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 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 11 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +3 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 3,776 2,830 3,217
As % of all contract jobs in England 11.63% 10.56% 8.70%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.21% 11.82% 9.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,670 1,943 2,370
10th Percentile £375 £400 £413
25th Percentile £431 £476 £486
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £617 £675 £675
90th Percentile £713 £775 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £560 £563
% change year-on-year -7.14% -0.44% -6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 22 96
10th Percentile £39.53 £38.78 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £48.70 £55.94
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £76.25 £80.56 £70.00
90th Percentile £93.75 £80.75 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.84%

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 28,595 23,952 32,438
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 88.09% 89.37% 87.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,305 14,693 21,759
10th Percentile £305 £310 £300
25th Percentile £410 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.69% -2.91%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £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 1,790 775 1,732
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.62 £14.00
25th Percentile £17.87 £20.88 £17.41
Median hourly rate £25.15 £34.00 £37.75
Median % change year-on-year -26.03% -9.93% +8.51%
75th Percentile £58.65 £63.93 £62.64
90th Percentile £69.99 £75.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £37.01
% change year-on-year -22.62% -12.19% +15.66%

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 23 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 23 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 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
London -1 1,892 £533 -11.25% 470
North of England +6 684 £500 -2.20% 437
Midlands +25 403 £515 -1.44% 232
South East +1 389 £525 -10.64% 629
Yorkshire +1 354 £500 -1.72% 171
West Midlands +20 328 £525 - 109
North West +4 283 £465 -7.00% 201
South West +11 238 £525 -12.50% 272
East of England +18 109 £570 +12.32% 267
East Midlands +12 75 £425 -10.53% 120
North East -7 48 £475 -17.03% 66
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
1 240 (6.36%) Confluence
2 82 (2.17%) SharePoint
3 81 (2.15%) Apache
4 76 (2.01%) SAS
5 70 (1.85%) Apache Spark
6 58 (1.54%) Apache Airflow
7 36 (0.95%) nginx
7 36 (0.95%) OpenStack
8 35 (0.93%) CMS
9 22 (0.58%) IIS
10 19 (0.50%) JBoss
11 18 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
12 13 (0.34%) CICS
12 13 (0.34%) WebLogic
13 10 (0.26%) HCL Notes
13 10 (0.26%) Mendix
13 10 (0.26%) WebSphere
14 9 (0.24%) iPlanet
14 9 (0.24%) Sitecore CMS
14 9 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 87 (2.30%) Microsoft Excel
2 59 (1.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 30 (0.79%) Microsoft Project
4 27 (0.72%) Microsoft Office
5 16 (0.42%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.24%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.21%) Weka
9 4 (0.11%) Trello
10 1 (0.026%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.026%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.026%) Moqups
10 1 (0.026%) Revit
Business Applications
1 58 (1.54%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.42%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.32%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.29%) Endur
5 10 (0.26%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.24%) Maximo
7 8 (0.21%) NEC Housing
7 8 (0.21%) Oracle ERP
8 5 (0.13%) Dynamics AX
8 5 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.11%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 4 (0.11%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.079%) Oracle Assets
10 3 (0.079%) Oracle Payables
10 3 (0.079%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.079%) SAP CO
10 3 (0.079%) SAP FI/CO
10 3 (0.079%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,893 (50.13%) Azure
2 1,323 (35.04%) AWS
3 1,019 (26.99%) Azure DevOps
4 688 (18.22%) GitHub
5 563 (14.91%) GCP
6 419 (11.10%) Serverless
7 378 (10.01%) GitHub Actions
8 305 (8.08%) Power Platform
9 208 (5.51%) Amazon S3
10 202 (5.35%) AWS CloudFormation
11 200 (5.30%) AWS Lambda
12 181 (4.79%) Azure Data Factory
13 166 (4.40%) Azure AKS
14 159 (4.21%) Entra ID
15 153 (4.05%) OpenShift
16 150 (3.97%) Dynamics 365
17 142 (3.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 138 (3.65%) SaaS
19 136 (3.60%) Azure Monitor
20 132 (3.50%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 193 (5.11%) Firewall
2 111 (2.94%) DNS
3 82 (2.17%) VPN
4 77 (2.04%) Network Security
5 59 (1.56%) TCP/IP
6 49 (1.30%) SSL
7 36 (0.95%) HTTP
8 28 (0.74%) HTTPS
9 23 (0.61%) WAN
10 18 (0.48%) BGP
10 18 (0.48%) SSH
11 17 (0.45%) FTP
11 17 (0.45%) MPLS
11 17 (0.45%) SMTP
12 16 (0.42%) DHCP
13 15 (0.40%) Kerberos
13 15 (0.40%) SD-WAN
14 13 (0.34%) LAN
15 10 (0.26%) Internet
16 9 (0.24%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 210 (5.56%) PostgreSQL
2 203 (5.38%) Power BI
3 148 (3.92%) NoSQL
3 148 (3.92%) SQL Server
4 109 (2.89%) Amazon RDS
5 106 (2.81%) Data Lake
6 87 (2.30%) MongoDB
6 87 (2.30%) Relational Database
7 85 (2.25%) Data Warehouse
8 80 (2.12%) Oracle Database
9 73 (1.93%) Azure SQL Database
10 63 (1.67%) Elasticsearch
11 51 (1.35%) DynamoDB
11 51 (1.35%) Tableau
12 50 (1.32%) Redis
13 49 (1.30%) MySQL
14 43 (1.14%) Metadata
15 42 (1.11%) Delta Lake
16 39 (1.03%) Pentaho
17 36 (0.95%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 677 (17.93%) Jenkins
2 545 (14.43%) Git
3 542 (14.35%) JIRA
4 482 (12.76%) GitLab
5 116 (3.07%) Selenium
6 84 (2.22%) JUnit
7 82 (2.17%) Postman
8 71 (1.88%) SonarQube
9 65 (1.72%) Sonatype Nexus
10 58 (1.54%) Bitbucket
11 54 (1.43%) Cypress.io
12 49 (1.30%) Cucumber
13 47 (1.24%) Artifactory
14 44 (1.17%) Gradle
15 43 (1.14%) Maven
16 36 (0.95%) Liquibase
16 36 (0.95%) Oracle APEX
17 33 (0.87%) CircleCI
17 33 (0.87%) JMeter
17 33 (0.87%) REST Assured
General
1 1,187 (31.44%) Social Skills
2 692 (18.33%) Finance
3 444 (11.76%) Public Sector
4 329 (8.71%) Banking
5 311 (8.24%) Analytical Skills
6 135 (3.58%) Documentation Skills
7 70 (1.85%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.77%) Financial Institution
9 58 (1.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 56 (1.48%) Marketing
11 45 (1.19%) Front Office
11 45 (1.19%) Retail
12 44 (1.17%) Investment Banking
12 44 (1.17%) Presentation Skills
13 43 (1.14%) Telecoms
14 32 (0.85%) Military
15 29 (0.77%) Pharmaceutical
16 25 (0.66%) Law
17 24 (0.64%) Organisational Skills
18 23 (0.61%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 705 (18.67%) DevOps Engineer
2 641 (16.98%) Developer
3 507 (13.43%) Senior
4 348 (9.22%) Architect
5 288 (7.63%) Lead
6 218 (5.77%) Azure Engineer
7 205 (5.43%) AWS Engineer
8 198 (5.24%) Data Engineer
9 195 (5.16%) Analyst
10 159 (4.21%) AWS DevOps
11 149 (3.95%) Software Engineer
12 140 (3.71%) Cloud Engineer
13 137 (3.63%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 131 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
15 124 (3.28%) Senior Developer
16 110 (2.91%) Business Analyst
16 110 (2.91%) Solutions Architect
17 103 (2.73%) Senior DevOps
18 102 (2.70%) Consultant
19 95 (2.52%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 429 (11.36%) REST
2 301 (7.97%) .NET
3 235 (6.22%) React
4 231 (6.12%) Node.js
5 214 (5.67%) RESTful
6 213 (5.64%) Kafka
7 186 (4.93%) Spring
8 167 (4.42%) JSON
9 163 (4.32%) Spring Boot
10 129 (3.42%) YAML
11 125 (3.31%) AngularJS
12 124 (3.28%) XML
13 122 (3.23%) OAuth
14 119 (3.15%) Elastic Stack
15 118 (3.13%) HTML
16 117 (3.10%) SOAP
17 98 (2.60%) Playwright
18 91 (2.41%) Middleware
19 88 (2.33%) CSS
20 82 (2.17%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 534 (14.14%) Cloud Native
2 203 (5.38%) Product Ownership
3 139 (3.68%) Distributed Systems
4 107 (2.83%) Onboarding
5 100 (2.65%) Public Cloud
6 73 (1.93%) Legacy Systems
7 70 (1.85%) Hybrid Cloud
8 67 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
9 50 (1.32%) Data Protection Act
9 50 (1.32%) Replication
10 49 (1.30%) Management Information System
11 47 (1.24%) Virtual Team
12 44 (1.17%) Private Cloud
13 43 (1.14%) Data Centre
13 43 (1.14%) Mobile App
14 42 (1.11%) Security Posture
15 35 (0.93%) AI Agents
15 35 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
16 33 (0.87%) NHS
17 29 (0.77%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 435 (11.52%) Linux
2 219 (5.80%) Windows
3 84 (2.22%) Unix
4 51 (1.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 51 (1.35%) VMS
4 51 (1.35%) Windows Server
5 30 (0.79%) Ubuntu
6 26 (0.69%) Android
7 24 (0.64%) Apple iOS
8 19 (0.50%) Windows 10
9 17 (0.45%) CentOS
10 14 (0.37%) Amazon Linux
11 10 (0.26%) Solaris
12 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
12 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
13 5 (0.13%) zOS
14 2 (0.053%) Debian
14 2 (0.053%) Windows Server 2012
15 1 (0.026%) Kali Linux
15 1 (0.026%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,139 (56.65%) CI/CD
2 1,521 (40.28%) Agile
3 958 (25.37%) Infrastructure as Code
4 746 (19.76%) Problem-Solving
5 716 (18.96%) Containerisation
6 590 (15.63%) Test Automation
7 559 (14.80%) Microservices
8 442 (11.71%) Continuous Improvement
9 441 (11.68%) Analytics
10 430 (11.39%) Migration
11 423 (11.20%) Scrum
12 379 (10.04%) Observability
13 373 (9.88%) AI
14 349 (9.24%) Software Engineering
15 345 (9.14%) Stakeholder Management
16 297 (7.87%) Mentoring
17 289 (7.65%) Data Modelling
18 270 (7.15%) Business Intelligence
19 261 (6.91%) Validation
20 260 (6.89%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 1,166 (30.88%) Python
2 770 (20.39%) SQL
3 498 (13.19%) Java
4 367 (9.72%) JavaScript
5 346 (9.16%) C#
6 322 (8.53%) PowerShell
7 302 (8.00%) Bash
8 258 (6.83%) TypeScript
9 131 (3.47%) Go
10 128 (3.39%) Bicep
11 74 (1.96%) PL/SQL
12 58 (1.54%) Shell Script
13 52 (1.38%) Scala
14 50 (1.32%) Groovy
15 41 (1.09%) C++
16 40 (1.06%) T-SQL
17 39 (1.03%) Ruby
18 30 (0.79%) Perl
19 20 (0.53%) Rust
20 19 (0.50%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,177 (31.17%) Security Cleared
2 974 (25.79%) SC Cleared
3 335 (8.87%) Degree
4 180 (4.77%) Computer Science Degree
5 171 (4.53%) Azure Certification
6 131 (3.47%) DV Cleared
7 116 (3.07%) AWS Certification
8 80 (2.12%) BPSS Clearance
9 76 (2.01%) Master's Degree
10 67 (1.77%) CISSP
11 55 (1.46%) Microsoft Certification
12 52 (1.38%) CISM
13 40 (1.06%) ISTQB
14 35 (0.93%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 32 (0.85%) PMI Certification
16 28 (0.74%) Cisco Certification
17 25 (0.66%) PMP
18 23 (0.61%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 21 (0.56%) IIBA
20 17 (0.45%) CBAP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 332 (8.79%) QA
2 147 (3.89%) GDPR
3 133 (3.52%) Data Quality
4 121 (3.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 107 (2.83%) NIST
6 86 (2.28%) Accessibility
7 61 (1.62%) NCSC
8 31 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 25 (0.66%) HIPAA
9 25 (0.66%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 25 (0.66%) WCAG
10 23 (0.61%) SLA
11 17 (0.45%) PMO
11 17 (0.45%) PSD2
12 16 (0.42%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.40%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.34%) SEPA
15 9 (0.24%) NIST 800
16 8 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 8 (0.21%) HL7
System Software
1 956 (25.32%) Docker
2 157 (4.16%) Active Directory
3 63 (1.67%) VMware Infrastructure
4 61 (1.62%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.74%) vSphere
6 17 (0.45%) DFS Replication
7 16 (0.42%) Squid
8 15 (0.40%) VMware NSX
9 14 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
10 10 (0.26%) Lustre
10 10 (0.26%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 9 (0.24%) Dovecot
11 9 (0.24%) Hyper-V
11 9 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.24%) Postfix
12 8 (0.21%) GPFS
12 8 (0.21%) NFS
12 8 (0.21%) Tivoli Directory Server
12 8 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
13 7 (0.19%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,144 (30.30%) Terraform
2 1,096 (29.03%) Kubernetes
3 484 (12.82%) Ansible
4 267 (7.07%) Grafana
5 245 (6.49%) Prometheus
6 76 (2.01%) Puppet
7 73 (1.93%) Argo
8 54 (1.43%) Single Sign-On
9 39 (1.03%) Progress Chef
10 37 (0.98%) Istio
10 37 (0.98%) Kibana
11 32 (0.85%) Packer
12 22 (0.58%) Podman
13 16 (0.42%) Proxmox
13 16 (0.42%) Rancher
14 15 (0.40%) Consul
15 14 (0.37%) Nessus
15 14 (0.37%) NetBackup
15 14 (0.37%) SCCM
16 13 (0.34%) logstash
Vendors
1 667 (17.66%) Microsoft
2 289 (7.65%) Oracle
3 225 (5.96%) Google
4 208 (5.51%) Databricks
5 206 (5.46%) Splunk
6 143 (3.79%) ServiceNow
7 122 (3.23%) Red Hat
8 104 (2.75%) VMware
9 96 (2.54%) Salesforce
10 91 (2.41%) SAP
11 65 (1.72%) Dynatrace
12 57 (1.51%) OpenAI
13 50 (1.32%) CyberArk
14 48 (1.27%) F5
15 42 (1.11%) Talend
16 41 (1.09%) IBM
16 41 (1.09%) Palo Alto
17 40 (1.06%) Atlassian
18 38 (1.01%) Denodo
19 32 (0.85%) MuleSoft