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 10 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 20 30
Rank change year-on-year +9 +10 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,189 2,615 2,475
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.86% 8.90% 5.75%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.86% 9.78% 6.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,543 1,857 1,753
10th Percentile £369 £368 £403
25th Percentile £425 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 116 30 43
10th Percentile £51.23 £27.46 £50.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £48.99 £58.25
Median hourly rate £67.25 £63.25 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.32% -2.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £79.41 £70.00
90th Percentile £87.50 £96.83 £72.30
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year - - -0.92%

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 40,358 26,726 37,148
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.46% 90.94% 86.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,374 17,206 23,926
10th Percentile £320 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £411 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £501 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.75% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £745 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £490 £479 £500
% change year-on-year +2.30% -4.20% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,406 1,085 2,441
10th Percentile £14.96 £14.50 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.00 £28.75 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +46.09% -21.23% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.25 £60.63 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.00 £27.13 £37.50
% change year-on-year +62.21% -27.67% +7.14%

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 10 May 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 10 May 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 10 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
England +6 4,305 £525 - 1,612
London +9 2,219 £538 -2.27% 701
UK excluding London +11 2,192 £500 - 1,094
Work from Home +9 1,517 £509 -3.05% 878
North of England +13 791 £500 - 331
Yorkshire +8 431 £500 -2.44% 96
South East +9 411 £500 - 333
Midlands +9 408 £485 +2.11% 117
West Midlands +16 322 £492 -3.05% 60
North West +5 301 £500 - 173
Scotland +9 224 £425 -10.53% 54
South West +6 223 £525 -3.45% 147
East of England +20 120 £550 +18.28% 81
East Midlands -5 80 £438 -5.41% 57
North East +5 69 £450 -5.26% 63
Wales +3 31 £450 -16.67% 27
Northern Ireland +13 22 £575 +35.29% 15
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
1 245 (4.72%) Confluence
2 196 (3.78%) Apache Spark
3 133 (2.56%) Apache Airflow
4 122 (2.35%) Apache
5 77 (1.48%) SAS
6 70 (1.35%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
7 25 (0.48%) nginx
7 25 (0.48%) OpenStack
8 21 (0.40%) CMS
9 13 (0.25%) Mendix
9 13 (0.25%) WebLogic
10 12 (0.23%) Anypoint
10 12 (0.23%) SharePoint Server
11 11 (0.21%) Jupyter
11 11 (0.21%) WebSphere
12 10 (0.19%) Camunda
12 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
13 9 (0.17%) Appian
13 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Excel
2 19 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 14 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
4 13 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
5 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
6 8 (0.15%) Adobe XD
7 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
8 5 (0.096%) Sketch
9 3 (0.058%) Simulink
10 2 (0.039%) PlantUML
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 26 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 14 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
3 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.13%) Aladdin
6 5 (0.096%) SAP MDG
7 4 (0.077%) SAP CRM
7 4 (0.077%) Shopify
8 3 (0.058%) Findur
8 3 (0.058%) Magento
8 3 (0.058%) Oracle Applications
8 3 (0.058%) Oracle ERP
8 3 (0.058%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.019%) Actimize
9 1 (0.019%) Cloudability
9 1 (0.019%) ProductWriter
9 1 (0.019%) R3 Corda
9 1 (0.019%) SAP Hybris
9 1 (0.019%) SDL Web 8
9 1 (0.019%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 2,305 (44.42%) Azure
2 2,266 (43.67%) AWS
3 1,140 (21.97%) GitHub
4 861 (16.59%) GCP
5 835 (16.09%) Azure DevOps
6 720 (13.88%) GitHub Actions
7 636 (12.26%) Serverless
8 386 (7.44%) Amazon S3
9 377 (7.27%) AWS Lambda
10 369 (7.11%) AWS CloudFormation
11 362 (6.98%) Power Platform
12 284 (5.47%) Amazon EKS
13 233 (4.49%) Azure AKS
14 222 (4.28%) OpenShift
15 220 (4.24%) Amazon ECS
16 218 (4.20%) Azure Data Factory
17 207 (3.99%) Amazon EC2
18 205 (3.95%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 185 (3.57%) Entra ID
20 162 (3.12%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 186 (3.58%) Firewall
2 112 (2.16%) DNS
3 105 (2.02%) Network Security
4 71 (1.37%) VPN
5 66 (1.27%) HTTP
6 39 (0.75%) TCP/IP
7 30 (0.58%) WAN
8 28 (0.54%) SSL
9 26 (0.50%) BGP
9 26 (0.50%) SD-WAN
10 24 (0.46%) Ethernet
11 23 (0.44%) Reverse Proxy
12 22 (0.42%) OSPF
13 20 (0.39%) SAN
14 17 (0.33%) VXLAN
15 16 (0.31%) 3GPP
15 16 (0.31%) Ethernet VPN
16 15 (0.29%) SSH
16 15 (0.29%) Wi-Fi
17 13 (0.25%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 361 (6.96%) PostgreSQL
2 274 (5.28%) Power BI
3 260 (5.01%) NoSQL
4 254 (4.89%) SQL Server
5 208 (4.01%) Data Lake
6 207 (3.99%) Relational Database
7 191 (3.68%) Data Warehouse
8 185 (3.57%) MongoDB
9 149 (2.87%) Amazon RDS
10 132 (2.54%) DynamoDB
11 122 (2.35%) Metadata
12 120 (2.31%) Big Data
13 119 (2.29%) Delta Lake
14 112 (2.16%) Azure SQL Database
15 95 (1.83%) Amazon Athena
16 93 (1.79%) MySQL
17 82 (1.58%) Amazon Redshift
18 78 (1.50%) Redis
19 76 (1.46%) BigQuery
20 59 (1.14%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 969 (18.67%) Git
2 952 (18.35%) Jenkins
3 739 (14.24%) GitLab
4 459 (8.85%) JIRA
5 181 (3.49%) Selenium
6 162 (3.12%) JUnit
7 131 (2.52%) Cucumber
8 116 (2.24%) Postman
9 104 (2.00%) JMeter
10 83 (1.60%) REST Assured
10 83 (1.60%) SonarQube
11 79 (1.52%) Bitbucket
12 70 (1.35%) MLflow
13 65 (1.25%) Cypress.io
13 65 (1.25%) Maven
14 61 (1.18%) Gradle
14 61 (1.18%) Mockito
15 60 (1.16%) Gatling
16 49 (0.94%) Artifactory
17 47 (0.91%) WebDriver
General
1 1,307 (25.19%) Social Skills
2 869 (16.75%) Finance
3 662 (12.76%) Public Sector
4 426 (8.21%) Analytical Skills
5 344 (6.63%) Banking
6 137 (2.64%) Documentation Skills
7 86 (1.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 63 (1.21%) Retail
9 62 (1.19%) Legal
10 60 (1.16%) Military
11 57 (1.10%) Influencing Skills
12 56 (1.08%) Front Office
13 50 (0.96%) Investment Banking
14 46 (0.89%) Financial Institution
15 42 (0.81%) Telecoms
16 39 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.62%) Law
18 28 (0.54%) Publishing
19 25 (0.48%) Marketing
20 24 (0.46%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,168 (22.51%) Developer
2 770 (14.84%) Senior
3 614 (11.83%) DevOps Engineer
4 557 (10.73%) Architect
5 429 (8.27%) Lead
6 419 (8.07%) Data Engineer
7 273 (5.26%) AWS Engineer
8 269 (5.18%) Java Developer
9 266 (5.13%) Azure Engineer
10 264 (5.09%) Software Engineer
11 226 (4.36%) Platform Engineer
12 218 (4.20%) Cloud Engineer
13 190 (3.66%) Senior Developer
14 176 (3.39%) Full-Stack Developer
15 153 (2.95%) Python Developer
16 147 (2.83%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 132 (2.54%) AWS DevOps
18 128 (2.47%) GCP Engineer
19 119 (2.29%) Solutions Architect
20 118 (2.27%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 566 (10.91%) REST
2 469 (9.04%) React
3 457 (8.81%) Spring
4 446 (8.60%) .NET
5 423 (8.15%) Kafka
6 415 (8.00%) RESTful
7 408 (7.86%) Node.js
7 408 (7.86%) Spring Boot
8 217 (4.18%) AngularJS
9 202 (3.89%) PySpark
10 193 (3.72%) Playwright
11 183 (3.53%) HTML
12 176 (3.39%) OAuth
13 155 (2.99%) CSS
14 148 (2.85%) YAML
15 124 (2.39%) JSON
16 123 (2.37%) OpenTelemetry
17 118 (2.27%) OAuth2
18 110 (2.12%) FastAPI
19 105 (2.02%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 969 (18.67%) Cloud Native
2 353 (6.80%) Distributed Systems
3 285 (5.49%) Product Ownership
4 128 (2.47%) Onboarding
5 115 (2.22%) Legacy Systems
6 100 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
7 91 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
8 84 (1.62%) Public Cloud
9 81 (1.56%) Data Protection Act
10 79 (1.52%) Data Centre
11 78 (1.50%) Algorithms
12 70 (1.35%) AI Agents
12 70 (1.35%) Virtual Team
13 67 (1.29%) Mobile App
14 58 (1.12%) Security Posture
15 54 (1.04%) Management Information System
16 48 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
17 43 (0.83%) Private Cloud
17 43 (0.83%) Self-Motivation
18 41 (0.79%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 546 (10.52%) Linux
2 249 (4.80%) Windows
3 102 (1.97%) Unix
4 81 (1.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 53 (1.02%) Android
6 51 (0.98%) Apple iOS
7 43 (0.83%) Windows Server
8 42 (0.81%) VMS
9 19 (0.37%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.27%) CentOS
11 12 (0.23%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.15%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.12%) AIX
14 6 (0.12%) Rocky
14 6 (0.12%) Solaris
14 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.077%) Debian
15 4 (0.077%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,890 (55.69%) DevOps
2 1,767 (34.05%) Agile
3 1,606 (30.95%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,225 (23.61%) Containerisation
5 1,077 (20.76%) Test Automation
6 1,006 (19.39%) Microservices
7 895 (17.25%) Problem-Solving
8 855 (16.48%) Observability
9 760 (14.65%) AI
10 697 (13.43%) Analytics
11 689 (13.28%) Software Engineering
12 644 (12.41%) Continuous Improvement
13 573 (11.04%) Data Modelling
14 564 (10.87%) Data Pipeline
15 520 (10.02%) Platform Engineering
16 504 (9.71%) Migration
17 468 (9.02%) Scrum
18 460 (8.86%) Data Engineering
19 457 (8.81%) ETL
20 430 (8.29%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,944 (37.46%) Python
2 1,224 (23.59%) SQL
3 1,031 (19.87%) Java
4 580 (11.18%) JavaScript
5 510 (9.83%) C#
6 457 (8.81%) TypeScript
7 374 (7.21%) Bash
8 331 (6.38%) PowerShell
9 174 (3.35%) Bicep
10 154 (2.97%) Go
11 101 (1.95%) Shell Script
12 99 (1.91%) Scala
13 85 (1.64%) C++
14 79 (1.52%) Ruby
15 69 (1.33%) Kotlin
16 59 (1.14%) PL/SQL
17 58 (1.12%) Apex Code
18 48 (0.93%) T-SQL
19 38 (0.73%) Groovy
20 34 (0.66%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,448 (27.91%) Security Cleared
2 1,201 (23.15%) SC Cleared
3 281 (5.42%) Degree
4 199 (3.84%) BPSS Clearance
5 167 (3.22%) AWS Certification
6 162 (3.12%) Azure Certification
7 161 (3.10%) Computer Science Degree
8 151 (2.91%) DV Cleared
9 75 (1.45%) CISSP
10 55 (1.06%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 55 (1.06%) Master's Degree
11 54 (1.04%) CISM
12 53 (1.02%) Microsoft Certification
13 52 (1.00%) Cisco Certification
14 40 (0.77%) ISTQB
15 29 (0.56%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 28 (0.54%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 23 (0.44%) CCSP
18 21 (0.40%) Oracle Certification
19 20 (0.39%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 427 (8.23%) QA
2 317 (6.11%) Data Quality
3 210 (4.05%) Accessibility
4 186 (3.58%) GDPR
5 145 (2.79%) NIST
6 130 (2.51%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 95 (1.83%) WCAG
8 72 (1.39%) NCSC
9 59 (1.14%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.75%) SLA
11 26 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.42%) GRC
13 20 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials
13 20 (0.39%) ISO 20022
14 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.29%) MiFID
16 14 (0.27%) PSD2
17 12 (0.23%) HL7
17 12 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 12 (0.23%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,361 (26.23%) Docker
2 133 (2.56%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.54%) Virtual Machines
4 74 (1.43%) VMware Infrastructure
5 34 (0.66%) VMware NSX
6 31 (0.60%) vSphere
7 20 (0.39%) Virtual Desktop
8 12 (0.23%) Hyper-V
8 12 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
9 8 (0.15%) HDFS
10 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
11 6 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
11 6 (0.12%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) RACF
12 5 (0.096%) Squid
13 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
13 4 (0.077%) NFS
13 4 (0.077%) SRDF
14 3 (0.058%) Ceph
15 2 (0.039%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,638 (31.57%) Terraform
2 1,637 (31.55%) Kubernetes
3 527 (10.16%) Ansible
4 482 (9.29%) Grafana
5 405 (7.80%) Prometheus
6 111 (2.14%) Argo
7 77 (1.48%) Istio
8 68 (1.31%) Puppet
9 51 (0.98%) Single Sign-On
10 45 (0.87%) Progress Chef
11 35 (0.67%) Kibana
12 22 (0.42%) Nessus
12 22 (0.42%) vCenter Server
13 21 (0.40%) Packer
14 20 (0.39%) Rancher
15 19 (0.37%) Control-M
16 17 (0.33%) IBM Guardium
17 15 (0.29%) linkerd
17 15 (0.29%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.29%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 768 (14.80%) Microsoft
2 375 (7.23%) Databricks
3 269 (5.18%) Google
4 243 (4.68%) Oracle
5 219 (4.22%) Splunk
6 141 (2.72%) Salesforce
7 136 (2.62%) ServiceNow
8 128 (2.47%) Red Hat
9 113 (2.18%) VMware
10 111 (2.14%) Dynatrace
11 83 (1.60%) OpenAI
12 60 (1.16%) MuleSoft
12 60 (1.16%) SAP
13 52 (1.00%) IBM
14 50 (0.96%) CyberArk
15 43 (0.83%) Cisco
16 42 (0.81%) Informatica
17 39 (0.75%) Tenable
18 38 (0.73%) AppDynamics
18 38 (0.73%) Denodo