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 4 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 17 27
Rank change year-on-year +6 +10 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,836 3,184 2,572
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.04% 9.68% 6.56%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.00% 10.70% 7.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,926 2,200 1,756
10th Percentile £379 £358 £400
25th Percentile £433 £420 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -6.78%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £710 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £486 £525
% change year-on-year +2.83% -7.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 43 76
10th Percentile £51.25 £45.41 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 -
Median hourly rate £68.22 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.95% - -8.45%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.80 £80.37 £72.75
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 44,879 29,748 33,534
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 90.41% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,704 18,653 21,488
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,741 1,659 1,873
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.30 £18.14
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.91
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.05 £40.94
% change year-on-year +90.72% -43.70% +3.38%

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 4 August 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 4 August 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 4 August 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 +7 4,906 £525 +2.44% 2,475
London +6 2,572 £539 +1.70% 1,358
UK excluding London +8 2,488 £500 +2.83% 1,399
Work from Home +6 1,792 £515 +2.90% 1,297
North of England +9 930 £500 +5.26% 406
Yorkshire +5 463 £511 +7.63% 125
South East -5 448 £525 +5.00% 379
Midlands +3 421 £487 +5.82% 155
North West +7 370 £525 +10.53% 227
West Midlands +14 358 £481 -3.80% 111
South West +6 276 £525 +1.45% 203
Scotland +6 243 £425 -15.00% 105
East of England +6 141 £510 +9.09% 78
North East 0 108 £425 -5.56% 55
East Midlands -15 56 £500 +13.77% 42
Wales -3 38 £450 -4.00% 34
Northern Ireland +25 24 £545 +3.81% 48
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 (5.04%) Confluence
2 215 (3.68%) Apache Airflow
3 206 (3.53%) Apache Spark
4 157 (2.69%) Apache
5 87 (1.49%) SAS
6 71 (1.22%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.57%) Jupyter
8 20 (0.34%) CMS
9 19 (0.33%) OpenStack
10 17 (0.29%) Anypoint
10 17 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.27%) nginx
11 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
11 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.24%) WebLogic
13 10 (0.17%) Camunda
13 10 (0.17%) Mule
14 8 (0.14%) IIS
14 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
15 7 (0.12%) WordPress
Applications
1 23 (0.39%) Chatbot
2 21 (0.36%) Microsoft Excel
3 13 (0.22%) Microsoft Office
4 11 (0.19%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 8 (0.14%) MS Visio
6 5 (0.086%) Microsoft Project
7 4 (0.069%) Simulink
7 4 (0.069%) Trello
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
10 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.017%) Maya
Business Applications
1 44 (0.75%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.31%) Payment Gateway
2 18 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.24%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.22%) Aladdin
5 10 (0.17%) SAP CRM
6 8 (0.14%) Shopify
7 7 (0.12%) NetSuite
8 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.086%) Magento
10 4 (0.069%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.069%) 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%) Salesforce CRM
12 2 (0.034%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
12 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 2,583 (44.26%) AWS
2 2,548 (43.66%) Azure
3 1,230 (21.08%) GitHub
4 994 (17.03%) GCP
5 944 (16.18%) Azure DevOps
6 797 (13.66%) GitHub Actions
7 629 (10.78%) Serverless
8 447 (7.66%) Amazon S3
9 417 (7.15%) Power Platform
10 412 (7.06%) AWS Lambda
11 314 (5.38%) Amazon EKS
12 298 (5.11%) AWS CloudFormation
13 269 (4.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 243 (4.16%) Azure AKS
15 229 (3.92%) Entra ID
16 217 (3.72%) Amazon EC2
17 206 (3.53%) Snowflake
18 193 (3.31%) Amazon ECS
19 187 (3.20%) Azure Data Factory
20 163 (2.79%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 225 (3.86%) Firewall
2 144 (2.47%) DNS
3 118 (2.02%) Network Security
4 97 (1.66%) VPN
5 73 (1.25%) TCP/IP
6 56 (0.96%) HTTP
7 47 (0.81%) WAN
8 41 (0.70%) BGP
9 39 (0.67%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.57%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 32 (0.55%) BIG-IP
11 32 (0.55%) VXLAN
12 30 (0.51%) Ethernet VPN
12 30 (0.51%) OSPF
13 29 (0.50%) SSL
14 28 (0.48%) Internet
15 26 (0.45%) DHCP
16 21 (0.36%) VSAN
17 20 (0.34%) 3GPP
17 20 (0.34%) 5G
Database & Business Intelligence
1 400 (6.85%) PostgreSQL
2 319 (5.47%) Power BI
3 272 (4.66%) Data Warehouse
4 260 (4.46%) SQL Server
5 253 (4.34%) NoSQL
6 247 (4.23%) Relational Database
7 224 (3.84%) MongoDB
8 203 (3.48%) Data Lake
9 156 (2.67%) Amazon RDS
10 153 (2.62%) DynamoDB
11 141 (2.42%) Metadata
12 126 (2.16%) Amazon Redshift
13 116 (1.99%) Delta Lake
14 110 (1.88%) MySQL
15 108 (1.85%) Amazon Athena
16 106 (1.82%) BigQuery
17 102 (1.75%) Big Data
18 95 (1.63%) Azure SQL Database
19 84 (1.44%) Redis
20 72 (1.23%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 1,108 (18.99%) Git
2 1,006 (17.24%) Jenkins
3 803 (13.76%) GitLab
4 542 (9.29%) JIRA
5 207 (3.55%) Selenium
6 193 (3.31%) JUnit
7 133 (2.28%) Cucumber
8 114 (1.95%) Postman
9 113 (1.94%) JMeter
10 112 (1.92%) Bitbucket
11 107 (1.83%) Maven
12 104 (1.78%) SonarQube
13 96 (1.64%) Gradle
14 94 (1.61%) REST Assured
15 87 (1.49%) Cypress.io
16 83 (1.42%) Gatling
17 75 (1.29%) Mockito
18 54 (0.93%) WebDriver
19 52 (0.89%) MLflow
20 46 (0.79%) Claude Code
General
1 1,445 (24.76%) Social Skills
2 1,015 (17.39%) Finance
3 831 (14.24%) Public Sector
4 482 (8.26%) Analytical Skills
5 441 (7.56%) Banking
6 133 (2.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 122 (2.09%) Retail
8 120 (2.06%) Documentation Skills
9 74 (1.27%) Investment Banking
10 69 (1.18%) Front Office
10 69 (1.18%) Military
11 65 (1.11%) Influencing Skills
11 65 (1.11%) Telecoms
12 61 (1.05%) Legal
13 52 (0.89%) Law
14 51 (0.87%) Financial Institution
15 41 (0.70%) Marketing
16 36 (0.62%) Manufacturing
16 36 (0.62%) Publishing
17 35 (0.60%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,330 (22.79%) Developer
2 986 (16.90%) Senior
3 700 (11.99%) DevOps Engineer
4 600 (10.28%) Architect
5 559 (9.58%) Lead
6 459 (7.86%) Data Engineer
7 333 (5.71%) Java Developer
8 326 (5.59%) AWS Engineer
9 317 (5.43%) Software Engineer
10 281 (4.81%) Senior Developer
11 273 (4.68%) Azure Engineer
12 260 (4.46%) Platform Engineer
13 256 (4.39%) Cloud Engineer
14 197 (3.38%) Full-Stack Developer
15 156 (2.67%) Solutions Architect
16 155 (2.66%) Python Developer
17 144 (2.47%) AWS DevOps
18 138 (2.36%) GCP Engineer
19 133 (2.28%) AWS DevOps Engineer
20 132 (2.26%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 772 (13.23%) REST
2 532 (9.12%) React
3 528 (9.05%) Spring
4 517 (8.86%) .NET
5 484 (8.29%) RESTful
6 480 (8.22%) Kafka
7 458 (7.85%) Spring Boot
8 388 (6.65%) Node.js
9 235 (4.03%) Playwright
10 222 (3.80%) HTML
11 212 (3.63%) PySpark
12 196 (3.36%) AngularJS
12 196 (3.36%) CSS
13 194 (3.32%) OAuth
14 193 (3.31%) JSON
15 147 (2.52%) OAuth2
16 129 (2.21%) SOAP
17 118 (2.02%) .NET Core
18 110 (1.88%) FastAPI
18 110 (1.88%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,195 (20.48%) Cloud Native
2 460 (7.88%) Distributed Systems
3 357 (6.12%) Product Ownership
4 185 (3.17%) Onboarding
5 179 (3.07%) Enterprise Software
6 152 (2.60%) Legacy Systems
7 146 (2.50%) AI Agents
8 132 (2.26%) Hybrid Cloud
9 104 (1.78%) Data Centre
10 95 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
11 93 (1.59%) Public Cloud
12 92 (1.58%) Security Posture
13 77 (1.32%) Algorithms
14 73 (1.25%) Data Structures
15 72 (1.23%) Virtual Team
16 71 (1.22%) Mobile App
17 69 (1.18%) Self-Motivation
18 67 (1.15%) Management Information System
19 63 (1.08%) Enterprise Cloud
20 58 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 565 (9.68%) Linux
2 265 (4.54%) Windows
3 133 (2.28%) Unix
4 108 (1.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.03%) Windows Server
6 56 (0.96%) Android
7 53 (0.91%) Apple iOS
8 25 (0.43%) VMS
9 19 (0.33%) Ubuntu
10 16 (0.27%) AIX
11 15 (0.26%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
13 8 (0.14%) Solaris
13 8 (0.14%) zOS
14 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
15 5 (0.086%) CentOS
15 5 (0.086%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.069%) Amazon Linux
16 4 (0.069%) Rocky
17 3 (0.051%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,282 (56.24%) DevOps
2 2,191 (37.54%) Agile
3 1,854 (31.77%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,313 (22.50%) Test Automation
5 1,276 (21.86%) Containerisation
6 1,196 (20.49%) Microservices
7 1,027 (17.60%) Observability
8 1,017 (17.43%) AI
9 956 (16.38%) Software Engineering
10 922 (15.80%) Problem-Solving
11 834 (14.29%) Continuous Improvement
12 760 (13.02%) Analytics
13 709 (12.15%) Platform Engineering
14 698 (11.96%) Data Pipeline
15 639 (10.95%) Data Modelling
16 627 (10.74%) Scrum
17 591 (10.13%) Event-Driven
18 583 (9.99%) Migration
19 564 (9.66%) Stakeholder Management
20 553 (9.48%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 2,117 (36.27%) Python
2 1,325 (22.70%) SQL
3 1,222 (20.94%) Java
4 630 (10.80%) JavaScript
5 554 (9.49%) C#
6 503 (8.62%) TypeScript
7 485 (8.31%) Bash
8 405 (6.94%) PowerShell
9 230 (3.94%) Bicep
10 156 (2.67%) Go
11 111 (1.90%) Kotlin
12 102 (1.75%) Shell Script
13 91 (1.56%) Scala
14 84 (1.44%) Apex Code
15 78 (1.34%) C++
16 61 (1.05%) PL/SQL
17 60 (1.03%) Groovy
18 50 (0.86%) Ruby
19 49 (0.84%) T-SQL
20 34 (0.58%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,680 (28.79%) Security Cleared
2 1,415 (24.25%) SC Cleared
3 293 (5.02%) Degree
4 233 (3.99%) BPSS Clearance
5 211 (3.62%) DV Cleared
6 194 (3.32%) Azure Certification
7 181 (3.10%) AWS Certification
8 147 (2.52%) Computer Science Degree
9 97 (1.66%) CISSP
10 64 (1.10%) Cisco Certification
11 57 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
12 51 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 48 (0.82%) CISM
14 46 (0.79%) ISTQB
15 40 (0.69%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 39 (0.67%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 28 (0.48%) CCSP
19 24 (0.41%) TOGAF Certification
20 20 (0.34%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 495 (8.48%) QA
2 401 (6.87%) Data Quality
3 304 (5.21%) Accessibility
4 147 (2.52%) GDPR
5 128 (2.19%) WCAG
6 112 (1.92%) NIST
7 95 (1.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 74 (1.27%) NCSC
9 40 (0.69%) PCI DSS
10 32 (0.55%) SLA
11 25 (0.43%) GRC
12 24 (0.41%) Cyber Essentials
13 15 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
15 12 (0.21%) HL7
15 12 (0.21%) SOC 2
16 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.19%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
18 8 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,542 (26.42%) Docker
2 157 (2.69%) Active Directory
3 98 (1.68%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.29%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.65%) VMware NSX
6 32 (0.55%) vSphere
7 20 (0.34%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
8 16 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.22%) Squid
10 8 (0.14%) HDFS
10 8 (0.14%) KVM
11 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.12%) Postfix
12 5 (0.086%) Ceph
12 5 (0.086%) SRDF
13 4 (0.069%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 4 (0.069%) NFS
14 2 (0.034%) Samba
Systems Management
1 1,835 (31.44%) Terraform
2 1,807 (30.96%) Kubernetes
3 529 (9.06%) Ansible
4 491 (8.41%) Grafana
5 399 (6.84%) Prometheus
6 115 (1.97%) Argo
7 66 (1.13%) Puppet
8 59 (1.01%) Istio
9 49 (0.84%) Progress Chef
10 40 (0.69%) Single Sign-On
11 34 (0.58%) Kibana
12 31 (0.53%) Packer
13 23 (0.39%) Control-M
13 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
14 20 (0.34%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.33%) vCenter Server
16 15 (0.26%) Jamf Pro
16 15 (0.26%) Nessus
16 15 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
17 14 (0.24%) Podman
Vendors
1 835 (14.31%) Microsoft
2 386 (6.61%) Databricks
3 343 (5.88%) Google
4 296 (5.07%) Oracle
5 206 (3.53%) Splunk
6 194 (3.32%) Salesforce
7 147 (2.52%) Dynatrace
8 136 (2.33%) ServiceNow
9 131 (2.24%) VMware
10 106 (1.82%) Red Hat
11 87 (1.49%) MuleSoft
12 77 (1.32%) OpenAI
13 70 (1.20%) SAP
14 67 (1.15%) IBM
15 66 (1.13%) Cisco
15 66 (1.13%) Informatica
16 45 (0.77%) F5
16 45 (0.77%) Foundry
17 44 (0.75%) Palo Alto
18 41 (0.70%) Talend