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 £492, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 4 August 2026.

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

 6 months to
4 Aug 2026		 Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 167 110 138
Rank change year-on-year -57 +28 -55
Contract jobs requiring a DevOps Engineer 62 54 54
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 0.94% 1.55% 1.09%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.01% 1.71% 1.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 48 40 46
10th Percentile £450 £335 £425
25th Percentile £462 £413 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £475 £575
Median % change year-on-year +3.58% -17.39% -4.17%
75th Percentile £550 £525 £655
90th Percentile £598 £566 £681
England median daily rate £513 £500 £550
% change year-on-year +2.50% -9.09% -8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £66.25 - -
Median hourly rate £67.50 - -
75th Percentile £68.75 - -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £70.00 £82.48 £74.00
% change year-on-year -15.13% +11.46% +2.78%

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 6,116 3,159 4,566
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.34% 90.59% 91.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,598 2,044 2,783
10th Percentile £303 £208 £250
25th Percentile £425 £375 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% +5.00%
75th Percentile £625 £600 £638
90th Percentile £714 £663 £697
England median daily rate £525 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 720 259 379
10th Percentile £16.24 £13.83 £15.96
25th Percentile £26.25 £15.50 £26.25
Median hourly rate £54.00 £25.15 £57.35
Median % change year-on-year +114.71% -56.15% +14.70%
75th Percentile £74.95 £58.72 £72.33
90th Percentile £87.23 £75.00 £80.00
England median hourly rate £45.00 £25.32 £45.00
% change year-on-year +77.73% -43.73% +5.88%

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 August 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
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 August 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 -33 44 £492 +15.76% 6
Buckinghamshire -16 26 £492 - 2
Berkshire -40 16 £550 +29.41% 4
Surrey - 13 £475 - 5
Hampshire -48 5 £513 +7.89% 3
Oxfordshire -17 2 £525 -
DevOps Engineer
England

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

For the 6 months to 4 August 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 62 (100.00%) DevOps
2 42 (67.74%) Azure
3 39 (62.90%) CI/CD
4 32 (51.61%) Security Cleared
5 31 (50.00%) SC Cleared
6 24 (38.71%) Azure DevOps
6 24 (38.71%) Terraform
7 21 (33.87%) Agile
7 21 (33.87%) Infrastructure as Code
8 17 (27.42%) Microsoft
9 16 (25.81%) Kubernetes
10 12 (19.35%) Containerisation
11 11 (17.74%) Cybersecurity
12 10 (16.13%) AWS
12 10 (16.13%) Python
13 9 (14.52%) Docker
13 9 (14.52%) Problem-Solving
13 9 (14.52%) Software Engineering
14 8 (12.90%) Business Intelligence
14 8 (12.90%) Java
14 8 (12.90%) Power BI
14 8 (12.90%) Power Platform
15 7 (11.29%) Continuous Improvement
15 7 (11.29%) GitHub
15 7 (11.29%) GitHub Actions
15 7 (11.29%) Grafana
15 7 (11.29%) Observability
15 7 (11.29%) Prometheus
15 7 (11.29%) Virtual Machines
16 6 (9.68%) Analytics

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 1 (1.61%) IIS
Cloud Services
1 42 (67.74%) Azure
2 24 (38.71%) Azure DevOps
3 10 (16.13%) AWS
4 8 (12.90%) Power Platform
5 7 (11.29%) GitHub
5 7 (11.29%) GitHub Actions
6 5 (8.06%) Amazon EKS
7 3 (4.84%) Azure Monitor
8 2 (3.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 2 (3.23%) Amazon ECS
8 2 (3.23%) Azure AI
8 2 (3.23%) Azure AKS
8 2 (3.23%) Azure Key Vault
8 2 (3.23%) Entra ID
8 2 (3.23%) OpenShift
9 1 (1.61%) Azure Data Factory
9 1 (1.61%) Azure Logic Apps
9 1 (1.61%) Azure Pipelines
9 1 (1.61%) PaaS
9 1 (1.61%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 2 (3.23%) Firewall
1 2 (3.23%) VPN
2 1 (1.61%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (12.90%) Power BI
2 2 (3.23%) PostgreSQL
2 2 (3.23%) Redis
Development Applications
1 5 (8.06%) GitLab
2 3 (4.84%) Git
3 1 (1.61%) Jenkins
3 1 (1.61%) JIRA
3 1 (1.61%) SonarQube
3 1 (1.61%) Sonatype Nexus
3 1 (1.61%) Visual Studio
General
1 7 (11.29%) Social Skills
2 6 (9.68%) Public Sector
3 4 (6.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 1 (1.61%) Finance
4 1 (1.61%) Health Technology
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (6.45%) ARM Templates
1 4 (6.45%) YAML
2 2 (3.23%) .NET
2 2 (3.23%) GraphQL
2 2 (3.23%) Kafka
2 2 (3.23%) Keycloak
2 2 (3.23%) Loki
2 2 (3.23%) Node.js
3 1 (1.61%) Elastic Stack
3 1 (1.61%) ModSecurity
3 1 (1.61%) OpenTelemetry
3 1 (1.61%) SAP Fiori
3 1 (1.61%) SAP PI
3 1 (1.61%) SAPUI5
Miscellaneous
1 9 (14.52%) Cloud Native
2 5 (8.06%) Virtual Team
3 2 (3.23%) Hybrid Cloud
4 1 (1.61%) Enterprise Software
4 1 (1.61%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 6 (9.68%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 62 (100.00%) DevOps
2 39 (62.90%) CI/CD
3 21 (33.87%) Agile
3 21 (33.87%) Infrastructure as Code
4 12 (19.35%) Containerisation
5 11 (17.74%) Cybersecurity
6 9 (14.52%) Problem-Solving
6 9 (14.52%) Software Engineering
7 8 (12.90%) Business Intelligence
8 7 (11.29%) Continuous Improvement
8 7 (11.29%) Observability
9 6 (9.68%) Analytics
9 6 (9.68%) Scrum
10 5 (8.06%) Cloud Security
10 5 (8.06%) Incident Response
10 5 (8.06%) Platform Engineering
10 5 (8.06%) Test Automation
11 4 (6.45%) Digital Innovation
11 4 (6.45%) Full-Stack Development
11 4 (6.45%) Site Reliability Engineering
Programming Languages
1 10 (16.13%) Python
2 8 (12.90%) Java
3 6 (9.68%) PowerShell
4 3 (4.84%) Bash
4 3 (4.84%) C#
5 2 (3.23%) Bicep
5 2 (3.23%) Go
5 2 (3.23%) JavaScript
5 2 (3.23%) Scala
5 2 (3.23%) TypeScript
6 1 (1.61%) ABAP
Qualifications
1 32 (51.61%) Security Cleared
2 31 (50.00%) SC Cleared
3 5 (8.06%) Azure Certification
4 3 (4.84%) DV Cleared
5 1 (1.61%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (1.61%) GDPR
1 1 (1.61%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 9 (14.52%) Docker
2 7 (11.29%) Virtual Machines
3 3 (4.84%) VMware Infrastructure
4 1 (1.61%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 24 (38.71%) Terraform
2 16 (25.81%) Kubernetes
3 7 (11.29%) Grafana
3 7 (11.29%) Prometheus
4 6 (9.68%) Ansible
5 3 (4.84%) Argo
5 3 (4.84%) Rancher
6 2 (3.23%) Puppet
Vendors
1 17 (27.42%) Microsoft
2 4 (6.45%) Splunk
3 3 (4.84%) VMware
4 2 (3.23%) Red Hat
5 1 (1.61%) Databricks
5 1 (1.61%) SAP
5 1 (1.61%) ServiceNow
29 DevOps Engineer jobs in the South East