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 26 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 341 293 312
Rank change year-on-year -48 +19 -49
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 284 255 309
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.69% 0.83% 0.70%
As % of the Programming Languages category 2.29% 2.46% 2.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 195 124 209
10th Percentile £325 £352 £400
25th Percentile £400 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £483 £525
Median % change year-on-year -6.74% -8.10% -2.78%
75th Percentile £538 £582 £625
90th Percentile £614 £688 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £466 £470 £466
% change year-on-year -0.87% +0.97% -13.48%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 10 7
10th Percentile £57.28 £64.85 £41.33
25th Percentile £66.50 £68.00 £58.13
Median hourly rate £68.00 £73.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.80% +13.46% -10.96%
75th Percentile - £93.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £80.60 £97.50 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.00 £68.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year - +4.62% -10.96%

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 12,412 10,357 12,896
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.95% 33.75% 29.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,281 6,669 9,127
10th Percentile £353 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -5.36%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £485 £500
% change year-on-year -0.67% -3.10% -1.19%
Number of hourly rates quoted 480 236 491
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.63 £35.00
25th Percentile £53.53 £35.56 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.76%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +1.97% +1.99% -3.85%

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 26 February 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 26 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Shell Script in the UK

Shell Script
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 Shell Script within the UK over the 6 months to 26 February 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 -56 234 £467 -6.63% 34
UK excluding London -53 155 £466 -0.87% 29
London -39 87 £445 -14.83% 13
Work from Home -34 85 £454 -7.35% 26
Midlands -33 38 £478 +3.80% 4
West Midlands -31 37 £480 +4.35% 3
North of England -48 36 £475 -18.28% 3
South East -26 29 £420 -16.00% 13
Yorkshire -52 21 £488 -17.55% 1
East of England -7 19 £470 +18.76% 3
South West -19 19 £525 -4.55% 1
Scotland -21 14 £402 -14.47% 6
North West -27 14 £462 -1.70% 2
Wales -3 2 £305 - 1
East Midlands -28 1 £425 +19.38% 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 12 (4.23%) Confluence
2 11 (3.87%) Apache
3 7 (2.46%) Apache Spark
3 7 (2.46%) JBoss
4 5 (1.76%) IIS
4 5 (1.76%) iPlanet
4 5 (1.76%) WebLogic
4 5 (1.76%) WebSphere
4 5 (1.76%) WebSphere Application Server
5 3 (1.06%) Apache Airflow
5 3 (1.06%) nginx
5 3 (1.06%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.70%) ArcGIS
6 2 (0.70%) Oracle Spatial
6 2 (0.70%) SAS
7 1 (0.35%) CICS
7 1 (0.35%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 1 (0.35%) Oracle Workflow
7 1 (0.35%) Tomcat
Applications
1 5 (1.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (1.06%) Microsoft Office
2 3 (1.06%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (1.76%) Oracle Applications
2 4 (1.41%) Oracle EBS
3 3 (1.06%) Oracle 11i
3 3 (1.06%) Oracle EBS R12
3 3 (1.06%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.35%) ION MarketView
4 1 (0.35%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.35%) Oracle Cash Management
4 1 (0.35%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.35%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.35%) Oracle Retail
Cloud Services
1 108 (38.03%) AWS
2 44 (15.49%) Azure
3 43 (15.14%) GitHub
4 33 (11.62%) Serverless
5 31 (10.92%) OpenShift
6 26 (9.15%) Amazon EC2
6 26 (9.15%) Amazon S3
7 24 (8.45%) AWS CloudFormation
7 24 (8.45%) AWS Lambda
8 23 (8.10%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 19 (6.69%) GitHub Actions
10 18 (6.34%) Amazon EKS
11 14 (4.93%) GCP
12 9 (3.17%) PaaS
13 8 (2.82%) Amazon ECS
13 8 (2.82%) Azure DevOps
14 7 (2.46%) Azure AKS
14 7 (2.46%) IaaS
14 7 (2.46%) Pulumi
15 6 (2.11%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 17 (5.99%) SSH
2 9 (3.17%) DNS
3 8 (2.82%) SAN
4 7 (2.46%) TCP/IP
5 6 (2.11%) Kerberos
6 5 (1.76%) Firewall
6 5 (1.76%) Network Security
7 3 (1.06%) HTTP
8 2 (0.70%) HTTPS
8 2 (0.70%) iSCSI
8 2 (0.70%) NAS
8 2 (0.70%) Reverse Proxy
9 1 (0.35%) AMQP
9 1 (0.35%) BIG-IP
9 1 (0.35%) DHCP
9 1 (0.35%) FTP
9 1 (0.35%) LAN
9 1 (0.35%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 37 (13.03%) MongoDB
2 35 (12.32%) Oracle Database
3 28 (9.86%) Amazon RDS
4 23 (8.10%) Relational Database
5 19 (6.69%) PostgreSQL
6 17 (5.99%) NoSQL
7 15 (5.28%) Data Warehouse
8 13 (4.58%) MySQL
8 13 (4.58%) SQL Server
9 11 (3.87%) DB2
10 7 (2.46%) Big Data
10 7 (2.46%) Hadoop
11 6 (2.11%) Couchbase
11 6 (2.11%) DynamoDB
11 6 (2.11%) Oracle Reports
12 5 (1.76%) Amazon Redshift
12 5 (1.76%) Data Mart
12 5 (1.76%) InfluxDB
12 5 (1.76%) Metadata
13 4 (1.41%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 74 (26.06%) Jenkins
2 50 (17.61%) GitLab
3 42 (14.79%) Git
4 24 (8.45%) JIRA
5 17 (5.99%) JUnit
6 8 (2.82%) Sonatype Nexus
7 7 (2.46%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 7 (2.46%) Maven
8 6 (2.11%) Mockito
8 6 (2.11%) PyCharm
8 6 (2.11%) PyUnit
9 5 (1.76%) Bitbucket Server
9 5 (1.76%) CA Release Automation
10 4 (1.41%) Subversion
10 4 (1.41%) Terragrunt
11 3 (1.06%) Bitbucket
11 3 (1.06%) CircleCI
11 3 (1.06%) ClearCase
11 3 (1.06%) JMeter
11 3 (1.06%) Selenium
General
1 81 (28.52%) Social Skills
2 44 (15.49%) Finance
3 40 (14.08%) Analytical Skills
4 36 (12.68%) Banking
5 30 (10.56%) Public Sector
6 18 (6.34%) Investment Banking
7 10 (3.52%) Front Office
8 9 (3.17%) Retail
9 8 (2.82%) Documentation Skills
10 6 (2.11%) Aerospace
11 4 (1.41%) Law
11 4 (1.41%) Telecoms
12 3 (1.06%) Local Government
12 3 (1.06%) Manufacturing
12 3 (1.06%) Military
13 2 (0.70%) Advertising
13 2 (0.70%) Financial Institution
13 2 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
14 1 (0.35%) Multimedia
14 1 (0.35%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 77 (27.11%) Developer
2 38 (13.38%) Java Developer
3 31 (10.92%) Senior
4 25 (8.80%) DevOps Engineer
5 21 (7.39%) Administrator
5 21 (7.39%) Support Engineer
6 18 (6.34%) Site Reliability Engineer
7 17 (5.99%) AWS Engineer
7 17 (5.99%) Site Engineer
8 16 (5.63%) Data Engineer
9 15 (5.28%) DBA
10 13 (4.58%) Oracle DBA
11 12 (4.23%) Product Engineer
11 12 (4.23%) Products Support Engineer
11 12 (4.23%) Senior Developer
11 12 (4.23%) Software Support Engineer
12 11 (3.87%) AWS DevOps
12 11 (3.87%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 11 (3.87%) Linux Administrator
12 11 (3.87%) SQL Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 37 (13.03%) Kafka
2 24 (8.45%) Spring
3 21 (7.39%) Middleware
3 21 (7.39%) Node.js
4 16 (5.63%) Elastic Stack
5 14 (4.93%) LDAP
5 14 (4.93%) REST
5 14 (4.93%) Spring Boot
6 12 (4.23%) JSON
6 12 (4.23%) RESTful
7 10 (3.52%) JMS
7 10 (3.52%) OpenAPI
7 10 (3.52%) SOAP
7 10 (3.52%) XML
8 8 (2.82%) .NET
8 8 (2.82%) AWS CDK
9 7 (2.46%) Oracle GoldenGate
9 7 (2.46%) pytest
9 7 (2.46%) XSD
10 6 (2.11%) React
Miscellaneous
1 17 (5.99%) Cloud Native
2 16 (5.63%) Management Information System
3 15 (5.28%) Equities
4 14 (4.93%) Data Structures
5 13 (4.58%) Data Centre
6 7 (2.46%) Distributed Systems
6 7 (2.46%) Enterprise Cloud
7 6 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
7 6 (2.11%) Legacy Applications
7 6 (2.11%) Replication
8 5 (1.76%) DataPower
8 5 (1.76%) Legacy Code
8 5 (1.76%) Mainframe
9 4 (1.41%) Derivative
9 4 (1.41%) Enterprise Software
9 4 (1.41%) Equity Derivative
9 4 (1.41%) Fixed Income
9 4 (1.41%) Linux Command Line
9 4 (1.41%) Onboarding
10 3 (1.06%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 192 (67.61%) Linux
2 91 (32.04%) Unix
3 39 (13.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 28 (9.86%) Windows
5 16 (5.63%) Ubuntu
6 13 (4.58%) CentOS
7 6 (2.11%) Android
7 6 (2.11%) Apple iOS
8 5 (1.76%) Windows Server
9 4 (1.41%) VMS
10 2 (0.70%) AIX
10 2 (0.70%) Debian
11 1 (0.35%) Amazon Linux
11 1 (0.35%) OpenVMS
11 1 (0.35%) Solaris
11 1 (0.35%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
11 1 (0.35%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 112 (39.44%) CI/CD
2 82 (28.87%) Problem-Solving
3 78 (27.46%) Agile
4 58 (20.42%) DevOps
5 49 (17.25%) Infrastructure as Code
5 49 (17.25%) Performance Tuning
6 46 (16.20%) Containerisation
7 36 (12.68%) Task Automation
8 34 (11.97%) Software Engineering
9 32 (11.27%) SDLC
10 27 (9.51%) Observability
11 25 (8.80%) Continuous Improvement
12 24 (8.45%) Microservices
13 23 (8.10%) Migration
13 23 (8.10%) Scrum
14 22 (7.75%) Data Modelling
14 22 (7.75%) Infrastructure Engineering
14 22 (7.75%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 21 (7.39%) ITIL
15 21 (7.39%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 123 (43.31%) Python
2 116 (40.85%) SQL
3 97 (34.15%) Java
4 43 (15.14%) JavaScript
5 25 (8.80%) Bash
6 21 (7.39%) PL/SQL
7 20 (7.04%) C++
8 18 (6.34%) C
8 18 (6.34%) TypeScript
9 16 (5.63%) Perl
10 13 (4.58%) Go
10 13 (4.58%) Korn
11 12 (4.23%) Ada
12 8 (2.82%) Groovy
13 7 (2.46%) MATLAB
13 7 (2.46%) PowerShell
14 5 (1.76%) ProC
15 3 (1.06%) PHP
16 2 (0.70%) JCL
16 2 (0.70%) VBA
Qualifications
1 102 (35.92%) Security Cleared
2 81 (28.52%) SC Cleared
3 23 (8.10%) BPSS Clearance
4 19 (6.69%) Degree
5 15 (5.28%) DV Cleared
6 14 (4.93%) Computer Science Degree
7 6 (2.11%) OCP
7 6 (2.11%) Oracle Certification
8 4 (1.41%) AWS Certification
9 3 (1.06%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.70%) CISSP
10 2 (0.70%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.70%) RHCE
11 1 (0.35%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 1 (0.35%) AWS Certified Developer
11 1 (0.35%) CISM
11 1 (0.35%) RHCA
11 1 (0.35%) RHCSA
11 1 (0.35%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (6.34%) SLA
2 13 (4.58%) Data Quality
3 10 (3.52%) QA
4 6 (2.11%) GDPR
5 3 (1.06%) FATCA
5 3 (1.06%) NCSC
6 2 (0.70%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 2 (0.70%) HIPAA
6 2 (0.70%) NIST
7 1 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 58 (20.42%) Docker
2 17 (5.99%) Active Directory
3 9 (3.17%) Virtual Machines
4 6 (2.11%) Oracle RAC
5 5 (1.76%) Tivoli Directory Server
6 4 (1.41%) VMware Infrastructure
7 3 (1.06%) HDFS
7 3 (1.06%) KVM
8 2 (0.70%) GridGain
8 2 (0.70%) SRDF
9 1 (0.35%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 1 (0.35%) Postfix
9 1 (0.35%) Varnish
9 1 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 69 (24.30%) Kubernetes
2 65 (22.89%) Terraform
3 51 (17.96%) Ansible
4 34 (11.97%) Grafana
5 33 (11.62%) Prometheus
6 22 (7.75%) Progress Chef
7 14 (4.93%) Red Hat Satellite
8 11 (3.87%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
9 9 (3.17%) Oracle RMAN
9 9 (3.17%) Puppet
10 8 (2.82%) Podman
11 7 (2.46%) Check_MK
11 7 (2.46%) Single Sign-On
12 6 (2.11%) Tivoli
13 5 (1.76%) CA Single Sign-On
13 5 (1.76%) CA Wily
13 5 (1.76%) Dell DRAC
14 4 (1.41%) Kibana
14 4 (1.41%) Packer
15 3 (1.06%) Docker Swarm
Vendors
1 80 (28.17%) Oracle
2 48 (16.90%) Red Hat
3 27 (9.51%) Splunk
4 23 (8.10%) Microsoft
5 18 (6.34%) IBM
6 16 (5.63%) Sybase
6 16 (5.63%) VMware
7 11 (3.87%) Dell
8 10 (3.52%) ServiceNow
9 8 (2.82%) AppDynamics
10 7 (2.46%) Broadcom
10 7 (2.46%) Murex
11 6 (2.11%) Confluent
11 6 (2.11%) Dynatrace
11 6 (2.11%) MuleSoft
12 5 (1.76%) Informatica
12 5 (1.76%) Talend
13 4 (1.41%) CyberArk
13 4 (1.41%) Google
13 4 (1.41%) NetApp