4 (1.59%) Bitbucket
8 4 (1.59%) PyCharm
8 4 (1.59%) PyUnit
8 4 (1.59%) SonarQube
9 3 (1.19%) Artifactory
9 3 (1.19%) CircleCI
10 2 (0.79%) Gatling
10 2 (0.79%) Gradle
10 2 (0.79%) Postman
10 2 (0.79%) Terragrunt
General
1 60 (23.81%) Social Skills
2 50 (19.84%) Finance
3 36 (14.29%) Banking
4 28 (11.11%) Public Sector
5 14 (5.56%) Analytical Skills
6 10 (3.97%) Front Office
6 10 (3.97%) Retail
7 9 (3.57%) Documentation Skills
8 8 (3.17%) Investment Banking
9 7 (2.78%) Aerospace
10 5 (1.98%) Advertising
11 3 (1.19%) Law
11 3 (1.19%) Local Government
11 3 (1.19%) Telecoms
12 2 (0.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 2 (0.79%) Manufacturing
12 2 (0.79%) Organisational Skills
13 1 (0.40%) Financial Institution
13 1 (0.40%) Marketing
13 1 (0.40%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 70 (27.78%) Developer
2 29 (11.51%) Data Engineer
3 27 (10.71%) Java Developer
4 20 (7.94%) Senior
5 19 (7.54%) Administrator
6 18 (7.14%) Python Developer
7 17 (6.75%) DBA
8 16 (6.35%) Support Engineer
9 15 (5.95%) DevOps Engineer
9 15 (5.95%) Site Engineer
9 15 (5.95%) Site Reliability Engineer
10 14 (5.56%) Oracle DBA
11 13 (5.16%) Linux Administrator
12 12 (4.76%) AWS Engineer
13 11 (4.37%) AWS DevOps
13 11 (4.37%) Consultant
14 10 (3.97%) Analyst
14 10 (3.97%) Architect
14 10 (3.97%) Database Engineer
15 9 (3.57%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 19 (7.54%) RESTful
2 17 (6.75%) Kafka
2 17 (6.75%) Middleware
3 15 (5.95%) Oracle GoldenGate
4 14 (5.56%) JSON
4 14 (5.56%) Node.js
4 14 (5.56%) Spring
5 13 (5.16%) Elastic Stack
5 13 (5.16%) LDAP
5 13 (5.16%) Spring Boot
6 9 (3.57%) REST
7 8 (3.17%) AWS CDK
7 8 (3.17%) Django
7 8 (3.17%) RabbitMQ
7 8 (3.17%) SOAP
8 7 (2.78%) .NET
8 7 (2.78%) FastAPI
8 7 (2.78%) XML
8 7 (2.78%) YAML
9 6 (2.38%) Flask
Miscellaneous
1 19 (7.54%) Cloud Native
1 19 (7.54%) Management Information System
2 15 (5.95%) Data Centre
3 13 (5.16%) Linux Command Line
4 8 (3.17%) Fixed Income
4 8 (3.17%) Mainframe
5 7 (2.78%) DataPower
5 7 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
6 6 (2.38%) Hedge funds
6 6 (2.38%) Public Cloud
7 5 (1.98%) Data Protection Act
7 5 (1.98%) Data Structures
7 5 (1.98%) Distributed Systems
7 5 (1.98%) Equities
7 5 (1.98%) Legacy Code
7 5 (1.98%) Self-Motivation
7 5 (1.98%) Virtual Team
8 4 (1.59%) Derivative
8 4 (1.59%) Enterprise Software
8 4 (1.59%) Equity Derivative
Operating Systems
1 157 (62.30%) Linux
2 103 (40.87%) Unix
3 34 (13.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 23 (9.13%) Windows
5 11 (4.37%) CentOS
6 6 (2.38%) Windows Server
7 5 (1.98%) VMS
7 5 (1.98%) zOS
8 4 (1.59%) Android
8 4 (1.59%) Apple iOS
8 4 (1.59%) Ubuntu
9 3 (1.19%) AIX
10 2 (0.79%) Debian
10 2 (0.79%) OpenVMS
10 2 (0.79%) Solaris
11 1 (0.40%) Amazon Linux
11 1 (0.40%) Embedded Linux
11 1 (0.40%) Oracle Linux
11 1 (0.40%) Windows Server 2008
11 1 (0.40%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 101 (40.08%) CI/CD
2 62 (24.60%) DevOps
3 59 (23.41%) Problem-Solving
4 57 (22.62%) Agile
5 46 (18.25%) Containerisation
6 43 (17.06%) Performance Tuning
7 42 (16.67%) Infrastructure as Code
8 38 (15.08%) Migration
9 29 (11.51%) Observability
10 28 (11.11%) Analytics
10 28 (11.11%) Task Automation
11 26 (10.32%) Microservices
12 24 (9.52%) High Availability
12 24 (9.52%) ITIL
13 23 (9.13%) Configuration Management
13 23 (9.13%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 22 (8.73%) ETL
15 21 (8.33%) Software Engineering
16 20 (7.94%) Continuous Improvement
16 20 (7.94%) Performance Optimisation
Programming Languages
1 125 (49.60%) SQL
2 104 (41.27%) Python
3 79 (31.35%) Java
4 35 (13.89%) PL/SQL
5 27 (10.71%) JavaScript
6 20 (7.94%) Bash
6 20 (7.94%) Korn
7 14 (5.56%) Perl
8 13 (5.16%) TypeScript
9 10 (3.97%) Go
10 9 (3.57%) MATLAB
11 8 (3.17%) C#
11 8 (3.17%) C++
12 7 (2.78%) PowerShell
13 6 (2.38%) C
14 5 (1.98%) Groovy
14 5 (1.98%) JCL
14 5 (1.98%) ProC
15 3 (1.19%) PHP
15 3 (1.19%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 97 (38.49%) Security Cleared
2 84 (33.33%) SC Cleared
3 18 (7.14%) BPSS Clearance
3 18 (7.14%) Degree
4 12 (4.76%) Oracle Certification
5 11 (4.37%) DV Cleared
6 9 (3.57%) Computer Science Degree
7 8 (3.17%) OCP
8 4 (1.59%) Master's Degree
9 3 (1.19%) Azure Certification
9 3 (1.19%) 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 16 (6.35%) SLA
2 10 (3.97%) Data Quality
3 8 (3.17%) QA
4 6 (2.38%) GDPR
5 3 (1.19%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 3 (1.19%) FATCA
5 3 (1.19%) HIPAA
5 3 (1.19%) NIST
6 1 (0.40%) DICOM
6 1 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 54 (21.43%) Docker
2 15 (5.95%) Oracle RAC
3 12 (4.76%) Active Directory
4 11 (4.37%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (1.98%) VMware Infrastructure
6 4 (1.59%) Postfix
6 4 (1.59%) Varnish
7 3 (1.19%) GridGain
7 3 (1.19%) NFS
7 3 (1.19%) Sendmail
8 2 (0.79%) HDFS
8 2 (0.79%) SRDF
9 1 (0.40%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 1 (0.40%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 58 (23.02%) Kubernetes
2 52 (20.63%) Terraform
3 50 (19.84%) Ansible
4 32 (12.70%) Grafana
5 31 (12.30%) Prometheus
6 22 (8.73%) Oracle RMAN
7 17 (6.75%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 14 (5.56%) Progress Chef
9 10 (3.97%) Podman
9 10 (3.97%) Red Hat Satellite
10 9 (3.57%) Check_MK
11 8 (3.17%) Data Guard
12 7 (2.78%) Puppet
13 6 (2.38%) Kibana
14 4 (1.59%) Docker Swarm
14 4 (1.59%) HAProxy
15 2 (0.79%) Control-M
15 2 (0.79%) logstash
15 2 (0.79%) NetBackup
15 2 (0.79%) systemd
Vendors
1 90 (35.71%) Oracle
2 36 (14.29%) Red Hat
3 17 (6.75%) VMware
4 16 (6.35%) Microsoft
5 11 (4.37%) IBM
5 11 (4.37%) Murex
6 9 (3.57%) Informatica
7 8 (3.17%) Sybase
8 7 (2.78%) Dell
8 7 (2.78%) Splunk
9 6 (2.38%) ServiceNow
9 6 (2.38%) Talend
10 5 (1.98%) Cloudera
10 5 (1.98%) Databricks
10 5 (1.98%) Dynatrace
10 5 (1.98%) Veritas
11 4 (1.59%) Hortonworks
11 4 (1.59%) Solace
12 3 (1.19%) CyberArk
12 3 (1.19%) Pure Storage