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

6 months to
10 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 3,640 2,847 3,240
As % of all contract jobs in England 11.63% 10.52% 8.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.16% 11.83% 10.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,559 1,955 2,400
10th Percentile £363 £400 £413
25th Percentile £425 £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 £775 £750
UK median daily rate £523 £563 £563
% change year-on-year -7.11% - -6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 23 82
10th Percentile £43.68 £39.05 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £50.31
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.84%
75th Percentile £82.00 £80.38 £68.75
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £77.95
UK median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +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 27,667 24,065 31,934
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 88.37% 88.96% 87.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,632 14,776 21,577
10th Percentile £304 £310 £306
25th Percentile £409 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.78% -1.82%
75th Percentile £625 £649 £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 1,736 770 1,456
10th Percentile £15.14 £15.61 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.88 £20.49 £18.99
Median hourly rate £25.15 £34.75 £43.84
Median % change year-on-year -27.63% -20.73% +25.25%
75th Percentile £57.50 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £42.19
% change year-on-year -22.62% -22.97% +23.04%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 1,809 £550 -7.78% 425
North of England +5 650 £487 -4.98% 358
Midlands +22 386 £515 -1.90% 198
South East +2 386 £525 -12.50% 468
Yorkshire +1 337 £500 -2.44% 153
West Midlands +21 312 £525 -1.52% 92
North West +5 270 £455 -9.00% 154
South West +8 237 £538 -8.90% 203
East of England +11 98 £550 +8.37% 182
East Midlands +20 74 £430 -9.47% 102
North East -7 45 £475 -17.21% 52
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
1 241 (6.62%) Confluence
2 79 (2.17%) SharePoint
3 74 (2.03%) Apache
4 72 (1.98%) SAS
5 64 (1.76%) Apache Airflow
6 61 (1.68%) Apache Spark
7 32 (0.88%) OpenStack
8 30 (0.82%) nginx
9 29 (0.80%) CMS
10 21 (0.58%) IIS
11 20 (0.55%) JBoss
12 16 (0.44%) CICS
12 16 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
13 13 (0.36%) WebLogic
14 10 (0.27%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.27%) Mendix
14 10 (0.27%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.25%) iPlanet
15 9 (0.25%) WebSphere Application Server
16 8 (0.22%) Smallworld
Applications
1 79 (2.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 50 (1.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 29 (0.80%) Microsoft Project
4 22 (0.60%) Microsoft Office
5 14 (0.38%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.33%) 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 53 (1.46%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.47%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.38%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.30%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.30%) Endur
5 9 (0.25%) Maximo
5 9 (0.25%) Remedy ITSM
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 EBS
9 4 (0.11%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.11%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.082%) Oracle Assets
10 3 (0.082%) Oracle BPM
10 3 (0.082%) Oracle Payables
10 3 (0.082%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.082%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.082%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,812 (49.78%) Azure
2 1,276 (35.05%) AWS
3 972 (26.70%) Azure DevOps
4 672 (18.46%) GitHub
5 542 (14.89%) GCP
6 403 (11.07%) Serverless
7 382 (10.49%) GitHub Actions
8 287 (7.88%) Power Platform
9 199 (5.47%) Amazon S3
10 194 (5.33%) AWS Lambda
11 184 (5.05%) AWS CloudFormation
12 168 (4.62%) Azure Data Factory
13 163 (4.48%) Azure AKS
14 148 (4.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 147 (4.04%) OpenShift
16 146 (4.01%) Entra ID
17 143 (3.93%) Dynamics 365
18 140 (3.85%) SaaS
19 131 (3.60%) Amazon EC2
20 130 (3.57%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 188 (5.16%) Firewall
2 114 (3.13%) DNS
3 77 (2.12%) VPN
4 72 (1.98%) Network Security
5 57 (1.57%) TCP/IP
6 56 (1.54%) SSL
7 37 (1.02%) HTTP
8 29 (0.80%) HTTPS
9 24 (0.66%) SSH
10 21 (0.58%) WAN
11 19 (0.52%) FTP
11 19 (0.52%) SMTP
12 18 (0.49%) BGP
13 17 (0.47%) MPLS
14 16 (0.44%) 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
1 223 (6.13%) PostgreSQL
2 194 (5.33%) Power BI
3 143 (3.93%) NoSQL
4 140 (3.85%) SQL Server
5 111 (3.05%) Amazon RDS
6 102 (2.80%) Data Lake
7 91 (2.50%) MongoDB
8 85 (2.34%) Relational Database
9 83 (2.28%) Oracle Database
10 80 (2.20%) Data Warehouse
11 70 (1.92%) Azure SQL Database
12 54 (1.48%) MySQL
13 52 (1.43%) Elasticsearch
13 52 (1.43%) Redis
14 50 (1.37%) DynamoDB
15 47 (1.29%) Tableau
16 41 (1.13%) Delta Lake
17 39 (1.07%) Amazon Aurora
17 39 (1.07%) Metadata
18 36 (0.99%) Pentaho
Development Applications
1 658 (18.08%) Jenkins
2 541 (14.86%) Git
3 534 (14.67%) JIRA
4 463 (12.72%) GitLab
5 110 (3.02%) Selenium
6 79 (2.17%) JUnit
7 77 (2.12%) SonarQube
8 69 (1.90%) Postman
9 65 (1.79%) Sonatype Nexus
10 57 (1.57%) Bitbucket
11 51 (1.40%) Cypress.io
12 48 (1.32%) Cucumber
13 46 (1.26%) Artifactory
14 43 (1.18%) Liquibase
15 42 (1.15%) Gradle
16 40 (1.10%) CircleCI
17 37 (1.02%) Maven
17 37 (1.02%) Oracle APEX
18 27 (0.74%) JMeter
18 27 (0.74%) TeamCity
General
1 1,136 (31.21%) Social Skills
2 655 (17.99%) Finance
3 442 (12.14%) Public Sector
4 319 (8.76%) Banking
5 284 (7.80%) Analytical Skills
6 115 (3.16%) Documentation Skills
7 69 (1.90%) Financial Institution
8 60 (1.65%) Influencing Skills
9 57 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 54 (1.48%) Marketing
11 46 (1.26%) Investment Banking
12 44 (1.21%) Front Office
12 44 (1.21%) Retail
12 44 (1.21%) Telecoms
13 40 (1.10%) Presentation Skills
14 31 (0.85%) Pharmaceutical
15 30 (0.82%) Military
16 25 (0.69%) Organisational Skills
17 24 (0.66%) Back Office
17 24 (0.66%) Law
Job Titles
1 685 (18.82%) DevOps Engineer
2 626 (17.20%) Developer
3 505 (13.87%) Senior
4 307 (8.43%) Architect
5 281 (7.72%) Lead
6 208 (5.71%) Azure Engineer
7 197 (5.41%) AWS Engineer
8 187 (5.14%) Data Engineer
9 186 (5.11%) Analyst
10 155 (4.26%) AWS DevOps
11 148 (4.07%) Software Engineer
12 138 (3.79%) Cloud Engineer
13 130 (3.57%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 130 (3.57%) Platform Engineer
13 130 (3.57%) Senior Developer
14 105 (2.88%) Senior DevOps
15 101 (2.77%) Business Analyst
15 101 (2.77%) Solutions Architect
16 95 (2.61%) Consultant
16 95 (2.61%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 415 (11.40%) REST
2 299 (8.21%) .NET
3 221 (6.07%) React
4 218 (5.99%) Node.js
5 216 (5.93%) RESTful
6 212 (5.82%) Kafka
7 174 (4.78%) JSON
8 167 (4.59%) Spring
9 149 (4.09%) Spring Boot
10 128 (3.52%) YAML
11 123 (3.38%) SOAP
12 122 (3.35%) AngularJS
12 122 (3.35%) Elastic Stack
13 119 (3.27%) XML
14 115 (3.16%) HTML
15 110 (3.02%) OAuth
16 87 (2.39%) Playwright
17 82 (2.25%) Middleware
18 76 (2.09%) ARM Templates
18 76 (2.09%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 499 (13.71%) Cloud Native
2 188 (5.16%) Product Ownership
3 136 (3.74%) Distributed Systems
4 102 (2.80%) Onboarding
5 92 (2.53%) Public Cloud
6 76 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
7 67 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
8 62 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
9 51 (1.40%) Replication
10 49 (1.35%) Data Protection Act
11 46 (1.26%) Mobile App
12 44 (1.21%) Management Information System
13 43 (1.18%) Data Centre
13 43 (1.18%) Security Posture
14 42 (1.15%) Virtual Team
15 39 (1.07%) Private Cloud
16 37 (1.02%) Self-Motivation
17 34 (0.93%) NHS
18 31 (0.85%) AI Agents
19 30 (0.82%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 432 (11.87%) Linux
2 212 (5.82%) Windows
3 85 (2.34%) Unix
4 54 (1.48%) VMS
5 51 (1.40%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 50 (1.37%) Windows Server
7 33 (0.91%) Android
8 30 (0.82%) Ubuntu
9 26 (0.71%) Apple iOS
10 19 (0.52%) Windows 10
11 16 (0.44%) Amazon Linux
11 16 (0.44%) CentOS
12 10 (0.27%) Solaris
13 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.16%) zOS
14 2 (0.055%) Debian
14 2 (0.055%) Mac OS
14 2 (0.055%) Windows Server 2012
15 1 (0.027%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,039 (56.02%) CI/CD
2 1,494 (41.04%) Agile
3 908 (24.95%) Infrastructure as Code
4 708 (19.45%) Problem-Solving
5 697 (19.15%) Containerisation
6 550 (15.11%) Test Automation
7 544 (14.95%) Microservices
8 420 (11.54%) Migration
9 407 (11.18%) Analytics
9 407 (11.18%) Continuous Improvement
9 407 (11.18%) Scrum
10 358 (9.84%) Observability
11 356 (9.78%) Software Engineering
12 350 (9.62%) AI
13 315 (8.65%) Stakeholder Management
14 284 (7.80%) Mentoring
15 264 (7.25%) Data Modelling
16 253 (6.95%) Business Intelligence
17 250 (6.87%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 248 (6.81%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 1,139 (31.29%) Python
2 729 (20.03%) SQL
3 473 (12.99%) Java
4 360 (9.89%) JavaScript
5 337 (9.26%) C#
6 326 (8.96%) PowerShell
7 313 (8.60%) Bash
8 248 (6.81%) TypeScript
9 144 (3.96%) Go
10 121 (3.32%) Bicep
11 78 (2.14%) PL/SQL
12 58 (1.59%) Shell Script
13 53 (1.46%) Groovy
14 41 (1.13%) Ruby
15 39 (1.07%) C++
16 37 (1.02%) Scala
16 37 (1.02%) T-SQL
17 33 (0.91%) Perl
18 24 (0.66%) Kotlin
19 23 (0.63%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,114 (30.60%) Security Cleared
2 924 (25.38%) SC Cleared
3 329 (9.04%) Degree
4 179 (4.92%) Computer Science Degree
5 165 (4.53%) Azure Certification
6 128 (3.52%) DV Cleared
7 110 (3.02%) AWS Certification
8 77 (2.12%) Master's Degree
9 69 (1.90%) BPSS Clearance
9 69 (1.90%) CISSP
10 55 (1.51%) Microsoft Certification
11 51 (1.40%) CISM
12 34 (0.93%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 33 (0.91%) ISTQB
14 30 (0.82%) PMI Certification
15 27 (0.74%) Cisco Certification
16 24 (0.66%) PMP
17 21 (0.58%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 16 (0.44%) IIBA
18 16 (0.44%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 328 (9.01%) QA
2 144 (3.96%) GDPR
3 122 (3.35%) Data Quality
4 115 (3.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 104 (2.86%) NIST
6 81 (2.23%) Accessibility
7 51 (1.40%) NCSC
8 27 (0.74%) WCAG
9 26 (0.71%) PCI DSS
10 23 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 21 (0.58%) SLA
12 20 (0.55%) HIPAA
13 18 (0.49%) PMO
14 15 (0.41%) PSD2
15 14 (0.38%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.33%) SOC 2
17 11 (0.30%) SEPA
18 9 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
18 9 (0.25%) HL7
19 8 (0.22%) MiFID
System Software
1 941 (25.85%) Docker
2 157 (4.31%) Active Directory
3 61 (1.68%) VMware Infrastructure
4 55 (1.51%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.77%) vSphere
6 19 (0.52%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.41%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (0.33%) 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 1,098 (30.16%) Terraform
2 1,066 (29.29%) Kubernetes
3 480 (13.19%) Ansible
4 271 (7.45%) Grafana
5 251 (6.90%) Prometheus
6 76 (2.09%) Argo
7 73 (2.01%) Puppet
8 51 (1.40%) Single Sign-On
9 40 (1.10%) Progress Chef
10 37 (1.02%) Istio
11 36 (0.99%) Kibana
12 32 (0.88%) Packer
13 24 (0.66%) Podman
14 17 (0.47%) Proxmox
15 15 (0.41%) Nessus
15 15 (0.41%) Rancher
16 14 (0.38%) Data Guard
16 14 (0.38%) NetBackup
16 14 (0.38%) SCCM
17 13 (0.36%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 638 (17.53%) Microsoft
2 295 (8.10%) Oracle
3 210 (5.77%) Google
4 201 (5.52%) Splunk
5 193 (5.30%) Databricks
6 146 (4.01%) ServiceNow
7 121 (3.32%) Red Hat
8 102 (2.80%) VMware
9 93 (2.55%) Salesforce
10 90 (2.47%) SAP
11 64 (1.76%) Dynatrace
12 49 (1.35%) OpenAI
13 46 (1.26%) F5
14 41 (1.13%) IBM
15 40 (1.10%) Palo Alto
16 39 (1.07%) Atlassian
16 39 (1.07%) CyberArk
17 38 (1.04%) Talend
18 35 (0.96%) Denodo
19 32 (0.88%) MuleSoft