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 1 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 24 28 39
Rank change year-on-year +4 +11 -17
Contract jobs citing Linux 182 103 78
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 7.84% 6.24% 4.34%
As % of the Operating Systems category 52.91% 42.04% 29.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 116 62 54
10th Percentile £311 £376 £206
25th Percentile £413 £451 £364
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £475
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +15.79% -11.71%
75th Percentile £583 £631 £600
90th Percentile £625 £711 £688
England median daily rate £513 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.82% - -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £60.00 - -
Median hourly rate £65.00 - £50.00
75th Percentile £69.99 - -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £63.14 £66.50 £61.84
% change year-on-year -5.06% +7.54% -4.86%

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 344 245 264
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 14.83% 14.84% 14.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 239 151 186
10th Percentile £179 £178 £164
25th Percentile £296 £210 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £426 £400
Median % change year-on-year +11.50% +6.50% -19.19%
75th Percentile £552 £575 £521
90th Percentile £619 £663 £631
England median daily rate £450 £470 £475
% change year-on-year -4.26% -1.05% -6.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 12 12
10th Percentile - £15.22 £16.59
25th Percentile £17.14 £17.40 £17.54
Median hourly rate £21.46 £18.57 £17.72
Median % change year-on-year +15.59% +4.77% +7.39%
75th Percentile £29.25 £22.89 £23.75
90th Percentile £69.99 £24.05 £27.58
England median hourly rate £25.15 £50.00 £32.50
% change year-on-year -49.70% +53.85% +30.00%

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 1 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 1 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 +5 76 £525 -4.55% 15
Shropshire -17 29 £508 +10.03% 4
Coventry +5 22 £311 +122.32%
Warwickshire -11 22 £515 -10.43% 6
Worcestershire -6 13 £600 -14.29% 9
Herefordshire -15 9 £550 +4.76% 1
Staffordshire -1 2 - - 9
Solihull +2 1 - -
Wolverhampton - 1 - - 2
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 29 (15.93%) Confluence
2 18 (9.89%) Apache
3 15 (8.24%) WebLogic
4 11 (6.04%) nginx
5 7 (3.85%) OpenStack
6 6 (3.30%) Apache Airflow
6 6 (3.30%) Apache Spark
7 2 (1.10%) Drupal
8 1 (0.55%) JBoss
8 1 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 10 (5.49%) Mozilla Thunderbird
2 9 (4.95%) MS Visio
3 3 (1.65%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.55%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (0.55%) SAP GRC
1 1 (0.55%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 95 (52.20%) AWS
2 66 (36.26%) Azure
3 30 (16.48%) Amazon S3
4 28 (15.38%) Amazon EC2
5 24 (13.19%) AWS KMS
5 24 (13.19%) GCP
6 22 (12.09%) Serverless
7 20 (10.99%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 20 (10.99%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 19 (10.44%) Datadog
9 17 (9.34%) Amazon ELB
10 16 (8.79%) OpenShift
11 14 (7.69%) Azure Monitor
12 13 (7.14%) GitHub
13 12 (6.59%) GitHub Actions
14 11 (6.04%) Microsoft 365
15 10 (5.49%) Amazon ECS
15 10 (5.49%) Route 53
16 8 (4.40%) SaaS
17 7 (3.85%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 29 (15.93%) DNS
2 26 (14.29%) SMTP
2 26 (14.29%) SSH
3 23 (12.64%) Firewall
4 17 (9.34%) FTP
4 17 (9.34%) HTTP
5 13 (7.14%) VSAN
6 10 (5.49%) IMAP
6 10 (5.49%) OpenLDAP
7 9 (4.95%) DKIM
7 9 (4.95%) DMARC
8 6 (3.30%) Internet
9 5 (2.75%) DHCP
9 5 (2.75%) Kerberos
9 5 (2.75%) TCP/IP
10 4 (2.20%) Network Security
11 2 (1.10%) Intrusion Detection
11 2 (1.10%) Wi-Fi
11 2 (1.10%) Wireless
12 1 (0.55%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 25 (13.74%) Amazon RDS
2 23 (12.64%) PostgreSQL
3 16 (8.79%) Elasticsearch
3 16 (8.79%) NoSQL
4 10 (5.49%) Amazon Aurora
5 6 (3.30%) Hadoop
6 5 (2.75%) Relational Database
7 4 (2.20%) Apache Hive
7 4 (2.20%) HBase
7 4 (2.20%) InfluxDB
8 3 (1.65%) MongoDB
9 2 (1.10%) Big Data
9 2 (1.10%) Delta Lake
9 2 (1.10%) MySQL
9 2 (1.10%) Parquet
9 2 (1.10%) SQL Server
10 1 (0.55%) RDBMS
10 1 (0.55%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 52 (28.57%) Jenkins
2 30 (16.48%) Git
3 26 (14.29%) JIRA
4 23 (12.64%) GitLab
5 17 (9.34%) Vagrant
6 10 (5.49%) Liquibase
7 9 (4.95%) SonarQube
7 9 (4.95%) Sonatype Nexus
8 7 (3.85%) CircleCI
9 6 (3.30%) Bitbucket
9 6 (3.30%) JUnit
9 6 (3.30%) Postman
10 5 (2.75%) Artifactory
10 5 (2.75%) Cypress.io
10 5 (2.75%) Gradle
10 5 (2.75%) Maven
10 5 (2.75%) Selenium
10 5 (2.75%) Snyk
10 5 (2.75%) webpack
11 2 (1.10%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 81 (44.51%) Social Skills
2 29 (15.93%) Analytical Skills
3 26 (14.29%) Public Sector
4 22 (12.09%) Finance
4 22 (12.09%) Presentation Skills
5 17 (9.34%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (5.49%) Financial Institution
7 9 (4.95%) Banking
8 2 (1.10%) Manufacturing
8 2 (1.10%) Organisational Skills
8 2 (1.10%) Telecoms
9 1 (0.55%) Aerospace
9 1 (0.55%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 29 (15.93%) Analyst
2 27 (14.84%) DevOps Engineer
3 23 (12.64%) AWS Engineer
3 23 (12.64%) Infrastructure Analyst
3 23 (12.64%) Platform Engineer
4 20 (10.99%) Site Engineer
4 20 (10.99%) Site Reliability Engineer
5 18 (9.89%) Cloud Platform Engineer
6 17 (9.34%) AWS DevOps
6 17 (9.34%) AWS DevOps Engineer
7 15 (8.24%) Storage Analyst
8 13 (7.14%) Senior
8 13 (7.14%) Splunk Engineer
9 12 (6.59%) Cloud Engineer
9 12 (6.59%) Software Engineer
10 11 (6.04%) Architect
11 10 (5.49%) AWS Platform Engineer
12 9 (4.95%) GCP Engineer
13 8 (4.40%) DevOps Platform Engineer
13 8 (4.40%) Monitoring Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 40 (21.98%) Elastic Stack
2 21 (11.54%) LDAP
3 19 (10.44%) REST
4 17 (9.34%) RESTful
5 15 (8.24%) Flash
6 6 (3.30%) RabbitMQ
6 6 (3.30%) YAML
7 5 (2.75%) JSON
7 5 (2.75%) OAuth
7 5 (2.75%) SAML
8 4 (2.20%) Node.js
8 4 (2.20%) NumPy
8 4 (2.20%) Spark Streaming
8 4 (2.20%) Spring
9 3 (1.65%) Flask
9 3 (1.65%) Middleware
9 3 (1.65%) Pandas
9 3 (1.65%) Spring Boot
10 2 (1.10%) CSS
10 2 (1.10%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 32 (17.58%) Linux Command Line
1 32 (17.58%) Replication
2 14 (7.69%) Management Information System
2 14 (7.69%) Public Cloud
3 12 (6.59%) Distributed Systems
4 10 (5.49%) Cloud Native
5 5 (2.75%) Data Centre
5 5 (2.75%) Data Protection Act
5 5 (2.75%) Onboarding
5 5 (2.75%) Private Cloud
6 4 (2.20%) Client/Server
7 3 (1.65%) Legacy Systems
7 3 (1.65%) SCADA
8 2 (1.10%) Derivative
8 2 (1.10%) Enterprise Software
8 2 (1.10%) Product Ownership
9 1 (0.55%) CCTV
9 1 (0.55%) FPGA
9 1 (0.55%) HP Storage
9 1 (0.55%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 78 (42.86%) Windows
2 38 (20.88%) Unix
3 21 (11.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 18 (9.89%) VMS
5 17 (9.34%) Amazon Linux
6 14 (7.69%) Ubuntu
7 9 (4.95%) AIX
7 9 (4.95%) Solaris
8 6 (3.30%) Windows Server
9 4 (2.20%) CentOS
10 3 (1.65%) Embedded Linux
10 3 (1.65%) Mac OS X
11 2 (1.10%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 65 (35.71%) DevOps
2 57 (31.32%) Agile
3 56 (30.77%) CI/CD
4 46 (25.27%) Containerisation
5 42 (23.08%) Problem-Solving
6 40 (21.98%) Change Management
7 33 (18.13%) Configuration Management
7 33 (18.13%) Incident Response
8 32 (17.58%) Observability
9 28 (15.38%) SIEM
10 27 (14.84%) Cloud Security
10 27 (14.84%) Computer Science
11 24 (13.19%) Platform Engineering
11 24 (13.19%) Software Engineering
12 23 (12.64%) Continuous Improvement
12 23 (12.64%) Infrastructure as Code
13 21 (11.54%) Microservices
13 21 (11.54%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 21 (11.54%) Validation
14 20 (10.99%) Service Management
Programming Languages
1 92 (50.55%) Python
2 47 (25.82%) SQL
3 41 (22.53%) PowerShell
4 28 (15.38%) Bash
5 23 (12.64%) Go
6 20 (10.99%) Groovy
7 17 (9.34%) Java
8 16 (8.79%) Shell Script
9 9 (4.95%) Perl
10 5 (2.75%) C++
11 3 (1.65%) JavaScript
11 3 (1.65%) VBScript
12 2 (1.10%) PHP
12 2 (1.10%) Ruby
12 2 (1.10%) TypeScript
13 1 (0.55%) Bicep
13 1 (0.55%) C
13 1 (0.55%) MATLAB
13 1 (0.55%) SystemVerilog
Qualifications
1 80 (43.96%) Security Cleared
2 61 (33.52%) SC Cleared
3 42 (23.08%) Degree
4 26 (14.29%) Computer Science Degree
5 22 (12.09%) DV Cleared
6 12 (6.59%) AWS Certification
6 12 (6.59%) Master's Degree
7 10 (5.49%) Azure Certification
8 8 (4.40%) BPSS Clearance
9 2 (1.10%) AWS Certified Developer
9 2 (1.10%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 1 (0.55%) CAPM
10 1 (0.55%) CBAP
10 1 (0.55%) CEH
10 1 (0.55%) CISSP
10 1 (0.55%) PMI Certification
10 1 (0.55%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (5.49%) NIST
2 8 (4.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 4 (2.20%) SOC 2
4 3 (1.65%) PCI DSS
5 2 (1.10%) NCSC
5 2 (1.10%) QA
6 1 (0.55%) SLA
System Software
1 63 (34.62%) Docker
2 32 (17.58%) VMware Infrastructure
3 26 (14.29%) vSphere
4 20 (10.99%) Active Directory
5 19 (10.44%) Postfix
6 17 (9.34%) DFS Replication
7 15 (8.24%) Dovecot
7 15 (8.24%) GPFS
7 15 (8.24%) NFS
8 13 (7.14%) VMware ESXi
9 10 (5.49%) Squid
10 4 (2.20%) HDFS
11 3 (1.65%) Firmware
12 2 (1.10%) Embedded Firmware
13 1 (0.55%) Snort
13 1 (0.55%) Terminal Services
Systems Management
1 52 (28.57%) Kubernetes
2 49 (26.92%) Terraform
3 48 (26.37%) Grafana
4 47 (25.82%) Prometheus
5 45 (24.73%) Ansible
6 26 (14.29%) vRealize
7 22 (12.09%) Puppet
8 16 (8.79%) Kibana
9 14 (7.69%) Progress Chef
10 13 (7.14%) VxRail
11 11 (6.04%) Nessus
12 10 (5.49%) Proxmox
13 5 (2.75%) Podman
14 4 (2.20%) Argo
14 4 (2.20%) Hadoop YARN
15 3 (1.65%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 3 (1.65%) logstash
16 2 (1.10%) Docker Swarm
16 2 (1.10%) Istio
17 1 (0.55%) Dell DRAC
Vendors
1 52 (28.57%) Splunk
2 42 (23.08%) Cisco
3 37 (20.33%) VMware
4 32 (17.58%) AppDynamics
4 32 (17.58%) ServiceNow
5 30 (16.48%) Oracle
6 29 (15.93%) IBM
7 18 (9.89%) Microsoft
8 17 (9.34%) CyberArk
8 17 (9.34%) Dynatrace
9 15 (8.24%) BeyondTrust
9 15 (8.24%) SolarWinds
10 14 (7.69%) Commvault
10 14 (7.69%) Dell
11 13 (7.14%) HP
12 11 (6.04%) Red Hat
13 10 (5.49%) Jaspersoft
14 9 (4.95%) Google
15 5 (2.75%) Broadcom
16 2 (1.10%) ArcSight