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

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 16 26
Rank change year-on-year +5 +10 0
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,965 3,262 2,646
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.12% 10.04% 6.91%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.15% 11.10% 8.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,048 2,229 1,794
10th Percentile £381 £361 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £759
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 47 73
10th Percentile £45.16 £49.59 £51.25
25th Percentile £60.66 £57.25 -
Median hourly rate £68.22 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.95% - -12.75%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £94.00 £84.78 £71.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.96 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +4.55% -2.99% -8.84%

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 45,377 29,398 32,720
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,769 18,279 20,543
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% -3.49%
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 2,906 1,760 1,592
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.73 £17.30 £18.69
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.03 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.58 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +88.14% -47.37% +14.67%

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 3 September 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 3 September 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 3 September 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 5,004 £525 +2.44% 4,909
London +5 2,666 £538 +1.90% 3,052
UK excluding London +5 2,517 £500 - 2,593
Work from Home +6 1,845 £525 +5.00% 2,214
North of England +5 948 £500 +5.26% 687
Yorkshire +5 472 £513 +6.38% 183
South East -3 452 £529 +5.75% 531
Midlands -2 384 £488 +0.21% 258
North West +4 366 £525 +7.97% 392
West Midlands +2 321 £488 -7.14% 160
South West +8 286 £550 +4.76% 359
Scotland -1 263 £438 -12.50% 366
East of England +6 150 £509 +1.80% 208
North East -1 121 £425 -5.56% 114
East Midlands -22 57 £450 +4.77% 97
Wales -3 43 £450 -2.70% 54
Northern Ireland +23 25 £545 +9.00% 145
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
1 271 (4.54%) Confluence
2 228 (3.82%) Apache Airflow
3 198 (3.32%) Apache Spark
4 163 (2.73%) Apache
5 85 (1.42%) SharePoint
6 64 (1.07%) SAS
7 36 (0.60%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.42%) CMS
9 20 (0.34%) nginx
9 20 (0.34%) OpenStack
10 18 (0.30%) Camunda
11 16 (0.27%) Anypoint
12 14 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.23%) SharePoint Server
13 11 (0.18%) WebSphere
14 9 (0.15%) Mule
15 8 (0.13%) WordPress
16 7 (0.12%) IIS
16 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
17 6 (0.10%) JBoss
Applications
1 22 (0.37%) Chatbot
1 22 (0.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (0.18%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Office
4 6 (0.10%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.067%) Simulink
5 4 (0.067%) Trello
6 2 (0.034%) Adobe XD
6 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.034%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.034%) Sketch
6 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.034%) Windchill
7 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
7 1 (0.017%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 50 (0.84%) Dynamics CRM
2 23 (0.39%) Payment Gateway
3 15 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
4 14 (0.23%) Aladdin
5 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
6 11 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
7 8 (0.13%) NetSuite
8 7 (0.12%) Shopify
9 6 (0.10%) Magento
9 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 5 (0.084%) Temenos T24
11 4 (0.067%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.067%) Sage X3
12 3 (0.050%) Endur
12 3 (0.050%) Finacle
12 3 (0.050%) Findur
12 3 (0.050%) FLEXCUBE
12 3 (0.050%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 2 (0.034%) SAP ERP
13 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,669 (44.74%) AWS
2 2,622 (43.96%) Azure
3 1,276 (21.39%) GitHub
4 997 (16.71%) Azure DevOps
5 994 (16.66%) GCP
6 835 (14.00%) GitHub Actions
7 655 (10.98%) Serverless
8 441 (7.39%) Power Platform
9 435 (7.29%) Amazon S3
10 433 (7.26%) AWS Lambda
11 322 (5.40%) Amazon EKS
12 292 (4.90%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 281 (4.71%) AWS CloudFormation
14 246 (4.12%) Entra ID
15 241 (4.04%) Snowflake
16 234 (3.92%) Azure AKS
17 210 (3.52%) Amazon EC2
18 188 (3.15%) Azure Data Factory
19 182 (3.05%) Amazon ECS
20 178 (2.98%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 231 (3.87%) Firewall
2 157 (2.63%) DNS
3 122 (2.05%) Network Security
4 93 (1.56%) VPN
5 80 (1.34%) TCP/IP
6 55 (0.92%) HTTP
7 48 (0.80%) WAN
8 41 (0.69%) BGP
9 40 (0.67%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.57%) SSL
10 34 (0.57%) VXLAN
11 33 (0.55%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
12 32 (0.54%) BIG-IP
12 32 (0.54%) DHCP
12 32 (0.54%) Ethernet VPN
13 28 (0.47%) Internet
14 27 (0.45%) 5G
14 27 (0.45%) OSPF
15 20 (0.34%) VLAN
15 20 (0.34%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 422 (7.07%) PostgreSQL
2 336 (5.63%) Power BI
3 286 (4.79%) Data Warehouse
4 285 (4.78%) SQL Server
5 267 (4.48%) Relational Database
6 252 (4.22%) NoSQL
7 242 (4.06%) MongoDB
8 219 (3.67%) Data Lake
9 184 (3.08%) Amazon RDS
10 169 (2.83%) Metadata
11 141 (2.36%) DynamoDB
12 133 (2.23%) MySQL
13 125 (2.10%) Amazon Redshift
14 122 (2.05%) Delta Lake
15 117 (1.96%) BigQuery
16 105 (1.76%) Redis
17 95 (1.59%) Azure SQL Database
18 94 (1.58%) Amazon Athena
19 93 (1.56%) Big Data
20 92 (1.54%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,154 (19.35%) Git
2 994 (16.66%) Jenkins
3 878 (14.72%) GitLab
4 508 (8.52%) JIRA
5 229 (3.84%) Selenium
6 188 (3.15%) JUnit
7 130 (2.18%) Cucumber
8 125 (2.10%) Maven
9 116 (1.94%) SonarQube
10 114 (1.91%) Gradle
11 111 (1.86%) Postman
12 110 (1.84%) JMeter
13 108 (1.81%) Bitbucket
14 98 (1.64%) Cypress.io
15 95 (1.59%) REST Assured
16 83 (1.39%) Gatling
16 83 (1.39%) Mockito
17 65 (1.09%) Claude Code
18 49 (0.82%) WebDriver
19 47 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,539 (25.80%) Social Skills
2 1,084 (18.17%) Finance
3 864 (14.48%) Public Sector
4 526 (8.82%) Analytical Skills
5 480 (8.05%) Banking
6 153 (2.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 121 (2.03%) Documentation Skills
8 119 (1.99%) Retail
9 87 (1.46%) Investment Banking
10 79 (1.32%) Front Office
11 74 (1.24%) Telecoms
12 69 (1.16%) Military
13 58 (0.97%) Influencing Skills
14 57 (0.96%) Legal
15 55 (0.92%) Law
16 50 (0.84%) Financial Institution
17 44 (0.74%) Marketing
17 44 (0.74%) Publishing
18 41 (0.69%) Manufacturing
19 34 (0.57%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,344 (22.53%) Developer
2 1,063 (17.82%) Senior
3 760 (12.74%) DevOps Engineer
4 609 (10.21%) Architect
5 552 (9.25%) Lead
6 448 (7.51%) Data Engineer
7 329 (5.52%) Java Developer
8 318 (5.33%) Software Engineer
9 315 (5.28%) AWS Engineer
10 293 (4.91%) Azure Engineer
11 289 (4.84%) Senior Developer
12 258 (4.33%) Cloud Engineer
13 257 (4.31%) Platform Engineer
14 181 (3.03%) Full-Stack Developer
15 163 (2.73%) Python Developer
16 156 (2.62%) Solutions Architect
17 145 (2.43%) AWS DevOps
17 145 (2.43%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 144 (2.41%) Test Engineer
19 138 (2.31%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,925 (32.27%) Terraform
2 863 (14.47%) REST
3 566 (9.49%) Kafka
4 553 (9.27%) React
5 532 (8.92%) Spring
6 510 (8.55%) .NET
7 505 (8.47%) RESTful
8 478 (8.01%) Spring Boot
9 357 (5.98%) Node.js
10 246 (4.12%) HTML
11 241 (4.04%) Playwright
12 227 (3.81%) CSS
13 219 (3.67%) JSON
14 211 (3.54%) PySpark
15 207 (3.47%) OAuth
16 173 (2.90%) AngularJS
17 157 (2.63%) OAuth2
18 134 (2.25%) SOAP
19 124 (2.08%) YAML
20 119 (1.99%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 1,260 (21.12%) Cloud Native
2 459 (7.69%) Distributed Systems
3 387 (6.49%) Product Ownership
4 220 (3.69%) Onboarding
5 211 (3.54%) Enterprise Software
6 194 (3.25%) AI Agents
7 158 (2.65%) Legacy Systems
8 133 (2.23%) Hybrid Cloud
9 102 (1.71%) Security Posture
10 96 (1.61%) Data Centre
11 95 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
12 85 (1.42%) Public Cloud
13 78 (1.31%) Data Structures
14 75 (1.26%) Management Information System
15 71 (1.19%) Enterprise Cloud
16 68 (1.14%) NHS
16 68 (1.14%) Virtual Team
17 67 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
17 67 (1.12%) Mobile App
18 65 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 606 (10.16%) Linux
2 257 (4.31%) Windows
3 156 (2.62%) Unix
4 123 (2.06%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 69 (1.16%) Windows Server
6 56 (0.94%) Android
7 51 (0.85%) Apple iOS
8 33 (0.55%) VMS
9 22 (0.37%) Ubuntu
10 17 (0.28%) AIX
11 14 (0.23%) Mac OS
12 10 (0.17%) CentOS
13 9 (0.15%) zOS
14 8 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
15 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
15 7 (0.12%) Rocky
15 7 (0.12%) Solaris
16 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
17 5 (0.084%) Windows Server 2008
18 3 (0.050%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,359 (56.31%) DevOps
2 2,264 (37.95%) Agile
3 2,014 (33.76%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,391 (23.32%) Test Automation
5 1,285 (21.54%) Containerisation
6 1,208 (20.25%) Microservices
7 1,110 (18.61%) AI
8 1,105 (18.52%) Observability
9 1,034 (17.33%) Software Engineering
10 938 (15.73%) Problem-Solving
11 889 (14.90%) Continuous Improvement
12 794 (13.31%) Platform Engineering
13 731 (12.25%) Analytics
14 683 (11.45%) Stakeholder Management
15 672 (11.27%) Data Pipeline
16 661 (11.08%) Event-Driven
17 645 (10.81%) Data Modelling
18 642 (10.76%) Technical Leadership
19 638 (10.70%) Scrum
20 621 (10.41%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 2,262 (37.92%) Python
2 1,383 (23.19%) SQL
3 1,282 (21.49%) Java
4 661 (11.08%) JavaScript
5 534 (8.95%) C#
6 527 (8.83%) Bash
7 520 (8.72%) TypeScript
8 459 (7.69%) PowerShell
9 250 (4.19%) Bicep
10 160 (2.68%) Go
11 125 (2.10%) Shell Script
12 110 (1.84%) Scala
13 102 (1.71%) Kotlin
14 83 (1.39%) Apex Code
15 70 (1.17%) Groovy
16 69 (1.16%) C++
17 58 (0.97%) PL/SQL
18 53 (0.89%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 53 (0.89%) Ruby
19 49 (0.82%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,745 (29.25%) Security Cleared
2 1,446 (24.24%) SC Cleared
3 317 (5.31%) Degree
4 255 (4.27%) BPSS Clearance
5 240 (4.02%) DV Cleared
6 200 (3.35%) Azure Certification
7 188 (3.15%) AWS Certification
8 162 (2.72%) Computer Science Degree
9 104 (1.74%) CISSP
10 69 (1.16%) Microsoft Certification
11 61 (1.02%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (0.91%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 53 (0.89%) ISTQB
14 50 (0.84%) CISM
15 42 (0.70%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 38 (0.64%) Master's Degree
17 29 (0.49%) CCSP
18 23 (0.39%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 20 (0.34%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
20 18 (0.30%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 536 (8.99%) QA
2 431 (7.23%) Data Quality
3 316 (5.30%) Accessibility
4 142 (2.38%) GDPR
5 132 (2.21%) WCAG
6 104 (1.74%) NIST
7 96 (1.61%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 71 (1.19%) NCSC
9 34 (0.57%) PCI DSS
10 33 (0.55%) SLA
11 25 (0.42%) GRC
12 24 (0.40%) Cyber Essentials
13 22 (0.37%) ISO 20022
14 19 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 15 (0.25%) HL7
16 13 (0.22%) SOC 2
17 12 (0.20%) Actionable Recommendations
17 12 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
18 11 (0.18%) EU AI Act
18 11 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
System Software
1 1,600 (26.82%) Docker
2 160 (2.68%) Active Directory
3 115 (1.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.29%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.59%) VMware NSX
6 33 (0.55%) vSphere
7 26 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
8 22 (0.37%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
10 15 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 15 (0.25%) Squid
11 9 (0.15%) KVM
12 8 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.084%) Ceph
14 4 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.067%) HDFS
14 4 (0.067%) NFS
14 4 (0.067%) Postfix
15 3 (0.050%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 3 (0.050%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 1,925 (32.27%) Kubernetes
2 567 (9.51%) Ansible
3 488 (8.18%) Grafana
4 388 (6.50%) Prometheus
5 122 (2.05%) Argo
6 64 (1.07%) Puppet
7 58 (0.97%) Progress Chef
8 50 (0.84%) Istio
9 45 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
10 38 (0.64%) Kibana
11 35 (0.59%) Packer
12 25 (0.42%) Kustomize
13 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
14 21 (0.35%) Control-M
15 18 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 17 (0.28%) Podman
17 14 (0.23%) Oracle RMAN
17 14 (0.23%) SCCM
18 12 (0.20%) Jamf Pro
18 12 (0.20%) Karpenter
Vendors
1 920 (15.42%) Microsoft
2 424 (7.11%) Databricks
3 357 (5.98%) Google
4 327 (5.48%) Oracle
5 213 (3.57%) Splunk
6 193 (3.24%) Salesforce
7 154 (2.58%) VMware
8 151 (2.53%) Dynatrace
9 139 (2.33%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.78%) Red Hat
11 93 (1.56%) OpenAI
12 91 (1.53%) MuleSoft
13 85 (1.42%) IBM
14 73 (1.22%) Informatica
15 70 (1.17%) SAP
16 62 (1.04%) Cisco
17 57 (0.96%) Foundry
18 46 (0.77%) F5
19 43 (0.72%) New Relic
20 41 (0.69%) Palo Alto