Linux Contract Job Trends in the West Midlands

Linux
England > West Midlands

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the West Midlands requiring Linux skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 23 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 25 23 48
Rank change year-on-year -2 +25 -25
Contract jobs citing Linux 183 105 67
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 7.70% 6.61% 3.70%
As % of the Operating Systems category 54.63% 42.34% 29.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 119 64 47
10th Percentile £306 £389 £211
25th Percentile £413 £475 £368
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £551 £438
Median % change year-on-year -4.72% +25.94% -18.98%
75th Percentile £581 £648 £600
90th Percentile £620 £709 £671
England median daily rate £510 £563 £550
% change year-on-year -9.33% +2.27% -6.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 2
10th Percentile - - £51.75
25th Percentile £60.00 - £54.38
Median hourly rate £65.00 - £60.00
75th Percentile £69.99 - £66.88
90th Percentile - - £70.25
England median hourly rate £63.14 £65.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year -3.98% +9.58% -7.69%

All Operating Systems
West Midlands

Linux falls under the Operating Systems category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring operating system skills in the West Midlands.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for operating system skills 335 248 231
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 14.09% 15.62% 12.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 233 155 162
10th Percentile £163 £188 £170
25th Percentile £290 £213 £208
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £435 £400
Median % change year-on-year +9.20% +8.75% -19.19%
75th Percentile £550 £582 £513
90th Percentile £619 £700 £636
England median daily rate £450 £475 £473
% change year-on-year -5.26% +0.53% -7.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 12 14
10th Percentile - £15.22 £16.90
25th Percentile £17.14 £17.40 £17.72
Median hourly rate £21.46 £18.57 £20.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.59% -9.44% +18.31%
75th Percentile £29.25 £22.89 £23.75
90th Percentile £69.99 £24.05 £42.13
England median hourly rate £23.79 £54.00 £28.50
% change year-on-year -55.95% +89.47% +10.85%

Linux
Job Vacancy Trend in the West Midlands

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Linux relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands.

Linux job vacancy trend in the West Midlands

Linux
Daily Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Linux.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Linux

Linux
Daily Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Linux in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 23 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Linux in the West Midlands

Linux
Hourly Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Linux.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Linux

Linux
Contract Job Locations in the West Midlands

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Linux within the West Midlands region over the 6 months to 23 January 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
Birmingham 0 73 £525 -8.70% 14
Shropshire -14 28 £525 +14.13% 13
Coventry +4 26 £316 +125.71% 1
Worcestershire -3 16 £575 -17.86% 6
Warwickshire -18 16 £480 -16.52% 8
Herefordshire -15 12 £550 +4.76% 1
Staffordshire -1 2 - - 8
Solihull -1 1 - -
Bilston - 1 £550 -
Wolverhampton - 1 - - 1
Linux
England

Linux
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the West Midlands 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 28 (15.30%) Confluence
2 21 (11.48%) Apache
3 18 (9.84%) WebLogic
4 11 (6.01%) nginx
5 7 (3.83%) OpenStack
6 4 (2.19%) Apache Airflow
6 4 (2.19%) Apache Spark
7 2 (1.09%) Drupal
8 1 (0.55%) CMS
8 1 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 9 (4.92%) Mozilla Thunderbird
1 9 (4.92%) MS Visio
2 2 (1.09%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.55%) Adobe Illustrator
3 1 (0.55%) Photoshop
Business Applications
1 1 (0.55%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 99 (54.10%) AWS
2 64 (34.97%) Azure
3 24 (13.11%) Amazon EC2
3 24 (13.11%) Amazon S3
4 21 (11.48%) GCP
5 20 (10.93%) Serverless
6 19 (10.38%) Datadog
7 18 (9.84%) AWS KMS
7 18 (9.84%) OpenShift
8 14 (7.65%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 14 (7.65%) Amazon ELB
8 14 (7.65%) Azure Monitor
8 14 (7.65%) Virtual Private Cloud
9 11 (6.01%) GitHub
10 10 (5.46%) Microsoft 365
11 9 (4.92%) Amazon ECS
11 9 (4.92%) GitHub Actions
11 9 (4.92%) Route 53
12 7 (3.83%) Azure DevOps
13 5 (2.73%) Amazon Glacier
Communications & Networking
1 22 (12.02%) Firewall
2 21 (11.48%) SSH
3 18 (9.84%) SMTP
4 17 (9.29%) DNS
5 14 (7.65%) FTP
5 14 (7.65%) HTTP
5 14 (7.65%) VSAN
6 9 (4.92%) IMAP
6 9 (4.92%) OpenLDAP
7 5 (2.73%) Kerberos
8 4 (2.19%) DKIM
8 4 (2.19%) DMARC
8 4 (2.19%) Network Security
9 2 (1.09%) DHCP
9 2 (1.09%) Intrusion Detection
9 2 (1.09%) TCP/IP
9 2 (1.09%) VPN
9 2 (1.09%) WAN
9 2 (1.09%) Wi-Fi
9 2 (1.09%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 24 (13.11%) Amazon RDS
2 20 (10.93%) PostgreSQL
3 17 (9.29%) Elasticsearch
4 14 (7.65%) NoSQL
5 9 (4.92%) Amazon Aurora
6 5 (2.73%) InfluxDB
6 5 (2.73%) Relational Database
7 4 (2.19%) Apache Hive
7 4 (2.19%) Hadoop
7 4 (2.19%) HBase
7 4 (2.19%) MongoDB
8 3 (1.64%) MySQL
9 1 (0.55%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 48 (26.23%) Jenkins
2 26 (14.21%) Git
2 26 (14.21%) JIRA
3 23 (12.57%) GitLab
4 14 (7.65%) Vagrant
5 10 (5.46%) Liquibase
6 7 (3.83%) CircleCI
7 6 (3.28%) JUnit
7 6 (3.28%) Postman
8 5 (2.73%) Artifactory
8 5 (2.73%) Bitbucket
8 5 (2.73%) Cypress.io
8 5 (2.73%) Gradle
8 5 (2.73%) Maven
8 5 (2.73%) Selenium
8 5 (2.73%) Snyk
8 5 (2.73%) SonarQube
8 5 (2.73%) Sonatype Nexus
8 5 (2.73%) webpack
9 2 (1.09%) Chocolatey
General
1 79 (43.17%) Social Skills
2 31 (16.94%) Analytical Skills
3 24 (13.11%) Public Sector
4 21 (11.48%) Finance
5 20 (10.93%) Presentation Skills
6 17 (9.29%) Documentation Skills
7 10 (5.46%) Financial Institution
8 9 (4.92%) Banking
9 2 (1.09%) Manufacturing
9 2 (1.09%) Organisational Skills
9 2 (1.09%) Telecoms
10 1 (0.55%) Aerospace
10 1 (0.55%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 32 (17.49%) Analyst
2 25 (13.66%) Site Engineer
2 25 (13.66%) Site Reliability Engineer
3 24 (13.11%) Infrastructure Analyst
4 23 (12.57%) DevOps Engineer
5 20 (10.93%) AWS Engineer
5 20 (10.93%) Platform Engineer
6 19 (10.38%) Storage Analyst
7 15 (8.20%) Cloud Platform Engineer
7 15 (8.20%) Splunk Engineer
8 14 (7.65%) AWS DevOps
8 14 (7.65%) AWS DevOps Engineer
9 12 (6.56%) Architect
9 12 (6.56%) Cloud Engineer
9 12 (6.56%) Software Engineer
10 10 (5.46%) Senior
11 9 (4.92%) AWS Platform Engineer
11 9 (4.92%) GCP Engineer
12 8 (4.37%) Monitoring Engineer
13 7 (3.83%) DevOps Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 39 (21.31%) Elastic Stack
2 20 (10.93%) LDAP
3 19 (10.38%) Flash
3 19 (10.38%) REST
4 17 (9.29%) RESTful
5 7 (3.83%) RabbitMQ
5 7 (3.83%) YAML
6 5 (2.73%) JSON
6 5 (2.73%) OAuth
6 5 (2.73%) SAML
6 5 (2.73%) Spring
7 4 (2.19%) Middleware
7 4 (2.19%) Node.js
7 4 (2.19%) Spark Streaming
8 3 (1.64%) CSS
8 3 (1.64%) Spring Boot
9 2 (1.09%) Drush
9 2 (1.09%) Kafka
9 2 (1.09%) React
9 2 (1.09%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 36 (19.67%) Linux Command Line
2 33 (18.03%) Replication
3 16 (8.74%) Management Information System
4 14 (7.65%) Public Cloud
5 12 (6.56%) Distributed Systems
6 10 (5.46%) Cloud Native
7 5 (2.73%) Data Centre
7 5 (2.73%) Data Protection Act
7 5 (2.73%) Onboarding
7 5 (2.73%) Private Cloud
8 4 (2.19%) Client/Server
9 3 (1.64%) Enterprise Software
9 3 (1.64%) Legacy Systems
9 3 (1.64%) Product Ownership
9 3 (1.64%) SCADA
10 2 (1.09%) Derivative
10 2 (1.09%) Hybrid Cloud
11 1 (0.55%) CCTV
11 1 (0.55%) FPGA
11 1 (0.55%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 76 (41.53%) Windows
2 42 (22.95%) Unix
3 16 (8.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 14 (7.65%) Amazon Linux
4 14 (7.65%) VMS
5 13 (7.10%) Ubuntu
6 9 (4.92%) AIX
6 9 (4.92%) Solaris
7 6 (3.28%) Windows Server
8 4 (2.19%) CentOS
9 3 (1.64%) Embedded Linux
10 2 (1.09%) Debian
10 2 (1.09%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 64 (34.97%) Agile
2 61 (33.33%) DevOps
3 59 (32.24%) CI/CD
4 47 (25.68%) Containerisation
5 42 (22.95%) Problem-Solving
6 38 (20.77%) Change Management
6 38 (20.77%) Observability
7 35 (19.13%) Incident Response
8 33 (18.03%) Configuration Management
9 29 (15.85%) Computer Science
10 27 (14.75%) Continuous Improvement
10 27 (14.75%) SIEM
11 26 (14.21%) Site Reliability Engineering
12 25 (13.66%) Software Engineering
13 24 (13.11%) Cloud Security
13 24 (13.11%) Infrastructure as Code
14 21 (11.48%) Microservices
14 21 (11.48%) Platform Engineering
15 20 (10.93%) Service Management
16 19 (10.38%) Task Automation
Programming Languages
1 88 (48.09%) Python
2 49 (26.78%) SQL
3 36 (19.67%) PowerShell
4 28 (15.30%) Bash
5 23 (12.57%) Go
6 19 (10.38%) Shell Script
7 16 (8.74%) Java
8 14 (7.65%) Groovy
9 7 (3.83%) Perl
10 5 (2.73%) C++
11 4 (2.19%) JavaScript
12 3 (1.64%) PHP
12 3 (1.64%) VBScript
13 2 (1.09%) Ruby
13 2 (1.09%) TypeScript
14 1 (0.55%) Bicep
14 1 (0.55%) C
14 1 (0.55%) MATLAB
14 1 (0.55%) SystemVerilog
Qualifications
1 81 (44.26%) Security Cleared
2 61 (33.33%) SC Cleared
3 43 (23.50%) Degree
4 28 (15.30%) Computer Science Degree
5 24 (13.11%) DV Cleared
6 12 (6.56%) AWS Certification
6 12 (6.56%) Master's Degree
7 11 (6.01%) BPSS Clearance
8 9 (4.92%) Azure Certification
9 3 (1.64%) CCNA
9 3 (1.64%) Cisco Certification
10 2 (1.09%) AWS Certified Developer
10 2 (1.09%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (1.09%) TOGAF Certification
11 1 (0.55%) CAPM
11 1 (0.55%) CBAP
11 1 (0.55%) CEH
11 1 (0.55%) CISSP
11 1 (0.55%) PMI Certification
11 1 (0.55%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (6.01%) NIST
2 9 (4.92%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 4 (2.19%) SOC 2
4 3 (1.64%) PCI DSS
4 3 (1.64%) QA
5 2 (1.09%) NCSC
6 1 (0.55%) SLA
System Software
1 64 (34.97%) Docker
2 31 (16.94%) VMware Infrastructure
3 30 (16.39%) vSphere
4 19 (10.38%) GPFS
4 19 (10.38%) NFS
5 17 (9.29%) VMware ESXi
6 14 (7.65%) Active Directory
6 14 (7.65%) DFS Replication
7 13 (7.10%) Postfix
8 9 (4.92%) Dovecot
8 9 (4.92%) Squid
9 4 (2.19%) HDFS
10 3 (1.64%) Firmware
11 2 (1.09%) Embedded Firmware
12 1 (0.55%) Terminal Services
Systems Management
1 59 (32.24%) Kubernetes
2 50 (27.32%) Ansible
3 49 (26.78%) Terraform
4 48 (26.23%) Grafana
5 47 (25.68%) Prometheus
6 30 (16.39%) vRealize
7 24 (13.11%) Puppet
8 17 (9.29%) Kibana
9 16 (8.74%) Progress Chef
10 14 (7.65%) VxRail
11 10 (5.46%) Nessus
12 9 (4.92%) Proxmox
13 5 (2.73%) Podman
14 4 (2.19%) Hadoop YARN
15 3 (1.64%) Docker Swarm
15 3 (1.64%) logstash
16 2 (1.09%) Argo
17 1 (0.55%) Dell DRAC
17 1 (0.55%) Fluentd
17 1 (0.55%) Rsyslog
Vendors
1 53 (28.96%) Splunk
2 46 (25.14%) Cisco
3 38 (20.77%) Oracle
4 36 (19.67%) VMware
5 33 (18.03%) IBM
5 33 (18.03%) ServiceNow
6 28 (15.30%) AppDynamics
7 18 (9.84%) CyberArk
8 17 (9.29%) Dynatrace
9 15 (8.20%) BeyondTrust
9 15 (8.20%) SolarWinds
10 14 (7.65%) Commvault
10 14 (7.65%) Dell
10 14 (7.65%) Microsoft
11 13 (7.10%) HP
12 9 (4.92%) Jaspersoft
13 8 (4.37%) Google
14 4 (2.19%) Red Hat
15 2 (1.09%) ArcSight
15 2 (1.09%) Calypso