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 6 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 367 302 331
Rank change year-on-year -65 +29 -85
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 274 244 287
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.61% 0.83% 0.65%
As % of the Programming Languages category 2.14% 2.46% 2.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 199 127 205
10th Percentile £349 £394 £350
25th Percentile £400 £428 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £459 £525 £501
Median % change year-on-year -12.57% +4.79% -7.22%
75th Percentile £538 £608 £625
90th Percentile £625 £675 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £500 £470
% change year-on-year -7.00% +6.38% -12.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 11 8
10th Percentile £46.75 £63.50 £44.75
25th Percentile £47.50 £66.50 £62.50
Median hourly rate £50.00 £68.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.47% +4.62% +10.64%
75th Percentile £52.50 £76.88 £67.50
90th Percentile £53.25 £93.75 £76.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £68.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -26.47% +4.62% +16.85%

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 12,830 9,923 12,821
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.37% 33.93% 29.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,549 6,676 9,095
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £478 £488
% change year-on-year -0.42% -1.95% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 533 243 478
10th Percentile £41.66 £22.27 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.51 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.25 £67.29
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.61
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year +1.56% +5.79% -3.20%

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 6 April 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
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 6 April 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 -63 227 £475 -13.64% 53
UK excluding London -101 134 £465 -7.00% 39
London -49 100 £500 -9.09% 21
Work from Home -40 80 £465 -11.30% 27
Midlands -40 44 £468 +1.63% 6
West Midlands -30 42 £468 +1.63% 5
South East -45 27 £396 -32.42% 17
North of England -75 24 £460 -21.70% 8
East of England -20 19 £473 +1.29% 5
Yorkshire -57 14 £460 -21.37% 3
South West -29 10 £638 +16.70% 3
North West -39 9 £450 -25.00% 5
Scotland -37 8 £402 -14.47%
Wales -11 2 £305 - 2
East Midlands - 2 £475 - 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 (4.38%) Confluence
2 11 (4.01%) Apache
3 9 (3.28%) Apache Spark
4 5 (1.82%) Apache Airflow
4 5 (1.82%) WebLogic
5 3 (1.09%) CICS
5 3 (1.09%) nginx
5 3 (1.09%) Oracle Workflow
5 3 (1.09%) SAS
5 3 (1.09%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.73%) ArcGIS
6 2 (0.73%) JBoss
6 2 (0.73%) Oracle Spatial
6 2 (0.73%) Tomcat
7 1 (0.36%) IBM HTTP Server
7 1 (0.36%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 1 (0.36%) WebSphere
7 1 (0.36%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 5 (1.82%) Microsoft Excel
1 5 (1.82%) Notepad++
2 3 (1.09%) Microsoft Office
2 3 (1.09%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (1.09%) Oracle 11i
1 3 (1.09%) Oracle Applications
2 2 (0.73%) Oracle EBS
3 1 (0.36%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.36%) Oracle Cash Management
3 1 (0.36%) Oracle EBS R12
3 1 (0.36%) Oracle Payables
3 1 (0.36%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.36%) Oracle Receivables
3 1 (0.36%) Oracle Retail
Cloud Services
1 105 (38.32%) AWS
2 54 (19.71%) Azure
3 42 (15.33%) GitHub
4 34 (12.41%) Serverless
5 31 (11.31%) Amazon EC2
5 31 (11.31%) Amazon S3
6 29 (10.58%) GitHub Actions
6 29 (10.58%) OpenShift
7 24 (8.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 24 (8.76%) AWS Lambda
8 16 (5.84%) Amazon EKS
9 15 (5.47%) AWS CloudFormation
10 12 (4.38%) Azure DevOps
10 12 (4.38%) GCP
11 8 (2.92%) AWS CodePipeline
11 8 (2.92%) IaaS
11 8 (2.92%) PaaS
12 7 (2.55%) Azure AKS
12 7 (2.55%) Pulumi
13 6 (2.19%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 18 (6.57%) SSH
2 10 (3.65%) DNS
3 9 (3.28%) SAN
4 8 (2.92%) Network Security
5 6 (2.19%) TCP/IP
6 5 (1.82%) Firewall
6 5 (1.82%) PuTTY
6 5 (1.82%) WinSCP
7 3 (1.09%) HTTPS
7 3 (1.09%) NAS
7 3 (1.09%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.73%) AMQP
8 2 (0.73%) HTTP
8 2 (0.73%) iSCSI
8 2 (0.73%) OpenVPN
9 1 (0.36%) DHCP
9 1 (0.36%) FTP
9 1 (0.36%) Kerberos
9 1 (0.36%) LAN
9 1 (0.36%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (10.58%) Oracle Database
2 24 (8.76%) MongoDB
2 24 (8.76%) SQL Server
3 23 (8.39%) Amazon RDS
4 20 (7.30%) PostgreSQL
5 19 (6.93%) Relational Database
6 18 (6.57%) Data Warehouse
7 13 (4.74%) Metadata
8 12 (4.38%) MySQL
9 8 (2.92%) DynamoDB
9 8 (2.92%) NoSQL
10 7 (2.55%) Big Data
11 6 (2.19%) Data Mart
11 6 (2.19%) Hadoop
11 6 (2.19%) InfluxDB
12 5 (1.82%) BusinessObjects
12 5 (1.82%) DB2
12 5 (1.82%) Oracle Reports
13 4 (1.46%) OLTP
13 4 (1.46%) Sybase ASE
Development Applications
1 68 (24.82%) Jenkins
2 48 (17.52%) GitLab
3 39 (14.23%) Git
4 24 (8.76%) JIRA
5 8 (2.92%) JUnit
6 7 (2.55%) Maven
7 6 (2.19%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 6 (2.19%) Mockito
8 5 (1.82%) PyCharm
8 5 (1.82%) PyUnit
9 4 (1.46%) JMeter
9 4 (1.46%) Sonatype Nexus
10 3 (1.09%) Artifactory
10 3 (1.09%) Bitbucket
10 3 (1.09%) CircleCI
10 3 (1.09%) Subversion
10 3 (1.09%) Terragrunt
11 2 (0.73%) Cucumber
11 2 (0.73%) Postman
11 2 (0.73%) SonarQube
General
1 69 (25.18%) Social Skills
2 44 (16.06%) Finance
3 38 (13.87%) Banking
4 31 (11.31%) Public Sector
5 21 (7.66%) Analytical Skills
6 12 (4.38%) Investment Banking
7 11 (4.01%) Front Office
8 9 (3.28%) Documentation Skills
8 9 (3.28%) Retail
9 7 (2.55%) Aerospace
10 4 (1.46%) Advertising
10 4 (1.46%) Telecoms
11 3 (1.09%) Law
11 3 (1.09%) Local Government
12 2 (0.73%) Organisational Skills
13 1 (0.36%) Influencing Skills
13 1 (0.36%) Manufacturing
13 1 (0.36%) Marketing
13 1 (0.36%) Presentation Skills
13 1 (0.36%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 75 (27.37%) Developer
2 33 (12.04%) Java Developer
3 25 (9.12%) Data Engineer
4 23 (8.39%) Senior
5 21 (7.66%) Administrator
5 21 (7.66%) DBA
6 19 (6.93%) Site Reliability Engineer
7 18 (6.57%) Oracle DBA
7 18 (6.57%) Site Engineer
8 17 (6.20%) DevOps Engineer
8 17 (6.20%) Support Engineer
9 15 (5.47%) Python Developer
10 14 (5.11%) AWS Engineer
10 14 (5.11%) Linux Administrator
11 11 (4.01%) AWS DevOps
12 10 (3.65%) Analyst
12 10 (3.65%) Consultant
12 10 (3.65%) Senior Developer
13 9 (3.28%) Architect
13 9 (3.28%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 21 (7.66%) Node.js
2 20 (7.30%) Kafka
3 16 (5.84%) RESTful
3 16 (5.84%) Spring
4 15 (5.47%) Middleware
5 14 (5.11%) Elastic Stack
5 14 (5.11%) Oracle GoldenGate
5 14 (5.11%) REST
5 14 (5.11%) Spring Boot
6 13 (4.74%) JSON
6 13 (4.74%) LDAP
7 10 (3.65%) SOAP
8 9 (3.28%) AWS CDK
8 9 (3.28%) XML
9 8 (2.92%) Django
9 8 (2.92%) OpenAPI
10 7 (2.55%) .NET
10 7 (2.55%) RabbitMQ
11 6 (2.19%) pytest
12 5 (1.82%) React
Miscellaneous
1 19 (6.93%) Cloud Native
1 19 (6.93%) Management Information System
2 14 (5.11%) Data Centre
3 10 (3.65%) Linux Command Line
4 8 (2.92%) Fixed Income
5 7 (2.55%) DataPower
5 7 (2.55%) Equities
5 7 (2.55%) Mainframe
6 6 (2.19%) Data Structures
6 6 (2.19%) Enterprise Cloud
6 6 (2.19%) Public Cloud
7 5 (1.82%) Data Protection Act
7 5 (1.82%) Enterprise Software
7 5 (1.82%) Legacy Code
7 5 (1.82%) Legacy Systems
7 5 (1.82%) Virtual Team
8 4 (1.46%) Clustering
8 4 (1.46%) Derivative
8 4 (1.46%) Distributed Systems
8 4 (1.46%) Equity Derivative
Operating Systems
1 177 (64.60%) Linux
2 111 (40.51%) Unix
3 42 (15.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 22 (8.03%) Windows
5 12 (4.38%) CentOS
6 6 (2.19%) Ubuntu
7 5 (1.82%) Android
7 5 (1.82%) Apple iOS
7 5 (1.82%) VMS
7 5 (1.82%) Windows Server
8 3 (1.09%) AIX
8 3 (1.09%) zOS
9 2 (0.73%) Debian
9 2 (0.73%) OpenVMS
10 1 (0.36%) Amazon Linux
10 1 (0.36%) Oracle Linux
10 1 (0.36%) Rocky
10 1 (0.36%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 111 (40.51%) CI/CD
2 71 (25.91%) Agile
2 71 (25.91%) Problem-Solving
3 59 (21.53%) DevOps
4 45 (16.42%) Containerisation
4 45 (16.42%) Infrastructure as Code
5 42 (15.33%) Performance Tuning
6 33 (12.04%) Task Automation
7 32 (11.68%) Migration
8 27 (9.85%) Analytics
8 27 (9.85%) Observability
9 26 (9.49%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 26 (9.49%) Microservices
10 25 (9.12%) Continuous Improvement
11 24 (8.76%) ITIL
12 23 (8.39%) ETL
12 23 (8.39%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 22 (8.03%) Configuration Management
13 22 (8.03%) High Availability
13 22 (8.03%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 126 (45.99%) SQL
2 106 (38.69%) Python
3 91 (33.21%) Java
4 29 (10.58%) JavaScript
4 29 (10.58%) PL/SQL
5 21 (7.66%) Bash
6 20 (7.30%) Korn
7 17 (6.20%) TypeScript
8 11 (4.01%) Perl
9 10 (3.65%) C++
9 10 (3.65%) Go
10 9 (3.28%) MATLAB
11 7 (2.55%) C
12 6 (2.19%) PowerShell
13 5 (1.82%) C#
13 5 (1.82%) ProC
14 4 (1.46%) Groovy
14 4 (1.46%) JCL
15 3 (1.09%) PHP
15 3 (1.09%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 112 (40.88%) Security Cleared
2 91 (33.21%) SC Cleared
3 23 (8.39%) BPSS Clearance
4 19 (6.93%) Degree
5 16 (5.84%) DV Cleared
6 11 (4.01%) Computer Science Degree
7 10 (3.65%) Oracle Certification
8 8 (2.92%) OCP
9 4 (1.46%) Master's Degree
10 3 (1.09%) Azure Certification
11 2 (0.73%) CISSP
12 1 (0.36%) AWS Certification
12 1 (0.36%) AWS Certified Developer
12 1 (0.36%) CISM
12 1 (0.36%) ITIL Certification
12 1 (0.36%) MOS
12 1 (0.36%) PMI Certification
12 1 (0.36%) RHCA
12 1 (0.36%) RHCE
12 1 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (7.30%) SLA
2 12 (4.38%) Data Quality
3 7 (2.55%) QA
4 5 (1.82%) GDPR
5 3 (1.09%) FATCA
6 2 (0.73%) California Consumer Privacy Act
6 2 (0.73%) HIPAA
6 2 (0.73%) NIST
7 1 (0.36%) DICOM
7 1 (0.36%) NCSC
7 1 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 59 (21.53%) Docker
2 14 (5.11%) Oracle RAC
3 12 (4.38%) Active Directory
4 9 (3.28%) Virtual Machines
5 4 (1.46%) Postfix
5 4 (1.46%) Varnish
5 4 (1.46%) VMware Infrastructure
6 3 (1.09%) GridGain
6 3 (1.09%) NFS
6 3 (1.09%) Sendmail
7 2 (0.73%) HDFS
7 2 (0.73%) SRDF
8 1 (0.36%) Apache ZooKeeper
8 1 (0.36%) Hyper-V
Systems Management
1 67 (24.45%) Kubernetes
2 58 (21.17%) Terraform
3 50 (18.25%) Ansible
4 34 (12.41%) Grafana
5 32 (11.68%) Prometheus
6 19 (6.93%) Oracle RMAN
7 18 (6.57%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
8 17 (6.20%) Progress Chef
9 15 (5.47%) Red Hat Satellite
10 10 (3.65%) Podman
11 9 (3.28%) Check_MK
12 8 (2.92%) Puppet
13 5 (1.82%) Data Guard
13 5 (1.82%) Dell DRAC
14 4 (1.46%) Docker Swarm
14 4 (1.46%) HAProxy
14 4 (1.46%) Kibana
15 2 (0.73%) NetBackup
15 2 (0.73%) systemd
15 2 (0.73%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 90 (32.85%) Oracle
2 42 (15.33%) Red Hat
3 18 (6.57%) Microsoft
4 16 (5.84%) VMware
5 12 (4.38%) Splunk
6 11 (4.01%) Dell
6 11 (4.01%) Murex
6 11 (4.01%) Sybase
7 8 (2.92%) Informatica
8 7 (2.55%) IBM
8 7 (2.55%) ServiceNow
9 6 (2.19%) Talend
10 5 (1.82%) Veritas
11 4 (1.46%) Cloudera
11 4 (1.46%) Databricks
11 4 (1.46%) Dynatrace
11 4 (1.46%) MuleSoft
12 3 (1.09%) Ab Initio
12 3 (1.09%) Pure Storage
12 3 (1.09%) Solace