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

6 months to
15 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 19 29
Rank change year-on-year +7 +10 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 4,247 2,681 2,483
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.45% 8.42% 5.88%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.03% 9.49% 6.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,977 1,856 1,840
10th Percentile £363 £388 £413
25th Percentile £420 £456 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £551
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% -0.18% -8.17%
75th Percentile £600 £660 £650
90th Percentile £688 £760 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 58 20 19
10th Percentile £39.86 £26.31 £55.00
25th Percentile £61.25 £51.78 £60.88
Median hourly rate £65.00 £66.25 £72.00
Median % change year-on-year -1.89% -7.99% +9.75%
75th Percentile £73.20 £75.63 £77.02
90th Percentile £87.95 £97.18 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £74.00 £75.00
% change year-on-year -12.16% -1.33% +14.32%

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 32,585 28,260 37,041
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.84% 88.76% 87.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,582 17,185 24,531
10th Percentile £304 £306 £304
25th Percentile £406 £413 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £742 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,992 898 1,578
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £14.17
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.56 £18.04
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -19.75% +15.71%
75th Percentile £55.89 £62.24 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.75 £75.00 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.45 £43.33
% change year-on-year -21.76% -29.73% +46.88%

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 15 January 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 15 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for CI/CD in the UK

CI/CD
Top 17 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 15 January 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 3,558 £520 -7.14% 2,345
London +6 1,864 £525 -12.50% 529
UK excluding London +8 1,763 £500 - 2,114
Work from Home +9 1,335 £513 -2.38% 1,332
North of England +8 630 £500 - 476
Midlands +17 359 £515 +3.00% 256
South East +10 352 £500 -9.91% 663
Yorkshire +4 318 £500 +1.01% 186
West Midlands +17 303 £525 - 111
North West +11 243 £471 -5.71% 226
Scotland +8 197 £465 -1.06% 87
South West +10 168 £538 -10.42% 257
East of England +5 85 £625 +72.41% 269
North East +11 72 £488 -11.36% 65
East Midlands +8 56 £418 -16.50% 140
Wales -4 26 £450 -18.18% 100
Northern Ireland -5 12 - - 50

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
1 163 (3.84%) Confluence
2 118 (2.78%) Apache Airflow
3 112 (2.64%) Apache Spark
4 105 (2.47%) Apache
5 90 (2.12%) SAS
6 52 (1.22%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.73%) nginx
8 20 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
8 20 (0.47%) OpenStack
9 18 (0.42%) CMS
9 18 (0.42%) JBoss
10 17 (0.40%) WebLogic
11 15 (0.35%) IIS
12 13 (0.31%) Anypoint
13 12 (0.28%) Appian
13 12 (0.28%) WebSphere
14 11 (0.26%) Mule
15 10 (0.24%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.24%) SugarCRM
16 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 47 (1.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 17 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
4 9 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
4 9 (0.21%) Mozilla Thunderbird
5 7 (0.16%) Adobe XD
6 5 (0.12%) Sketch
7 3 (0.071%) MS Visio
8 1 (0.024%) Oracle Smart View
8 1 (0.024%) Revit
8 1 (0.024%) Simulink
8 1 (0.024%) Trello
Business Applications
1 27 (0.64%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (0.14%) Aladdin
3 5 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
4 3 (0.071%) Endur
4 3 (0.071%) Magento
4 3 (0.071%) Maximo
4 3 (0.071%) Oracle Applications
4 3 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
5 2 (0.047%) NetSuite
5 2 (0.047%) Oracle Payables
5 2 (0.047%) Oracle Receivables
5 2 (0.047%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.047%) Shopify
6 1 (0.024%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.024%) ION Anvil
6 1 (0.024%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.024%) Oracle Cash Management
6 1 (0.024%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
6 1 (0.024%) Orchestrade
6 1 (0.024%) Siebel CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,963 (46.22%) AWS
2 1,781 (41.94%) Azure
3 961 (22.63%) GitHub
4 716 (16.86%) GCP
5 640 (15.07%) Azure DevOps
6 639 (15.05%) GitHub Actions
7 599 (14.10%) Serverless
8 353 (8.31%) Amazon S3
9 339 (7.98%) AWS Lambda
10 337 (7.94%) AWS CloudFormation
11 243 (5.72%) OpenShift
12 230 (5.42%) Amazon EKS
13 228 (5.37%) Amazon ECS
14 225 (5.30%) Power Platform
15 215 (5.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 206 (4.85%) Amazon EC2
17 181 (4.26%) Azure AKS
18 164 (3.86%) Azure Data Factory
19 132 (3.11%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 130 (3.06%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 187 (4.40%) Firewall
2 117 (2.75%) DNS
3 85 (2.00%) Network Security
4 67 (1.58%) VPN
5 65 (1.53%) TCP/IP
6 44 (1.04%) HTTP
7 43 (1.01%) SSL
8 26 (0.61%) SSH
9 20 (0.47%) Kerberos
10 18 (0.42%) DHCP
11 16 (0.38%) WAN
12 15 (0.35%) Wireshark
13 14 (0.33%) HTTPS
13 14 (0.33%) OpenLDAP
14 13 (0.31%) Ethernet
15 11 (0.26%) Reverse Proxy
15 11 (0.26%) SD-WAN
16 10 (0.24%) FTP
16 10 (0.24%) SMTP
17 9 (0.21%) BGP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 345 (8.12%) PostgreSQL
2 256 (6.03%) NoSQL
3 177 (4.17%) Amazon RDS
4 174 (4.10%) MongoDB
5 168 (3.96%) SQL Server
6 165 (3.89%) Power BI
7 151 (3.56%) Relational Database
8 148 (3.48%) Data Lake
9 136 (3.20%) Data Warehouse
10 105 (2.47%) MySQL
11 101 (2.38%) Azure SQL Database
12 95 (2.24%) DynamoDB
13 74 (1.74%) Redis
14 70 (1.65%) Delta Lake
15 61 (1.44%) BigQuery
16 59 (1.39%) Big Data
16 59 (1.39%) Oracle Database
17 55 (1.30%) Amazon Redshift
18 54 (1.27%) Amazon Athena
19 51 (1.20%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 950 (22.37%) Jenkins
2 840 (19.78%) Git
3 726 (17.09%) GitLab
4 403 (9.49%) JIRA
5 190 (4.47%) Selenium
6 149 (3.51%) Cucumber
7 145 (3.41%) JUnit
8 110 (2.59%) Postman
9 106 (2.50%) Cypress.io
10 88 (2.07%) SonarQube
11 87 (2.05%) Sonatype Nexus
12 78 (1.84%) JMeter
13 74 (1.74%) Bitbucket
14 61 (1.44%) Artifactory
14 61 (1.44%) REST Assured
15 60 (1.41%) MLflow
16 59 (1.39%) Maven
17 56 (1.32%) Gradle
18 54 (1.27%) CircleCI
19 48 (1.13%) Liquibase
General
1 1,206 (28.40%) Social Skills
2 748 (17.61%) Finance
3 549 (12.93%) Public Sector
4 367 (8.64%) Banking
5 339 (7.98%) Analytical Skills
6 102 (2.40%) Documentation Skills
7 67 (1.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 62 (1.46%) Financial Institution
9 57 (1.34%) Military
10 54 (1.27%) Investment Banking
11 51 (1.20%) Marketing
12 48 (1.13%) Telecoms
13 47 (1.11%) Front Office
14 37 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
15 36 (0.85%) Presentation Skills
16 28 (0.66%) Manufacturing
17 27 (0.64%) Legal
18 25 (0.59%) Retail
19 21 (0.49%) Billing
20 20 (0.47%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 986 (23.22%) Developer
2 579 (13.63%) Senior
3 560 (13.19%) DevOps Engineer
4 328 (7.72%) Architect
5 298 (7.02%) Data Engineer
6 284 (6.69%) Lead
7 260 (6.12%) AWS Engineer
8 246 (5.79%) Software Engineer
9 224 (5.27%) Java Developer
10 203 (4.78%) Azure Engineer
11 194 (4.57%) Platform Engineer
12 165 (3.89%) Full-Stack Developer
13 161 (3.79%) Cloud Engineer
14 154 (3.63%) Senior Developer
15 146 (3.44%) AWS DevOps
16 126 (2.97%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 125 (2.94%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 104 (2.45%) Test Engineer
19 102 (2.40%) Python Developer
19 102 (2.40%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 526 (12.39%) REST
2 434 (10.22%) React
3 420 (9.89%) Node.js
4 410 (9.65%) RESTful
5 358 (8.43%) Kafka
6 343 (8.08%) Spring
7 333 (7.84%) .NET
8 294 (6.92%) Spring Boot
9 210 (4.94%) AngularJS
10 200 (4.71%) HTML
11 172 (4.05%) CSS
12 163 (3.84%) JSON
12 163 (3.84%) OAuth
13 155 (3.65%) Playwright
14 144 (3.39%) Elastic Stack
15 137 (3.23%) PySpark
16 127 (2.99%) YAML
17 120 (2.83%) GraphQL
18 111 (2.61%) SOAP
19 103 (2.43%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 684 (16.11%) Cloud Native
2 267 (6.29%) Distributed Systems
3 193 (4.54%) Product Ownership
4 108 (2.54%) Onboarding
5 87 (2.05%) Public Cloud
6 78 (1.84%) Mobile App
7 73 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
8 70 (1.65%) Legacy Systems
9 64 (1.51%) Hybrid Cloud
10 59 (1.39%) Algorithms
11 58 (1.37%) Data Protection Act
12 52 (1.22%) AI Agents
13 51 (1.20%) Security Posture
14 50 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
14 50 (1.18%) Virtual Team
15 48 (1.13%) Data Centre
15 48 (1.13%) Replication
16 43 (1.01%) NHS
17 41 (0.97%) Private Cloud
18 35 (0.82%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 582 (13.70%) Linux
2 216 (5.09%) Windows
3 103 (2.43%) Unix
4 76 (1.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.48%) Apple iOS
6 62 (1.46%) Android
7 48 (1.13%) VMS
8 46 (1.08%) Windows Server
9 30 (0.71%) Ubuntu
10 23 (0.54%) CentOS
11 12 (0.28%) Solaris
12 9 (0.21%) Amazon Linux
12 9 (0.21%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.14%) zOS
14 3 (0.071%) Windows Server 2016
15 2 (0.047%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.047%) SUSE
16 1 (0.024%) Debian
16 1 (0.024%) Embedded Linux
16 1 (0.024%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,450 (57.69%) DevOps
2 1,509 (35.53%) Agile
3 1,340 (31.55%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,092 (25.71%) Containerisation
5 943 (22.20%) Problem-Solving
6 858 (20.20%) Test Automation
7 802 (18.88%) Microservices
8 582 (13.70%) Observability
9 569 (13.40%) Software Engineering
10 503 (11.84%) Analytics
11 485 (11.42%) AI
12 452 (10.64%) Continuous Improvement
13 397 (9.35%) Migration
14 395 (9.30%) Data Pipeline
15 382 (8.99%) Full-Stack Development
16 360 (8.48%) DevSecOps
17 358 (8.43%) Mentoring
18 350 (8.24%) Scrum
19 325 (7.65%) ETL
19 325 (7.65%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,642 (38.66%) Python
2 906 (21.33%) SQL
3 892 (21.00%) Java
4 560 (13.19%) JavaScript
5 452 (10.64%) TypeScript
6 406 (9.56%) Bash
7 382 (8.99%) C#
8 304 (7.16%) PowerShell
9 218 (5.13%) Go
10 121 (2.85%) Bicep
11 114 (2.68%) Shell Script
12 100 (2.35%) C++
13 84 (1.98%) Scala
14 67 (1.58%) Ruby
15 54 (1.27%) PL/SQL
16 51 (1.20%) PHP
17 49 (1.15%) T-SQL
18 45 (1.06%) Perl
19 43 (1.01%) Groovy
20 41 (0.97%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,129 (26.58%) Security Cleared
2 912 (21.47%) SC Cleared
3 279 (6.57%) Degree
4 179 (4.21%) Computer Science Degree
5 159 (3.74%) AWS Certification
6 130 (3.06%) BPSS Clearance
7 120 (2.83%) Azure Certification
8 118 (2.78%) DV Cleared
9 75 (1.77%) Master's Degree
10 62 (1.46%) CISSP
11 54 (1.27%) Microsoft Certification
12 48 (1.13%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 43 (1.01%) CISM
14 30 (0.71%) ISTQB
14 30 (0.71%) MCP
15 27 (0.64%) Oracle Certification
16 26 (0.61%) Cisco Certification
17 25 (0.59%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 19 (0.45%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 17 (0.40%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 402 (9.47%) QA
2 206 (4.85%) Data Quality
3 183 (4.31%) Accessibility
4 158 (3.72%) GDPR
5 127 (2.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 111 (2.61%) NIST
7 72 (1.70%) WCAG
8 52 (1.22%) NCSC
9 45 (1.06%) PCI DSS
10 24 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 23 (0.54%) HIPAA
12 21 (0.49%) PSD2
13 20 (0.47%) SLA
14 16 (0.38%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.35%) ISO 20022
16 13 (0.31%) EU AI Act
16 13 (0.31%) MiFID
16 13 (0.31%) SEPA
17 10 (0.24%) HL7
18 7 (0.16%) FINRA
System Software
1 1,383 (32.56%) Docker
2 129 (3.04%) Active Directory
3 74 (1.74%) VMware Infrastructure
4 57 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.92%) vSphere
6 15 (0.35%) VMware NSX
7 12 (0.28%) HDFS
8 11 (0.26%) Squid
9 10 (0.24%) Hyper-V
9 10 (0.24%) KVM
9 10 (0.24%) NFS
9 10 (0.24%) Virtual Desktop
10 9 (0.21%) DFS Replication
10 9 (0.21%) Dovecot
10 9 (0.21%) Postfix
11 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
12 7 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
12 7 (0.16%) zsh
13 4 (0.094%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
13 4 (0.094%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,525 (35.91%) Kubernetes
2 1,460 (34.38%) Terraform
3 573 (13.49%) Ansible
4 465 (10.95%) Grafana
5 407 (9.58%) Prometheus
6 117 (2.75%) Argo
7 68 (1.60%) Puppet
8 65 (1.53%) Progress Chef
9 53 (1.25%) Istio
10 50 (1.18%) Single Sign-On
11 39 (0.92%) Kibana
12 23 (0.54%) Podman
13 22 (0.52%) Nessus
14 18 (0.42%) Packer
14 18 (0.42%) Proxmox
15 16 (0.38%) NetBackup
16 15 (0.35%) Rancher
16 15 (0.35%) vRealize
17 13 (0.31%) ITRS Geneos
17 13 (0.31%) logstash
Vendors
1 591 (13.92%) Microsoft
2 298 (7.02%) Databricks
3 247 (5.82%) Oracle
4 229 (5.39%) Google
5 210 (4.94%) Splunk
6 143 (3.37%) Red Hat
7 113 (2.66%) ServiceNow
7 113 (2.66%) VMware
8 81 (1.91%) Salesforce
9 75 (1.77%) OpenAI
10 69 (1.62%) Dynatrace
11 53 (1.25%) SAP
12 43 (1.01%) MuleSoft
12 43 (1.01%) Talend
13 42 (0.99%) IBM
14 40 (0.94%) F5
15 36 (0.85%) CyberArk
16 32 (0.75%) Atlassian
16 32 (0.75%) Cisco
16 32 (0.75%) Denodo