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

6 months to
29 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +3 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 3,795 2,796 3,223
As % of all contract jobs in England 11.55% 10.51% 8.66%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.14% 11.75% 9.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,664 1,919 2,362
10th Percentile £375 £400 £413
25th Percentile £435 £479 £481
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £570
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +0.88% -5.00%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £675
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £560 £560
% change year-on-year -7.14% - -6.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 54 21 100
10th Percentile - £38.50 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £56.25 £56.65
Median hourly rate £48.75 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.78% +3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £80.88 £80.75 £71.41
90th Percentile £95.00 - £81.25
UK median hourly rate £53.75 £70.36 £65.00
% change year-on-year -23.61% +8.25% -0.92%

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 28,878 23,799 32,593
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 87.87% 89.45% 87.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,472 14,557 21,833
10th Percentile £305 £310 £300
25th Percentile £410 £413 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.67% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £625 £644 £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 1,785 763 1,818
10th Percentile £15.04 £15.62 £13.99
25th Percentile £17.87 £21.00 £17.02
Median hourly rate £25.15 £34.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year -26.03% -6.85% +4.29%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £62.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.96
% change year-on-year -22.62% -9.62% +10.65%

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 29 January 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 29 January 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 29 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
London -1 1,908 £540 -10.00% 459
North of England +4 677 £500 -2.20% 319
South East +1 399 £525 -8.70% 473
Midlands +24 396 £515 +1.78% 152
Yorkshire +1 346 £500 -0.74% 123
West Midlands +25 319 £525 +1.25% 85
North West +4 285 £458 -9.76% 156
South West +9 242 £525 -12.50% 155
East of England +23 108 £575 +11.65% 138
East Midlands +16 77 £425 -12.82% 64
North East -6 49 £475 -15.93% 41
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
1 239 (6.30%) Confluence
2 82 (2.16%) Apache
3 78 (2.06%) SharePoint
4 76 (2.00%) SAS
5 74 (1.95%) Apache Spark
6 59 (1.55%) Apache Airflow
7 37 (0.97%) OpenStack
8 35 (0.92%) nginx
9 34 (0.90%) CMS
10 22 (0.58%) IIS
11 19 (0.50%) JBoss
11 19 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
12 12 (0.32%) CICS
13 11 (0.29%) WebLogic
14 10 (0.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 10 (0.26%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.26%) Mendix
14 10 (0.26%) Sitecore CMS
14 10 (0.26%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.24%) iPlanet
Applications
1 92 (2.42%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.63%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 32 (0.84%) Microsoft Project
4 29 (0.76%) Microsoft Office
5 18 (0.47%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.21%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.21%) Weka
8 3 (0.079%) Trello
9 1 (0.026%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.026%) Revit
Business Applications
1 60 (1.58%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.29%) Endur
3 11 (0.29%) VisionPLUS
4 10 (0.26%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.24%) Maximo
5 9 (0.24%) Oracle ERP
6 8 (0.21%) NEC Housing
7 5 (0.13%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.11%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.11%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.079%) Oracle Assets
9 3 (0.079%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.079%) Oracle Payables
9 3 (0.079%) Oracle Receivables
9 3 (0.079%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.079%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.079%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,919 (50.57%) Azure
2 1,333 (35.13%) AWS
3 1,027 (27.06%) Azure DevOps
4 697 (18.37%) GitHub
5 568 (14.97%) GCP
6 421 (11.09%) Serverless
7 379 (9.99%) GitHub Actions
8 305 (8.04%) Power Platform
9 209 (5.51%) Amazon S3
10 205 (5.40%) AWS CloudFormation
11 204 (5.38%) AWS Lambda
12 182 (4.80%) Azure Data Factory
13 166 (4.37%) Azure AKS
14 164 (4.32%) Entra ID
15 158 (4.16%) OpenShift
16 150 (3.95%) Dynamics 365
17 144 (3.79%) SaaS
18 139 (3.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 139 (3.66%) Azure Monitor
19 136 (3.58%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 193 (5.09%) Firewall
2 108 (2.85%) DNS
3 81 (2.13%) VPN
4 79 (2.08%) Network Security
5 59 (1.55%) TCP/IP
6 47 (1.24%) SSL
7 33 (0.87%) HTTP
8 28 (0.74%) HTTPS
9 23 (0.61%) WAN
10 18 (0.47%) DHCP
11 17 (0.45%) BGP
12 16 (0.42%) Kerberos
12 16 (0.42%) MPLS
12 16 (0.42%) SD-WAN
12 16 (0.42%) SSH
13 15 (0.40%) FTP
13 15 (0.40%) SMTP
14 13 (0.34%) LAN
15 10 (0.26%) Internet
16 9 (0.24%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 209 (5.51%) PostgreSQL
2 203 (5.35%) Power BI
3 147 (3.87%) SQL Server
4 142 (3.74%) NoSQL
5 110 (2.90%) Amazon RDS
6 108 (2.85%) Data Lake
7 94 (2.48%) Relational Database
8 88 (2.32%) MongoDB
9 86 (2.27%) Data Warehouse
10 77 (2.03%) Oracle Database
11 73 (1.92%) Azure SQL Database
12 65 (1.71%) Elasticsearch
13 54 (1.42%) DynamoDB
14 51 (1.34%) Tableau
15 50 (1.32%) Redis
16 48 (1.26%) MySQL
17 45 (1.19%) Metadata
18 44 (1.16%) Delta Lake
19 39 (1.03%) Pentaho
20 37 (0.97%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 678 (17.87%) Jenkins
2 539 (14.20%) Git
3 537 (14.15%) JIRA
4 482 (12.70%) GitLab
5 110 (2.90%) Selenium
6 83 (2.19%) JUnit
7 82 (2.16%) Postman
8 69 (1.82%) SonarQube
9 64 (1.69%) Sonatype Nexus
10 57 (1.50%) Bitbucket
11 49 (1.29%) Cypress.io
12 47 (1.24%) Artifactory
13 46 (1.21%) Cucumber
14 44 (1.16%) Maven
15 43 (1.13%) Gradle
16 36 (0.95%) Oracle APEX
16 36 (0.95%) REST Assured
17 34 (0.90%) CircleCI
18 33 (0.87%) Liquibase
19 31 (0.82%) JMeter
General
1 1,187 (31.28%) Social Skills
2 704 (18.55%) Finance
3 443 (11.67%) Public Sector
4 321 (8.46%) Analytical Skills
4 321 (8.46%) Banking
5 142 (3.74%) Documentation Skills
6 75 (1.98%) Influencing Skills
7 65 (1.71%) Financial Institution
8 58 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 58 (1.53%) Marketing
9 46 (1.21%) Front Office
9 46 (1.21%) Retail
10 44 (1.16%) Investment Banking
11 43 (1.13%) Presentation Skills
12 42 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 34 (0.90%) Military
14 29 (0.76%) Pharmaceutical
15 26 (0.69%) Law
16 25 (0.66%) Organisational Skills
17 24 (0.63%) Legal
Job Titles
1 712 (18.76%) DevOps Engineer
2 637 (16.79%) Developer
3 512 (13.49%) Senior
4 363 (9.57%) Architect
5 289 (7.62%) Lead
6 223 (5.88%) Azure Engineer
7 207 (5.45%) AWS Engineer
8 200 (5.27%) Analyst
8 200 (5.27%) Data Engineer
9 158 (4.16%) AWS DevOps
10 148 (3.90%) Software Engineer
11 143 (3.77%) Cloud Engineer
12 137 (3.61%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 129 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
14 125 (3.29%) Senior Developer
15 117 (3.08%) Solutions Architect
16 115 (3.03%) Business Analyst
17 102 (2.69%) Senior DevOps
18 99 (2.61%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 97 (2.56%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 436 (11.49%) REST
2 302 (7.96%) .NET
3 245 (6.46%) React
4 236 (6.22%) Node.js
5 218 (5.74%) Kafka
6 207 (5.45%) RESTful
7 194 (5.11%) Spring
8 177 (4.66%) Spring Boot
9 161 (4.24%) JSON
10 125 (3.29%) XML
10 125 (3.29%) YAML
11 123 (3.24%) OAuth
12 122 (3.21%) AngularJS
13 118 (3.11%) Elastic Stack
14 116 (3.06%) HTML
14 116 (3.06%) SOAP
15 101 (2.66%) Playwright
16 95 (2.50%) Middleware
17 90 (2.37%) CSS
18 88 (2.32%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 539 (14.20%) Cloud Native
2 203 (5.35%) Product Ownership
3 137 (3.61%) Distributed Systems
4 102 (2.69%) Public Cloud
5 100 (2.64%) Onboarding
6 75 (1.98%) Legacy Systems
7 67 (1.77%) Hybrid Cloud
8 64 (1.69%) Enterprise Software
9 51 (1.34%) Data Protection Act
10 50 (1.32%) Replication
11 49 (1.29%) Management Information System
12 48 (1.26%) Virtual Team
13 46 (1.21%) Security Posture
14 44 (1.16%) Private Cloud
15 41 (1.08%) Data Centre
15 41 (1.08%) Mobile App
16 35 (0.92%) Self-Motivation
17 34 (0.90%) AI Agents
17 34 (0.90%) NHS
18 29 (0.76%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 428 (11.28%) Linux
2 219 (5.77%) Windows
3 82 (2.16%) Unix
4 51 (1.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (1.32%) Windows Server
6 49 (1.29%) VMS
7 30 (0.79%) Ubuntu
8 23 (0.61%) Android
9 21 (0.55%) Apple iOS
10 19 (0.50%) Windows 10
11 17 (0.45%) CentOS
12 12 (0.32%) Amazon Linux
13 10 (0.26%) Solaris
14 7 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.13%) zOS
17 3 (0.079%) Windows Server 2012
18 2 (0.053%) Debian
19 1 (0.026%) Embedded Linux
19 1 (0.026%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,161 (56.94%) CI/CD
2 1,506 (39.68%) Agile
3 961 (25.32%) Infrastructure as Code
4 751 (19.79%) Problem-Solving
5 717 (18.89%) Containerisation
6 591 (15.57%) Test Automation
7 555 (14.62%) Microservices
8 448 (11.81%) Analytics
8 448 (11.81%) Continuous Improvement
9 439 (11.57%) Migration
10 417 (10.99%) Scrum
11 387 (10.20%) Observability
12 377 (9.93%) AI
13 359 (9.46%) Stakeholder Management
14 348 (9.17%) Software Engineering
15 301 (7.93%) Mentoring
16 297 (7.83%) Data Modelling
17 269 (7.09%) Business Intelligence
18 262 (6.90%) Data Pipeline
18 262 (6.90%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,149 (30.28%) Python
2 773 (20.37%) SQL
3 498 (13.12%) Java
4 363 (9.57%) JavaScript
5 347 (9.14%) C#
6 326 (8.59%) PowerShell
7 300 (7.91%) Bash
8 263 (6.93%) TypeScript
9 126 (3.32%) Bicep
9 126 (3.32%) Go
10 73 (1.92%) PL/SQL
11 54 (1.42%) Scala
12 51 (1.34%) Shell Script
13 49 (1.29%) Groovy
14 42 (1.11%) T-SQL
15 40 (1.05%) Ruby
16 38 (1.00%) C++
17 27 (0.71%) Perl
18 21 (0.55%) PHP
18 21 (0.55%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,193 (31.44%) Security Cleared
2 987 (26.01%) SC Cleared
3 340 (8.96%) Degree
4 181 (4.77%) Computer Science Degree
5 174 (4.58%) Azure Certification
6 131 (3.45%) DV Cleared
7 116 (3.06%) AWS Certification
8 79 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
8 79 (2.08%) Master's Degree
9 69 (1.82%) CISSP
10 55 (1.45%) CISM
10 55 (1.45%) Microsoft Certification
11 37 (0.97%) ISTQB
12 36 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 32 (0.84%) PMI Certification
14 29 (0.76%) Cisco Certification
15 25 (0.66%) PMP
16 24 (0.63%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 22 (0.58%) IIBA
18 18 (0.47%) CBAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 323 (8.51%) QA
2 158 (4.16%) GDPR
3 139 (3.66%) Data Quality
4 128 (3.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 116 (3.06%) NIST
6 93 (2.45%) Accessibility
7 66 (1.74%) NCSC
8 31 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 28 (0.74%) WCAG
10 25 (0.66%) HIPAA
10 25 (0.66%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 25 (0.66%) SLA
11 19 (0.50%) PMO
11 19 (0.50%) PSD2
12 17 (0.45%) ISO 20022
12 17 (0.45%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.40%) SEPA
14 10 (0.26%) NIST 800
15 8 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
15 8 (0.21%) HL7
System Software
1 958 (25.24%) Docker
2 163 (4.30%) Active Directory
3 65 (1.71%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.61%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.76%) vSphere
6 15 (0.40%) DFS Replication
6 15 (0.40%) Squid
6 15 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
6 15 (0.40%) VMware NSX
7 11 (0.29%) Lustre
7 11 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 9 (0.24%) GPFS
8 9 (0.24%) Hyper-V
9 8 (0.21%) Dovecot
9 8 (0.21%) NFS
9 8 (0.21%) Postfix
9 8 (0.21%) Tivoli Directory Server
9 8 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
10 7 (0.18%) Firmware
10 7 (0.18%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,143 (30.12%) Terraform
2 1,098 (28.93%) Kubernetes
3 474 (12.49%) Ansible
4 266 (7.01%) Grafana
5 244 (6.43%) Prometheus
6 74 (1.95%) Argo
7 72 (1.90%) Puppet
8 55 (1.45%) Single Sign-On
9 37 (0.97%) Istio
10 36 (0.95%) Kibana
10 36 (0.95%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.82%) Packer
12 21 (0.55%) Podman
13 16 (0.42%) Rancher
14 15 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 15 (0.40%) Consul
14 15 (0.40%) Proxmox
14 15 (0.40%) SCCM
15 14 (0.37%) logstash
15 14 (0.37%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 664 (17.50%) Microsoft
2 290 (7.64%) Oracle
3 221 (5.82%) Google
4 211 (5.56%) Databricks
5 210 (5.53%) Splunk
6 138 (3.64%) ServiceNow
7 124 (3.27%) Red Hat
8 108 (2.85%) VMware
9 97 (2.56%) Salesforce
10 91 (2.40%) SAP
11 61 (1.61%) Dynatrace
12 59 (1.55%) OpenAI
13 56 (1.48%) CyberArk
14 49 (1.29%) F5
15 42 (1.11%) Talend
16 41 (1.08%) IBM
16 41 (1.08%) Palo Alto
17 40 (1.05%) Atlassian
18 38 (1.00%) Denodo
19 31 (0.82%) MuleSoft