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

6 months to
24 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 23 30 42
Rank change year-on-year +7 +12 -19
Contract jobs citing Linux 178 101 78
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 7.85% 6.03% 4.32%
As % of the Operating Systems category 52.51% 41.56% 29.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 113 59 53
10th Percentile £308 £371 £204
25th Percentile £429 £432 £361
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £475
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +15.79% -11.71%
75th Percentile £581 £629 £600
90th Percentile £625 £713 £688
England median daily rate £513 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -6.82% - -5.98%
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 £63.75 £66.50 £62.17
% change year-on-year -4.14% +6.96% -4.35%

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 339 243 265
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 14.95% 14.50% 14.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 236 150 187
10th Percentile £178 £178 £163
25th Percentile £291 £210 £206
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £425 £400
Median % change year-on-year +11.76% +6.25% -19.19%
75th Percentile £552 £565 £518
90th Percentile £618 £664 £624
England median daily rate £450 £475 £475
% change year-on-year -5.26% - -7.32%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 11 12
10th Percentile - £15.22 £16.59
25th Percentile £17.14 £16.68 £17.54
Median hourly rate £21.46 £18.13 £17.72
Median % change year-on-year +18.37% +2.31% +7.85%
75th Percentile £29.25 £22.89 £23.75
90th Percentile £69.99 £24.18 £27.58
England median hourly rate £25.15 £55.33 £32.50
% change year-on-year -54.54% +70.23% +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 24 December 2025.

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 24 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
Birmingham +4 72 £525 -4.55% 27
Shropshire -13 29 £508 +10.03% 18
Warwickshire -3 22 £515 -10.04% 3
Coventry +4 21 £310 +121.43% 13
Worcestershire -4 13 £600 -14.29% 12
Herefordshire -15 9 £550 +4.76% 2
Staffordshire 0 2 - - 17
Solihull 0 1 - -
Wolverhampton - 1 - - 9
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 (16.29%) Confluence
2 18 (10.11%) Apache
3 15 (8.43%) WebLogic
4 11 (6.18%) nginx
5 7 (3.93%) OpenStack
6 6 (3.37%) Apache Airflow
6 6 (3.37%) Apache Spark
7 2 (1.12%) Drupal
8 1 (0.56%) JBoss
8 1 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 10 (5.62%) Mozilla Thunderbird
2 9 (5.06%) MS Visio
3 3 (1.69%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.56%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (0.56%) SAP GRC
1 1 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 96 (53.93%) AWS
2 66 (37.08%) Azure
3 32 (17.98%) Amazon S3
4 30 (16.85%) Amazon EC2
5 26 (14.61%) AWS KMS
6 24 (13.48%) GCP
7 23 (12.92%) Serverless
8 22 (12.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 22 (12.36%) Virtual Private Cloud
9 19 (10.67%) Datadog
10 18 (10.11%) Amazon ELB
11 16 (8.99%) OpenShift
12 14 (7.87%) Azure Monitor
13 12 (6.74%) GitHub
13 12 (6.74%) GitHub Actions
14 11 (6.18%) Microsoft 365
14 11 (6.18%) Route 53
15 10 (5.62%) Amazon ECS
16 8 (4.49%) Amazon Glacier
16 8 (4.49%) Azure DevOps
Communications & Networking
1 31 (17.42%) DNS
2 27 (15.17%) SMTP
2 27 (15.17%) SSH
3 24 (13.48%) Firewall
4 18 (10.11%) FTP
4 18 (10.11%) HTTP
5 14 (7.87%) VSAN
6 10 (5.62%) IMAP
6 10 (5.62%) OpenLDAP
7 9 (5.06%) DKIM
7 9 (5.06%) DMARC
8 6 (3.37%) DHCP
8 6 (3.37%) Internet
9 5 (2.81%) Kerberos
9 5 (2.81%) TCP/IP
10 4 (2.25%) Network Security
11 2 (1.12%) Intrusion Detection
11 2 (1.12%) LAN
11 2 (1.12%) Wi-Fi
11 2 (1.12%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 27 (15.17%) Amazon RDS
2 22 (12.36%) PostgreSQL
3 16 (8.99%) NoSQL
4 15 (8.43%) Elasticsearch
5 10 (5.62%) Amazon Aurora
6 6 (3.37%) Hadoop
7 5 (2.81%) Relational Database
8 4 (2.25%) Apache Hive
8 4 (2.25%) HBase
8 4 (2.25%) InfluxDB
9 3 (1.69%) MongoDB
9 3 (1.69%) SQL Server
10 2 (1.12%) Big Data
10 2 (1.12%) Delta Lake
10 2 (1.12%) MySQL
10 2 (1.12%) Parquet
11 1 (0.56%) RDBMS
11 1 (0.56%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 53 (29.78%) Jenkins
2 31 (17.42%) Git
3 26 (14.61%) JIRA
4 23 (12.92%) GitLab
5 18 (10.11%) Vagrant
6 10 (5.62%) Liquibase
7 9 (5.06%) SonarQube
7 9 (5.06%) Sonatype Nexus
8 7 (3.93%) CircleCI
9 6 (3.37%) Bitbucket
9 6 (3.37%) JUnit
9 6 (3.37%) Postman
10 5 (2.81%) Artifactory
10 5 (2.81%) Cypress.io
10 5 (2.81%) Gradle
10 5 (2.81%) Maven
10 5 (2.81%) Selenium
10 5 (2.81%) Snyk
10 5 (2.81%) webpack
11 2 (1.12%) MLflow
General
1 80 (44.94%) Social Skills
2 27 (15.17%) Analytical Skills
3 26 (14.61%) Public Sector
4 22 (12.36%) Finance
4 22 (12.36%) Presentation Skills
5 17 (9.55%) Documentation Skills
6 10 (5.62%) Financial Institution
7 9 (5.06%) Banking
8 2 (1.12%) Manufacturing
8 2 (1.12%) Organisational Skills
8 2 (1.12%) Telecoms
9 1 (0.56%) Aerospace
9 1 (0.56%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 28 (15.73%) DevOps Engineer
2 26 (14.61%) Analyst
3 23 (12.92%) AWS Engineer
3 23 (12.92%) Platform Engineer
4 21 (11.80%) Infrastructure Analyst
5 19 (10.67%) Site Engineer
5 19 (10.67%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 18 (10.11%) Cloud Platform Engineer
7 17 (9.55%) AWS DevOps
7 17 (9.55%) AWS DevOps Engineer
8 13 (7.30%) Senior
9 12 (6.74%) Cloud Engineer
9 12 (6.74%) Software Engineer
9 12 (6.74%) Splunk Engineer
9 12 (6.74%) Storage Analyst
10 10 (5.62%) Architect
10 10 (5.62%) AWS Platform Engineer
11 9 (5.06%) GCP Engineer
12 8 (4.49%) DevOps Platform Engineer
12 8 (4.49%) Monitoring Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 39 (21.91%) Elastic Stack
2 21 (11.80%) LDAP
3 19 (10.67%) REST
4 17 (9.55%) RESTful
5 12 (6.74%) Flash
6 6 (3.37%) RabbitMQ
7 5 (2.81%) JSON
7 5 (2.81%) OAuth
7 5 (2.81%) SAML
7 5 (2.81%) YAML
8 4 (2.25%) Node.js
8 4 (2.25%) NumPy
8 4 (2.25%) Spark Streaming
8 4 (2.25%) Spring
9 3 (1.69%) Flask
9 3 (1.69%) Pandas
9 3 (1.69%) Spring Boot
10 2 (1.12%) Apache Avro
10 2 (1.12%) Drush
10 2 (1.12%) React
Miscellaneous
1 31 (17.42%) Replication
2 30 (16.85%) Linux Command Line
3 14 (7.87%) Public Cloud
4 13 (7.30%) Management Information System
5 12 (6.74%) Distributed Systems
6 10 (5.62%) Cloud Native
7 5 (2.81%) Data Centre
7 5 (2.81%) Data Protection Act
7 5 (2.81%) Onboarding
7 5 (2.81%) Private Cloud
8 4 (2.25%) Client/Server
9 3 (1.69%) Legacy Systems
9 3 (1.69%) SCADA
10 2 (1.12%) Derivative
10 2 (1.12%) PKI
10 2 (1.12%) Product Ownership
11 1 (0.56%) CCTV
11 1 (0.56%) FPGA
11 1 (0.56%) HP Storage
11 1 (0.56%) PMI
Operating Systems
1 78 (43.82%) Windows
2 35 (19.66%) Unix
3 22 (12.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 19 (10.67%) VMS
5 18 (10.11%) Amazon Linux
6 15 (8.43%) Ubuntu
7 9 (5.06%) AIX
7 9 (5.06%) Solaris
8 7 (3.93%) Windows Server
9 4 (2.25%) CentOS
10 3 (1.69%) Embedded Linux
10 3 (1.69%) Mac OS X
11 2 (1.12%) Debian
12 1 (0.56%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 64 (35.96%) DevOps
2 55 (30.90%) Agile
2 55 (30.90%) CI/CD
3 44 (24.72%) Containerisation
4 41 (23.03%) Change Management
4 41 (23.03%) Problem-Solving
5 34 (19.10%) Configuration Management
6 32 (17.98%) Incident Response
7 31 (17.42%) Observability
8 28 (15.73%) Cloud Security
8 28 (15.73%) SIEM
9 26 (14.61%) Computer Science
10 25 (14.04%) Platform Engineering
11 24 (13.48%) Software Engineering
12 23 (12.92%) Continuous Improvement
13 22 (12.36%) Infrastructure as Code
14 21 (11.80%) Microservices
15 20 (11.24%) Service Management
15 20 (11.24%) Site Reliability Engineering
15 20 (11.24%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 91 (51.12%) Python
2 47 (26.40%) SQL
3 41 (23.03%) PowerShell
4 26 (14.61%) Bash
5 23 (12.92%) Go
6 21 (11.80%) Groovy
7 18 (10.11%) Java
8 16 (8.99%) Shell Script
9 10 (5.62%) Perl
10 5 (2.81%) C++
11 3 (1.69%) JavaScript
11 3 (1.69%) VBScript
12 2 (1.12%) PHP
12 2 (1.12%) Ruby
12 2 (1.12%) TypeScript
13 1 (0.56%) C
13 1 (0.56%) MATLAB
13 1 (0.56%) SystemVerilog
Qualifications
1 79 (44.38%) Security Cleared
2 60 (33.71%) SC Cleared
3 41 (23.03%) Degree
4 25 (14.04%) Computer Science Degree
5 22 (12.36%) DV Cleared
6 13 (7.30%) AWS Certification
7 12 (6.74%) Master's Degree
8 10 (5.62%) Azure Certification
9 7 (3.93%) BPSS Clearance
10 2 (1.12%) AWS Certified Developer
10 2 (1.12%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
11 1 (0.56%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
11 1 (0.56%) CAPM
11 1 (0.56%) CBAP
11 1 (0.56%) CEH
11 1 (0.56%) CISSP
11 1 (0.56%) PMI Certification
11 1 (0.56%) PMP
11 1 (0.56%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (5.06%) NIST
2 7 (3.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 4 (2.25%) SOC 2
4 3 (1.69%) PCI DSS
5 2 (1.12%) NCSC
5 2 (1.12%) QA
6 1 (0.56%) SLA
System Software
1 62 (34.83%) Docker
2 31 (17.42%) VMware Infrastructure
3 25 (14.04%) vSphere
4 22 (12.36%) Active Directory
5 19 (10.67%) Postfix
6 18 (10.11%) DFS Replication
7 15 (8.43%) Dovecot
8 12 (6.74%) GPFS
8 12 (6.74%) NFS
8 12 (6.74%) VMware ESXi
9 10 (5.62%) Squid
10 4 (2.25%) HDFS
11 3 (1.69%) Firmware
12 2 (1.12%) Embedded Firmware
13 1 (0.56%) Snort
13 1 (0.56%) Terminal Services
13 1 (0.56%) Virtual Machines
13 1 (0.56%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 50 (28.09%) Kubernetes
2 49 (27.53%) Grafana
2 49 (27.53%) Terraform
3 48 (26.97%) Prometheus
4 44 (24.72%) Ansible
5 25 (14.04%) vRealize
6 21 (11.80%) Puppet
7 15 (8.43%) Kibana
8 14 (7.87%) Progress Chef
9 13 (7.30%) VxRail
10 11 (6.18%) Nessus
11 10 (5.62%) Proxmox
12 5 (2.81%) Podman
13 4 (2.25%) Argo
13 4 (2.25%) Hadoop YARN
14 3 (1.69%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 3 (1.69%) logstash
15 2 (1.12%) Docker Swarm
15 2 (1.12%) Istio
16 1 (0.56%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 51 (28.65%) Splunk
2 41 (23.03%) Cisco
3 37 (20.79%) VMware
4 32 (17.98%) AppDynamics
5 30 (16.85%) ServiceNow
6 27 (15.17%) Oracle
7 26 (14.61%) IBM
8 19 (10.67%) Microsoft
9 17 (9.55%) Dynatrace
10 16 (8.99%) CyberArk
11 15 (8.43%) BeyondTrust
11 15 (8.43%) SolarWinds
12 14 (7.87%) Commvault
12 14 (7.87%) Dell
13 13 (7.30%) HP
14 11 (6.18%) Red Hat
15 10 (5.62%) Jaspersoft
16 9 (5.06%) Google
17 5 (2.81%) Broadcom
18 2 (1.12%) Veeam