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

6 months to
24 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 19 27
Rank change year-on-year +9 +8 -5
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,626 2,728 2,597
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.05% 9.08% 5.98%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.01% 9.98% 7.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,782 1,896 1,799
10th Percentile £375 £360 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £511 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.25% -7.09% -8.33%
75th Percentile £608 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £734 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £526
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.61% -4.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 32 73
10th Percentile £51.25 £42.70 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £49.75 £62.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £65.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £87.60 £88.17 £71.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year - -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 43,234 27,342 36,961
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 91.04% 85.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,976 17,315 23,545
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.09% -4.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £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 2,595 1,301 2,587
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.65
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.79 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £72.50 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.08 £38.12
% change year-on-year +77.47% -34.22% +17.29%

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 24 June 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 24 June 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 24 June 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 4,690 £525 +1.94% 1,008
London +10 2,435 £540 +0.47% 406
UK excluding London +9 2,403 £500 +5.26% 850
Work from Home +8 1,683 £513 -0.73% 586
North of England +11 937 £500 +3.09% 221
Yorkshire +7 490 £514 +2.80% 48
Midlands +5 412 £484 +5.01% 85
South East +1 411 £515 +3.00% 298
North West +7 360 £500 +2.04% 142
West Midlands +16 335 £490 -1.94% 56
South West +6 242 £525 -3.23% 99
Scotland +5 236 £425 -13.97% 41
East of England +14 137 £550 +22.22% 63
North East +8 102 £425 +0.59% 35
East Midlands -10 70 £445 +1.25% 29
Wales +9 41 £425 -17.11% 24
Northern Ireland +23 31 £545 +28.24% 37
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
1 276 (4.91%) Confluence
2 221 (3.93%) Apache Spark
3 199 (3.54%) Apache Airflow
4 146 (2.60%) Apache
5 85 (1.51%) SAS
6 77 (1.37%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.41%) CMS
8 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
9 20 (0.36%) nginx
10 17 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.28%) OpenStack
12 15 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
13 14 (0.25%) WebSphere
14 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
15 12 (0.21%) Camunda
16 11 (0.20%) Anypoint
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
18 8 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
Applications
1 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Excel
2 21 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 19 (0.34%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
6 7 (0.12%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.071%) Adobe XD
8 3 (0.053%) Simulink
9 2 (0.036%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.036%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 33 (0.59%) Dynamics CRM
2 21 (0.37%) Payment Gateway
3 15 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
4 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.14%) Shopify
7 7 (0.12%) SAP CRM
8 5 (0.089%) Magento
8 5 (0.089%) NetSuite
8 5 (0.089%) SAP MDG
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Sage X3
10 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
11 2 (0.036%) Endur
11 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 1 (0.018%) Cloudability
12 1 (0.018%) SAP CX
12 1 (0.018%) SAP Hybris
12 1 (0.018%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 2,479 (44.06%) AWS
2 2,452 (43.58%) Azure
3 1,180 (20.97%) GitHub
4 940 (16.71%) GCP
5 897 (15.94%) Azure DevOps
6 746 (13.26%) GitHub Actions
7 662 (11.77%) Serverless
8 436 (7.75%) Amazon S3
9 410 (7.29%) AWS Lambda
10 407 (7.23%) Power Platform
11 322 (5.72%) AWS CloudFormation
12 284 (5.05%) Amazon EKS
13 253 (4.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 240 (4.27%) Azure AKS
15 227 (4.03%) Amazon EC2
16 209 (3.71%) Entra ID
17 203 (3.61%) Azure Data Factory
18 191 (3.39%) Amazon ECS
19 185 (3.29%) OpenShift
20 177 (3.15%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 210 (3.73%) Firewall
2 126 (2.24%) Network Security
3 118 (2.10%) DNS
4 83 (1.48%) VPN
5 64 (1.14%) HTTP
6 43 (0.76%) WAN
7 42 (0.75%) TCP/IP
8 40 (0.71%) BGP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.59%) OSPF
11 31 (0.55%) BIG-IP
12 30 (0.53%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
12 30 (0.53%) VXLAN
13 28 (0.50%) Ethernet VPN
14 26 (0.46%) SSL
15 21 (0.37%) 3GPP
15 21 (0.37%) Ethernet
15 21 (0.37%) Wi-Fi
16 20 (0.36%) Internet
16 20 (0.36%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 368 (6.54%) PostgreSQL
2 303 (5.39%) Power BI
3 274 (4.87%) NoSQL
4 259 (4.60%) SQL Server
5 235 (4.18%) Data Warehouse
6 229 (4.07%) Relational Database
7 210 (3.73%) Data Lake
8 196 (3.48%) MongoDB
9 164 (2.92%) Amazon RDS
10 157 (2.79%) DynamoDB
11 127 (2.26%) Metadata
12 122 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
13 121 (2.15%) Big Data
14 117 (2.08%) Amazon Athena
15 111 (1.97%) Delta Lake
16 104 (1.85%) Azure SQL Database
17 95 (1.69%) MySQL
18 91 (1.62%) BigQuery
19 81 (1.44%) Redis
20 70 (1.24%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,024 (18.20%) Git
2 1,012 (17.99%) Jenkins
3 806 (14.33%) GitLab
4 523 (9.30%) JIRA
5 201 (3.57%) Selenium
6 185 (3.29%) JUnit
7 140 (2.49%) Cucumber
8 127 (2.26%) Postman
9 113 (2.01%) JMeter
10 109 (1.94%) REST Assured
11 97 (1.72%) SonarQube
12 81 (1.44%) Maven
13 80 (1.42%) Bitbucket
13 80 (1.42%) Gradle
14 73 (1.30%) Gatling
15 71 (1.26%) Mockito
16 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
17 62 (1.10%) MLflow
18 57 (1.01%) WebDriver
19 38 (0.68%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,378 (24.49%) Social Skills
2 965 (17.15%) Finance
3 771 (13.70%) Public Sector
4 438 (7.79%) Analytical Skills
5 420 (7.47%) Banking
6 140 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
7 121 (2.15%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 87 (1.55%) Retail
9 76 (1.35%) Legal
10 73 (1.30%) Investment Banking
11 68 (1.21%) Influencing Skills
12 66 (1.17%) Military
13 61 (1.08%) Front Office
14 53 (0.94%) Telecoms
15 48 (0.85%) Financial Institution
15 48 (0.85%) Law
16 37 (0.66%) Marketing
17 33 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
17 33 (0.59%) Publishing
18 24 (0.43%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,197 (21.28%) Developer
2 889 (15.80%) Senior
3 703 (12.50%) DevOps Engineer
4 606 (10.77%) Architect
5 485 (8.62%) Lead
6 457 (8.12%) Data Engineer
7 326 (5.79%) AWS Engineer
8 309 (5.49%) Software Engineer
9 292 (5.19%) Java Developer
10 273 (4.85%) Azure Engineer
11 247 (4.39%) Cloud Engineer
12 231 (4.11%) Platform Engineer
13 218 (3.87%) Senior Developer
14 172 (3.06%) Full-Stack Developer
15 165 (2.93%) Python Developer
16 152 (2.70%) AWS DevOps
17 140 (2.49%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 139 (2.47%) GCP Engineer
19 137 (2.44%) Test Engineer
20 135 (2.40%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 657 (11.68%) REST
2 505 (8.98%) React
3 488 (8.67%) Spring
4 484 (8.60%) .NET
5 462 (8.21%) RESTful
6 443 (7.87%) Spring Boot
7 437 (7.77%) Kafka
8 356 (6.33%) Node.js
9 225 (4.00%) PySpark
10 210 (3.73%) AngularJS
11 200 (3.55%) Playwright
12 197 (3.50%) OAuth
13 186 (3.31%) HTML
14 161 (2.86%) CSS
15 158 (2.81%) JSON
16 140 (2.49%) YAML
17 139 (2.47%) OAuth2
18 123 (2.19%) FastAPI
19 118 (2.10%) OpenID
19 118 (2.10%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 1,120 (19.91%) Cloud Native
2 405 (7.20%) Distributed Systems
3 328 (5.83%) Product Ownership
4 149 (2.65%) Onboarding
5 136 (2.42%) Legacy Systems
6 124 (2.20%) Enterprise Software
7 115 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
8 112 (1.99%) AI Agents
9 104 (1.85%) Data Centre
10 98 (1.74%) Public Cloud
11 85 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
12 84 (1.49%) Security Posture
13 79 (1.40%) Virtual Team
14 77 (1.37%) Algorithms
15 69 (1.23%) Management Information System
15 69 (1.23%) Mobile App
16 62 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
17 58 (1.03%) Data Structures
18 57 (1.01%) Self-Motivation
19 53 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 537 (9.54%) Linux
2 253 (4.50%) Windows
3 117 (2.08%) Unix
4 109 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (0.89%) Android
6 49 (0.87%) Windows Server
7 47 (0.84%) Apple iOS
8 32 (0.57%) VMS
9 26 (0.46%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.27%) CentOS
10 15 (0.27%) Mac OS
11 11 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
12 10 (0.18%) Solaris
13 8 (0.14%) AIX
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
14 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 7 (0.12%) zOS
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 4 (0.071%) Debian
17 3 (0.053%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,158 (56.13%) DevOps
2 1,982 (35.23%) Agile
3 1,739 (30.91%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,243 (22.09%) Containerisation
5 1,203 (21.38%) Test Automation
6 1,096 (19.48%) Microservices
7 941 (16.73%) Observability
8 913 (16.23%) AI
9 877 (15.59%) Problem-Solving
10 820 (14.58%) Software Engineering
11 742 (13.19%) Analytics
12 722 (12.83%) Continuous Improvement
13 644 (11.45%) Data Pipeline
14 627 (11.14%) Platform Engineering
15 618 (10.98%) Data Modelling
16 566 (10.06%) Migration
17 557 (9.90%) Scrum
18 534 (9.49%) Data Engineering
19 501 (8.91%) Event-Driven
20 493 (8.76%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 2,088 (37.11%) Python
2 1,320 (23.46%) SQL
3 1,140 (20.26%) Java
4 577 (10.26%) JavaScript
5 551 (9.79%) C#
6 467 (8.30%) TypeScript
7 402 (7.15%) Bash
8 345 (6.13%) PowerShell
9 199 (3.54%) Bicep
10 158 (2.81%) Go
11 95 (1.69%) Shell Script
12 94 (1.67%) Scala
13 86 (1.53%) Kotlin
14 80 (1.42%) Apex Code
14 80 (1.42%) C++
15 59 (1.05%) Ruby
16 55 (0.98%) PL/SQL
17 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
18 47 (0.84%) Groovy
19 30 (0.53%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,566 (27.84%) Security Cleared
2 1,316 (23.39%) SC Cleared
3 292 (5.19%) Degree
4 217 (3.86%) BPSS Clearance
5 176 (3.13%) Azure Certification
6 175 (3.11%) AWS Certification
7 166 (2.95%) DV Cleared
8 140 (2.49%) Computer Science Degree
9 85 (1.51%) CISSP
10 63 (1.12%) Cisco Certification
11 55 (0.98%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 53 (0.94%) CISM
13 52 (0.92%) ISTQB
14 50 (0.89%) Microsoft Certification
15 49 (0.87%) Master's Degree
16 37 (0.66%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 28 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 28 (0.50%) CCSP
18 21 (0.37%) GIAC
19 18 (0.32%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 436 (7.75%) QA
2 366 (6.51%) Data Quality
3 254 (4.51%) Accessibility
4 172 (3.06%) GDPR
5 141 (2.51%) NIST
6 113 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 110 (1.96%) WCAG
8 82 (1.46%) NCSC
9 56 (1.00%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.68%) SLA
11 25 (0.44%) GRC
12 21 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
12 21 (0.37%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.30%) ISO 20022
14 16 (0.28%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 14 (0.25%) MiFID
17 13 (0.23%) PSD2
18 12 (0.21%) HL7
19 11 (0.20%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,424 (25.31%) Docker
2 134 (2.38%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
4 77 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.57%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.52%) vSphere
7 22 (0.39%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
9 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
10 10 (0.18%) Squid
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 (0.089%) KVM
13 5 (0.089%) RACF
13 5 (0.089%) SRDF
14 4 (0.071%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
15 3 (0.053%) NFS
15 3 (0.053%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,761 (31.30%) Terraform
2 1,711 (30.41%) Kubernetes
3 514 (9.14%) Ansible
4 476 (8.46%) Grafana
5 412 (7.32%) Prometheus
6 100 (1.78%) Argo
7 68 (1.21%) Istio
8 65 (1.16%) Puppet
9 54 (0.96%) Single Sign-On
10 41 (0.73%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.60%) Kibana
12 29 (0.52%) Packer
13 23 (0.41%) Control-M
13 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Nessus
15 17 (0.30%) IBM Guardium
15 17 (0.30%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.27%) Rancher
18 14 (0.25%) Active Directory Federation Services
Vendors
1 781 (13.88%) Microsoft
2 366 (6.51%) Databricks
3 310 (5.51%) Google
4 257 (4.57%) Oracle
5 215 (3.82%) Splunk
6 183 (3.25%) Salesforce
7 142 (2.52%) ServiceNow
8 133 (2.36%) Red Hat
9 130 (2.31%) Dynatrace
10 108 (1.92%) VMware
11 94 (1.67%) OpenAI
12 68 (1.21%) MuleSoft
13 66 (1.17%) SAP
14 62 (1.10%) IBM
15 55 (0.98%) Informatica
16 54 (0.96%) Cisco
17 47 (0.84%) Palo Alto
18 40 (0.71%) CyberArk
19 39 (0.69%) Talend
20 38 (0.68%) F5