DevOps Contract Job Trends in England

DevOps
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring DevOps skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 1 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 18
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 3,986 2,720 3,251
As % of all contract jobs in England 11.26% 10.65% 8.56%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.92% 11.80% 9.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,790 1,920 2,326
10th Percentile £381 £400 £413
25th Percentile £438 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £573 £568
Median % change year-on-year -8.30% +0.88% -5.42%
75th Percentile £615 £675 £671
90th Percentile £725 £776 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 18 98
10th Percentile - £37.68 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £61.11 £60.31
Median hourly rate £63.50 £74.72 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.02% +14.95% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £80.75 £73.80
90th Percentile £92.33 £89.00 £84.77
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £74.44 £65.00
% change year-on-year -12.68% +14.52% -0.76%

All Process & Methodology Skills
England

DevOps falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 30,846 23,044 33,123
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 87.12% 90.26% 87.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,757 14,550 21,943
10th Percentile £313 £307 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £617 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,917 778 2,099
10th Percentile £15.25 £15.50 £13.29
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £28.55 £35.00 £34.21
Median % change year-on-year -18.43% +2.31% -2.92%
75th Percentile £63.75 £65.00 £59.94
90th Percentile £73.41 £75.73 £72.07
UK median hourly rate £27.50 £32.50 £33.00
% change year-on-year -15.38% -1.52% -5.71%

DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing DevOps relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

DevOps job vacancy trend in England

DevOps
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DevOps.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DevOps

DevOps
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DevOps in England over the 6 months to 1 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for DevOps in England

DevOps
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DevOps.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing DevOps

DevOps
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing DevOps in England over the 6 months to 1 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in England

DevOps
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing DevOps within the England region over the 6 months to 1 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
London -3 1,997 £540 -9.24% 599
North of England +6 728 £500 -4.76% 437
South East +1 423 £525 -8.70% 530
Midlands +15 412 £500 +1.52% 204
Yorkshire +1 382 £500 -3.61% 152
West Midlands +12 328 £515 +3.00% 118
North West +3 296 £492 -6.29% 228
South West +10 258 £525 -12.50% 225
East of England +16 115 £575 +13.30% 163
East Midlands +5 83 £430 -9.47% 84
North East -3 53 £488 -7.14% 62
DevOps
UK

DevOps
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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
1 250 (6.27%) Confluence
2 96 (2.41%) Apache Spark
3 84 (2.11%) Apache
4 80 (2.01%) SAS
4 80 (2.01%) SharePoint
5 57 (1.43%) Apache Airflow
6 31 (0.78%) OpenStack
7 29 (0.73%) CMS
7 29 (0.73%) nginx
8 20 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
9 17 (0.43%) IIS
10 13 (0.33%) JBoss
10 13 (0.33%) WebLogic
11 12 (0.30%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 12 (0.30%) Sitecore CMS
12 11 (0.28%) Mendix
13 10 (0.25%) HCL Notes
14 8 (0.20%) GeoServer
14 8 (0.20%) Smallworld
14 8 (0.20%) WebSphere
Applications
1 85 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 38 (0.95%) Microsoft Project
4 26 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 21 (0.53%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.30%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.20%) Weka
8 4 (0.10%) Trello
9 2 (0.050%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.025%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.025%) InDesign
10 1 (0.025%) Maya
10 1 (0.025%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.025%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 62 (1.56%) Dynamics CRM
2 13 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.25%) Endur
3 10 (0.25%) Maximo
4 9 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.20%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.20%) NEC Housing
6 7 (0.18%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.15%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.15%) SAP ERP
8 5 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.10%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.075%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.075%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.075%) SAP CO
10 3 (0.075%) SAP FI
10 3 (0.075%) SAP FI/CO
10 3 (0.075%) VisionPLUS
10 3 (0.075%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,032 (50.98%) Azure
2 1,389 (34.85%) AWS
3 1,099 (27.57%) Azure DevOps
4 721 (18.09%) GitHub
5 592 (14.85%) GCP
6 440 (11.04%) Serverless
7 383 (9.61%) GitHub Actions
8 327 (8.20%) Power Platform
9 220 (5.52%) Amazon S3
10 208 (5.22%) AWS CloudFormation
11 207 (5.19%) AWS Lambda
12 194 (4.87%) Azure Data Factory
13 183 (4.59%) OpenShift
14 180 (4.52%) Entra ID
15 174 (4.37%) Azure AKS
16 162 (4.06%) Amazon EKS
17 149 (3.74%) Azure Monitor
17 149 (3.74%) Dynamics 365
18 143 (3.59%) SaaS
19 131 (3.29%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 192 (4.82%) Firewall
2 107 (2.68%) DNS
3 83 (2.08%) VPN
4 82 (2.06%) Network Security
5 52 (1.30%) TCP/IP
6 32 (0.80%) SSL
7 25 (0.63%) HTTP
8 20 (0.50%) WAN
9 17 (0.43%) DHCP
9 17 (0.43%) SD-WAN
10 16 (0.40%) HTTPS
11 15 (0.38%) Kerberos
12 12 (0.30%) MPLS
12 12 (0.30%) SAN
13 11 (0.28%) BGP
13 11 (0.28%) Reverse Proxy
14 9 (0.23%) Internet
14 9 (0.23%) IPsec
15 8 (0.20%) LAN
15 8 (0.20%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 228 (5.72%) PostgreSQL
2 211 (5.29%) Power BI
3 160 (4.01%) SQL Server
4 153 (3.84%) NoSQL
5 124 (3.11%) Data Lake
6 102 (2.56%) Relational Database
7 100 (2.51%) Amazon RDS
8 96 (2.41%) Data Warehouse
9 94 (2.36%) MongoDB
10 77 (1.93%) Azure SQL Database
11 75 (1.88%) Elasticsearch
12 73 (1.83%) Oracle Database
13 65 (1.63%) DynamoDB
14 59 (1.48%) Delta Lake
15 54 (1.35%) Redis
16 51 (1.28%) MySQL
17 48 (1.20%) Tableau
18 46 (1.15%) Metadata
19 42 (1.05%) Amazon Athena
19 42 (1.05%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 691 (17.34%) Jenkins
2 551 (13.82%) Git
3 538 (13.50%) JIRA
4 494 (12.39%) GitLab
5 118 (2.96%) Selenium
6 92 (2.31%) JUnit
7 77 (1.93%) Postman
8 66 (1.66%) Bitbucket
9 62 (1.56%) SonarQube
10 54 (1.35%) Cucumber
11 51 (1.28%) Maven
12 49 (1.23%) Sonatype Nexus
13 46 (1.15%) Cypress.io
14 45 (1.13%) Artifactory
15 42 (1.05%) REST Assured
16 35 (0.88%) Oracle APEX
17 33 (0.83%) JMeter
18 32 (0.80%) Liquibase
19 30 (0.75%) Gradle
20 28 (0.70%) CircleCI
General
1 1,202 (30.16%) Social Skills
2 751 (18.84%) Finance
3 486 (12.19%) Public Sector
4 350 (8.78%) Analytical Skills
5 319 (8.00%) Banking
6 145 (3.64%) Documentation Skills
7 74 (1.86%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.68%) Financial Institution
9 53 (1.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 52 (1.30%) Retail
11 51 (1.28%) Marketing
12 46 (1.15%) Front Office
13 43 (1.08%) Investment Banking
14 42 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
15 38 (0.95%) Organisational Skills
15 38 (0.95%) Telecoms
16 32 (0.80%) Military
17 27 (0.68%) Pharmaceutical
18 25 (0.63%) Legal
19 24 (0.60%) Law
Job Titles
1 736 (18.46%) DevOps Engineer
2 640 (16.06%) Developer
3 555 (13.92%) Senior
4 419 (10.51%) Architect
5 328 (8.23%) Lead
6 244 (6.12%) Azure Engineer
7 233 (5.85%) Data Engineer
8 228 (5.72%) Analyst
9 206 (5.17%) AWS Engineer
10 161 (4.04%) Cloud Engineer
11 158 (3.96%) AWS DevOps
12 147 (3.69%) Software Engineer
13 138 (3.46%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 138 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
14 128 (3.21%) Solutions Architect
15 124 (3.11%) Business Analyst
16 119 (2.99%) Senior Developer
17 117 (2.94%) Senior DevOps
18 109 (2.73%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 104 (2.61%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 437 (10.96%) REST
2 324 (8.13%) .NET
3 257 (6.45%) Node.js
3 257 (6.45%) React
4 222 (5.57%) Kafka
5 211 (5.29%) Spring
6 200 (5.02%) RESTful
7 192 (4.82%) Spring Boot
8 150 (3.76%) AngularJS
9 148 (3.71%) JSON
10 129 (3.24%) HTML
11 127 (3.19%) YAML
12 118 (2.96%) OAuth
13 115 (2.89%) Elastic Stack
13 115 (2.89%) Playwright
14 110 (2.76%) XML
15 107 (2.68%) SOAP
16 105 (2.63%) PySpark
17 100 (2.51%) Middleware
18 98 (2.46%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 581 (14.58%) Cloud Native
2 214 (5.37%) Product Ownership
3 140 (3.51%) Distributed Systems
4 107 (2.68%) Onboarding
5 106 (2.66%) Public Cloud
6 81 (2.03%) Legacy Systems
7 76 (1.91%) Hybrid Cloud
8 68 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
9 53 (1.33%) Management Information System
10 50 (1.25%) Security Posture
11 49 (1.23%) Data Protection Act
12 46 (1.15%) Virtual Team
13 44 (1.10%) Private Cloud
14 36 (0.90%) Data Centre
15 35 (0.88%) NHS
15 35 (0.88%) Replication
16 34 (0.85%) Data Structures
17 33 (0.83%) Mobile App
18 32 (0.80%) AI Agents
19 31 (0.78%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 430 (10.79%) Linux
2 210 (5.27%) Windows
3 83 (2.08%) Unix
4 59 (1.48%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 40 (1.00%) VMS
6 36 (0.90%) Windows Server
7 24 (0.60%) Ubuntu
8 17 (0.43%) CentOS
9 12 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.28%) Apple iOS
10 11 (0.28%) Windows 10
11 9 (0.23%) Solaris
12 7 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
14 4 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
15 3 (0.075%) Amazon Linux
16 2 (0.050%) Debian
16 2 (0.050%) Windows Server 2008
16 2 (0.050%) zOS
17 1 (0.025%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,291 (57.48%) CI/CD
2 1,561 (39.16%) Agile
3 1,010 (25.34%) Infrastructure as Code
4 768 (19.27%) Problem-Solving
5 741 (18.59%) Containerisation
6 597 (14.98%) Test Automation
7 580 (14.55%) Microservices
8 506 (12.69%) Analytics
9 503 (12.62%) Continuous Improvement
10 463 (11.62%) Migration
11 447 (11.21%) Scrum
12 434 (10.89%) AI
13 429 (10.76%) Observability
14 410 (10.29%) Stakeholder Management
15 374 (9.38%) Software Engineering
16 360 (9.03%) Data Modelling
17 338 (8.48%) Mentoring
18 289 (7.25%) Data Pipeline
19 285 (7.15%) Business Intelligence
20 276 (6.92%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,220 (30.61%) Python
2 843 (21.15%) SQL
3 521 (13.07%) Java
4 388 (9.73%) C#
5 385 (9.66%) JavaScript
6 316 (7.93%) PowerShell
7 314 (7.88%) Bash
8 270 (6.77%) TypeScript
9 130 (3.26%) Go
10 125 (3.14%) Bicep
11 81 (2.03%) PL/SQL
12 60 (1.51%) Scala
13 46 (1.15%) Shell Script
14 44 (1.10%) T-SQL
15 40 (1.00%) C++
16 38 (0.95%) Ruby
17 37 (0.93%) Groovy
18 27 (0.68%) Rust
19 21 (0.53%) PHP
20 20 (0.50%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,280 (32.11%) Security Cleared
2 1,044 (26.19%) SC Cleared
3 336 (8.43%) Degree
4 193 (4.84%) Azure Certification
5 178 (4.47%) Computer Science Degree
6 140 (3.51%) DV Cleared
7 127 (3.19%) AWS Certification
8 86 (2.16%) BPSS Clearance
9 78 (1.96%) Master's Degree
10 74 (1.86%) CISSP
11 56 (1.40%) CISM
12 54 (1.35%) Microsoft Certification
13 44 (1.10%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 43 (1.08%) ISTQB
15 34 (0.85%) Cisco Certification
15 34 (0.85%) PMI Certification
16 28 (0.70%) PMP
17 26 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 23 (0.58%) IIBA
19 20 (0.50%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 349 (8.76%) QA
2 162 (4.06%) GDPR
3 161 (4.04%) Data Quality
4 120 (3.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 112 (2.81%) NIST
6 89 (2.23%) Accessibility
7 66 (1.66%) NCSC
8 32 (0.80%) PCI DSS
9 31 (0.78%) WCAG
10 25 (0.63%) SLA
11 24 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 21 (0.53%) HIPAA
12 21 (0.53%) PMO
13 16 (0.40%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.38%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.33%) PSD2
16 11 (0.28%) NIST 800
17 10 (0.25%) SEPA
18 8 (0.20%) GRC
18 8 (0.20%) HL7
System Software
1 945 (23.71%) Docker
2 162 (4.06%) Active Directory
3 73 (1.83%) Virtual Machines
4 68 (1.71%) VMware Infrastructure
5 41 (1.03%) vSphere
6 24 (0.60%) VMware NSX
7 14 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
8 11 (0.28%) Lustre
8 11 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 10 (0.25%) Squid
10 9 (0.23%) GPFS
11 8 (0.20%) Postfix
11 8 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
12 7 (0.18%) Firmware
12 7 (0.18%) Hyper-V
13 6 (0.15%) HDFS
13 6 (0.15%) NFS
14 5 (0.13%) DFS Replication
14 5 (0.13%) RACF
14 5 (0.13%) Tivoli Directory Server
Systems Management
1 1,182 (29.65%) Terraform
2 1,135 (28.47%) Kubernetes
3 459 (11.52%) Ansible
4 279 (7.00%) Grafana
5 237 (5.95%) Prometheus
6 87 (2.18%) Argo
7 71 (1.78%) Puppet
8 61 (1.53%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (1.10%) Istio
10 31 (0.78%) Kibana
11 30 (0.75%) Progress Chef
12 29 (0.73%) Packer
13 23 (0.58%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.50%) Podman
15 18 (0.45%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 17 (0.43%) Consul
16 17 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
16 17 (0.43%) Rancher
17 16 (0.40%) FortiGate
18 13 (0.33%) logstash
Vendors
1 680 (17.06%) Microsoft
2 279 (7.00%) Oracle
3 248 (6.22%) Databricks
4 231 (5.80%) Google
5 197 (4.94%) Splunk
6 144 (3.61%) ServiceNow
7 136 (3.41%) Red Hat
8 116 (2.91%) VMware
9 101 (2.53%) Salesforce
10 95 (2.38%) SAP
11 69 (1.73%) OpenAI
12 58 (1.46%) Dynatrace
13 57 (1.43%) Atlassian
14 55 (1.38%) CyberArk
15 42 (1.05%) Talend
16 39 (0.98%) IBM
17 38 (0.95%) Denodo
18 36 (0.90%) F5
19 33 (0.83%) Foundry
20 30 (0.75%) Palo Alto