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

6 months to
2 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 3,701 2,915 3,308
As % of all contract jobs in England 11.68% 10.47% 9.06%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.19% 11.79% 10.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,603 2,009 2,439
10th Percentile £368 £400 £413
25th Percentile £426 £475 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £623 £675 £675
90th Percentile £700 £763 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £563 £563
% change year-on-year -6.71% +0.04% -6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 23 86
10th Percentile - £39.05 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £47.14
Median hourly rate £50.00 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -25.93% +3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £78.63 £80.38 £68.75
90th Percentile £94.88 £80.75 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £55.00 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -18.52% +3.85% -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 28,067 24,730 32,211
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 88.57% 88.83% 88.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,937 15,201 21,830
10th Percentile £304 £310 £306
25th Percentile £408 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.78% -1.82%
75th Percentile £625 £645 £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 1,762 813 1,440
10th Percentile £15.18 £15.62 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.96 £20.30 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -21.35% +25.35%
75th Percentile £57.44 £64.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.79
% change year-on-year -22.62% -25.79% +25.12%

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 2 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 2 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 2 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 -3 1,834 £550 -7.37% 560
North of England +5 653 £487 -4.68% 268
South East +1 399 £523 -12.92% 296
Midlands +18 389 £515 -1.90% 92
Yorkshire +1 340 £500 -2.44% 108
West Midlands +19 315 £525 -3.77% 65
North West +5 271 £455 -9.00% 120
South West +9 241 £538 -10.42% 127
East of England +20 109 £550 +6.80% 79
East Midlands +21 74 £430 -9.47% 26
North East -3 44 £475 -17.03% 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
1 242 (6.54%) Confluence
2 78 (2.11%) SharePoint
3 75 (2.03%) Apache
4 72 (1.95%) SAS
5 65 (1.76%) Apache Airflow
6 63 (1.70%) Apache Spark
7 32 (0.86%) OpenStack
8 31 (0.84%) CMS
8 31 (0.84%) nginx
9 22 (0.59%) IIS
10 21 (0.57%) JBoss
11 16 (0.43%) CICS
11 16 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
12 14 (0.38%) WebLogic
13 11 (0.30%) WebSphere
14 9 (0.24%) HCL Notes
14 9 (0.24%) iPlanet
14 9 (0.24%) Mendix
14 9 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
15 8 (0.22%) Smallworld
Applications
1 77 (2.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 48 (1.30%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 28 (0.76%) Microsoft Project
4 20 (0.54%) Microsoft Office
5 13 (0.35%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 10 (0.27%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.22%) Weka
9 4 (0.11%) Trello
10 1 (0.027%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.027%) Moqups
10 1 (0.027%) Revit
Business Applications
1 55 (1.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.49%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.38%) Aladdin
3 14 (0.38%) Endur
3 14 (0.38%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.30%) Remedy ITSM
5 10 (0.27%) Maximo
6 7 (0.19%) NEC Housing
7 6 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
8 5 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
8 5 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.11%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.11%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.11%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.081%) NetSuite
10 3 (0.081%) Oracle General Ledger
10 3 (0.081%) Oracle Payables
10 3 (0.081%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.081%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,843 (49.80%) Azure
2 1,310 (35.40%) AWS
3 991 (26.78%) Azure DevOps
4 680 (18.37%) GitHub
5 554 (14.97%) GCP
6 410 (11.08%) Serverless
7 386 (10.43%) GitHub Actions
8 286 (7.73%) Power Platform
9 209 (5.65%) Amazon S3
10 200 (5.40%) AWS Lambda
11 193 (5.21%) AWS CloudFormation
12 166 (4.49%) Azure Data Factory
13 160 (4.32%) Azure AKS
14 149 (4.03%) Entra ID
15 148 (4.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 147 (3.97%) OpenShift
17 143 (3.86%) Dynamics 365
18 142 (3.84%) SaaS
19 133 (3.59%) Amazon EC2
19 133 (3.59%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 187 (5.05%) Firewall
2 117 (3.16%) DNS
3 78 (2.11%) VPN
4 71 (1.92%) Network Security
5 58 (1.57%) TCP/IP
6 57 (1.54%) SSL
7 39 (1.05%) HTTP
8 29 (0.78%) HTTPS
9 24 (0.65%) SSH
10 21 (0.57%) WAN
11 19 (0.51%) FTP
11 19 (0.51%) SMTP
12 18 (0.49%) BGP
13 17 (0.46%) MPLS
14 16 (0.43%) DHCP
15 15 (0.41%) Kerberos
15 15 (0.41%) SD-WAN
16 14 (0.38%) OpenLDAP
17 11 (0.30%) Internet
18 10 (0.27%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 235 (6.35%) PostgreSQL
2 196 (5.30%) Power BI
3 147 (3.97%) NoSQL
4 145 (3.92%) SQL Server
5 117 (3.16%) Amazon RDS
6 103 (2.78%) Data Lake
7 96 (2.59%) MongoDB
8 86 (2.32%) Relational Database
9 84 (2.27%) Data Warehouse
9 84 (2.27%) Oracle Database
10 69 (1.86%) Azure SQL Database
11 55 (1.49%) MySQL
12 53 (1.43%) Elasticsearch
13 51 (1.38%) DynamoDB
13 51 (1.38%) Redis
14 48 (1.30%) Tableau
15 44 (1.19%) Delta Lake
16 40 (1.08%) Amazon Athena
16 40 (1.08%) Metadata
17 38 (1.03%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 669 (18.08%) Jenkins
2 551 (14.89%) Git
3 548 (14.81%) JIRA
4 475 (12.83%) GitLab
5 111 (3.00%) Selenium
6 78 (2.11%) JUnit
6 78 (2.11%) SonarQube
7 73 (1.97%) Postman
8 65 (1.76%) Sonatype Nexus
9 60 (1.62%) Bitbucket
10 53 (1.43%) Cypress.io
11 52 (1.41%) Artifactory
12 48 (1.30%) Cucumber
13 43 (1.16%) Gradle
13 43 (1.16%) Liquibase
14 40 (1.08%) CircleCI
15 39 (1.05%) Maven
16 37 (1.00%) Oracle APEX
17 28 (0.76%) JMeter
18 27 (0.73%) REST Assured
General
1 1,167 (31.53%) Social Skills
2 661 (17.86%) Finance
3 448 (12.10%) Public Sector
4 332 (8.97%) Banking
5 287 (7.75%) Analytical Skills
6 116 (3.13%) Documentation Skills
7 67 (1.81%) Financial Institution
8 58 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 58 (1.57%) Influencing Skills
9 56 (1.51%) Marketing
10 54 (1.46%) Investment Banking
11 47 (1.27%) Retail
12 46 (1.24%) Telecoms
13 45 (1.22%) Front Office
14 38 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
15 32 (0.86%) Pharmaceutical
16 30 (0.81%) Military
17 29 (0.78%) Back Office
18 25 (0.68%) Law
18 25 (0.68%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 677 (18.29%) DevOps Engineer
2 649 (17.54%) Developer
3 506 (13.67%) Senior
4 321 (8.67%) Architect
5 278 (7.51%) Lead
6 208 (5.62%) Azure Engineer
7 203 (5.49%) AWS Engineer
8 187 (5.05%) Data Engineer
9 185 (5.00%) Analyst
10 155 (4.19%) AWS DevOps
11 153 (4.13%) Software Engineer
12 140 (3.78%) Cloud Engineer
13 133 (3.59%) Senior Developer
14 132 (3.57%) Platform Engineer
15 130 (3.51%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 105 (2.84%) Senior DevOps
17 104 (2.81%) Solutions Architect
18 98 (2.65%) Business Analyst
19 96 (2.59%) Consultant
20 95 (2.57%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 423 (11.43%) REST
2 309 (8.35%) .NET
3 231 (6.24%) React
4 229 (6.19%) Node.js
5 227 (6.13%) RESTful
6 214 (5.78%) Kafka
7 179 (4.84%) JSON
8 167 (4.51%) Spring
9 149 (4.03%) Spring Boot
10 135 (3.65%) AngularJS
11 131 (3.54%) YAML
12 128 (3.46%) SOAP
13 126 (3.40%) HTML
14 125 (3.38%) Elastic Stack
15 123 (3.32%) XML
16 110 (2.97%) OAuth
17 87 (2.35%) Playwright
18 86 (2.32%) CSS
19 80 (2.16%) Middleware
20 74 (2.00%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 503 (13.59%) Cloud Native
2 195 (5.27%) Product Ownership
3 148 (4.00%) Distributed Systems
4 107 (2.89%) Onboarding
5 91 (2.46%) Public Cloud
6 81 (2.19%) Legacy Systems
7 70 (1.89%) Hybrid Cloud
8 63 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
9 56 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
10 51 (1.38%) Replication
11 50 (1.35%) Mobile App
12 44 (1.19%) Security Posture
13 43 (1.16%) Management Information System
13 43 (1.16%) Virtual Team
14 42 (1.13%) Data Centre
15 39 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
16 38 (1.03%) Private Cloud
17 34 (0.92%) NHS
18 33 (0.89%) Data Structures
19 32 (0.86%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 441 (11.92%) Linux
2 212 (5.73%) Windows
3 85 (2.30%) Unix
4 52 (1.41%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 52 (1.41%) VMS
4 52 (1.41%) Windows Server
5 37 (1.00%) Android
6 31 (0.84%) Ubuntu
7 29 (0.78%) Apple iOS
8 19 (0.51%) Windows 10
9 17 (0.46%) CentOS
10 16 (0.43%) Amazon Linux
11 11 (0.30%) Solaris
12 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
12 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.16%) zOS
13 3 (0.081%) Mac OS
14 2 (0.054%) Debian
14 2 (0.054%) Windows Server 2012
15 1 (0.027%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,072 (55.98%) CI/CD
2 1,534 (41.45%) Agile
3 931 (25.16%) Infrastructure as Code
4 718 (19.40%) Containerisation
5 717 (19.37%) Problem-Solving
6 563 (15.21%) Microservices
7 557 (15.05%) Test Automation
8 425 (11.48%) Scrum
9 421 (11.38%) Migration
10 410 (11.08%) Analytics
11 402 (10.86%) Continuous Improvement
12 362 (9.78%) Software Engineering
13 361 (9.75%) AI
14 359 (9.70%) Observability
15 316 (8.54%) Stakeholder Management
16 288 (7.78%) Mentoring
17 267 (7.21%) Data Modelling
18 255 (6.89%) Business Intelligence
19 254 (6.86%) Data Pipeline
19 254 (6.86%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,167 (31.53%) Python
2 739 (19.97%) SQL
3 484 (13.08%) Java
4 372 (10.05%) JavaScript
5 348 (9.40%) C#
6 332 (8.97%) PowerShell
7 318 (8.59%) Bash
8 260 (7.03%) TypeScript
9 150 (4.05%) Go
10 122 (3.30%) Bicep
11 81 (2.19%) PL/SQL
12 59 (1.59%) Shell Script
13 54 (1.46%) Groovy
14 45 (1.22%) C++
15 42 (1.13%) Ruby
16 37 (1.00%) Scala
17 35 (0.95%) T-SQL
18 34 (0.92%) Perl
19 26 (0.70%) Kotlin
20 23 (0.62%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,113 (30.07%) Security Cleared
2 919 (24.83%) SC Cleared
3 331 (8.94%) Degree
4 184 (4.97%) Computer Science Degree
5 172 (4.65%) Azure Certification
6 129 (3.49%) DV Cleared
7 117 (3.16%) AWS Certification
8 77 (2.08%) Master's Degree
9 70 (1.89%) BPSS Clearance
10 69 (1.86%) CISSP
11 55 (1.49%) Microsoft Certification
12 50 (1.35%) CISM
13 40 (1.08%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 31 (0.84%) ISTQB
15 29 (0.78%) PMI Certification
16 27 (0.73%) Cisco Certification
17 22 (0.59%) PMP
18 21 (0.57%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 16 (0.43%) Oracle Certification
20 15 (0.41%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 334 (9.02%) QA
2 151 (4.08%) GDPR
3 122 (3.30%) Data Quality
4 115 (3.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 103 (2.78%) NIST
6 81 (2.19%) Accessibility
7 50 (1.35%) NCSC
8 26 (0.70%) WCAG
9 25 (0.68%) PCI DSS
10 22 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 21 (0.57%) HIPAA
12 19 (0.51%) SLA
13 18 (0.49%) PMO
14 15 (0.41%) PSD2
15 14 (0.38%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.32%) SOC 2
17 11 (0.30%) MiFID
17 11 (0.30%) SEPA
18 10 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
18 10 (0.27%) HL7
System Software
1 960 (25.94%) Docker
2 158 (4.27%) Active Directory
3 61 (1.65%) VMware Infrastructure
4 55 (1.49%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.76%) vSphere
6 19 (0.51%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.41%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (0.32%) Squid
10 11 (0.30%) Oracle RAC
11 10 (0.27%) Dovecot
11 10 (0.27%) Lustre
11 10 (0.27%) Postfix
11 10 (0.27%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 8 (0.22%) GPFS
12 8 (0.22%) Hyper-V
12 8 (0.22%) NFS
12 8 (0.22%) Tivoli Directory Server
13 7 (0.19%) Virtual Servers
13 7 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,115 (30.13%) Terraform
2 1,082 (29.24%) Kubernetes
3 489 (13.21%) Ansible
4 271 (7.32%) Grafana
5 252 (6.81%) Prometheus
6 76 (2.05%) Argo
7 72 (1.95%) Puppet
8 53 (1.43%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (1.13%) Progress Chef
10 38 (1.03%) Kibana
11 37 (1.00%) Istio
12 33 (0.89%) Packer
13 24 (0.65%) Podman
14 17 (0.46%) Proxmox
15 16 (0.43%) ITRS Geneos
15 16 (0.43%) Nessus
16 15 (0.41%) Rancher
16 15 (0.41%) SCCM
17 14 (0.38%) Data Guard
17 14 (0.38%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 640 (17.29%) Microsoft
2 301 (8.13%) Oracle
3 212 (5.73%) Google
4 198 (5.35%) Splunk
5 197 (5.32%) Databricks
6 147 (3.97%) ServiceNow
7 121 (3.27%) Red Hat
8 102 (2.76%) VMware
9 93 (2.51%) Salesforce
10 91 (2.46%) SAP
11 65 (1.76%) Dynatrace
12 51 (1.38%) OpenAI
13 46 (1.24%) F5
14 45 (1.22%) IBM
15 40 (1.08%) Palo Alto
16 39 (1.05%) Atlassian
17 38 (1.03%) CyberArk
17 38 (1.03%) Talend
18 35 (0.95%) Denodo
19 32 (0.86%) Cisco