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

6 months to
12 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 20 30
Rank change year-on-year +8 +10 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,126 2,592 2,476
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.79% 8.88% 5.76%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.80% 9.76% 6.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,486 1,843 1,750
10th Percentile £370 £369 £403
25th Percentile £425 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £516 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.81% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £605 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £496 £550
% change year-on-year +0.91% -9.91% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 118 30 45
10th Percentile £51.24 £27.46 £50.50
25th Percentile £61.38 £48.99 £60.25
Median hourly rate £66.50 £63.25 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +5.14% -2.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £79.41 £70.00
90th Percentile £86.90 £96.83 £72.10
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £66.00
% change year-on-year - -1.52% +0.60%

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 40,059 26,552 37,102
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.33% 90.94% 86.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,139 17,089 23,891
10th Percentile £321 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £519 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.69% -1.24% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £745 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £478 £500
% change year-on-year +2.93% -4.40% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,402 1,086 2,440
10th Percentile £14.97 £14.42 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.87 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.40 £28.75 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +47.48% -21.23% +0.29%
75th Percentile £67.25 £60.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £26.50 £38.00
% change year-on-year +69.81% -30.26% +8.57%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 4,256 £525 - 1,575
London +8 2,185 £543 -1.33% 660
UK excluding London +12 2,176 £500 +0.91% 1,104
Work from Home +9 1,500 £509 -3.05% 842
North of England +10 795 £500 - 321
Yorkshire +7 430 £500 - 89
South East +10 404 £502 +0.30% 349
Midlands +11 397 £487 +2.58% 129
West Midlands +16 316 £492 -3.05% 71
North West +6 303 £500 - 169
South West +6 225 £525 -3.23% 135
Scotland +7 218 £438 -7.89% 47
East of England +23 120 £550 +18.28% 82
East Midlands -9 75 £445 -3.78% 58
North East +6 72 £450 -5.26% 65
Wales +4 33 £450 -16.67% 28
Northern Ireland +14 22 £575 +35.29% 23
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
1 245 (4.78%) Confluence
2 192 (3.75%) Apache Spark
3 132 (2.58%) Apache Airflow
4 119 (2.32%) Apache
5 77 (1.50%) SAS
6 69 (1.35%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
7 25 (0.49%) nginx
7 25 (0.49%) OpenStack
8 19 (0.37%) CMS
9 13 (0.25%) Mendix
9 13 (0.25%) WebLogic
10 12 (0.23%) SharePoint Server
11 11 (0.21%) Anypoint
11 11 (0.21%) Jupyter
11 11 (0.21%) WebSphere
12 10 (0.20%) Camunda
12 10 (0.20%) HCL Notes
13 9 (0.18%) Appian
13 9 (0.18%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 30 (0.59%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 15 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
4 12 (0.23%) Chatbot
4 12 (0.23%) Microsoft Project
5 8 (0.16%) Adobe XD
6 7 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 5 (0.098%) Sketch
8 3 (0.059%) Simulink
9 2 (0.039%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
10 1 (0.020%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 25 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 14 (0.27%) Payment Gateway
3 11 (0.21%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.14%) Aladdin
6 5 (0.098%) SAP MDG
7 4 (0.078%) Magento
7 4 (0.078%) SAP CRM
7 4 (0.078%) Shopify
8 3 (0.059%) Findur
8 3 (0.059%) Oracle Applications
8 3 (0.059%) Oracle ERP
8 3 (0.059%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.020%) Actimize
9 1 (0.020%) NetSuite
9 1 (0.020%) Oracle General Ledger
9 1 (0.020%) ProductWriter
9 1 (0.020%) SAP ERP
9 1 (0.020%) SDL Web 8
9 1 (0.020%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 2,268 (44.25%) Azure
2 2,232 (43.54%) AWS
3 1,123 (21.91%) GitHub
4 853 (16.64%) GCP
5 821 (16.02%) Azure DevOps
6 710 (13.85%) GitHub Actions
7 628 (12.25%) Serverless
8 376 (7.34%) Amazon S3
9 371 (7.24%) AWS Lambda
10 360 (7.02%) Power Platform
11 359 (7.00%) AWS CloudFormation
12 282 (5.50%) Amazon EKS
13 227 (4.43%) Azure AKS
14 217 (4.23%) OpenShift
15 215 (4.19%) Azure Data Factory
16 212 (4.14%) Amazon ECS
17 205 (4.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 205 (4.00%) Amazon EC2
18 181 (3.53%) Entra ID
19 161 (3.14%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 185 (3.61%) Firewall
2 110 (2.15%) DNS
3 103 (2.01%) Network Security
4 70 (1.37%) VPN
5 65 (1.27%) HTTP
6 40 (0.78%) TCP/IP
7 32 (0.62%) WAN
8 28 (0.55%) BGP
8 28 (0.55%) SD-WAN
8 28 (0.55%) SSL
9 25 (0.49%) Ethernet
10 24 (0.47%) OSPF
11 23 (0.45%) Reverse Proxy
12 21 (0.41%) SAN
13 19 (0.37%) VXLAN
14 18 (0.35%) Ethernet VPN
15 16 (0.31%) 3GPP
16 15 (0.29%) SSH
16 15 (0.29%) Wi-Fi
17 14 (0.27%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 351 (6.85%) PostgreSQL
2 273 (5.33%) Power BI
3 254 (4.96%) NoSQL
4 244 (4.76%) SQL Server
5 207 (4.04%) Data Lake
6 205 (4.00%) Relational Database
7 190 (3.71%) Data Warehouse
8 183 (3.57%) MongoDB
9 146 (2.85%) Amazon RDS
10 130 (2.54%) DynamoDB
11 121 (2.36%) Metadata
12 119 (2.32%) Big Data
13 117 (2.28%) Delta Lake
14 108 (2.11%) Azure SQL Database
15 91 (1.78%) Amazon Athena
16 89 (1.74%) MySQL
17 81 (1.58%) Amazon Redshift
18 78 (1.52%) BigQuery
19 74 (1.44%) Redis
20 59 (1.15%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 950 (18.53%) Git
2 943 (18.40%) Jenkins
3 734 (14.32%) GitLab
4 456 (8.90%) JIRA
5 180 (3.51%) Selenium
6 159 (3.10%) JUnit
7 128 (2.50%) Cucumber
8 116 (2.26%) Postman
9 101 (1.97%) JMeter
10 83 (1.62%) REST Assured
11 82 (1.60%) SonarQube
12 78 (1.52%) Bitbucket
13 68 (1.33%) MLflow
14 64 (1.25%) Maven
15 62 (1.21%) Cypress.io
16 61 (1.19%) Gradle
16 61 (1.19%) Mockito
17 60 (1.17%) Gatling
18 48 (0.94%) Artifactory
19 47 (0.92%) WebDriver
General
1 1,275 (24.87%) Social Skills
2 846 (16.50%) Finance
3 652 (12.72%) Public Sector
4 420 (8.19%) Analytical Skills
5 343 (6.69%) Banking
6 132 (2.58%) Documentation Skills
7 86 (1.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 63 (1.23%) Retail
9 61 (1.19%) Legal
9 61 (1.19%) Military
10 57 (1.11%) Influencing Skills
11 55 (1.07%) Front Office
12 51 (0.99%) Investment Banking
13 44 (0.86%) Financial Institution
14 42 (0.82%) Telecoms
15 40 (0.78%) Presentation Skills
16 31 (0.60%) Law
17 28 (0.55%) Publishing
18 26 (0.51%) Marketing
19 24 (0.47%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,150 (22.43%) Developer
2 761 (14.85%) Senior
3 612 (11.94%) DevOps Engineer
4 545 (10.63%) Architect
5 425 (8.29%) Lead
6 411 (8.02%) Data Engineer
7 270 (5.27%) AWS Engineer
8 266 (5.19%) Java Developer
9 262 (5.11%) Software Engineer
10 260 (5.07%) Azure Engineer
11 226 (4.41%) Platform Engineer
12 217 (4.23%) Cloud Engineer
13 185 (3.61%) Senior Developer
14 174 (3.39%) Full-Stack Developer
15 152 (2.97%) Python Developer
16 146 (2.85%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 132 (2.58%) AWS DevOps
18 128 (2.50%) GCP Engineer
19 118 (2.30%) AWS DevOps Engineer
20 117 (2.28%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 559 (10.91%) REST
2 462 (9.01%) React
3 450 (8.78%) Spring
4 435 (8.49%) .NET
5 414 (8.08%) Kafka
6 408 (7.96%) RESTful
7 403 (7.86%) Spring Boot
8 399 (7.78%) Node.js
9 209 (4.08%) AngularJS
10 198 (3.86%) PySpark
11 190 (3.71%) Playwright
12 181 (3.53%) HTML
13 173 (3.37%) OAuth
14 153 (2.98%) CSS
15 147 (2.87%) YAML
16 123 (2.40%) JSON
17 120 (2.34%) OpenTelemetry
18 116 (2.26%) OAuth2
19 108 (2.11%) FastAPI
20 101 (1.97%) Elastic Stack
Miscellaneous
1 954 (18.61%) Cloud Native
2 351 (6.85%) Distributed Systems
3 281 (5.48%) Product Ownership
4 122 (2.38%) Onboarding
5 112 (2.18%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (1.97%) Hybrid Cloud
7 92 (1.79%) Enterprise Software
8 84 (1.64%) Public Cloud
9 81 (1.58%) Data Centre
9 81 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
10 77 (1.50%) Algorithms
11 68 (1.33%) Virtual Team
12 67 (1.31%) AI Agents
12 67 (1.31%) Mobile App
13 58 (1.13%) Security Posture
14 53 (1.03%) Management Information System
15 47 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
16 43 (0.84%) Private Cloud
17 42 (0.82%) Self-Motivation
18 41 (0.80%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 541 (10.55%) Linux
2 244 (4.76%) Windows
3 102 (1.99%) Unix
4 81 (1.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 53 (1.03%) Android
6 51 (0.99%) Apple iOS
7 43 (0.84%) Windows Server
8 42 (0.82%) VMS
9 19 (0.37%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.27%) CentOS
11 11 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.16%) zOS
13 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.12%) AIX
14 6 (0.12%) Rocky
14 6 (0.12%) Solaris
14 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.078%) Debian
15 4 (0.078%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,859 (55.77%) DevOps
2 1,740 (33.94%) Agile
3 1,591 (31.04%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,207 (23.55%) Containerisation
5 1,058 (20.64%) Test Automation
6 992 (19.35%) Microservices
7 873 (17.03%) Problem-Solving
8 851 (16.60%) Observability
9 752 (14.67%) AI
10 686 (13.38%) Analytics
11 682 (13.30%) Software Engineering
12 634 (12.37%) Continuous Improvement
13 573 (11.18%) Data Modelling
14 554 (10.81%) Data Pipeline
15 518 (10.11%) Platform Engineering
16 496 (9.68%) Migration
17 460 (8.97%) Scrum
18 450 (8.78%) ETL
19 449 (8.76%) Data Engineering
20 421 (8.21%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,917 (37.40%) Python
2 1,208 (23.57%) SQL
3 1,018 (19.86%) Java
4 573 (11.18%) JavaScript
5 500 (9.75%) C#
6 445 (8.68%) TypeScript
7 370 (7.22%) Bash
8 327 (6.38%) PowerShell
9 172 (3.36%) Bicep
10 155 (3.02%) Go
11 101 (1.97%) Shell Script
12 98 (1.91%) Scala
13 87 (1.70%) C++
14 79 (1.54%) Ruby
15 68 (1.33%) Kotlin
16 58 (1.13%) Apex Code
17 56 (1.09%) PL/SQL
18 47 (0.92%) T-SQL
19 38 (0.74%) Groovy
20 34 (0.66%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,436 (28.01%) Security Cleared
2 1,190 (23.21%) SC Cleared
3 272 (5.31%) Degree
4 197 (3.84%) BPSS Clearance
5 164 (3.20%) AWS Certification
6 162 (3.16%) Azure Certification
7 154 (3.00%) Computer Science Degree
8 150 (2.93%) DV Cleared
9 72 (1.40%) CISSP
10 54 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 52 (1.01%) Cisco Certification
11 52 (1.01%) Master's Degree
11 52 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
12 51 (0.99%) CISM
13 40 (0.78%) ISTQB
14 29 (0.57%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 28 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 23 (0.45%) CCSP
17 21 (0.41%) Oracle Certification
18 20 (0.39%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 417 (8.13%) QA
2 314 (6.13%) Data Quality
3 209 (4.08%) Accessibility
4 180 (3.51%) GDPR
5 138 (2.69%) NIST
6 122 (2.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 94 (1.83%) WCAG
8 70 (1.37%) NCSC
9 59 (1.15%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.76%) SLA
11 25 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.43%) GRC
13 20 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials
13 20 (0.39%) ISO 20022
14 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.29%) MiFID
16 14 (0.27%) PSD2
17 12 (0.23%) HL7
17 12 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 12 (0.23%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,342 (26.18%) Docker
2 128 (2.50%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.56%) Virtual Machines
4 72 (1.40%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.64%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.59%) vSphere
7 19 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 12 (0.23%) Hyper-V
8 12 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
9 8 (0.16%) HDFS
10 7 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
10 7 (0.14%) Oracle RAC
11 6 (0.12%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) RACF
12 5 (0.098%) Squid
13 4 (0.078%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
13 4 (0.078%) NFS
13 4 (0.078%) SRDF
14 3 (0.059%) Ceph
15 2 (0.039%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,620 (31.60%) Terraform
2 1,615 (31.51%) Kubernetes
3 520 (10.14%) Ansible
4 476 (9.29%) Grafana
5 403 (7.86%) Prometheus
6 109 (2.13%) Argo
7 77 (1.50%) Istio
8 65 (1.27%) Puppet
9 52 (1.01%) Single Sign-On
10 42 (0.82%) Progress Chef
11 35 (0.68%) Kibana
12 22 (0.43%) Nessus
13 21 (0.41%) Packer
13 21 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.39%) Rancher
15 19 (0.37%) Control-M
16 17 (0.33%) IBM Guardium
17 15 (0.29%) NetBackup
18 14 (0.27%) linkerd
18 14 (0.27%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 751 (14.65%) Microsoft
2 368 (7.18%) Databricks
3 269 (5.25%) Google
4 235 (4.58%) Oracle
5 215 (4.19%) Splunk
6 140 (2.73%) Salesforce
7 133 (2.59%) ServiceNow
8 127 (2.48%) Red Hat
9 110 (2.15%) Dynatrace
10 109 (2.13%) VMware
11 82 (1.60%) OpenAI
12 59 (1.15%) MuleSoft
13 58 (1.13%) SAP
14 52 (1.01%) IBM
15 46 (0.90%) CyberArk
16 43 (0.84%) Cisco
17 39 (0.76%) Tenable
18 38 (0.74%) AppDynamics
18 38 (0.74%) Denodo
18 38 (0.74%) Informatica