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 31 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

 6 months to
31 Dec 2025		 Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 416 336 322
Rank change year-on-year -80 -14 +29
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 179 213 296
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 0.64% 0.69%
As % of the System Software category 3.97% 5.34% 5.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 129 132 202
10th Percentile £359 £346 £273
25th Percentile £450 £398 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
75th Percentile £588 £606 £608
90th Percentile £655 £663 £686
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £450 £525
% change year-on-year +16.67% -14.29% -0.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 9 11
10th Percentile £64.70 £29.73 -
25th Percentile - £53.00 £73.09
Median hourly rate £70.00 £63.00 £78.73
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -19.97% +12.46%
75th Percentile - £66.00 £88.75
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £63.00 £78.73
% change year-on-year +11.11% -19.97% +12.46%

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 4,508 3,988 5,319
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 12.17% 11.95% 12.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,024 2,587 3,620
10th Percentile £213 £203 £195
25th Percentile £400 £363 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -4.76%
75th Percentile £600 £615 £608
90th Percentile £695 £707 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £455 £468
% change year-on-year +4.40% -2.78% +1.74%
Number of hourly rates quoted 148 91 219
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.00 £15.70
25th Percentile £20.82 £21.05 £18.50
Median hourly rate £48.11 £27.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.95% -45.00% +86.92%
75th Percentile £74.26 £64.50 £69.62
90th Percentile £90.45 £75.00 £78.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £30.00 £48.95
% change year-on-year +108.33% -38.71% +144.74%

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 31 December 2025.

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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Virtual Machines over the 6 months to 31 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Virtual Machines in the UK

Virtual Machines
Top 13 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 31 December 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 -73 163 £525 +5.00% 339
UK excluding London -64 88 £525 +16.67% 335
London -22 72 £525 - 39
Work from Home +15 71 £538 +7.50% 196
North of England -44 27 £480 +16.93% 71
South West +4 22 £550 +2.80% 39
South East -29 20 £563 +60.71% 79
Yorkshire -40 20 £485 +10.23% 27
East of England -29 11 £475 -7.32% 53
North West -19 7 £469 +24.13% 42
Scotland +13 5 £538 +7.50% 14
West Midlands -42 3 £566 +25.83% 35
Midlands -47 3 £566 +25.83% 66

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 14 (7.82%) Microsoft Exchange
2 6 (3.35%) IIS
3 5 (2.79%) Confluence
3 5 (2.79%) SharePoint
4 4 (2.23%) Apache
4 4 (2.23%) OpenStack
5 3 (1.68%) SharePoint Server
6 2 (1.12%) Ethereum
6 2 (1.12%) Hyperledger
7 1 (0.56%) Apache Spark
7 1 (0.56%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.56%) nginx
7 1 (0.56%) Skype for Business
Applications
1 1 (0.56%) MS Visio
1 1 (0.56%) OmniGraffle
Business Applications
1 1 (0.56%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 70 (39.11%) Azure
2 30 (16.76%) AWS
3 29 (16.20%) GitHub
4 20 (11.17%) GitHub Actions
5 18 (10.06%) Azure DevOps
6 14 (7.82%) Entra ID
7 13 (7.26%) OpenShift
8 12 (6.70%) Microsoft 365
9 10 (5.59%) Cloud Computing
10 9 (5.03%) Serverless
11 8 (4.47%) Azure AKS
11 8 (4.47%) Azure Monitor
11 8 (4.47%) GCP
12 7 (3.91%) AWS CodePipeline
12 7 (3.91%) IaaS
13 6 (3.35%) Amazon ECS
13 6 (3.35%) AWS CloudFormation
13 6 (3.35%) AWS Lambda
13 6 (3.35%) Azure Storage
14 5 (2.79%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 36 (20.11%) Firewall
2 30 (16.76%) DNS
3 16 (8.94%) VPN
4 12 (6.70%) DHCP
4 12 (6.70%) WAN
5 9 (5.03%) TCP/IP
6 8 (4.47%) Network Security
7 7 (3.91%) Skype
8 6 (3.35%) Reverse Proxy
8 6 (3.35%) Wi-Fi
9 5 (2.79%) Intrusion Detection
9 5 (2.79%) SAN
10 4 (2.23%) NAS
10 4 (2.23%) VLAN
11 2 (1.12%) Modbus
11 2 (1.12%) Wireless
12 1 (0.56%) Ethernet
12 1 (0.56%) HTTPS
12 1 (0.56%) RTP
12 1 (0.56%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (6.15%) SQL Server
2 9 (5.03%) PostgreSQL
3 6 (3.35%) Data Lake
4 5 (2.79%) Azure SQL Database
5 4 (2.23%) OLTP
5 4 (2.23%) Oracle Database
6 3 (1.68%) Amazon RDS
6 3 (1.68%) Data Hub
6 3 (1.68%) Data Mining
6 3 (1.68%) Oracle Reports
7 2 (1.12%) Data Vault
7 2 (1.12%) ImageNet
8 1 (0.56%) Big Data
8 1 (0.56%) NoSQL
8 1 (0.56%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 26 (14.53%) Git
2 22 (12.29%) JIRA
3 14 (7.82%) Jenkins
4 10 (5.59%) GitLab
5 7 (3.91%) PVCS
5 7 (3.91%) Rational DOORS
6 3 (1.68%) RStudio
7 2 (1.12%) Hardhat
7 2 (1.12%) Terragrunt
8 1 (0.56%) Artifactory
8 1 (0.56%) GDB
8 1 (0.56%) Gradle
8 1 (0.56%) Robot Framework
8 1 (0.56%) SonarQube
General
1 41 (22.91%) Social Skills
2 15 (8.38%) Public Sector
3 12 (6.70%) Analytical Skills
4 10 (5.59%) Finance
5 8 (4.47%) Electronics
6 6 (3.35%) Spanish Language
6 6 (3.35%) Telecoms
7 5 (2.79%) Banking
8 3 (1.68%) Documentation Skills
8 3 (1.68%) Law
8 3 (1.68%) Manufacturing
8 3 (1.68%) Social Science
9 2 (1.12%) Back Office
9 2 (1.12%) Front Office
10 1 (0.56%) Aerospace
10 1 (0.56%) Italian Language
10 1 (0.56%) Legal
10 1 (0.56%) Police
10 1 (0.56%) Presentation Skills
10 1 (0.56%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 22 (12.29%) DevOps Engineer
2 18 (10.06%) Security Engineer
3 17 (9.50%) Senior
4 16 (8.94%) Architect
5 13 (7.26%) Azure Engineer
5 13 (7.26%) Platform Engineer
5 13 (7.26%) Software Engineer
6 11 (6.15%) C++ Software Engineer
6 11 (6.15%) Embedded C++ Engineer
6 11 (6.15%) Embedded C++ Software Engineer
6 11 (6.15%) Embedded Engineer
6 11 (6.15%) Embedded Software Engineer
7 10 (5.59%) Infrastructure Engineer
8 9 (5.03%) Data Engineer
9 8 (4.47%) Cloud Engineer
9 8 (4.47%) Developer
9 8 (4.47%) Site Reliability Engineer
10 7 (3.91%) Site Engineer
11 6 (3.35%) Embedded C/C++ Engineer
11 6 (3.35%) Infrastructure Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (5.03%) ARM Templates
1 9 (5.03%) Middleware
2 6 (3.35%) OpenTelemetry
2 6 (3.35%) TensorFlow
3 5 (2.79%) Hugging Face
3 5 (2.79%) OpenCV
3 5 (2.79%) PyTorch
3 5 (2.79%) Regular Expression
3 5 (2.79%) SpaCy
4 3 (1.68%) Elastic Stack
4 3 (1.68%) Kafka
4 3 (1.68%) YAML
5 2 (1.12%) .NET
5 2 (1.12%) Loki
5 2 (1.12%) RabbitMQ
5 2 (1.12%) Smart Contracts
5 2 (1.12%) Truffle
5 2 (1.12%) web3js
6 1 (0.56%) Retrofit
6 1 (0.56%) SwiftUI
Miscellaneous
1 19 (10.61%) Data Centre
2 13 (7.26%) Private Cloud
3 10 (5.59%) Cloud Native
3 10 (5.59%) Replication
4 7 (3.91%) Hybrid Cloud
4 7 (3.91%) Management Information System
4 7 (3.91%) Onboarding
5 6 (3.35%) CAN bus
5 6 (3.35%) Clustering
5 6 (3.35%) Linux Command Line
6 5 (2.79%) Public Cloud
6 5 (2.79%) Security Posture
6 5 (2.79%) Self-Motivation
7 4 (2.23%) Operational Technology
7 4 (2.23%) PKI
8 3 (1.68%) Algorithms
8 3 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
8 3 (1.68%) Life Science
8 3 (1.68%) NHS
8 3 (1.68%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 55 (30.73%) Linux
2 52 (29.05%) Windows
3 26 (14.53%) Windows Server
4 23 (12.85%) VMS
5 10 (5.59%) Windows 10
6 9 (5.03%) Windows Server 2016
7 7 (3.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 3 (1.68%) Windows Server 2012
9 2 (1.12%) Windows Server 2019
10 1 (0.56%) Android
10 1 (0.56%) Apple iOS
10 1 (0.56%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 62 (34.64%) DevOps
2 58 (32.40%) CI/CD
3 44 (24.58%) Infrastructure as Code
4 36 (20.11%) Agile
5 28 (15.64%) Migration
6 23 (12.85%) High Availability
6 23 (12.85%) Problem-Solving
7 20 (11.17%) Containerisation
7 20 (11.17%) Cybersecurity
7 20 (11.17%) Infrastructure Engineering
8 19 (10.61%) Continuous Improvement
9 18 (10.06%) Analytics
9 18 (10.06%) Technical Leadership
10 15 (8.38%) Information Security
10 15 (8.38%) Infrastructure Automation
10 15 (8.38%) Platform Engineering
11 14 (7.82%) Root Cause Analysis
12 13 (7.26%) Mentoring
12 13 (7.26%) Software Engineering
13 12 (6.70%) Security Operations
Programming Languages
1 40 (22.35%) Python
2 32 (17.88%) PowerShell
3 20 (11.17%) SQL
4 16 (8.94%) C++
5 14 (7.82%) Bash
6 13 (7.26%) Java
7 12 (6.70%) Embedded C++
8 11 (6.15%) Bicep
9 10 (5.59%) Shell Script
10 9 (5.03%) C#
11 8 (4.47%) C
12 6 (3.35%) Embedded C
12 6 (3.35%) Ruby
13 4 (2.23%) Scala
14 2 (1.12%) Go
14 2 (1.12%) PHP
14 2 (1.12%) Solidity
15 1 (0.56%) JavaScript
15 1 (0.56%) Swift
15 1 (0.56%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 53 (29.61%) Security Cleared
2 42 (23.46%) SC Cleared
3 13 (7.26%) Degree
4 11 (6.15%) DV Cleared
5 10 (5.59%) Azure Certification
6 8 (4.47%) OCP
6 8 (4.47%) Oracle Certification
7 7 (3.91%) VCAP
7 7 (3.91%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
8 5 (2.79%) BPSS Clearance
8 5 (2.79%) Microsoft Certification
9 4 (2.23%) Computer Science Degree
9 4 (2.23%) MCSA
9 4 (2.23%) MCSE
10 3 (1.68%) Cisco Certification
11 2 (1.12%) CCNA
11 2 (1.12%) CCNP
11 2 (1.12%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
11 2 (1.12%) Master's Degree
12 1 (0.56%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 8 (4.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 5 (2.79%) Accessibility
2 5 (2.79%) GDPR
2 5 (2.79%) QA
3 3 (1.68%) Cyber Essentials
3 3 (1.68%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
3 3 (1.68%) NIST
3 3 (1.68%) SLA
4 2 (1.12%) GRC
System Software
1 43 (24.02%) VMware Infrastructure
2 36 (20.11%) Active Directory
3 16 (8.94%) Docker
3 16 (8.94%) vSphere
4 13 (7.26%) VMware ESXi
5 10 (5.59%) VMware NSX
6 8 (4.47%) Hyper-V
7 7 (3.91%) Virtual Desktop
8 5 (2.79%) KVM
9 4 (2.23%) Firmware
10 2 (1.12%) Xen
11 1 (0.56%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 51 (28.49%) Terraform
2 35 (19.55%) Kubernetes
3 28 (15.64%) Ansible
4 26 (14.53%) vCenter Server
5 14 (7.82%) SCCM
6 12 (6.70%) WSUS
7 10 (5.59%) Microsoft Intune
8 6 (3.35%) CASB
8 6 (3.35%) SCOrch
8 6 (3.35%) vRealize
9 4 (2.23%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 4 (2.23%) Rancher
9 4 (2.23%) vMotion
10 3 (1.68%) Data Guard
10 3 (1.68%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
10 3 (1.68%) Oracle RMAN
11 2 (1.12%) Fluentd
11 2 (1.12%) Pacemaker
11 2 (1.12%) Packer
11 2 (1.12%) systemd
Vendors
1 57 (31.84%) Microsoft
2 50 (27.93%) VMware
3 15 (8.38%) Cisco
4 11 (6.15%) Oracle
5 9 (5.03%) IBM
6 7 (3.91%) ANSYS
6 7 (3.91%) Databricks
7 6 (3.35%) Sophos
8 5 (2.79%) NetApp
8 5 (2.79%) Red Hat
8 5 (2.79%) SolarWinds
8 5 (2.79%) Veeam
9 4 (2.23%) Dell
9 4 (2.23%) Pure Storage
9 4 (2.23%) Remedy
10 3 (1.68%) Citrix
10 3 (1.68%) F5
10 3 (1.68%) Rockwell
11 2 (1.12%) OpenAI
11 2 (1.12%) ServiceNow
372 Virtual Machines jobs Nationwide