DevOps Contract Job Trends in the North West

DevOps
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North West requiring DevOps skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 7 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 15 17
Rank change year-on-year -2 +2 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 320 214 189
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 8.01% 9.75% 7.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 9.69% 11.01% 9.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 216 184 102
10th Percentile £385 £317 £356
25th Percentile £413 £384 £416
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £450 £538
Median % change year-on-year +16.67% -16.28% +2.38%
75th Percentile £640 £556 £600
90th Percentile £719 £665 £675
England median daily rate £525 £525 £550
% change year-on-year - -4.59% -4.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 9 1 3
10th Percentile £37.25 - -
25th Percentile £46.80 - -
Median hourly rate £66.66 £95.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year -29.83% +105.72% -
75th Percentile £73.00 - £66.84
90th Percentile £73.40 - £79.24
England median hourly rate £68.75 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +2.61% -4.29% +7.69%

All Process & Methodology Skills
North West

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 the North West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 3,304 1,943 2,006
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 82.70% 88.52% 83.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,872 1,287 1,091
10th Percentile £300 £267 £294
25th Percentile £402 £363 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £450 £478
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -5.86% -4.40%
75th Percentile £600 £575 £575
90th Percentile £675 £680 £663
England median daily rate £525 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 359 140 111
10th Percentile £14.35 £13.82 £16.50
25th Percentile £21.14 £17.30 £29.00
Median hourly rate £46.80 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +86.10% -40.83% +25.00%
75th Percentile £71.91 £48.03 £62.50
90th Percentile £84.00 £67.53 £73.56
England median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -3.37%

DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing DevOps relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West.

DevOps job vacancy trend in the North West

DevOps
Daily Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing DevOps.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing DevOps

DevOps
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DevOps in the North West over the 6 months to 7 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for DevOps in the North West

DevOps
Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing DevOps.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing DevOps

DevOps
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North West

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing DevOps in the North West over the 6 months to 7 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the North West

DevOps
Contract Job Locations in the North West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing DevOps within the North West region over the 6 months to 7 October 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
Manchester +3 214 £525 +5.00% 329
Cheshire -18 47 £474 +11.53% 41
Lancashire 0 37 £640 +16.36% 41
Merseyside -15 10 £625 +23.76% 17
Cumbria - 3 £353 - 3
DevOps
England

DevOps
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North West 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 23 (7.19%) Confluence
2 8 (2.50%) SharePoint
3 7 (2.19%) SAS
4 5 (1.56%) Camunda
5 4 (1.25%) Apache Airflow
6 3 (0.94%) Apache
6 3 (0.94%) Apache Spark
7 1 (0.31%) Anypoint
7 1 (0.31%) CMS
7 1 (0.31%) Drupal
7 1 (0.31%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.31%) NetWeaver
7 1 (0.31%) nginx
7 1 (0.31%) SharePoint 2013
7 1 (0.31%) Traefik
7 1 (0.31%) Umbraco
7 1 (0.31%) WordPress
Applications
1 6 (1.88%) MS Visio
2 4 (1.25%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 3 (0.94%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 7 (2.19%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.31%) Dynamics AX
2 1 (0.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.31%) SAP MM
2 1 (0.31%) SAP PM
2 1 (0.31%) SAP QM
2 1 (0.31%) Teamcenter
2 1 (0.31%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 159 (49.69%) Azure
2 144 (45.00%) AWS
3 87 (27.19%) Azure DevOps
4 52 (16.25%) GCP
5 49 (15.31%) GitHub
6 31 (9.69%) Power Platform
7 28 (8.75%) GitHub Actions
7 28 (8.75%) Serverless
8 24 (7.50%) AWS Lambda
9 23 (7.19%) Google Kubernetes Engine
10 21 (6.56%) Azure AKS
11 19 (5.94%) Amazon ECS
12 18 (5.63%) Azure Monitor
13 16 (5.00%) AWS CloudFormation
14 15 (4.69%) Amazon EKS
14 15 (4.69%) OCI
15 14 (4.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 13 (4.06%) Entra ID
16 13 (4.06%) OpenShift
16 13 (4.06%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 30 (9.38%) Firewall
2 12 (3.75%) SSL
3 11 (3.44%) BGP
3 11 (3.44%) Ethernet VPN
3 11 (3.44%) OSPF
3 11 (3.44%) SD-WAN
3 11 (3.44%) VXLAN
3 11 (3.44%) WAN
4 10 (3.13%) BIG-IP
4 10 (3.13%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
5 9 (2.81%) Network Security
5 9 (2.81%) Wi-Fi
5 9 (2.81%) WLAN
6 8 (2.50%) DNS
7 5 (1.56%) VPN
8 3 (0.94%) TCP/IP
9 2 (0.63%) DHCP
10 1 (0.31%) Cisco Nexus
10 1 (0.31%) HTTP
10 1 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 36 (11.25%) SQL Server
2 20 (6.25%) SQL Server Integration Services
3 19 (5.94%) Power BI
4 18 (5.63%) MongoDB
4 18 (5.63%) Relational Database
5 16 (5.00%) MySQL
6 11 (3.44%) PostgreSQL
7 10 (3.13%) Data Warehouse
7 10 (3.13%) Oracle Database
7 10 (3.13%) RDBMS
8 9 (2.81%) NoSQL
9 7 (2.19%) Ataccama
9 7 (2.19%) Data Lake
10 6 (1.88%) DynamoDB
11 5 (1.56%) Azure SQL Database
11 5 (1.56%) BigQuery
12 4 (1.25%) SQL Server Reporting Services
13 3 (0.94%) Amazon RDS
13 3 (0.94%) Elasticsearch
13 3 (0.94%) Oracle Exadata
Development Applications
1 58 (18.13%) GitLab
2 48 (15.00%) Jenkins
3 44 (13.75%) Git
4 29 (9.06%) JIRA
5 15 (4.69%) JUnit
5 15 (4.69%) Selenium
6 14 (4.38%) Claude Code
6 14 (4.38%) REST Assured
7 13 (4.06%) Sonatype Nexus
8 11 (3.44%) Cucumber
8 11 (3.44%) Postman
8 11 (3.44%) SonarQube
9 9 (2.81%) Mockito
10 8 (2.50%) Maven
11 7 (2.19%) Gradle
12 6 (1.88%) Gatling
13 4 (1.25%) Bitbucket Server
13 4 (1.25%) ClearCase
14 3 (0.94%) LoadRunner
14 3 (0.94%) Zephyr
General
1 64 (20.00%) Finance
2 52 (16.25%) Social Skills
3 42 (13.13%) Public Sector
4 27 (8.44%) Banking
5 26 (8.13%) Analytical Skills
6 16 (5.00%) Retail
7 12 (3.75%) Military
8 5 (1.56%) Manufacturing
9 4 (1.25%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (0.94%) Aerospace
10 3 (0.94%) Health Technology
11 2 (0.63%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (0.63%) Law
11 2 (0.63%) Publishing
12 1 (0.31%) Billing
12 1 (0.31%) Legal
12 1 (0.31%) Organisational Skills
12 1 (0.31%) Police
12 1 (0.31%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.31%) Social Housing
Job Titles
1 68 (21.25%) Senior
2 67 (20.94%) DevOps Engineer
3 48 (15.00%) Developer
4 43 (13.44%) Lead
5 27 (8.44%) Architect
6 25 (7.81%) Cloud Engineer
7 20 (6.25%) Senior DevOps
8 19 (5.94%) Senior DevOps Engineer
8 19 (5.94%) Software Engineer
9 17 (5.31%) AWS Engineer
9 17 (5.31%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 16 (5.00%) Security Engineer
11 15 (4.69%) Analyst
12 14 (4.38%) DBA
13 12 (3.75%) Azure Engineer
13 12 (3.75%) Consultant
13 12 (3.75%) Java Developer
13 12 (3.75%) SQL DBA
14 11 (3.44%) Solutions Architect
15 10 (3.13%) Lead DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 117 (36.56%) Terraform
2 33 (10.31%) REST
2 33 (10.31%) Spring Boot
3 30 (9.38%) Kafka
3 30 (9.38%) Spring
4 25 (7.81%) React
5 23 (7.19%) Node.js
6 17 (5.31%) JSON
7 16 (5.00%) Playwright
8 13 (4.06%) .NET
8 13 (4.06%) RESTful
9 10 (3.13%) PySpark
10 9 (2.81%) HTML
10 9 (2.81%) XML
11 8 (2.50%) Next.js
12 7 (2.19%) CSS
13 6 (1.88%) ADO
13 6 (1.88%) AngularJS
13 6 (1.88%) ARM Templates
14 5 (1.56%) Langfuse
Miscellaneous
1 77 (24.06%) Cloud Native
2 18 (5.63%) Security Posture
3 16 (5.00%) Replication
4 15 (4.69%) Management Information System
5 13 (4.06%) Clustering
5 13 (4.06%) Data Structures
5 13 (4.06%) Distributed Systems
5 13 (4.06%) Hybrid Cloud
5 13 (4.06%) Onboarding
5 13 (4.06%) Product Ownership
6 10 (3.13%) Data Centre
7 9 (2.81%) Algorithms
8 8 (2.50%) Legacy Systems
9 6 (1.88%) Cloud Security Posture
9 6 (1.88%) Enterprise Software
9 6 (1.88%) Public Cloud
10 5 (1.56%) AI Agents
10 5 (1.56%) Data Protection Act
10 5 (1.56%) Enterprise Cloud
11 4 (1.25%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 40 (12.50%) Linux
2 34 (10.63%) Windows
3 18 (5.63%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 13 (4.06%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.94%) AIX
5 3 (0.94%) Unix
6 2 (0.63%) VMS
7 1 (0.31%) Android
7 1 (0.31%) Apple iOS
7 1 (0.31%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 202 (63.13%) CI/CD
2 114 (35.63%) Agile
3 95 (29.69%) Infrastructure as Code
4 69 (21.56%) Observability
5 61 (19.06%) Test Automation
6 57 (17.81%) Microservices
7 56 (17.50%) Continuous Improvement
8 53 (16.56%) Containerisation
9 51 (15.94%) AI
10 49 (15.31%) Software Engineering
11 46 (14.38%) Migration
12 37 (11.56%) Platform Engineering
12 37 (11.56%) Scrum
12 37 (11.56%) Technical Leadership
13 34 (10.63%) Cloud Security
13 34 (10.63%) Event-Driven
14 33 (10.31%) Infrastructure Automation
14 33 (10.31%) Problem-Solving
14 33 (10.31%) Roadmaps
14 33 (10.31%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 85 (26.56%) Python
2 76 (23.75%) Java
3 60 (18.75%) SQL
4 48 (15.00%) PowerShell
5 34 (10.63%) Bash
6 27 (8.44%) JavaScript
7 21 (6.56%) C#
7 21 (6.56%) TypeScript
8 18 (5.63%) Bicep
9 17 (5.31%) T-SQL
10 6 (1.88%) Search Processing Language
11 4 (1.25%) VB
11 4 (1.25%) VB6
12 3 (0.94%) Rust
12 3 (0.94%) Shell Script
13 2 (0.63%) PROC SQL
13 2 (0.63%) Scala
14 1 (0.31%) ABAP
14 1 (0.31%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 1 (0.31%) Go
Qualifications
1 93 (29.06%) Security Cleared
2 79 (24.69%) SC Cleared
3 38 (11.88%) Degree
4 31 (9.69%) Azure Certification
5 29 (9.06%) BPSS Clearance
6 25 (7.81%) AWS Certification
7 17 (5.31%) CISSP
7 17 (5.31%) Microsoft Certification
8 9 (2.81%) ITIL Foundation Certificate
9 8 (2.50%) DV Cleared
10 7 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
11 4 (1.25%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.94%) ITIL Certification
13 2 (0.63%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 1 (0.31%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 1 (0.31%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
14 1 (0.31%) CCIE
14 1 (0.31%) CCNP
14 1 (0.31%) Cisco Certification
14 1 (0.31%) SAFe Agilist
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 33 (10.31%) QA
2 19 (5.94%) Data Quality
3 13 (4.06%) Accessibility
4 6 (1.88%) GDPR
5 4 (1.25%) PMO
6 3 (0.94%) NCSC
7 2 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 2 (0.63%) SLA
7 2 (0.63%) WCAG
8 1 (0.31%) Actionable Recommendations
8 1 (0.31%) California Consumer Privacy Act
8 1 (0.31%) HIPAA
8 1 (0.31%) NIST
8 1 (0.31%) P3O
8 1 (0.31%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 76 (23.75%) Docker
2 11 (3.44%) Virtual Machines
3 6 (1.88%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.94%) Oracle RAC
4 3 (0.94%) VMware Infrastructure
5 2 (0.63%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 1 (0.31%) Microsoft App-V
6 1 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
6 1 (0.31%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 95 (29.69%) Kubernetes
2 36 (11.25%) Ansible
3 17 (5.31%) Grafana
4 15 (4.69%) Progress Chef
5 14 (4.38%) Prometheus
6 10 (3.13%) SCOM
7 8 (2.50%) Istio
8 6 (1.88%) Microsoft Intune
9 4 (1.25%) Argo
10 3 (0.94%) Data Guard
10 3 (0.94%) Oracle RMAN
10 3 (0.94%) Packer
11 2 (0.63%) Failover Clustering
12 1 (0.31%) Consul
12 1 (0.31%) Jamf Pro
12 1 (0.31%) Kibana
12 1 (0.31%) Puppet
12 1 (0.31%) Rancher
12 1 (0.31%) vRealize
12 1 (0.31%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 56 (17.50%) Microsoft
2 27 (8.44%) Google
3 20 (6.25%) ServiceNow
4 17 (5.31%) Red Hat
5 16 (5.00%) Splunk
6 15 (4.69%) Oracle
7 12 (3.75%) Palo Alto
7 12 (3.75%) SAP
8 11 (3.44%) F5
9 10 (3.13%) Aruba
9 10 (3.13%) Dynatrace
10 9 (2.81%) Arista
11 6 (1.88%) IBM
11 6 (1.88%) OpenAI
11 6 (1.88%) Salesforce
12 5 (1.56%) Atlassian
12 5 (1.56%) Informatica
12 5 (1.56%) Veracode
13 4 (1.25%) Databricks
14 3 (0.94%) AppDynamics