Virtual Machines Contract Job Trends

Virtual Machine (VM)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Virtual Machines skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 10 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 407 313 306
Rank change year-on-year -94 -7 +17
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 232 207 294
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.51% 0.71% 0.67%
As % of the System Software category 4.70% 5.49% 6.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 157 134 193
10th Percentile £343 £350 £276
25th Percentile £413 £451 £394
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £518 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.43% +3.55% -7.88%
75th Percentile £575 £625 £608
90th Percentile £650 £748 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.05% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 12 25
10th Percentile - £35.23 -
25th Percentile - £59.38 £14.06
Median hourly rate £70.00 £63.00 £14.63
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% +330.77% -77.84%
75th Percentile - £66.00 £15.19
90th Percentile - - £88.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £63.00 £14.63
% change year-on-year +11.11% +330.77% -77.33%

All System Software Skills
UK

Virtual Machines falls under the System Software category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring system software skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for system software skills 4,934 3,773 4,769
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.76% 12.91% 10.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,356 2,583 3,252
10th Percentile £213 £213 £193
25th Percentile £400 £400 £325
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £488
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +7.69% -7.14%
75th Percentile £588 £623 £600
90th Percentile £688 £700 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £476 £463
% change year-on-year -0.21% +2.92% -3.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 171 95 229
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.18 £14.06
25th Percentile £21.25 £21.36 £15.50
Median hourly rate £51.00 £29.00 £22.50
Median % change year-on-year +75.86% +28.89% -55.00%
75th Percentile £74.13 £66.00 £60.75
90th Percentile £86.00 £87.30 £70.66
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.50 £37.50 £22.00
% change year-on-year +34.67% +70.45% -38.03%

Virtual Machines
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Virtual Machines job vacancy trend in the UK

Virtual Machines
Daily Rate Trend

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

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Virtual Machines over the 6 months to 10 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Virtual Machines in the UK

Virtual Machines
Hourly Rate Trend

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

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
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 Virtual Machines within the UK over the 6 months to 10 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 -68 221 £500 -4.76% 68
UK excluding London -75 123 £485 -3.05% 51
London -69 92 £518 -10.00% 27
Work from Home -24 88 £500 - 39
North of England -27 74 £475 +24.67% 17
Yorkshire -17 43 £500 +14.29% 4
North West -16 30 £456 +19.69% 13
South East -47 19 £500 +1.21% 14
Midlands -67 13 £425 -10.53% 4
East of England -43 10 £550 +2.33% 11
West Midlands -67 10 £375 -18.92% 3
South West -27 8 £538 +0.47% 2
Scotland +4 3 £550 +7.32% 3
North East -19 1 £400 +10.34%
East Midlands -34 1 £500 -2.44% 1

Virtual Machines
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 6 (2.59%) Microsoft Exchange
2 5 (2.16%) OpenStack
3 3 (1.29%) Palantir Foundry
4 2 (0.86%) Apache
4 2 (0.86%) nginx
4 2 (0.86%) SharePoint
5 1 (0.43%) Apache Spark
5 1 (0.43%) ArcGIS
5 1 (0.43%) JBoss
5 1 (0.43%) WebLogic
Applications
1 2 (0.86%) Adobe Illustrator
1 2 (0.86%) Chatbot
1 2 (0.86%) Photoshop
Business Applications
1 1 (0.43%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 105 (45.26%) Azure
2 41 (17.67%) AWS
3 33 (14.22%) GitHub
3 33 (14.22%) OpenShift
4 25 (10.78%) Azure DevOps
5 24 (10.34%) GitHub Actions
6 19 (8.19%) GCP
7 17 (7.33%) Azure Monitor
7 17 (7.33%) Entra ID
7 17 (7.33%) Serverless
8 12 (5.17%) Azure AKS
9 11 (4.74%) Azure Storage
9 11 (4.74%) Microsoft 365
10 8 (3.45%) Azure Key Vault
11 7 (3.02%) AWS Lambda
11 7 (3.02%) Azure Functions
12 6 (2.59%) Amazon ECS
12 6 (2.59%) AWS CloudFormation
12 6 (2.59%) AWS CodePipeline
12 6 (2.59%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 33 (14.22%) Firewall
2 27 (11.64%) DNS
3 15 (6.47%) VPN
3 15 (6.47%) VSAN
4 12 (5.17%) DHCP
4 12 (5.17%) Network Security
5 11 (4.74%) VLAN
6 10 (4.31%) SAN
6 10 (4.31%) SSL
7 9 (3.88%) Reverse Proxy
8 8 (3.45%) TCP/IP
9 6 (2.59%) WAN
10 5 (2.16%) FTP
11 4 (1.72%) SSH
11 4 (1.72%) Wi-Fi
12 3 (1.29%) NAS
12 3 (1.29%) SD-WAN
13 2 (0.86%) Cisco Nexus
13 2 (0.86%) LAN
14 1 (0.43%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (4.74%) SQL Server
2 9 (3.88%) PostgreSQL
3 7 (3.02%) Azure SQL Database
4 6 (2.59%) DB2
5 5 (2.16%) Oracle Database
5 5 (2.16%) Power BI
6 3 (1.29%) Amazon RDS
6 3 (1.29%) Data Hub
6 3 (1.29%) Data Lake
6 3 (1.29%) Data Warehouse
6 3 (1.29%) Oracle Reports
7 2 (0.86%) Data Vault
7 2 (0.86%) ImageNet
8 1 (0.43%) Amazon Athena
8 1 (0.43%) Amazon Redshift
8 1 (0.43%) Big Data
8 1 (0.43%) DynamoDB
8 1 (0.43%) OpenStack Swift
8 1 (0.43%) Power Query
8 1 (0.43%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 32 (13.79%) Git
2 12 (5.17%) GitLab
3 10 (4.31%) JIRA
4 9 (3.88%) Jenkins
4 9 (3.88%) PVCS
5 8 (3.45%) Rational DOORS
6 2 (0.86%) JMeter
6 2 (0.86%) Postman
6 2 (0.86%) RStudio
6 2 (0.86%) Selenium
6 2 (0.86%) Sonatype Nexus
7 1 (0.43%) Gradle
7 1 (0.43%) SonarQube
7 1 (0.43%) Terragrunt
General
1 30 (12.93%) Social Skills
2 16 (6.90%) Finance
3 14 (6.03%) Public Sector
4 11 (4.74%) Analytical Skills
5 9 (3.88%) Banking
5 9 (3.88%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 9 (3.88%) Legal
6 8 (3.45%) Electronics
7 4 (1.72%) Retail
8 3 (1.29%) Spanish Language
9 2 (0.86%) Documentation Skills
9 2 (0.86%) Marketing
9 2 (0.86%) Social Science
10 1 (0.43%) Advertising
10 1 (0.43%) Back Office
10 1 (0.43%) Front Office
10 1 (0.43%) Italian Language
10 1 (0.43%) Law
10 1 (0.43%) Manufacturing
10 1 (0.43%) Police
Job Titles
1 29 (12.50%) DevOps Engineer
2 25 (10.78%) Azure Engineer
3 23 (9.91%) Senior
4 16 (6.90%) Architect
5 15 (6.47%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 12 (5.17%) VMware Engineer
7 11 (4.74%) Cloud Engineer
8 10 (4.31%) Analyst
8 10 (4.31%) Azure DevOps Engineer
8 10 (4.31%) Site Reliability Engineer
9 9 (3.88%) Data Engineer
9 9 (3.88%) Platform Engineer
9 9 (3.88%) Security Engineer
9 9 (3.88%) Software Engineer
9 9 (3.88%) Wintel Engineer
10 8 (3.45%) C++ Software Engineer
10 8 (3.45%) Embedded C++ Engineer
10 8 (3.45%) Embedded C++ Software Engineer
10 8 (3.45%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 8 (3.45%) Site Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 8 (3.45%) ARM Templates
1 8 (3.45%) REST
1 8 (3.45%) YAML
2 4 (1.72%) Middleware
3 3 (1.29%) Hugging Face
3 3 (1.29%) JSON
4 2 (0.86%) .NET
4 2 (0.86%) Kafka
4 2 (0.86%) OpenCV
4 2 (0.86%) PySpark
4 2 (0.86%) PyTorch
4 2 (0.86%) Regular Expression
4 2 (0.86%) SpaCy
4 2 (0.86%) TensorFlow
5 1 (0.43%) cloud-init
5 1 (0.43%) Node.js
5 1 (0.43%) NumPy
5 1 (0.43%) OpenID
5 1 (0.43%) Pandas
5 1 (0.43%) SciPy
Miscellaneous
1 23 (9.91%) Data Centre
2 16 (6.90%) Replication
3 15 (6.47%) Cloud Native
4 14 (6.03%) Clustering
5 13 (5.60%) Hybrid Cloud
6 12 (5.17%) Private Cloud
7 11 (4.74%) Linux Command Line
8 8 (3.45%) Product Ownership
9 6 (2.59%) FlexPod
10 5 (2.16%) Cyber Threat
10 5 (2.16%) Onboarding
11 4 (1.72%) Public Cloud
12 3 (1.29%) Data Protection Act
12 3 (1.29%) SCADA
13 2 (0.86%) Celerra
13 2 (0.86%) EMC Centera
13 2 (0.86%) Enterprise Storage
13 2 (0.86%) NHS
13 2 (0.86%) Symmetrix
13 2 (0.86%) Symmetrix DMX
Operating Systems
1 71 (30.60%) Linux
2 56 (24.14%) Windows
3 37 (15.95%) VMS
4 32 (13.79%) Windows Server
5 24 (10.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 7 (3.02%) AIX
6 7 (3.02%) Data ONTAP
6 7 (3.02%) Unix
7 6 (2.59%) CoreOS
8 4 (1.72%) SUSE
9 3 (1.29%) Apple iOS
9 3 (1.29%) Ubuntu
10 2 (0.86%) Windows Server 2019
11 1 (0.43%) Android
11 1 (0.43%) Rocky
11 1 (0.43%) Windows Server 2012
11 1 (0.43%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 71 (30.60%) DevOps
2 65 (28.02%) CI/CD
3 50 (21.55%) Migration
4 48 (20.69%) Infrastructure as Code
5 35 (15.09%) High Availability
6 33 (14.22%) Disaster Recovery
7 28 (12.07%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 28 (12.07%) Network Virtualisation
7 28 (12.07%) Performance Tuning
8 27 (11.64%) Containerisation
9 24 (10.34%) Continuous Improvement
10 23 (9.91%) Platform Engineering
11 22 (9.48%) Technical Leadership
12 21 (9.05%) Cybersecurity
13 18 (7.76%) AI
13 18 (7.76%) Capacity Planning
13 18 (7.76%) Deployment Automation
14 17 (7.33%) Problem-Solving
15 16 (6.90%) Runbook
16 15 (6.47%) Task Automation
Programming Languages
1 63 (27.16%) Python
2 59 (25.43%) PowerShell
3 36 (15.52%) Bash
4 34 (14.66%) SQL
5 10 (4.31%) C
6 9 (3.88%) C++
6 9 (3.88%) Shell Script
7 8 (3.45%) Bicep
7 8 (3.45%) Embedded C++
8 7 (3.02%) Embedded C
9 6 (2.59%) Ruby
10 5 (2.16%) Java
11 3 (1.29%) C#
11 3 (1.29%) PL/SQL
12 2 (0.86%) Korn
12 2 (0.86%) PHP
13 1 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 1 (0.43%) Go
13 1 (0.43%) JavaScript
13 1 (0.43%) VBA
Qualifications
1 54 (23.28%) Security Cleared
2 42 (18.10%) SC Cleared
3 17 (7.33%) OCP
3 17 (7.33%) Oracle Certification
4 15 (6.47%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
5 14 (6.03%) Azure Certification
6 12 (5.17%) VCAP
7 9 (3.88%) Microsoft Certification
8 8 (3.45%) MCSA
8 8 (3.45%) MCSE
9 6 (2.59%) DV Cleared
10 4 (1.72%) BPSS Clearance
11 3 (1.29%) Degree
12 2 (0.86%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
13 1 (0.43%) CCNP
13 1 (0.43%) Cisco Certification
13 1 (0.43%) CISSP
13 1 (0.43%) PMP
13 1 (0.43%) RHCE
13 1 (0.43%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (2.59%) GDPR
1 6 (2.59%) QA
2 3 (1.29%) Accessibility
2 3 (1.29%) Cyber Essentials
3 2 (0.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (0.43%) Data Quality
4 1 (0.43%) NIST
4 1 (0.43%) WCAG
System Software
1 67 (28.88%) VMware Infrastructure
2 39 (16.81%) vSphere
3 34 (14.66%) VMware ESXi
4 30 (12.93%) Active Directory
5 25 (10.78%) Hyper-V
6 17 (7.33%) KVM
7 15 (6.47%) Docker
8 10 (4.31%) VMware NSX
9 9 (3.88%) Firmware
9 9 (3.88%) NFS
10 5 (2.16%) Ceph
10 5 (2.16%) Virtual Desktop
11 2 (0.86%) EMC RecoverPoint
11 2 (0.86%) Xen
12 1 (0.43%) BitLocker
12 1 (0.43%) HDFS
12 1 (0.43%) iptables
12 1 (0.43%) NLBS
12 1 (0.43%) Samba
12 1 (0.43%) Veritas Volume Manager
Systems Management
1 66 (28.45%) Terraform
2 53 (22.84%) Ansible
3 52 (22.41%) Kubernetes
4 32 (13.79%) vCenter Server
5 13 (5.60%) PowerCLI
6 9 (3.88%) SCCM
7 7 (3.02%) Microsoft Intune
7 7 (3.02%) SnapMirror
8 6 (2.59%) Grafana
8 6 (2.59%) IBM BigFix
8 6 (2.59%) VxRail
9 5 (2.16%) WSUS
10 4 (1.72%) Failover Clustering
10 4 (1.72%) Prometheus
10 4 (1.72%) systemd
11 3 (1.29%) CASB
11 3 (1.29%) Data Guard
11 3 (1.29%) Microsoft Clustering
11 3 (1.29%) Oracle RMAN
11 3 (1.29%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 70 (30.17%) VMware
2 66 (28.45%) Microsoft
3 18 (7.76%) IBM
4 17 (7.33%) Red Hat
5 14 (6.03%) Cisco
6 11 (4.74%) Oracle
7 10 (4.31%) Dell
7 10 (4.31%) Google
7 10 (4.31%) NetApp
8 8 (3.45%) ANSYS
8 8 (3.45%) Tenable
9 7 (3.02%) Databricks
10 6 (2.59%) OpenAI
10 6 (2.59%) Veeam
11 4 (1.72%) OpenText
11 4 (1.72%) Pure Storage
11 4 (1.72%) ServiceNow
11 4 (1.72%) Sophos
12 3 (1.29%) Alibaba
12 3 (1.29%) Palantir