SSH Contracts

Secure Shell (SSH)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring SSH skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited SSH over the 6 months leading up to 30 June 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jun 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 501 541 650
Rank change year-on-year +40 +109 +41
Contract jobs citing SSH 33 44 34
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.11% 0.10% 0.061%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 0.86% 0.82% 0.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 27 25 18
10th Percentile £350 £263 £313
25th Percentile £405 £510 £314
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £533 £550
Median % change year-on-year -10.88% -3.09% -9.84%
75th Percentile £550 £575 £561
90th Percentile £589 £675 £583
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £225 £532
% change year-on-year +111.11% -57.67% +11.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 2
10th Percentile - - £20.34
25th Percentile - - £24.91
Median hourly rate - - £32.99
75th Percentile - - £40.59
90th Percentile - - £44.88
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £47.73

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 3,819 5,390 7,146
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.46% 12.49% 12.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,297 3,176 4,600
10th Percentile £225 £213 £240
25th Percentile £363 £350 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £480 £500 £506
Median % change year-on-year -4.00% -1.19% +1.20%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £625
90th Percentile £675 £688 £721
UK excluding London median daily rate £473 £490 £475
% change year-on-year -3.57% +3.16% +5.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 185 432 434
10th Percentile £14.40 £13.87 £9.80
25th Percentile £19.46 £17.69 £10.63
Median hourly rate £42.50 £45.00 £21.11
Median % change year-on-year -5.56% +113.17% -25.93%
75th Percentile £60.13 £63.75 £62.55
90th Percentile £78.00 £73.21 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.93 £47.50 £22.13
% change year-on-year -32.79% +114.64% -1.64%

SSH
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing SSH as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for SSH in the UK

SSH
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing SSH.

Daily rate trend for SSH in the UK

SSH
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SSH over the 6 months to 30 June 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SSH in the UK

SSH
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing SSH.

Hourly rate trend for SSH in the UK

SSH
Top 8 Contract 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 30 June 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 +47 32 £475 -10.88% 133
London +42 25 £500 -6.37% 52
Work from Home +39 10 £550 -1.79% 24
UK excluding London +41 6 £475 +111.11% 82
Midlands +15 5 £475 - 25
West Midlands +11 5 £475 - 16
North of England +7 1 £350 +55.56% 19
Yorkshire - 1 £350 - 10

SSH
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 5 (15.15%) Confluence
2 4 (12.12%) Apache
2 4 (12.12%) Apache Spark
2 4 (12.12%) Jupyter
3 2 (6.06%) nginx
Applications
1 3 (9.09%) AutoCAD
Cloud Services
1 13 (39.39%) AWS
2 8 (24.24%) Azure
3 7 (21.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
3 7 (21.21%) Amazon S3
4 6 (18.18%) Amazon EC2
5 5 (15.15%) Amazon ELB
5 5 (15.15%) Amazon Glacier
5 5 (15.15%) AWS KMS
5 5 (15.15%) Virtual Private Cloud
6 4 (12.12%) Power Platform
7 2 (6.06%) Amazon OpenSearch
7 2 (6.06%) AWS Lambda
7 2 (6.06%) GitHub
7 2 (6.06%) Route 53
7 2 (6.06%) Serverless
8 1 (3.03%) Entra ID
8 1 (3.03%) GCP
8 1 (3.03%) OCI
8 1 (3.03%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 10 (30.30%) HTTP
1 10 (30.30%) SMTP
2 8 (24.24%) DNS
2 8 (24.24%) TCP/IP
3 7 (21.21%) Firewall
3 7 (21.21%) HTTPS
4 6 (18.18%) Internet
4 6 (18.18%) SSL
5 5 (15.15%) FTP
6 3 (9.09%) Network Security
6 3 (9.09%) Remote Desktop
6 3 (9.09%) SNMP
6 3 (9.09%) Telnet
6 3 (9.09%) Wireshark
7 2 (6.06%) DHCP
8 1 (3.03%) DSLAM
8 1 (3.03%) NAS
8 1 (3.03%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 5 (15.15%) Amazon RDS
2 4 (12.12%) Apache Hive
2 4 (12.12%) Azure SQL Database
2 4 (12.12%) Delta Lake
2 4 (12.12%) Power BI
2 4 (12.12%) RDBMS
2 4 (12.12%) Relational Database
2 4 (12.12%) SQL Server
3 2 (6.06%) MariaDB
3 2 (6.06%) PostgreSQL
4 1 (3.03%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 12 (36.36%) Git
1 12 (36.36%) JIRA
2 11 (33.33%) Jenkins
3 5 (15.15%) Vagrant
4 4 (12.12%) RStudio
5 3 (9.09%) GitLab
5 3 (9.09%) Gradle
5 3 (9.09%) JMeter
5 3 (9.09%) Selenium
6 1 (3.03%) Atlassian Bamboo
General
1 17 (51.52%) Analytical Skills
2 13 (39.39%) Social Skills
3 8 (24.24%) Public Sector
4 3 (9.09%) Organisational Skills
4 3 (9.09%) Telecoms
5 2 (6.06%) Finance
6 1 (3.03%) Banking
Job Titles
1 7 (21.21%) Network Engineer
2 6 (18.18%) DevOps Engineer
3 5 (15.15%) Audio Visual Engineer
4 4 (12.12%) Data Engineer
5 3 (9.09%) Commissioning Engineer
6 2 (6.06%) Automation Tester
6 2 (6.06%) AWS Engineer
6 2 (6.06%) Java Automation Tester
6 2 (6.06%) Linux Engineer
6 2 (6.06%) Linux Systems Engineer
6 2 (6.06%) Network Systems Engineer
6 2 (6.06%) Principal Engineer
6 2 (6.06%) Principal Systems Engineer
6 2 (6.06%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
6 2 (6.06%) Systems Engineer
6 2 (6.06%) Tester
7 1 (3.03%) Automation Test Analyst
7 1 (3.03%) Java Engineer
7 1 (3.03%) Principal Security Engineer
7 1 (3.03%) QA Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 7 (21.21%) JSON
2 5 (15.15%) LDAP
3 4 (12.12%) pydantic
3 4 (12.12%) PySpark
3 4 (12.12%) YAML
4 3 (9.09%) Kafka
4 3 (9.09%) WireMock
4 3 (9.09%) XML
5 2 (6.06%) Elastic Stack
Miscellaneous
1 8 (24.24%) Onboarding
1 8 (24.24%) Replication
2 4 (12.12%) Data Structures
2 4 (12.12%) Linux Command Line
2 4 (12.12%) Reference Data
3 3 (9.09%) Digital Signage
3 3 (9.09%) Management Information System
4 2 (6.06%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (3.03%) Cloud Native
5 1 (3.03%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 1 (3.03%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 19 (57.58%) Linux
2 12 (36.36%) Windows
3 9 (27.27%) Unix
4 7 (21.21%) Amazon Linux
5 5 (15.15%) VMS
6 2 (6.06%) CentOS
6 2 (6.06%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (6.06%) SUSE
6 2 (6.06%) Ubuntu
7 1 (3.03%) AIX
7 1 (3.03%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 11 (33.33%) Agile
1 11 (33.33%) Configuration Management
1 11 (33.33%) DevOps
2 10 (30.30%) Data Security
3 9 (27.27%) Performance Tuning
4 7 (21.21%) Key Management
5 6 (18.18%) Cloud Security
5 6 (18.18%) Cryptography
5 6 (18.18%) Data Ingestion
5 6 (18.18%) Disaster Recovery
5 6 (18.18%) Problem Management
5 6 (18.18%) Problem-Solving
5 6 (18.18%) Technical Leadership
6 5 (15.15%) Change Management
6 5 (15.15%) Infrastructure as Code
6 5 (15.15%) Patch Management
6 5 (15.15%) Platform Engineering
6 5 (15.15%) Process Improvement
6 5 (15.15%) Service Management
6 5 (15.15%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 17 (51.52%) Python
2 11 (33.33%) Java
3 8 (24.24%) Bash
3 8 (24.24%) Perl
4 7 (21.21%) ActionScript
4 7 (21.21%) ActionScript 2.0
4 7 (21.21%) SQL
5 5 (15.15%) Groovy
5 5 (15.15%) PowerShell
6 4 (12.12%) C
6 4 (12.12%) Scala
7 1 (3.03%) Korn
7 1 (3.03%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 14 (42.42%) Security Cleared
2 13 (39.39%) SC Cleared
3 1 (3.03%) IBM Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (12.12%) GDPR
2 3 (9.09%) SLA
3 1 (3.03%) QA
System Software
1 8 (24.24%) Docker
2 5 (15.15%) Active Directory
2 5 (15.15%) DFS Replication
3 3 (9.09%) FreeRADIUS
3 3 (9.09%) iptables
4 2 (6.06%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 11 (33.33%) Terraform
2 8 (24.24%) Grafana
3 7 (21.21%) Ansible
4 6 (18.18%) Prometheus
4 6 (18.18%) Puppet
5 4 (12.12%) Nagios
6 3 (9.09%) Cacti
6 3 (9.09%) Kubernetes
6 3 (9.09%) Netcool
6 3 (9.09%) Packer
6 3 (9.09%) Progress Chef
6 3 (9.09%) Proxmox
6 3 (9.09%) ZABBIX
7 2 (6.06%) Failover Clustering
7 2 (6.06%) FortiGate
7 2 (6.06%) Kibana
7 2 (6.06%) Red Hat Satellite
8 1 (3.03%) Graylog
8 1 (3.03%) logstash
8 1 (3.03%) yum
Vendors
1 7 (21.21%) IBM
1 7 (21.21%) IBM Sterling
2 5 (15.15%) ServiceNow
2 5 (15.15%) VMware
3 4 (12.12%) Databricks
3 4 (12.12%) Splunk
4 3 (9.09%) Nokia
4 3 (9.09%) Red Hat
5 1 (3.03%) Cisco
5 1 (3.03%) Huawei
5 1 (3.03%) Juniper
5 1 (3.03%) Microsoft
5 1 (3.03%) Palo Alto