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 13 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 382 391 325
Rank change year-on-year +9 -66 -4
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 300 167 254
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.56% 0.51% 0.65%
As % of the System Software category 5.69% 4.37% 5.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 182 118 169
10th Percentile £390 £350 £344
25th Percentile £425 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year - -6.54% +1.90%
75th Percentile £588 £590 £608
90th Percentile £675 £675 £666
UK excluding London median daily rate £489 £494 £570
% change year-on-year -0.96% -13.42% +8.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 4 14
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £26.00 £33.25 £14.06
Median hourly rate £35.00 £34.50 £14.63
Median % change year-on-year +1.45% +135.90% -77.84%
75th Percentile £68.75 £35.75 £15.19
90th Percentile £69.50 - £63.04
UK excluding London median hourly rate £46.75 - £14.63
% change year-on-year - - -69.09%

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 5,272 3,821 4,456
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 9.88% 11.60% 11.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,476 2,438 3,079
10th Percentile £225 £231 £220
25th Percentile £400 £388 £380
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year - - -3.85%
75th Percentile £592 £600 £606
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £500
% change year-on-year - -5.00% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 214 105 143
10th Percentile £15.81 £14.24 £14.06
25th Percentile £22.10 £18.13 £16.50
Median hourly rate £52.75 £32.77 £24.18
Median % change year-on-year +60.97% +35.53% -49.75%
75th Percentile £74.00 £80.00 £59.28
90th Percentile £83.53 £91.50 £71.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £57.50 £62.50 £26.00
% change year-on-year -8.00% +140.38% +4.00%

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 13 August 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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Virtual Machines over the 6 months to 13 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Virtual Machines in the UK

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 13 August 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 +17 278 £500 - 90
UK excluding London +6 172 £489 -0.96% 54
London -55 107 £532 +1.33% 44
Work from Home -30 89 £500 - 51
North of England 0 79 £492 +17.18% 8
South East -20 54 £475 -15.56% 21
Yorkshire -11 42 £508 +13.53%
North West -12 36 £480 +42.22% 7
South West -23 17 £540 -8.09% 6
Midlands -53 17 £487 +2.53% 5
West Midlands -47 11 £406 -11.74% 4
East of England -15 6 £425 +41.67% 11
Scotland -12 4 £375 -26.83% 4
East Midlands -14 4 £500 +5.26% 1
North East - 1 £400 - 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 5 (1.67%) Confluence
1 5 (1.67%) SharePoint
2 4 (1.33%) Microsoft Exchange
3 3 (1.00%) Apache
3 3 (1.00%) Apache Spark
3 3 (1.00%) IIS
4 2 (0.67%) CMS
4 2 (0.67%) OpenStack
4 2 (0.67%) Umbraco
5 1 (0.33%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.33%) ArcGIS
5 1 (0.33%) JBoss
5 1 (0.33%) Palantir Foundry
5 1 (0.33%) WebLogic
Applications
1 4 (1.33%) Adobe Illustrator
1 4 (1.33%) Photoshop
2 2 (0.67%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.67%) InDesign
3 1 (0.33%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.33%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.33%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 2 (0.67%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.33%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 141 (47.00%) Azure
2 51 (17.00%) Entra ID
3 48 (16.00%) AWS
4 35 (11.67%) Azure Monitor
5 32 (10.67%) Azure DevOps
6 30 (10.00%) OpenShift
7 27 (9.00%) Azure AKS
8 26 (8.67%) GitHub
9 21 (7.00%) IaaS
10 19 (6.33%) GitHub Actions
11 15 (5.00%) Microsoft 365
11 15 (5.00%) Serverless
12 14 (4.67%) GCP
13 13 (4.33%) Azure Key Vault
14 12 (4.00%) Azure ExpressRoute
15 11 (3.67%) PaaS
16 10 (3.33%) Azure Storage
16 10 (3.33%) Power Platform
17 9 (3.00%) Azure Functions
17 9 (3.00%) Azure Logic Apps
Communications & Networking
1 43 (14.33%) DNS
2 41 (13.67%) Firewall
3 26 (8.67%) VPN
4 22 (7.33%) VLAN
5 21 (7.00%) Network Security
5 21 (7.00%) SSL
6 20 (6.67%) DHCP
6 20 (6.67%) VSAN
7 17 (5.67%) WAN
8 10 (3.33%) SD-WAN
9 8 (2.67%) FTP
10 7 (2.33%) LAN
10 7 (2.33%) SAN
11 5 (1.67%) SSH
11 5 (1.67%) Wi-Fi
12 4 (1.33%) HTTPS
13 3 (1.00%) Cisco Nexus
13 3 (1.00%) TCP/IP
14 2 (0.67%) NAS
14 2 (0.67%) SNMP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 33 (11.00%) SQL Server
2 11 (3.67%) Azure SQL Database
3 10 (3.33%) MySQL
3 10 (3.33%) Power BI
4 8 (2.67%) Data Lake
4 8 (2.67%) PostgreSQL
5 7 (2.33%) SQL Server Integration Services
6 3 (1.00%) Amazon Athena
6 3 (1.00%) Amazon Redshift
6 3 (1.00%) Apache Hive
6 3 (1.00%) Big Data
6 3 (1.00%) Data Warehouse
6 3 (1.00%) Db2
6 3 (1.00%) DynamoDB
6 3 (1.00%) Hadoop
6 3 (1.00%) Oracle Database
7 1 (0.33%) MariaDB
7 1 (0.33%) Oracle Exadata
7 1 (0.33%) Oracle Reports
7 1 (0.33%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 16 (5.33%) Git
2 12 (4.00%) Jenkins
3 8 (2.67%) GitLab
4 6 (2.00%) JIRA
5 4 (1.33%) SonarQube
6 3 (1.00%) PVCS
6 3 (1.00%) Terragrunt
7 2 (0.67%) CppUnit
7 2 (0.67%) Rational DOORS
7 2 (0.67%) Sonatype Nexus
7 2 (0.67%) Team Foundation Server
8 1 (0.33%) Selenium
8 1 (0.33%) SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
8 1 (0.33%) Visual Studio
General
1 42 (14.00%) Social Skills
2 27 (9.00%) Finance
3 13 (4.33%) Legal
4 12 (4.00%) Public Sector
5 11 (3.67%) Analytical Skills
6 10 (3.33%) Banking
7 7 (2.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 7 (2.33%) Retail
8 6 (2.00%) Front Office
9 5 (1.67%) Manufacturing
10 4 (1.33%) Documentation Skills
10 4 (1.33%) Marketing
11 2 (0.67%) Law
11 2 (0.67%) Local Government
11 2 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
11 2 (0.67%) Publishing
12 1 (0.33%) Advertising
12 1 (0.33%) Aerospace
12 1 (0.33%) Influencing Skills
12 1 (0.33%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 44 (14.67%) Infrastructure Engineer
2 34 (11.33%) Azure Engineer
3 32 (10.67%) Cloud Engineer
4 31 (10.33%) DevOps Engineer
5 26 (8.67%) Senior
6 22 (7.33%) Lead
7 18 (6.00%) Architect
8 17 (5.67%) Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
9 16 (5.33%) Analyst
10 15 (5.00%) Azure Infrastructure Engineer
11 12 (4.00%) Consultant
12 10 (3.33%) Administrator
12 10 (3.33%) Linux Engineer
13 9 (3.00%) DBA
13 9 (3.00%) Storage Engineer
13 9 (3.00%) VMware Engineer
13 9 (3.00%) Wintel Engineer
14 8 (2.67%) Migration Engineer
14 8 (2.67%) Platform Engineer
14 8 (2.67%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (3.67%) ARM Templates
2 8 (2.67%) REST
2 8 (2.67%) YAML
3 5 (1.67%) Middleware
4 3 (1.00%) Elastic Stack
4 3 (1.00%) JSON
5 2 (0.67%) SOAP
6 1 (0.33%) ADO
6 1 (0.33%) cloud-init
6 1 (0.33%) Java SE
6 1 (0.33%) Lambda Expressions
6 1 (0.33%) LDAP
6 1 (0.33%) Microsoft Graph
6 1 (0.33%) Node.js
6 1 (0.33%) NumPy
6 1 (0.33%) OpenID
6 1 (0.33%) Oracle GoldenGate
6 1 (0.33%) Pandas
6 1 (0.33%) SciPy
6 1 (0.33%) WebSockets
Miscellaneous
1 33 (11.00%) Replication
2 23 (7.67%) Clustering
3 19 (6.33%) Hybrid Cloud
4 14 (4.67%) Data Centre
4 14 (4.67%) Linux Command Line
5 8 (2.67%) Cloud Native
5 8 (2.67%) Enterprise Storage
5 8 (2.67%) PKI
5 8 (2.67%) Product Ownership
6 7 (2.33%) Mainframe
6 7 (2.33%) Onboarding
6 7 (2.33%) Public Cloud
6 7 (2.33%) Self-Motivation
7 6 (2.00%) Fixed Income
7 6 (2.00%) Market Risk
7 6 (2.00%) Operational Technology
8 5 (1.67%) Security Posture
9 4 (1.33%) FlexPod
10 3 (1.00%) Celerra
10 3 (1.00%) IBM XIV
Operating Systems
1 100 (33.33%) Windows
2 81 (27.00%) Linux
3 58 (19.33%) Windows Server
4 37 (12.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 32 (10.67%) VMS
6 8 (2.67%) Ubuntu
6 8 (2.67%) Unix
7 6 (2.00%) AIX
7 6 (2.00%) CoreOS
8 5 (1.67%) Data ONTAP
8 5 (1.67%) SUSE
9 3 (1.00%) Apple iOS
9 3 (1.00%) Windows Server 2012
9 3 (1.00%) Windows Server 2016
9 3 (1.00%) Windows Server 2019
10 1 (0.33%) Android
10 1 (0.33%) Rocky
10 1 (0.33%) Solaris
10 1 (0.33%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 77 (25.67%) DevOps
2 74 (24.67%) CI/CD
3 66 (22.00%) Migration
4 63 (21.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
5 55 (18.33%) Infrastructure as Code
6 42 (14.00%) Performance Tuning
7 40 (13.33%) High Availability
8 38 (12.67%) Disaster Recovery
9 36 (12.00%) Validation
10 34 (11.33%) Continuous Improvement
11 33 (11.00%) RBAC
12 30 (10.00%) Problem-Solving
13 29 (9.67%) Network Virtualisation
14 26 (8.67%) Runbook
14 26 (8.67%) Stakeholder Management
15 25 (8.33%) Capacity Planning
16 24 (8.00%) Platform Engineering
16 24 (8.00%) Vulnerability Management
17 22 (7.33%) Analytics
17 22 (7.33%) Vulnerability Remediation
Programming Languages
1 86 (28.67%) PowerShell
2 62 (20.67%) Python
3 42 (14.00%) SQL
4 36 (12.00%) Bash
5 11 (3.67%) Bicep
6 9 (3.00%) C#
7 6 (2.00%) C
7 6 (2.00%) Shell Script
7 6 (2.00%) T-SQL
8 4 (1.33%) Korn
8 4 (1.33%) PL/SQL
9 3 (1.00%) Java
10 2 (0.67%) C++
10 2 (0.67%) Embedded C
11 1 (0.33%) Data Analysis Expressions
11 1 (0.33%) Go
11 1 (0.33%) Groovy
11 1 (0.33%) JavaScript
11 1 (0.33%) RPG
11 1 (0.33%) VBA
Qualifications
1 81 (27.00%) Security Cleared
2 66 (22.00%) SC Cleared
3 19 (6.33%) Azure Certification
4 17 (5.67%) Degree
4 17 (5.67%) Microsoft Certification
5 15 (5.00%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
6 11 (3.67%) VCAP
7 10 (3.33%) BPSS Clearance
7 10 (3.33%) MCSA
7 10 (3.33%) MCSE
8 7 (2.33%) OCP
8 7 (2.33%) Oracle Certification
9 6 (2.00%) DV Cleared
9 6 (2.00%) ISTQB
9 6 (2.00%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
10 5 (1.67%) CCNA
10 5 (1.67%) Cisco Certification
10 5 (1.67%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
11 3 (1.00%) PMI Certification
11 3 (1.00%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (3.33%) QA
2 4 (1.33%) SLA
3 3 (1.00%) PCI DSS
4 2 (0.67%) Actionable Recommendations
4 2 (0.67%) GMP
4 2 (0.67%) GxP
4 2 (0.67%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 2 (0.67%) NIST
5 1 (0.33%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.33%) GDPR
5 1 (0.33%) HIPAA
5 1 (0.33%) SOC 2
5 1 (0.33%) WCAG
System Software
1 95 (31.67%) VMware Infrastructure
2 51 (17.00%) Active Directory
3 48 (16.00%) vSphere
4 41 (13.67%) VMware ESXi
5 26 (8.67%) Hyper-V
6 25 (8.33%) Docker
7 14 (4.67%) VMware NSX
8 10 (3.33%) KVM
9 9 (3.00%) NFS
10 8 (2.67%) Virtual Desktop
11 7 (2.33%) Ceph
12 6 (2.00%) Firmware
13 3 (1.00%) EMC RecoverPoint
13 3 (1.00%) VMware Workstation
14 2 (0.67%) HDFS
14 2 (0.67%) Veritas Volume Manager
15 1 (0.33%) BitLocker
15 1 (0.33%) iptables
15 1 (0.33%) Oracle RAC
15 1 (0.33%) Samba
Systems Management
1 68 (22.67%) Terraform
2 51 (17.00%) Kubernetes
3 46 (15.33%) Ansible
4 31 (10.33%) vCenter Server
5 16 (5.33%) Grafana
6 13 (4.33%) PowerCLI
7 12 (4.00%) Prometheus
8 9 (3.00%) SCOM
9 8 (2.67%) SCCM
9 8 (2.67%) VxRail
10 7 (2.33%) Failover Clustering
10 7 (2.33%) vMotion
11 6 (2.00%) Microsoft Intune
11 6 (2.00%) Podman
12 5 (1.67%) Microsoft Clustering
12 5 (1.67%) Proxmox
12 5 (1.67%) SnapMirror
13 4 (1.33%) Argo
13 4 (1.33%) OPNET
13 4 (1.33%) Packer
Vendors
1 100 (33.33%) VMware
2 95 (31.67%) Microsoft
3 29 (9.67%) Cisco
4 22 (7.33%) Oracle
5 21 (7.00%) ServiceNow
6 17 (5.67%) NetApp
6 17 (5.67%) Red Hat
7 15 (5.00%) Dell
8 13 (4.33%) IBM
9 11 (3.67%) Veeam
10 10 (3.33%) Google
10 10 (3.33%) Qualys
11 9 (3.00%) CyberArk
12 7 (2.33%) Commvault
12 7 (2.33%) Databricks
12 7 (2.33%) SolarWinds
12 7 (2.33%) Splunk
12 7 (2.33%) Tenable
13 5 (1.67%) EMC
13 5 (1.67%) Meraki