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

6 months to
5 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 411 261 294
Rank change year-on-year -150 +33 -53
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 248 289 326
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 1.00% 0.76%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.88% 2.93% 2.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 166 166 236
10th Percentile £325 £358 £332
25th Percentile £400 £432 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £466 £520 £501
Median % change year-on-year -10.36% +3.79% -7.27%
75th Percentile £538 £600 £617
90th Percentile £634 £650 £710
UK excluding London median daily rate £455 £500 £460
% change year-on-year -9.00% +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 13,188 9,880 12,901
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.85% 34.15% 30.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,621 6,689 9,138
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 £625 £650
90th Percentile £713 £757 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £475 £485
% change year-on-year +1.39% -2.06% -3.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 561 229 521
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 £79.00 £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 5 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 5 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 5 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 -107 216 £471 -10.24% 53
UK excluding London -148 122 £455 -9.00% 39
London -70 98 £525 -4.55% 18
Work from Home -68 64 £500 +4.17% 39
South East -57 34 £400 -33.33% 18
North of England -90 29 £460 -8.00% 9
Midlands -41 27 £467 +1.48% 5
West Midlands -44 26 £466 +1.29% 4
East of England -18 25 £470 +44.62% 5
Yorkshire -61 15 £480 -4.00% 4
North West -40 12 £450 -11.05% 5
South West -45 2 £556 +6.71% 1
Scotland -59 2 - - 2
Northern Ireland - 2 £190 -
Wales -18 1 £345 -
East Midlands -25 1 £525 +25.75% 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 12 (4.84%) Apache
1 12 (4.84%) Confluence
2 7 (2.82%) Apache Airflow
2 7 (2.82%) Apache Spark
3 6 (2.42%) CICS
4 4 (1.61%) WebLogic
5 3 (1.21%) JBoss
5 3 (1.21%) nginx
5 3 (1.21%) Tomcat
5 3 (1.21%) WebSphere
5 3 (1.21%) WebSphere Application Server
6 2 (0.81%) ArcGIS
6 2 (0.81%) Oracle Spatial
6 2 (0.81%) Oracle Workflow
6 2 (0.81%) SharePoint
7 1 (0.40%) IBM HTTP Server
7 1 (0.40%) SAS
Applications
1 7 (2.82%) 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 87 (35.08%) AWS
2 50 (20.16%) Azure
3 42 (16.94%) GitHub
4 36 (14.52%) GitHub Actions
4 36 (14.52%) Serverless
5 25 (10.08%) Amazon S3
5 25 (10.08%) AWS Lambda
6 23 (9.27%) Amazon EC2
7 20 (8.06%) OpenShift
8 17 (6.85%) GCP
9 16 (6.45%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 15 (6.05%) Amazon EKS
11 13 (5.24%) Azure DevOps
12 12 (4.84%) AWS CloudFormation
13 10 (4.03%) PaaS
13 10 (4.03%) Power Platform
14 9 (3.63%) AWS CodePipeline
15 8 (3.23%) IaaS
15 8 (3.23%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 6 (2.42%) Azure Key Vault
Communications & Networking
1 11 (4.44%) DNS
2 10 (4.03%) SSH
3 8 (3.23%) Network Security
4 7 (2.82%) PuTTY
4 7 (2.82%) SAN
4 7 (2.82%) WinSCP
5 5 (2.02%) Firewall
5 5 (2.02%) TCP/IP
6 3 (1.21%) HTTPS
6 3 (1.21%) MQTT
6 3 (1.21%) NAS
6 3 (1.21%) Reverse Proxy
7 2 (0.81%) AMQP
7 2 (0.81%) HTTP
7 2 (0.81%) iSCSI
7 2 (0.81%) Multicast
7 2 (0.81%) OpenVPN
7 2 (0.81%) SSL
7 2 (0.81%) VPN
8 1 (0.40%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (10.89%) SQL Server
2 25 (10.08%) Oracle Database
3 20 (8.06%) Relational Database
4 19 (7.66%) PostgreSQL
5 17 (6.85%) MongoDB
6 16 (6.45%) Data Warehouse
7 14 (5.65%) Amazon RDS
8 13 (5.24%) Metadata
9 11 (4.44%) MySQL
10 10 (4.03%) BusinessObjects
10 10 (4.03%) Db2
11 9 (3.63%) Data Lake
11 9 (3.63%) DynamoDB
12 7 (2.82%) Amazon Aurora
12 7 (2.82%) Oracle Reports
12 7 (2.82%) Power BI
13 6 (2.42%) Apache Cassandra
13 6 (2.42%) Elasticsearch
13 6 (2.42%) NoSQL
14 5 (2.02%) Oracle Database 12c
Development Applications
1 64 (25.81%) Jenkins
2 49 (19.76%) Git
3 48 (19.35%) GitLab
4 22 (8.87%) JIRA
5 9 (3.63%) JUnit
6 7 (2.82%) Maven
6 7 (2.82%) SonarQube
7 5 (2.02%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 5 (2.02%) JMeter
7 5 (2.02%) Mockito
7 5 (2.02%) Sonatype Nexus
8 4 (1.61%) Bitbucket
9 3 (1.21%) Artifactory
9 3 (1.21%) CircleCI
9 3 (1.21%) PyCharm
9 3 (1.21%) PyUnit
9 3 (1.21%) Terragrunt
10 2 (0.81%) Gatling
10 2 (0.81%) Gradle
10 2 (0.81%) Xcode
General
1 58 (23.39%) Social Skills
2 56 (22.58%) Finance
3 41 (16.53%) Banking
4 28 (11.29%) Public Sector
5 16 (6.45%) Analytical Skills
6 14 (5.65%) Documentation Skills
7 10 (4.03%) Front Office
7 10 (4.03%) Retail
8 9 (3.63%) Investment Banking
9 8 (3.23%) 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%) Financial Institution
13 1 (0.40%) Influencing Skills
13 1 (0.40%) Manufacturing
13 1 (0.40%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 64 (25.81%) Developer
2 31 (12.50%) Data Engineer
3 26 (10.48%) Senior
4 24 (9.68%) Java Developer
5 23 (9.27%) Administrator
6 19 (7.66%) DBA
6 19 (7.66%) Python Developer
7 17 (6.85%) Linux Administrator
8 16 (6.45%) Oracle DBA
9 15 (6.05%) Support Engineer
10 14 (5.65%) DevOps Engineer
11 12 (4.84%) Analyst
11 12 (4.84%) Consultant
12 10 (4.03%) AWS DevOps
12 10 (4.03%) AWS Engineer
13 9 (3.63%) Database Engineer
13 9 (3.63%) Senior Developer
13 9 (3.63%) Site Engineer
13 9 (3.63%) Site Reliability Engineer
13 9 (3.63%) Support Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 25 (10.08%) RESTful
2 16 (6.45%) Middleware
2 16 (6.45%) Spring
3 15 (6.05%) JSON
3 15 (6.05%) Kafka
3 15 (6.05%) LDAP
3 15 (6.05%) Oracle GoldenGate
3 15 (6.05%) Spring Boot
4 11 (4.44%) Node.js
5 10 (4.03%) Elastic Stack
5 10 (4.03%) HTML
6 9 (3.63%) FastAPI
7 8 (3.23%) AWS CDK
7 8 (3.23%) CSS
7 8 (3.23%) Django
7 8 (3.23%) Flask
7 8 (3.23%) Pandas
7 8 (3.23%) React
7 8 (3.23%) REST
7 8 (3.23%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 22 (8.87%) Management Information System
2 16 (6.45%) Data Centre
3 15 (6.05%) Cloud Native
4 13 (5.24%) Linux Command Line
5 8 (3.23%) Fixed Income
5 8 (3.23%) Mainframe
6 7 (2.82%) Hedge funds
6 7 (2.82%) Public Cloud
7 6 (2.42%) Data Structures
7 6 (2.42%) DataPower
7 6 (2.42%) Enterprise Software
7 6 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
7 6 (2.42%) 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 (61.69%) Linux
2 104 (41.94%) Unix
3 37 (14.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 25 (10.08%) Windows
5 13 (5.24%) CentOS
6 7 (2.82%) zOS
7 6 (2.42%) 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%) VMS
11 1 (0.40%) Amazon Linux
11 1 (0.40%) Embedded Linux
11 1 (0.40%) Ubuntu
11 1 (0.40%) Windows Server 2008
11 1 (0.40%) Windows Server 2016
11 1 (0.40%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 104 (41.94%) CI/CD
2 66 (26.61%) DevOps
3 53 (21.37%) Agile
3 53 (21.37%) Problem-Solving
4 44 (17.74%) Infrastructure as Code
5 41 (16.53%) Performance Tuning
6 39 (15.73%) Containerisation
7 35 (14.11%) Analytics
8 33 (13.31%) Migration
9 30 (12.10%) Microservices
10 24 (9.68%) Observability
11 23 (9.27%) High Availability
11 23 (9.27%) Performance Optimisation
11 23 (9.27%) Task Automation
12 22 (8.87%) AI
12 22 (8.87%) Continuous Improvement
12 22 (8.87%) Data Pipeline
12 22 (8.87%) Infrastructure Engineering
13 21 (8.47%) ETL
13 21 (8.47%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 123 (49.60%) SQL
2 108 (43.55%) Python
3 71 (28.63%) Java
4 34 (13.71%) PL/SQL
5 26 (10.48%) JavaScript
6 24 (9.68%) Bash
7 16 (6.45%) Korn
8 14 (5.65%) PowerShell
9 12 (4.84%) Perl
10 11 (4.44%) MATLAB
11 10 (4.03%) TypeScript
12 9 (3.63%) C#
13 8 (3.23%) C++
13 8 (3.23%) Go
14 7 (2.82%) C
15 6 (2.42%) JCL
15 6 (2.42%) Ruby
16 5 (2.02%) Groovy
17 4 (1.61%) ProC
18 3 (1.21%) Rust
Qualifications
1 96 (38.71%) Security Cleared
2 82 (33.06%) SC Cleared
3 22 (8.87%) Degree
4 17 (6.85%) BPSS Clearance
5 10 (4.03%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.63%) Oracle Certification
7 7 (2.82%) DV Cleared
8 5 (2.02%) Master's Degree
8 5 (2.02%) OCP
9 4 (1.61%) Azure Certification
10 3 (1.21%) CISSP
11 2 (0.81%) AWS Certification
12 1 (0.40%) AWS Certified Developer
12 1 (0.40%) CISM
12 1 (0.40%) ITIL Certification
12 1 (0.40%) MOS
12 1 (0.40%) PMI Certification
12 1 (0.40%) RHCA
12 1 (0.40%) RHCE
12 1 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (7.26%) SLA
2 9 (3.63%) Data Quality
3 8 (3.23%) QA
4 6 (2.42%) 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 (20.97%) Docker
2 16 (6.45%) Oracle RAC
3 15 (6.05%) Active Directory
4 9 (3.63%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (2.02%) Postfix
5 5 (2.02%) Varnish
5 5 (2.02%) VMware Infrastructure
6 4 (1.61%) NFS
6 4 (1.61%) 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 52 (20.97%) Kubernetes
2 50 (20.16%) Ansible
3 48 (19.35%) Terraform
4 27 (10.89%) Grafana
5 26 (10.48%) Prometheus
6 23 (9.27%) Oracle RMAN
7 17 (6.85%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 14 (5.65%) Podman
9 11 (4.44%) Check_MK
9 11 (4.44%) Red Hat Satellite
10 10 (4.03%) Progress Chef
11 9 (3.63%) Data Guard
11 9 (3.63%) Puppet
12 5 (2.02%) HAProxy
13 4 (1.61%) Docker Swarm
13 4 (1.61%) Kibana
14 2 (0.81%) Argo
14 2 (0.81%) Packer
14 2 (0.81%) systemd
14 2 (0.81%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 92 (37.10%) Oracle
2 35 (14.11%) Red Hat
3 17 (6.85%) VMware
4 15 (6.05%) Microsoft
5 10 (4.03%) Murex
6 9 (3.63%) Informatica
7 8 (3.23%) Splunk
7 8 (3.23%) Sybase
8 6 (2.42%) Google
8 6 (2.42%) IBM
8 6 (2.42%) ServiceNow
8 6 (2.42%) Talend
9 5 (2.02%) Cloudera
9 5 (2.02%) Databricks
9 5 (2.02%) Dynatrace
9 5 (2.02%) Tenable
9 5 (2.02%) Veritas
10 4 (1.61%) New Relic
10 4 (1.61%) NVIDIA
10 4 (1.61%) Solace