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 19 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 14 18
Rank change year-on-year +1 +4 -7
Contract jobs citing DevOps 3,871 2,743 3,206
As % of all contract jobs in England 11.15% 10.59% 8.56%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.75% 11.77% 9.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,700 1,913 2,322
10th Percentile £375 £400 £413
25th Percentile £438 £475 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £575 £568
Median % change year-on-year -8.70% +1.32% -5.42%
75th Percentile £614 £675 £670
90th Percentile £719 £775 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -5.45% - -7.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 18 100
10th Percentile - £37.68 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £57.97 £57.29
Median hourly rate £58.50 £70.97 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -17.57% +9.18% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £80.75 £76.53
90th Percentile £93.75 £82.78 £84.52
UK median hourly rate £58.50 £73.23 £65.00
% change year-on-year -20.11% +12.65% -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 30,349 23,302 32,721
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 87.42% 89.94% 87.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,395 14,514 21,728
10th Percentile £311 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £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 1,903 732 1,999
10th Percentile £15.18 £15.62 £13.39
25th Percentile £18.26 £21.20 £16.25
Median hourly rate £26.78 £35.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -23.49% - -
75th Percentile £61.18 £64.79 £60.13
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.23 £73.05
UK median hourly rate £25.50 £32.50 £35.00
% change year-on-year -21.54% -7.14% -

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 19 February 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 19 February 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 19 February 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 1,946 £530 -11.67% 509
North of England +4 694 £500 - 323
South East +1 417 £525 -8.70% 392
Midlands +13 392 £513 +2.50% 141
Yorkshire +1 365 £500 - 100
West Midlands +14 311 £525 +3.75% 101
North West +2 281 £475 -5.00% 180
South West +12 250 £525 -12.50% 132
East of England +17 117 £575 +13.30% 59
East Midlands +9 80 £425 -10.53% 40
North East -4 51 £475 -9.52% 46
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 (6.25%) Confluence
2 89 (2.30%) Apache Spark
3 83 (2.14%) Apache
4 80 (2.07%) SharePoint
5 57 (1.47%) SAS
6 52 (1.34%) Apache Airflow
7 34 (0.88%) OpenStack
8 31 (0.80%) nginx
9 29 (0.75%) CMS
10 20 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
11 17 (0.44%) IIS
12 14 (0.36%) JBoss
13 12 (0.31%) Sitecore CMS
13 12 (0.31%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.28%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 10 (0.26%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.26%) Mendix
16 8 (0.21%) GeoServer
16 8 (0.21%) Smallworld
16 8 (0.21%) WebSphere
Applications
1 90 (2.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 35 (0.90%) Microsoft Project
4 27 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.49%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.21%) Weka
8 4 (0.10%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 3 (0.077%) Trello
10 2 (0.052%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.026%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.026%) Maya
11 1 (0.026%) Revit
11 1 (0.026%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 62 (1.60%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.28%) Endur
3 10 (0.26%) Maximo
3 10 (0.26%) Oracle ERP
3 10 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
4 8 (0.21%) Aladdin
4 8 (0.21%) NEC Housing
5 6 (0.15%) SAP ERP
6 5 (0.13%) Dynamics AX
6 5 (0.13%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 4 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
7 4 (0.10%) Payment Gateway
8 3 (0.077%) Oracle Assets
8 3 (0.077%) Oracle Payables
8 3 (0.077%) Oracle Receivables
8 3 (0.077%) Salesforce CRM
8 3 (0.077%) SAP CO
8 3 (0.077%) SAP FI/CO
8 3 (0.077%) VisionPLUS
8 3 (0.077%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,984 (51.25%) Azure
2 1,347 (34.80%) AWS
3 1,066 (27.54%) Azure DevOps
4 714 (18.44%) GitHub
5 586 (15.14%) GCP
6 432 (11.16%) Serverless
7 381 (9.84%) GitHub Actions
8 315 (8.14%) Power Platform
9 214 (5.53%) Amazon S3
10 206 (5.32%) AWS CloudFormation
10 206 (5.32%) AWS Lambda
11 191 (4.93%) Azure Data Factory
12 174 (4.49%) Azure AKS
13 168 (4.34%) OpenShift
14 166 (4.29%) Entra ID
15 154 (3.98%) Amazon EKS
16 150 (3.87%) Dynamics 365
17 148 (3.82%) SaaS
18 147 (3.80%) Azure Monitor
19 132 (3.41%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 185 (4.78%) Firewall
2 105 (2.71%) DNS
3 85 (2.20%) Network Security
4 80 (2.07%) VPN
5 53 (1.37%) TCP/IP
6 39 (1.01%) SSL
7 28 (0.72%) HTTP
8 27 (0.70%) HTTPS
9 20 (0.52%) WAN
10 17 (0.44%) DHCP
11 15 (0.39%) Kerberos
12 14 (0.36%) SD-WAN
13 13 (0.34%) BGP
14 12 (0.31%) MPLS
15 10 (0.26%) Internet
15 10 (0.26%) LAN
15 10 (0.26%) Reverse Proxy
16 9 (0.23%) FTP
16 9 (0.23%) IPsec
16 9 (0.23%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 217 (5.61%) PostgreSQL
2 205 (5.30%) Power BI
3 152 (3.93%) SQL Server
4 148 (3.82%) NoSQL
5 119 (3.07%) Data Lake
6 104 (2.69%) Amazon RDS
7 97 (2.51%) Relational Database
8 92 (2.38%) Data Warehouse
9 89 (2.30%) MongoDB
10 74 (1.91%) Azure SQL Database
11 73 (1.89%) Elasticsearch
11 73 (1.89%) Oracle Database
12 57 (1.47%) DynamoDB
13 54 (1.39%) Delta Lake
13 54 (1.39%) Redis
14 50 (1.29%) MySQL
15 49 (1.27%) Tableau
16 46 (1.19%) Metadata
17 40 (1.03%) Amazon Athena
18 37 (0.96%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 662 (17.10%) Jenkins
2 514 (13.28%) Git
3 509 (13.15%) JIRA
4 485 (12.53%) GitLab
5 114 (2.94%) Selenium
6 85 (2.20%) JUnit
7 81 (2.09%) Postman
8 59 (1.52%) SonarQube
9 57 (1.47%) Bitbucket
10 54 (1.39%) Sonatype Nexus
11 50 (1.29%) Cucumber
12 47 (1.21%) Cypress.io
12 47 (1.21%) Maven
13 46 (1.19%) Artifactory
14 42 (1.08%) REST Assured
15 36 (0.93%) Gradle
15 36 (0.93%) Oracle APEX
16 35 (0.90%) Liquibase
17 34 (0.88%) JMeter
18 28 (0.72%) CircleCI
General
1 1,195 (30.87%) Social Skills
2 704 (18.19%) Finance
3 465 (12.01%) Public Sector
4 337 (8.71%) Analytical Skills
5 308 (7.96%) Banking
6 142 (3.67%) Documentation Skills
7 77 (1.99%) Influencing Skills
8 65 (1.68%) Financial Institution
9 57 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 56 (1.45%) Marketing
11 47 (1.21%) Retail
12 44 (1.14%) Investment Banking
13 43 (1.11%) Front Office
14 41 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
15 40 (1.03%) Telecoms
16 34 (0.88%) Organisational Skills
17 31 (0.80%) Military
18 26 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
19 25 (0.65%) Law
20 24 (0.62%) Legal
Job Titles
1 738 (19.06%) DevOps Engineer
2 632 (16.33%) Developer
3 532 (13.74%) Senior
4 412 (10.64%) Architect
5 305 (7.88%) Lead
6 243 (6.28%) Azure Engineer
7 218 (5.63%) Analyst
8 209 (5.40%) Data Engineer
9 202 (5.22%) AWS Engineer
10 152 (3.93%) Cloud Engineer
11 151 (3.90%) AWS DevOps
12 146 (3.77%) Software Engineer
13 138 (3.56%) Platform Engineer
14 132 (3.41%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 127 (3.28%) Solutions Architect
16 123 (3.18%) Business Analyst
17 117 (3.02%) Senior Developer
18 109 (2.82%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 107 (2.76%) Senior DevOps
20 100 (2.58%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 438 (11.31%) REST
2 308 (7.96%) .NET
3 251 (6.48%) React
4 249 (6.43%) Node.js
5 223 (5.76%) Kafka
6 211 (5.45%) Spring
7 199 (5.14%) RESTful
8 191 (4.93%) Spring Boot
9 154 (3.98%) JSON
10 129 (3.33%) AngularJS
11 127 (3.28%) YAML
12 121 (3.13%) OAuth
13 117 (3.02%) Elastic Stack
13 117 (3.02%) HTML
14 115 (2.97%) XML
15 113 (2.92%) SOAP
16 107 (2.76%) Playwright
17 102 (2.63%) Middleware
18 99 (2.56%) CSS
19 98 (2.53%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 556 (14.36%) Cloud Native
2 209 (5.40%) Product Ownership
3 138 (3.56%) Distributed Systems
4 107 (2.76%) Public Cloud
5 105 (2.71%) Onboarding
6 81 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
7 71 (1.83%) Hybrid Cloud
8 67 (1.73%) Enterprise Software
9 51 (1.32%) Management Information System
10 45 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
10 45 (1.16%) Private Cloud
10 45 (1.16%) Security Posture
10 45 (1.16%) Virtual Team
11 39 (1.01%) Replication
12 38 (0.98%) Mobile App
13 37 (0.96%) Data Centre
13 37 (0.96%) NHS
14 33 (0.85%) Data Structures
15 32 (0.83%) AI Agents
16 31 (0.80%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 428 (11.06%) Linux
2 212 (5.48%) Windows
3 82 (2.12%) Unix
4 51 (1.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 44 (1.14%) VMS
6 39 (1.01%) Windows Server
7 27 (0.70%) Ubuntu
8 19 (0.49%) Windows 10
9 17 (0.44%) Android
9 17 (0.44%) CentOS
10 16 (0.41%) Apple iOS
11 9 (0.23%) Solaris
12 8 (0.21%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
15 4 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.052%) Debian
16 2 (0.052%) zOS
17 1 (0.026%) Mac OS X
17 1 (0.026%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,217 (57.27%) CI/CD
2 1,510 (39.01%) Agile
3 995 (25.70%) Infrastructure as Code
4 754 (19.48%) Problem-Solving
5 733 (18.94%) Containerisation
6 576 (14.88%) Test Automation
7 572 (14.78%) Microservices
8 470 (12.14%) Continuous Improvement
9 459 (11.86%) Analytics
10 447 (11.55%) Migration
11 420 (10.85%) AI
12 412 (10.64%) Scrum
13 411 (10.62%) Observability
14 379 (9.79%) Stakeholder Management
15 367 (9.48%) Software Engineering
16 323 (8.34%) Mentoring
17 316 (8.16%) Data Modelling
18 268 (6.92%) Business Intelligence
19 267 (6.90%) Data Pipeline
20 264 (6.82%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,181 (30.51%) Python
2 787 (20.33%) SQL
3 513 (13.25%) Java
4 367 (9.48%) JavaScript
5 363 (9.38%) C#
6 312 (8.06%) PowerShell
7 292 (7.54%) Bash
8 269 (6.95%) TypeScript
9 132 (3.41%) Go
10 128 (3.31%) Bicep
11 75 (1.94%) PL/SQL
12 61 (1.58%) Scala
13 45 (1.16%) Shell Script
14 41 (1.06%) Groovy
14 41 (1.06%) T-SQL
15 40 (1.03%) C++
16 38 (0.98%) Ruby
17 26 (0.67%) Rust
18 22 (0.57%) Perl
19 21 (0.54%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,222 (31.57%) Security Cleared
2 995 (25.70%) SC Cleared
3 342 (8.83%) Degree
4 186 (4.80%) Azure Certification
5 183 (4.73%) Computer Science Degree
6 140 (3.62%) DV Cleared
7 116 (3.00%) AWS Certification
8 82 (2.12%) Master's Degree
9 80 (2.07%) BPSS Clearance
10 67 (1.73%) CISSP
11 59 (1.52%) Microsoft Certification
12 54 (1.39%) CISM
13 43 (1.11%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 41 (1.06%) ISTQB
15 31 (0.80%) PMI Certification
16 29 (0.75%) Cisco Certification
17 25 (0.65%) PMP
18 23 (0.59%) IIBA
19 22 (0.57%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
20 20 (0.52%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 335 (8.65%) QA
2 162 (4.18%) GDPR
3 142 (3.67%) Data Quality
4 120 (3.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 110 (2.84%) NIST
6 90 (2.32%) Accessibility
7 65 (1.68%) NCSC
8 30 (0.77%) PCI DSS
9 28 (0.72%) WCAG
10 25 (0.65%) SLA
11 23 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 21 (0.54%) HIPAA
13 20 (0.52%) PMO
14 17 (0.44%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.39%) ISO 20022
15 15 (0.39%) PSD2
16 11 (0.28%) SEPA
17 10 (0.26%) NIST 800
18 8 (0.21%) HL7
18 8 (0.21%) MiFID
System Software
1 939 (24.26%) Docker
2 156 (4.03%) Active Directory
3 74 (1.91%) Virtual Machines
4 68 (1.76%) VMware Infrastructure
5 40 (1.03%) vSphere
6 25 (0.65%) VMware NSX
7 16 (0.41%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.34%) Squid
9 11 (0.28%) Lustre
9 11 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 9 (0.23%) DFS Replication
10 9 (0.23%) GPFS
10 9 (0.23%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.18%) Firmware
11 7 (0.18%) Postfix
11 7 (0.18%) Virtual Servers
11 7 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
12 6 (0.15%) KVM
12 6 (0.15%) NFS
13 5 (0.13%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,185 (30.61%) Terraform
2 1,133 (29.27%) Kubernetes
3 454 (11.73%) Ansible
4 275 (7.10%) Grafana
5 240 (6.20%) Prometheus
6 83 (2.14%) Argo
7 70 (1.81%) Puppet
8 65 (1.68%) Single Sign-On
9 38 (0.98%) Istio
10 32 (0.83%) Kibana
11 28 (0.72%) Packer
12 27 (0.70%) Progress Chef
13 22 (0.57%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.54%) Podman
15 18 (0.46%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 17 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
17 16 (0.41%) Consul
18 15 (0.39%) FortiGate
19 14 (0.36%) Rancher
19 14 (0.36%) SCCM
Vendors
1 665 (17.18%) Microsoft
2 264 (6.82%) Oracle
3 235 (6.07%) Databricks
4 227 (5.86%) Google
5 199 (5.14%) Splunk
6 130 (3.36%) ServiceNow
7 128 (3.31%) Red Hat
8 115 (2.97%) VMware
9 103 (2.66%) Salesforce
10 94 (2.43%) SAP
11 70 (1.81%) OpenAI
12 56 (1.45%) Dynatrace
13 54 (1.39%) CyberArk
14 47 (1.21%) Atlassian
15 42 (1.08%) IBM
16 37 (0.96%) F5
17 31 (0.80%) Palo Alto
18 30 (0.77%) Foundry
18 30 (0.77%) Talend
19 27 (0.70%) Cisco