Lead DevOps Contract Job Trends in the North of England

Lead Development Operations
England > North of England

The median Lead Development Operations daily rate in the North of England is £488, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 November 2025.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 192 154 186
Rank change year-on-year -38 +32 +28
Contract jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 11 8 6
As % of all contract jobs in the North of England 0.25% 0.20% 0.12%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.27% 0.22% 0.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 6 4 3
10th Percentile £455 £456 £125
25th Percentile £461 £484 £233
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £513 £425
Median % change year-on-year -4.88% +20.59% -32.67%
75th Percentile £500 £541 £556
90th Percentile £519 £546 £628
England median daily rate £570 £635 £650
% change year-on-year -10.20% -2.31% -6.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £52.00
England median hourly rate - - £52.00

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
North of England

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the North of England. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the North of England with a recognized job title 4,085 3,651 4,596
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.72% 92.01% 93.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,733 1,980 3,137
10th Percentile £215 £263 £262
25th Percentile £365 £386 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £466 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.00% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £561 £575 £600
90th Percentile £671 £650 £675
England median daily rate £510 £525 £538
% change year-on-year -2.86% -2.33% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 265 223 223
10th Percentile £15.18 £15.39 £15.75
25th Percentile £19.00 £18.00 £17.88
Median hourly rate £27.38 £31.00 £27.50
Median % change year-on-year -11.69% +12.73% +29.41%
75th Percentile £51.50 £48.75 £46.18
90th Percentile £74.26 £70.00 £61.59
England median hourly rate £25.15 £41.50 £45.94
% change year-on-year -39.40% -9.66% +53.13%

Lead DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend in the North of England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Lead DevOps' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North of England.

Lead DevOps job vacancy trend in the North of England

Lead DevOps
Daily Rate Trend in the North of England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the North of England.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the North of England

Lead DevOps
Contract Job Locations in the North of England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Lead DevOps within the North of England region over the 6 months to 1 November 2025. 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
Yorkshire -25 8 £500 -2.44%
North West -19 4 £455 - 3
Lead DevOps
England

Lead DevOps Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North of England

For the 6 months to 1 November 2025, Lead DevOps contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the North of England region featuring Lead DevOps in the job title.

1 11 (100.00%) DevOps
2 8 (72.73%) AWS
2 8 (72.73%) Terraform
3 7 (63.64%) CI/CD
4 6 (54.55%) Infrastructure as Code
4 6 (54.55%) Python
4 6 (54.55%) Security Cleared
5 5 (45.45%) Ansible
5 5 (45.45%) Docker
5 5 (45.45%) Infrastructure Automation
5 5 (45.45%) Kubernetes
5 5 (45.45%) SC Cleared
6 4 (36.36%) Azure
6 4 (36.36%) Cloud Security
6 4 (36.36%) GitHub
6 4 (36.36%) GitHub Actions
6 4 (36.36%) Jenkins
6 4 (36.36%) Prometheus
7 3 (27.27%) Agile
7 3 (27.27%) AI
7 3 (27.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 3 (27.27%) Amazon GuardDuty
7 3 (27.27%) AWS Certification
7 3 (27.27%) AWS CloudFormation
7 3 (27.27%) AWS KMS
7 3 (27.27%) AWS Lambda
7 3 (27.27%) Cost Optimisation
7 3 (27.27%) DevSecOps
7 3 (27.27%) DNS
7 3 (27.27%) FinOps

Lead DevOps Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North of 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:

Cloud Services
1 8 (72.73%) AWS
2 4 (36.36%) Azure
2 4 (36.36%) GitHub
2 4 (36.36%) GitHub Actions
3 3 (27.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
3 3 (27.27%) Amazon GuardDuty
3 3 (27.27%) AWS CloudFormation
3 3 (27.27%) AWS KMS
3 3 (27.27%) AWS Lambda
3 3 (27.27%) Serverless
4 2 (18.18%) Amazon ECS
4 2 (18.18%) Amazon EKS
4 2 (18.18%) Amazon ElastiCache
4 2 (18.18%) Amazon Macie
4 2 (18.18%) Amazon SQS
4 2 (18.18%) AWS CloudTrail
4 2 (18.18%) AWS Direct Connect
4 2 (18.18%) AWS Fargate
4 2 (18.18%) Azure DevOps
4 2 (18.18%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (27.27%) DNS
2 2 (18.18%) Firewall
2 2 (18.18%) Network Security
2 2 (18.18%) SSL
2 2 (18.18%) TCP/IP
2 2 (18.18%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (18.18%) Amazon RDS
1 2 (18.18%) DynamoDB
2 1 (9.09%) Amazon Athena
2 1 (9.09%) Amazon Redshift
2 1 (9.09%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 4 (36.36%) Jenkins
2 3 (27.27%) GitLab
3 2 (18.18%) Git
4 1 (9.09%) CircleCI
4 1 (9.09%) JIRA
General
1 2 (18.18%) Public Sector
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (18.18%) Elastic Stack
2 1 (9.09%) .NET
2 1 (9.09%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 2 (18.18%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
2 1 (9.09%) Cloud Native
2 1 (9.09%) Legacy Systems
2 1 (9.09%) NHS
2 1 (9.09%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 3 (27.27%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 11 (100.00%) DevOps
2 7 (63.64%) CI/CD
3 6 (54.55%) Infrastructure as Code
4 5 (45.45%) Infrastructure Automation
5 4 (36.36%) Cloud Security
6 3 (27.27%) Agile
6 3 (27.27%) AI
6 3 (27.27%) Cost Optimisation
6 3 (27.27%) DevSecOps
6 3 (27.27%) FinOps
6 3 (27.27%) Observability
7 2 (18.18%) Auto-Scaling
7 2 (18.18%) Configuration Management
7 2 (18.18%) Database Security
7 2 (18.18%) Mentoring
7 2 (18.18%) Network Load Balancing
7 2 (18.18%) Performance Metrics
7 2 (18.18%) Release Management
7 2 (18.18%) Resource Management
7 2 (18.18%) SIEM
Programming Languages
1 6 (54.55%) Python
2 2 (18.18%) Bash
2 2 (18.18%) Shell Script
3 1 (9.09%) Bicep
3 1 (9.09%) JavaScript
3 1 (9.09%) SQL
Qualifications
1 6 (54.55%) Security Cleared
2 5 (45.45%) SC Cleared
3 3 (27.27%) AWS Certification
4 2 (18.18%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
4 2 (18.18%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 1 (9.09%) Azure Certification
5 1 (9.09%) BPSS Clearance
5 1 (9.09%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (27.27%) GDPR
1 3 (27.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 3 (27.27%) NIST
1 3 (27.27%) SOC 2
2 2 (18.18%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 5 (45.45%) Docker
Systems Management
1 8 (72.73%) Terraform
2 5 (45.45%) Ansible
2 5 (45.45%) Kubernetes
3 4 (36.36%) Prometheus
4 3 (27.27%) Grafana
5 2 (18.18%) Kustomize
5 2 (18.18%) Puppet
6 1 (9.09%) Packer
Vendors
1 2 (18.18%) Splunk
2 1 (9.09%) InterSystems