Unix Engineer Contracts

Unix Engineer
UK

The median Unix Engineer daily rate in the UK is £475, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 492 558 608
Rank change year-on-year +66 +50 +166
Contract jobs requiring a Unix Engineer 28 24 110
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.096% 0.055% 0.18%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.10% 0.059% 0.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 15 12 84
10th Percentile £363 £260 £413
25th Percentile £407 £444 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £519 £534
Median % change year-on-year -8.43% -2.81% +18.61%
75th Percentile £775 £563 £600
90th Percentile - £574 £694
UK excluding London median daily rate £440 £488 £525
% change year-on-year -9.74% -7.14% +31.25%

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 27,084 40,415 56,464
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.52% 92.78% 94.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,692 26,309 39,470
10th Percentile £300 £275 £313
25th Percentile £406 £410 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -2.78% +2.86%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £492 £500
% change year-on-year -3.46% -1.60% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,035 2,664 1,570
10th Percentile £14.07 £12.86 £14.29
25th Percentile £18.50 £16.30 £19.50
Median hourly rate £29.00 £36.42 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.37% -19.07% +91.49%
75th Percentile £62.50 £60.75 £65.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.00 £39.55 £42.50
% change year-on-year -29.20% -6.94% +117.95%

Unix Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings that featured Unix Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Unix Engineer in the UK

Unix Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for Unix Engineer in the UK

Unix Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Unix Engineer over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Unix Engineer in the UK

Unix Engineer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

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

Hourly rate trend for Unix Engineer in the UK

Unix Engineer
Top 12 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Unix Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 1 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
Work from Home +52 19 £488 - 4
England +61 18 £475 -11.63% 5
UK excluding London +63 17 £440 -9.74% 4
Scotland +13 9 £529 -
London +39 8 £750 +39.53% 1
North of England - 4 £390 - 2
East of England +30 2 £313 -43.18%
North West - 2 - - 2
West Midlands - 2 £475 -
Midlands - 2 £475 -
North East - 1 £375 -
Yorkshire - 1 £405 -

Unix Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 1 May 2025, Unix Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Unix Engineer in the job title.

1 28 (100.00%) Unix
2 22 (78.57%) Linux
3 15 (53.57%) Python
4 11 (39.29%) Ansible
5 10 (35.71%) Perl
5 10 (35.71%) Shell Script
6 9 (32.14%) VMware
6 9 (32.14%) AIX
6 9 (32.14%) VMware Infrastructure
6 9 (32.14%) High Availability
7 7 (25.00%) Jenkins
7 7 (25.00%) DevOps
7 7 (25.00%) SAN
8 6 (21.43%) OO
8 6 (21.43%) Red Hat
8 6 (21.43%) Security Cleared
8 6 (21.43%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 6 (21.43%) CI/CD
8 6 (21.43%) Platform Engineering
9 5 (17.86%) Canary Deployment
9 5 (17.86%) Terraform
9 5 (17.86%) OpenStack
9 5 (17.86%) Splunk
9 5 (17.86%) Docker
9 5 (17.86%) AppDynamics
9 5 (17.86%) Kubernetes
9 5 (17.86%) SDLC
9 5 (17.86%) Dynatrace
9 5 (17.86%) Disaster Recovery
9 5 (17.86%) Apache

Unix Engineer Skill Set
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 (17.86%) Apache
1 5 (17.86%) nginx
1 5 (17.86%) OpenStack
2 1 (3.57%) Confluence
Cloud Services
1 4 (14.29%) Azure
1 4 (14.29%) Cloud Computing
2 3 (10.71%) AWS
Communications & Networking
1 7 (25.00%) SAN
2 4 (14.29%) HTTP
2 4 (14.29%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (7.14%) Oracle Database
2 1 (3.57%) InfluxDB
2 1 (3.57%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 7 (25.00%) Jenkins
2 1 (3.57%) JIRA
General
1 4 (14.29%) Social Skills
2 2 (7.14%) Finance
2 2 (7.14%) Organisational Skills
2 2 (7.14%) Public Sector
3 1 (3.57%) Banking
3 1 (3.57%) Documentation Skills
3 1 (3.57%) Investment Banking
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (14.29%) Elastic Stack
2 1 (3.57%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 4 (14.29%) Cloud Native
1 4 (14.29%) Distributed Systems
2 2 (7.14%) Enterprise Storage
3 1 (3.57%) Data Centre
3 1 (3.57%) Data Structures
3 1 (3.57%) EMC VMAX
3 1 (3.57%) Linux Command Line
3 1 (3.57%) NVMe
Operating Systems
1 28 (100.00%) Unix
2 22 (78.57%) Linux
3 9 (32.14%) AIX
4 5 (17.86%) HPUX
4 5 (17.86%) Solaris
5 4 (14.29%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 4 (14.29%) Windows
6 3 (10.71%) CentOS
6 3 (10.71%) Ubuntu
7 1 (3.57%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 9 (32.14%) High Availability
2 7 (25.00%) DevOps
3 6 (21.43%) CI/CD
3 6 (21.43%) OO
3 6 (21.43%) Platform Engineering
3 6 (21.43%) Site Reliability Engineering
4 5 (17.86%) Canary Deployment
4 5 (17.86%) Disaster Recovery
4 5 (17.86%) SDLC
5 4 (14.29%) Storage Management
5 4 (14.29%) Task Automation
6 3 (10.71%) Configuration Management
6 3 (10.71%) ITIL
6 3 (10.71%) Patch Management
6 3 (10.71%) Problem Management
6 3 (10.71%) Problem-Solving
6 3 (10.71%) Vulnerability Remediation
7 2 (7.14%) Incident Management
7 2 (7.14%) ITSM
7 2 (7.14%) Service Management
Programming Languages
1 15 (53.57%) Python
2 10 (35.71%) Perl
2 10 (35.71%) Shell Script
3 5 (17.86%) Groovy
4 4 (14.29%) Bash
5 1 (3.57%) Java
Qualifications
1 6 (21.43%) Security Cleared
2 5 (17.86%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (7.14%) Disclosure Scotland
1 2 (7.14%) SLA
2 1 (3.57%) Cyber Essentials
2 1 (3.57%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
System Software
1 9 (32.14%) VMware Infrastructure
2 5 (17.86%) Docker
3 4 (14.29%) KVM
4 2 (7.14%) Virtual Machines
5 1 (3.57%) Veritas Cluster Server
Systems Management
1 11 (39.29%) Ansible
2 5 (17.86%) Kubernetes
2 5 (17.86%) Terraform
3 4 (14.29%) Puppet
4 3 (10.71%) Progress Chef
5 2 (7.14%) Tivoli
5 2 (7.14%) Tivoli Storage Manager
6 1 (3.57%) Cobbler
6 1 (3.57%) EMC NetWorker
6 1 (3.57%) Grafana
6 1 (3.57%) HAProxy
6 1 (3.57%) Nagios
6 1 (3.57%) Red Hat Satellite
Vendors
1 9 (32.14%) VMware
2 6 (21.43%) Red Hat
3 5 (17.86%) AppDynamics
3 5 (17.86%) Dynatrace
3 5 (17.86%) Splunk
4 4 (14.29%) IBM
4 4 (14.29%) Oracle
5 2 (7.14%) HP
5 2 (7.14%) NetApp
6 1 (3.57%) Commvault
6 1 (3.57%) EMC
6 1 (3.57%) Microsoft
6 1 (3.57%) Palo Alto
6 1 (3.57%) ServiceNow
6 1 (3.57%) Veritas