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 11 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 318 284 303
Rank change year-on-year -34 +19 -32
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 301 255 314
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.83% 0.80% 0.73%
As % of the Programming Languages category 2.69% 2.45% 2.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 190 141 214
10th Percentile £324 £360 £400
25th Percentile £400 £413 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £533
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -6.10% -1.39%
75th Percentile £558 £573 £630
90th Percentile £625 £700 £730
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £458 £475
% change year-on-year +4.92% -3.68% -11.71%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 7 5
10th Percentile £53.55 £66.20 £34.49
25th Percentile £65.00 £68.38 £55.00
Median hourly rate £68.00 £92.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year -26.49% +48.00% -14.38%
75th Percentile £81.50 £97.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £110.00 - £72.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.00 £68.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year - +8.80% -14.38%

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 11,191 10,401 12,971
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.75% 32.72% 30.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,416 6,613 9,220
10th Percentile £350 £350 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £619 £641 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -1.28% -2.50% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 384 238 418
10th Percentile £35.48 £21.25 £32.22
25th Percentile £51.24 £36.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +0.81% -1.59%
75th Percentile £68.88 £68.56 £70.00
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.17% -3.08% -

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 11 January 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 11 January 2026.

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 11 January 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 -16 236 £480 -6.80% 88
UK excluding London +22 179 £480 +4.92% 87
Work from Home -16 93 £452 -11.42% 42
London -54 83 £450 -14.29% 10
North of England -7 50 £480 -10.70% 13
Scotland +7 35 £493 +4.89% 2
Yorkshire -21 35 £500 -16.49% 6
Midlands -17 31 £516 +26.47% 12
West Midlands -8 29 £525 +14.13% 4
South East -5 27 £420 - 29
South West -4 21 £525 -4.55% 8
East of England -2 16 £477 - 21
North West -18 15 £453 +25.83% 5
East Midlands -21 2 £425 +19.38% 8
Wales - 1 £265 - 5
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 2

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 17 (5.65%) Apache
2 11 (3.65%) Apache Spark
2 11 (3.65%) JBoss
3 8 (2.66%) Apache Airflow
3 8 (2.66%) IIS
3 8 (2.66%) iPlanet
3 8 (2.66%) WebSphere
3 8 (2.66%) WebSphere Application Server
4 3 (1.00%) Confluence
4 3 (1.00%) SharePoint
4 3 (1.00%) Tomcat
5 2 (0.66%) SAS
6 1 (0.33%) CICS
6 1 (0.33%) nginx
6 1 (0.33%) Oracle SOA Suite
6 1 (0.33%) Oracle Workflow
6 1 (0.33%) WebLogic
Applications
1 8 (2.66%) Microsoft Excel
1 8 (2.66%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (2.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (1.66%) Oracle Applications
2 4 (1.33%) Oracle EBS
3 3 (1.00%) Oracle 11i
3 3 (1.00%) Oracle EBS R12
3 3 (1.00%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 3 (1.00%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.33%) ION MarketView
4 1 (0.33%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.33%) Oracle Cash Management
4 1 (0.33%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.33%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.33%) Oracle Retail
Cloud Services
1 98 (32.56%) AWS
2 47 (15.61%) Azure
2 47 (15.61%) GitHub
3 34 (11.30%) OpenShift
4 28 (9.30%) Serverless
5 24 (7.97%) Amazon EC2
5 24 (7.97%) Amazon S3
5 24 (7.97%) AWS CloudFormation
6 23 (7.64%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 21 (6.98%) AWS Lambda
8 18 (5.98%) Amazon EKS
8 18 (5.98%) GCP
9 17 (5.65%) GitHub Actions
10 10 (3.32%) Amazon ECS
10 10 (3.32%) Azure DevOps
10 10 (3.32%) PaaS
11 9 (2.99%) Virtual Private Cloud
12 8 (2.66%) OCI
13 6 (1.99%) Azure AKS
13 6 (1.99%) Pulumi
Communications & Networking
1 14 (4.65%) SSH
2 13 (4.32%) TCP/IP
3 11 (3.65%) DNS
4 9 (2.99%) Firewall
4 9 (2.99%) Kerberos
5 7 (2.33%) HTTP
6 4 (1.33%) Network Security
6 4 (1.33%) SAN
7 2 (0.66%) SSL
8 1 (0.33%) BGP
8 1 (0.33%) FTP
8 1 (0.33%) IPsec
8 1 (0.33%) LAN
8 1 (0.33%) NAS
8 1 (0.33%) SMTP
8 1 (0.33%) SNMP
8 1 (0.33%) VLAN
8 1 (0.33%) VRRP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 52 (17.28%) Oracle Database
2 42 (13.95%) MongoDB
3 27 (8.97%) Amazon RDS
3 27 (8.97%) Relational Database
4 21 (6.98%) DB2
5 20 (6.64%) NoSQL
6 18 (5.98%) PostgreSQL
7 16 (5.32%) SQL Server
8 11 (3.65%) Data Warehouse
8 11 (3.65%) Hadoop
9 10 (3.32%) MySQL
10 9 (2.99%) Elasticsearch
11 8 (2.66%) Apache Hive
12 6 (1.99%) Big Data
12 6 (1.99%) Couchbase
12 6 (1.99%) HBase
12 6 (1.99%) Oracle Reports
13 5 (1.66%) Amazon Redshift
13 5 (1.66%) InfluxDB
14 4 (1.33%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 82 (27.24%) Jenkins
2 58 (19.27%) Git
3 44 (14.62%) GitLab
4 25 (8.31%) JUnit
5 15 (4.98%) JIRA
6 11 (3.65%) Sonatype Nexus
7 9 (2.99%) Maven
8 8 (2.66%) Bitbucket Server
8 8 (2.66%) CA Release Automation
8 8 (2.66%) ClearCase
9 6 (1.99%) Mockito
9 6 (1.99%) Postman
10 5 (1.66%) Subversion
11 4 (1.33%) Atlassian Bamboo
11 4 (1.33%) CircleCI
11 4 (1.33%) Terragrunt
12 3 (1.00%) Gradle
12 3 (1.00%) PyUnit
12 3 (1.00%) REST Assured
12 3 (1.00%) SoapUI
General
1 101 (33.55%) Social Skills
2 56 (18.60%) Finance
3 52 (17.28%) Analytical Skills
4 38 (12.62%) Banking
5 30 (9.97%) Public Sector
6 23 (7.64%) Investment Banking
7 12 (3.99%) Front Office
8 6 (1.99%) Aerospace
8 6 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
9 4 (1.33%) Financial Institution
9 4 (1.33%) Law
9 4 (1.33%) Multimedia
9 4 (1.33%) Retail
10 3 (1.00%) Local Government
10 3 (1.00%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.00%) Military
10 3 (1.00%) Wearables
11 2 (0.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 2 (0.66%) Telecoms
12 1 (0.33%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 79 (26.25%) Developer
2 40 (13.29%) Java Developer
3 39 (12.96%) DevOps Engineer
4 33 (10.96%) Senior
5 23 (7.64%) Administrator
6 19 (6.31%) SQL Developer
7 18 (5.98%) AWS Engineer
7 18 (5.98%) Investment Banking Java Developer
7 18 (5.98%) Site Reliability Engineer
8 17 (5.65%) DBA
8 17 (5.65%) Support Engineer
9 15 (4.98%) Site Engineer
10 14 (4.65%) Senior Developer
11 13 (4.32%) Oracle DBA
12 12 (3.99%) Product Engineer
12 12 (3.99%) Products Support Engineer
12 12 (3.99%) Senior Java Developer
12 12 (3.99%) Software Support Engineer
13 11 (3.65%) Automation Engineer
13 11 (3.65%) AWS DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 51 (16.94%) Kafka
2 29 (9.63%) Spring
3 20 (6.64%) Middleware
4 19 (6.31%) JMS
4 19 (6.31%) Node.js
5 17 (5.65%) Elastic Stack
5 17 (5.65%) REST
6 15 (4.98%) RESTful
7 14 (4.65%) FastAPI
8 13 (4.32%) LDAP
8 13 (4.32%) SOAP
9 10 (3.32%) Spring Boot
10 9 (2.99%) OpenID
11 8 (2.66%) AWS CDK
11 8 (2.66%) OAuth
11 8 (2.66%) OpenAPI
11 8 (2.66%) SAML
11 8 (2.66%) XML
12 7 (2.33%) JSON
12 7 (2.33%) XSD
Miscellaneous
1 20 (6.64%) Data Structures
2 19 (6.31%) Equities
3 14 (4.65%) Cloud Native
4 11 (3.65%) Data Centre
5 10 (3.32%) Management Information System
6 8 (2.66%) Data Protection Act
6 8 (2.66%) Legacy Applications
6 8 (2.66%) Linux Command Line
6 8 (2.66%) Replication
7 7 (2.33%) Distributed Systems
7 7 (2.33%) Enterprise Cloud
8 6 (1.99%) Enterprise Software
8 6 (1.99%) Onboarding
8 6 (1.99%) PKI
9 5 (1.66%) Mainframe
9 5 (1.66%) Security Operations Centre
10 4 (1.33%) DataPower
10 4 (1.33%) Hedge funds
10 4 (1.33%) Legacy Code
11 3 (1.00%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 212 (70.43%) Linux
2 95 (31.56%) Unix
3 35 (11.63%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 33 (10.96%) Windows
5 16 (5.32%) Ubuntu
6 14 (4.65%) CentOS
7 8 (2.66%) Windows Server
8 5 (1.66%) Android
8 5 (1.66%) Apple iOS
8 5 (1.66%) VMS
9 4 (1.33%) AIX
10 2 (0.66%) Debian
10 2 (0.66%) Oracle Linux
10 2 (0.66%) Solaris
11 1 (0.33%) Mac OS X
11 1 (0.33%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 111 (36.88%) CI/CD
2 96 (31.89%) Problem-Solving
3 95 (31.56%) Agile
4 75 (24.92%) DevOps
5 53 (17.61%) Performance Tuning
6 49 (16.28%) Infrastructure as Code
7 48 (15.95%) Task Automation
8 43 (14.29%) Containerisation
9 41 (13.62%) SDLC
10 32 (10.63%) Observability
10 32 (10.63%) Software Engineering
11 27 (8.97%) Root Cause Analysis
12 26 (8.64%) Migration
13 23 (7.64%) Microservices
14 22 (7.31%) ITIL
14 22 (7.31%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 21 (6.98%) Analytics
15 21 (6.98%) Configuration Management
15 21 (6.98%) Multithreading
16 20 (6.64%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 153 (50.83%) Python
2 105 (34.88%) SQL
3 86 (28.57%) Java
4 42 (13.95%) JavaScript
5 38 (12.62%) Bash
6 23 (7.64%) C
7 20 (6.64%) Perl
8 18 (5.98%) PL/SQL
9 17 (5.65%) TypeScript
10 16 (5.32%) C++
10 16 (5.32%) Go
11 12 (3.99%) Ada
12 11 (3.65%) Groovy
13 7 (2.33%) Korn
14 6 (1.99%) PowerShell
15 5 (1.66%) MATLAB
15 5 (1.66%) ProC
16 2 (0.66%) JCL
16 2 (0.66%) PHP
16 2 (0.66%) Tcl
Qualifications
1 77 (25.58%) Security Cleared
2 56 (18.60%) SC Cleared
3 17 (5.65%) BPSS Clearance
4 14 (4.65%) DV Cleared
5 12 (3.99%) Degree
6 8 (2.66%) Computer Science Degree
7 7 (2.33%) AWS Certification
8 6 (1.99%) OCP
8 6 (1.99%) Oracle Certification
9 4 (1.33%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.66%) RHCE
10 2 (0.66%) RHCSA
11 1 (0.33%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 1 (0.33%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 1 (0.33%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (5.32%) SLA
2 11 (3.65%) Data Quality
3 7 (2.33%) QA
4 5 (1.66%) NCSC
5 4 (1.33%) GDPR
6 2 (0.66%) Disclosure Scotland
7 1 (0.33%) Accessibility
7 1 (0.33%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.33%) WCAG
System Software
1 63 (20.93%) Docker
2 18 (5.98%) Active Directory
3 11 (3.65%) Oracle RAC
4 8 (2.66%) Tivoli Directory Server
4 8 (2.66%) Virtual Machines
5 7 (2.33%) HDFS
5 7 (2.33%) KVM
6 5 (1.66%) VMware Infrastructure
7 2 (0.66%) GridGain
8 1 (0.33%) Apache ZooKeeper
8 1 (0.33%) Snort
8 1 (0.33%) Squid
8 1 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 77 (25.58%) Ansible
2 70 (23.26%) Kubernetes
3 68 (22.59%) Terraform
4 41 (13.62%) Grafana
5 36 (11.96%) Prometheus
6 21 (6.98%) Progress Chef
7 16 (5.32%) Red Hat Satellite
8 14 (4.65%) Data Guard
9 13 (4.32%) Puppet
10 10 (3.32%) yum
11 9 (2.99%) Single Sign-On
11 9 (2.99%) Tivoli
12 8 (2.66%) CA Single Sign-On
12 8 (2.66%) CA Wily
13 7 (2.33%) Hadoop YARN
13 7 (2.33%) Packer
13 7 (2.33%) Podman
14 6 (1.99%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 5 (1.66%) Check_MK
15 5 (1.66%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 86 (28.57%) Oracle
2 46 (15.28%) Red Hat
3 45 (14.95%) Splunk
4 27 (8.97%) Microsoft
5 22 (7.31%) IBM
5 22 (7.31%) Sybase
6 13 (4.32%) VMware
7 12 (3.99%) ServiceNow
8 11 (3.65%) AppDynamics
9 10 (3.32%) Dynatrace
9 10 (3.32%) MuleSoft
10 9 (2.99%) Google
10 9 (2.99%) NetApp
11 8 (2.66%) Broadcom
11 8 (2.66%) Confluent
11 8 (2.66%) Dell
12 5 (1.66%) Informatica
12 5 (1.66%) Okta
13 3 (1.00%) Ab Initio
13 3 (1.00%) Hyperion