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

6 months to
1 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 367 287 329
Rank change year-on-year -80 +42 -87
Contract jobs citing Shell Script 275 249 289
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.62% 0.86% 0.65%
As % of the Programming Languages category 2.16% 2.53% 2.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 197 130 201
10th Percentile £345 £357 £350
25th Percentile £400 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £455 £523 £507
Median % change year-on-year -12.92% +3.16% -6.20%
75th Percentile £538 £605 £625
90th Percentile £624 £675 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £463 £500 £468
% change year-on-year -7.50% +6.95% -13.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 9 9
10th Percentile £47.25 £63.20 £48.16
25th Percentile £48.75 £65.00 £61.25
Median hourly rate £52.50 £68.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.79% +4.62% +16.85%
75th Percentile £60.88 £77.50 -
90th Percentile £65.15 £93.75 £76.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £66.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -21.05% +2.31% +23.81%

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 12,748 9,859 12,934
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.53% 33.95% 29.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,489 6,631 9,140
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £414 £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 £753 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 524 244 486
10th Percentile £41.25 £22.30 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.88 £46.20
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.56 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.72
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -1.44%

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 1 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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Shell Script over the 6 months to 1 April 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Shell Script in the UK

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 1 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 -69 228 £475 -12.04% 53
UK excluding London -95 133 £463 -7.50% 39
London -57 102 £500 -9.09% 21
Work from Home -51 81 £465 -8.91% 27
Midlands -48 39 £471 +2.45% 6
West Midlands -37 37 £471 +2.45% 5
South East -44 26 £400 -25.93% 17
North of England -70 26 £455 -22.55% 8
East of England -17 20 £470 +0.75% 5
Yorkshire -57 16 £454 -22.48% 3
South West -28 12 £575 +5.26% 3
North West -40 9 £450 -25.00% 5
Scotland -35 8 £402 -14.47%
Wales -9 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 (4.36%) Confluence
2 11 (4.00%) Apache
3 9 (3.27%) 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%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.73%) ArcGIS
6 2 (0.73%) JBoss
6 2 (0.73%) Oracle Spatial
6 2 (0.73%) SAS
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
2 3 (1.09%) Microsoft Office
2 3 (1.09%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 4 (1.45%) Oracle Applications
2 3 (1.09%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (1.09%) Oracle EBS
3 2 (0.73%) Oracle EBS R12
3 2 (0.73%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.36%) Oracle Assets
4 1 (0.36%) Oracle Cash Management
4 1 (0.36%) Oracle Payables
4 1 (0.36%) Oracle Receivables
4 1 (0.36%) Oracle Retail
Cloud Services
1 108 (39.27%) AWS
2 54 (19.64%) Azure
3 45 (16.36%) GitHub
4 35 (12.73%) Serverless
5 32 (11.64%) Amazon EC2
5 32 (11.64%) Amazon S3
6 30 (10.91%) GitHub Actions
7 29 (10.55%) OpenShift
8 25 (9.09%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 25 (9.09%) AWS Lambda
9 17 (6.18%) Amazon EKS
10 16 (5.82%) AWS CloudFormation
11 12 (4.36%) Azure DevOps
11 12 (4.36%) GCP
12 8 (2.91%) AWS CodePipeline
12 8 (2.91%) IaaS
12 8 (2.91%) PaaS
13 7 (2.55%) Azure AKS
13 7 (2.55%) Pulumi
14 6 (2.18%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 18 (6.55%) SSH
2 10 (3.64%) DNS
3 9 (3.27%) SAN
4 8 (2.91%) Network Security
5 6 (2.18%) TCP/IP
6 5 (1.82%) Firewall
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%) BIG-IP
9 1 (0.36%) DHCP
9 1 (0.36%) Kerberos
9 1 (0.36%) LAN
9 1 (0.36%) Multicast
9 1 (0.36%) VLAN
9 1 (0.36%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (10.55%) Oracle Database
2 24 (8.73%) Amazon RDS
2 24 (8.73%) MongoDB
3 23 (8.36%) SQL Server
4 19 (6.91%) PostgreSQL
4 19 (6.91%) Relational Database
5 13 (4.73%) MySQL
6 12 (4.36%) Data Warehouse
7 10 (3.64%) NoSQL
8 8 (2.91%) DynamoDB
8 8 (2.91%) Metadata
9 7 (2.55%) Big Data
10 6 (2.18%) Data Mart
10 6 (2.18%) Hadoop
10 6 (2.18%) InfluxDB
11 5 (1.82%) DB2
11 5 (1.82%) Oracle Reports
12 4 (1.45%) KDB
12 4 (1.45%) Pentaho
12 4 (1.45%) Sybase ASE
Development Applications
1 69 (25.09%) Jenkins
2 48 (17.45%) GitLab
3 40 (14.55%) Git
4 24 (8.73%) JIRA
5 8 (2.91%) JUnit
6 7 (2.55%) Maven
7 6 (2.18%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 6 (2.18%) Mockito
8 5 (1.82%) PyCharm
8 5 (1.82%) PyUnit
9 4 (1.45%) JMeter
9 4 (1.45%) 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%) Gatling
11 2 (0.73%) Postman
General
1 69 (25.09%) Social Skills
2 44 (16.00%) Finance
3 38 (13.82%) Banking
4 33 (12.00%) Public Sector
5 23 (8.36%) Analytical Skills
6 12 (4.36%) Investment Banking
7 11 (4.00%) Front Office
8 9 (3.27%) Documentation Skills
8 9 (3.27%) Retail
9 7 (2.55%) Aerospace
10 4 (1.45%) Advertising
10 4 (1.45%) Telecoms
11 3 (1.09%) Law
11 3 (1.09%) Local Government
12 2 (0.73%) Manufacturing
12 2 (0.73%) Organisational Skills
13 1 (0.36%) Influencing Skills
13 1 (0.36%) Military
13 1 (0.36%) Presentation Skills
13 1 (0.36%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 75 (27.27%) Developer
2 33 (12.00%) Java Developer
3 23 (8.36%) Senior
4 22 (8.00%) Administrator
5 21 (7.64%) DBA
6 20 (7.27%) Data Engineer
7 19 (6.91%) Site Reliability Engineer
8 18 (6.55%) DevOps Engineer
8 18 (6.55%) Oracle DBA
8 18 (6.55%) Site Engineer
8 18 (6.55%) Support Engineer
9 15 (5.45%) Python Developer
10 14 (5.09%) AWS Engineer
10 14 (5.09%) Linux Administrator
11 11 (4.00%) AWS DevOps
11 11 (4.00%) Consultant
12 10 (3.64%) Analyst
12 10 (3.64%) Senior Developer
13 9 (3.27%) Architect
13 9 (3.27%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 21 (7.64%) Node.js
2 20 (7.27%) Kafka
3 17 (6.18%) Middleware
4 16 (5.82%) Elastic Stack
4 16 (5.82%) RESTful
4 16 (5.82%) Spring
5 14 (5.09%) REST
5 14 (5.09%) Spring Boot
6 13 (4.73%) JSON
6 13 (4.73%) LDAP
6 13 (4.73%) Oracle GoldenGate
7 10 (3.64%) OpenAPI
7 10 (3.64%) SOAP
8 9 (3.27%) AWS CDK
8 9 (3.27%) XML
9 8 (2.91%) Django
10 7 (2.55%) .NET
10 7 (2.55%) RabbitMQ
10 7 (2.55%) XSD
11 6 (2.18%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 21 (7.64%) Cloud Native
2 19 (6.91%) Management Information System
3 14 (5.09%) Data Centre
4 8 (2.91%) Fixed Income
5 7 (2.55%) DataPower
5 7 (2.55%) Enterprise Cloud
5 7 (2.55%) Equities
5 7 (2.55%) Mainframe
6 6 (2.18%) Data Structures
6 6 (2.18%) Legacy Systems
6 6 (2.18%) 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%) Linux Command Line
7 5 (1.82%) Virtual Team
8 4 (1.45%) Clustering
8 4 (1.45%) Derivative
8 4 (1.45%) Distributed Systems
8 4 (1.45%) Equity Derivative
Operating Systems
1 182 (66.18%) Linux
2 108 (39.27%) Unix
3 42 (15.27%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 22 (8.00%) Windows
5 12 (4.36%) CentOS
6 8 (2.91%) 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
1 112 (40.73%) CI/CD
2 74 (26.91%) Agile
3 72 (26.18%) Problem-Solving
4 60 (21.82%) DevOps
5 46 (16.73%) Containerisation
5 46 (16.73%) Infrastructure as Code
6 42 (15.27%) Performance Tuning
7 33 (12.00%) Task Automation
8 28 (10.18%) Analytics
9 27 (9.82%) Observability
10 26 (9.45%) Continuous Improvement
10 26 (9.45%) Infrastructure Engineering
10 26 (9.45%) Microservices
10 26 (9.45%) Migration
11 23 (8.36%) ITIL
11 23 (8.36%) Scrum
11 23 (8.36%) Site Reliability Engineering
11 23 (8.36%) Software Engineering
12 22 (8.00%) Data Modelling
12 22 (8.00%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 122 (44.36%) SQL
2 109 (39.64%) Python
3 93 (33.82%) Java
4 31 (11.27%) JavaScript
5 23 (8.36%) PL/SQL
6 22 (8.00%) Bash
7 19 (6.91%) Korn
8 17 (6.18%) TypeScript
9 12 (4.36%) C++
10 11 (4.00%) Perl
11 10 (3.64%) Go
12 9 (3.27%) C
12 9 (3.27%) MATLAB
13 6 (2.18%) PowerShell
14 5 (1.82%) C#
14 5 (1.82%) ProC
15 4 (1.45%) Ada
15 4 (1.45%) Groovy
15 4 (1.45%) JCL
16 3 (1.09%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 111 (40.36%) Security Cleared
2 91 (33.09%) SC Cleared
3 23 (8.36%) BPSS Clearance
4 19 (6.91%) Degree
5 16 (5.82%) DV Cleared
6 11 (4.00%) Computer Science Degree
7 9 (3.27%) Oracle Certification
8 8 (2.91%) OCP
9 4 (1.45%) 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 (7.27%) SLA
2 13 (4.73%) Data Quality
3 10 (3.64%) QA
4 6 (2.18%) 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 61 (22.18%) Docker
2 13 (4.73%) Oracle RAC
3 12 (4.36%) Active Directory
4 9 (3.27%) Virtual Machines
5 4 (1.45%) Postfix
5 4 (1.45%) Varnish
5 4 (1.45%) 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
8 1 (0.36%) KVM
Systems Management
1 69 (25.09%) Kubernetes
2 59 (21.45%) Terraform
3 49 (17.82%) Ansible
4 36 (13.09%) Grafana
5 34 (12.36%) Prometheus
6 17 (6.18%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
6 17 (6.18%) Oracle RMAN
6 17 (6.18%) Progress Chef
7 15 (5.45%) Red Hat Satellite
8 10 (3.64%) Podman
9 9 (3.27%) Check_MK
10 8 (2.91%) Puppet
11 5 (1.82%) Dell DRAC
12 4 (1.45%) Data Guard
12 4 (1.45%) Docker Swarm
12 4 (1.45%) HAProxy
12 4 (1.45%) Kibana
13 2 (0.73%) Sysdig
13 2 (0.73%) systemd
13 2 (0.73%) Thomson Reuters DACS
Vendors
1 84 (30.55%) Oracle
2 44 (16.00%) Red Hat
3 18 (6.55%) Microsoft
4 16 (5.82%) VMware
5 12 (4.36%) Splunk
6 11 (4.00%) Dell
6 11 (4.00%) Murex
6 11 (4.00%) Sybase
7 7 (2.55%) IBM
7 7 (2.55%) ServiceNow
8 6 (2.18%) MuleSoft
9 5 (1.82%) Talend
9 5 (1.82%) Veritas
10 4 (1.45%) Cloudera
10 4 (1.45%) Databricks
10 4 (1.45%) Dynatrace
11 3 (1.09%) Ab Initio
11 3 (1.09%) CyberArk
11 3 (1.09%) Pure Storage
11 3 (1.09%) Solace