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

6 months to
17 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 19 26
Rank change year-on-year +9 +7 -4
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,527 2,653 2,580
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.98% 8.94% 5.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.95% 9.82% 6.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,723 1,854 1,788
10th Percentile £375 £360 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.46% -6.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £602 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £525
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 29 69
10th Percentile £51.50 £42.61 £51.00
25th Percentile £61.63 £50.00 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £68.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.80 £89.50 £71.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year - -3.70% +2.89%

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 42,679 27,009 37,072
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.81% 91.00% 85.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,607 17,137 23,609
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £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 2,567 1,242 2,598
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.87 £16.03
Median hourly rate £43.96 £26.27 £37.34
Median % change year-on-year +67.37% -29.66% +6.69%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +76.94% -34.02% +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 17 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 17 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 17 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 +9 4,598 £525 +1.11% 2,821
London +10 2,379 £543 +0.60% 738
UK excluding London +11 2,366 £500 +5.26% 2,809
Work from Home +8 1,625 £513 -0.15% 2,571
North of England +13 920 £500 +4.17% 615
Yorkshire +6 483 £514 +5.44% 189
South East +4 411 £513 +2.50% 654
Midlands +4 399 £484 +4.73% 325
North West +8 350 £500 +0.81% 326
West Midlands +17 323 £492 -1.60% 163
South West +9 243 £525 -3.23% 260
Scotland +4 234 £425 -14.14% 292
East of England +15 134 £550 +22.22% 351
North East +8 102 £425 -2.30% 102
East Midlands -7 69 £444 +0.49% 162
Wales +10 39 £425 -19.05% 161
Northern Ireland +22 31 £545 +28.24% 188
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
1 277 (5.01%) Confluence
2 213 (3.85%) Apache Spark
3 189 (3.42%) Apache Airflow
4 142 (2.57%) Apache
5 84 (1.52%) SAS
6 74 (1.34%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.54%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.42%) CMS
9 22 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
10 19 (0.34%) nginx
11 18 (0.33%) OpenStack
12 15 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
13 14 (0.25%) WebSphere
14 13 (0.24%) WebLogic
15 12 (0.22%) Camunda
16 9 (0.16%) Anypoint
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Mendix
16 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 28 (0.51%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.36%) Chatbot
2 20 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
4 11 (0.20%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.072%) Adobe XD
7 3 (0.054%) Simulink
8 2 (0.036%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.036%) PlantUML
9 1 (0.018%) Maya
9 1 (0.018%) Sketch
9 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 30 (0.54%) Dynamics CRM
2 21 (0.38%) Payment Gateway
3 14 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 7 (0.13%) SAP CRM
6 7 (0.13%) Shopify
7 5 (0.090%) Magento
7 5 (0.090%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.072%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.054%) Findur
9 3 (0.054%) SAP BPC
10 2 (0.036%) Endur
10 2 (0.036%) Sage X3
10 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 1 (0.018%) Oracle Applications
11 1 (0.018%) Remedy ITSM
11 1 (0.018%) SAP ERP
11 1 (0.018%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 2,418 (43.75%) AWS
2 2,404 (43.50%) Azure
3 1,176 (21.28%) GitHub
4 925 (16.74%) GCP
5 871 (15.76%) Azure DevOps
6 741 (13.41%) GitHub Actions
7 656 (11.87%) Serverless
8 424 (7.67%) Amazon S3
9 406 (7.35%) AWS Lambda
10 398 (7.20%) Power Platform
11 324 (5.86%) AWS CloudFormation
12 289 (5.23%) Amazon EKS
13 250 (4.52%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 236 (4.27%) Azure AKS
15 219 (3.96%) Amazon EC2
16 204 (3.69%) Azure Data Factory
17 198 (3.58%) Entra ID
18 197 (3.56%) Amazon ECS
19 186 (3.37%) OpenShift
20 171 (3.09%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 210 (3.80%) Firewall
2 125 (2.26%) Network Security
3 116 (2.10%) DNS
4 79 (1.43%) VPN
5 64 (1.16%) HTTP
6 43 (0.78%) TCP/IP
7 41 (0.74%) WAN
8 39 (0.71%) BGP
9 35 (0.63%) SD-WAN
10 32 (0.58%) OSPF
11 30 (0.54%) VXLAN
12 29 (0.52%) BIG-IP
13 28 (0.51%) Ethernet VPN
13 28 (0.51%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 28 (0.51%) SSL
14 21 (0.38%) 3GPP
14 21 (0.38%) Ethernet
14 21 (0.38%) SAN
14 21 (0.38%) Wi-Fi
15 18 (0.33%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 363 (6.57%) PostgreSQL
2 294 (5.32%) Power BI
3 268 (4.85%) NoSQL
4 257 (4.65%) SQL Server
5 226 (4.09%) Data Warehouse
6 218 (3.94%) Relational Database
7 208 (3.76%) Data Lake
8 197 (3.56%) MongoDB
9 160 (2.89%) Amazon RDS
10 154 (2.79%) DynamoDB
11 126 (2.28%) Metadata
12 119 (2.15%) Big Data
13 115 (2.08%) Amazon Athena
14 112 (2.03%) Amazon Redshift
15 110 (1.99%) Delta Lake
16 102 (1.85%) Azure SQL Database
17 95 (1.72%) BigQuery
18 93 (1.68%) MySQL
19 79 (1.43%) Redis
20 71 (1.28%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,012 (18.31%) Git
2 997 (18.04%) Jenkins
3 793 (14.35%) GitLab
4 513 (9.28%) JIRA
5 200 (3.62%) Selenium
6 177 (3.20%) JUnit
7 138 (2.50%) Cucumber
8 123 (2.23%) Postman
9 113 (2.04%) JMeter
10 107 (1.94%) REST Assured
11 96 (1.74%) SonarQube
12 78 (1.41%) Bitbucket
13 77 (1.39%) Gradle
14 76 (1.38%) Maven
15 73 (1.32%) Gatling
16 69 (1.25%) Cypress.io
17 67 (1.21%) Mockito
18 60 (1.09%) MLflow
19 57 (1.03%) WebDriver
20 40 (0.72%) Artifactory
General
1 1,363 (24.66%) Social Skills
2 934 (16.90%) Finance
3 747 (13.52%) Public Sector
4 423 (7.65%) Analytical Skills
5 400 (7.24%) Banking
6 140 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
7 121 (2.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 84 (1.52%) Retail
9 75 (1.36%) Legal
10 68 (1.23%) Investment Banking
11 66 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
12 64 (1.16%) Military
13 59 (1.07%) Front Office
14 50 (0.90%) Telecoms
15 48 (0.87%) Law
16 47 (0.85%) Financial Institution
17 34 (0.62%) Marketing
18 33 (0.60%) Presentation Skills
19 32 (0.58%) Publishing
20 23 (0.42%) Billing
Job Titles
1 1,185 (21.44%) Developer
2 879 (15.90%) Senior
3 683 (12.36%) DevOps Engineer
4 595 (10.77%) Architect
5 478 (8.65%) Lead
6 441 (7.98%) Data Engineer
7 318 (5.75%) AWS Engineer
8 300 (5.43%) Software Engineer
9 290 (5.25%) Java Developer
10 268 (4.85%) Azure Engineer
11 248 (4.49%) Cloud Engineer
12 231 (4.18%) Platform Engineer
13 219 (3.96%) Senior Developer
14 170 (3.08%) Full-Stack Developer
15 167 (3.02%) Python Developer
16 148 (2.68%) AWS DevOps
17 144 (2.61%) GCP Engineer
18 141 (2.55%) Test Engineer
19 136 (2.46%) AWS DevOps Engineer
20 135 (2.44%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 632 (11.43%) REST
2 500 (9.05%) React
3 482 (8.72%) Spring
4 469 (8.49%) .NET
5 451 (8.16%) RESTful
6 438 (7.92%) Spring Boot
7 433 (7.83%) Kafka
8 367 (6.64%) Node.js
9 216 (3.91%) AngularJS
10 212 (3.84%) PySpark
11 196 (3.55%) Playwright
12 192 (3.47%) OAuth
13 183 (3.31%) HTML
14 160 (2.89%) CSS
15 149 (2.70%) JSON
16 139 (2.51%) YAML
17 138 (2.50%) OAuth2
18 123 (2.23%) FastAPI
19 122 (2.21%) OpenTelemetry
20 116 (2.10%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 1,088 (19.69%) Cloud Native
2 393 (7.11%) Distributed Systems
3 313 (5.66%) Product Ownership
4 150 (2.71%) Onboarding
5 133 (2.41%) Legacy Systems
6 116 (2.10%) Enterprise Software
7 113 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
8 106 (1.92%) AI Agents
9 105 (1.90%) Data Centre
10 96 (1.74%) Public Cloud
11 85 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
12 77 (1.39%) Algorithms
13 75 (1.36%) Security Posture
14 74 (1.34%) Virtual Team
15 69 (1.25%) Mobile App
16 66 (1.19%) Management Information System
17 63 (1.14%) Greenfield Project
18 56 (1.01%) Data Structures
19 55 (1.00%) Self-Motivation
20 45 (0.81%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 520 (9.41%) Linux
2 244 (4.41%) Windows
3 119 (2.15%) Unix
4 105 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (0.90%) Android
6 48 (0.87%) Apple iOS
7 46 (0.83%) Windows Server
8 38 (0.69%) VMS
9 25 (0.45%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.27%) CentOS
11 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
12 10 (0.18%) Solaris
12 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
14 7 (0.13%) AIX
14 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
14 7 (0.13%) zOS
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
16 4 (0.072%) Debian
17 3 (0.054%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,085 (55.82%) DevOps
2 1,913 (34.61%) Agile
3 1,734 (31.37%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,230 (22.25%) Containerisation
5 1,171 (21.19%) Test Automation
6 1,078 (19.50%) Microservices
7 946 (17.12%) Observability
8 896 (16.21%) AI
9 863 (15.61%) Problem-Solving
10 799 (14.46%) Software Engineering
11 730 (13.21%) Analytics
12 713 (12.90%) Continuous Improvement
13 616 (11.15%) Data Pipeline
14 612 (11.07%) Data Modelling
15 608 (11.00%) Platform Engineering
16 549 (9.93%) Migration
17 537 (9.72%) Scrum
18 516 (9.34%) Data Engineering
19 481 (8.70%) Mentoring
20 480 (8.68%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 2,057 (37.22%) Python
2 1,306 (23.63%) SQL
3 1,123 (20.32%) Java
4 569 (10.29%) JavaScript
5 529 (9.57%) C#
6 462 (8.36%) TypeScript
7 398 (7.20%) Bash
8 349 (6.31%) PowerShell
9 191 (3.46%) Bicep
10 150 (2.71%) Go
11 96 (1.74%) Shell Script
12 95 (1.72%) Scala
13 84 (1.52%) Kotlin
14 81 (1.47%) C++
15 78 (1.41%) Apex Code
16 61 (1.10%) Ruby
17 56 (1.01%) PL/SQL
18 49 (0.89%) T-SQL
19 43 (0.78%) Groovy
20 33 (0.60%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,533 (27.74%) Security Cleared
2 1,284 (23.23%) SC Cleared
3 283 (5.12%) Degree
4 216 (3.91%) BPSS Clearance
5 178 (3.22%) Azure Certification
6 176 (3.18%) AWS Certification
7 159 (2.88%) DV Cleared
8 139 (2.51%) Computer Science Degree
9 81 (1.47%) CISSP
10 60 (1.09%) Cisco Certification
11 52 (0.94%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.92%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 51 (0.92%) CISM
12 51 (0.92%) Microsoft Certification
13 48 (0.87%) Master's Degree
14 35 (0.63%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 28 (0.51%) CCSP
16 27 (0.49%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 19 (0.34%) TOGAF Certification
18 18 (0.33%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 423 (7.65%) QA
2 352 (6.37%) Data Quality
3 250 (4.52%) Accessibility
4 172 (3.11%) GDPR
5 138 (2.50%) NIST
6 112 (2.03%) WCAG
7 111 (2.01%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 81 (1.47%) NCSC
9 55 (1.00%) PCI DSS
10 40 (0.72%) SLA
11 25 (0.45%) GRC
12 21 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 20 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
14 18 (0.33%) ISO 20022
15 17 (0.31%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.25%) MiFID
17 12 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 12 (0.22%) PSD2
18 10 (0.18%) HL7
18 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,409 (25.49%) Docker
2 127 (2.30%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
4 77 (1.39%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.60%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.54%) vSphere
7 22 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
9 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
9 11 (0.20%) Squid
10 8 (0.14%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.13%) Postfix
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.090%) KVM
13 5 (0.090%) SRDF
14 4 (0.072%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 4 (0.072%) NFS
15 3 (0.054%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 1,735 (31.39%) Terraform
2 1,683 (30.45%) Kubernetes
3 512 (9.26%) Ansible
4 483 (8.74%) Grafana
5 420 (7.60%) Prometheus
6 108 (1.95%) Argo
7 78 (1.41%) Istio
8 62 (1.12%) Puppet
9 58 (1.05%) Single Sign-On
10 39 (0.71%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.60%) Kibana
12 28 (0.51%) Packer
13 23 (0.42%) Control-M
13 23 (0.42%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.40%) Nessus
15 17 (0.31%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 17 (0.31%) IBM Guardium
15 17 (0.31%) Kustomize
15 17 (0.31%) Microsoft Intune
16 15 (0.27%) Rancher
Vendors
1 762 (13.79%) Microsoft
2 363 (6.57%) Databricks
3 304 (5.50%) Google
4 254 (4.60%) Oracle
5 214 (3.87%) Splunk
6 174 (3.15%) Salesforce
7 137 (2.48%) ServiceNow
8 133 (2.41%) Red Hat
9 128 (2.32%) Dynatrace
10 107 (1.94%) VMware
11 89 (1.61%) OpenAI
12 65 (1.18%) SAP
13 63 (1.14%) MuleSoft
14 60 (1.09%) IBM
15 52 (0.94%) Cisco
16 51 (0.92%) Informatica
17 46 (0.83%) Palo Alto
18 40 (0.72%) CyberArk
18 40 (0.72%) Tenable
19 38 (0.69%) Talend