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

6 months to
18 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 5,943 3,233 2,602
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.10% 9.83% 6.72%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.10% 10.87% 7.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,002 2,225 1,773
10th Percentile £385 £360 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -5.17%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 47 77
10th Percentile £51.25 £44.51 £51.25
25th Percentile £62.00 £55.00 -
Median hourly rate £69.00 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.15% - -10.34%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £84.78 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.96 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +4.55% -2.99% -7.59%

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 45,374 29,740 33,103
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.72% 90.47% 85.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,858 18,514 21,188
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.58%
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 2,851 1,725 1,782
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.30 £18.17
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -38.57% +0.86%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.25 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +19.72%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 +6 4,998 £525 +2.44% 1,321
London +6 2,626 £545 +3.81% 521
UK excluding London +7 2,532 £500 - 1,037
Work from Home +6 1,826 £525 +5.00% 745
North of England +9 951 £500 - 306
Yorkshire +5 477 £513 +2.50% 84
South East -6 463 £525 +5.00% 325
Midlands 0 407 £488 +2.63% 106
North West +5 369 £525 +5.85% 165
West Midlands +10 342 £487 -5.49% 79
South West +3 285 £525 +0.96% 165
Scotland +3 243 £438 -12.50% 49
East of England +6 146 £510 +1.90% 67
North East +1 116 £425 -9.09% 58
East Midlands -19 59 £488 +10.92% 26
Wales -4 42 £450 -5.26% 20
Northern Ireland +25 25 £545 +3.81% 13
Channel Islands - 2 £475 -

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
1 272 (4.58%) Confluence
2 219 (3.69%) Apache Airflow
3 203 (3.42%) Apache Spark
4 155 (2.61%) Apache
5 86 (1.45%) SAS
6 74 (1.25%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.57%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.35%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.34%) CMS
10 17 (0.29%) Anypoint
10 17 (0.29%) nginx
11 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
12 15 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
13 13 (0.22%) WebSphere
14 10 (0.17%) Camunda
14 10 (0.17%) WebLogic
15 9 (0.15%) Mule
16 8 (0.13%) IIS
17 7 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
17 7 (0.12%) WordPress
Applications
1 24 (0.40%) Chatbot
2 20 (0.34%) Microsoft Excel
3 11 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
4 10 (0.17%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.067%) Simulink
6 4 (0.067%) Trello
7 3 (0.050%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.034%) Adobe XD
8 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
8 2 (0.034%) Sketch
8 2 (0.034%) Windchill
9 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.017%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 45 (0.76%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.34%) Payment Gateway
3 17 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
4 14 (0.24%) Oracle EBS
5 13 (0.22%) Aladdin
6 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
7 8 (0.13%) NetSuite
8 7 (0.12%) Shopify
9 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 5 (0.084%) Magento
11 4 (0.067%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.067%) Sage X3
12 3 (0.050%) Endur
12 3 (0.050%) Findur
12 3 (0.050%) SAP BPC
12 3 (0.050%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
13 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
13 2 (0.034%) SAP ERP
13 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,646 (44.52%) AWS
2 2,627 (44.20%) Azure
3 1,277 (21.49%) GitHub
4 1,009 (16.98%) GCP
5 986 (16.59%) Azure DevOps
6 843 (14.18%) GitHub Actions
7 632 (10.63%) Serverless
8 434 (7.30%) Power Platform
9 433 (7.29%) Amazon S3
10 416 (7.00%) AWS Lambda
11 321 (5.40%) Amazon EKS
12 300 (5.05%) AWS CloudFormation
13 280 (4.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 241 (4.06%) Azure AKS
15 240 (4.04%) Entra ID
16 223 (3.75%) Snowflake
17 211 (3.55%) Amazon EC2
18 188 (3.16%) Azure Data Factory
19 179 (3.01%) Amazon ECS
20 171 (2.88%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.07%) Firewall
2 155 (2.61%) DNS
3 126 (2.12%) Network Security
4 98 (1.65%) VPN
5 82 (1.38%) TCP/IP
6 57 (0.96%) HTTP
7 48 (0.81%) WAN
8 46 (0.77%) BGP
9 40 (0.67%) SD-WAN
10 37 (0.62%) VXLAN
11 35 (0.59%) Ethernet VPN
12 34 (0.57%) SSL
13 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 32 (0.54%) BIG-IP
15 31 (0.52%) OSPF
16 30 (0.50%) Internet
17 29 (0.49%) DHCP
18 24 (0.40%) 5G
19 20 (0.34%) VSAN
20 19 (0.32%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 418 (7.03%) PostgreSQL
2 334 (5.62%) Power BI
3 279 (4.69%) Data Warehouse
3 279 (4.69%) SQL Server
4 259 (4.36%) NoSQL
5 252 (4.24%) Relational Database
6 232 (3.90%) MongoDB
7 209 (3.52%) Data Lake
8 172 (2.89%) Amazon RDS
9 156 (2.62%) Metadata
10 142 (2.39%) DynamoDB
11 129 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
12 124 (2.09%) MySQL
13 114 (1.92%) BigQuery
14 111 (1.87%) Delta Lake
15 100 (1.68%) Amazon Athena
16 98 (1.65%) Big Data
16 98 (1.65%) Redis
17 96 (1.62%) Azure SQL Database
18 86 (1.45%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,134 (19.08%) Git
2 1,034 (17.40%) Jenkins
3 851 (14.32%) GitLab
4 520 (8.75%) JIRA
5 220 (3.70%) Selenium
6 186 (3.13%) JUnit
7 130 (2.19%) Cucumber
8 116 (1.95%) JMeter
9 113 (1.90%) Bitbucket
10 112 (1.88%) Maven
10 112 (1.88%) Postman
11 103 (1.73%) Gradle
11 103 (1.73%) SonarQube
12 95 (1.60%) Cypress.io
13 87 (1.46%) REST Assured
14 82 (1.38%) Gatling
15 74 (1.25%) Mockito
16 59 (0.99%) Claude Code
17 55 (0.93%) WebDriver
18 48 (0.81%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,501 (25.26%) Social Skills
2 1,062 (17.87%) Finance
3 850 (14.30%) Public Sector
4 506 (8.51%) Analytical Skills
5 465 (7.82%) Banking
6 147 (2.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 125 (2.10%) Documentation Skills
8 121 (2.04%) Retail
9 80 (1.35%) Investment Banking
10 73 (1.23%) Front Office
11 70 (1.18%) Military
12 69 (1.16%) Telecoms
13 62 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
14 59 (0.99%) Legal
15 53 (0.89%) Law
16 52 (0.87%) Financial Institution
17 42 (0.71%) Marketing
17 42 (0.71%) Publishing
18 40 (0.67%) Aerospace
19 38 (0.64%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,332 (22.41%) Developer
2 1,034 (17.40%) Senior
3 722 (12.15%) DevOps Engineer
4 614 (10.33%) Architect
5 575 (9.68%) Lead
6 453 (7.62%) Data Engineer
7 324 (5.45%) Java Developer
8 322 (5.42%) AWS Engineer
9 320 (5.38%) Software Engineer
10 287 (4.83%) Azure Engineer
11 283 (4.76%) Senior Developer
12 265 (4.46%) Cloud Engineer
13 260 (4.37%) Platform Engineer
14 189 (3.18%) Full-Stack Developer
15 162 (2.73%) Python Developer
16 156 (2.62%) Solutions Architect
17 145 (2.44%) AWS DevOps
18 140 (2.36%) Test Engineer
19 134 (2.25%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 134 (2.25%) GCP Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 824 (13.87%) REST
2 544 (9.15%) React
3 526 (8.85%) Kafka
4 520 (8.75%) .NET
5 515 (8.67%) Spring
6 491 (8.26%) RESTful
7 453 (7.62%) Spring Boot
8 378 (6.36%) Node.js
9 238 (4.00%) Playwright
10 234 (3.94%) HTML
11 213 (3.58%) JSON
12 205 (3.45%) CSS
12 205 (3.45%) PySpark
13 199 (3.35%) OAuth
14 193 (3.25%) AngularJS
15 152 (2.56%) OAuth2
16 127 (2.14%) SOAP
17 123 (2.07%) YAML
18 116 (1.95%) .NET Core
19 108 (1.82%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 1,232 (20.73%) Cloud Native
2 453 (7.62%) Distributed Systems
3 371 (6.24%) Product Ownership
4 204 (3.43%) Onboarding
5 195 (3.28%) Enterprise Software
6 169 (2.84%) AI Agents
7 154 (2.59%) Legacy Systems
8 141 (2.37%) Hybrid Cloud
9 103 (1.73%) Security Posture
10 97 (1.63%) Data Centre
11 96 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
12 91 (1.53%) Public Cloud
13 73 (1.23%) Enterprise Cloud
14 72 (1.21%) Data Structures
15 69 (1.16%) Virtual Team
16 68 (1.14%) Management Information System
17 67 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
17 67 (1.13%) Mobile App
17 67 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
18 64 (1.08%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 596 (10.03%) Linux
2 276 (4.64%) Windows
3 142 (2.39%) Unix
4 114 (1.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.04%) Windows Server
6 55 (0.93%) Android
7 51 (0.86%) Apple iOS
8 26 (0.44%) VMS
9 21 (0.35%) Ubuntu
10 17 (0.29%) AIX
11 12 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
12 9 (0.15%) zOS
13 8 (0.13%) Solaris
14 7 (0.12%) CentOS
15 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
16 5 (0.084%) Rocky
16 5 (0.084%) Windows Server 2016
17 4 (0.067%) Amazon Linux
17 4 (0.067%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,356 (56.47%) DevOps
2 2,240 (37.69%) Agile
3 1,962 (33.01%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,363 (22.93%) Test Automation
5 1,275 (21.45%) Containerisation
6 1,200 (20.19%) Microservices
7 1,071 (18.02%) AI
8 1,059 (17.82%) Observability
9 995 (16.74%) Software Engineering
10 949 (15.97%) Problem-Solving
11 870 (14.64%) Continuous Improvement
12 758 (12.75%) Analytics
13 745 (12.54%) Platform Engineering
14 698 (11.74%) Data Pipeline
15 650 (10.94%) Data Modelling
16 631 (10.62%) Scrum
17 625 (10.52%) Event-Driven
18 621 (10.45%) Stakeholder Management
19 611 (10.28%) Migration
20 602 (10.13%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 2,205 (37.10%) Python
2 1,375 (23.14%) SQL
3 1,249 (21.02%) Java
4 658 (11.07%) JavaScript
5 563 (9.47%) C#
6 509 (8.56%) Bash
6 509 (8.56%) TypeScript
7 451 (7.59%) PowerShell
8 236 (3.97%) Bicep
9 161 (2.71%) Go
10 109 (1.83%) Shell Script
11 101 (1.70%) Scala
12 96 (1.62%) Kotlin
13 86 (1.45%) Apex Code
14 83 (1.40%) C++
15 66 (1.11%) PL/SQL
16 65 (1.09%) Groovy
17 52 (0.87%) Ruby
18 49 (0.82%) T-SQL
19 41 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,745 (29.36%) Security Cleared
2 1,468 (24.70%) SC Cleared
3 296 (4.98%) Degree
4 242 (4.07%) BPSS Clearance
5 218 (3.67%) DV Cleared
6 196 (3.30%) Azure Certification
7 187 (3.15%) AWS Certification
8 144 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
9 105 (1.77%) CISSP
10 66 (1.11%) Cisco Certification
11 60 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
12 57 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 52 (0.87%) ISTQB
14 48 (0.81%) CISM
15 42 (0.71%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 37 (0.62%) Master's Degree
17 28 (0.47%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 28 (0.47%) CCSP
18 20 (0.34%) GIAC
19 18 (0.30%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 520 (8.75%) QA
2 410 (6.90%) Data Quality
3 307 (5.17%) Accessibility
4 149 (2.51%) GDPR
5 122 (2.05%) WCAG
6 114 (1.92%) NIST
7 102 (1.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 76 (1.28%) NCSC
9 44 (0.74%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.59%) SLA
11 26 (0.44%) Cyber Essentials
12 25 (0.42%) GRC
13 20 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 17 (0.29%) ISO 20022
15 14 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 13 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
16 13 (0.22%) HL7
17 12 (0.20%) SOC 2
18 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
18 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 1,577 (26.54%) Docker
2 158 (2.66%) Active Directory
3 107 (1.80%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.25%) Virtual Machines
5 36 (0.61%) VMware NSX
6 28 (0.47%) vSphere
7 22 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 20 (0.34%) Hyper-V
9 16 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
9 16 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.22%) Squid
11 9 (0.15%) KVM
12 8 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
13 7 (0.12%) HDFS
14 5 (0.084%) Ceph
15 4 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 4 (0.067%) NFS
15 4 (0.067%) Postfix
15 4 (0.067%) SRDF
16 3 (0.050%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 1,909 (32.12%) Terraform
2 1,894 (31.87%) Kubernetes
3 555 (9.34%) Ansible
4 496 (8.35%) Grafana
5 394 (6.63%) Prometheus
6 118 (1.99%) Argo
7 68 (1.14%) Puppet
8 60 (1.01%) Progress Chef
9 59 (0.99%) Istio
10 45 (0.76%) Single Sign-On
11 35 (0.59%) Kibana
12 34 (0.57%) Packer
13 24 (0.40%) Kustomize
14 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
15 21 (0.35%) Control-M
16 15 (0.25%) Oracle RMAN
16 15 (0.25%) vCenter Server
17 14 (0.24%) Rancher
18 13 (0.22%) Podman
18 13 (0.22%) SCCM
Vendors
1 883 (14.86%) Microsoft
2 393 (6.61%) Databricks
3 354 (5.96%) Google
4 318 (5.35%) Oracle
5 219 (3.69%) Splunk
6 200 (3.37%) Salesforce
7 153 (2.57%) Dynatrace
8 148 (2.49%) ServiceNow
9 141 (2.37%) VMware
10 108 (1.82%) Red Hat
11 90 (1.51%) MuleSoft
12 78 (1.31%) OpenAI
13 77 (1.30%) IBM
14 73 (1.23%) SAP
15 72 (1.21%) Cisco
16 71 (1.19%) Informatica
17 50 (0.84%) Foundry
18 47 (0.79%) F5
19 45 (0.76%) New Relic
20 44 (0.74%) Talend