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 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 21 29
Rank change year-on-year +9 +8 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 4,254 2,794 2,656
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.56% 8.12% 6.05%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.07% 9.22% 6.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,971 1,937 1,946
10th Percentile £363 £388 £413
25th Percentile £423 £453 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £550 £560
Median % change year-on-year -7.27% -1.79% -6.67%
75th Percentile £600 £653 £663
90th Percentile £688 £750 £756
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 60 30 24
10th Percentile £42.25 £26.48 £51.88
25th Percentile £61.63 - £61.06
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year - -13.33% +14.32%
75th Percentile £67.00 £74.00 £77.50
90th Percentile £86.15 £88.41 £78.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £67.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -3.70% -10.00% +14.32%

All Process and 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 32,541 30,291 38,815
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.45% 88.04% 88.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,482 18,505 25,899
10th Percentile £300 £306 £308
25th Percentile £406 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,089 1,000 1,504
10th Percentile £14.53 £15.61 £14.38
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.30 £18.95
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.84
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.86% +25.25%
75th Percentile £48.75 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.00 £73.78 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £32.28 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.75% -27.46% +39.06%

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 December 2025.

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 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for CI/CD in the UK

CI/CD
Top 17 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 December 2025. 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 3,534 £515 -8.44% 1,491
London +5 1,845 £525 -11.58% 513
UK excluding London +10 1,804 £500 - 1,314
Work from Home +10 1,368 £510 -2.95% 1,062
North of England +10 611 £488 -0.26% 352
Midlands +20 359 £515 +3.00% 137
South East +7 344 £500 -10.71% 439
Yorkshire +3 306 £500 +2.56% 116
West Midlands +18 295 £520 -0.95% 89
North West +11 239 £460 -4.66% 202
Scotland +10 237 £470 +0.21% 122
South West +19 169 £550 -4.35% 152
East of England +7 105 £550 +10.00% 94
North East +10 70 £494 -10.23% 39
East Midlands +14 64 £420 -15.15% 46
Wales -3 30 £463 -13.95% 25
Northern Ireland -9 11 - - 14

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
1 164 (3.86%) Confluence
2 128 (3.01%) Apache Airflow
3 110 (2.59%) Apache Spark
4 103 (2.42%) Apache
5 83 (1.95%) SAS
6 38 (0.89%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.80%) nginx
8 31 (0.73%) WebLogic
9 23 (0.54%) JBoss
10 20 (0.47%) Anypoint
11 18 (0.42%) CMS
11 18 (0.42%) IIS
11 18 (0.42%) OpenStack
12 17 (0.40%) WebSphere
13 16 (0.38%) Mule
14 11 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
15 10 (0.24%) SugarCRM
15 10 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
16 9 (0.21%) Tomcat
17 8 (0.19%) iPlanet
Applications
1 44 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
2 18 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 11 (0.26%) Mozilla Thunderbird
4 9 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
4 9 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
5 8 (0.19%) Chatbot
6 5 (0.12%) Adobe XD
6 5 (0.12%) MS Visio
6 5 (0.12%) Sketch
7 1 (0.024%) Oracle Smart View
7 1 (0.024%) Revit
7 1 (0.024%) Simulink
7 1 (0.024%) Trello
Business Applications
1 27 (0.63%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.26%) Aladdin
3 6 (0.14%) Endur
4 5 (0.12%) Maximo
5 4 (0.094%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.094%) thinkFolio
6 3 (0.071%) Magento
6 3 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
6 3 (0.071%) Payment Gateway
6 3 (0.071%) SAP S/4HANA
6 3 (0.071%) Shopify
7 2 (0.047%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.047%) Oracle Applications
7 2 (0.047%) Oracle Payables
7 2 (0.047%) Oracle Receivables
7 2 (0.047%) Orchestrade
8 1 (0.024%) OpenText MBPM
8 1 (0.024%) Oracle Cash Management
8 1 (0.024%) Oracle EBS
8 1 (0.024%) Oracle Financials
Cloud Services
1 2,007 (47.18%) AWS
2 1,736 (40.81%) Azure
3 918 (21.58%) GitHub
4 728 (17.11%) GCP
5 628 (14.76%) Azure DevOps
6 621 (14.60%) GitHub Actions
7 569 (13.38%) Serverless
8 362 (8.51%) Amazon S3
9 335 (7.87%) AWS Lambda
10 320 (7.52%) AWS CloudFormation
11 246 (5.78%) OpenShift
12 238 (5.59%) Amazon EKS
13 226 (5.31%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 225 (5.29%) Amazon ECS
15 224 (5.27%) Amazon EC2
16 191 (4.49%) Power Platform
17 162 (3.81%) Azure AKS
18 145 (3.41%) Virtual Private Cloud
19 140 (3.29%) Azure Data Factory
20 116 (2.73%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 180 (4.23%) Firewall
2 134 (3.15%) DNS
3 80 (1.88%) VPN
4 78 (1.83%) TCP/IP
5 72 (1.69%) Network Security
6 46 (1.08%) SSL
7 45 (1.06%) HTTP
8 25 (0.59%) SSH
9 21 (0.49%) DHCP
10 19 (0.45%) Kerberos
11 18 (0.42%) Ethernet
12 16 (0.38%) HTTPS
12 16 (0.38%) OpenLDAP
12 16 (0.38%) WAN
12 16 (0.38%) Wireshark
13 13 (0.31%) AMQP
14 12 (0.28%) SMTP
15 11 (0.26%) FTP
15 11 (0.26%) IMAP
15 11 (0.26%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 372 (8.74%) PostgreSQL
2 251 (5.90%) NoSQL
3 188 (4.42%) Amazon RDS
4 181 (4.25%) MongoDB
5 173 (4.07%) SQL Server
6 153 (3.60%) Relational Database
7 140 (3.29%) Data Warehouse
8 139 (3.27%) Power BI
9 132 (3.10%) Data Lake
10 110 (2.59%) MySQL
11 90 (2.12%) DynamoDB
12 83 (1.95%) Azure SQL Database
13 72 (1.69%) Delta Lake
14 68 (1.60%) Redis
15 67 (1.57%) Oracle Database
16 66 (1.55%) Big Data
17 59 (1.39%) BigQuery
18 53 (1.25%) Amazon Redshift
19 50 (1.18%) Amazon Aurora
20 47 (1.10%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 987 (23.20%) Jenkins
2 894 (21.02%) Git
3 716 (16.83%) GitLab
4 429 (10.08%) JIRA
5 191 (4.49%) Selenium
6 149 (3.50%) Cucumber
7 147 (3.46%) JUnit
8 113 (2.66%) Cypress.io
9 112 (2.63%) SonarQube
10 108 (2.54%) Postman
11 100 (2.35%) Sonatype Nexus
12 82 (1.93%) Bitbucket
13 69 (1.62%) JMeter
14 68 (1.60%) Artifactory
14 68 (1.60%) CircleCI
15 66 (1.55%) Maven
16 59 (1.39%) Gradle
17 57 (1.34%) REST Assured
18 55 (1.29%) Liquibase
19 52 (1.22%) MLflow
General
1 1,199 (28.19%) Social Skills
2 753 (17.70%) Finance
3 544 (12.79%) Public Sector
4 364 (8.56%) Banking
5 355 (8.35%) Analytical Skills
6 97 (2.28%) Documentation Skills
7 66 (1.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 64 (1.50%) Financial Institution
9 62 (1.46%) Investment Banking
10 56 (1.32%) Marketing
11 55 (1.29%) Military
12 50 (1.18%) Front Office
12 50 (1.18%) Telecoms
13 41 (0.96%) Presentation Skills
14 36 (0.85%) Influencing Skills
15 31 (0.73%) Manufacturing
15 31 (0.73%) Retail
16 21 (0.49%) Electronics
16 21 (0.49%) Law
17 18 (0.42%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,014 (23.84%) Developer
2 579 (13.61%) Senior
3 574 (13.49%) DevOps Engineer
4 335 (7.87%) Architect
5 284 (6.68%) Data Engineer
6 281 (6.61%) Lead
7 267 (6.28%) AWS Engineer
8 247 (5.81%) Java Developer
9 244 (5.74%) Software Engineer
10 203 (4.77%) Platform Engineer
11 193 (4.54%) Azure Engineer
12 172 (4.04%) Full-Stack Developer
13 161 (3.78%) Senior Developer
14 150 (3.53%) AWS DevOps
15 143 (3.36%) Cloud Engineer
16 127 (2.99%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 122 (2.87%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 110 (2.59%) Python Engineer
19 109 (2.56%) Python Developer
20 97 (2.28%) Site Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 518 (12.18%) REST
2 441 (10.37%) RESTful
3 434 (10.20%) React
4 424 (9.97%) Node.js
5 362 (8.51%) Kafka
6 348 (8.18%) Spring
7 340 (7.99%) .NET
8 303 (7.12%) Spring Boot
9 219 (5.15%) HTML
10 214 (5.03%) AngularJS
11 189 (4.44%) CSS
12 173 (4.07%) JSON
13 161 (3.78%) Elastic Stack
14 151 (3.55%) Playwright
15 147 (3.46%) OAuth
16 127 (2.99%) SOAP
17 123 (2.89%) GraphQL
18 118 (2.77%) PySpark
19 110 (2.59%) YAML
20 108 (2.54%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 648 (15.23%) Cloud Native
2 262 (6.16%) Distributed Systems
3 200 (4.70%) Product Ownership
4 104 (2.44%) Onboarding
5 95 (2.23%) Mobile App
6 93 (2.19%) Public Cloud
7 89 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
8 76 (1.79%) Hybrid Cloud
9 72 (1.69%) Enterprise Software
10 71 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
11 66 (1.55%) Algorithms
12 57 (1.34%) Greenfield Project
13 53 (1.25%) Replication
14 52 (1.22%) Security Posture
15 51 (1.20%) Virtual Team
16 49 (1.15%) Data Centre
17 45 (1.06%) AI Agents
18 43 (1.01%) Private Cloud
19 41 (0.96%) Data Structures
20 39 (0.92%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 610 (14.34%) Linux
2 219 (5.15%) Windows
3 109 (2.56%) Unix
4 81 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 74 (1.74%) Android
6 71 (1.67%) Apple iOS
7 52 (1.22%) Windows Server
8 41 (0.96%) VMS
9 26 (0.61%) Ubuntu
10 23 (0.54%) CentOS
11 14 (0.33%) Solaris
12 11 (0.26%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.21%) Mac OS
14 4 (0.094%) zOS
15 3 (0.071%) SUSE
15 3 (0.071%) Windows Server 2016
16 2 (0.047%) Oracle Linux
16 2 (0.047%) Robot Operating System
16 2 (0.047%) Windows Server 2019
17 1 (0.024%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,458 (57.78%) DevOps
2 1,610 (37.85%) Agile
3 1,334 (31.36%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,082 (25.43%) Containerisation
5 935 (21.98%) Problem-Solving
6 866 (20.36%) Test Automation
7 817 (19.21%) Microservices
8 584 (13.73%) Software Engineering
9 522 (12.27%) Observability
10 473 (11.12%) Analytics
11 433 (10.18%) AI
12 422 (9.92%) Migration
13 411 (9.66%) Continuous Improvement
14 382 (8.98%) Data Pipeline
15 378 (8.89%) Full-Stack Development
16 377 (8.86%) Scrum
17 356 (8.37%) DevSecOps
18 349 (8.20%) Mentoring
19 329 (7.73%) TDD
20 322 (7.57%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,646 (38.69%) Python
2 937 (22.03%) Java
3 870 (20.45%) SQL
4 579 (13.61%) JavaScript
5 467 (10.98%) TypeScript
6 448 (10.53%) Bash
7 408 (9.59%) C#
8 313 (7.36%) PowerShell
9 248 (5.83%) Go
10 115 (2.70%) C++
11 112 (2.63%) Bicep
12 111 (2.61%) Shell Script
13 71 (1.67%) Scala
14 60 (1.41%) PHP
15 56 (1.32%) Kotlin
16 53 (1.25%) PL/SQL
16 53 (1.25%) Ruby
17 49 (1.15%) Groovy
18 45 (1.06%) Perl
19 43 (1.01%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,097 (25.79%) Security Cleared
2 875 (20.57%) SC Cleared
3 284 (6.68%) Degree
4 187 (4.40%) Computer Science Degree
5 169 (3.97%) AWS Certification
6 127 (2.99%) DV Cleared
7 118 (2.77%) Azure Certification
8 117 (2.75%) BPSS Clearance
9 78 (1.83%) Master's Degree
10 74 (1.74%) CISSP
11 57 (1.34%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 52 (1.22%) CISM
12 52 (1.22%) Microsoft Certification
13 33 (0.78%) ISTQB
14 30 (0.71%) Cisco Certification
15 28 (0.66%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 26 (0.61%) Oracle Certification
17 17 (0.40%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 16 (0.38%) CCSP
18 16 (0.38%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 423 (9.94%) QA
2 183 (4.30%) Data Quality
3 176 (4.14%) Accessibility
4 155 (3.64%) GDPR
5 136 (3.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 115 (2.70%) NIST
7 62 (1.46%) WCAG
8 51 (1.20%) NCSC
9 47 (1.10%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.56%) HIPAA
11 18 (0.42%) PSD2
12 17 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 17 (0.40%) SLA
13 16 (0.38%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.35%) EU AI Act
15 11 (0.26%) ISO 20022
15 11 (0.26%) SEPA
16 10 (0.24%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.24%) HL7
17 9 (0.21%) MiFID
System Software
1 1,375 (32.32%) Docker
2 130 (3.06%) Active Directory
3 76 (1.79%) VMware Infrastructure
4 57 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.87%) vSphere
6 13 (0.31%) VMware NSX
7 12 (0.28%) HDFS
7 12 (0.28%) Squid
8 11 (0.26%) Dovecot
8 11 (0.26%) NFS
8 11 (0.26%) Postfix
8 11 (0.26%) VMware ESXi
9 10 (0.24%) DFS Replication
9 10 (0.24%) Hyper-V
9 10 (0.24%) KVM
10 9 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
11 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.19%) zsh
12 6 (0.14%) Firmware
13 4 (0.094%) Veritas Volume Manager
Systems Management
1 1,548 (36.39%) Kubernetes
2 1,485 (34.91%) Terraform
3 591 (13.89%) Ansible
4 489 (11.50%) Grafana
5 422 (9.92%) Prometheus
6 121 (2.84%) Argo
7 78 (1.83%) Progress Chef
8 70 (1.65%) Puppet
9 46 (1.08%) Istio
10 42 (0.99%) Kibana
11 40 (0.94%) Single Sign-On
12 27 (0.63%) Packer
13 24 (0.56%) Podman
14 23 (0.54%) Nessus
15 19 (0.45%) Proxmox
16 17 (0.40%) vCenter Server
17 16 (0.38%) ITRS Geneos
18 14 (0.33%) logstash
18 14 (0.33%) Rancher
18 14 (0.33%) vRealize
Vendors
1 565 (13.28%) Microsoft
2 281 (6.61%) Databricks
3 268 (6.30%) Oracle
4 236 (5.55%) Google
5 220 (5.17%) Splunk
6 137 (3.22%) Red Hat
7 117 (2.75%) VMware
8 109 (2.56%) ServiceNow
9 89 (2.09%) Salesforce
10 62 (1.46%) OpenAI
10 62 (1.46%) SAP
11 58 (1.36%) Dynatrace
12 49 (1.15%) MuleSoft
13 47 (1.10%) IBM
14 43 (1.01%) F5
14 43 (1.01%) Talend
15 42 (0.99%) CyberArk
16 34 (0.80%) Cisco
17 30 (0.71%) Denodo
18 28 (0.66%) BeyondTrust