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 30 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 17 27
Rank change year-on-year +6 +10 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,881 3,109 2,563
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.10% 9.47% 6.43%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.07% 10.47% 7.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,967 2,148 1,755
10th Percentile £375 £357 £400
25th Percentile £434 £420 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -8.33%
75th Percentile £613 £614 £650
90th Percentile £700 £713 £772
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £484 £525
% change year-on-year +3.31% -7.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 118 42 74
10th Percentile £52.13 £44.96 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £66.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.85% -1.52% +0.30%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £85.80 £81.66 £73.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year +3.85% -3.70% +2.89%

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 45,002 29,684 34,056
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.96% 90.46% 85.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,855 18,648 21,888
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £734 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,714 1,621 1,980
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £13.69
25th Percentile £19.89 £17.33 £17.74
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.57 £40.33
% change year-on-year +86.55% -41.56% -

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 30 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 30 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 30 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 4,927 £525 +2.44% 2,032
London +7 2,579 £545 +3.81% 1,060
UK excluding London +9 2,499 £500 +3.31% 1,214
Work from Home +7 1,793 £514 +2.80% 1,003
North of England +10 941 £500 +5.26% 385
Yorkshire +5 476 £509 +7.05% 104
South East -4 454 £525 +5.00% 327
Midlands +3 415 £488 +6.09% 148
North West +6 371 £525 +7.42% 217
West Midlands +13 351 £486 -1.82% 105
South West +5 274 £525 +0.96% 155
Scotland +5 247 £425 -15.00% 81
East of England +6 144 £538 +11.11% 73
North East 0 107 £425 - 65
East Midlands -15 57 £488 +10.39% 43
Wales -2 39 £450 -4.00% 32
Northern Ireland +20 24 £545 +3.81% 24
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
1 294 (5.00%) Confluence
2 210 (3.57%) Apache Airflow
3 209 (3.55%) Apache Spark
4 154 (2.62%) Apache
5 85 (1.45%) SAS
6 74 (1.26%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.56%) Jupyter
8 20 (0.34%) CMS
9 19 (0.32%) OpenStack
10 18 (0.31%) nginx
10 18 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
11 17 (0.29%) Anypoint
12 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
12 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.24%) WebLogic
14 10 (0.17%) Camunda
14 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Exchange
14 10 (0.17%) Mule
15 8 (0.14%) IIS
16 6 (0.10%) JBoss
Applications
1 21 (0.36%) Chatbot
1 21 (0.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 14 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
3 13 (0.22%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
5 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.068%) Simulink
7 3 (0.051%) Adobe XD
7 3 (0.051%) Trello
8 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
8 2 (0.034%) Sketch
8 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.017%) Maya
Business Applications
1 41 (0.70%) 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 7 (0.12%) NetSuite
9 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 5 (0.085%) Magento
11 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
12 3 (0.051%) Endur
12 3 (0.051%) Findur
12 3 (0.051%) SAP BPC
13 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
13 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
13 2 (0.034%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
13 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 2,621 (44.57%) AWS
2 2,564 (43.60%) Azure
3 1,233 (20.97%) GitHub
4 1,007 (17.12%) GCP
5 922 (15.68%) Azure DevOps
6 796 (13.54%) GitHub Actions
7 637 (10.83%) Serverless
8 450 (7.65%) Amazon S3
9 423 (7.19%) Power Platform
10 414 (7.04%) AWS Lambda
11 320 (5.44%) Amazon EKS
12 306 (5.20%) AWS CloudFormation
13 266 (4.52%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 246 (4.18%) Azure AKS
15 229 (3.89%) Entra ID
16 218 (3.71%) Amazon EC2
17 203 (3.45%) Snowflake
18 190 (3.23%) Amazon ECS
19 184 (3.13%) Azure Data Factory
20 161 (2.74%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 228 (3.88%) Firewall
2 147 (2.50%) DNS
3 119 (2.02%) Network Security
4 102 (1.73%) VPN
5 72 (1.22%) TCP/IP
6 57 (0.97%) HTTP
7 47 (0.80%) WAN
8 41 (0.70%) BGP
9 39 (0.66%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.56%) BIG-IP
10 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 31 (0.53%) SSL
11 31 (0.53%) VXLAN
12 30 (0.51%) OSPF
13 29 (0.49%) Ethernet VPN
14 27 (0.46%) Internet
15 25 (0.43%) DHCP
16 20 (0.34%) 3GPP
16 20 (0.34%) 5G
16 20 (0.34%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 409 (6.95%) PostgreSQL
2 320 (5.44%) Power BI
3 264 (4.49%) Data Warehouse
4 263 (4.47%) SQL Server
5 257 (4.37%) NoSQL
6 250 (4.25%) Relational Database
7 219 (3.72%) MongoDB
8 203 (3.45%) Data Lake
9 157 (2.67%) DynamoDB
10 154 (2.62%) Amazon RDS
11 137 (2.33%) Metadata
12 130 (2.21%) Amazon Redshift
13 113 (1.92%) Delta Lake
13 113 (1.92%) MySQL
14 109 (1.85%) Amazon Athena
15 105 (1.79%) Big Data
16 104 (1.77%) BigQuery
17 93 (1.58%) Azure SQL Database
18 83 (1.41%) Redis
19 75 (1.28%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,098 (18.67%) Git
2 1,016 (17.28%) Jenkins
3 810 (13.77%) GitLab
4 539 (9.17%) JIRA
5 210 (3.57%) Selenium
6 194 (3.30%) JUnit
7 137 (2.33%) Cucumber
8 118 (2.01%) Postman
9 114 (1.94%) JMeter
10 109 (1.85%) Bitbucket
11 104 (1.77%) Maven
12 103 (1.75%) SonarQube
13 101 (1.72%) REST Assured
14 95 (1.62%) Gradle
15 84 (1.43%) Cypress.io
16 82 (1.39%) Gatling
17 74 (1.26%) Mockito
18 56 (0.95%) MLflow
18 56 (0.95%) WebDriver
19 45 (0.77%) Claude Code
General
1 1,450 (24.66%) Social Skills
2 1,023 (17.40%) Finance
3 834 (14.18%) Public Sector
4 479 (8.14%) Analytical Skills
5 440 (7.48%) Banking
6 127 (2.16%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 123 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
8 122 (2.07%) Retail
9 74 (1.26%) Investment Banking
10 70 (1.19%) Military
11 68 (1.16%) Front Office
12 65 (1.11%) Legal
12 65 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 64 (1.09%) Influencing Skills
14 52 (0.88%) Law
15 49 (0.83%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.66%) Marketing
17 34 (0.58%) Manufacturing
17 34 (0.58%) Publishing
18 31 (0.53%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,332 (22.65%) Developer
2 981 (16.68%) Senior
3 708 (12.04%) DevOps Engineer
4 614 (10.44%) Architect
5 554 (9.42%) Lead
6 456 (7.75%) Data Engineer
7 337 (5.73%) Java Developer
8 326 (5.54%) AWS Engineer
9 317 (5.39%) Software Engineer
10 275 (4.68%) Senior Developer
11 272 (4.63%) Azure Engineer
12 264 (4.49%) Platform Engineer
13 255 (4.34%) Cloud Engineer
14 195 (3.32%) Full-Stack Developer
15 159 (2.70%) Python Developer
16 154 (2.62%) Solutions Architect
17 144 (2.45%) AWS DevOps
18 140 (2.38%) GCP Engineer
19 133 (2.26%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 133 (2.26%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 765 (13.01%) REST
2 540 (9.18%) React
3 528 (8.98%) Spring
4 517 (8.79%) .NET
5 486 (8.26%) RESTful
6 483 (8.21%) Kafka
7 462 (7.86%) Spring Boot
8 390 (6.63%) Node.js
9 233 (3.96%) Playwright
10 224 (3.81%) HTML
11 215 (3.66%) PySpark
12 201 (3.42%) AngularJS
13 199 (3.38%) OAuth
14 198 (3.37%) CSS
15 191 (3.25%) JSON
16 151 (2.57%) OAuth2
17 128 (2.18%) SOAP
18 116 (1.97%) .NET Core
19 114 (1.94%) FastAPI
20 112 (1.90%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 1,205 (20.49%) Cloud Native
2 464 (7.89%) Distributed Systems
3 355 (6.04%) Product Ownership
4 189 (3.21%) Onboarding
5 177 (3.01%) Enterprise Software
6 147 (2.50%) Legacy Systems
7 144 (2.45%) AI Agents
8 133 (2.26%) Hybrid Cloud
9 106 (1.80%) Data Centre
10 95 (1.62%) Public Cloud
11 94 (1.60%) Data Protection Act
11 94 (1.60%) Security Posture
12 79 (1.34%) Algorithms
13 76 (1.29%) Virtual Team
14 74 (1.26%) Data Structures
15 71 (1.21%) Mobile App
15 71 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
16 66 (1.12%) Management Information System
17 63 (1.07%) Enterprise Cloud
18 60 (1.02%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 562 (9.56%) Linux
2 269 (4.57%) Windows
3 127 (2.16%) Unix
4 107 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 59 (1.00%) Windows Server
6 57 (0.97%) Android
7 53 (0.90%) Apple iOS
8 27 (0.46%) VMS
9 19 (0.32%) Ubuntu
10 16 (0.27%) AIX
11 15 (0.26%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
12 9 (0.15%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) Solaris
14 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
15 5 (0.085%) CentOS
15 5 (0.085%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.068%) Rocky
17 3 (0.051%) Amazon Linux
17 3 (0.051%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,301 (56.13%) DevOps
2 2,199 (37.39%) Agile
3 1,862 (31.66%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,322 (22.48%) Test Automation
5 1,292 (21.97%) Containerisation
6 1,206 (20.51%) Microservices
7 1,036 (17.62%) Observability
8 1,021 (17.36%) AI
9 947 (16.10%) Software Engineering
10 918 (15.61%) Problem-Solving
11 831 (14.13%) Continuous Improvement
12 764 (12.99%) Analytics
13 705 (11.99%) Platform Engineering
14 694 (11.80%) Data Pipeline
15 639 (10.87%) Data Modelling
16 626 (10.64%) Scrum
17 589 (10.02%) Event-Driven
18 588 (10.00%) Migration
19 552 (9.39%) Stakeholder Management
20 549 (9.34%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 2,155 (36.64%) Python
2 1,337 (22.73%) SQL
3 1,229 (20.90%) Java
4 635 (10.80%) JavaScript
5 553 (9.40%) C#
6 503 (8.55%) TypeScript
7 489 (8.31%) Bash
8 393 (6.68%) PowerShell
9 222 (3.77%) Bicep
10 165 (2.81%) Go
11 112 (1.90%) Kotlin
12 103 (1.75%) Shell Script
13 86 (1.46%) Scala
14 83 (1.41%) Apex Code
15 77 (1.31%) C++
16 62 (1.05%) PL/SQL
17 61 (1.04%) Groovy
18 51 (0.87%) Ruby
19 48 (0.82%) T-SQL
20 34 (0.58%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,671 (28.41%) Security Cleared
2 1,406 (23.91%) SC Cleared
3 296 (5.03%) Degree
4 235 (4.00%) BPSS Clearance
5 208 (3.54%) DV Cleared
6 191 (3.25%) Azure Certification
7 181 (3.08%) AWS Certification
8 147 (2.50%) Computer Science Degree
9 94 (1.60%) CISSP
10 62 (1.05%) Cisco Certification
11 55 (0.94%) Microsoft Certification
12 53 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 48 (0.82%) CISM
14 46 (0.78%) ISTQB
15 40 (0.68%) Master's Degree
16 39 (0.66%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 29 (0.49%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 28 (0.48%) CCSP
19 24 (0.41%) TOGAF Certification
20 20 (0.34%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 501 (8.52%) QA
2 400 (6.80%) Data Quality
3 307 (5.22%) Accessibility
4 150 (2.55%) GDPR
5 128 (2.18%) WCAG
6 109 (1.85%) NIST
7 91 (1.55%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 71 (1.21%) NCSC
9 43 (0.73%) PCI DSS
10 34 (0.58%) SLA
11 26 (0.44%) GRC
12 23 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials
13 16 (0.27%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
15 13 (0.22%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.20%) HL7
16 12 (0.20%) ISO 20022
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
18 9 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
19 8 (0.14%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,540 (26.19%) Docker
2 156 (2.65%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.68%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.71%) VMware NSX
6 36 (0.61%) vSphere
7 20 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
8 19 (0.32%) Hyper-V
9 16 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
9 16 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.22%) Squid
11 8 (0.14%) HDFS
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 5 (0.085%) Ceph
13 5 (0.085%) SRDF
14 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.068%) NFS
14 4 (0.068%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,860 (31.63%) Terraform
2 1,818 (30.91%) Kubernetes
3 529 (9.00%) Ansible
4 500 (8.50%) Grafana
5 406 (6.90%) Prometheus
6 122 (2.07%) Argo
7 65 (1.11%) Puppet
8 61 (1.04%) Istio
9 47 (0.80%) Progress Chef
10 43 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
11 35 (0.60%) Kibana
12 31 (0.53%) Packer
13 24 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
15 20 (0.34%) Kustomize
16 19 (0.32%) Control-M
17 15 (0.26%) Jamf Pro
17 15 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
18 14 (0.24%) Nessus
18 14 (0.24%) Podman
Vendors
1 836 (14.22%) Microsoft
2 390 (6.63%) Databricks
3 340 (5.78%) Google
4 297 (5.05%) Oracle
5 213 (3.62%) Splunk
6 196 (3.33%) Salesforce
7 147 (2.50%) Dynatrace
8 140 (2.38%) ServiceNow
9 134 (2.28%) VMware
10 110 (1.87%) Red Hat
11 86 (1.46%) MuleSoft
12 81 (1.38%) OpenAI
13 73 (1.24%) SAP
14 69 (1.17%) IBM
15 65 (1.11%) Cisco
16 64 (1.09%) Informatica
17 47 (0.80%) Foundry
18 45 (0.77%) F5
19 44 (0.75%) Palo Alto
20 39 (0.66%) AppDynamics