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 £513, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 29 May 2026.

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

6 months to
29 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 119 110 144
Rank change year-on-year -9 +34 -32
Contract jobs requiring a DevOps Engineer 89 46 55
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 1.49% 1.57% 0.98%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.62% 1.73% 1.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 64 33 48
10th Percentile £450 £413 £396
25th Percentile £462 £463 £442
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -10.64%
75th Percentile £581 £600 £616
90th Percentile £688 £675 £675
England median daily rate £505 £525 £538
% change year-on-year -3.85% -2.33% -12.24%
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 £66.00
% change year-on-year -18.16% +24.97% -8.33%

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 5,493 2,666 5,149
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.70% 91.27% 92.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,377 1,792 3,079
10th Percentile £300 £220 £229
25th Percentile £413 £375 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% - -
75th Percentile £613 £600 £624
90th Percentile £700 £650 £688
England median daily rate £515 £520 £525
% change year-on-year -0.91% -1.00% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 539 163 509
10th Percentile £15.08 £14.20 £12.85
25th Percentile £24.25 £17.23 £18.32
Median hourly rate £50.00 £33.89 £48.00
Median % change year-on-year +47.56% -29.41% -4.00%
75th Percentile £80.15 £63.75 £63.75
90th Percentile £88.00 £75.00 £77.50
England median hourly rate £45.00 £29.07 £37.50
% change year-on-year +54.80% -22.48% -16.67%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 -36 46 £492 -1.60% 1
Buckinghamshire -15 24 £492 -
Hampshire -17 22 £525 +2.44% 3
Berkshire -40 20 £550 +10.00% 1
Surrey - 20 £675 -
Oxfordshire - 2 £525 -
Kent -7 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 29 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 89 (100.00%) DevOps
2 52 (58.43%) Azure
2 52 (58.43%) Security Cleared
3 45 (50.56%) CI/CD
3 45 (50.56%) SC Cleared
4 30 (33.71%) Terraform
5 29 (32.58%) Azure DevOps
6 27 (30.34%) Infrastructure as Code
7 25 (28.09%) Agile
7 25 (28.09%) Python
8 24 (26.97%) Kubernetes
9 18 (20.22%) Containerisation
10 17 (19.10%) Observability
11 16 (17.98%) AWS
11 16 (17.98%) Grafana
11 16 (17.98%) Microsoft
11 16 (17.98%) Prometheus
11 16 (17.98%) Software Engineering
12 15 (16.85%) Linux
13 14 (15.73%) Bash
14 13 (14.61%) Ansible
14 13 (14.61%) GitHub
14 13 (14.61%) Red Hat
15 12 (13.48%) Cybersecurity
15 12 (13.48%) GitHub Actions
16 11 (12.36%) PowerShell
16 11 (12.36%) YAML
17 10 (11.24%) GitLab
18 9 (10.11%) Argo
18 9 (10.11%) Docker

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 (2.25%) IIS
2 1 (1.12%) Apache
Cloud Services
1 52 (58.43%) Azure
2 29 (32.58%) Azure DevOps
3 16 (17.98%) AWS
4 13 (14.61%) GitHub
5 12 (13.48%) GitHub Actions
6 8 (8.99%) OpenShift
6 8 (8.99%) Power Platform
7 7 (7.87%) Amazon EKS
8 6 (6.74%) Azure Monitor
8 6 (6.74%) Cloud Computing
9 5 (5.62%) Azure Key Vault
10 4 (4.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 4 (4.49%) Amazon ECS
11 2 (2.25%) Entra ID
12 1 (1.12%) Amazon OpenSearch
12 1 (1.12%) Azure AKS
12 1 (1.12%) Azure Data Factory
12 1 (1.12%) Azure Pipelines
12 1 (1.12%) IaaS
12 1 (1.12%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 3 (3.37%) Firewall
2 1 (1.12%) DHCP
2 1 (1.12%) DNS
2 1 (1.12%) SAN
2 1 (1.12%) SNMP
2 1 (1.12%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (8.99%) Power BI
2 7 (7.87%) PostgreSQL
2 7 (7.87%) Redis
3 1 (1.12%) Delta Lake
3 1 (1.12%) Relational Database
3 1 (1.12%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 10 (11.24%) GitLab
2 4 (4.49%) Git
3 3 (3.37%) Jenkins
4 2 (2.25%) SonarQube
4 2 (2.25%) Sonatype Nexus
5 1 (1.12%) Artifactory
5 1 (1.12%) JIRA
5 1 (1.12%) Postman
5 1 (1.12%) Visual Studio
5 1 (1.12%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 7 (7.87%) Social Skills
2 6 (6.74%) Public Sector
3 3 (3.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 1 (1.12%) Finance
4 1 (1.12%) Health Technology
4 1 (1.12%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (12.36%) YAML
2 7 (7.87%) Kafka
2 7 (7.87%) Keycloak
3 6 (6.74%) JSON
3 6 (6.74%) XML
4 5 (5.62%) ARM Templates
5 4 (4.49%) Loki
6 3 (3.37%) Elastic Stack
7 2 (2.25%) .NET
7 2 (2.25%) GraphQL
7 2 (2.25%) Node.js
7 2 (2.25%) REST
8 1 (1.12%) AngularJS
8 1 (1.12%) ModSecurity
8 1 (1.12%) React
8 1 (1.12%) SAP Fiori
8 1 (1.12%) SAP PI
8 1 (1.12%) SAPUI5
8 1 (1.12%) Vue
8 1 (1.12%) ZeroMQ
Miscellaneous
1 10 (11.24%) Cloud Native
2 5 (5.62%) Virtual Team
3 1 (1.12%) Hybrid Cloud
3 1 (1.12%) Onboarding
3 1 (1.12%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 15 (16.85%) Linux
2 6 (6.74%) Windows
3 3 (3.37%) Windows 10
4 1 (1.12%) Ubuntu
4 1 (1.12%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 89 (100.00%) DevOps
2 45 (50.56%) CI/CD
3 27 (30.34%) Infrastructure as Code
4 25 (28.09%) Agile
5 18 (20.22%) Containerisation
6 17 (19.10%) Observability
7 16 (17.98%) Software Engineering
8 12 (13.48%) Cybersecurity
9 9 (10.11%) GitOps
9 9 (10.11%) Problem-Solving
10 8 (8.99%) Business Intelligence
10 8 (8.99%) Platform Engineering
11 7 (7.87%) Root Cause Analysis
12 6 (6.74%) Configuration Management
12 6 (6.74%) Continuous Improvement
12 6 (6.74%) Scrum
12 6 (6.74%) SDLC
12 6 (6.74%) Site Reliability Engineering
13 5 (5.62%) Cost Optimisation
13 5 (5.62%) Incident Response
Programming Languages
1 25 (28.09%) Python
2 14 (15.73%) Bash
3 11 (12.36%) PowerShell
4 9 (10.11%) Java
5 4 (4.49%) C#
6 3 (3.37%) JavaScript
7 2 (2.25%) Go
7 2 (2.25%) Scala
7 2 (2.25%) TypeScript
8 1 (1.12%) ABAP
8 1 (1.12%) Bicep
8 1 (1.12%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 52 (58.43%) Security Cleared
2 45 (50.56%) SC Cleared
3 7 (7.87%) DV Cleared
4 3 (3.37%) Azure Certification
5 1 (1.12%) Computer Science Degree
5 1 (1.12%) Degree
5 1 (1.12%) OCP
5 1 (1.12%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (3.37%) NCSC
1 3 (3.37%) QA
2 1 (1.12%) GDPR
2 1 (1.12%) PCI DSS
2 1 (1.12%) SLA
System Software
1 9 (10.11%) Docker
2 7 (7.87%) Virtual Machines
3 4 (4.49%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (2.25%) Active Directory
5 1 (1.12%) DFS Replication
5 1 (1.12%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 30 (33.71%) Terraform
2 24 (26.97%) Kubernetes
3 16 (17.98%) Grafana
3 16 (17.98%) Prometheus
4 13 (14.61%) Ansible
5 9 (10.11%) Argo
6 4 (4.49%) Istio
6 4 (4.49%) linkerd
6 4 (4.49%) Puppet
7 3 (3.37%) Rancher
8 1 (1.12%) Fluentd
8 1 (1.12%) Packer
8 1 (1.12%) Podman
Vendors
1 16 (17.98%) Microsoft
2 13 (14.61%) Red Hat
3 9 (10.11%) Splunk
3 9 (10.11%) VMware
4 2 (2.25%) Databricks
5 1 (1.12%) Arista
5 1 (1.12%) Checkmarx
5 1 (1.12%) Ericsson
5 1 (1.12%) Fortinet
5 1 (1.12%) Mavenir
5 1 (1.12%) Oracle
5 1 (1.12%) SAP
5 1 (1.12%) ServiceNow