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

 6 months to
21 Jan 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +3 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 3,762 2,812 3,221
As % of all contract jobs in England 11.65% 10.55% 8.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.22% 11.81% 9.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,660 1,929 2,373
10th Percentile £371 £400 £413
25th Percentile £429 £480 £481
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% - -4.17%
75th Percentile £615 £675 £675
90th Percentile £713 £775 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £563 £563
% change year-on-year -7.56% - -6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 22 94
10th Percentile £40.13 £38.78 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £48.70 £56.31
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £78.63 £80.56 £70.00
90th Percentile £94.88 £80.75 £78.00
UK median hourly rate £48.75 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -27.78% +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 28,450 23,808 32,355
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 88.12% 89.33% 87.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,222 14,593 21,730
10th Percentile £305 £310 £300
25th Percentile £409 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.87% -2.73%
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 1,765 770 1,701
10th Percentile £15.18 £15.62 £14.00
25th Percentile £17.87 £21.00 £17.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £38.16
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -8.27% +9.67%
75th Percentile £57.50 £64.01 £63.29
90th Percentile £69.65 £75.00 £75.16
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £37.50
% change year-on-year -22.62% -13.33% +17.19%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 -2 1,881 £533 -11.25% 437
North of England +6 682 £500 -2.20% 367
Midlands +23 395 £515 -1.67% 191
South East +1 395 £525 -10.64% 514
Yorkshire +1 356 £500 -0.74% 144
West Midlands +25 322 £525 - 95
North West +4 280 £458 -8.50% 172
South West +10 239 £525 -12.50% 201
East of England +18 108 £558 +9.85% 199
East Midlands +12 73 £425 -10.53% 92
North East -7 47 £475 -17.03% 53
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
1 234 (6.22%) Confluence
2 82 (2.18%) Apache
3 81 (2.15%) SharePoint
4 76 (2.02%) SAS
5 70 (1.86%) Apache Spark
6 60 (1.59%) Apache Airflow
7 35 (0.93%) OpenStack
8 34 (0.90%) CMS
9 31 (0.82%) nginx
10 22 (0.58%) IIS
11 19 (0.51%) JBoss
12 18 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
13 14 (0.37%) CICS
14 13 (0.35%) WebLogic
15 10 (0.27%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.27%) Mendix
15 10 (0.27%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.24%) iPlanet
16 9 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
17 8 (0.21%) Smallworld
Applications
1 86 (2.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 55 (1.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 31 (0.82%) Microsoft Project
4 23 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
5 16 (0.43%) 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 (0.027%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.027%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.027%) Moqups
10 1 (0.027%) Revit
Business Applications
1 60 (1.59%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.35%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.29%) Endur
5 10 (0.27%) 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 (0.080%) Oracle Assets
10 3 (0.080%) Oracle Payables
10 3 (0.080%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.080%) SAP FI/CO
10 3 (0.080%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.080%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,877 (49.89%) Azure
2 1,320 (35.09%) AWS
3 1,013 (26.93%) Azure DevOps
4 681 (18.10%) GitHub
5 568 (15.10%) GCP
6 419 (11.14%) Serverless
7 377 (10.02%) GitHub Actions
8 304 (8.08%) Power Platform
9 205 (5.45%) Amazon S3
10 201 (5.34%) AWS CloudFormation
11 198 (5.26%) AWS Lambda
12 175 (4.65%) Azure Data Factory
13 167 (4.44%) Azure AKS
14 158 (4.20%) Entra ID
15 152 (4.04%) Dynamics 365
16 150 (3.99%) OpenShift
17 145 (3.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 139 (3.69%) SaaS
19 134 (3.56%) Azure Monitor
20 129 (3.43%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 190 (5.05%) Firewall
2 105 (2.79%) DNS
3 77 (2.05%) VPN
4 75 (1.99%) Network Security
5 53 (1.41%) TCP/IP
6 49 (1.30%) SSL
7 36 (0.96%) HTTP
8 28 (0.74%) HTTPS
9 25 (0.66%) WAN
10 20 (0.53%) BGP
11 19 (0.51%) MPLS
12 18 (0.48%) SSH
13 17 (0.45%) FTP
13 17 (0.45%) SD-WAN
13 17 (0.45%) SMTP
14 15 (0.40%) DHCP
14 15 (0.40%) Kerberos
15 13 (0.35%) LAN
16 10 (0.27%) Internet
17 9 (0.24%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 212 (5.64%) PostgreSQL
2 203 (5.40%) Power BI
3 149 (3.96%) NoSQL
4 145 (3.85%) SQL Server
5 109 (2.90%) Amazon RDS
6 105 (2.79%) Data Lake
7 89 (2.37%) MongoDB
8 87 (2.31%) Relational Database
9 83 (2.21%) Data Warehouse
10 80 (2.13%) Oracle Database
11 71 (1.89%) Azure SQL Database
12 56 (1.49%) Elasticsearch
13 53 (1.41%) DynamoDB
14 51 (1.36%) Redis
15 50 (1.33%) Tableau
16 49 (1.30%) MySQL
17 41 (1.09%) Delta Lake
17 41 (1.09%) Metadata
18 39 (1.04%) Pentaho
19 36 (0.96%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 676 (17.97%) Jenkins
2 550 (14.62%) Git
3 539 (14.33%) JIRA
4 483 (12.84%) GitLab
5 115 (3.06%) Selenium
6 85 (2.26%) JUnit
7 82 (2.18%) Postman
8 69 (1.83%) SonarQube
9 66 (1.75%) Sonatype Nexus
10 54 (1.44%) Cypress.io
11 53 (1.41%) Bitbucket
12 48 (1.28%) Cucumber
13 46 (1.22%) Artifactory
14 45 (1.20%) Gradle
15 43 (1.14%) Maven
16 37 (0.98%) Liquibase
17 36 (0.96%) Oracle APEX
18 33 (0.88%) CircleCI
18 33 (0.88%) JMeter
18 33 (0.88%) REST Assured
General
1 1,177 (31.29%) Social Skills
2 682 (18.13%) Finance
3 446 (11.86%) Public Sector
4 331 (8.80%) Banking
5 309 (8.21%) Analytical Skills
6 125 (3.32%) Documentation Skills
7 68 (1.81%) Financial Institution
8 65 (1.73%) Influencing Skills
9 56 (1.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 56 (1.49%) Marketing
10 45 (1.20%) Front Office
11 44 (1.17%) Investment Banking
11 44 (1.17%) Presentation Skills
11 44 (1.17%) Retail
12 43 (1.14%) Telecoms
13 32 (0.85%) Military
14 31 (0.82%) Pharmaceutical
15 26 (0.69%) Organisational Skills
16 25 (0.66%) Law
17 24 (0.64%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 708 (18.82%) DevOps Engineer
2 642 (17.07%) Developer
3 508 (13.50%) Senior
4 334 (8.88%) Architect
5 286 (7.60%) Lead
6 214 (5.69%) Azure Engineer
7 206 (5.48%) AWS Engineer
8 198 (5.26%) Data Engineer
9 195 (5.18%) Analyst
10 159 (4.23%) AWS DevOps
11 151 (4.01%) Software Engineer
12 140 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
13 137 (3.64%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 130 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
15 123 (3.27%) Senior Developer
16 108 (2.87%) Solutions Architect
17 106 (2.82%) Business Analyst
18 103 (2.74%) Senior DevOps
19 101 (2.68%) Consultant
20 95 (2.53%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 435 (11.56%) REST
2 300 (7.97%) .NET
3 233 (6.19%) React
4 230 (6.11%) Node.js
5 219 (5.82%) RESTful
6 218 (5.79%) Kafka
7 188 (5.00%) Spring
8 172 (4.57%) JSON
9 165 (4.39%) Spring Boot
10 128 (3.40%) YAML
11 126 (3.35%) AngularJS
12 124 (3.30%) XML
13 120 (3.19%) OAuth
14 119 (3.16%) SOAP
15 118 (3.14%) Elastic Stack
16 116 (3.08%) HTML
17 96 (2.55%) Playwright
18 90 (2.39%) Middleware
19 86 (2.29%) CSS
20 82 (2.18%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 531 (14.11%) Cloud Native
2 198 (5.26%) Product Ownership
3 140 (3.72%) Distributed Systems
4 105 (2.79%) Onboarding
5 99 (2.63%) Public Cloud
6 72 (1.91%) Legacy Systems
7 71 (1.89%) Hybrid Cloud
8 66 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
9 50 (1.33%) Data Protection Act
10 49 (1.30%) Management Information System
10 49 (1.30%) Replication
11 47 (1.25%) Virtual Team
12 46 (1.22%) Data Centre
13 45 (1.20%) Mobile App
14 44 (1.17%) Private Cloud
15 42 (1.12%) Security Posture
16 35 (0.93%) NHS
16 35 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
17 34 (0.90%) AI Agents
18 29 (0.77%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 433 (11.51%) Linux
2 219 (5.82%) Windows
3 84 (2.23%) Unix
4 51 (1.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 51 (1.36%) VMS
5 49 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 30 (0.80%) Ubuntu
7 27 (0.72%) Android
8 25 (0.66%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.48%) Windows 10
10 17 (0.45%) CentOS
11 14 (0.37%) Amazon Linux
12 10 (0.27%) Solaris
13 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 5 (0.13%) zOS
15 2 (0.053%) Debian
15 2 (0.053%) Windows Server 2012
16 1 (0.027%) Kali Linux
16 1 (0.027%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,130 (56.62%) CI/CD
2 1,518 (40.35%) Agile
3 951 (25.28%) Infrastructure as Code
4 739 (19.64%) Problem-Solving
5 720 (19.14%) Containerisation
6 588 (15.63%) Test Automation
7 562 (14.94%) Microservices
8 436 (11.59%) Analytics
8 436 (11.59%) Continuous Improvement
9 426 (11.32%) Migration
10 421 (11.19%) Scrum
11 380 (10.10%) Observability
12 371 (9.86%) AI
13 353 (9.38%) Software Engineering
14 334 (8.88%) Stakeholder Management
15 297 (7.89%) Mentoring
16 280 (7.44%) Data Modelling
17 266 (7.07%) Business Intelligence
18 261 (6.94%) Data Pipeline
19 259 (6.88%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 1,167 (31.02%) Python
2 759 (20.18%) SQL
3 502 (13.34%) Java
4 365 (9.70%) JavaScript
5 345 (9.17%) C#
6 323 (8.59%) PowerShell
7 303 (8.05%) Bash
8 261 (6.94%) TypeScript
9 132 (3.51%) Go
10 128 (3.40%) Bicep
11 74 (1.97%) PL/SQL
12 59 (1.57%) Shell Script
13 50 (1.33%) Groovy
14 49 (1.30%) Scala
15 42 (1.12%) C++
16 41 (1.09%) Ruby
17 39 (1.04%) T-SQL
18 31 (0.82%) Perl
19 20 (0.53%) Rust
20 19 (0.51%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,164 (30.94%) Security Cleared
2 961 (25.54%) SC Cleared
3 337 (8.96%) Degree
4 184 (4.89%) Computer Science Degree
5 169 (4.49%) Azure Certification
6 132 (3.51%) DV Cleared
7 112 (2.98%) AWS Certification
8 78 (2.07%) Master's Degree
9 77 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
10 66 (1.75%) CISSP
11 54 (1.44%) Microsoft Certification
12 52 (1.38%) CISM
13 41 (1.09%) ISTQB
14 35 (0.93%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 31 (0.82%) PMI Certification
16 28 (0.74%) Cisco Certification
17 25 (0.66%) PMP
18 21 (0.56%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 17 (0.45%) IIBA
20 16 (0.43%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 336 (8.93%) QA
2 149 (3.96%) GDPR
3 131 (3.48%) Data Quality
4 116 (3.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 102 (2.71%) NIST
6 84 (2.23%) Accessibility
7 56 (1.49%) NCSC
8 30 (0.80%) PCI DSS
9 26 (0.69%) WCAG
10 25 (0.66%) HIPAA
10 25 (0.66%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 23 (0.61%) SLA
12 17 (0.45%) PSD2
13 16 (0.43%) ISO 20022
13 16 (0.43%) PMO
14 15 (0.40%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.35%) SEPA
16 10 (0.27%) HL7
17 9 (0.24%) NIST 800
18 8 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 958 (25.47%) Docker
2 156 (4.15%) Active Directory
3 63 (1.67%) VMware Infrastructure
4 60 (1.59%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.74%) vSphere
6 17 (0.45%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.40%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
9 11 (0.29%) Squid
10 10 (0.27%) Lustre
10 10 (0.27%) 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 1,136 (30.20%) Terraform
2 1,093 (29.05%) Kubernetes
3 487 (12.95%) Ansible
4 262 (6.96%) Grafana
5 240 (6.38%) Prometheus
6 76 (2.02%) Puppet
7 72 (1.91%) Argo
8 48 (1.28%) Single Sign-On
9 39 (1.04%) Progress Chef
10 37 (0.98%) Istio
11 36 (0.96%) Kibana
12 32 (0.85%) Packer
13 22 (0.58%) Podman
14 16 (0.43%) Proxmox
14 16 (0.43%) Rancher
15 14 (0.37%) Nessus
15 14 (0.37%) NetBackup
16 13 (0.35%) SCCM
17 12 (0.32%) Data Guard
17 12 (0.32%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 661 (17.57%) Microsoft
2 292 (7.76%) Oracle
3 228 (6.06%) Google
4 204 (5.42%) Databricks
5 201 (5.34%) Splunk
6 143 (3.80%) ServiceNow
7 119 (3.16%) Red Hat
8 103 (2.74%) VMware
9 95 (2.53%) Salesforce
10 91 (2.42%) SAP
11 62 (1.65%) Dynatrace
12 57 (1.52%) OpenAI
13 48 (1.28%) F5
14 45 (1.20%) CyberArk
15 42 (1.12%) Talend
16 41 (1.09%) IBM
16 41 (1.09%) Palo Alto
17 38 (1.01%) Denodo
18 35 (0.93%) Atlassian
19 33 (0.88%) Cisco
1,806 DevOps jobs in England