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

6 months to
22 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 18 27
Rank change year-on-year +7 +9 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,846 3,042 2,600
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.08% 9.32% 6.29%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.04% 10.32% 7.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,920 2,095 1,780
10th Percentile £375 £358 £400
25th Percentile £430 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -8.33%
75th Percentile £613 £615 £650
90th Percentile £700 £716 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £485 £525
% change year-on-year +3.09% -7.62% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 39 77
10th Percentile £52.38 £48.09 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 £62.50
Median hourly rate £70.00 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% - -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £84.12 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +3.85% -2.99% +2.13%

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 44,825 29,480 35,296
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.35% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,802 18,519 22,641
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.11%
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 2,641 1,572 2,187
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £13.06
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.44 £16.86
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%
75th Percentile £68.50 £50.75 £62.50
90th Percentile £83.00 £68.75 £73.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.34 £40.00
% change year-on-year +84.88% -39.15% -1.95%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 4,858 £525 +2.44% 1,989
London +8 2,527 £550 +4.56% 1,026
UK excluding London +9 2,494 £500 +3.09% 1,233
Work from Home +8 1,793 £513 +2.50% 942
North of England +11 948 £500 +5.26% 373
Yorkshire +5 484 £500 +3.63% 110
South East -2 448 £525 +5.00% 374
Midlands +1 403 £479 +3.57% 152
North West +8 374 £515 +5.13% 208
West Midlands +11 335 £481 -0.82% 101
South West +6 265 £525 - 139
Scotland +3 256 £425 -15.00% 92
East of England +10 144 £549 +17.63% 63
North East +3 105 £425 - 56
East Midlands -13 61 £460 +2.22% 51
Wales -2 39 £450 -5.26% 29
Northern Ireland +27 30 £523 +4.50% 27
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
1 290 (4.96%) Confluence
2 214 (3.66%) Apache Spark
3 208 (3.56%) Apache Airflow
4 150 (2.57%) Apache
5 79 (1.35%) SAS
6 69 (1.18%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.56%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.39%) CMS
9 22 (0.38%) OpenStack
10 20 (0.34%) nginx
11 18 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
12 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
12 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.24%) Anypoint
13 14 (0.24%) WebLogic
14 10 (0.17%) Camunda
14 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Exchange
15 9 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
16 8 (0.14%) Mule
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
Applications
1 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.34%) Chatbot
3 17 (0.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 15 (0.26%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.068%) Simulink
8 3 (0.051%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
9 2 (0.034%) Sketch
9 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
9 2 (0.034%) Trello
10 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.017%) Maya
Business Applications
1 38 (0.65%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.34%) Payment Gateway
3 18 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
4 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
5 12 (0.21%) Aladdin
6 10 (0.17%) SAP CRM
7 8 (0.14%) Shopify
8 7 (0.12%) NetSuite
9 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 5 (0.086%) Magento
11 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
12 3 (0.051%) Endur
12 3 (0.051%) Findur
12 3 (0.051%) SAP BPC
13 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
13 2 (0.034%) R3 Corda
13 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
13 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
13 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 2,597 (44.42%) AWS
2 2,547 (43.57%) Azure
3 1,238 (21.18%) GitHub
4 993 (16.99%) GCP
5 911 (15.58%) Azure DevOps
6 791 (13.53%) GitHub Actions
7 638 (10.91%) Serverless
8 457 (7.82%) Amazon S3
9 418 (7.15%) AWS Lambda
10 409 (7.00%) Power Platform
11 309 (5.29%) AWS CloudFormation
12 308 (5.27%) Amazon EKS
13 259 (4.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 244 (4.17%) Azure AKS
15 227 (3.88%) Entra ID
16 225 (3.85%) Amazon EC2
17 195 (3.34%) Snowflake
18 192 (3.28%) Amazon ECS
19 181 (3.10%) Azure Data Factory
20 166 (2.84%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 218 (3.73%) Firewall
2 144 (2.46%) DNS
3 123 (2.10%) Network Security
4 99 (1.69%) VPN
5 69 (1.18%) TCP/IP
6 61 (1.04%) HTTP
7 45 (0.77%) WAN
8 42 (0.72%) BGP
9 38 (0.65%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 32 (0.55%) BIG-IP
12 31 (0.53%) OSPF
12 31 (0.53%) VXLAN
13 29 (0.50%) Ethernet VPN
14 28 (0.48%) SSL
15 26 (0.44%) Internet
16 24 (0.41%) DHCP
17 20 (0.34%) 3GPP
17 20 (0.34%) 5G
17 20 (0.34%) Ethernet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 402 (6.88%) PostgreSQL
2 304 (5.20%) Power BI
3 262 (4.48%) NoSQL
4 259 (4.43%) SQL Server
5 254 (4.34%) Data Warehouse
6 253 (4.33%) Relational Database
7 216 (3.69%) MongoDB
8 199 (3.40%) Data Lake
9 161 (2.75%) Amazon RDS
10 158 (2.70%) DynamoDB
11 140 (2.39%) Metadata
12 127 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
13 118 (2.02%) Big Data
14 114 (1.95%) MySQL
15 110 (1.88%) Amazon Athena
16 108 (1.85%) Delta Lake
17 103 (1.76%) BigQuery
18 91 (1.56%) Azure SQL Database
19 79 (1.35%) Redis
20 73 (1.25%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,100 (18.82%) Git
2 1,024 (17.52%) Jenkins
3 801 (13.70%) GitLab
4 542 (9.27%) JIRA
5 214 (3.66%) Selenium
6 188 (3.22%) JUnit
7 137 (2.34%) Cucumber
8 120 (2.05%) Postman
9 111 (1.90%) JMeter
10 108 (1.85%) REST Assured
11 107 (1.83%) Maven
12 103 (1.76%) SonarQube
13 99 (1.69%) Gradle
14 91 (1.56%) Bitbucket
15 88 (1.51%) Cypress.io
16 78 (1.33%) Gatling
17 72 (1.23%) Mockito
18 57 (0.98%) WebDriver
19 56 (0.96%) MLflow
20 43 (0.74%) Claude Code
General
1 1,418 (24.26%) Social Skills
2 992 (16.97%) Finance
3 814 (13.92%) Public Sector
4 477 (8.16%) Analytical Skills
5 431 (7.37%) Banking
6 136 (2.33%) Documentation Skills
7 128 (2.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 112 (1.92%) Retail
9 71 (1.21%) Investment Banking
10 70 (1.20%) Legal
11 68 (1.16%) Front Office
11 68 (1.16%) Military
12 65 (1.11%) Influencing Skills
12 65 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 50 (0.86%) Law
14 44 (0.75%) Financial Institution
15 40 (0.68%) Marketing
16 34 (0.58%) Publishing
17 32 (0.55%) Manufacturing
18 30 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,298 (22.20%) Developer
2 971 (16.61%) Senior
3 731 (12.50%) DevOps Engineer
4 608 (10.40%) Architect
5 534 (9.13%) Lead
6 453 (7.75%) Data Engineer
7 335 (5.73%) AWS Engineer
8 328 (5.61%) Java Developer
9 313 (5.35%) Software Engineer
10 274 (4.69%) Azure Engineer
11 255 (4.36%) Senior Developer
12 252 (4.31%) Cloud Engineer
13 251 (4.29%) Platform Engineer
14 187 (3.20%) Full-Stack Developer
15 162 (2.77%) Python Developer
16 151 (2.58%) AWS DevOps
17 148 (2.53%) Solutions Architect
18 139 (2.38%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 138 (2.36%) GCP Engineer
20 136 (2.33%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 735 (12.57%) REST
2 532 (9.10%) React
3 526 (9.00%) Spring
4 512 (8.76%) .NET
5 488 (8.35%) RESTful
6 476 (8.14%) Kafka
7 465 (7.95%) Spring Boot
8 385 (6.59%) Node.js
9 230 (3.93%) Playwright
10 214 (3.66%) HTML
11 210 (3.59%) PySpark
12 205 (3.51%) AngularJS
13 190 (3.25%) CSS
14 188 (3.22%) JSON
15 185 (3.16%) OAuth
16 137 (2.34%) OAuth2
17 123 (2.10%) SOAP
18 120 (2.05%) YAML
19 119 (2.04%) FastAPI
20 118 (2.02%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 1,168 (19.98%) Cloud Native
2 444 (7.59%) Distributed Systems
3 357 (6.11%) Product Ownership
4 187 (3.20%) Onboarding
5 164 (2.81%) Enterprise Software
6 145 (2.48%) Legacy Systems
7 132 (2.26%) AI Agents
8 129 (2.21%) Hybrid Cloud
9 103 (1.76%) Data Centre
10 101 (1.73%) Data Protection Act
11 99 (1.69%) Public Cloud
12 94 (1.61%) Security Posture
13 82 (1.40%) Algorithms
14 80 (1.37%) Virtual Team
15 70 (1.20%) Mobile App
16 68 (1.16%) Self-Motivation
17 67 (1.15%) Data Structures
18 65 (1.11%) Management Information System
19 60 (1.03%) Enterprise Cloud
20 58 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 574 (9.82%) Linux
2 268 (4.58%) Windows
3 128 (2.19%) Unix
4 110 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 58 (0.99%) Windows Server
6 53 (0.91%) Android
7 50 (0.86%) Apple iOS
8 27 (0.46%) VMS
9 19 (0.33%) Ubuntu
10 16 (0.27%) AIX
11 15 (0.26%) Mac OS
12 11 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
13 10 (0.17%) Solaris
14 9 (0.15%) zOS
15 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
16 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
17 6 (0.10%) CentOS
18 5 (0.086%) Rocky
19 4 (0.068%) Embedded Linux
20 3 (0.051%) Amazon Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,280 (56.11%) DevOps
2 2,167 (37.07%) Agile
3 1,835 (31.39%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,315 (22.49%) Test Automation
5 1,298 (22.20%) Containerisation
6 1,181 (20.20%) Microservices
7 1,015 (17.36%) Observability
8 997 (17.05%) AI
9 918 (15.70%) Software Engineering
10 903 (15.45%) Problem-Solving
11 797 (13.63%) Continuous Improvement
12 752 (12.86%) Analytics
13 689 (11.79%) Platform Engineering
14 683 (11.68%) Data Pipeline
15 620 (10.61%) Data Modelling
16 607 (10.38%) Scrum
17 584 (9.99%) Migration
18 561 (9.60%) Event-Driven
19 546 (9.34%) Data Engineering
20 523 (8.95%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 2,147 (36.73%) Python
2 1,319 (22.56%) SQL
3 1,202 (20.56%) Java
4 610 (10.43%) JavaScript
5 551 (9.43%) C#
6 494 (8.45%) TypeScript
7 480 (8.21%) Bash
8 389 (6.65%) PowerShell
9 218 (3.73%) Bicep
10 166 (2.84%) Go
11 104 (1.78%) Shell Script
12 103 (1.76%) Kotlin
13 84 (1.44%) Apex Code
14 80 (1.37%) Scala
15 77 (1.32%) C++
16 62 (1.06%) PL/SQL
17 59 (1.01%) Groovy
18 52 (0.89%) Ruby
19 45 (0.77%) T-SQL
20 30 (0.51%) Swift
Qualifications
1 1,653 (28.28%) Security Cleared
2 1,382 (23.64%) SC Cleared
3 301 (5.15%) Degree
4 227 (3.88%) BPSS Clearance
5 205 (3.51%) DV Cleared
6 190 (3.25%) Azure Certification
7 181 (3.10%) AWS Certification
8 138 (2.36%) Computer Science Degree
9 96 (1.64%) CISSP
10 65 (1.11%) Cisco Certification
11 55 (0.94%) Microsoft Certification
12 52 (0.89%) CISM
13 51 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 48 (0.82%) ISTQB
15 47 (0.80%) Master's Degree
16 39 (0.67%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 29 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 29 (0.50%) CCSP
18 26 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
19 21 (0.36%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 490 (8.38%) QA
2 387 (6.62%) Data Quality
3 298 (5.10%) Accessibility
4 160 (2.74%) GDPR
5 123 (2.10%) WCAG
6 122 (2.09%) NIST
7 98 (1.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 75 (1.28%) NCSC
9 44 (0.75%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.60%) SLA
11 29 (0.50%) GRC
12 22 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
13 15 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
13 15 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.24%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.21%) HL7
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
18 10 (0.17%) PSD2
19 8 (0.14%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,526 (26.10%) Docker
2 158 (2.70%) Active Directory
3 97 (1.66%) VMware Infrastructure
4 81 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.72%) VMware NSX
6 36 (0.62%) vSphere
7 21 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.31%) Oracle RAC
8 18 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.27%) Hyper-V
10 13 (0.22%) Squid
11 8 (0.14%) HDFS
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 5 (0.086%) Ceph
13 5 (0.086%) RACF
13 5 (0.086%) SRDF
14 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.068%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,848 (31.61%) Terraform
2 1,801 (30.81%) Kubernetes
3 538 (9.20%) Ansible
4 511 (8.74%) Grafana
5 424 (7.25%) Prometheus
6 116 (1.98%) Argo
7 64 (1.09%) Puppet
8 60 (1.03%) Istio
9 48 (0.82%) Single Sign-On
10 45 (0.77%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.53%) Packer
12 30 (0.51%) Kibana
13 26 (0.44%) vCenter Server
14 24 (0.41%) Control-M
15 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
16 20 (0.34%) Kustomize
16 20 (0.34%) Nessus
17 17 (0.29%) IBM Guardium
17 17 (0.29%) Oracle RMAN
18 15 (0.26%) Podman
Vendors
1 822 (14.06%) Microsoft
2 372 (6.36%) Databricks
3 330 (5.64%) Google
4 296 (5.06%) Oracle
5 216 (3.69%) Splunk
6 194 (3.32%) Salesforce
7 138 (2.36%) Dynatrace
8 137 (2.34%) ServiceNow
9 134 (2.29%) VMware
10 115 (1.97%) Red Hat
11 86 (1.47%) OpenAI
12 84 (1.44%) MuleSoft
13 76 (1.30%) SAP
14 73 (1.25%) IBM
15 66 (1.13%) Cisco
16 63 (1.08%) Informatica
17 48 (0.82%) Foundry
18 45 (0.77%) Palo Alto
19 44 (0.75%) F5
20 37 (0.63%) CyberArk