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

6 months to
12 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 3,598 2,839 3,249
As % of all contract jobs in England 11.60% 10.63% 8.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.14% 11.93% 10.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,532 1,949 2,403
10th Percentile £368 £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 £525 £563 £563
% change year-on-year -6.67% - -6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 48 23 83
10th Percentile £43.68 £39.05 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £50.63
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 £70.00
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £77.90
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 27,375 23,793 32,010
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 88.27% 89.07% 87.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,424 14,594 21,607
10th Percentile £304 £310 £305
25th Percentile £410 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -2.27%
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 1,725 761 1,484
10th Percentile £15.13 £15.53 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.88 £20.30 £18.93
Median hourly rate £25.15 £34.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -26.03% -20.00% +21.43%
75th Percentile £57.50 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.86 £75.00 £77.00
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.25 £40.50
% change year-on-year -22.00% -20.38% +16.41%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 1,794 £548 -8.75% 469
North of England +5 638 £487 -4.51% 345
South East 0 384 £525 -10.64% 448
Midlands +21 381 £515 -1.67% 176
Yorkshire +1 329 £500 -1.96% 148
West Midlands +20 309 £525 - 87
North West +4 266 £455 -9.00% 152
South West +6 232 £531 -11.46% 179
East of England +14 96 £550 +8.37% 161
East Midlands +18 72 £425 -10.53% 86
North East -8 44 £475 -17.21% 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
1 233 (6.48%) Confluence
2 79 (2.20%) SharePoint
3 74 (2.06%) Apache
4 72 (2.00%) SAS
5 62 (1.72%) Apache Airflow
6 59 (1.64%) Apache Spark
7 32 (0.89%) OpenStack
8 29 (0.81%) CMS
8 29 (0.81%) nginx
9 21 (0.58%) IIS
10 20 (0.56%) JBoss
11 16 (0.44%) CICS
11 16 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
12 13 (0.36%) WebLogic
13 10 (0.28%) HCL Notes
13 10 (0.28%) Mendix
13 10 (0.28%) WebSphere
14 9 (0.25%) iPlanet
14 9 (0.25%) WebSphere Application Server
15 8 (0.22%) Smallworld
Applications
1 79 (2.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 50 (1.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 29 (0.81%) Microsoft Project
4 22 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
5 14 (0.39%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.33%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.25%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.22%) Weka
9 4 (0.11%) Trello
10 1 (0.028%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.028%) Moqups
10 1 (0.028%) Revit
Business Applications
1 53 (1.47%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.47%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.39%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.31%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.31%) Endur
5 9 (0.25%) Maximo
6 7 (0.19%) NEC Housing
7 6 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
8 5 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
8 5 (0.14%) Remedy ITSM
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 (0.083%) Oracle Assets
10 3 (0.083%) Oracle Payables
10 3 (0.083%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.083%) SAP FI/CO
10 3 (0.083%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.083%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,795 (49.89%) Azure
2 1,265 (35.16%) AWS
3 962 (26.74%) Azure DevOps
4 670 (18.62%) GitHub
5 533 (14.81%) GCP
6 402 (11.17%) Serverless
7 380 (10.56%) GitHub Actions
8 286 (7.95%) Power Platform
9 196 (5.45%) Amazon S3
10 194 (5.39%) AWS Lambda
11 182 (5.06%) AWS CloudFormation
12 166 (4.61%) Azure Data Factory
13 162 (4.50%) Azure AKS
14 147 (4.09%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 144 (4.00%) Entra ID
15 144 (4.00%) OpenShift
16 143 (3.97%) Dynamics 365
17 140 (3.89%) SaaS
18 130 (3.61%) Amazon EC2
18 130 (3.61%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 185 (5.14%) Firewall
2 110 (3.06%) DNS
3 76 (2.11%) VPN
4 71 (1.97%) Network Security
5 55 (1.53%) TCP/IP
6 50 (1.39%) SSL
7 36 (1.00%) HTTP
8 28 (0.78%) HTTPS
9 21 (0.58%) WAN
10 20 (0.56%) SSH
11 18 (0.50%) BGP
11 18 (0.50%) FTP
11 18 (0.50%) SMTP
12 17 (0.47%) MPLS
13 16 (0.44%) DHCP
14 15 (0.42%) Kerberos
14 15 (0.42%) SD-WAN
15 13 (0.36%) OpenLDAP
16 11 (0.31%) Internet
17 10 (0.28%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 215 (5.98%) PostgreSQL
2 194 (5.39%) Power BI
3 138 (3.84%) NoSQL
4 137 (3.81%) SQL Server
5 110 (3.06%) Amazon RDS
6 102 (2.83%) Data Lake
7 88 (2.45%) MongoDB
8 84 (2.33%) Relational Database
9 82 (2.28%) Oracle Database
10 80 (2.22%) Data Warehouse
11 71 (1.97%) Azure SQL Database
12 52 (1.45%) Elasticsearch
12 52 (1.45%) MySQL
13 51 (1.42%) Redis
14 50 (1.39%) DynamoDB
15 47 (1.31%) Tableau
16 39 (1.08%) Metadata
17 38 (1.06%) Amazon Aurora
18 37 (1.03%) Delta Lake
19 36 (1.00%) Pentaho
Development Applications
1 648 (18.01%) Jenkins
2 535 (14.87%) Git
3 525 (14.59%) JIRA
4 456 (12.67%) GitLab
5 109 (3.03%) Selenium
6 79 (2.20%) JUnit
7 72 (2.00%) SonarQube
8 69 (1.92%) Postman
9 63 (1.75%) Sonatype Nexus
10 56 (1.56%) Bitbucket
11 51 (1.42%) Cypress.io
12 48 (1.33%) Cucumber
13 46 (1.28%) Artifactory
14 41 (1.14%) Gradle
14 41 (1.14%) Liquibase
15 40 (1.11%) CircleCI
16 37 (1.03%) Oracle APEX
17 36 (1.00%) Maven
18 27 (0.75%) JMeter
18 27 (0.75%) TeamCity
General
1 1,122 (31.18%) Social Skills
2 645 (17.93%) Finance
3 432 (12.01%) Public Sector
4 317 (8.81%) Banking
5 282 (7.84%) Analytical Skills
6 112 (3.11%) Documentation Skills
7 67 (1.86%) Financial Institution
8 60 (1.67%) Influencing Skills
9 56 (1.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 54 (1.50%) Marketing
11 46 (1.28%) Investment Banking
12 44 (1.22%) Front Office
12 44 (1.22%) Telecoms
13 43 (1.20%) Retail
14 39 (1.08%) Presentation Skills
15 31 (0.86%) Pharmaceutical
16 30 (0.83%) Military
17 25 (0.69%) Organisational Skills
18 24 (0.67%) Back Office
18 24 (0.67%) Law
Job Titles
1 680 (18.90%) DevOps Engineer
2 619 (17.20%) Developer
3 498 (13.84%) Senior
4 302 (8.39%) Architect
5 280 (7.78%) Lead
6 209 (5.81%) Azure Engineer
7 196 (5.45%) AWS Engineer
8 185 (5.14%) Analyst
9 183 (5.09%) Data Engineer
10 152 (4.22%) AWS DevOps
11 148 (4.11%) Software Engineer
12 137 (3.81%) Cloud Engineer
13 129 (3.59%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 128 (3.56%) Platform Engineer
14 128 (3.56%) Senior Developer
15 104 (2.89%) Senior DevOps
16 101 (2.81%) Business Analyst
17 100 (2.78%) Solutions Architect
18 95 (2.64%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 93 (2.58%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 410 (11.40%) REST
2 296 (8.23%) .NET
3 221 (6.14%) React
4 217 (6.03%) Node.js
5 211 (5.86%) RESTful
6 209 (5.81%) Kafka
7 169 (4.70%) JSON
8 167 (4.64%) Spring
9 149 (4.14%) Spring Boot
10 124 (3.45%) YAML
11 119 (3.31%) SOAP
11 119 (3.31%) XML
12 118 (3.28%) AngularJS
13 115 (3.20%) Elastic Stack
14 110 (3.06%) HTML
14 110 (3.06%) OAuth
15 87 (2.42%) Playwright
16 81 (2.25%) Middleware
17 76 (2.11%) ARM Templates
17 76 (2.11%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 494 (13.73%) Cloud Native
2 186 (5.17%) Product Ownership
3 133 (3.70%) Distributed Systems
4 99 (2.75%) Onboarding
5 91 (2.53%) Public Cloud
6 76 (2.11%) Legacy Systems
7 67 (1.86%) Hybrid Cloud
8 62 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
9 50 (1.39%) Replication
10 49 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
11 44 (1.22%) Mobile App
12 43 (1.20%) Management Information System
13 42 (1.17%) Data Centre
13 42 (1.17%) Security Posture
13 42 (1.17%) Virtual Team
14 39 (1.08%) Private Cloud
15 37 (1.03%) Self-Motivation
16 34 (0.94%) NHS
17 31 (0.86%) AI Agents
18 30 (0.83%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 420 (11.67%) Linux
2 208 (5.78%) Windows
3 83 (2.31%) Unix
4 52 (1.45%) VMS
5 50 (1.39%) Windows Server
6 49 (1.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 29 (0.81%) Android
8 28 (0.78%) Ubuntu
9 25 (0.69%) Apple iOS
10 19 (0.53%) Windows 10
11 15 (0.42%) Amazon Linux
11 15 (0.42%) CentOS
12 10 (0.28%) Solaris
13 6 (0.17%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.17%) zOS
14 2 (0.056%) Debian
14 2 (0.056%) Windows Server 2012
15 1 (0.028%) Kali Linux
15 1 (0.028%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,013 (55.95%) CI/CD
2 1,472 (40.91%) Agile
3 897 (24.93%) Infrastructure as Code
4 699 (19.43%) Problem-Solving
5 686 (19.07%) Containerisation
6 542 (15.06%) Test Automation
7 536 (14.90%) Microservices
8 417 (11.59%) Migration
9 404 (11.23%) Analytics
9 404 (11.23%) Continuous Improvement
10 398 (11.06%) Scrum
11 354 (9.84%) Observability
12 350 (9.73%) Software Engineering
13 348 (9.67%) AI
14 312 (8.67%) Stakeholder Management
15 280 (7.78%) Mentoring
16 263 (7.31%) Data Modelling
17 253 (7.03%) Business Intelligence
18 247 (6.86%) Data Pipeline
18 247 (6.86%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,121 (31.16%) Python
2 722 (20.07%) SQL
3 470 (13.06%) Java
4 355 (9.87%) JavaScript
5 334 (9.28%) C#
6 319 (8.87%) PowerShell
7 303 (8.42%) Bash
8 248 (6.89%) TypeScript
9 140 (3.89%) Go
10 119 (3.31%) Bicep
11 78 (2.17%) PL/SQL
12 58 (1.61%) Shell Script
13 50 (1.39%) Groovy
14 41 (1.14%) Ruby
15 38 (1.06%) C++
16 37 (1.03%) Scala
16 37 (1.03%) T-SQL
17 32 (0.89%) Perl
18 23 (0.64%) PHP
19 22 (0.61%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,097 (30.49%) Security Cleared
2 909 (25.26%) SC Cleared
3 323 (8.98%) Degree
4 176 (4.89%) Computer Science Degree
5 163 (4.53%) Azure Certification
6 126 (3.50%) DV Cleared
7 105 (2.92%) AWS Certification
8 75 (2.08%) Master's Degree
9 67 (1.86%) BPSS Clearance
9 67 (1.86%) CISSP
10 53 (1.47%) Microsoft Certification
11 51 (1.42%) CISM
12 33 (0.92%) ISTQB
13 32 (0.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 30 (0.83%) PMI Certification
15 27 (0.75%) Cisco Certification
16 24 (0.67%) PMP
17 20 (0.56%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 16 (0.44%) IIBA
18 16 (0.44%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 326 (9.06%) QA
2 143 (3.97%) GDPR
3 122 (3.39%) Data Quality
4 112 (3.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 102 (2.83%) NIST
6 81 (2.25%) Accessibility
7 48 (1.33%) NCSC
8 27 (0.75%) WCAG
9 26 (0.72%) PCI DSS
10 23 (0.64%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 21 (0.58%) SLA
12 19 (0.53%) HIPAA
13 17 (0.47%) PMO
14 15 (0.42%) PSD2
15 14 (0.39%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.33%) SOC 2
17 11 (0.31%) SEPA
18 9 (0.25%) HL7
19 8 (0.22%) MiFID
19 8 (0.22%) NIST 800
System Software
1 930 (25.85%) Docker
2 156 (4.34%) Active Directory
3 61 (1.70%) VMware Infrastructure
4 54 (1.50%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.78%) vSphere
6 18 (0.50%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.42%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.39%) Virtual Desktop
9 11 (0.31%) Oracle RAC
9 11 (0.31%) Squid
10 10 (0.28%) Lustre
10 10 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 9 (0.25%) Dovecot
11 9 (0.25%) Postfix
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 1,084 (30.13%) Terraform
2 1,050 (29.18%) Kubernetes
3 470 (13.06%) Ansible
4 263 (7.31%) Grafana
5 242 (6.73%) Prometheus
6 73 (2.03%) Argo
7 71 (1.97%) Puppet
8 46 (1.28%) Single Sign-On
9 40 (1.11%) Progress Chef
10 36 (1.00%) Kibana
11 35 (0.97%) Istio
12 30 (0.83%) Packer
13 24 (0.67%) Podman
14 16 (0.44%) Proxmox
15 15 (0.42%) Rancher
16 14 (0.39%) Data Guard
16 14 (0.39%) Nessus
16 14 (0.39%) NetBackup
16 14 (0.39%) SCCM
17 13 (0.36%) ITRS Geneos
Vendors
1 630 (17.51%) Microsoft
2 293 (8.14%) Oracle
3 206 (5.73%) Google
4 193 (5.36%) Splunk
5 192 (5.34%) Databricks
6 141 (3.92%) ServiceNow
7 118 (3.28%) Red Hat
8 101 (2.81%) VMware
9 92 (2.56%) Salesforce
10 89 (2.47%) SAP
11 64 (1.78%) Dynatrace
12 49 (1.36%) OpenAI
13 46 (1.28%) F5
14 41 (1.14%) IBM
15 39 (1.08%) Atlassian
15 39 (1.08%) CyberArk
15 39 (1.08%) Palo Alto
16 38 (1.06%) Talend
17 35 (0.97%) Denodo
18 32 (0.89%) MuleSoft