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 17 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 16 26
Rank change year-on-year +5 +10 0
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 6,131 3,403 2,689
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.22% 10.33% 7.03%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.28% 11.41% 8.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,139 2,298 1,821
10th Percentile £377 £362 £390
25th Percentile £437 £423 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -7.27% -5.17%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £520
% change year-on-year - -3.85% -5.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 131 47 69
10th Percentile £45.20 £50.75 £62.40
25th Percentile £60.81 £60.38 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.70 £65.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.15% -3.70% -10.00%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £93.75 £69.10 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £68.75
% change year-on-year +3.85% -5.45% -8.33%

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 46,183 29,816 32,769
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.50% 90.52% 85.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,080 18,531 20,147
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,092 1,799 1,460
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.25 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.42 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.50 £44.68 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.71 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +84.31% -47.37% +5.81%

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 17 September 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 17 September 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 17 September 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 5,133 £525 +2.44% 7,272
London +4 2,716 £538 +2.38% 4,190
UK excluding London +7 2,603 £500 - 3,860
Work from Home +7 1,885 £525 +5.00% 3,287
North of England +5 982 £500 +5.26% 1,080
Yorkshire +6 505 £500 +2.04% 300
South East +3 469 £533 +6.50% 753
Midlands -4 383 £488 -2.50% 397
North West 0 359 £530 +9.00% 630
West Midlands -1 323 £490 -6.67% 253
South West +8 295 £548 +1.01% 488
Scotland 0 279 £425 -15.00% 543
East of England +5 157 £505 +1.00% 313
North East -1 129 £425 -5.03% 157
East Midlands -18 56 £463 +7.68% 144
Wales +1 46 £425 -5.56% 82
Northern Ireland +22 24 £591 +18.25% 214
Channel Islands - 2 £475 - 1

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
1 279 (4.55%) Confluence
2 229 (3.74%) Apache Airflow
3 197 (3.21%) Apache Spark
4 164 (2.67%) Apache
5 94 (1.53%) SharePoint
6 65 (1.06%) SAS
7 36 (0.59%) Jupyter
8 28 (0.46%) CMS
9 24 (0.39%) nginx
10 19 (0.31%) OpenStack
11 18 (0.29%) Camunda
12 16 (0.26%) Anypoint
13 15 (0.24%) Palantir Foundry
14 12 (0.20%) SharePoint Server
15 9 (0.15%) Mule
15 9 (0.15%) WebLogic
15 9 (0.15%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.15%) WordPress
16 6 (0.098%) Microsoft Exchange
16 6 (0.098%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 23 (0.38%) Chatbot
2 19 (0.31%) Microsoft Excel
3 8 (0.13%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.11%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.065%) Trello
6 3 (0.049%) Adobe XD
6 3 (0.049%) Simulink
6 3 (0.049%) Sketch
6 3 (0.049%) Windchill
7 2 (0.033%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.033%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.033%) Spreadsheet
8 1 (0.016%) EngageOne
8 1 (0.016%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 52 (0.85%) Dynamics CRM
2 23 (0.38%) Payment Gateway
3 20 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
5 11 (0.18%) Aladdin
5 11 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.13%) NetSuite
6 8 (0.13%) SAP MDG
7 6 (0.098%) Magento
7 6 (0.098%) Shopify
8 5 (0.082%) Temenos T24
9 4 (0.065%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.065%) Sage X3
10 3 (0.049%) Endur
10 3 (0.049%) Finacle
10 3 (0.049%) FLEXCUBE
10 3 (0.049%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 2 (0.033%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.033%) Oracle EBS R12
11 2 (0.033%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,715 (44.28%) AWS
2 2,657 (43.34%) Azure
3 1,298 (21.17%) GitHub
4 1,025 (16.72%) GCP
5 995 (16.23%) Azure DevOps
6 847 (13.82%) GitHub Actions
7 653 (10.65%) Serverless
8 447 (7.29%) Amazon S3
9 440 (7.18%) AWS Lambda
10 434 (7.08%) Power Platform
11 332 (5.42%) Amazon EKS
12 308 (5.02%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 283 (4.62%) AWS CloudFormation
14 252 (4.11%) Entra ID
15 239 (3.90%) Azure AKS
16 238 (3.88%) Snowflake
17 223 (3.64%) Amazon EC2
18 199 (3.25%) Amazon ECS
19 187 (3.05%) Azure Data Factory
20 186 (3.03%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 236 (3.85%) Firewall
2 165 (2.69%) DNS
3 130 (2.12%) Network Security
4 93 (1.52%) VPN
5 89 (1.45%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.85%) HTTP
7 50 (0.82%) WAN
8 43 (0.70%) BGP
9 42 (0.69%) SD-WAN
10 39 (0.64%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 38 (0.62%) BIG-IP
11 38 (0.62%) VXLAN
12 36 (0.59%) Ethernet VPN
13 34 (0.55%) SSL
14 33 (0.54%) DHCP
15 30 (0.49%) Internet
16 27 (0.44%) 5G
17 26 (0.42%) OSPF
18 22 (0.36%) VLAN
19 20 (0.33%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 432 (7.05%) PostgreSQL
2 326 (5.32%) Power BI
3 294 (4.80%) Data Warehouse
4 288 (4.70%) SQL Server
5 285 (4.65%) Relational Database
6 258 (4.21%) MongoDB
7 254 (4.14%) NoSQL
8 227 (3.70%) Data Lake
9 193 (3.15%) Amazon RDS
10 176 (2.87%) Metadata
11 144 (2.35%) DynamoDB
12 141 (2.30%) MySQL
13 128 (2.09%) BigQuery
14 125 (2.04%) Amazon Redshift
15 123 (2.01%) Delta Lake
16 109 (1.78%) Redis
17 96 (1.57%) Amazon Athena
18 93 (1.52%) Amazon Aurora
19 87 (1.42%) Big Data
19 87 (1.42%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 1,223 (19.95%) Git
2 1,022 (16.67%) Jenkins
3 913 (14.89%) GitLab
4 520 (8.48%) JIRA
5 236 (3.85%) Selenium
6 190 (3.10%) JUnit
7 139 (2.27%) Cucumber
7 139 (2.27%) Maven
8 125 (2.04%) SonarQube
9 119 (1.94%) Gradle
10 108 (1.76%) Bitbucket
10 108 (1.76%) Postman
11 102 (1.66%) JMeter
12 97 (1.58%) Cypress.io
13 95 (1.55%) REST Assured
14 84 (1.37%) Gatling
15 83 (1.35%) Mockito
16 74 (1.21%) Claude Code
17 49 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
18 45 (0.73%) WebDriver
General
1 1,604 (26.16%) Social Skills
2 1,140 (18.59%) Finance
3 874 (14.26%) Public Sector
4 533 (8.69%) Analytical Skills
5 525 (8.56%) Banking
6 160 (2.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 122 (1.99%) Retail
8 106 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
9 89 (1.45%) Investment Banking
10 86 (1.40%) Front Office
11 82 (1.34%) Military
12 69 (1.13%) Telecoms
13 57 (0.93%) Influencing Skills
14 54 (0.88%) Law
15 52 (0.85%) Legal
16 48 (0.78%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.77%) Marketing
17 47 (0.77%) Publishing
18 43 (0.70%) Aerospace
19 41 (0.67%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,381 (22.52%) Developer
2 1,102 (17.97%) Senior
3 789 (12.87%) DevOps Engineer
4 619 (10.10%) Architect
5 568 (9.26%) Lead
6 457 (7.45%) Data Engineer
7 346 (5.64%) Java Developer
8 327 (5.33%) Software Engineer
9 317 (5.17%) AWS Engineer
10 299 (4.88%) Azure Engineer
11 295 (4.81%) Senior Developer
12 267 (4.35%) Cloud Engineer
13 254 (4.14%) Platform Engineer
14 179 (2.92%) Full-Stack Developer
15 164 (2.67%) Python Developer
16 158 (2.58%) Solutions Architect
17 155 (2.53%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
18 150 (2.45%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 146 (2.38%) AWS DevOps
19 146 (2.38%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,983 (32.34%) Terraform
2 920 (15.01%) REST
3 587 (9.57%) Kafka
4 553 (9.02%) React
5 543 (8.86%) Spring
6 529 (8.63%) RESTful
7 520 (8.48%) .NET
8 493 (8.04%) Spring Boot
9 365 (5.95%) Node.js
10 257 (4.19%) HTML
11 248 (4.05%) Playwright
12 236 (3.85%) CSS
13 229 (3.74%) JSON
14 221 (3.60%) OAuth
14 221 (3.60%) PySpark
15 176 (2.87%) AngularJS
16 168 (2.74%) OAuth2
17 141 (2.30%) SOAP
18 126 (2.06%) YAML
19 120 (1.96%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 1,299 (21.19%) Cloud Native
2 478 (7.80%) Distributed Systems
3 412 (6.72%) Product Ownership
4 249 (4.06%) Onboarding
5 232 (3.78%) Enterprise Software
6 213 (3.47%) AI Agents
7 156 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
8 136 (2.22%) Hybrid Cloud
9 109 (1.78%) Security Posture
10 104 (1.70%) Data Centre
11 96 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
12 91 (1.48%) Public Cloud
13 80 (1.30%) Data Structures
14 78 (1.27%) Management Information System
15 76 (1.24%) Virtual Team
16 73 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
17 72 (1.17%) Enterprise Cloud
18 69 (1.13%) NHS
18 69 (1.13%) Private Cloud
18 69 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 645 (10.52%) Linux
2 280 (4.57%) Windows
3 164 (2.67%) Unix
4 129 (2.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.08%) Windows Server
6 53 (0.86%) Android
7 46 (0.75%) Apple iOS
8 31 (0.51%) VMS
9 24 (0.39%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.24%) AIX
10 15 (0.24%) Mac OS
11 14 (0.23%) CentOS
12 12 (0.20%) zOS
13 8 (0.13%) Rocky
13 8 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 7 (0.11%) Solaris
15 6 (0.098%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.082%) Windows Server 2008
17 3 (0.049%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,436 (56.04%) DevOps
2 2,347 (38.28%) Agile
3 2,122 (34.61%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,463 (23.86%) Test Automation
5 1,319 (21.51%) Containerisation
6 1,247 (20.34%) Microservices
7 1,174 (19.15%) Observability
8 1,172 (19.12%) AI
9 1,100 (17.94%) Software Engineering
10 984 (16.05%) Problem-Solving
11 937 (15.28%) Continuous Improvement
12 831 (13.55%) Platform Engineering
13 756 (12.33%) Stakeholder Management
14 738 (12.04%) Analytics
15 702 (11.45%) Event-Driven
16 688 (11.22%) Data Pipeline
17 686 (11.19%) Technical Leadership
18 672 (10.96%) Scrum
19 655 (10.68%) Data Modelling
20 637 (10.39%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 2,345 (38.25%) Python
2 1,393 (22.72%) SQL
3 1,321 (21.55%) Java
4 686 (11.19%) JavaScript
5 554 (9.04%) C#
6 544 (8.87%) Bash
7 539 (8.79%) TypeScript
8 480 (7.83%) PowerShell
9 257 (4.19%) Bicep
10 177 (2.89%) Go
11 126 (2.06%) Shell Script
12 116 (1.89%) Scala
13 105 (1.71%) Kotlin
14 82 (1.34%) C++
15 79 (1.29%) Apex Code
16 74 (1.21%) Groovy
17 59 (0.96%) PL/SQL
18 51 (0.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 49 (0.80%) Ruby
19 49 (0.80%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,799 (29.34%) Security Cleared
2 1,486 (24.24%) SC Cleared
3 322 (5.25%) Degree
4 272 (4.44%) BPSS Clearance
5 264 (4.31%) DV Cleared
6 215 (3.51%) Azure Certification
7 191 (3.12%) AWS Certification
8 159 (2.59%) Computer Science Degree
9 105 (1.71%) CISSP
10 72 (1.17%) Microsoft Certification
11 61 (0.99%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (0.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 51 (0.83%) ISTQB
14 48 (0.78%) CISM
15 44 (0.72%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 38 (0.62%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.49%) CCSP
18 23 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 21 (0.34%) TOGAF Certification
20 19 (0.31%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 567 (9.25%) QA
2 448 (7.31%) Data Quality
3 333 (5.43%) Accessibility
4 137 (2.23%) WCAG
5 123 (2.01%) GDPR
6 90 (1.47%) NIST
7 79 (1.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 74 (1.21%) NCSC
9 31 (0.51%) PCI DSS
10 28 (0.46%) SLA
11 26 (0.42%) GRC
12 25 (0.41%) ISO 20022
13 23 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
14 15 (0.24%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 13 (0.21%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.20%) Actionable Recommendations
16 12 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 12 (0.20%) HL7
17 11 (0.18%) EU AI Act
17 11 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,631 (26.60%) Docker
2 160 (2.61%) Active Directory
3 121 (1.97%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.24%) Virtual Machines
5 36 (0.59%) VMware NSX
6 31 (0.51%) vSphere
7 27 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
8 20 (0.33%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
10 15 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
10 15 (0.24%) Squid
11 9 (0.15%) KVM
12 8 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.098%) Ceph
14 4 (0.065%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.065%) HDFS
14 4 (0.065%) NFS
14 4 (0.065%) Postfix
14 4 (0.065%) RACF
15 3 (0.049%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 2,001 (32.64%) Kubernetes
2 590 (9.62%) Ansible
3 495 (8.07%) Grafana
4 389 (6.34%) Prometheus
5 118 (1.92%) Argo
6 65 (1.06%) Puppet
7 57 (0.93%) Progress Chef
8 49 (0.80%) Single Sign-On
9 46 (0.75%) Istio
10 42 (0.69%) Kibana
11 37 (0.60%) Packer
12 26 (0.42%) Kustomize
13 25 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
14 22 (0.36%) Control-M
15 18 (0.29%) Podman
16 17 (0.28%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.24%) Oracle RMAN
17 15 (0.24%) SCCM
18 13 (0.21%) Jamf Pro
19 12 (0.20%) Karpenter
Vendors
1 949 (15.48%) Microsoft
2 433 (7.06%) Databricks
3 376 (6.13%) Google
4 332 (5.42%) Oracle
5 222 (3.62%) Splunk
6 190 (3.10%) Salesforce
7 162 (2.64%) VMware
8 154 (2.51%) Dynatrace
9 145 (2.37%) ServiceNow
10 107 (1.75%) Red Hat
11 100 (1.63%) OpenAI
12 95 (1.55%) MuleSoft
13 93 (1.52%) IBM
14 71 (1.16%) SAP
15 67 (1.09%) Informatica
16 64 (1.04%) Cisco
17 62 (1.01%) Foundry
18 53 (0.86%) F5
19 42 (0.69%) Talend
20 41 (0.67%) New Relic