Lead DevOps Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Lead Development Operations
UK > UK excluding London

The median Lead Development Operations daily rate in the UK excluding London is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 14 September 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 357 350 388
Rank change year-on-year -7 +38 +78
Contract jobs requiring a Lead DevOps 14 17 40
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 0.091% 0.095% 0.18%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.10% 0.10% 0.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 9 13 27
10th Percentile £443 £418 £535
25th Percentile £450 £500 £599
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £650
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -15.38% -5.80%
75th Percentile £575 £659 £731
90th Percentile £644 £671 £805
UK median daily rate £575 £650 £650
% change year-on-year -11.54% - -6.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £52.00
UK median hourly rate - - £52.00

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK excluding London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the UK excluding London. 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 UK excluding London with a recognized job title 13,780 16,491 20,504
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 89.87% 92.30% 94.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,473 9,642 13,706
10th Percentile £213 £221 £225
25th Percentile £361 £378 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - +1.01%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £652 £680 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,243 1,460 1,195
10th Percentile £13.29 £14.41 £14.00
25th Percentile £16.17 £19.50 £17.75
Median hourly rate £25.15 £45.00 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year -44.11% +8.43% +88.64%
75th Percentile £51.65 £66.61 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.83 £75.00 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £43.75
% change year-on-year -41.51% -1.71% +68.27%

Lead DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings that featured Lead DevOps in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Lead DevOps in the UK excluding London

Lead DevOps
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK excluding London

Lead DevOps
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Lead DevOps in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 14 September 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Lead DevOps in the UK excluding London

Lead DevOps
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Lead DevOps job vacancies in the UK excluding London

Lead DevOps
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

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 UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 14 September 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
North of England -8 9 £475 -5.00% 1
Yorkshire -10 7 £500 -
Midlands -11 4 £575 +17.95% 2
North West -9 3 £450 -
West Midlands -17 3 £569 +16.67%
South West +22 2 £525 -4.55% 3
East Midlands - 1 £638 - 2
Lead DevOps
UK

Lead DevOps Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 14 September 2025, Lead DevOps contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the UK excluding London region featuring Lead DevOps in the job title.

1 14 (100.00%) DevOps
2 11 (78.57%) Terraform
3 8 (57.14%) Kubernetes
3 8 (57.14%) CI/CD
4 7 (50.00%) GitLab
4 7 (50.00%) AWS
5 6 (42.86%) Python
5 6 (42.86%) Ansible
5 6 (42.86%) Docker
5 6 (42.86%) Infrastructure as Code
6 5 (35.71%) Problem-Solving
6 5 (35.71%) AWS Certification
6 5 (35.71%) SC Cleared
6 5 (35.71%) Security Cleared
7 4 (28.57%) Azure
7 4 (28.57%) Puppet
7 4 (28.57%) GitHub
7 4 (28.57%) Jenkins
7 4 (28.57%) DevSecOps
7 4 (28.57%) Platform Engineering
8 3 (21.43%) NIST
8 3 (21.43%) Amazon GuardDuty
8 3 (21.43%) FinOps
8 3 (21.43%) SOC 2
8 3 (21.43%) Cost Optimisation
8 3 (21.43%) AWS KMS
8 3 (21.43%) GitHub Actions
8 3 (21.43%) Technical Leadership
8 3 (21.43%) Infrastructure Automation
8 3 (21.43%) Prometheus

Lead DevOps Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 1 (7.14%) Apache Spark
Cloud Services
1 7 (50.00%) AWS
2 4 (28.57%) Azure
2 4 (28.57%) GitHub
3 3 (21.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
3 3 (21.43%) Amazon GuardDuty
3 3 (21.43%) AWS KMS
3 3 (21.43%) AWS Lambda
3 3 (21.43%) Azure DevOps
3 3 (21.43%) GitHub Actions
3 3 (21.43%) Serverless
4 2 (14.29%) Amazon ECS
4 2 (14.29%) Amazon EKS
4 2 (14.29%) Amazon ElastiCache
4 2 (14.29%) Amazon Macie
4 2 (14.29%) AWS CloudFormation
4 2 (14.29%) AWS CloudTrail
4 2 (14.29%) AWS Direct Connect
4 2 (14.29%) AWS Fargate
4 2 (14.29%) IBM Cloud
4 2 (14.29%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (21.43%) DNS
2 2 (14.29%) Firewall
2 2 (14.29%) Network Security
2 2 (14.29%) SSL
2 2 (14.29%) TCP/IP
2 2 (14.29%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (14.29%) Amazon RDS
1 2 (14.29%) DynamoDB
2 1 (7.14%) Amazon Athena
2 1 (7.14%) Amazon Redshift
2 1 (7.14%) Flink
2 1 (7.14%) MongoDB
2 1 (7.14%) NoSQL
2 1 (7.14%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 7 (50.00%) GitLab
2 4 (28.57%) Jenkins
3 3 (21.43%) Git
4 1 (7.14%) JIRA
General
1 2 (14.29%) Analytical Skills
1 2 (14.29%) Finance
1 2 (14.29%) Public Sector
2 1 (7.14%) Social Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (14.29%) Elastic Stack
2 1 (7.14%) .NET
2 1 (7.14%) Apache Beam
2 1 (7.14%) JDBC
2 1 (7.14%) Kafka
2 1 (7.14%) Spark Streaming
2 1 (7.14%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 2 (14.29%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
2 1 (7.14%) Data Centre
2 1 (7.14%) Hybrid Cloud
2 1 (7.14%) NHS
2 1 (7.14%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 2 (14.29%) Linux
2 1 (7.14%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 14 (100.00%) DevOps
2 8 (57.14%) CI/CD
3 6 (42.86%) Infrastructure as Code
4 5 (35.71%) Problem-Solving
5 4 (28.57%) DevSecOps
5 4 (28.57%) Platform Engineering
6 3 (21.43%) Agile
6 3 (21.43%) Artificial Intelligence
6 3 (21.43%) Configuration Management
6 3 (21.43%) Cost Optimisation
6 3 (21.43%) FinOps
6 3 (21.43%) Infrastructure Automation
6 3 (21.43%) Technical Leadership
7 2 (14.29%) Continuous Improvement
7 2 (14.29%) Database Security
7 2 (14.29%) Network Load Balancing
7 2 (14.29%) Problem Management
7 2 (14.29%) Release Management
7 2 (14.29%) Resource Management
7 2 (14.29%) SIEM
Programming Languages
1 6 (42.86%) Python
2 2 (14.29%) Shell Script
3 1 (7.14%) Bash
3 1 (7.14%) Bicep
3 1 (7.14%) JavaScript
3 1 (7.14%) Ruby
3 1 (7.14%) SQL
Qualifications
1 5 (35.71%) AWS Certification
1 5 (35.71%) SC Cleared
1 5 (35.71%) Security Cleared
2 2 (14.29%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
2 2 (14.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
3 1 (7.14%) Azure Certification
3 1 (7.14%) ISTQB
3 1 (7.14%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (21.43%) GDPR
1 3 (21.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 3 (21.43%) NIST
1 3 (21.43%) SOC 2
2 2 (14.29%) Actionable Recommendations
3 1 (7.14%) QA
System Software
1 6 (42.86%) Docker
Systems Management
1 11 (78.57%) Terraform
2 8 (57.14%) Kubernetes
3 6 (42.86%) Ansible
4 4 (28.57%) Puppet
5 3 (21.43%) Prometheus
6 2 (14.29%) Argo
6 2 (14.29%) Grafana
6 2 (14.29%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 3 (21.43%) Red Hat
2 2 (14.29%) IBM
2 2 (14.29%) Splunk
3 1 (7.14%) InterSystems
3 1 (7.14%) Microsoft