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

6 months to
13 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 18 27
Rank change year-on-year +8 +9 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,888 3,029 2,654
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.18% 9.27% 6.21%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.13% 10.25% 7.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,967 2,090 1,829
10th Percentile £375 £358 £400
25th Percentile £430 £424 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -8.33%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £525
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 40 79
10th Percentile £51.25 £44.31 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £51.25 £62.50
Median hourly rate £70.00 £64.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.53% -0.77% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £83.54 £71.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +3.85% - -0.92%

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 44,845 29,559 36,499
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.12% 90.45% 85.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,888 18,632 23,279
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.81% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,665 1,513 2,446
10th Percentile £14.90 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.61 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -4.70%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +82.48% -35.31% +0.51%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 4,895 £525 +2.44% 1,809
London +9 2,553 £550 +3.77% 906
UK excluding London +8 2,514 £500 +5.26% 1,286
Work from Home +8 1,775 £520 +3.90% 896
North of England +9 966 £500 +5.26% 332
Yorkshire +6 501 £503 +5.95% 93
South East -4 441 £525 +5.00% 344
Midlands +1 412 £488 +6.09% 138
North West +7 377 £505 +3.32% 195
West Midlands +14 339 £490 -1.44% 86
South West +8 258 £525 -3.23% 266
Scotland +3 257 £425 -15.00% 80
East of England +4 147 £550 +17.90% 60
North East +7 103 £425 - 45
East Midlands -10 66 £447 +1.46% 51
Wales +3 44 £425 -9.33% 29
Northern Ireland +26 31 £523 +22.94% 55
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
1 298 (5.06%) Confluence
2 224 (3.80%) Apache Spark
3 205 (3.48%) Apache Airflow
4 151 (2.56%) Apache
5 83 (1.41%) SAS
6 69 (1.17%) SharePoint
7 32 (0.54%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.44%) CMS
9 20 (0.34%) nginx
10 19 (0.32%) OpenStack
11 18 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
12 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
13 15 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
13 15 (0.25%) SharePoint Server
14 14 (0.24%) WebLogic
15 13 (0.22%) Anypoint
16 12 (0.20%) Camunda
17 9 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
17 9 (0.15%) Sitecore CMS
18 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
Applications
1 26 (0.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.34%) Chatbot
2 20 (0.34%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 16 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
4 12 (0.20%) Microsoft Project
5 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.068%) Adobe XD
6 4 (0.068%) Simulink
7 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
8 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
8 1 (0.017%) Maya
8 1 (0.017%) Sketch
8 1 (0.017%) Spreadsheet
8 1 (0.017%) Trello
Business Applications
1 36 (0.61%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.34%) Payment Gateway
3 18 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
4 15 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
5 11 (0.19%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.15%) SAP CRM
7 8 (0.14%) Shopify
8 6 (0.10%) NetSuite
8 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.085%) Magento
10 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
11 3 (0.051%) Endur
11 3 (0.051%) Findur
11 3 (0.051%) SAP BPC
12 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
12 2 (0.034%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
13 1 (0.017%) Cloudability
13 1 (0.017%) PeopleSoft HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,619 (44.48%) AWS
2 2,562 (43.51%) Azure
3 1,234 (20.96%) GitHub
4 993 (16.86%) GCP
5 915 (15.54%) Azure DevOps
6 783 (13.30%) GitHub Actions
7 655 (11.12%) Serverless
8 463 (7.86%) Amazon S3
9 420 (7.13%) AWS Lambda
9 420 (7.13%) Power Platform
10 314 (5.33%) AWS CloudFormation
11 301 (5.11%) Amazon EKS
12 258 (4.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 239 (4.06%) Azure AKS
14 233 (3.96%) Amazon EC2
15 218 (3.70%) Entra ID
16 196 (3.33%) Amazon ECS
17 189 (3.21%) Azure Data Factory
18 184 (3.13%) Snowflake
19 181 (3.07%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 214 (3.63%) Firewall
2 134 (2.28%) DNS
3 129 (2.19%) Network Security
4 95 (1.61%) VPN
5 64 (1.09%) HTTP
6 54 (0.92%) TCP/IP
7 47 (0.80%) WAN
8 43 (0.73%) BGP
9 39 (0.66%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.58%) OSPF
11 32 (0.54%) BIG-IP
12 31 (0.53%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 30 (0.51%) VXLAN
14 28 (0.48%) Ethernet VPN
15 27 (0.46%) SSL
16 22 (0.37%) Internet
17 21 (0.36%) Ethernet
17 21 (0.36%) Wi-Fi
18 20 (0.34%) 3GPP
18 20 (0.34%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 390 (6.62%) PostgreSQL
2 310 (5.26%) Power BI
3 270 (4.59%) SQL Server
4 259 (4.40%) NoSQL
5 252 (4.28%) Relational Database
6 251 (4.26%) Data Warehouse
7 205 (3.48%) MongoDB
8 199 (3.38%) Data Lake
9 168 (2.85%) Amazon RDS
10 152 (2.58%) DynamoDB
11 139 (2.36%) Metadata
12 129 (2.19%) Amazon Redshift
13 123 (2.09%) Big Data
14 119 (2.02%) Amazon Athena
15 115 (1.95%) Delta Lake
16 101 (1.72%) MySQL
17 96 (1.63%) BigQuery
18 94 (1.60%) Azure SQL Database
19 78 (1.32%) Redis
20 70 (1.19%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,089 (18.50%) Git
2 1,034 (17.56%) Jenkins
3 819 (13.91%) GitLab
4 558 (9.48%) JIRA
5 212 (3.60%) Selenium
6 193 (3.28%) JUnit
7 137 (2.33%) Cucumber
8 131 (2.22%) Postman
9 116 (1.97%) JMeter
10 112 (1.90%) REST Assured
11 101 (1.72%) SonarQube
12 97 (1.65%) Maven
13 94 (1.60%) Gradle
14 86 (1.46%) Bitbucket
15 82 (1.39%) Cypress.io
16 79 (1.34%) Gatling
17 71 (1.21%) Mockito
18 59 (1.00%) MLflow
18 59 (1.00%) WebDriver
19 42 (0.71%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,446 (24.56%) Social Skills
2 1,011 (17.17%) Finance
3 817 (13.88%) Public Sector
4 485 (8.24%) Analytical Skills
5 439 (7.46%) Banking
6 144 (2.45%) Documentation Skills
7 125 (2.12%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 105 (1.78%) Retail
9 75 (1.27%) Investment Banking
10 73 (1.24%) Legal
11 68 (1.15%) Influencing Skills
11 68 (1.15%) Military
12 65 (1.10%) Front Office
13 56 (0.95%) Telecoms
14 50 (0.85%) Law
15 47 (0.80%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.66%) Marketing
17 32 (0.54%) Publishing
18 31 (0.53%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,289 (21.89%) Developer
2 946 (16.07%) Senior
3 739 (12.55%) DevOps Engineer
4 624 (10.60%) Architect
5 535 (9.09%) Lead
6 465 (7.90%) Data Engineer
7 340 (5.77%) AWS Engineer
8 327 (5.55%) Java Developer
9 308 (5.23%) Software Engineer
10 279 (4.74%) Azure Engineer
11 258 (4.38%) Cloud Engineer
12 252 (4.28%) Platform Engineer
13 235 (3.99%) Senior Developer
14 185 (3.14%) Full-Stack Developer
15 167 (2.84%) Python Developer
16 156 (2.65%) AWS DevOps
17 148 (2.51%) Solutions Architect
18 144 (2.45%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 143 (2.43%) GCP Engineer
19 143 (2.43%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 713 (12.11%) REST
2 536 (9.10%) React
3 530 (9.00%) Spring
4 516 (8.76%) .NET
5 497 (8.44%) RESTful
6 467 (7.93%) Spring Boot
7 464 (7.88%) Kafka
8 385 (6.54%) Node.js
9 229 (3.89%) Playwright
10 224 (3.80%) PySpark
11 218 (3.70%) AngularJS
12 210 (3.57%) HTML
13 191 (3.24%) OAuth
14 184 (3.13%) CSS
15 172 (2.92%) JSON
16 140 (2.38%) OAuth2
17 128 (2.17%) YAML
18 123 (2.09%) GraphQL
19 120 (2.04%) FastAPI
20 119 (2.02%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 1,188 (20.18%) Cloud Native
2 420 (7.13%) Distributed Systems
3 350 (5.94%) Product Ownership
4 185 (3.14%) Onboarding
5 151 (2.56%) Enterprise Software
6 150 (2.55%) Legacy Systems
7 122 (2.07%) AI Agents
7 122 (2.07%) Hybrid Cloud
8 110 (1.87%) Data Centre
9 101 (1.72%) Public Cloud
10 92 (1.56%) Data Protection Act
11 91 (1.55%) Security Posture
12 80 (1.36%) Virtual Team
13 74 (1.26%) Algorithms
14 73 (1.24%) Mobile App
15 66 (1.12%) Management Information System
16 64 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
17 63 (1.07%) Data Structures
18 62 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
19 58 (0.99%) Enterprise Cloud
Operating Systems
1 564 (9.58%) Linux
2 261 (4.43%) Windows
3 122 (2.07%) Unix
4 105 (1.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 53 (0.90%) Android
5 53 (0.90%) Windows Server
6 49 (0.83%) Apple iOS
7 28 (0.48%) VMS
8 18 (0.31%) Ubuntu
9 15 (0.25%) Mac OS
10 13 (0.22%) AIX
11 11 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 10 (0.17%) Solaris
12 10 (0.17%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) CentOS
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
14 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.085%) Rocky
16 4 (0.068%) Embedded Linux
17 3 (0.051%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,309 (56.20%) DevOps
2 2,131 (36.19%) Agile
3 1,842 (31.28%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,332 (22.62%) Containerisation
5 1,299 (22.06%) Test Automation
6 1,163 (19.75%) Microservices
7 1,002 (17.02%) Observability
8 961 (16.32%) AI
9 923 (15.68%) Problem-Solving
10 880 (14.95%) Software Engineering
11 776 (13.18%) Continuous Improvement
12 758 (12.87%) Analytics
13 686 (11.65%) Platform Engineering
14 681 (11.57%) Data Pipeline
15 626 (10.63%) Data Modelling
16 595 (10.11%) Scrum
17 586 (9.95%) Migration
18 553 (9.39%) Data Engineering
19 552 (9.38%) Event-Driven
20 512 (8.70%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 2,180 (37.02%) Python
2 1,337 (22.71%) SQL
3 1,216 (20.65%) Java
4 613 (10.41%) JavaScript
5 563 (9.56%) C#
6 506 (8.59%) TypeScript
7 457 (7.76%) Bash
8 370 (6.28%) PowerShell
9 207 (3.52%) Bicep
10 171 (2.90%) Go
11 98 (1.66%) Kotlin
11 98 (1.66%) Scala
11 98 (1.66%) Shell Script
12 86 (1.46%) Apex Code
13 78 (1.32%) C++
14 56 (0.95%) PL/SQL
15 54 (0.92%) Groovy
16 51 (0.87%) Ruby
17 48 (0.82%) T-SQL
18 29 (0.49%) Swift
Qualifications
1 1,679 (28.52%) Security Cleared
2 1,407 (23.90%) SC Cleared
3 305 (5.18%) Degree
4 238 (4.04%) BPSS Clearance
5 193 (3.28%) DV Cleared
6 181 (3.07%) AWS Certification
7 175 (2.97%) Azure Certification
8 150 (2.55%) Computer Science Degree
9 95 (1.61%) CISSP
10 66 (1.12%) Cisco Certification
11 55 (0.93%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 54 (0.92%) Master's Degree
13 53 (0.90%) CISM
14 51 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
15 49 (0.83%) ISTQB
16 38 (0.65%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 28 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 28 (0.48%) CCSP
18 27 (0.46%) TOGAF Certification
19 21 (0.36%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 475 (8.07%) QA
2 377 (6.40%) Data Quality
3 286 (4.86%) Accessibility
4 161 (2.73%) GDPR
5 131 (2.22%) NIST
6 115 (1.95%) WCAG
7 104 (1.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 84 (1.43%) NCSC
9 50 (0.85%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.59%) SLA
11 26 (0.44%) GRC
12 21 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
13 17 (0.29%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.25%) ISO 20022
14 15 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
14 15 (0.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 13 (0.22%) HL7
16 12 (0.20%) PSD2
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
18 10 (0.17%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,520 (25.82%) Docker
2 144 (2.45%) Active Directory
3 90 (1.53%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.65%) VMware NSX
6 33 (0.56%) vSphere
7 21 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 19 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 14 (0.24%) Hyper-V
11 13 (0.22%) Squid
12 8 (0.14%) HDFS
13 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
13 7 (0.12%) Postfix
14 5 (0.085%) KVM
14 5 (0.085%) RACF
14 5 (0.085%) SRDF
15 4 (0.068%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
15 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 4 (0.068%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 1,856 (31.52%) Terraform
2 1,824 (30.98%) Kubernetes
3 535 (9.09%) Ansible
4 509 (8.64%) Grafana
5 428 (7.27%) Prometheus
6 116 (1.97%) Argo
7 64 (1.09%) Puppet
8 63 (1.07%) Istio
9 53 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
10 44 (0.75%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.54%) Kibana
12 31 (0.53%) Packer
13 25 (0.42%) Control-M
13 25 (0.42%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.36%) Kustomize
14 21 (0.36%) Nessus
15 18 (0.31%) IBM Guardium
16 16 (0.27%) Microsoft Intune
16 16 (0.27%) Rancher
17 15 (0.25%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 810 (13.76%) Microsoft
2 378 (6.42%) Databricks
3 323 (5.49%) Google
4 287 (4.87%) Oracle
5 226 (3.84%) Splunk
6 199 (3.38%) Salesforce
7 137 (2.33%) ServiceNow
8 131 (2.22%) Dynatrace
9 124 (2.11%) VMware
10 117 (1.99%) Red Hat
11 83 (1.41%) OpenAI
12 76 (1.29%) MuleSoft
13 75 (1.27%) SAP
14 67 (1.14%) IBM
15 61 (1.04%) Cisco
16 60 (1.02%) Informatica
17 48 (0.82%) Foundry
18 46 (0.78%) Palo Alto
19 44 (0.75%) CyberArk
20 41 (0.70%) F5