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

6 months to
22 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 20 30
Rank change year-on-year +10 +10 -8
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,244 2,539 2,460
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.85% 8.81% 5.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.86% 9.68% 6.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,579 1,790 1,740
10th Percentile £375 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.16% -5.76% -8.33%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £485 £534
% change year-on-year +3.09% -9.18% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 116 26 47
10th Percentile £51.23 £31.25 £50.75
25th Percentile £61.25 £48.99 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.25 £63.25 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.32% -2.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £79.41 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.50 £95.53 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.25
% change year-on-year - -3.35% +2.51%

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 40,767 26,234 36,547
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.37% 91.05% 86.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,562 16,839 23,562
10th Percentile £325 £303 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £497 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.66% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,395 1,067 2,440
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.36 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.96 £18.30 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.18 £36.05
Median % change year-on-year +50.82% -21.82% +0.13%
75th Percentile £67.50 £59.95 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -33.82% +8.57%

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 May 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 May 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 May 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 +7 4,339 £525 - 1,661
UK excluding London +11 2,240 £500 +3.09% 1,213
London +9 2,224 £545 -0.91% 713
Work from Home +8 1,523 £513 -2.01% 988
North of England +13 836 £500 +1.63% 337
Yorkshire +4 460 £500 +2.56% 84
South East +14 411 £505 +1.00% 383
Midlands +8 391 £481 +2.67% 106
West Midlands +18 312 £488 -4.77% 63
North West +8 310 £500 - 195
South West +12 239 £525 -3.23% 166
Scotland +8 223 £425 -11.92% 56
East of England +18 122 £550 +20.22% 107
North East +3 79 £450 -1.10% 61
East Midlands -8 72 £444 -3.32% 43
Wales +2 34 £425 -24.51% 31
Northern Ireland +14 28 £644 +51.47% 45
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
1 256 (4.88%) Confluence
2 189 (3.60%) Apache Spark
3 143 (2.73%) Apache Airflow
4 119 (2.27%) Apache
5 76 (1.45%) SAS
6 72 (1.37%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.48%) nginx
8 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
9 22 (0.42%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.36%) CMS
11 13 (0.25%) Mendix
11 13 (0.25%) SharePoint Server
11 13 (0.25%) WebLogic
11 13 (0.25%) WebSphere
12 12 (0.23%) Jupyter
13 11 (0.21%) Anypoint
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
15 9 (0.17%) Appian
15 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Office
4 16 (0.31%) Chatbot
5 13 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
6 8 (0.15%) Adobe XD
7 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
8 5 (0.095%) Sketch
9 3 (0.057%) Simulink
10 2 (0.038%) PlantUML
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 26 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.36%) Payment Gateway
3 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.17%) Aladdin
6 6 (0.11%) SAP CRM
7 5 (0.095%) Magento
7 5 (0.095%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.076%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.076%) Shopify
9 3 (0.057%) Findur
9 3 (0.057%) Oracle Applications
9 3 (0.057%) SAP BPC
10 1 (0.019%) Actimize
10 1 (0.019%) Endur
10 1 (0.019%) NetSuite
10 1 (0.019%) SAP ERP
10 1 (0.019%) SDL Web 8
10 1 (0.019%) Teamcenter
10 1 (0.019%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 2,308 (44.01%) Azure
2 2,277 (43.42%) AWS
3 1,138 (21.70%) GitHub
4 878 (16.74%) GCP
5 822 (15.68%) Azure DevOps
6 707 (13.48%) GitHub Actions
7 636 (12.13%) Serverless
8 377 (7.19%) Amazon S3
8 377 (7.19%) AWS Lambda
9 363 (6.92%) Power Platform
10 339 (6.46%) AWS CloudFormation
11 288 (5.49%) Amazon EKS
12 227 (4.33%) Azure AKS
13 220 (4.20%) OpenShift
14 219 (4.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 218 (4.16%) Azure Data Factory
16 211 (4.02%) Amazon EC2
17 202 (3.85%) Amazon ECS
18 187 (3.57%) Entra ID
19 159 (3.03%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 190 (3.62%) Firewall
2 114 (2.17%) DNS
3 108 (2.06%) Network Security
4 77 (1.47%) VPN
5 64 (1.22%) HTTP
6 37 (0.71%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.69%) WAN
8 32 (0.61%) BGP
8 32 (0.61%) SSL
9 31 (0.59%) SD-WAN
10 28 (0.53%) OSPF
11 23 (0.44%) Reverse Proxy
11 23 (0.44%) VXLAN
12 21 (0.40%) Ethernet VPN
13 20 (0.38%) Ethernet
13 20 (0.38%) SAN
14 19 (0.36%) BIG-IP
15 18 (0.34%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.32%) 3GPP
16 17 (0.32%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 351 (6.69%) PostgreSQL
2 271 (5.17%) Power BI
3 262 (5.00%) NoSQL
4 250 (4.77%) SQL Server
5 209 (3.99%) Relational Database
6 207 (3.95%) Data Lake
7 195 (3.72%) MongoDB
8 187 (3.57%) Data Warehouse
9 156 (2.97%) Amazon RDS
10 138 (2.63%) DynamoDB
11 124 (2.36%) Metadata
12 120 (2.29%) Big Data
13 116 (2.21%) Delta Lake
14 106 (2.02%) Azure SQL Database
15 91 (1.74%) Amazon Athena
16 90 (1.72%) MySQL
17 81 (1.54%) BigQuery
18 79 (1.51%) Amazon Redshift
19 74 (1.41%) Redis
20 71 (1.35%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 963 (18.36%) Git
2 958 (18.27%) Jenkins
3 743 (14.17%) GitLab
4 471 (8.98%) JIRA
5 199 (3.79%) Selenium
6 157 (2.99%) JUnit
7 131 (2.50%) Cucumber
8 123 (2.35%) Postman
9 105 (2.00%) JMeter
10 104 (1.98%) REST Assured
11 89 (1.70%) SonarQube
12 74 (1.41%) Bitbucket
13 68 (1.30%) Gatling
14 67 (1.28%) Cypress.io
15 65 (1.24%) Maven
15 65 (1.24%) MLflow
16 63 (1.20%) Gradle
17 61 (1.16%) Mockito
18 46 (0.88%) Artifactory
18 46 (0.88%) WebDriver
General
1 1,276 (24.33%) Social Skills
2 855 (16.30%) Finance
3 663 (12.64%) Public Sector
4 414 (7.89%) Analytical Skills
5 361 (6.88%) Banking
6 130 (2.48%) Documentation Skills
7 83 (1.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 70 (1.33%) Retail
9 67 (1.28%) Legal
10 64 (1.22%) Influencing Skills
11 59 (1.13%) Investment Banking
11 59 (1.13%) Military
12 56 (1.07%) Front Office
13 47 (0.90%) Financial Institution
14 37 (0.71%) Telecoms
15 35 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
16 32 (0.61%) Law
17 27 (0.51%) Publishing
18 26 (0.50%) Marketing
19 23 (0.44%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,152 (21.97%) Developer
2 786 (14.99%) Senior
3 636 (12.13%) DevOps Engineer
4 565 (10.77%) Architect
5 452 (8.62%) Lead
6 409 (7.80%) Data Engineer
7 277 (5.28%) Software Engineer
8 276 (5.26%) AWS Engineer
9 268 (5.11%) Azure Engineer
10 260 (4.96%) Java Developer
11 223 (4.25%) Cloud Engineer
11 223 (4.25%) Platform Engineer
12 199 (3.79%) Senior Developer
13 167 (3.18%) Full-Stack Developer
14 156 (2.97%) Python Developer
15 136 (2.59%) GCP Engineer
16 135 (2.57%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 127 (2.42%) AWS DevOps
18 124 (2.36%) Solutions Architect
18 124 (2.36%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 580 (11.06%) REST
2 480 (9.15%) React
3 455 (8.68%) .NET
4 451 (8.60%) Spring
5 423 (8.07%) Kafka
6 417 (7.95%) RESTful
7 408 (7.78%) Spring Boot
8 388 (7.40%) Node.js
9 214 (4.08%) AngularJS
10 197 (3.76%) PySpark
11 196 (3.74%) Playwright
12 181 (3.45%) HTML
13 178 (3.39%) OAuth
14 151 (2.88%) CSS
15 143 (2.73%) YAML
16 128 (2.44%) JSON
17 126 (2.40%) OAuth2
18 125 (2.38%) OpenTelemetry
19 113 (2.15%) FastAPI
20 109 (2.08%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 976 (18.61%) Cloud Native
2 358 (6.83%) Distributed Systems
3 288 (5.49%) Product Ownership
4 132 (2.52%) Onboarding
5 120 (2.29%) Legacy Systems
6 107 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
7 92 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
8 90 (1.72%) Data Centre
9 82 (1.56%) Public Cloud
10 81 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
11 78 (1.49%) Algorithms
12 76 (1.45%) AI Agents
13 69 (1.32%) Virtual Team
14 63 (1.20%) Mobile App
15 61 (1.16%) Security Posture
16 57 (1.09%) Management Information System
17 55 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
18 50 (0.95%) Self-Motivation
19 45 (0.86%) NHS
20 44 (0.84%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 525 (10.01%) Linux
2 229 (4.37%) Windows
3 110 (2.10%) Unix
4 85 (1.62%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (0.92%) Android
6 45 (0.86%) Apple iOS
7 42 (0.80%) VMS
8 40 (0.76%) Windows Server
9 21 (0.40%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.29%) CentOS
11 11 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.15%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) AIX
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
14 6 (0.11%) Solaris
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.076%) Debian
16 3 (0.057%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,948 (56.22%) DevOps
2 1,751 (33.39%) Agile
3 1,615 (30.80%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,196 (22.81%) Containerisation
5 1,077 (20.54%) Test Automation
6 1,020 (19.45%) Microservices
7 886 (16.90%) Observability
8 847 (16.15%) Problem-Solving
9 784 (14.95%) AI
10 710 (13.54%) Software Engineering
11 676 (12.89%) Analytics
12 651 (12.41%) Continuous Improvement
13 582 (11.10%) Data Modelling
14 563 (10.74%) Data Pipeline
15 538 (10.26%) Platform Engineering
16 506 (9.65%) Migration
17 471 (8.98%) Scrum
18 455 (8.68%) Data Engineering
19 454 (8.66%) ETL
20 446 (8.50%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,920 (36.61%) Python
2 1,228 (23.42%) SQL
3 1,051 (20.04%) Java
4 571 (10.89%) JavaScript
5 507 (9.67%) C#
6 445 (8.49%) TypeScript
7 376 (7.17%) Bash
8 321 (6.12%) PowerShell
9 178 (3.39%) Bicep
10 146 (2.78%) Go
11 99 (1.89%) Scala
12 98 (1.87%) Shell Script
13 86 (1.64%) C++
14 68 (1.30%) Apex Code
14 68 (1.30%) Kotlin
15 67 (1.28%) Ruby
16 56 (1.07%) PL/SQL
17 45 (0.86%) T-SQL
18 39 (0.74%) Groovy
19 33 (0.63%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,447 (27.59%) Security Cleared
2 1,199 (22.86%) SC Cleared
3 281 (5.36%) Degree
4 201 (3.83%) BPSS Clearance
5 160 (3.05%) DV Cleared
6 158 (3.01%) Azure Certification
7 148 (2.82%) AWS Certification
8 147 (2.80%) Computer Science Degree
9 71 (1.35%) CISSP
10 55 (1.05%) Cisco Certification
11 52 (0.99%) CISM
12 50 (0.95%) Master's Degree
13 48 (0.92%) Microsoft Certification
14 45 (0.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 45 (0.86%) ISTQB
15 31 (0.59%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 25 (0.48%) CCSP
17 24 (0.46%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 21 (0.40%) RHCE
19 19 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 408 (7.78%) QA
2 313 (5.97%) Data Quality
3 221 (4.21%) Accessibility
4 174 (3.32%) GDPR
5 135 (2.57%) NIST
6 115 (2.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 101 (1.93%) WCAG
8 73 (1.39%) NCSC
9 56 (1.07%) PCI DSS
10 40 (0.76%) SLA
11 26 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.42%) GRC
13 19 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
14 18 (0.34%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
16 15 (0.29%) MiFID
17 12 (0.23%) HL7
17 12 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 12 (0.23%) PSD2
18 10 (0.19%) HIPAA
System Software
1 1,344 (25.63%) Docker
2 119 (2.27%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.51%) Virtual Machines
4 66 (1.26%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.63%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.57%) vSphere
7 20 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
9 9 (0.17%) Squid
10 8 (0.15%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.13%) HDFS
11 7 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
11 7 (0.13%) Postfix
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
13 4 (0.076%) NFS
13 4 (0.076%) SRDF
14 3 (0.057%) Ceph
14 3 (0.057%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,630 (31.08%) Terraform
2 1,627 (31.03%) Kubernetes
3 526 (10.03%) Ansible
4 490 (9.34%) Grafana
5 416 (7.93%) Prometheus
6 107 (2.04%) Argo
7 77 (1.47%) Istio
8 67 (1.28%) Puppet
9 56 (1.07%) Single Sign-On
10 37 (0.71%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.63%) Kibana
12 23 (0.44%) Packer
13 22 (0.42%) Nessus
14 21 (0.40%) vCenter Server
15 20 (0.38%) Control-M
16 17 (0.32%) IBM Guardium
16 17 (0.32%) Rancher
17 15 (0.29%) linkerd
17 15 (0.29%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.29%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 744 (14.19%) Microsoft
2 374 (7.13%) Databricks
3 271 (5.17%) Google
4 238 (4.54%) Oracle
5 222 (4.23%) Splunk
6 153 (2.92%) Salesforce
7 143 (2.73%) ServiceNow
8 134 (2.56%) Red Hat
9 114 (2.17%) Dynatrace
10 102 (1.95%) VMware
11 87 (1.66%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.18%) SAP
13 58 (1.11%) MuleSoft
14 55 (1.05%) IBM
15 47 (0.90%) Cisco
16 41 (0.78%) CyberArk
17 40 (0.76%) Informatica
18 39 (0.74%) Tenable
19 38 (0.72%) AppDynamics
19 38 (0.72%) Palo Alto