YAML Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

YAML
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring YAML skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 3 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 339 296 345
Rank change year-on-year -43 +49 +72
Contract jobs citing YAML 62 46 57
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.34% 0.32% 0.29%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 1.86% 1.79% 1.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 43 29 43
10th Percentile £418 £475 £415
25th Percentile £472 £575 £462
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £613 £590
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% +3.81% +2.61%
75th Percentile £659 £663 £659
90th Percentile £700 £685 £679
UK median daily rate £513 £600 £576
% change year-on-year -14.58% +4.17% -4.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £46.25 - -
Median hourly rate £47.50 - £78.00
75th Percentile £48.75 - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK median hourly rate £47.50 £60.00 £77.50
% change year-on-year -20.83% -22.58% +39.95%

All Software Libraries and Frameworks
UK excluding London

YAML falls under the Software Libraries and Frameworks category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills in the UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills 3,338 2,571 3,403
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 18.26% 17.99% 17.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,199 1,600 2,329
10th Percentile £345 £340 £325
25th Percentile £405 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.60% - -4.76%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £685 £679
UK median daily rate £508 £538 £550
% change year-on-year -5.58% -2.27% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 167 57 134
10th Percentile £40.00 £22.00 £38.28
25th Percentile £46.25 £27.75 £46.18
Median hourly rate £63.00 £62.50 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +0.80% +19.05% -19.23%
75th Percentile £68.00 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £74.61 £77.50
UK median hourly rate £61.50 £62.50 £54.50
% change year-on-year -1.60% +14.68% -16.15%

YAML
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing YAML relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

YAML job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

YAML
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing YAML.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing YAML

YAML
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing YAML in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 3 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for YAML in the UK excluding London

YAML
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing YAML.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing YAML

YAML
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 YAML within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 3 January 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
North of England -39 22 £513 -12.02% 5
West Midlands -28 21 £700 +14.38% 5
Midlands -34 21 £700 +14.38% 7
Yorkshire -33 16 £525 -12.32% 4
South West +2 15 £700 +14.29% 1
South East -20 11 £435 -30.40% 8
North West -23 5 £420 +1.82% 1
East of England - 2 - -
Wales -3 1 - -
North East - 1 - -
YAML
UK

YAML
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 5 (8.06%) OpenStack
2 4 (6.45%) Confluence
3 1 (1.61%) Apache Airflow
3 1 (1.61%) IIS
3 1 (1.61%) SharePoint
Cloud Services
1 32 (51.61%) Azure
2 27 (43.55%) GitHub
3 18 (29.03%) Azure DevOps
4 11 (17.74%) AWS
5 9 (14.52%) GitHub Actions
5 9 (14.52%) OpenShift
6 8 (12.90%) GCP
7 7 (11.29%) Azure AKS
7 7 (11.29%) npm
8 6 (9.68%) Amazon EKS
8 6 (9.68%) AWS CloudFormation
8 6 (9.68%) Cloud Computing
8 6 (9.68%) Datadog
9 5 (8.06%) Azure Monitor
9 5 (8.06%) Google Kubernetes Engine
9 5 (8.06%) Pulumi
9 5 (8.06%) Serverless
10 4 (6.45%) Entra ID
11 3 (4.84%) AWS Lambda
12 2 (3.23%) IaaS
Communications & Networking
1 3 (4.84%) VPN
2 2 (3.23%) DNS
2 2 (3.23%) Firewall
2 2 (3.23%) HTTP
2 2 (3.23%) LAN
2 2 (3.23%) WAN
3 1 (1.61%) Kerberos
3 1 (1.61%) SD-WAN
3 1 (1.61%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (9.68%) Redis
2 5 (8.06%) PostgreSQL
3 3 (4.84%) SQL Server
4 2 (3.23%) Amazon RDS
4 2 (3.23%) MongoDB
5 1 (1.61%) Amazon Redshift
5 1 (1.61%) Apache Hive
5 1 (1.61%) Azure SQL Database
5 1 (1.61%) Big Data
5 1 (1.61%) Data Lake
5 1 (1.61%) Delta Lake
5 1 (1.61%) DynamoDB
5 1 (1.61%) Elasticsearch
5 1 (1.61%) Hadoop
5 1 (1.61%) Impala
5 1 (1.61%) MySQL
5 1 (1.61%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 17 (27.42%) SonarQube
2 14 (22.58%) Git
3 10 (16.13%) GitLab
4 8 (12.90%) Cypress.io
4 8 (12.90%) Jenkins
5 6 (9.68%) CircleCI
5 6 (9.68%) JIRA
5 6 (9.68%) Postman
6 5 (8.06%) Artifactory
6 5 (8.06%) Bitbucket
6 5 (8.06%) Gradle
6 5 (8.06%) JUnit
6 5 (8.06%) Maven
6 5 (8.06%) Selenium
6 5 (8.06%) Snyk
6 5 (8.06%) Sonatype Nexus
6 5 (8.06%) webpack
7 1 (1.61%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 1 (1.61%) Mocha
7 1 (1.61%) Visual Studio
General
1 11 (17.74%) Social Skills
2 6 (9.68%) Documentation Skills
3 4 (6.45%) Public Sector
4 3 (4.84%) Analytical Skills
5 2 (3.23%) Telecoms
6 1 (1.61%) Banking
6 1 (1.61%) Finance
6 1 (1.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 1 (1.61%) Military
Job Titles
1 20 (32.26%) DevOps Engineer
2 11 (17.74%) DevSecOps Engineer
3 9 (14.52%) Software Engineer
4 7 (11.29%) Developer
5 6 (9.68%) Lead
6 5 (8.06%) Architect
6 5 (8.06%) Senior
7 4 (6.45%) Full-Stack Developer
8 3 (4.84%) Azure Developer
8 3 (4.84%) Senior Software Engineer
9 2 (3.23%) Automation Specialist
9 2 (3.23%) Azure DevOps Engineer
9 2 (3.23%) Azure Engineer
9 2 (3.23%) Backend Developer
9 2 (3.23%) Cloud Developer
9 2 (3.23%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 2 (3.23%) Project Manager
9 2 (3.23%) Senior DevOps
9 2 (3.23%) Senior DevOps Engineer
9 2 (3.23%) Technical Leader
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (20.97%) JSON
2 11 (17.74%) .NET
3 8 (12.90%) Elastic Stack
4 7 (11.29%) Node.js
4 7 (11.29%) REST
4 7 (11.29%) XML
5 5 (8.06%) React
6 4 (6.45%) .NET Core
6 4 (6.45%) .NET Framework
7 3 (4.84%) Jest
7 3 (4.84%) OAuth
7 3 (4.84%) RESTful
8 2 (3.23%) ARM Templates
8 2 (3.23%) Entity Framework
8 2 (3.23%) Express.js
8 2 (3.23%) Kafka
8 2 (3.23%) Keycloak
8 2 (3.23%) Middleware
8 2 (3.23%) Nunjucks
9 1 (1.61%) OpenCV
Miscellaneous
1 5 (8.06%) Private Cloud
2 4 (6.45%) Cloud Native
3 2 (3.23%) Product Ownership
4 1 (1.61%) CUDA
4 1 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
4 1 (1.61%) Data Structures
4 1 (1.61%) Embedded Systems
4 1 (1.61%) Legacy Systems
4 1 (1.61%) Management Information System
4 1 (1.61%) Onboarding
4 1 (1.61%) Raspberry Pi
4 1 (1.61%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 21 (33.87%) Linux
2 7 (11.29%) Ubuntu
3 6 (9.68%) CentOS
3 6 (9.68%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (4.84%) Windows
5 1 (1.61%) Android
5 1 (1.61%) Robot Operating System
5 1 (1.61%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 56 (90.32%) DevOps
2 51 (82.26%) CI/CD
3 32 (51.61%) Infrastructure as Code
4 26 (41.94%) Containerisation
5 22 (35.48%) Test Automation
6 21 (33.87%) DevSecOps
7 18 (29.03%) Agile
8 17 (27.42%) RBAC
9 15 (24.19%) Platform Engineering
10 14 (22.58%) Software Engineering
11 13 (20.97%) ITSM
12 12 (19.35%) Continuous Improvement
12 12 (19.35%) Mentoring
13 11 (17.74%) Problem-Solving
13 11 (17.74%) Regulatory Compliance
14 9 (14.52%) Full-Stack Development
14 9 (14.52%) Stakeholder Management
15 8 (12.90%) Migration
16 7 (11.29%) Task Automation
16 7 (11.29%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 30 (48.39%) Python
2 10 (16.13%) SQL
3 7 (11.29%) Bash
3 7 (11.29%) PowerShell
4 6 (9.68%) Bicep
4 6 (9.68%) C#
4 6 (9.68%) Perl
4 6 (9.68%) Ruby
5 3 (4.84%) JavaScript
6 2 (3.23%) Java
6 2 (3.23%) TypeScript
7 1 (1.61%) C++
7 1 (1.61%) Go
7 1 (1.61%) Shell Script
7 1 (1.61%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 28 (45.16%) Security Cleared
2 21 (33.87%) SC Cleared
3 15 (24.19%) DV Cleared
4 6 (9.68%) RHCE
5 3 (4.84%) Azure Certification
6 2 (3.23%) Degree
6 2 (3.23%) Microsoft Certification
7 1 (1.61%) AWS Certification
7 1 (1.61%) BPSS Clearance
7 1 (1.61%) Computer Science Degree
7 1 (1.61%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (17.74%) NCSC
2 2 (3.23%) Accessibility
2 2 (3.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 2 (3.23%) WCAG
3 1 (1.61%) Cyber Essentials
3 1 (1.61%) QA
System Software
1 29 (46.77%) Docker
2 2 (3.23%) Active Directory
3 1 (1.61%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 31 (50.00%) Terraform
2 26 (41.94%) Ansible
3 25 (40.32%) Kubernetes
4 13 (20.97%) Puppet
5 11 (17.74%) Grafana
6 8 (12.90%) Prometheus
7 6 (9.68%) Podman
7 6 (9.68%) Progress Chef
8 2 (3.23%) Packer
8 2 (3.23%) Single Sign-On
9 1 (1.61%) Control-M
9 1 (1.61%) Docker Swarm
9 1 (1.61%) Kibana
9 1 (1.61%) logstash
9 1 (1.61%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 23 (37.10%) Red Hat
2 9 (14.52%) Splunk
3 5 (8.06%) Microsoft
4 2 (3.23%) Google
5 1 (1.61%) Cloudera
5 1 (1.61%) Databricks
5 1 (1.61%) NVIDIA
5 1 (1.61%) Oracle
5 1 (1.61%) Proofpoint
5 1 (1.61%) ServiceNow