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 27 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 402 317 320
Rank change year-on-year -85 +3 +4
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 221 210 293
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.50% 0.72% 0.66%
As % of the System Software category 4.57% 5.46% 6.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 152 136 192
10th Percentile £355 £350 £300
25th Percentile £413 £440 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% +2.50% -7.92%
75th Percentile £575 £613 £608
90th Percentile £650 £747 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £500 £513
% change year-on-year -2.50% -2.44% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 12 23
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 4,834 3,843 4,781
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 10.96% 13.24% 10.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,296 2,621 3,240
10th Percentile £213 £213 £190
25th Percentile £400 £400 £320
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £480
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +9.38% -8.57%
75th Percentile £596 £623 £600
90th Percentile £688 £706 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £475 £450
% change year-on-year +0.63% +5.56% -6.05%
Number of hourly rates quoted 159 93 230
10th Percentile £15.50 £15.35 £14.06
25th Percentile £21.00 £21.46 £15.82
Median hourly rate £48.72 £29.00 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.00% +16.00% -44.35%
75th Percentile £74.13 £66.00 £61.31
90th Percentile £85.20 £85.50 £72.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.72 £37.50 £30.45
% change year-on-year +29.92% +23.15% +10.73%

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 27 March 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 14 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 27 March 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 -83 212 £500 -4.76% 68
UK excluding London -77 116 £488 -2.50% 51
London -71 89 £505 -12.17% 27
Work from Home -23 86 £500 - 39
North of England -27 68 £475 +24.67% 17
Yorkshire -24 39 £500 +13.64% 4
North West -20 28 £458 +20.21% 13
South East -50 17 £500 +1.63% 14
East of England -41 11 £600 +11.63% 11
South West -20 10 £525 -1.87% 2
Midlands -73 8 £425 -15.08% 4
West Midlands -64 7 £375 -25.07% 3
Scotland -2 3 £550 +7.32% 3
North East -14 1 £400 +10.34%

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 7 (3.17%) Microsoft Exchange
2 5 (2.26%) OpenStack
3 3 (1.36%) Palantir Foundry
3 3 (1.36%) SharePoint
4 2 (0.90%) Ethereum
4 2 (0.90%) Hyperledger
4 2 (0.90%) nginx
5 1 (0.45%) Apache
5 1 (0.45%) ArcGIS
5 1 (0.45%) JBoss
5 1 (0.45%) SharePoint Server
Applications
1 2 (0.90%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.45%) Adobe Illustrator
2 1 (0.45%) Photoshop
Business Applications
1 1 (0.45%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 101 (45.70%) Azure
2 41 (18.55%) AWS
3 36 (16.29%) GitHub
4 27 (12.22%) OpenShift
5 26 (11.76%) Azure DevOps
6 24 (10.86%) GitHub Actions
7 19 (8.60%) GCP
8 17 (7.69%) Azure Monitor
9 15 (6.79%) Serverless
10 14 (6.33%) Entra ID
11 11 (4.98%) Azure AKS
11 11 (4.98%) Microsoft 365
12 10 (4.52%) Azure Storage
13 7 (3.17%) AWS CodePipeline
13 7 (3.17%) Azure Functions
13 7 (3.17%) Azure Key Vault
14 6 (2.71%) Amazon ECS
14 6 (2.71%) AWS CloudFormation
14 6 (2.71%) AWS Lambda
14 6 (2.71%) Cloud Computing
Communications & Networking
1 31 (14.03%) Firewall
2 23 (10.41%) DNS
3 14 (6.33%) VPN
3 14 (6.33%) VSAN
4 12 (5.43%) Network Security
5 10 (4.52%) SAN
6 9 (4.07%) DHCP
6 9 (4.07%) VLAN
7 8 (3.62%) Reverse Proxy
7 8 (3.62%) SSL
7 8 (3.62%) TCP/IP
8 6 (2.71%) WAN
9 4 (1.81%) SSH
10 3 (1.36%) NAS
10 3 (1.36%) Wi-Fi
11 2 (0.90%) Cisco Nexus
11 2 (0.90%) FTP
11 2 (0.90%) SD-WAN
11 2 (0.90%) Skype
12 1 (0.45%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 12 (5.43%) SQL Server
2 8 (3.62%) PostgreSQL
3 7 (3.17%) Azure SQL Database
4 6 (2.71%) DB2
5 5 (2.26%) Oracle Database
5 5 (2.26%) Power BI
6 3 (1.36%) Amazon RDS
6 3 (1.36%) Data Hub
6 3 (1.36%) Data Lake
6 3 (1.36%) Oracle Reports
7 2 (0.90%) Data Vault
7 2 (0.90%) Data Warehouse
7 2 (0.90%) ImageNet
8 1 (0.45%) OpenStack Swift
8 1 (0.45%) Relational Database
8 1 (0.45%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 31 (14.03%) Git
2 14 (6.33%) JIRA
3 11 (4.98%) GitLab
3 11 (4.98%) Jenkins
4 8 (3.62%) PVCS
4 8 (3.62%) Rational DOORS
5 3 (1.36%) RStudio
6 2 (0.90%) Hardhat
6 2 (0.90%) JMeter
6 2 (0.90%) Postman
6 2 (0.90%) Selenium
6 2 (0.90%) Sonatype Nexus
7 1 (0.45%) Gradle
7 1 (0.45%) Terragrunt
General
1 33 (14.93%) Social Skills
2 15 (6.79%) Public Sector
3 14 (6.33%) Finance
4 12 (5.43%) Analytical Skills
5 10 (4.52%) Banking
6 8 (3.62%) Electronics
7 7 (3.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 7 (3.17%) Legal
8 3 (1.36%) Documentation Skills
8 3 (1.36%) Retail
8 3 (1.36%) Social Science
8 3 (1.36%) Spanish Language
9 1 (0.45%) Advertising
9 1 (0.45%) Back Office
9 1 (0.45%) Front Office
9 1 (0.45%) Italian Language
9 1 (0.45%) Law
9 1 (0.45%) Manufacturing
9 1 (0.45%) Marketing
9 1 (0.45%) Police
Job Titles
1 30 (13.57%) DevOps Engineer
2 25 (11.31%) Azure Engineer
3 20 (9.05%) Senior
4 15 (6.79%) Architect
5 14 (6.33%) Infrastructure Engineer
6 11 (4.98%) Cloud Engineer
6 11 (4.98%) Software Engineer
6 11 (4.98%) VMware Engineer
7 10 (4.52%) Analyst
7 10 (4.52%) Azure DevOps Engineer
7 10 (4.52%) C++ Software Engineer
7 10 (4.52%) Embedded C++ Engineer
7 10 (4.52%) Embedded C++ Software Engineer
7 10 (4.52%) Embedded Engineer
7 10 (4.52%) Embedded Software Engineer
7 10 (4.52%) Platform Engineer
7 10 (4.52%) Site Reliability Engineer
7 10 (4.52%) Wintel Engineer
8 9 (4.07%) Security Engineer
9 8 (3.62%) Site Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (4.98%) ARM Templates
2 5 (2.26%) YAML
3 3 (1.36%) Hugging Face
3 3 (1.36%) Middleware
3 3 (1.36%) REST
4 2 (0.90%) .NET
4 2 (0.90%) Elastic Stack
4 2 (0.90%) Kafka
4 2 (0.90%) OpenCV
4 2 (0.90%) PySpark
4 2 (0.90%) PyTorch
4 2 (0.90%) Regular Expression
4 2 (0.90%) Smart Contracts
4 2 (0.90%) SpaCy
4 2 (0.90%) TensorFlow
4 2 (0.90%) Truffle
4 2 (0.90%) web3js
5 1 (0.45%) LangChain
5 1 (0.45%) LangGraph
5 1 (0.45%) vLLM
Miscellaneous
1 22 (9.95%) Data Centre
2 16 (7.24%) Replication
3 15 (6.79%) Cloud Native
4 14 (6.33%) Clustering
4 14 (6.33%) Private Cloud
5 13 (5.88%) Hybrid Cloud
6 11 (4.98%) Linux Command Line
7 6 (2.71%) FlexPod
7 6 (2.71%) Onboarding
8 5 (2.26%) Cyber Threat
9 4 (1.81%) Public Cloud
10 3 (1.36%) Analytical Mindset
10 3 (1.36%) CAN bus
10 3 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
10 3 (1.36%) PKI
10 3 (1.36%) Product Ownership
10 3 (1.36%) SCADA
11 2 (0.90%) Blockchain
11 2 (0.90%) Self-Motivation
11 2 (0.90%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 68 (30.77%) Linux
2 59 (26.70%) Windows
3 33 (14.93%) VMS
4 31 (14.03%) Windows Server
5 20 (9.05%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 7 (3.17%) Data ONTAP
7 6 (2.71%) AIX
7 6 (2.71%) CoreOS
7 6 (2.71%) Unix
8 5 (2.26%) Windows Server 2016
9 4 (1.81%) SUSE
10 3 (1.36%) Apple iOS
10 3 (1.36%) Ubuntu
11 2 (0.90%) Windows 10
11 2 (0.90%) Windows Server 2019
12 1 (0.45%) Android
12 1 (0.45%) Rocky
12 1 (0.45%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 75 (33.94%) DevOps
2 68 (30.77%) CI/CD
3 52 (23.53%) Infrastructure as Code
4 47 (21.27%) Migration
5 37 (16.74%) High Availability
6 33 (14.93%) Disaster Recovery
7 28 (12.67%) Containerisation
7 28 (12.67%) Network Virtualisation
8 25 (11.31%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 24 (10.86%) Performance Tuning
10 23 (10.41%) Continuous Improvement
11 22 (9.95%) Cybersecurity
11 22 (9.95%) Technical Leadership
12 21 (9.50%) Platform Engineering
13 18 (8.14%) Agile
14 17 (7.69%) Capacity Planning
15 16 (7.24%) AI
15 16 (7.24%) Deployment Automation
16 15 (6.79%) Runbook
16 15 (6.79%) Site Reliability Engineering
Programming Languages
1 57 (25.79%) PowerShell
1 57 (25.79%) Python
2 33 (14.93%) Bash
2 33 (14.93%) SQL
3 11 (4.98%) C++
4 10 (4.52%) C
4 10 (4.52%) Embedded C++
5 9 (4.07%) Shell Script
6 8 (3.62%) Bicep
7 7 (3.17%) Embedded C
8 6 (2.71%) Ruby
9 5 (2.26%) C#
9 5 (2.26%) Java
10 3 (1.36%) PL/SQL
11 2 (0.90%) Korn
11 2 (0.90%) PHP
11 2 (0.90%) Solidity
12 1 (0.45%) Go
Qualifications
1 57 (25.79%) Security Cleared
2 46 (20.81%) SC Cleared
3 16 (7.24%) OCP
3 16 (7.24%) Oracle Certification
4 15 (6.79%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
5 14 (6.33%) Azure Certification
6 13 (5.88%) VCAP
7 9 (4.07%) Microsoft Certification
8 8 (3.62%) MCSA
8 8 (3.62%) MCSE
9 6 (2.71%) DV Cleared
10 3 (1.36%) BPSS Clearance
10 3 (1.36%) Degree
10 3 (1.36%) Master's Degree
11 2 (0.90%) Computer Science Degree
11 2 (0.90%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
12 1 (0.45%) CCNP
12 1 (0.45%) CISSP
12 1 (0.45%) CompTIA Security+
12 1 (0.45%) RHCSA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (2.71%) GDPR
2 5 (2.26%) QA
3 4 (1.81%) Cyber Essentials
4 3 (1.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 2 (0.90%) Accessibility
5 2 (0.90%) NIST
6 1 (0.45%) Data Quality
6 1 (0.45%) GRC
System Software
1 62 (28.05%) VMware Infrastructure
2 38 (17.19%) vSphere
3 30 (13.57%) VMware ESXi
4 26 (11.76%) Active Directory
5 22 (9.95%) Hyper-V
6 19 (8.60%) Docker
7 18 (8.14%) KVM
8 10 (4.52%) VMware NSX
9 9 (4.07%) Firmware
10 8 (3.62%) NFS
10 8 (3.62%) Virtual Desktop
11 2 (0.90%) EMC RecoverPoint
11 2 (0.90%) Xen
12 1 (0.45%) Ceph
12 1 (0.45%) iptables
12 1 (0.45%) NLBS
12 1 (0.45%) Samba
Systems Management
1 70 (31.67%) Terraform
2 54 (24.43%) Kubernetes
3 52 (23.53%) Ansible
4 33 (14.93%) vCenter Server
5 12 (5.43%) PowerCLI
6 8 (3.62%) SCCM
7 7 (3.17%) Microsoft Intune
7 7 (3.17%) SnapMirror
8 6 (2.71%) IBM BigFix
8 6 (2.71%) VxRail
8 6 (2.71%) WSUS
9 5 (2.26%) Grafana
10 4 (1.81%) Failover Clustering
10 4 (1.81%) Prometheus
11 3 (1.36%) CASB
11 3 (1.36%) Data Guard
11 3 (1.36%) Microsoft Clustering
11 3 (1.36%) Rancher
11 3 (1.36%) SCOrch
11 3 (1.36%) vRealize
Vendors
1 67 (30.32%) VMware
2 62 (28.05%) Microsoft
3 16 (7.24%) IBM
4 15 (6.79%) Red Hat
5 14 (6.33%) Cisco
6 12 (5.43%) NetApp
7 10 (4.52%) Google
8 9 (4.07%) Dell
8 9 (4.07%) Oracle
9 8 (3.62%) ANSYS
10 7 (3.17%) Databricks
10 7 (3.17%) Tenable
11 6 (2.71%) Veeam
12 5 (2.26%) OpenAI
13 4 (1.81%) Pure Storage
13 4 (1.81%) ServiceNow
13 4 (1.81%) Sophos
14 3 (1.36%) Alibaba
14 3 (1.36%) Foundry
14 3 (1.36%) Palantir