CI/CD Contract Job Trends

CI/CD
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring CI/CD skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 18 27
Rank change year-on-year +7 +9 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,861 3,069 2,614
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.10% 9.36% 6.26%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.07% 10.36% 7.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,935 2,118 1,794
10th Percentile £375 £358 £400
25th Percentile £430 £423 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -8.33%
75th Percentile £613 £615 £650
90th Percentile £700 £717 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £478 £525
% change year-on-year +4.60% -8.95% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 39 77
10th Percentile £52.50 £48.09 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 £62.50
Median hourly rate £70.00 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% - -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £84.12 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +3.85% -2.99% +2.13%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

CI/CD falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 44,857 29,633 35,662
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.35% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,817 18,625 22,863
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.02%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,658 1,571 2,253
10th Percentile £14.84 £14.20 £13.00
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.44 £16.82
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%
75th Percentile £68.50 £51.05 £62.00
90th Percentile £82.41 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +87.50% -37.04% -6.09%

CI/CD
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing CI/CD relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

CI/CD job vacancy trend in the UK

CI/CD
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing CI/CD.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing CI/CD

CI/CD
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing CI/CD over the 6 months to 20 July 2026.

Daily rate histogram for CI/CD in the UK

CI/CD
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing CI/CD.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing CI/CD

CI/CD
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing CI/CD over the 6 months to 20 July 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for CI/CD in the UK

CI/CD
Top 18 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing CI/CD within the UK over the 6 months to 20 July 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
England +8 4,866 £525 +2.44% 1,680
London +9 2,531 £550 +3.77% 865
UK excluding London +9 2,505 £500 +4.60% 1,058
Work from Home +8 1,801 £514 +2.80% 808
North of England +10 945 £500 +5.26% 308
Yorkshire +5 487 £500 +5.26% 95
South East -3 445 £525 +5.00% 329
Midlands +2 410 £477 +3.70% 131
North West +8 372 £513 +5.13% 169
West Midlands +12 337 £481 -0.80% 92
South West +5 267 £525 -1.64% 118
Scotland +3 259 £425 -15.00% 74
East of England +14 148 £550 +17.90% 60
North East +5 101 £425 - 46
East Midlands -12 66 £447 -0.67% 39
Wales +2 40 £450 -4.00% 30
Northern Ireland +27 30 £523 +4.50% 26
Channel Islands - 1 £500 -

CI/CD
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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
1 293 (5.00%) Confluence
2 219 (3.74%) Apache Spark
3 210 (3.58%) Apache Airflow
4 154 (2.63%) Apache
5 79 (1.35%) SAS
6 70 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 32 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 27 (0.46%) CMS
9 21 (0.36%) nginx
9 21 (0.36%) OpenStack
10 18 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
11 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.24%) WebLogic
13 13 (0.22%) Anypoint
14 11 (0.19%) Camunda
14 11 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
15 9 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 9 (0.15%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.14%) Mule
Applications
1 25 (0.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.34%) Chatbot
3 19 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 16 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.20%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.068%) Simulink
8 3 (0.051%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
9 2 (0.034%) Sketch
9 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
9 2 (0.034%) Trello
10 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.017%) Maya
Business Applications
1 39 (0.67%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.34%) Payment Gateway
3 18 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
4 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
5 12 (0.20%) Aladdin
6 10 (0.17%) SAP CRM
7 8 (0.14%) Shopify
8 6 (0.10%) NetSuite
8 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.085%) Magento
10 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
11 3 (0.051%) Endur
11 3 (0.051%) Findur
11 3 (0.051%) SAP BPC
12 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
12 2 (0.034%) R3 Corda
12 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
12 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
12 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 2,599 (44.34%) AWS
2 2,550 (43.51%) Azure
3 1,232 (21.02%) GitHub
4 982 (16.75%) GCP
5 912 (15.56%) Azure DevOps
6 787 (13.43%) GitHub Actions
7 637 (10.87%) Serverless
8 459 (7.83%) Amazon S3
9 413 (7.05%) AWS Lambda
10 412 (7.03%) Power Platform
11 307 (5.24%) AWS CloudFormation
12 297 (5.07%) Amazon EKS
13 255 (4.35%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 238 (4.06%) Azure AKS
15 226 (3.86%) Amazon EC2
16 220 (3.75%) Entra ID
17 194 (3.31%) Snowflake
18 187 (3.19%) Amazon ECS
19 183 (3.12%) Azure Data Factory
20 176 (3.00%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 217 (3.70%) Firewall
2 140 (2.39%) DNS
3 124 (2.12%) Network Security
4 94 (1.60%) VPN
5 65 (1.11%) HTTP
6 64 (1.09%) TCP/IP
7 44 (0.75%) WAN
8 43 (0.73%) BGP
9 36 (0.61%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 32 (0.55%) BIG-IP
11 32 (0.55%) OSPF
12 30 (0.51%) VXLAN
13 28 (0.48%) Ethernet VPN
14 27 (0.46%) SSL
15 25 (0.43%) Internet
16 21 (0.36%) DHCP
16 21 (0.36%) SAN
16 21 (0.36%) Wi-Fi
17 20 (0.34%) Ethernet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 398 (6.79%) PostgreSQL
2 306 (5.22%) Power BI
3 265 (4.52%) SQL Server
4 257 (4.38%) NoSQL
5 254 (4.33%) Data Warehouse
5 254 (4.33%) Relational Database
6 211 (3.60%) MongoDB
7 200 (3.41%) Data Lake
8 163 (2.78%) Amazon RDS
9 153 (2.61%) DynamoDB
10 138 (2.35%) Metadata
11 128 (2.18%) Amazon Redshift
12 119 (2.03%) Big Data
13 112 (1.91%) Amazon Athena
14 110 (1.88%) Delta Lake
15 106 (1.81%) MySQL
16 100 (1.71%) BigQuery
17 88 (1.50%) Azure SQL Database
18 78 (1.33%) Redis
19 73 (1.25%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,100 (18.77%) Git
2 1,014 (17.30%) Jenkins
3 799 (13.63%) GitLab
4 555 (9.47%) JIRA
5 216 (3.69%) Selenium
6 192 (3.28%) JUnit
7 138 (2.35%) Cucumber
8 124 (2.12%) Postman
9 112 (1.91%) JMeter
10 111 (1.89%) REST Assured
11 101 (1.72%) SonarQube
12 100 (1.71%) Maven
13 97 (1.66%) Gradle
14 90 (1.54%) Bitbucket
15 89 (1.52%) Cypress.io
16 77 (1.31%) Gatling
17 73 (1.25%) Mockito
18 59 (1.01%) WebDriver
19 58 (0.99%) MLflow
20 43 (0.73%) Claude Code
General
1 1,435 (24.48%) Social Skills
2 999 (17.04%) Finance
3 812 (13.85%) Public Sector
4 489 (8.34%) Analytical Skills
5 440 (7.51%) Banking
6 141 (2.41%) Documentation Skills
7 125 (2.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 112 (1.91%) Retail
9 72 (1.23%) Investment Banking
10 71 (1.21%) Legal
11 68 (1.16%) Influencing Skills
12 67 (1.14%) Front Office
12 67 (1.14%) Military
13 63 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 50 (0.85%) Law
15 45 (0.77%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.67%) Marketing
17 32 (0.55%) Manufacturing
18 30 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
19 29 (0.49%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,295 (22.10%) Developer
2 964 (16.45%) Senior
3 728 (12.42%) DevOps Engineer
4 612 (10.44%) Architect
5 533 (9.09%) Lead
6 456 (7.78%) Data Engineer
7 335 (5.72%) AWS Engineer
8 330 (5.63%) Java Developer
9 312 (5.32%) Software Engineer
10 276 (4.71%) Azure Engineer
11 254 (4.33%) Cloud Engineer
12 253 (4.32%) Senior Developer
13 250 (4.27%) Platform Engineer
14 188 (3.21%) Full-Stack Developer
15 162 (2.76%) Python Developer
16 150 (2.56%) AWS DevOps
17 145 (2.47%) Solutions Architect
18 139 (2.37%) GCP Engineer
19 138 (2.35%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 138 (2.35%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 722 (12.32%) REST
2 539 (9.20%) React
3 526 (8.97%) Spring
4 516 (8.80%) .NET
5 493 (8.41%) RESTful
6 469 (8.00%) Kafka
7 465 (7.93%) Spring Boot
8 379 (6.47%) Node.js
9 230 (3.92%) Playwright
10 214 (3.65%) HTML
10 214 (3.65%) PySpark
11 213 (3.63%) AngularJS
12 190 (3.24%) CSS
13 183 (3.12%) OAuth
14 178 (3.04%) JSON
15 137 (2.34%) OAuth2
16 123 (2.10%) YAML
17 121 (2.06%) FastAPI
18 119 (2.03%) GraphQL
19 117 (2.00%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 1,168 (19.93%) Cloud Native
2 435 (7.42%) Distributed Systems
3 357 (6.09%) Product Ownership
4 189 (3.22%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.76%) Enterprise Software
6 148 (2.53%) Legacy Systems
7 126 (2.15%) Hybrid Cloud
8 125 (2.13%) AI Agents
9 107 (1.83%) Data Centre
10 99 (1.69%) Public Cloud
11 98 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
12 94 (1.60%) Security Posture
13 80 (1.36%) Virtual Team
14 79 (1.35%) Algorithms
15 72 (1.23%) Mobile App
16 69 (1.18%) Data Structures
17 66 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
18 63 (1.07%) Management Information System
19 60 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
20 59 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
Operating Systems
1 566 (9.66%) Linux
2 266 (4.54%) Windows
3 125 (2.13%) Unix
4 108 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 57 (0.97%) Windows Server
6 52 (0.89%) Android
7 50 (0.85%) Apple iOS
8 28 (0.48%) VMS
9 17 (0.29%) Ubuntu
10 16 (0.27%) AIX
11 15 (0.26%) Mac OS
12 11 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
13 10 (0.17%) Solaris
14 9 (0.15%) zOS
15 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
16 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
17 6 (0.10%) CentOS
18 5 (0.085%) Rocky
19 4 (0.068%) Embedded Linux
20 3 (0.051%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,280 (55.96%) DevOps
2 2,177 (37.14%) Agile
3 1,829 (31.21%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,308 (22.32%) Test Automation
5 1,298 (22.15%) Containerisation
6 1,169 (19.95%) Microservices
7 1,005 (17.15%) Observability
8 982 (16.75%) AI
9 918 (15.66%) Problem-Solving
10 902 (15.39%) Software Engineering
11 788 (13.44%) Continuous Improvement
12 742 (12.66%) Analytics
13 682 (11.64%) Data Pipeline
14 680 (11.60%) Platform Engineering
15 623 (10.63%) Data Modelling
16 614 (10.48%) Scrum
17 584 (9.96%) Migration
18 548 (9.35%) Data Engineering
19 543 (9.26%) Event-Driven
20 521 (8.89%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 2,151 (36.70%) Python
2 1,326 (22.62%) SQL
3 1,202 (20.51%) Java
4 611 (10.42%) JavaScript
5 558 (9.52%) C#
6 502 (8.57%) TypeScript
7 472 (8.05%) Bash
8 382 (6.52%) PowerShell
9 209 (3.57%) Bicep
10 169 (2.88%) Go
11 106 (1.81%) Shell Script
12 101 (1.72%) Kotlin
13 88 (1.50%) Scala
14 87 (1.48%) Apex Code
15 77 (1.31%) C++
16 62 (1.06%) PL/SQL
17 56 (0.96%) Groovy
18 52 (0.89%) Ruby
19 45 (0.77%) T-SQL
20 30 (0.51%) Swift
Qualifications
1 1,664 (28.39%) Security Cleared
2 1,393 (23.77%) SC Cleared
3 297 (5.07%) Degree
4 232 (3.96%) BPSS Clearance
5 205 (3.50%) DV Cleared
6 183 (3.12%) Azure Certification
7 181 (3.09%) AWS Certification
8 141 (2.41%) Computer Science Degree
9 95 (1.62%) CISSP
10 67 (1.14%) Cisco Certification
11 52 (0.89%) CISM
11 52 (0.89%) Microsoft Certification
12 51 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 49 (0.84%) ISTQB
13 49 (0.84%) Master's Degree
14 39 (0.67%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 30 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 29 (0.49%) CCSP
17 26 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
18 21 (0.36%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 489 (8.34%) QA
2 386 (6.59%) Data Quality
3 296 (5.05%) Accessibility
4 160 (2.73%) GDPR
5 125 (2.13%) NIST
6 119 (2.03%) WCAG
7 103 (1.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 79 (1.35%) NCSC
9 45 (0.77%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.60%) SLA
11 29 (0.49%) GRC
12 22 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
13 15 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
13 15 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 15 (0.26%) SOC 2
14 13 (0.22%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.20%) HL7
16 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
17 10 (0.17%) PSD2
18 8 (0.14%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,516 (25.87%) Docker
2 151 (2.58%) Active Directory
3 94 (1.60%) VMware Infrastructure
4 81 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 41 (0.70%) VMware NSX
6 36 (0.61%) vSphere
7 21 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 19 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 18 (0.31%) Oracle RAC
10 16 (0.27%) Hyper-V
11 13 (0.22%) Squid
12 8 (0.14%) HDFS
13 7 (0.12%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
13 7 (0.12%) Postfix
14 5 (0.085%) RACF
14 5 (0.085%) SRDF
15 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 4 (0.068%) Ceph
15 4 (0.068%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,836 (31.33%) Terraform
2 1,798 (30.68%) Kubernetes
3 536 (9.15%) Ansible
4 511 (8.72%) Grafana
5 424 (7.23%) Prometheus
6 117 (2.00%) Argo
7 62 (1.06%) Puppet
8 60 (1.02%) Istio
9 51 (0.87%) Single Sign-On
10 43 (0.73%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.53%) Kibana
12 30 (0.51%) Packer
13 26 (0.44%) vCenter Server
14 25 (0.43%) Control-M
15 21 (0.36%) Nessus
16 20 (0.34%) Kustomize
16 20 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
17 18 (0.31%) IBM Guardium
18 17 (0.29%) Oracle RMAN
19 15 (0.26%) Rancher
Vendors
1 815 (13.91%) Microsoft
2 375 (6.40%) Databricks
3 320 (5.46%) Google
4 295 (5.03%) Oracle
5 222 (3.79%) Splunk
6 200 (3.41%) Salesforce
7 138 (2.35%) ServiceNow
8 134 (2.29%) Dynatrace
9 131 (2.24%) VMware
10 116 (1.98%) Red Hat
11 82 (1.40%) OpenAI
12 80 (1.36%) MuleSoft
13 74 (1.26%) SAP
14 73 (1.25%) IBM
15 67 (1.14%) Cisco
16 63 (1.07%) Informatica
17 49 (0.84%) Foundry
18 46 (0.78%) Palo Alto
19 44 (0.75%) F5
20 41 (0.70%) CyberArk