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 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 276 265 288
Rank change year-on-year -11 +23 -24
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 332 333 392
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.96% 0.91% 0.84%
As % of the Programming Languages category 2.97% 2.85% 2.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 198 204 276
10th Percentile £308 £336 £400
25th Percentile £366 £380 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £473 £475 £530
Median % change year-on-year -0.42% -10.38% -3.64%
75th Percentile £553 £551 £588
90th Percentile £625 £696 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £467 £425 £498
% change year-on-year +9.88% -14.57% -7.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 6 9
10th Percentile £61.16 £63.50 £53.16
25th Percentile - £64.63 £61.25
Median hourly rate £68.00 £81.50 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -16.56% +16.43% -4.11%
75th Percentile £88.25 £97.50 £78.00
90th Percentile £110.00 - £80.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.00 £68.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year - -2.86% -4.11%

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 11,193 11,702 14,523
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.37% 32.04% 31.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,353 7,566 10,347
10th Percentile £342 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £620 £645 £663
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 314 284 438
10th Percentile £29.00 £25.14 £33.67
25th Percentile £42.81 £40.06 £47.56
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £61.92
Median % change year-on-year - +0.94% +0.68%
75th Percentile £67.75 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.00 £78.23
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 November 2025.

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 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Shell Script in the UK

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 5 November 2025. 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 -14 268 £467 -6.60% 141
UK excluding London +23 204 £467 +9.88% 111
Work from Home +12 106 £430 -12.88% 83
London -47 104 £475 -9.09% 67
North of England -6 59 £473 +1.18% 10
Scotland +15 48 £475 +22.11% 8
Yorkshire -6 38 £500 -1.23% 2
South East -17 32 £400 - 61
Midlands -8 27 £478 +13.69% 12
West Midlands -4 23 £490 +16.67% 7
South West +15 22 £513 -17.51% 4
North West -13 21 £402 +11.67% 7
East of England - 16 £423 - 12
East Midlands -15 4 £360 -30.77% 5
Wales +2 2 £283 -44.20% 5
Northern Ireland - 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 18 (5.42%) JBoss
2 16 (4.82%) Apache
3 15 (4.52%) Apache Spark
4 11 (3.31%) Tomcat
5 10 (3.01%) Apache Airflow
5 10 (3.01%) WebSphere
5 10 (3.01%) WebSphere Application Server
6 8 (2.41%) IIS
6 8 (2.41%) iPlanet
7 5 (1.51%) Confluence
8 3 (0.90%) OpenStack
9 2 (0.60%) Oracle Workflow
9 2 (0.60%) SAS
9 2 (0.60%) WebLogic
10 1 (0.30%) CICS
10 1 (0.30%) nginx
10 1 (0.30%) SharePoint
10 1 (0.30%) Tuxedo
Applications
1 6 (1.81%) Microsoft Excel
1 6 (1.81%) Microsoft Office
2 5 (1.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (0.90%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (0.60%) Oracle Applications
2 2 (0.60%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (0.60%) Oracle EBS R12
2 2 (0.60%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.30%) ION MarketView
Cloud Services
1 91 (27.41%) AWS
2 41 (12.35%) GitHub
3 35 (10.54%) Azure
4 31 (9.34%) OpenShift
5 30 (9.04%) GCP
6 23 (6.93%) AWS CloudFormation
7 17 (5.12%) Serverless
8 16 (4.82%) Amazon EC2
8 16 (4.82%) Amazon S3
8 16 (4.82%) AWS Lambda
9 15 (4.52%) Amazon ECS
10 14 (4.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 14 (4.22%) Virtual Private Cloud
11 10 (3.01%) Amazon EKS
11 10 (3.01%) OCI
12 9 (2.71%) Azure DevOps
13 8 (2.41%) Cloud Computing
13 8 (2.41%) PaaS
14 7 (2.11%) AWS Fargate
14 7 (2.11%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 17 (5.12%) DNS
2 13 (3.92%) SAN
3 11 (3.31%) Firewall
4 10 (3.01%) TCP/IP
5 9 (2.71%) Kerberos
6 6 (1.81%) SSH
7 5 (1.51%) HTTP
8 4 (1.20%) SSL
9 3 (0.90%) iSCSI
9 3 (0.90%) NAS
9 3 (0.90%) VPN
10 2 (0.60%) Calico
10 2 (0.60%) LAN
10 2 (0.60%) Network Security
11 1 (0.30%) Internet
11 1 (0.30%) IPsec
11 1 (0.30%) SMS
11 1 (0.30%) SMTP
11 1 (0.30%) SNMP
11 1 (0.30%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 53 (15.96%) Oracle Database
2 50 (15.06%) MongoDB
3 41 (12.35%) Relational Database
4 38 (11.45%) DB2
5 20 (6.02%) Amazon RDS
6 19 (5.72%) PostgreSQL
7 18 (5.42%) SQL Server
8 17 (5.12%) NoSQL
9 15 (4.52%) Data Warehouse
10 12 (3.61%) MySQL
11 11 (3.31%) BigQuery
12 9 (2.71%) Hadoop
13 8 (2.41%) Elasticsearch
13 8 (2.41%) Metadata
13 8 (2.41%) SQL Server Integration Services
13 8 (2.41%) Star Schema
14 7 (2.11%) Apache Hive
15 6 (1.81%) Big Data
15 6 (1.81%) HBase
15 6 (1.81%) Redis
Development Applications
1 86 (25.90%) Jenkins
2 82 (24.70%) Git
3 48 (14.46%) JUnit
4 35 (10.54%) GitLab
5 28 (8.43%) JIRA
6 25 (7.53%) Sonatype Nexus
7 24 (7.23%) Maven
8 10 (3.01%) Gradle
8 10 (3.01%) SonarQube
9 9 (2.71%) TeamCity
10 8 (2.41%) Bitbucket Server
10 8 (2.41%) CA Release Automation
10 8 (2.41%) ClearCase
10 8 (2.41%) ER Studio
10 8 (2.41%) Postman
10 8 (2.41%) Subversion
11 7 (2.11%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 7 (2.11%) Mockito
12 6 (1.81%) SoapUI
12 6 (1.81%) Xcode
General
1 130 (39.16%) Social Skills
2 84 (25.30%) Finance
3 81 (24.40%) Analytical Skills
4 57 (17.17%) Banking
5 38 (11.45%) Investment Banking
6 27 (8.13%) Public Sector
7 18 (5.42%) Front Office
8 9 (2.71%) Financial Institution
9 4 (1.20%) Multimedia
10 3 (0.90%) Military
10 3 (0.90%) Wearables
11 2 (0.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 2 (0.60%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.30%) Aerospace
12 1 (0.30%) Aviation
12 1 (0.30%) Back Office
12 1 (0.30%) Documentation Skills
12 1 (0.30%) Law
12 1 (0.30%) Legal
12 1 (0.30%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 91 (27.41%) Developer
2 54 (16.27%) Java Developer
3 42 (12.65%) Senior
4 34 (10.24%) DevOps Engineer
5 32 (9.64%) Investment Banking Java Developer
5 32 (9.64%) SQL Developer
6 26 (7.83%) Administrator
7 19 (5.72%) Senior Developer
8 17 (5.12%) Senior Java Developer
9 16 (4.82%) Linux Developer
9 16 (4.82%) Senior Investment Banking Java Developer
9 16 (4.82%) Senior SQL Developer
9 16 (4.82%) Support Engineer
9 16 (4.82%) Sybase Developer
10 14 (4.22%) Automation Engineer
10 14 (4.22%) DBA
11 13 (3.92%) AWS Engineer
11 13 (3.92%) Site Reliability Engineer
12 12 (3.61%) Platform Engineer
12 12 (3.61%) Software Support Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 71 (21.39%) Kafka
2 53 (15.96%) Spring
3 33 (9.94%) JMS
4 26 (7.83%) REST
5 24 (7.23%) Spring Boot
6 22 (6.63%) SOAP
7 17 (5.12%) RESTful
8 15 (4.52%) Elastic Stack
8 15 (4.52%) Middleware
9 14 (4.22%) FastAPI
9 14 (4.22%) Node.js
10 13 (3.92%) HTML
10 13 (3.92%) Spring Cloud
11 12 (3.61%) CSS
12 11 (3.31%) J2EE
13 10 (3.01%) OpenID
14 9 (2.71%) OAuth
14 9 (2.71%) SAML
14 9 (2.71%) Spring MVC
15 8 (2.41%) HTML5
Miscellaneous
1 39 (11.75%) Data Structures
2 34 (10.24%) Equities
3 15 (4.52%) Linux Command Line
4 10 (3.01%) Data Centre
4 10 (3.01%) Data Protection Act
4 10 (3.01%) Distributed Systems
4 10 (3.01%) Enterprise Storage
5 9 (2.71%) Cloud Native
5 9 (2.71%) Legacy Applications
6 8 (2.41%) Replication
7 7 (2.11%) Enterprise Cloud
7 7 (2.11%) Management Information System
7 7 (2.11%) Onboarding
8 6 (1.81%) Enterprise Software
8 6 (1.81%) PKI
8 6 (1.81%) Virtual Reality
9 5 (1.51%) FPGA
9 5 (1.51%) Security Operations Centre
9 5 (1.51%) Verilog
10 4 (1.20%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 226 (68.07%) Linux
2 114 (34.34%) Unix
3 38 (11.45%) Windows
4 34 (10.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 16 (4.82%) Ubuntu
6 14 (4.22%) CentOS
7 11 (3.31%) Windows Server
8 6 (1.81%) Android
8 6 (1.81%) Apple iOS
9 4 (1.20%) VMS
9 4 (1.20%) Windows Server 2012
9 4 (1.20%) Windows Server 2016
9 4 (1.20%) Windows Server 2019
10 3 (0.90%) Oracle Linux
11 2 (0.60%) AIX
11 2 (0.60%) Solaris
12 1 (0.30%) Mac OS X
12 1 (0.30%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 113 (34.04%) Agile
1 113 (34.04%) Problem-Solving
2 98 (29.52%) CI/CD
3 82 (24.70%) DevOps
4 55 (16.57%) Performance Tuning
5 54 (16.27%) SDLC
6 44 (13.25%) Infrastructure as Code
7 38 (11.45%) Multithreading
8 37 (11.14%) Software Engineering
9 35 (10.54%) Containerisation
10 33 (9.94%) Database Tuning
11 32 (9.64%) Open Source
11 32 (9.64%) Task Automation
12 31 (9.34%) Microservices
12 31 (9.34%) Migration
13 25 (7.53%) Data Modelling
13 25 (7.53%) Infrastructure Automation
14 24 (7.23%) ITIL
15 23 (6.93%) Root Cause Analysis
16 22 (6.63%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 202 (60.84%) Python
2 114 (34.34%) SQL
3 103 (31.02%) Java
4 40 (12.05%) JavaScript
5 36 (10.84%) Bash
6 31 (9.34%) C
7 26 (7.83%) C++
8 19 (5.72%) Perl
9 14 (4.22%) Groovy
10 12 (3.61%) Ada
11 11 (3.31%) TypeScript
12 10 (3.01%) Go
12 10 (3.01%) PL/SQL
13 8 (2.41%) PowerShell
14 6 (1.81%) Tcl
15 5 (1.51%) C#
15 5 (1.51%) SystemVerilog
16 4 (1.20%) Korn
16 4 (1.20%) Scala
17 3 (0.90%) JCL
Qualifications
1 66 (19.88%) Security Cleared
2 49 (14.76%) SC Cleared
3 19 (5.72%) Degree
4 12 (3.61%) AWS Certification
5 10 (3.01%) Computer Science Degree
6 8 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
7 5 (1.51%) DV Cleared
8 3 (0.90%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
8 3 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 3 (0.90%) RHCE
9 2 (0.60%) Master's Degree
9 2 (0.60%) PhD
9 2 (0.60%) RHCSA
9 2 (0.60%) TOGAF Certification
10 1 (0.30%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 1 (0.30%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (4.22%) QA
2 12 (3.61%) Data Quality
3 7 (2.11%) SLA
4 5 (1.51%) NCSC
4 5 (1.51%) PCI DSS
5 3 (0.90%) Accessibility
5 3 (0.90%) Actionable Recommendations
5 3 (0.90%) GDPR
6 2 (0.60%) Disclosure Scotland
6 2 (0.60%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.60%) NIST
6 2 (0.60%) SOC 2
6 2 (0.60%) WCAG
7 1 (0.30%) Basel II
7 1 (0.30%) Basel III
System Software
1 66 (19.88%) Docker
2 21 (6.33%) Active Directory
3 11 (3.31%) Oracle RAC
4 8 (2.41%) Tivoli Directory Server
5 7 (2.11%) KVM
5 7 (2.11%) VMware Infrastructure
6 6 (1.81%) HDFS
7 4 (1.20%) Virtual Machines
8 3 (0.90%) Hyper-V
9 2 (0.60%) GridGain
9 2 (0.60%) VMware NSX
9 2 (0.60%) vSphere
10 1 (0.30%) Snort
10 1 (0.30%) Squid
10 1 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 75 (22.59%) Ansible
2 65 (19.58%) Kubernetes
3 59 (17.77%) Terraform
4 24 (7.23%) Grafana
5 22 (6.63%) Prometheus
6 20 (6.02%) Progress Chef
7 18 (5.42%) Puppet
8 11 (3.31%) Data Guard
9 10 (3.01%) Red Hat Satellite
9 10 (3.01%) yum
10 9 (2.71%) Single Sign-On
11 8 (2.41%) CA Single Sign-On
11 8 (2.41%) CA Wily
11 8 (2.41%) Packer
11 8 (2.41%) Tivoli
12 6 (1.81%) Control-M
12 6 (1.81%) Hadoop YARN
12 6 (1.81%) NetBackup
13 5 (1.51%) Jamf Pro
14 4 (1.20%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 85 (25.60%) Oracle
2 47 (14.16%) Splunk
3 41 (12.35%) Red Hat
4 36 (10.84%) Sybase
5 29 (8.73%) Microsoft
6 21 (6.33%) IBM
7 18 (5.42%) ServiceNow
8 17 (5.12%) Google
9 15 (4.52%) NetApp
10 11 (3.31%) VMware
11 10 (3.01%) AppDynamics
11 10 (3.01%) Dynatrace
12 8 (2.41%) Broadcom
12 8 (2.41%) MuleSoft
13 7 (2.11%) 3PAR
13 7 (2.11%) Confluent
13 7 (2.11%) Dell
13 7 (2.11%) HP
13 7 (2.11%) Veritas
14 6 (1.81%) CA Agile Central