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 12 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 19 30
Rank change year-on-year +8 +11 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,058 2,635 2,405
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.03% 9.00% 5.48%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.95% 9.94% 6.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,485 1,898 1,726
10th Percentile £363 £380 £405
25th Percentile £423 £446 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £509 £530 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.96% -3.64% -8.33%
75th Percentile £600 £640 £650
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £535
% change year-on-year - -6.54% -2.73%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 30 20
10th Percentile £50.24 £26.31 £31.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £44.51 £53.75
Median hourly rate £67.50 £64.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.65% +6.61% -7.78%
75th Percentile £79.75 £81.60 £67.25
90th Percentile £90.00 £96.83 £72.69
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £60.50
% change year-on-year - +7.44% -7.63%

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 39,057 26,521 37,944
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.17% 90.63% 86.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,711 17,185 24,560
10th Percentile £315 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £636 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £488 £500
% change year-on-year - -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,313 1,013 2,392
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.99 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.38 £19.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £37.00 £30.81 £34.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.11% -9.40% -5.88%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.00 £58.53
90th Percentile £77.90 £75.19 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.00 £29.00 £33.07
% change year-on-year +27.59% -12.29% -8.15%

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 12 April 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 12 April 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 12 April 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 4,228 £520 -5.45% 1,411
London +5 2,168 £525 -8.70% 572
UK excluding London +10 2,134 £500 - 1,029
Work from Home +9 1,504 £500 -4.76% 713
North of England +8 767 £500 - 305
Midlands +16 433 £490 +2.73% 116
South East +9 424 £500 -2.44% 297
Yorkshire +5 408 £500 -2.20% 95
West Midlands +22 352 £495 +0.41% 71
North West +8 305 £490 -2.00% 168
Scotland +9 201 £438 -7.89% 66
South West +4 197 £525 -8.70% 148
East of England +6 106 £575 +25.48% 84
East Midlands 0 75 £425 -8.11% 45
North East +4 62 £475 -9.52% 44
Wales -2 28 £440 -18.52% 14
Northern Ireland +6 19 £500 +17.65% 10
Channel Islands - 1 £500 - 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
1 232 (4.59%) Confluence
2 180 (3.56%) Apache Spark
3 127 (2.51%) Apache Airflow
4 122 (2.41%) Apache
5 114 (2.25%) SAS
6 70 (1.38%) SharePoint
7 29 (0.57%) OpenStack
8 26 (0.51%) CMS
9 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
9 25 (0.49%) nginx
10 18 (0.36%) WebLogic
11 13 (0.26%) Mendix
12 12 (0.24%) Anypoint
13 11 (0.22%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.20%) Sitecore CMS
15 9 (0.18%) Appian
15 9 (0.18%) SharePoint Server
15 9 (0.18%) WebSphere
16 8 (0.16%) IIS
17 7 (0.14%) Camunda
Applications
1 44 (0.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 23 (0.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 15 (0.30%) Microsoft Office
4 13 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
5 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
6 8 (0.16%) Adobe XD
7 5 (0.099%) MS Visio
7 5 (0.099%) Sketch
8 3 (0.059%) Simulink
9 2 (0.040%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
10 1 (0.020%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 36 (0.71%) Dynamics CRM
2 10 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
3 8 (0.16%) Payment Gateway
4 6 (0.12%) Aladdin
5 4 (0.079%) SAP S/4HANA
6 3 (0.059%) Findur
6 3 (0.059%) Oracle Applications
6 3 (0.059%) SAP BPC
6 3 (0.059%) Shopify
7 2 (0.040%) Oracle Payables
7 2 (0.040%) Oracle Receivables
8 1 (0.020%) Cloudability
8 1 (0.020%) Oracle Assets
8 1 (0.020%) Oracle Cash Management
8 1 (0.020%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
8 1 (0.020%) Orchestrade
8 1 (0.020%) ProductWriter
8 1 (0.020%) R3 Corda
8 1 (0.020%) SAP Hybris
8 1 (0.020%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 2,226 (44.01%) AWS
2 2,220 (43.89%) Azure
3 1,123 (22.20%) GitHub
4 829 (16.39%) GCP
5 817 (16.15%) Azure DevOps
6 699 (13.82%) GitHub Actions
7 650 (12.85%) Serverless
8 393 (7.77%) Amazon S3
9 392 (7.75%) AWS CloudFormation
10 377 (7.45%) AWS Lambda
11 342 (6.76%) Power Platform
12 281 (5.56%) Amazon EKS
13 255 (5.04%) OpenShift
14 224 (4.43%) Amazon ECS
15 221 (4.37%) Azure AKS
16 210 (4.15%) Azure Data Factory
17 207 (4.09%) Amazon EC2
18 201 (3.97%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 178 (3.52%) Entra ID
20 163 (3.22%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 182 (3.60%) Firewall
2 108 (2.14%) DNS
3 100 (1.98%) Network Security
4 70 (1.38%) HTTP
5 65 (1.29%) VPN
6 34 (0.67%) TCP/IP
7 28 (0.55%) SSL
8 22 (0.43%) Ethernet
8 22 (0.43%) Reverse Proxy
9 20 (0.40%) SSH
10 19 (0.38%) SAN
11 18 (0.36%) BGP
12 16 (0.32%) WAN
13 14 (0.28%) 3GPP
13 14 (0.28%) HTTPS
14 13 (0.26%) Kerberos
14 13 (0.26%) NAS
14 13 (0.26%) SD-WAN
15 11 (0.22%) DHCP
15 11 (0.22%) OSPF
Database & Business Intelligence
1 371 (7.33%) PostgreSQL
2 275 (5.44%) NoSQL
3 249 (4.92%) Power BI
4 231 (4.57%) SQL Server
5 193 (3.82%) Data Lake
5 193 (3.82%) Data Warehouse
6 189 (3.74%) Relational Database
7 180 (3.56%) MongoDB
8 159 (3.14%) Amazon RDS
9 131 (2.59%) DynamoDB
10 123 (2.43%) Azure SQL Database
11 112 (2.21%) Delta Lake
12 110 (2.17%) Big Data
13 109 (2.16%) Metadata
14 95 (1.88%) MySQL
15 90 (1.78%) Amazon Athena
16 78 (1.54%) Redis
17 77 (1.52%) Amazon Redshift
18 75 (1.48%) BigQuery
19 54 (1.07%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 980 (19.38%) Git
2 972 (19.22%) Jenkins
3 729 (14.41%) GitLab
4 465 (9.19%) JIRA
5 212 (4.19%) Selenium
6 190 (3.76%) JUnit
7 145 (2.87%) Cucumber
8 122 (2.41%) Postman
9 103 (2.04%) JMeter
10 91 (1.80%) REST Assured
11 82 (1.62%) SonarQube
12 77 (1.52%) Cypress.io
13 74 (1.46%) Bitbucket
14 69 (1.36%) MLflow
15 67 (1.32%) Maven
16 60 (1.19%) Mockito
17 58 (1.15%) Gatling
18 53 (1.05%) Sonatype Nexus
19 51 (1.01%) Artifactory
20 50 (0.99%) Gradle
General
1 1,312 (25.94%) Social Skills
2 841 (16.63%) Finance
3 653 (12.91%) Public Sector
4 426 (8.42%) Analytical Skills
5 350 (6.92%) Banking
6 138 (2.73%) Documentation Skills
7 72 (1.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 60 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
9 58 (1.15%) Legal
10 54 (1.07%) Military
11 49 (0.97%) Front Office
11 49 (0.97%) Retail
12 48 (0.95%) Investment Banking
13 44 (0.87%) Financial Institution
14 43 (0.85%) Telecoms
15 38 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
16 33 (0.65%) Law
17 28 (0.55%) Marketing
18 23 (0.45%) Billing
18 23 (0.45%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,169 (23.11%) Developer
2 707 (13.98%) Senior
3 568 (11.23%) DevOps Engineer
4 515 (10.18%) Architect
5 413 (8.17%) Lead
6 407 (8.05%) Data Engineer
7 272 (5.38%) AWS Engineer
8 261 (5.16%) Java Developer
8 261 (5.16%) Software Engineer
9 260 (5.14%) Azure Engineer
10 233 (4.61%) Platform Engineer
11 201 (3.97%) Cloud Engineer
12 185 (3.66%) Full-Stack Developer
13 184 (3.64%) Senior Developer
14 147 (2.91%) Python Developer
15 141 (2.79%) Site Reliability Engineer
16 137 (2.71%) AWS DevOps
17 119 (2.35%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 117 (2.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
19 116 (2.29%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 589 (11.64%) REST
2 489 (9.67%) React
3 450 (8.90%) Node.js
4 448 (8.86%) Spring
5 428 (8.46%) RESTful
6 424 (8.38%) Kafka
7 423 (8.36%) .NET
8 386 (7.63%) Spring Boot
9 233 (4.61%) AngularJS
10 197 (3.89%) PySpark
11 188 (3.72%) Playwright
12 183 (3.62%) HTML
13 175 (3.46%) OAuth
14 165 (3.26%) CSS
15 157 (3.10%) YAML
16 143 (2.83%) JSON
17 114 (2.25%) GraphQL
18 109 (2.16%) OpenTelemetry
19 107 (2.12%) OAuth2
20 104 (2.06%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 887 (17.54%) Cloud Native
2 332 (6.56%) Distributed Systems
3 270 (5.34%) Product Ownership
4 112 (2.21%) Onboarding
5 93 (1.84%) Enterprise Software
6 92 (1.82%) Hybrid Cloud
7 91 (1.80%) Legacy Systems
8 83 (1.64%) Public Cloud
9 80 (1.58%) Algorithms
10 73 (1.44%) Virtual Team
11 72 (1.42%) Data Protection Act
12 67 (1.32%) Mobile App
13 63 (1.25%) AI Agents
14 62 (1.23%) Data Centre
15 55 (1.09%) Security Posture
16 49 (0.97%) NHS
17 46 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
18 45 (0.89%) Management Information System
19 44 (0.87%) Data Structures
20 41 (0.81%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 548 (10.83%) Linux
2 229 (4.53%) Windows
3 89 (1.76%) Unix
4 84 (1.66%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 53 (1.05%) Apple iOS
6 50 (0.99%) Android
7 45 (0.89%) VMS
8 39 (0.77%) Windows Server
9 22 (0.43%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.28%) CentOS
11 10 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 6 (0.12%) Solaris
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
13 5 (0.099%) Rocky
13 5 (0.099%) Windows Server 2016
13 5 (0.099%) Windows Server 2019
13 5 (0.099%) zOS
14 4 (0.079%) SUSE
15 3 (0.059%) Debian
15 3 (0.059%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,820 (55.75%) DevOps
2 1,744 (34.48%) Agile
3 1,538 (30.41%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,226 (24.24%) Containerisation
5 1,059 (20.94%) Test Automation
6 986 (19.49%) Microservices
7 976 (19.30%) Problem-Solving
8 802 (15.86%) Observability
9 724 (14.31%) Analytics
10 712 (14.08%) AI
11 650 (12.85%) Software Engineering
12 632 (12.50%) Continuous Improvement
13 552 (10.91%) Data Pipeline
14 537 (10.62%) Data Modelling
15 489 (9.67%) Migration
16 480 (9.49%) Platform Engineering
17 460 (9.09%) Scrum
18 459 (9.07%) Data Engineering
19 457 (9.04%) ETL
20 423 (8.36%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,923 (38.02%) Python
2 1,212 (23.96%) SQL
3 998 (19.73%) Java
4 588 (11.63%) JavaScript
5 501 (9.91%) C#
6 496 (9.81%) TypeScript
7 374 (7.39%) Bash
8 318 (6.29%) PowerShell
9 165 (3.26%) Bicep
10 157 (3.10%) Go
11 109 (2.16%) Shell Script
12 101 (2.00%) Scala
13 82 (1.62%) Ruby
14 81 (1.60%) C++
15 60 (1.19%) PL/SQL
16 56 (1.11%) Kotlin
17 48 (0.95%) Apex Code
17 48 (0.95%) T-SQL
18 36 (0.71%) Groovy
19 32 (0.63%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,406 (27.80%) Security Cleared
2 1,150 (22.74%) SC Cleared
3 284 (5.61%) Degree
4 192 (3.80%) BPSS Clearance
5 166 (3.28%) Computer Science Degree
6 165 (3.26%) AWS Certification
7 146 (2.89%) Azure Certification
8 141 (2.79%) DV Cleared
9 70 (1.38%) CISSP
10 58 (1.15%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 56 (1.11%) Master's Degree
12 53 (1.05%) Microsoft Certification
13 52 (1.03%) CISM
14 40 (0.79%) Cisco Certification
15 38 (0.75%) ISTQB
16 30 (0.59%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 25 (0.49%) Oracle Certification
18 18 (0.36%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 17 (0.34%) OCP
19 17 (0.34%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 427 (8.44%) QA
2 317 (6.27%) Data Quality
3 206 (4.07%) Accessibility
4 191 (3.78%) GDPR
5 148 (2.93%) NIST
6 143 (2.83%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 98 (1.94%) WCAG
8 71 (1.40%) NCSC
9 54 (1.07%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.69%) SLA
11 26 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 20 (0.40%) GRC
13 18 (0.36%) ISO 20022
14 17 (0.34%) PSD2
14 17 (0.34%) SOC 2
15 14 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials
15 14 (0.28%) HL7
16 13 (0.26%) HIPAA
16 13 (0.26%) MiFID
17 12 (0.24%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,409 (27.86%) Docker
2 132 (2.61%) Active Directory
3 81 (1.60%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.29%) Virtual Machines
5 48 (0.95%) vSphere
6 41 (0.81%) VMware NSX
7 13 (0.26%) Virtual Desktop
8 12 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
9 11 (0.22%) Hyper-V
10 7 (0.14%) HDFS
10 7 (0.14%) Oracle RAC
11 5 (0.099%) Postfix
11 5 (0.099%) RACF
12 4 (0.079%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
12 4 (0.079%) Ceph
12 4 (0.079%) NFS
12 4 (0.079%) SRDF
13 3 (0.059%) KVM
14 2 (0.040%) Firmware
14 2 (0.040%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,651 (32.64%) Kubernetes
2 1,608 (31.79%) Terraform
3 516 (10.20%) Ansible
4 464 (9.17%) Grafana
5 401 (7.93%) Prometheus
6 112 (2.21%) Argo
7 77 (1.52%) Istio
8 66 (1.30%) Puppet
9 52 (1.03%) Progress Chef
10 47 (0.93%) Single Sign-On
11 31 (0.61%) Kibana
12 29 (0.57%) vCenter Server
13 21 (0.42%) Rancher
14 19 (0.38%) Nessus
15 17 (0.34%) Packer
16 16 (0.32%) NetBackup
17 15 (0.30%) Control-M
18 14 (0.28%) IBM Guardium
18 14 (0.28%) linkerd
19 12 (0.24%) Podman
Vendors
1 748 (14.79%) Microsoft
2 389 (7.69%) Databricks
3 260 (5.14%) Google
4 251 (4.96%) Oracle
5 207 (4.09%) Splunk
6 140 (2.77%) Red Hat
6 140 (2.77%) ServiceNow
7 124 (2.45%) VMware
8 118 (2.33%) Salesforce
9 90 (1.78%) OpenAI
10 88 (1.74%) Dynatrace
11 55 (1.09%) IBM
12 51 (1.01%) SAP
13 50 (0.99%) CyberArk
13 50 (0.99%) Talend
14 48 (0.95%) MuleSoft
15 40 (0.79%) Cisco
16 38 (0.75%) Denodo
17 35 (0.69%) Informatica
18 33 (0.65%) Tenable