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 11 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 9 19 29
Rank change year-on-year +10 +10 -7
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,494 2,615 2,548
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.01% 8.90% 5.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.99% 9.78% 6.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,701 1,824 1,773
10th Percentile £375 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £511 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.81% -7.14% -8.33%
75th Percentile £606 £621 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £773
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £526
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.61% -4.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 29 59
10th Percentile £51.25 £42.61 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £50.00 £61.13
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -7.41% +2.89%
75th Percentile £77.50 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.30 £89.50 £72.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year - -7.14% +6.70%

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 42,291 26,731 37,187
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.76% 91.01% 85.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,385 16,984 23,772
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £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 2,541 1,182 2,587
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.28 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +61.14% -25.26% +1.39%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.00 £61.16
90th Percentile £81.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +8.91%

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 11 June 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 11 June 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 11 June 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 +10 4,566 £525 +1.94% 1,335
London +10 2,361 £543 +0.60% 528
UK excluding London +11 2,348 £500 +5.26% 969
Work from Home +8 1,613 £514 +0.29% 851
North of England +13 907 £500 +4.17% 295
Yorkshire +8 485 £514 +8.21% 66
South East +9 418 £511 +6.96% 304
Midlands +5 398 £481 +4.03% 94
North West +7 343 £500 - 188
West Midlands +15 319 £492 -1.60% 56
South West +11 238 £525 - 119
Scotland +5 229 £425 -14.14% 40
East of England +13 131 £550 +22.22% 87
North East +6 94 £450 +3.45% 43
East Midlands -9 72 £440 -2.22% 38
Wales +9 39 £425 -21.30% 18
Northern Ireland +23 32 £545 +28.24% 27
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
1 267 (4.86%) Confluence
2 210 (3.82%) Apache Spark
3 182 (3.31%) Apache Airflow
4 136 (2.48%) Apache
5 84 (1.53%) SAS
6 74 (1.35%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.46%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.44%) CMS
9 22 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
10 19 (0.35%) nginx
10 19 (0.35%) OpenStack
11 15 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
12 14 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.25%) WebSphere
13 13 (0.24%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.22%) Camunda
15 9 (0.16%) Anypoint
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
15 9 (0.16%) Mendix
15 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 28 (0.51%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 19 (0.35%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
5 11 (0.20%) Microsoft Project
6 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.073%) Adobe XD
8 3 (0.055%) Simulink
9 2 (0.036%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.036%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 29 (0.53%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.36%) Payment Gateway
3 13 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
4 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 7 (0.13%) SAP CRM
6 7 (0.13%) Shopify
7 5 (0.091%) Magento
7 5 (0.091%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.055%) Findur
9 3 (0.055%) NetSuite
9 3 (0.055%) Oracle Applications
9 3 (0.055%) SAP BPC
10 2 (0.036%) Endur
10 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 1 (0.018%) Cloudability
11 1 (0.018%) SAP CX
11 1 (0.018%) SAP ERP
11 1 (0.018%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,404 (43.76%) AWS
2 2,384 (43.39%) Azure
3 1,178 (21.44%) GitHub
4 929 (16.91%) GCP
5 858 (15.62%) Azure DevOps
6 746 (13.58%) GitHub Actions
7 653 (11.89%) Serverless
8 415 (7.55%) Amazon S3
9 403 (7.34%) AWS Lambda
10 389 (7.08%) Power Platform
11 332 (6.04%) AWS CloudFormation
12 294 (5.35%) Amazon EKS
13 243 (4.42%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 234 (4.26%) Azure AKS
15 213 (3.88%) Amazon EC2
16 208 (3.79%) Azure Data Factory
17 198 (3.60%) Amazon ECS
18 196 (3.57%) Entra ID
19 192 (3.49%) OpenShift
20 170 (3.09%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 214 (3.90%) Firewall
2 118 (2.15%) Network Security
3 117 (2.13%) DNS
4 78 (1.42%) VPN
5 61 (1.11%) HTTP
6 45 (0.82%) TCP/IP
7 40 (0.73%) WAN
8 38 (0.69%) BGP
9 35 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 32 (0.58%) OSPF
11 29 (0.53%) BIG-IP
11 29 (0.53%) SSL
11 29 (0.53%) VXLAN
12 28 (0.51%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 27 (0.49%) Ethernet VPN
14 22 (0.40%) SAN
15 21 (0.38%) Ethernet
15 21 (0.38%) Wi-Fi
16 20 (0.36%) 3GPP
17 17 (0.31%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 365 (6.64%) PostgreSQL
2 291 (5.30%) Power BI
3 265 (4.82%) SQL Server
4 262 (4.77%) NoSQL
5 216 (3.93%) Data Warehouse
6 215 (3.91%) Data Lake
7 212 (3.86%) Relational Database
8 193 (3.51%) MongoDB
9 159 (2.89%) Amazon RDS
10 155 (2.82%) DynamoDB
11 126 (2.29%) Metadata
12 122 (2.22%) Big Data
13 113 (2.06%) Delta Lake
14 111 (2.02%) Amazon Athena
15 103 (1.87%) Amazon Redshift
15 103 (1.87%) Azure SQL Database
16 95 (1.73%) MySQL
17 93 (1.69%) BigQuery
18 76 (1.38%) Redis
19 72 (1.31%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 993 (18.07%) Git
2 990 (18.02%) Jenkins
3 781 (14.22%) GitLab
4 505 (9.19%) JIRA
5 204 (3.71%) Selenium
6 169 (3.08%) JUnit
7 141 (2.57%) Cucumber
8 125 (2.28%) Postman
9 113 (2.06%) REST Assured
10 111 (2.02%) JMeter
11 91 (1.66%) SonarQube
12 76 (1.38%) Bitbucket
13 75 (1.37%) Gradle
14 71 (1.29%) Gatling
14 71 (1.29%) Maven
15 67 (1.22%) Cypress.io
16 65 (1.18%) Mockito
17 61 (1.11%) MLflow
18 54 (0.98%) WebDriver
19 41 (0.75%) Artifactory
General
1 1,349 (24.55%) Social Skills
2 920 (16.75%) Finance
3 725 (13.20%) Public Sector
4 422 (7.68%) Analytical Skills
5 386 (7.03%) Banking
6 140 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
7 111 (2.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 81 (1.47%) Retail
9 73 (1.33%) Legal
10 67 (1.22%) Influencing Skills
11 63 (1.15%) Investment Banking
11 63 (1.15%) Military
12 59 (1.07%) Front Office
13 47 (0.86%) Financial Institution
13 47 (0.86%) Law
14 44 (0.80%) Telecoms
15 34 (0.62%) Marketing
16 33 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.58%) Publishing
18 24 (0.44%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,180 (21.48%) Developer
2 863 (15.71%) Senior
3 680 (12.38%) DevOps Engineer
4 586 (10.67%) Architect
5 481 (8.76%) Lead
6 432 (7.86%) Data Engineer
7 318 (5.79%) AWS Engineer
8 297 (5.41%) Software Engineer
9 280 (5.10%) Java Developer
10 268 (4.88%) Azure Engineer
11 243 (4.42%) Cloud Engineer
12 227 (4.13%) Platform Engineer
13 214 (3.90%) Senior Developer
14 172 (3.13%) Full-Stack Developer
15 166 (3.02%) Python Developer
16 146 (2.66%) AWS DevOps
17 144 (2.62%) GCP Engineer
18 139 (2.53%) Test Engineer
19 136 (2.48%) AWS DevOps Engineer
20 133 (2.42%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 618 (11.25%) REST
2 497 (9.05%) React
3 476 (8.66%) .NET
4 472 (8.59%) Spring
5 438 (7.97%) RESTful
6 430 (7.83%) Spring Boot
7 428 (7.79%) Kafka
8 368 (6.70%) Node.js
9 220 (4.00%) AngularJS
10 206 (3.75%) PySpark
11 197 (3.59%) Playwright
12 189 (3.44%) OAuth
13 186 (3.39%) HTML
14 162 (2.95%) CSS
15 141 (2.57%) JSON
16 138 (2.51%) YAML
17 135 (2.46%) OAuth2
18 123 (2.24%) FastAPI
18 123 (2.24%) OpenTelemetry
19 121 (2.20%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 1,064 (19.37%) Cloud Native
2 377 (6.86%) Distributed Systems
3 309 (5.62%) Product Ownership
4 141 (2.57%) Onboarding
5 133 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
6 112 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
7 109 (1.98%) Enterprise Software
8 103 (1.87%) Data Centre
9 101 (1.84%) AI Agents
10 95 (1.73%) Public Cloud
11 84 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
12 74 (1.35%) Algorithms
12 74 (1.35%) Virtual Team
13 72 (1.31%) Security Posture
14 69 (1.26%) Mobile App
15 64 (1.16%) Management Information System
16 61 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
17 52 (0.95%) Data Structures
17 52 (0.95%) Self-Motivation
18 45 (0.82%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 522 (9.50%) Linux
2 243 (4.42%) Windows
3 119 (2.17%) Unix
4 100 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 51 (0.93%) Android
6 47 (0.86%) Apple iOS
7 45 (0.82%) Windows Server
8 39 (0.71%) VMS
9 22 (0.40%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.25%) CentOS
11 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 10 (0.18%) Solaris
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.15%) Windows Server 2008
15 7 (0.13%) AIX
15 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
15 7 (0.13%) zOS
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 4 (0.073%) Debian
18 3 (0.055%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,071 (55.90%) DevOps
2 1,875 (34.13%) Agile
3 1,714 (31.20%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,216 (22.13%) Containerisation
5 1,152 (20.97%) Test Automation
6 1,071 (19.49%) Microservices
7 946 (17.22%) Observability
8 879 (16.00%) AI
9 855 (15.56%) Problem-Solving
10 783 (14.25%) Software Engineering
11 725 (13.20%) Analytics
12 698 (12.70%) Continuous Improvement
13 613 (11.16%) Data Pipeline
14 606 (11.03%) Data Modelling
15 595 (10.83%) Platform Engineering
16 547 (9.96%) Migration
17 526 (9.57%) Scrum
18 505 (9.19%) Data Engineering
19 479 (8.72%) Mentoring
20 478 (8.70%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 2,041 (37.15%) Python
2 1,311 (23.86%) SQL
3 1,117 (20.33%) Java
4 574 (10.45%) JavaScript
5 528 (9.61%) C#
6 462 (8.41%) TypeScript
7 393 (7.15%) Bash
8 352 (6.41%) PowerShell
9 186 (3.39%) Bicep
10 147 (2.68%) Go
11 101 (1.84%) Shell Script
12 97 (1.77%) Scala
13 82 (1.49%) C++
13 82 (1.49%) Kotlin
14 73 (1.33%) Apex Code
15 61 (1.11%) Ruby
16 60 (1.09%) PL/SQL
17 49 (0.89%) T-SQL
18 41 (0.75%) Groovy
19 35 (0.64%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,523 (27.72%) Security Cleared
2 1,275 (23.21%) SC Cleared
3 281 (5.11%) Degree
4 213 (3.88%) BPSS Clearance
5 174 (3.17%) Azure Certification
6 171 (3.11%) AWS Certification
7 160 (2.91%) DV Cleared
8 138 (2.51%) Computer Science Degree
9 79 (1.44%) CISSP
10 59 (1.07%) Cisco Certification
11 51 (0.93%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 51 (0.93%) CISM
11 51 (0.93%) ISTQB
12 47 (0.86%) Microsoft Certification
13 46 (0.84%) Master's Degree
14 34 (0.62%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 28 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 27 (0.49%) CCSP
17 19 (0.35%) TOGAF Certification
18 17 (0.31%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 428 (7.79%) QA
2 342 (6.22%) Data Quality
3 238 (4.33%) Accessibility
4 175 (3.19%) GDPR
5 138 (2.51%) NIST
6 112 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 109 (1.98%) WCAG
8 80 (1.46%) NCSC
9 53 (0.96%) PCI DSS
10 42 (0.76%) SLA
11 25 (0.46%) GRC
12 22 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 20 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
14 17 (0.31%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.29%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.25%) MiFID
17 12 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 12 (0.22%) PSD2
18 10 (0.18%) HL7
18 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,388 (25.26%) Docker
2 125 (2.28%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
4 78 (1.42%) VMware Infrastructure
5 34 (0.62%) VMware NSX
6 31 (0.56%) vSphere
7 21 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
9 11 (0.20%) Squid
10 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.15%) Hyper-V
12 7 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.13%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.091%) KVM
14 5 (0.091%) SRDF
15 4 (0.073%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
15 4 (0.073%) NFS
16 3 (0.055%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,717 (31.25%) Terraform
2 1,669 (30.38%) Kubernetes
3 515 (9.37%) Ansible
4 489 (8.90%) Grafana
5 425 (7.74%) Prometheus
6 112 (2.04%) Argo
7 79 (1.44%) Istio
8 61 (1.11%) Puppet
9 58 (1.06%) Single Sign-On
10 38 (0.69%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.58%) Kibana
12 27 (0.49%) Packer
13 23 (0.42%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.40%) Control-M
14 22 (0.40%) Nessus
15 17 (0.31%) IBM Guardium
16 16 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Intune
16 16 (0.29%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 751 (13.67%) Microsoft
2 368 (6.70%) Databricks
3 305 (5.55%) Google
4 260 (4.73%) Oracle
5 217 (3.95%) Splunk
6 167 (3.04%) Salesforce
7 141 (2.57%) ServiceNow
8 136 (2.48%) Red Hat
9 126 (2.29%) Dynatrace
10 111 (2.02%) VMware
11 87 (1.58%) OpenAI
12 65 (1.18%) SAP
13 60 (1.09%) IBM
14 58 (1.06%) MuleSoft
15 53 (0.96%) Cisco
16 46 (0.84%) Palo Alto
17 45 (0.82%) Informatica
18 41 (0.75%) CyberArk
19 40 (0.73%) Tenable
20 38 (0.69%) AppDynamics