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 11 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 493 544 652
Rank change year-on-year +51 +108 +45
Contract jobs citing SSH 25 38 51
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.085% 0.088% 0.088%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 0.66% 0.69% 0.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 18 23 36
10th Percentile £331 £265 £313
25th Percentile £461 £511 £387
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £540 £448
Median % change year-on-year -7.41% +20.54% -27.89%
75th Percentile £564 £597 £562
90th Percentile £640 £925 £619
UK excluding London median daily rate £350 £225 £438
% change year-on-year +55.56% -48.57% -15.87%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £47.73
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 3,800 5,473 7,157
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.90% 12.73% 12.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,310 3,274 4,628
10th Percentile £213 £205 £240
25th Percentile £363 £350 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £489 £495 £518
Median % change year-on-year -1.26% -4.44% +3.60%
75th Percentile £598 £600 £638
90th Percentile £675 £700 £724
UK excluding London median daily rate £466 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -2.00% - +6.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 175 418 472
10th Percentile £14.20 £13.50 £9.80
25th Percentile £17.30 £16.44 £10.63
Median hourly rate £29.00 £40.00 £18.50
Median % change year-on-year -27.50% +116.22% -34.51%
75th Percentile £57.50 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £74.50 £70.00 £74.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.20 £46.14 £18.47
% change year-on-year -47.55% +149.85% -14.12%

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 11 May 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 11 May 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 +67 24 £500 -7.41% 46
London +21 20 £523 -5.00% 22
Work from Home +46 8 £550 +1.38% 23
UK excluding London +55 3 £350 +55.56% 26
North of England +19 3 £350 +55.56% 10
Yorkshire - 2 £350 - 3
North West +14 1 - - 7
South West - 1 - - 4

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 6 (24.00%) Apache
1 6 (24.00%) Apache Spark
1 6 (24.00%) Jupyter
Applications
1 1 (4.00%) AutoCAD
Cloud Services
1 10 (40.00%) Azure
2 6 (24.00%) Power Platform
3 4 (16.00%) AWS
4 2 (8.00%) Amazon OpenSearch
4 2 (8.00%) GitHub
5 1 (4.00%) GCP
Communications & Networking
1 8 (32.00%) HTTPS
2 7 (28.00%) SSL
3 5 (20.00%) TCP/IP
4 3 (12.00%) DHCP
4 3 (12.00%) DNS
4 3 (12.00%) Network Security
4 3 (12.00%) Remote Desktop
4 3 (12.00%) SNMP
4 3 (12.00%) Telnet
4 3 (12.00%) Wireshark
5 2 (8.00%) Firewall
5 2 (8.00%) HTTP
5 2 (8.00%) Internet
5 2 (8.00%) SMTP
6 1 (4.00%) DSLAM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (24.00%) Apache Hive
1 6 (24.00%) Azure SQL Database
1 6 (24.00%) Delta Lake
1 6 (24.00%) Power BI
1 6 (24.00%) SQL Server
2 4 (16.00%) RDBMS
2 4 (16.00%) Relational Database
3 2 (8.00%) MariaDB
3 2 (8.00%) PostgreSQL
4 1 (4.00%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 9 (36.00%) JIRA
2 8 (32.00%) Git
3 6 (24.00%) RStudio
4 3 (12.00%) GitLab
4 3 (12.00%) Gradle
4 3 (12.00%) Jenkins
4 3 (12.00%) JMeter
4 3 (12.00%) Selenium
General
1 15 (60.00%) Analytical Skills
2 10 (40.00%) Social Skills
3 4 (16.00%) Public Sector
4 3 (12.00%) Organisational Skills
4 3 (12.00%) Telecoms
5 2 (8.00%) Banking
5 2 (8.00%) Finance
Job Titles
1 6 (24.00%) Data Engineer
2 5 (20.00%) Network Engineer
3 3 (12.00%) Linux Engineer
3 3 (12.00%) Linux Systems Engineer
3 3 (12.00%) Systems Engineer
4 2 (8.00%) Audio Visual Engineer
4 2 (8.00%) Automation Tester
4 2 (8.00%) Java Automation Tester
4 2 (8.00%) Network Systems Engineer
4 2 (8.00%) Principal Engineer
4 2 (8.00%) Principal Systems Engineer
4 2 (8.00%) Senior
4 2 (8.00%) Tester
5 1 (4.00%) Administrator
5 1 (4.00%) Analyst
5 1 (4.00%) Network Security Engineer
5 1 (4.00%) Quality Engineer
5 1 (4.00%) Senior Network Engineer
5 1 (4.00%) Senior Systems Engineer
5 1 (4.00%) Test Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (36.00%) JSON
2 6 (24.00%) pydantic
2 6 (24.00%) PySpark
2 6 (24.00%) YAML
3 3 (12.00%) Kafka
3 3 (12.00%) WireMock
3 3 (12.00%) XML
4 2 (8.00%) Elastic Stack
4 2 (8.00%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 6 (24.00%) Data Structures
1 6 (24.00%) Linux Command Line
1 6 (24.00%) Onboarding
1 6 (24.00%) Reference Data
2 3 (12.00%) Data Protection Act
2 3 (12.00%) Replication
3 1 (4.00%) Clustering
3 1 (4.00%) Digital Signage
3 1 (4.00%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 1 (4.00%) Management Information System
3 1 (4.00%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 14 (56.00%) Linux
2 9 (36.00%) Unix
3 8 (32.00%) Windows
4 2 (8.00%) CentOS
4 2 (8.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 2 (8.00%) SUSE
4 2 (8.00%) Ubuntu
5 1 (4.00%) AIX
5 1 (4.00%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 13 (52.00%) Data Security
2 12 (48.00%) Agile
3 9 (36.00%) Performance Tuning
4 8 (32.00%) Data Ingestion
4 8 (32.00%) Key Management
4 8 (32.00%) Problem-Solving
5 7 (28.00%) Cryptography
6 6 (24.00%) Configuration Management
6 6 (24.00%) Data Pipeline
6 6 (24.00%) Disaster Recovery
6 6 (24.00%) Problem Management
6 6 (24.00%) Scaled Agile Framework
6 6 (24.00%) Scrum
6 6 (24.00%) Technical Leadership
7 5 (20.00%) Process Improvement
7 5 (20.00%) Service Management
7 5 (20.00%) Test Automation
8 4 (16.00%) Containerisation
8 4 (16.00%) Mentoring
8 4 (16.00%) Time Management
Programming Languages
1 13 (52.00%) Python
2 10 (40.00%) Bash
3 9 (36.00%) SQL
4 8 (32.00%) ActionScript
4 8 (32.00%) ActionScript 2.0
5 6 (24.00%) Java
5 6 (24.00%) Scala
6 5 (20.00%) C
7 4 (16.00%) Perl
8 1 (4.00%) Korn
8 1 (4.00%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 9 (36.00%) Security Cleared
2 7 (28.00%) SC Cleared
3 1 (4.00%) IBM Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (24.00%) GDPR
2 3 (12.00%) SLA
3 1 (4.00%) QA
System Software
1 3 (12.00%) Docker
1 3 (12.00%) FreeRADIUS
1 3 (12.00%) iptables
2 2 (8.00%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 7 (28.00%) Ansible
1 7 (28.00%) Puppet
2 4 (16.00%) Nagios
2 4 (16.00%) Progress Chef
3 3 (12.00%) Cacti
3 3 (12.00%) Grafana
3 3 (12.00%) Kubernetes
3 3 (12.00%) Netcool
3 3 (12.00%) Proxmox
3 3 (12.00%) Terraform
3 3 (12.00%) ZABBIX
4 2 (8.00%) Failover Clustering
4 2 (8.00%) Red Hat Satellite
5 1 (4.00%) Graylog
5 1 (4.00%) logstash
5 1 (4.00%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 8 (32.00%) IBM
1 8 (32.00%) IBM Sterling
2 6 (24.00%) Databricks
3 5 (20.00%) VMware
4 4 (16.00%) Red Hat
4 4 (16.00%) Splunk
5 3 (12.00%) Nokia
6 1 (4.00%) Cisco
6 1 (4.00%) Huawei
6 1 (4.00%) Juniper
6 1 (4.00%) Microsoft
6 1 (4.00%) Palo Alto