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

6 months to
2 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 19 26
Rank change year-on-year +8 +7 -3
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,702 2,833 2,634
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.08% 9.15% 6.07%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.04% 10.07% 7.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,831 1,957 1,823
10th Percentile £375 £358 £400
25th Percentile £425 £424 £459
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -8.33%
75th Percentile £606 £615 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £525
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 124 34 78
10th Percentile £51.25 £43.10 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £50.31 £62.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.20 £87.01 £71.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.25
% change year-on-year - -3.35% +2.51%

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 43,739 28,136 37,017
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.86% 85.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,189 17,763 23,600
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.08% -3.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £621 £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 2,627 1,381 2,550
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.61 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +3.45%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +75.84% -34.42% +8.91%

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 2 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 2 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 2 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 4,755 £525 +2.44% 1,862
London +10 2,478 £540 +1.89% 888
UK excluding London +8 2,433 £500 +5.26% 1,228
Work from Home +8 1,710 £515 +0.49% 1,037
North of England +11 950 £500 +5.26% 318
Yorkshire +8 495 £514 +2.80% 83
South East -5 419 £525 +5.00% 409
Midlands +3 408 £489 +6.22% 138
North West +8 367 £500 +2.83% 193
West Midlands +14 334 £492 -1.59% 85
South West +11 244 £525 - 157
Scotland +7 241 £425 -14.14% 67
East of England +12 139 £550 +18.02% 76
North East +7 103 £425 +0.59% 45
East Midlands -14 67 £447 +1.71% 53
Wales +8 42 £425 -15.08% 34
Northern Ireland +24 31 £523 +22.94% 46
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
1 286 (5.02%) Confluence
2 220 (3.86%) Apache Spark
3 201 (3.53%) Apache Airflow
4 147 (2.58%) Apache
5 82 (1.44%) SAS
6 74 (1.30%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.54%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.42%) CMS
9 20 (0.35%) nginx
10 18 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
11 17 (0.30%) OpenStack
11 17 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.26%) SharePoint Server
12 15 (0.26%) WebSphere
13 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) Camunda
15 9 (0.16%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.14%) Appian
Applications
1 26 (0.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 21 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 20 (0.35%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.16%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.070%) Adobe XD
8 3 (0.053%) Simulink
9 2 (0.035%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.035%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 36 (0.63%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.35%) Payment Gateway
3 16 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.21%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.14%) Shopify
7 7 (0.12%) SAP CRM
8 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
9 5 (0.088%) Magento
9 5 (0.088%) SAP MDG
10 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.070%) Sage X3
11 3 (0.053%) Endur
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
12 2 (0.035%) Salesforce CRM
12 2 (0.035%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.035%) Temenos T24
13 1 (0.018%) Cloudability
13 1 (0.018%) SAP CX
Cloud Services
1 2,503 (43.90%) AWS
2 2,472 (43.35%) Azure
3 1,189 (20.85%) GitHub
4 953 (16.71%) GCP
5 896 (15.71%) Azure DevOps
6 750 (13.15%) GitHub Actions
7 652 (11.43%) Serverless
8 447 (7.84%) Amazon S3
9 413 (7.24%) AWS Lambda
10 410 (7.19%) Power Platform
11 317 (5.56%) AWS CloudFormation
12 280 (4.91%) Amazon EKS
13 250 (4.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 237 (4.16%) Azure AKS
15 233 (4.09%) Amazon EC2
16 213 (3.74%) Entra ID
17 195 (3.42%) Azure Data Factory
18 190 (3.33%) Amazon ECS
19 187 (3.28%) Snowflake
20 179 (3.14%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 207 (3.63%) Firewall
2 131 (2.30%) Network Security
3 119 (2.09%) DNS
4 86 (1.51%) VPN
5 62 (1.09%) HTTP
6 47 (0.82%) WAN
7 45 (0.79%) TCP/IP
8 41 (0.72%) BGP
9 39 (0.68%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.60%) OSPF
11 32 (0.56%) BIG-IP
12 31 (0.54%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 30 (0.53%) VXLAN
14 28 (0.49%) Ethernet VPN
15 27 (0.47%) SSL
16 21 (0.37%) Ethernet
16 21 (0.37%) Internet
16 21 (0.37%) Wi-Fi
17 20 (0.35%) 3GPP
17 20 (0.35%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 370 (6.49%) PostgreSQL
2 305 (5.35%) Power BI
3 267 (4.68%) NoSQL
3 267 (4.68%) SQL Server
4 244 (4.28%) Data Warehouse
5 234 (4.10%) Relational Database
6 202 (3.54%) MongoDB
7 200 (3.51%) Data Lake
8 165 (2.89%) Amazon RDS
9 153 (2.68%) DynamoDB
10 131 (2.30%) Metadata
11 127 (2.23%) Amazon Redshift
12 120 (2.10%) Big Data
13 117 (2.05%) Amazon Athena
14 112 (1.96%) Delta Lake
15 95 (1.67%) Azure SQL Database
15 95 (1.67%) BigQuery
16 94 (1.65%) MySQL
17 73 (1.28%) Redis
18 68 (1.19%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,046 (18.34%) Git
2 1,018 (17.85%) Jenkins
3 799 (14.01%) GitLab
4 543 (9.52%) JIRA
5 212 (3.72%) Selenium
6 189 (3.31%) JUnit
7 140 (2.46%) Cucumber
8 129 (2.26%) Postman
9 114 (2.00%) JMeter
9 114 (2.00%) REST Assured
10 97 (1.70%) SonarQube
11 86 (1.51%) Maven
12 83 (1.46%) Gradle
13 80 (1.40%) Bitbucket
14 77 (1.35%) Cypress.io
15 74 (1.30%) Gatling
16 71 (1.25%) Mockito
17 61 (1.07%) MLflow
18 57 (1.00%) WebDriver
19 41 (0.72%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,386 (24.31%) Social Skills
2 984 (17.26%) Finance
3 778 (13.64%) Public Sector
4 450 (7.89%) Analytical Skills
5 430 (7.54%) Banking
6 143 (2.51%) Documentation Skills
7 120 (2.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 97 (1.70%) Retail
9 76 (1.33%) Investment Banking
10 71 (1.25%) Legal
11 70 (1.23%) Influencing Skills
12 64 (1.12%) Military
13 62 (1.09%) Front Office
14 55 (0.96%) Telecoms
15 50 (0.88%) Law
16 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 39 (0.68%) Marketing
18 32 (0.56%) Presentation Skills
18 32 (0.56%) Publishing
19 27 (0.47%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,231 (21.59%) Developer
2 904 (15.85%) Senior
3 714 (12.52%) DevOps Engineer
4 602 (10.56%) Architect
5 503 (8.82%) Lead
6 456 (8.00%) Data Engineer
7 331 (5.80%) AWS Engineer
8 309 (5.42%) Java Developer
8 309 (5.42%) Software Engineer
9 275 (4.82%) Azure Engineer
10 252 (4.42%) Cloud Engineer
11 239 (4.19%) Platform Engineer
12 224 (3.93%) Senior Developer
13 175 (3.07%) Full-Stack Developer
14 169 (2.96%) Python Developer
15 152 (2.67%) AWS DevOps
16 143 (2.51%) GCP Engineer
17 141 (2.47%) Test Engineer
18 140 (2.46%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 139 (2.44%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 672 (11.79%) REST
2 509 (8.93%) React
3 507 (8.89%) Spring
4 505 (8.86%) .NET
5 472 (8.28%) RESTful
6 448 (7.86%) Spring Boot
7 445 (7.80%) Kafka
8 364 (6.38%) Node.js
9 223 (3.91%) PySpark
10 221 (3.88%) Playwright
11 212 (3.72%) AngularJS
12 193 (3.38%) HTML
13 186 (3.26%) OAuth
14 169 (2.96%) CSS
15 162 (2.84%) JSON
16 134 (2.35%) OAuth2
17 132 (2.31%) YAML
18 121 (2.12%) FastAPI
18 121 (2.12%) GraphQL
19 116 (2.03%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 1,145 (20.08%) Cloud Native
2 405 (7.10%) Distributed Systems
3 342 (6.00%) Product Ownership
4 156 (2.74%) Onboarding
5 143 (2.51%) Legacy Systems
6 139 (2.44%) Enterprise Software
7 119 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
8 113 (1.98%) AI Agents
9 105 (1.84%) Data Centre
10 94 (1.65%) Public Cloud
11 88 (1.54%) Security Posture
12 87 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
13 76 (1.33%) Algorithms
13 76 (1.33%) Virtual Team
14 70 (1.23%) Mobile App
15 69 (1.21%) Management Information System
16 61 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
17 60 (1.05%) Data Structures
17 60 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
18 54 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 544 (9.54%) Linux
2 254 (4.45%) Windows
3 120 (2.10%) Unix
4 106 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 51 (0.89%) Windows Server
6 50 (0.88%) Android
7 46 (0.81%) Apple iOS
8 30 (0.53%) VMS
9 22 (0.39%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
11 11 (0.19%) CentOS
11 11 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 10 (0.18%) AIX
12 10 (0.18%) Solaris
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
13 8 (0.14%) zOS
14 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 4 (0.070%) Debian
17 3 (0.053%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,209 (56.28%) DevOps
2 2,031 (35.62%) Agile
3 1,765 (30.95%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,277 (22.40%) Containerisation
5 1,244 (21.82%) Test Automation
6 1,108 (19.43%) Microservices
7 947 (16.61%) Observability
8 918 (16.10%) AI
9 887 (15.56%) Problem-Solving
10 842 (14.77%) Software Engineering
11 754 (13.22%) Analytics
12 736 (12.91%) Continuous Improvement
13 654 (11.47%) Data Pipeline
14 649 (11.38%) Platform Engineering
15 612 (10.73%) Data Modelling
16 571 (10.01%) Migration
17 563 (9.87%) Scrum
18 544 (9.54%) Data Engineering
19 521 (9.14%) Event-Driven
20 494 (8.66%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 2,107 (36.95%) Python
2 1,325 (23.24%) SQL
3 1,163 (20.40%) Java
4 585 (10.26%) JavaScript
5 564 (9.89%) C#
6 479 (8.40%) TypeScript
7 418 (7.33%) Bash
8 352 (6.17%) PowerShell
9 206 (3.61%) Bicep
10 162 (2.84%) Go
11 94 (1.65%) Shell Script
12 93 (1.63%) Scala
13 91 (1.60%) Kotlin
14 82 (1.44%) Apex Code
15 78 (1.37%) C++
16 55 (0.96%) Ruby
17 54 (0.95%) PL/SQL
18 50 (0.88%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.84%) Groovy
20 27 (0.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,595 (27.97%) Security Cleared
2 1,345 (23.59%) SC Cleared
3 298 (5.23%) Degree
4 220 (3.86%) BPSS Clearance
5 174 (3.05%) DV Cleared
6 172 (3.02%) AWS Certification
6 172 (3.02%) Azure Certification
7 143 (2.51%) Computer Science Degree
8 85 (1.49%) CISSP
9 64 (1.12%) Cisco Certification
10 54 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 53 (0.93%) CISM
12 50 (0.88%) Master's Degree
13 49 (0.86%) ISTQB
14 48 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
15 37 (0.65%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 28 (0.49%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 28 (0.49%) CCSP
17 21 (0.37%) GIAC
18 19 (0.33%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 449 (7.87%) QA
2 365 (6.40%) Data Quality
3 268 (4.70%) Accessibility
4 167 (2.93%) GDPR
5 135 (2.37%) NIST
6 111 (1.95%) WCAG
7 109 (1.91%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 83 (1.46%) NCSC
9 53 (0.93%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.67%) SLA
11 26 (0.46%) GRC
12 21 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
13 18 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.26%) ISO 20022
15 15 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 12 (0.21%) HL7
16 12 (0.21%) PSD2
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
18 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,456 (25.53%) Docker
2 135 (2.37%) Active Directory
3 81 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
4 79 (1.39%) VMware Infrastructure
5 34 (0.60%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.51%) vSphere
7 21 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.23%) Squid
10 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.14%) Hyper-V
12 7 (0.12%) HDFS
12 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 5 (0.088%) KVM
13 5 (0.088%) RACF
13 5 (0.088%) SRDF
14 4 (0.070%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 4 (0.070%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.070%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,788 (31.36%) Terraform
2 1,748 (30.66%) Kubernetes
3 524 (9.19%) Ansible
4 479 (8.40%) Grafana
5 408 (7.16%) Prometheus
6 105 (1.84%) Argo
7 66 (1.16%) Istio
8 64 (1.12%) Puppet
9 55 (0.96%) Single Sign-On
10 42 (0.74%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.56%) Kibana
12 30 (0.53%) Packer
13 25 (0.44%) vCenter Server
14 24 (0.42%) Control-M
15 21 (0.37%) Nessus
16 18 (0.32%) IBM Guardium
16 18 (0.32%) Kustomize
17 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Intune
18 15 (0.26%) Rancher
19 13 (0.23%) Active Directory Federation Services
Vendors
1 787 (13.80%) Microsoft
2 369 (6.47%) Databricks
3 307 (5.38%) Google
4 263 (4.61%) Oracle
5 217 (3.81%) Splunk
6 190 (3.33%) Salesforce
7 140 (2.46%) ServiceNow
8 130 (2.28%) Dynatrace
9 121 (2.12%) Red Hat
10 112 (1.96%) VMware
11 83 (1.46%) OpenAI
12 69 (1.21%) MuleSoft
13 68 (1.19%) SAP
14 66 (1.16%) IBM
15 60 (1.05%) Cisco
16 59 (1.03%) Informatica
17 47 (0.82%) Palo Alto
18 42 (0.74%) CyberArk
19 41 (0.72%) F5
19 41 (0.72%) Foundry