SSH Contract Job Trends

Secure Shell (SSH)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring SSH skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 477 512 550
Rank change year-on-year +35 +38 +156
Contract jobs citing SSH 95 39 83
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.27% 0.11% 0.18%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 2.39% 0.89% 1.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 65 22 56
10th Percentile £192 £377 £293
25th Percentile £363 £404 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £466 £463 £450
Median % change year-on-year +0.65% +2.78% -16.67%
75th Percentile £488 £621 £595
90th Percentile £650 £684 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £420 £431
% change year-on-year +13.10% -2.61% -9.21%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 3
10th Percentile - - £29.44
25th Percentile - - £47.65
Median hourly rate - - £78.00
75th Percentile - - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £78.00

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
UK

SSH falls under the Communications and Computer Networking category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring communications or computer networking skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 3,981 4,373 6,592
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.34% 12.05% 14.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,577 2,528 4,107
10th Percentile £205 £225 £213
25th Percentile £358 £375 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £687 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £452 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -4.95% - +5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 200 161 344
10th Percentile £15.50 £18.03 £17.72
25th Percentile £20.42 £25.75 £22.75
Median hourly rate £34.50 £47.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.37% -13.64% +30.95%
75th Percentile £65.00 £65.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £75.67
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £50.00 £56.49
% change year-on-year -15.00% -11.49% +25.53%

SSH
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing SSH relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

SSH job vacancy trend in the UK

SSH
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSH.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSH

SSH
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SSH over the 6 months to 17 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SSH in the UK

SSH
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSH.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSH

SSH
Top 11 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SSH within the UK over the 6 months to 17 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 +7 80 £475 +11.76% 23
UK excluding London -3 55 £475 +13.10% 26
London +30 35 £466 -12.99% 8
Midlands +5 34 £475 +11.76% 4
West Midlands +3 31 £475 +11.76% 4
Work from Home +14 20 £400 -20.00% 8
North of England -29 20 £475 +16.56% 4
North West -14 11 £452 -0.78% 1
Yorkshire -35 9 £675 +65.64% 3
East Midlands - 3 £134 -
South East -3 1 £384 -25.07% 5

SSH
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 41 (43.16%) Confluence
2 13 (13.68%) SharePoint
3 12 (12.63%) nginx
4 5 (5.26%) TPMS
5 3 (3.16%) Apache Airflow
5 3 (3.16%) Apache Spark
Applications
1 12 (12.63%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (10.53%) Mozilla Thunderbird
3 2 (2.11%) AutoCAD
3 2 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
4 1 (1.05%) MS Visio
4 1 (1.05%) OmniGraffle
Cloud Services
1 35 (36.84%) AWS
2 27 (28.42%) Amazon S3
3 24 (25.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
4 23 (24.21%) Amazon EC2
5 22 (23.16%) Amazon ELB
5 22 (23.16%) AWS KMS
5 22 (23.16%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 20 (21.05%) Azure
7 12 (12.63%) Amazon Glacier
7 12 (12.63%) Route 53
8 10 (10.53%) Amazon ECS
8 10 (10.53%) Microsoft 365
9 6 (6.32%) GCP
9 6 (6.32%) Nutanix
10 5 (5.26%) GitHub
11 3 (3.16%) SaaS
12 2 (2.11%) AWS Lambda
12 2 (2.11%) GitHub Actions
12 2 (2.11%) Serverless
13 1 (1.05%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 32 (33.68%) DNS
1 32 (33.68%) HTTP
2 30 (31.58%) Firewall
3 26 (27.37%) SMTP
4 23 (24.21%) FTP
5 10 (10.53%) IMAP
5 10 (10.53%) OpenLDAP
5 10 (10.53%) SSL
6 8 (8.42%) SNMP
6 8 (8.42%) TCP/IP
7 6 (6.32%) Kerberos
8 5 (5.26%) Telnet
9 4 (4.21%) Internet
10 3 (3.16%) PuTTY
11 2 (2.11%) DMZ
11 2 (2.11%) HTTPS
11 2 (2.11%) Network Security
11 2 (2.11%) SD-WAN
11 2 (2.11%) VLAN
11 2 (2.11%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (23.16%) Amazon RDS
2 14 (14.74%) PostgreSQL
3 10 (10.53%) Amazon Aurora
4 5 (5.26%) Hadoop
5 3 (3.16%) Big Data
5 3 (3.16%) Delta Lake
5 3 (3.16%) NoSQL
5 3 (3.16%) Parquet
6 2 (2.11%) Apache Hive
6 2 (2.11%) Elasticsearch
6 2 (2.11%) Impala
7 1 (1.05%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 47 (49.47%) JIRA
2 34 (35.79%) Git
3 30 (31.58%) Jenkins
4 22 (23.16%) Vagrant
5 5 (5.26%) SonarQube
6 3 (3.16%) MLflow
7 2 (2.11%) Poetry
7 2 (2.11%) PyCharm
7 2 (2.11%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (2.11%) TeamCity
7 2 (2.11%) Visual Studio Code
8 1 (1.05%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 1 (1.05%) Bitbucket
General
1 46 (48.42%) Social Skills
2 22 (23.16%) Public Sector
3 16 (16.84%) Finance
4 15 (15.79%) Presentation Skills
5 13 (13.68%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (10.53%) Analytical Skills
7 3 (3.16%) Banking
Job Titles
1 24 (25.26%) DevOps Engineer
2 18 (18.95%) AWS Engineer
2 18 (18.95%) Platform Engineer
3 17 (17.89%) Cloud Platform Engineer
4 16 (16.84%) AWS DevOps
4 16 (16.84%) AWS DevOps Engineer
5 13 (13.68%) Analyst
6 10 (10.53%) AWS Platform Engineer
6 10 (10.53%) Consultant
7 9 (9.47%) Developer
7 9 (9.47%) DevOps Platform Engineer
8 7 (7.37%) Cryptography Engineer
8 7 (7.37%) Java Developer
9 6 (6.32%) Management Consultant
10 5 (5.26%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 5 (5.26%) Network Engineer
11 3 (3.16%) Audio Visual Engineer
11 3 (3.16%) Data Engineer
11 3 (3.16%) Support Engineer
11 3 (3.16%) Technical Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 26 (27.37%) LDAP
2 7 (7.37%) Node.js
3 5 (5.26%) OAuth
3 5 (5.26%) SAML
4 4 (4.21%) Kafka
5 3 (3.16%) Apache Avro
5 3 (3.16%) Elastic Stack
5 3 (3.16%) Flask
5 3 (3.16%) NumPy
5 3 (3.16%) Pandas
6 2 (2.11%) SailPoint
7 1 (1.05%) Middleware
7 1 (1.05%) TIBCO EMS
Miscellaneous
1 24 (25.26%) Replication
2 13 (13.68%) Tandem
3 5 (5.26%) Data Protection Act
3 5 (5.26%) Management Information System
3 5 (5.26%) PKI
4 4 (4.21%) Onboarding
5 3 (3.16%) Linux Command Line
6 2 (2.11%) Algorithms
6 2 (2.11%) Cloud Native
6 2 (2.11%) Digital Signage
6 2 (2.11%) Enterprise Software
6 2 (2.11%) Machine to Machine
6 2 (2.11%) Market Risk
7 1 (1.05%) BYOD
7 1 (1.05%) Data Centre
7 1 (1.05%) Hybrid Cloud
7 1 (1.05%) Virtual Team
7 1 (1.05%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 62 (65.26%) Windows
2 57 (60.00%) Linux
3 24 (25.26%) Amazon Linux
4 22 (23.16%) VMS
5 17 (17.89%) Unix
6 10 (10.53%) Ubuntu
7 7 (7.37%) AIX
7 7 (7.37%) Solaris
8 3 (3.16%) Windows 10
8 3 (3.16%) Windows 7
8 3 (3.16%) Windows 8
8 3 (3.16%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 34 (35.79%) Change Management
1 34 (35.79%) DevOps
2 29 (30.53%) Key Management
3 27 (28.42%) Cryptography
4 24 (25.26%) Patch Management
4 24 (25.26%) Problem-Solving
5 23 (24.21%) Configuration Management
5 23 (24.21%) Platform Engineering
6 22 (23.16%) CI/CD
6 22 (23.16%) Cloud Security
7 18 (18.95%) Stakeholder Management
8 16 (16.84%) Incident Response
9 15 (15.79%) Agile
9 15 (15.79%) Computer Science
9 15 (15.79%) Information Security
9 15 (15.79%) Project Management
10 14 (14.74%) Data Protection
10 14 (14.74%) Service Management
11 13 (13.68%) ITIL
12 12 (12.63%) Privileged Access Management
Programming Languages
1 39 (41.05%) Python
2 29 (30.53%) PowerShell
3 25 (26.32%) Groovy
4 20 (21.05%) Java
5 17 (17.89%) SQL
6 12 (12.63%) Perl
7 8 (8.42%) Bash
8 7 (7.37%) JavaScript
8 7 (7.37%) Shell Script
8 7 (7.37%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 27 (28.42%) Security Cleared
2 25 (26.32%) Degree
2 25 (26.32%) SC Cleared
3 13 (13.68%) Computer Science Degree
4 10 (10.53%) AWS Certification
4 10 (10.53%) Azure Certification
4 10 (10.53%) BPSS Clearance
5 6 (6.32%) CISSP
6 5 (5.26%) FFIEC
6 5 (5.26%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
7 3 (3.16%) CEH
7 3 (3.16%) CISM
8 1 (1.05%) CCNP
8 1 (1.05%) Cisco Certification
8 1 (1.05%) Master's Degree
8 1 (1.05%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (12.63%) NIST
1 12 (12.63%) PCI DSS
2 5 (5.26%) GDPR
2 5 (5.26%) GLBA
2 5 (5.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 4 (4.21%) SOC 2
4 3 (3.16%) FIPS 140-2
5 2 (2.11%) GRC
5 2 (2.11%) SLA
System Software
1 32 (33.68%) Active Directory
2 27 (28.42%) Docker
3 22 (23.16%) DFS Replication
4 10 (10.53%) Dovecot
4 10 (10.53%) Postfix
4 10 (10.53%) Squid
5 7 (7.37%) VMware Infrastructure
6 5 (5.26%) Firmware
7 3 (3.16%) BitLocker
8 2 (2.11%) HDFS
9 1 (1.05%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 1 (1.05%) Virtual Machines
9 1 (1.05%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 26 (27.37%) Terraform
2 22 (23.16%) Grafana
2 22 (23.16%) Prometheus
3 12 (12.63%) Ansible
4 10 (10.53%) Nessus
4 10 (10.53%) Proxmox
5 6 (6.32%) Single Sign-On
6 4 (4.21%) Kibana
6 4 (4.21%) Kubernetes
7 3 (3.16%) Argo
7 3 (3.16%) Istio
7 3 (3.16%) Packer
7 3 (3.16%) SCCM
8 2 (2.11%) FortiGate
8 2 (2.11%) Progress Chef
9 1 (1.05%) yum
Vendors
1 30 (31.58%) ServiceNow
2 13 (13.68%) IBM
2 13 (13.68%) Microsoft
3 12 (12.63%) Thales
4 11 (11.58%) CyberArk
5 10 (10.53%) Jaspersoft
6 7 (7.37%) BeyondTrust
6 7 (7.37%) Splunk
6 7 (7.37%) VMware
7 6 (6.32%) Gemalto
8 4 (4.21%) Cisco
9 3 (3.16%) BiZZdesign
9 3 (3.16%) Cloudera
9 3 (3.16%) Dell
9 3 (3.16%) Draytek
9 3 (3.16%) McAfee
10 2 (2.11%) Qualys
10 2 (2.11%) Red Hat
10 2 (2.11%) Tenable
11 1 (1.05%) TIBCO