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

6 months to
11 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 19 30
Rank change year-on-year +8 +11 -10
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 4,550 2,699 2,522
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.46% 8.77% 5.66%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.17% 9.80% 6.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,182 1,875 1,872
10th Percentile £363 £390 £413
25th Percentile £415 £455 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £688 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £538
% change year-on-year - -6.98% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 61 20 25
10th Percentile £40.00 £26.15 £52.50
25th Percentile £61.25 £26.97 £60.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.27
Median % change year-on-year - -3.37% +2.53%
75th Percentile £77.50 £75.63 £76.53
90th Percentile £95.00 £97.18 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £74.44 £68.75
% change year-on-year -12.68% +8.28% +4.79%

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 34,545 27,534 38,814
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.04% 89.45% 87.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,908 16,837 25,471
10th Percentile £306 £306 £300
25th Percentile £408 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £717 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.50% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,083 848 2,117
10th Percentile £14.51 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.78 £21.03 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -2.99% +2.48%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.38 £60.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.08 £35.00
% change year-on-year -19.08% -11.20% +8.53%

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 11 February 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 11 February 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 11 February 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 3,776 £513 -8.48% 1,381
London +4 1,977 £525 -11.21% 587
UK excluding London +8 1,886 £500 - 1,035
Work from Home +7 1,409 £500 -5.66% 847
North of England +10 709 £491 -1.80% 297
Midlands +19 384 £506 +3.27% 131
Yorkshire +4 362 £500 - 84
South East +3 360 £500 -10.71% 331
West Midlands +19 324 £520 +5.80% 95
North West +9 281 £450 -10.00% 186
Scotland +10 215 £450 -5.26% 68
South West +5 162 £525 -12.50% 139
East of England +3 85 £600 +33.33% 51
North East +6 72 £488 -6.02% 29
East Midlands +7 60 £418 -14.80% 37
Wales +1 27 £433 -21.36% 21
Northern Ireland +6 19 - - 10

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
1 187 (4.11%) Confluence
2 142 (3.12%) Apache Spark
3 118 (2.59%) Apache
4 117 (2.57%) Apache Airflow
5 74 (1.63%) SAS
6 59 (1.30%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.62%) CMS
8 26 (0.57%) nginx
9 25 (0.55%) OpenStack
10 23 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.35%) Appian
12 15 (0.33%) JBoss
12 15 (0.33%) WebLogic
13 13 (0.29%) IIS
14 11 (0.24%) Ethereum
14 11 (0.24%) Hyperledger
15 10 (0.22%) Anypoint
15 10 (0.22%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.22%) SugarCRM
16 9 (0.20%) Adobe Experience Manager
Applications
1 52 (1.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 24 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 17 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
4 13 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
5 9 (0.20%) Chatbot
6 8 (0.18%) Adobe XD
7 6 (0.13%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 5 (0.11%) Sketch
9 3 (0.066%) MS Visio
10 1 (0.022%) Oracle Smart View
10 1 (0.022%) Revit
10 1 (0.022%) Simulink
10 1 (0.022%) Trello
Business Applications
1 23 (0.51%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.11%) Aladdin
2 5 (0.11%) Payment Gateway
3 3 (0.066%) Magento
3 3 (0.066%) Maximo
3 3 (0.066%) Oracle Applications
3 3 (0.066%) Oracle ERP
4 2 (0.044%) Endur
4 2 (0.044%) Oracle EBS
4 2 (0.044%) Oracle Payables
4 2 (0.044%) Oracle Receivables
4 2 (0.044%) Shopify
5 1 (0.022%) Oracle Assets
5 1 (0.022%) Oracle Cash Management
5 1 (0.022%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
5 1 (0.022%) Orchestrade
5 1 (0.022%) R3 Corda
5 1 (0.022%) SAP Hybris
5 1 (0.022%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.022%) Siebel CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,077 (45.65%) AWS
2 1,931 (42.44%) Azure
3 1,022 (22.46%) GitHub
4 767 (16.86%) GCP
5 684 (15.03%) Azure DevOps
6 665 (14.62%) GitHub Actions
7 623 (13.69%) Serverless
8 373 (8.20%) AWS CloudFormation
9 368 (8.09%) Amazon S3
10 347 (7.63%) AWS Lambda
11 265 (5.82%) OpenShift
12 258 (5.67%) Power Platform
13 253 (5.56%) Amazon EKS
14 237 (5.21%) Amazon ECS
15 214 (4.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 206 (4.53%) Amazon EC2
17 194 (4.26%) Azure AKS
18 184 (4.04%) Azure Data Factory
19 141 (3.10%) Entra ID
20 138 (3.03%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 183 (4.02%) Firewall
2 115 (2.53%) DNS
3 102 (2.24%) Network Security
4 71 (1.56%) VPN
5 53 (1.16%) HTTP
6 52 (1.14%) TCP/IP
7 41 (0.90%) SSL
8 23 (0.51%) Kerberos
9 22 (0.48%) SSH
10 18 (0.40%) Reverse Proxy
11 17 (0.37%) DHCP
11 17 (0.37%) Ethernet
11 17 (0.37%) WAN
12 14 (0.31%) HTTPS
12 14 (0.31%) Wireshark
13 12 (0.26%) NAS
13 12 (0.26%) SAN
13 12 (0.26%) SD-WAN
14 11 (0.24%) BGP
15 9 (0.20%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 374 (8.22%) PostgreSQL
2 267 (5.87%) NoSQL
3 190 (4.18%) SQL Server
4 187 (4.11%) Power BI
5 185 (4.07%) MongoDB
6 184 (4.04%) Amazon RDS
7 166 (3.65%) Data Lake
8 163 (3.58%) Relational Database
9 152 (3.34%) Data Warehouse
10 110 (2.42%) Azure SQL Database
11 109 (2.40%) MySQL
12 100 (2.20%) DynamoDB
13 82 (1.80%) Delta Lake
14 76 (1.67%) Big Data
15 74 (1.63%) Redis
16 67 (1.47%) Amazon Athena
17 63 (1.38%) Metadata
18 62 (1.36%) BigQuery
19 59 (1.30%) Amazon Redshift
20 55 (1.21%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 982 (21.58%) Jenkins
2 863 (18.97%) Git
3 770 (16.92%) GitLab
4 419 (9.21%) JIRA
5 194 (4.26%) Selenium
6 163 (3.58%) Cucumber
7 156 (3.43%) JUnit
8 121 (2.66%) Postman
9 95 (2.09%) Cypress.io
10 85 (1.87%) JMeter
10 85 (1.87%) REST Assured
11 79 (1.74%) Sonatype Nexus
12 78 (1.71%) SonarQube
13 68 (1.49%) Bitbucket
14 65 (1.43%) MLflow
15 64 (1.41%) Maven
16 60 (1.32%) Gradle
17 56 (1.23%) Artifactory
18 48 (1.05%) Gatling
19 46 (1.01%) Mockito
General
1 1,253 (27.54%) Social Skills
2 790 (17.36%) Finance
3 584 (12.84%) Public Sector
4 395 (8.68%) Analytical Skills
5 352 (7.74%) Banking
6 110 (2.42%) Documentation Skills
7 67 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 61 (1.34%) Financial Institution
9 54 (1.19%) Military
10 50 (1.10%) Marketing
11 49 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
12 47 (1.03%) Front Office
12 47 (1.03%) Investment Banking
13 44 (0.97%) Telecoms
14 39 (0.86%) Legal
15 35 (0.77%) Retail
16 33 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
17 24 (0.53%) Law
18 23 (0.51%) Manufacturing
19 22 (0.48%) Billing
Job Titles
1 1,072 (23.56%) Developer
2 624 (13.71%) Senior
3 583 (12.81%) DevOps Engineer
4 389 (8.55%) Architect
5 327 (7.19%) Data Engineer
6 317 (6.97%) Lead
7 284 (6.24%) AWS Engineer
8 241 (5.30%) Java Developer
9 234 (5.14%) Software Engineer
10 221 (4.86%) Azure Engineer
11 198 (4.35%) Platform Engineer
12 185 (4.07%) Full-Stack Developer
13 184 (4.04%) Cloud Engineer
14 157 (3.45%) Senior Developer
15 154 (3.38%) AWS DevOps
16 134 (2.95%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 127 (2.79%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 126 (2.77%) Python Developer
19 115 (2.53%) Test Engineer
20 112 (2.46%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 579 (12.73%) REST
2 469 (10.31%) React
3 434 (9.54%) Node.js
4 423 (9.30%) RESTful
5 390 (8.57%) Spring
6 387 (8.51%) Kafka
7 354 (7.78%) .NET
8 338 (7.43%) Spring Boot
9 216 (4.75%) AngularJS
10 202 (4.44%) HTML
11 185 (4.07%) CSS
12 180 (3.96%) OAuth
13 177 (3.89%) Playwright
14 160 (3.52%) JSON
15 155 (3.41%) PySpark
16 144 (3.16%) YAML
17 141 (3.10%) Elastic Stack
18 130 (2.86%) GraphQL
19 121 (2.66%) FastAPI
20 111 (2.44%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 760 (16.70%) Cloud Native
2 278 (6.11%) Distributed Systems
3 215 (4.73%) Product Ownership
4 120 (2.64%) Onboarding
5 88 (1.93%) Public Cloud
6 79 (1.74%) Legacy Systems
7 78 (1.71%) Mobile App
8 77 (1.69%) Enterprise Software
9 75 (1.65%) Algorithms
10 71 (1.56%) Hybrid Cloud
11 66 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
12 60 (1.32%) Virtual Team
13 55 (1.21%) Data Centre
14 54 (1.19%) AI Agents
15 51 (1.12%) Security Posture
16 49 (1.08%) NHS
17 47 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
18 43 (0.95%) Private Cloud
19 42 (0.92%) Replication
20 36 (0.79%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 599 (13.16%) Linux
2 223 (4.90%) Windows
3 97 (2.13%) Unix
4 79 (1.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 56 (1.23%) Apple iOS
6 51 (1.12%) Android
7 48 (1.05%) VMS
8 46 (1.01%) Windows Server
9 29 (0.64%) Ubuntu
10 25 (0.55%) CentOS
11 11 (0.24%) Mac OS
12 10 (0.22%) Solaris
13 6 (0.13%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.11%) zOS
15 3 (0.066%) Embedded Linux
15 3 (0.066%) SUSE
16 2 (0.044%) Rocky
16 2 (0.044%) Windows Server 2008
16 2 (0.044%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,577 (56.64%) DevOps
2 1,568 (34.46%) Agile
3 1,406 (30.90%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,165 (25.60%) Containerisation
5 1,009 (22.18%) Problem-Solving
6 924 (20.31%) Test Automation
7 841 (18.48%) Microservices
8 670 (14.73%) Observability
9 575 (12.64%) Analytics
10 567 (12.46%) Software Engineering
11 561 (12.33%) AI
12 504 (11.08%) Continuous Improvement
13 421 (9.25%) Data Pipeline
14 413 (9.08%) Migration
15 412 (9.05%) Full-Stack Development
16 386 (8.48%) Mentoring
17 380 (8.35%) Data Modelling
18 377 (8.29%) Scrum
19 374 (8.22%) Data Engineering
20 367 (8.07%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,776 (39.03%) Python
2 993 (21.82%) SQL
3 928 (20.40%) Java
4 595 (13.08%) JavaScript
5 500 (10.99%) TypeScript
6 399 (8.77%) C#
7 386 (8.48%) Bash
8 315 (6.92%) PowerShell
9 206 (4.53%) Go
10 134 (2.95%) Bicep
11 113 (2.48%) Shell Script
12 100 (2.20%) Scala
13 78 (1.71%) C++
14 68 (1.49%) Ruby
15 56 (1.23%) PL/SQL
16 50 (1.10%) Kotlin
17 49 (1.08%) T-SQL
18 44 (0.97%) Groovy
19 40 (0.88%) PHP
20 37 (0.81%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,191 (26.18%) Security Cleared
2 959 (21.08%) SC Cleared
3 294 (6.46%) Degree
4 176 (3.87%) Computer Science Degree
5 166 (3.65%) AWS Certification
6 156 (3.43%) BPSS Clearance
7 126 (2.77%) Azure Certification
8 124 (2.73%) DV Cleared
9 83 (1.82%) Master's Degree
10 67 (1.47%) CISSP
11 57 (1.25%) Microsoft Certification
12 54 (1.19%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 49 (1.08%) CISM
14 32 (0.70%) ISTQB
15 27 (0.59%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 27 (0.59%) Cisco Certification
16 26 (0.57%) Oracle Certification
17 17 (0.37%) RHCE
18 16 (0.35%) OCP
18 16 (0.35%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 407 (8.95%) QA
2 230 (5.05%) Data Quality
3 199 (4.37%) Accessibility
4 172 (3.78%) GDPR
5 131 (2.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 123 (2.70%) NIST
7 77 (1.69%) WCAG
8 64 (1.41%) NCSC
9 51 (1.12%) PCI DSS
10 27 (0.59%) HIPAA
11 26 (0.57%) SLA
12 23 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 21 (0.46%) SOC 2
14 20 (0.44%) PSD2
15 19 (0.42%) ISO 20022
16 16 (0.35%) SEPA
17 14 (0.31%) MiFID
18 12 (0.26%) EU AI Act
19 10 (0.22%) HL7
20 9 (0.20%) GRC
System Software
1 1,409 (30.97%) Docker
2 128 (2.81%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.74%) VMware Infrastructure
4 70 (1.54%) Virtual Machines
5 50 (1.10%) vSphere
6 25 (0.55%) VMware NSX
7 11 (0.24%) Virtual Desktop
8 9 (0.20%) HDFS
9 8 (0.18%) Hyper-V
9 8 (0.18%) Postfix
9 8 (0.18%) Squid
9 8 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
10 7 (0.15%) NFS
11 6 (0.13%) DFS Replication
11 6 (0.13%) Dovecot
11 6 (0.13%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 6 (0.13%) zsh
12 5 (0.11%) KVM
12 5 (0.11%) RACF
13 4 (0.088%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,586 (34.86%) Kubernetes
2 1,532 (33.67%) Terraform
3 561 (12.33%) Ansible
4 490 (10.77%) Grafana
5 427 (9.38%) Prometheus
6 122 (2.68%) Argo
7 63 (1.38%) Puppet
8 61 (1.34%) Single Sign-On
9 58 (1.27%) Progress Chef
10 54 (1.19%) Istio
11 37 (0.81%) Kibana
12 31 (0.68%) Nessus
13 23 (0.51%) Control-M
14 21 (0.46%) IBM Guardium
14 21 (0.46%) Podman
15 20 (0.44%) vCenter Server
16 18 (0.40%) Packer
17 16 (0.35%) Rancher
18 15 (0.33%) NetBackup
18 15 (0.33%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 642 (14.11%) Microsoft
2 340 (7.47%) Databricks
3 255 (5.60%) Google
4 231 (5.08%) Oracle
4 231 (5.08%) Splunk
5 140 (3.08%) Red Hat
6 122 (2.68%) VMware
7 118 (2.59%) ServiceNow
8 93 (2.04%) OpenAI
9 91 (2.00%) Salesforce
10 62 (1.36%) Dynatrace
11 56 (1.23%) SAP
12 48 (1.05%) CyberArk
13 45 (0.99%) IBM
14 37 (0.81%) MuleSoft
15 36 (0.79%) Talend
16 35 (0.77%) Tenable
17 32 (0.70%) F5
18 31 (0.68%) Cisco
19 29 (0.64%) Atlassian