DevOps Engineer Contract Job Trends in the South East

Development Operations Engineer
England > South East

The median Development Operations Engineer daily rate in the South East is £506, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 4 May 2026.

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

6 months to
4 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 118 104 140
Rank change year-on-year -14 +36 -34
Contract jobs requiring a DevOps Engineer 91 50 52
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 1.56% 1.67% 0.94%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.70% 1.82% 1.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 64 39 44
10th Percentile £419 £413 £391
25th Percentile £462 £463 £447
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £506 £550 £528
Median % change year-on-year -7.95% +4.27% -12.08%
75th Percentile £600 £663 £616
90th Percentile £688 £678 £675
England median daily rate £513 £550 £538
% change year-on-year -6.82% +2.33% -11.89%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £46.25 - -
Median hourly rate £57.50 - -
75th Percentile £68.75 - -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £67.50 £82.48 £59.75
% change year-on-year -18.16% +38.04% +3.91%

All Contract IT Job Roles
South East

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the South East. 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 South East with a recognized job title 5,347 2,754 5,095
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.86% 91.77% 92.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,325 1,821 3,078
10th Percentile £300 £248 £213
25th Percentile £413 £400 £397
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year +3.00% - -
75th Percentile £613 £600 £618
90th Percentile £713 £665 £688
England median daily rate £511 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -2.67% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 506 164 480
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.78
25th Percentile £24.30 £20.09 £18.32
Median hourly rate £55.00 £32.50 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +69.23% -31.58% -1.86%
75th Percentile £81.76 £63.75 £62.50
90th Percentile £88.00 £75.00 £77.04
England median hourly rate £47.00 £30.62 £36.50
% change year-on-year +53.52% -16.12% -18.03%

DevOps Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'DevOps Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East.

DevOps Engineer job vacancy trend in the South East

DevOps Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the South East.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the South East

DevOps Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the South East

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DevOps Engineer in the South East over the 6 months to 4 May 2026.

Daily rate histogram for DevOps Engineer in the South East

DevOps Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the South East.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for DevOps Engineer job vacancies in the South East

DevOps Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram in the South East

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing DevOps Engineer in the South East over the 6 months to 4 May 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps Engineer in the South East

DevOps Engineer
Contract Job Locations in the South East

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing DevOps Engineer within the South East region over the 6 months to 4 May 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
Thames Valley -19 46 £492 -18.00% 18
Hampshire -14 26 £525 -4.55% 3
Buckinghamshire - 24 £492 - 2
Berkshire -34 19 £475 -20.83% 9
Surrey +2 18 £675 +3.85% 5
Oxfordshire - 3 £525 - 7
Kent -11 1 £600 +5.54%
DevOps Engineer
England

DevOps Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East

For the 6 months to 4 May 2026, DevOps Engineer 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 South East region featuring DevOps Engineer in the job title.

1 91 (100.00%) DevOps
2 57 (62.64%) Azure
3 56 (61.54%) Security Cleared
4 48 (52.75%) SC Cleared
5 45 (49.45%) CI/CD
6 33 (36.26%) Terraform
7 31 (34.07%) Python
8 30 (32.97%) Azure DevOps
8 30 (32.97%) Infrastructure as Code
9 29 (31.87%) Kubernetes
10 28 (30.77%) Agile
11 24 (26.37%) Containerisation
12 23 (25.27%) AWS
13 21 (23.08%) Observability
14 20 (21.98%) Grafana
14 20 (21.98%) Prometheus
15 19 (20.88%) Ansible
15 19 (20.88%) Bash
16 17 (18.68%) GitHub
16 17 (18.68%) Linux
17 16 (17.58%) GitHub Actions
17 16 (17.58%) Microsoft
17 16 (17.58%) Software Engineering
18 15 (16.48%) Red Hat
19 14 (15.38%) GitLab
19 14 (15.38%) PowerShell
20 13 (14.29%) Cybersecurity
20 13 (14.29%) Docker
20 13 (14.29%) Platform Engineering
20 13 (14.29%) Splunk

DevOps Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East 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 2 (2.20%) IIS
2 1 (1.10%) Apache
Cloud Services
1 57 (62.64%) Azure
2 30 (32.97%) Azure DevOps
3 23 (25.27%) AWS
4 17 (18.68%) GitHub
5 16 (17.58%) GitHub Actions
6 9 (9.89%) Amazon EKS
6 9 (9.89%) OpenShift
7 8 (8.79%) Power Platform
8 6 (6.59%) Azure Monitor
8 6 (6.59%) Cloud Computing
9 5 (5.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 5 (5.49%) Azure Key Vault
10 4 (4.40%) Amazon ECS
10 4 (4.40%) Azure AKS
10 4 (4.40%) Serverless
11 3 (3.30%) Azure Functions
11 3 (3.30%) Entra ID
12 2 (2.20%) AWS CloudFormation
12 2 (2.20%) GCP
12 2 (2.20%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 4 (4.40%) Firewall
2 2 (2.20%) DNS
2 2 (2.20%) VPN
3 1 (1.10%) DHCP
3 1 (1.10%) HTTP
3 1 (1.10%) Internet
3 1 (1.10%) Network Security
3 1 (1.10%) SAN
3 1 (1.10%) SNMP
3 1 (1.10%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (10.99%) PostgreSQL
1 10 (10.99%) Redis
2 8 (8.79%) Power BI
3 1 (1.10%) Amazon Aurora
3 1 (1.10%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (1.10%) Delta Lake
3 1 (1.10%) Relational Database
3 1 (1.10%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 14 (15.38%) GitLab
2 7 (7.69%) Git
3 6 (6.59%) Jenkins
4 1 (1.10%) Artifactory
4 1 (1.10%) JIRA
4 1 (1.10%) Postman
4 1 (1.10%) SonarQube
4 1 (1.10%) Sonatype Nexus
4 1 (1.10%) Visual Studio
4 1 (1.10%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 7 (7.69%) Public Sector
2 6 (6.59%) Social Skills
3 2 (2.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 1 (1.10%) Analytical Skills
4 1 (1.10%) Documentation Skills
4 1 (1.10%) Finance
4 1 (1.10%) Health Technology
4 1 (1.10%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (12.09%) Keycloak
1 11 (12.09%) YAML
2 10 (10.99%) Kafka
3 6 (6.59%) JSON
3 6 (6.59%) XML
4 4 (4.40%) .NET
4 4 (4.40%) Elastic Stack
4 4 (4.40%) GraphQL
4 4 (4.40%) Loki
4 4 (4.40%) REST
5 3 (3.30%) ARM Templates
6 2 (2.20%) .NET Core
6 2 (2.20%) Node.js
7 1 (1.10%) AngularJS
7 1 (1.10%) React
7 1 (1.10%) SAP Fiori
7 1 (1.10%) SAP PI
7 1 (1.10%) SAPUI5
7 1 (1.10%) Vue
7 1 (1.10%) ZeroMQ
Miscellaneous
1 11 (12.09%) Cloud Native
2 5 (5.49%) Virtual Team
3 2 (2.20%) Product Ownership
4 1 (1.10%) Hybrid Cloud
4 1 (1.10%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 17 (18.68%) Linux
2 6 (6.59%) Windows
3 3 (3.30%) Windows 10
4 1 (1.10%) Ubuntu
4 1 (1.10%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 91 (100.00%) DevOps
2 45 (49.45%) CI/CD
3 30 (32.97%) Infrastructure as Code
4 28 (30.77%) Agile
5 24 (26.37%) Containerisation
6 21 (23.08%) Observability
7 16 (17.58%) Software Engineering
8 13 (14.29%) Cybersecurity
8 13 (14.29%) Platform Engineering
9 12 (13.19%) GitOps
10 9 (9.89%) DevSecOps
10 9 (9.89%) Problem-Solving
10 9 (9.89%) SDLC
10 9 (9.89%) Site Reliability Engineering
11 8 (8.79%) Business Intelligence
11 8 (8.79%) Configuration Management
11 8 (8.79%) Root Cause Analysis
12 7 (7.69%) Scrum
13 6 (6.59%) Continuous Improvement
13 6 (6.59%) Test Automation
Programming Languages
1 31 (34.07%) Python
2 19 (20.88%) Bash
3 14 (15.38%) PowerShell
4 8 (8.79%) Java
5 6 (6.59%) C#
6 5 (5.49%) JavaScript
7 2 (2.20%) Go
7 2 (2.20%) PHP
7 2 (2.20%) Scala
7 2 (2.20%) TypeScript
8 1 (1.10%) ABAP
8 1 (1.10%) Bicep
8 1 (1.10%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 56 (61.54%) Security Cleared
2 48 (52.75%) SC Cleared
3 9 (9.89%) DV Cleared
4 2 (2.20%) Degree
5 1 (1.10%) Azure Certification
5 1 (1.10%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.10%) OCP
5 1 (1.10%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (5.49%) NCSC
2 3 (3.30%) QA
3 1 (1.10%) GDPR
3 1 (1.10%) PCI DSS
3 1 (1.10%) SLA
System Software
1 13 (14.29%) Docker
2 4 (4.40%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (3.30%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (2.20%) Active Directory
5 1 (1.10%) DFS Replication
5 1 (1.10%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 33 (36.26%) Terraform
2 29 (31.87%) Kubernetes
3 20 (21.98%) Grafana
3 20 (21.98%) Prometheus
4 19 (20.88%) Ansible
5 11 (12.09%) Argo
6 7 (7.69%) Puppet
7 6 (6.59%) Istio
7 6 (6.59%) linkerd
8 4 (4.40%) Rancher
9 2 (2.20%) Podman
9 2 (2.20%) Progress Chef
10 1 (1.10%) Fluentd
10 1 (1.10%) Packer
Vendors
1 16 (17.58%) Microsoft
2 15 (16.48%) Red Hat
3 13 (14.29%) Splunk
4 12 (13.19%) VMware
5 2 (2.20%) Databricks
6 1 (1.10%) Arista
6 1 (1.10%) Checkmarx
6 1 (1.10%) Ericsson
6 1 (1.10%) Fortinet
6 1 (1.10%) Google
6 1 (1.10%) Mavenir
6 1 (1.10%) Oracle
6 1 (1.10%) SAP
6 1 (1.10%) ServiceNow
6 1 (1.10%) Tenable