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 18 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 415 276 250
Rank change year-on-year -139 -26 +13
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 272 304 361
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.51% 0.92% 0.93%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.93% 2.82% 2.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 190 187 246
10th Percentile £325 £320 £333
25th Percentile £400 £400 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -6.00% - -5.66%
75th Percentile £597 £600 £605
90th Percentile £700 £638 £710
UK excluding London median daily rate £441 £500 £450
% change year-on-year -11.85% +11.11% -10.89%
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 14,093 10,793 12,173
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.31% 32.83% 31.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,171 7,209 8,531
10th Percentile £363 £340 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £533
Median % change year-on-year +1.98% -5.25% -3.09%
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 523 281 395
10th Percentile £29.96 £28.25 £27.00
25th Percentile £50.00 £36.25 £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 £78.95 £82.96 £77.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% +8.56%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 -146 224 £475 -5.00% 109
UK excluding London -139 143 £441 -11.85% 75
London -64 108 £550 +4.76% 48
Work from Home -70 75 £470 -1.05% 40
South East -71 34 £400 -33.33% 11
North of England -109 33 £425 -15.00% 24
Scotland -41 26 £425 -13.79% 6
Midlands -39 23 £470 +14.63% 8
West Midlands -32 20 £470 +2.17% 6
Yorkshire -65 20 £425 -16.05% 6
East of England -20 16 £350 +7.69% 10
North West -58 11 £413 +7.14% 15
South West -52 8 £544 +4.32% 9
East Midlands -19 3 £481 +33.61% 2
North East - 3 £463 - 3
Northern Ireland +6 2 £190 - 4
Wales -19 1 £265 -6.19% 3

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 (7.35%) Apache
2 14 (5.15%) Apache Airflow
3 9 (3.31%) SAS
4 8 (2.94%) Apache Spark
5 6 (2.21%) CICS
5 6 (2.21%) Oracle Workflow
5 6 (2.21%) WebLogic
6 4 (1.47%) Confluence
6 4 (1.47%) WebSphere
7 3 (1.10%) JBoss
7 3 (1.10%) 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 (2.57%) Notepad++
Business Applications
1 4 (1.47%) Oracle Assets
1 4 (1.47%) Oracle EBS
1 4 (1.47%) Oracle E-Business Tax
1 4 (1.47%) Oracle FAH
1 4 (1.47%) Oracle General Ledger
1 4 (1.47%) Oracle Internet Expenses
1 4 (1.47%) Oracle iProcurement
1 4 (1.47%) Oracle Payables
1 4 (1.47%) Oracle Receivables
2 3 (1.10%) 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 95 (34.93%) AWS
2 61 (22.43%) Azure
3 48 (17.65%) GCP
4 47 (17.28%) GitHub
5 31 (11.40%) Serverless
6 26 (9.56%) GitHub Actions
7 25 (9.19%) AWS Lambda
8 22 (8.09%) Amazon S3
9 16 (5.88%) Amazon EC2
10 15 (5.51%) OpenShift
11 11 (4.04%) dbt
12 10 (3.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 9 (3.31%) Azure DevOps
13 9 (3.31%) Virtual Private Cloud
14 8 (2.94%) AWS CloudFormation
14 8 (2.94%) Power Platform
15 7 (2.57%) Amazon SQS
16 6 (2.21%) Azure Key Vault
16 6 (2.21%) Cloud Composer
16 6 (2.21%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 16 (5.88%) DNS
2 10 (3.68%) SSL
2 10 (3.68%) TCP/IP
3 9 (3.31%) HTTP
4 7 (2.57%) Network Security
4 7 (2.57%) PuTTY
4 7 (2.57%) VPN
4 7 (2.57%) WinSCP
5 6 (2.21%) SAN
5 6 (2.21%) SSH
6 5 (1.84%) Firewall
7 4 (1.47%) MQTT
7 4 (1.47%) Multicast
8 3 (1.10%) 5G
8 3 (1.10%) BGP
8 3 (1.10%) 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 29 (10.66%) Oracle Database
2 28 (10.29%) SQL Server
3 26 (9.56%) Data Warehouse
4 19 (6.99%) Relational Database
5 17 (6.25%) PostgreSQL
6 16 (5.88%) Db2
6 16 (5.88%) MySQL
7 15 (5.51%) Metadata
8 12 (4.41%) MongoDB
9 11 (4.04%) Data Lake
10 10 (3.68%) Amazon Aurora
10 10 (3.68%) Amazon RDS
10 10 (3.68%) BusinessObjects
10 10 (3.68%) Oracle Reports
11 9 (3.31%) BigQuery
11 9 (3.31%) NoSQL
12 8 (2.94%) DynamoDB
12 8 (2.94%) Elasticsearch
12 8 (2.94%) PowerCenter
12 8 (2.94%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 61 (22.43%) Git
2 54 (19.85%) Jenkins
3 30 (11.03%) GitLab
4 19 (6.99%) Maven
5 12 (4.41%) JUnit
6 11 (4.04%) Claude Code
7 10 (3.68%) JIRA
8 9 (3.31%) Sonatype Nexus
9 8 (2.94%) SonarQube
10 6 (2.21%) Mockito
11 5 (1.84%) Gradle
11 5 (1.84%) Oracle Forms
12 4 (1.47%) Artifactory
12 4 (1.47%) Bitbucket
12 4 (1.47%) JDeveloper
13 3 (1.10%) JMeter
13 3 (1.10%) webpack
13 3 (1.10%) Xcode
14 2 (0.74%) Gatling
14 2 (0.74%) Terragrunt
General
1 88 (32.35%) Finance
2 57 (20.96%) Banking
3 48 (17.65%) Social Skills
4 23 (8.46%) Analytical Skills
5 21 (7.72%) Public Sector
6 15 (5.51%) Investment Banking
7 7 (2.57%) Documentation Skills
7 7 (2.57%) Front Office
8 5 (1.84%) Advertising
9 4 (1.47%) Aerospace
9 4 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 4 (1.47%) Retail
9 4 (1.47%) Telecoms
10 3 (1.10%) 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 (24.26%) Developer
2 37 (13.60%) Data Engineer
2 37 (13.60%) Senior
3 26 (9.56%) Python Developer
4 19 (6.99%) Senior Developer
5 18 (6.62%) Java Developer
6 17 (6.25%) Architect
7 16 (5.88%) Cloud Engineer
7 16 (5.88%) Support Engineer
8 14 (5.15%) DBA
9 13 (4.78%) DevOps Engineer
9 13 (4.78%) GCP Engineer
10 12 (4.41%) Oracle DBA
11 11 (4.04%) Administrator
11 11 (4.04%) Java Engineer
12 9 (3.31%) Analyst
12 9 (3.31%) Software Engineer
13 8 (2.94%) Database Engineer
13 8 (2.94%) Oracle Database Engineer
13 8 (2.94%) Senior Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 35 (12.87%) RESTful
2 20 (7.35%) Kafka
2 20 (7.35%) REST
3 19 (6.99%) Spring
4 18 (6.62%) FastAPI
4 18 (6.62%) Spring Boot
5 17 (6.25%) Flask
6 16 (5.88%) Pandas
7 15 (5.51%) JSON
8 14 (5.15%) Oracle GoldenGate
9 12 (4.41%) Middleware
10 11 (4.04%) CSS
10 11 (4.04%) HTML
11 10 (3.68%) Django
11 10 (3.68%) PySpark
12 9 (3.31%) RabbitMQ
12 9 (3.31%) Web Services
13 8 (2.94%) Elastic Stack
13 8 (2.94%) SOAP
14 7 (2.57%) React
Miscellaneous
1 31 (11.40%) Linux Command Line
2 15 (5.51%) Cloud Native
2 15 (5.51%) Management Information System
3 11 (4.04%) Fixed Income
4 8 (2.94%) Data Centre
4 8 (2.94%) Enterprise Software
4 8 (2.94%) Mainframe
4 8 (2.94%) Replication
5 7 (2.57%) Derivative
5 7 (2.57%) Enterprise Cloud
5 7 (2.57%) Hedge funds
5 7 (2.57%) Self-Motivation
6 6 (2.21%) DataPower
6 6 (2.21%) Legacy Systems
6 6 (2.21%) Market Risk
6 6 (2.21%) Online Banking
6 6 (2.21%) Product Ownership
6 6 (2.21%) Public Cloud
7 5 (1.84%) Distributed Systems
8 4 (1.47%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 148 (54.41%) Linux
2 124 (45.59%) Unix
3 24 (8.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 21 (7.72%) Windows
5 9 (3.31%) Solaris
6 7 (2.57%) zOS
7 5 (1.84%) AIX
7 5 (1.84%) CentOS
7 5 (1.84%) Windows Server
8 3 (1.10%) 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
1 109 (40.07%) CI/CD
2 74 (27.21%) DevOps
3 55 (20.22%) Infrastructure as Code
4 53 (19.49%) Containerisation
5 43 (15.81%) AI
6 42 (15.44%) Data Pipeline
6 42 (15.44%) Performance Tuning
7 41 (15.07%) Agile
7 41 (15.07%) Migration
8 40 (14.71%) Problem-Solving
9 39 (14.34%) Performance Optimisation
10 37 (13.60%) Analytics
11 34 (12.50%) ETL
12 32 (11.76%) Code Quality
13 31 (11.40%) Observability
14 29 (10.66%) Root Cause Analysis
15 27 (9.93%) Microservices
16 25 (9.19%) Configuration Management
16 25 (9.19%) SDLC
16 25 (9.19%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 141 (51.84%) SQL
2 137 (50.37%) Python
3 67 (24.63%) Java
4 44 (16.18%) PL/SQL
5 43 (15.81%) Bash
6 17 (6.25%) PowerShell
7 16 (5.88%) JavaScript
8 15 (5.51%) Korn
9 14 (5.15%) Groovy
10 11 (4.04%) Perl
11 8 (2.94%) C#
12 7 (2.57%) JCL
12 7 (2.57%) TypeScript
13 6 (2.21%) Ruby
13 6 (2.21%) Scala
14 5 (1.84%) Go
15 4 (1.47%) C
15 4 (1.47%) C++
15 4 (1.47%) MATLAB
15 4 (1.47%) Rust
Qualifications
1 86 (31.62%) Security Cleared
2 68 (25.00%) SC Cleared
3 26 (9.56%) Degree
4 15 (5.51%) BPSS Clearance
5 8 (2.94%) Computer Science Degree
6 7 (2.57%) DV Cleared
7 6 (2.21%) Oracle Certification
8 5 (1.84%) Master's Degree
9 4 (1.47%) AWS Certification
9 4 (1.47%) 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%) GIAC
11 1 (0.37%) ITIL Certification
11 1 (0.37%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
11 1 (0.37%) MOS
11 1 (0.37%) PMI Certification
11 1 (0.37%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (10.66%) Data Quality
2 11 (4.04%) QA
3 7 (2.57%) SLA
4 6 (2.21%) Accessibility
5 3 (1.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
5 3 (1.10%) Disclosure Scotland
5 3 (1.10%) GDPR
5 3 (1.10%) HIPAA
5 3 (1.10%) NIST
6 1 (0.37%) DICOM
6 1 (0.37%) ISO 15022
6 1 (0.37%) ISO 20022
6 1 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 1 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 59 (21.69%) Docker
2 15 (5.51%) Oracle RAC
3 9 (3.31%) Active Directory
4 6 (2.21%) Virtual Machines
4 6 (2.21%) VMware Infrastructure
5 5 (1.84%) zsh
6 4 (1.47%) NFS
6 4 (1.47%) Postfix
6 4 (1.47%) Sendmail
6 4 (1.47%) Varnish
7 3 (1.10%) 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 75 (27.57%) Kubernetes
2 58 (21.32%) Terraform
3 47 (17.28%) Ansible
4 21 (7.72%) Grafana
5 20 (7.35%) Oracle RMAN
6 19 (6.99%) Prometheus
7 14 (5.15%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 8 (2.94%) Data Guard
8 8 (2.94%) Podman
8 8 (2.94%) Puppet
9 7 (2.57%) Control-M
10 6 (2.21%) Kibana
11 5 (1.84%) Progress Chef
12 4 (1.47%) Check_MK
12 4 (1.47%) HAProxy
12 4 (1.47%) HP ALM
12 4 (1.47%) NetBackup
12 4 (1.47%) Red Hat Satellite
13 3 (1.10%) Consul
13 3 (1.10%) Packer
Vendors
1 90 (33.09%) Oracle
2 32 (11.76%) Google
3 18 (6.62%) Red Hat
4 17 (6.25%) Informatica
5 15 (5.51%) Microsoft
5 15 (5.51%) Splunk
6 13 (4.78%) IBM
7 12 (4.41%) Sybase
8 11 (4.04%) VMware
9 10 (3.68%) New Relic
10 8 (2.94%) HP
10 8 (2.94%) ServiceNow
11 7 (2.57%) Solace
12 6 (2.21%) Dynatrace
12 6 (2.21%) Murex
12 6 (2.21%) Tenable
13 5 (1.84%) Cisco
13 5 (1.84%) Databricks
13 5 (1.84%) NVIDIA
13 5 (1.84%) SAP