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

6 months to
25 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 17 27
Rank change year-on-year +6 +10 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,919 3,254 2,638
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.03% 9.94% 6.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.05% 10.99% 7.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,011 2,231 1,773
10th Percentile £383 £361 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -5.34%
75th Percentile £613 £615 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 48 77
10th Percentile £47.30 £47.64 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 -
Median hourly rate £70.00 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% - -10.65%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £84.32 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.50 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +6.92% -2.99% -7.59%

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 45,365 29,616 33,160
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.57% 90.47% 85.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,789 18,444 20,998
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% -3.67%
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 2,884 1,758 1,700
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £13.87
25th Percentile £18.00 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +65.23% -38.57% -3.67%
75th Percentile £67.99 £47.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.63 £42.50
% change year-on-year +94.26% -46.75% +6.25%

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 25 August 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 25 August 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 25 August 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 4,962 £525 +2.34% 1,381
London +5 2,644 £538 +2.38% 573
UK excluding London +6 2,488 £500 - 1,120
Work from Home +6 1,826 £525 +5.00% 750
North of England +7 936 £500 +1.63% 302
Yorkshire +4 461 £503 +0.65% 83
South East -4 443 £525 +5.00% 309
Midlands 0 385 £488 +2.63% 111
North West +5 367 £525 +6.71% 165
West Midlands +5 323 £489 -5.74% 78
South West +5 286 £550 +5.77% 247
Scotland -1 256 £425 -14.66% 67
East of England +3 143 £510 +1.90% 60
North East -1 119 £425 -10.53% 57
East Midlands -21 56 £449 +3.16% 32
Wales -3 44 £450 -2.70% 23
Northern Ireland +22 25 £545 +3.81% 15
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
1 276 (4.66%) Confluence
2 226 (3.82%) Apache Airflow
3 199 (3.36%) Apache Spark
4 154 (2.60%) Apache
5 77 (1.30%) SharePoint
6 65 (1.10%) SAS
7 36 (0.61%) Jupyter
8 22 (0.37%) OpenStack
9 21 (0.35%) CMS
10 19 (0.32%) nginx
11 17 (0.29%) Anypoint
12 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
13 15 (0.25%) Camunda
14 14 (0.24%) Palantir Foundry
15 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.15%) Mule
17 8 (0.14%) IIS
18 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
18 7 (0.12%) WordPress
19 6 (0.10%) JBoss
Applications
1 23 (0.39%) Chatbot
2 21 (0.35%) Microsoft Excel
3 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Office
3 10 (0.17%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.068%) Simulink
5 4 (0.068%) Trello
6 3 (0.051%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.034%) Adobe XD
7 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.034%) Sketch
7 2 (0.034%) Windchill
8 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
8 1 (0.017%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 1 (0.017%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 49 (0.83%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.34%) Payment Gateway
3 16 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
4 13 (0.22%) Aladdin
4 13 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
5 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
6 8 (0.14%) NetSuite
7 7 (0.12%) Shopify
8 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.084%) Magento
10 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
11 3 (0.051%) Endur
11 3 (0.051%) Findur
11 3 (0.051%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
12 2 (0.034%) Remedy ITSM
12 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
12 2 (0.034%) SAP ERP
12 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 2,648 (44.74%) AWS
2 2,630 (44.43%) Azure
3 1,266 (21.39%) GitHub
4 998 (16.86%) GCP
5 995 (16.81%) Azure DevOps
6 833 (14.07%) GitHub Actions
7 645 (10.90%) Serverless
8 437 (7.38%) Power Platform
9 427 (7.21%) Amazon S3
10 424 (7.16%) AWS Lambda
11 327 (5.52%) Amazon EKS
12 293 (4.95%) AWS CloudFormation
13 284 (4.80%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 250 (4.22%) Azure AKS
15 235 (3.97%) Snowflake
16 234 (3.95%) Entra ID
17 213 (3.60%) Amazon EC2
18 183 (3.09%) Azure Data Factory
19 180 (3.04%) Azure Monitor
20 179 (3.02%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 231 (3.90%) Firewall
2 157 (2.65%) DNS
3 123 (2.08%) Network Security
4 95 (1.61%) VPN
5 78 (1.32%) TCP/IP
6 60 (1.01%) HTTP
7 48 (0.81%) WAN
8 45 (0.76%) BGP
9 40 (0.68%) SD-WAN
10 37 (0.63%) VXLAN
11 35 (0.59%) Ethernet VPN
12 34 (0.57%) SSL
13 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 32 (0.54%) BIG-IP
15 31 (0.52%) OSPF
16 30 (0.51%) Internet
17 29 (0.49%) DHCP
18 26 (0.44%) 5G
19 21 (0.35%) VSAN
20 20 (0.34%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 413 (6.98%) PostgreSQL
2 333 (5.63%) Power BI
3 287 (4.85%) SQL Server
4 281 (4.75%) Data Warehouse
5 259 (4.38%) NoSQL
6 255 (4.31%) Relational Database
7 242 (4.09%) MongoDB
8 212 (3.58%) Data Lake
9 179 (3.02%) Amazon RDS
10 164 (2.77%) Metadata
11 142 (2.40%) DynamoDB
12 129 (2.18%) Amazon Redshift
13 125 (2.11%) MySQL
14 116 (1.96%) BigQuery
14 116 (1.96%) Delta Lake
15 104 (1.76%) Redis
16 97 (1.64%) Big Data
17 96 (1.62%) Azure SQL Database
18 94 (1.59%) Amazon Athena
19 88 (1.49%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,127 (19.04%) Git
2 1,005 (16.98%) Jenkins
3 865 (14.61%) GitLab
4 517 (8.73%) JIRA
5 222 (3.75%) Selenium
6 182 (3.07%) JUnit
7 129 (2.18%) Cucumber
8 115 (1.94%) Bitbucket
9 113 (1.91%) JMeter
9 113 (1.91%) Maven
10 112 (1.89%) Postman
11 108 (1.82%) Gradle
12 107 (1.81%) SonarQube
13 98 (1.66%) Cypress.io
14 92 (1.55%) REST Assured
15 85 (1.44%) Gatling
16 74 (1.25%) Mockito
17 61 (1.03%) Claude Code
18 51 (0.86%) WebDriver
19 46 (0.78%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,529 (25.83%) Social Skills
2 1,061 (17.93%) Finance
3 857 (14.48%) Public Sector
4 516 (8.72%) Analytical Skills
5 464 (7.84%) Banking
6 146 (2.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 126 (2.13%) Documentation Skills
8 121 (2.04%) Retail
9 80 (1.35%) Investment Banking
10 74 (1.25%) Front Office
11 71 (1.20%) Telecoms
12 64 (1.08%) Military
13 60 (1.01%) Legal
14 59 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
15 53 (0.90%) Law
16 48 (0.81%) Financial Institution
17 43 (0.73%) Marketing
17 43 (0.73%) Publishing
18 38 (0.64%) Manufacturing
19 35 (0.59%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,329 (22.45%) Developer
2 1,044 (17.64%) Senior
3 750 (12.67%) DevOps Engineer
4 626 (10.58%) Architect
5 558 (9.43%) Lead
6 438 (7.40%) Data Engineer
7 319 (5.39%) Java Developer
8 318 (5.37%) AWS Engineer
9 315 (5.32%) Software Engineer
10 291 (4.92%) Azure Engineer
11 276 (4.66%) Senior Developer
12 256 (4.33%) Platform Engineer
13 255 (4.31%) Cloud Engineer
14 185 (3.13%) Full-Stack Developer
15 161 (2.72%) Python Developer
16 157 (2.65%) Solutions Architect
17 145 (2.45%) AWS DevOps
18 141 (2.38%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 141 (2.38%) Test Engineer
19 136 (2.30%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,910 (32.27%) Terraform
2 835 (14.11%) REST
3 549 (9.28%) React
4 540 (9.12%) Kafka
5 518 (8.75%) Spring
6 517 (8.73%) .NET
7 499 (8.43%) RESTful
8 459 (7.75%) Spring Boot
9 363 (6.13%) Node.js
10 247 (4.17%) HTML
11 238 (4.02%) Playwright
12 219 (3.70%) JSON
13 218 (3.68%) CSS
14 209 (3.53%) PySpark
15 204 (3.45%) OAuth
16 184 (3.11%) AngularJS
17 156 (2.64%) OAuth2
18 126 (2.13%) SOAP
19 123 (2.08%) YAML
20 118 (1.99%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 1,233 (20.83%) Cloud Native
2 454 (7.67%) Distributed Systems
3 386 (6.52%) Product Ownership
4 214 (3.62%) Onboarding
5 207 (3.50%) Enterprise Software
6 175 (2.96%) AI Agents
7 158 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
8 133 (2.25%) Hybrid Cloud
9 97 (1.64%) Data Centre
9 97 (1.64%) Security Posture
10 96 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
11 85 (1.44%) Public Cloud
12 73 (1.23%) Enterprise Cloud
13 72 (1.22%) Data Structures
14 70 (1.18%) Mobile App
15 68 (1.15%) NHS
16 67 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
16 67 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
16 67 (1.13%) Virtual Team
17 66 (1.12%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 580 (9.80%) Linux
2 258 (4.36%) Windows
3 138 (2.33%) Unix
4 108 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.06%) Windows Server
6 56 (0.95%) Android
7 51 (0.86%) Apple iOS
8 30 (0.51%) VMS
9 21 (0.35%) Ubuntu
10 17 (0.29%) AIX
11 11 (0.19%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.15%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) CentOS
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 5 (0.084%) Windows Server 2008
15 5 (0.084%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.068%) Rocky
17 3 (0.051%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,354 (56.66%) DevOps
2 2,245 (37.93%) Agile
3 1,967 (33.23%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,369 (23.13%) Test Automation
5 1,276 (21.56%) Containerisation
6 1,201 (20.29%) Microservices
7 1,077 (18.20%) Observability
8 1,075 (18.16%) AI
9 1,010 (17.06%) Software Engineering
10 943 (15.93%) Problem-Solving
11 875 (14.78%) Continuous Improvement
12 770 (13.01%) Platform Engineering
13 730 (12.33%) Analytics
14 670 (11.32%) Data Pipeline
15 652 (11.02%) Stakeholder Management
16 641 (10.83%) Event-Driven
17 634 (10.71%) Data Modelling
18 629 (10.63%) Technical Leadership
19 625 (10.56%) Scrum
20 617 (10.42%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 2,197 (37.12%) Python
2 1,377 (23.26%) SQL
3 1,258 (21.25%) Java
4 660 (11.15%) JavaScript
5 545 (9.21%) C#
6 515 (8.70%) TypeScript
7 511 (8.63%) Bash
8 454 (7.67%) PowerShell
9 249 (4.21%) Bicep
10 153 (2.58%) Go
11 113 (1.91%) Shell Script
12 102 (1.72%) Scala
13 101 (1.71%) Kotlin
14 88 (1.49%) Apex Code
15 77 (1.30%) C++
16 69 (1.17%) Groovy
17 61 (1.03%) PL/SQL
18 52 (0.88%) Ruby
19 49 (0.83%) T-SQL
20 44 (0.74%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,736 (29.33%) Security Cleared
2 1,451 (24.51%) SC Cleared
3 303 (5.12%) Degree
4 249 (4.21%) BPSS Clearance
5 221 (3.73%) DV Cleared
6 204 (3.45%) Azure Certification
7 185 (3.13%) AWS Certification
8 153 (2.58%) Computer Science Degree
9 100 (1.69%) CISSP
10 64 (1.08%) Microsoft Certification
11 62 (1.05%) Cisco Certification
12 57 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.84%) ISTQB
14 46 (0.78%) CISM
15 40 (0.68%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 37 (0.63%) Master's Degree
17 27 (0.46%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.44%) CCSP
19 20 (0.34%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
19 20 (0.34%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 533 (9.00%) QA
2 413 (6.98%) Data Quality
3 308 (5.20%) Accessibility
4 140 (2.37%) GDPR
5 125 (2.11%) WCAG
6 107 (1.81%) NIST
7 97 (1.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 70 (1.18%) NCSC
9 40 (0.68%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.64%) SLA
11 24 (0.41%) GRC
12 23 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials
13 19 (0.32%) ISO 20022
13 19 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.27%) HL7
15 14 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 13 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
17 12 (0.20%) SOC 2
18 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
18 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 1,586 (26.80%) Docker
2 157 (2.65%) Active Directory
3 109 (1.84%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.27%) Virtual Machines
5 36 (0.61%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.51%) vSphere
7 20 (0.34%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
8 19 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
9 15 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
9 15 (0.25%) Squid
10 8 (0.14%) KVM
10 8 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
11 5 (0.084%) Ceph
12 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 4 (0.068%) HDFS
12 4 (0.068%) NFS
12 4 (0.068%) Postfix
13 3 (0.051%) VirtualBox
14 2 (0.034%) zsh
Systems Management
1 1,897 (32.05%) Kubernetes
2 552 (9.33%) Ansible
3 488 (8.24%) Grafana
4 389 (6.57%) Prometheus
5 121 (2.04%) Argo
6 64 (1.08%) Puppet
7 57 (0.96%) Istio
8 55 (0.93%) Progress Chef
9 46 (0.78%) Single Sign-On
10 38 (0.64%) Kibana
11 35 (0.59%) Packer
12 24 (0.41%) Kustomize
13 21 (0.35%) Control-M
13 21 (0.35%) Microsoft Intune
14 18 (0.30%) vCenter Server
15 14 (0.24%) Oracle RMAN
16 13 (0.22%) Podman
16 13 (0.22%) SCCM
17 12 (0.20%) Jamf Pro
18 10 (0.17%) Rancher
Vendors
1 894 (15.10%) Microsoft
2 409 (6.91%) Databricks
3 345 (5.83%) Google
4 318 (5.37%) Oracle
5 218 (3.68%) Splunk
6 198 (3.35%) Salesforce
7 154 (2.60%) Dynatrace
8 143 (2.42%) ServiceNow
9 142 (2.40%) VMware
10 101 (1.71%) Red Hat
11 95 (1.61%) MuleSoft
12 83 (1.40%) OpenAI
13 77 (1.30%) IBM
14 71 (1.20%) Informatica
15 70 (1.18%) SAP
16 68 (1.15%) Cisco
17 49 (0.83%) Foundry
18 46 (0.78%) F5
19 45 (0.76%) New Relic
20 42 (0.71%) Palo Alto