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

6 months to
28 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 5,349 2,542 2,473
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.95% 8.87% 5.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.96% 9.75% 6.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,627 1,800 1,748
10th Percentile £375 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.12% -6.68% -8.33%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £477 £536
% change year-on-year +4.93% -11.06% -2.59%
Number of hourly rates quoted 122 26 49
10th Percentile £51.25 £39.76 £51.00
25th Percentile £61.25 £49.24 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £63.25 £67.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.72% -5.60% +2.13%
75th Percentile £77.50 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £82.93 £90.63 £72.89
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 41,286 26,078 36,653
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.54% 91.02% 85.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,818 16,706 23,627
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.19% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £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 2,472 1,084 2,486
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.08 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.28 £27.52 £36.00
Median % change year-on-year +53.64% -23.57% -1.09%
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.84 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.19 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +78.93% -32.93% +7.14%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 4,430 £525 - 1,608
UK excluding London +12 2,298 £500 +4.93% 1,063
London +10 2,264 £545 -0.91% 732
Work from Home +9 1,561 £513 -2.01% 853
North of England +12 873 £500 +2.04% 352
Yorkshire +6 482 £500 +5.26% 84
South East +10 415 £509 +1.80% 281
Midlands +8 394 £481 +4.00% 115
North West +9 325 £500 - 214
West Midlands +17 316 £488 -1.52% 73
South West +12 241 £525 -1.64% 141
Scotland +8 228 £425 -11.46% 52
East of England +12 128 £550 +18.28% 74
North East +1 81 £450 -2.17% 57
East Midlands -5 71 £440 -3.19% 42
Wales +4 38 £425 -24.51% 27
Northern Ireland +18 28 £644 +51.47% 32
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
1 252 (4.71%) Confluence
2 196 (3.66%) Apache Spark
3 152 (2.84%) Apache Airflow
4 126 (2.36%) Apache
5 77 (1.44%) SharePoint
6 76 (1.42%) SAS
7 24 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
7 24 (0.45%) nginx
8 23 (0.43%) CMS
9 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
10 15 (0.28%) SharePoint Server
11 14 (0.26%) Jupyter
11 14 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.24%) Mendix
12 13 (0.24%) WebLogic
12 13 (0.24%) WebSphere
13 12 (0.22%) Camunda
14 11 (0.21%) Anypoint
15 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
16 9 (0.17%) Adobe Experience Manager
Applications
1 30 (0.56%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 17 (0.32%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Office
5 11 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.17%) Adobe XD
7 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
8 6 (0.11%) Sketch
9 3 (0.056%) Simulink
10 2 (0.037%) PlantUML
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 27 (0.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.36%) Payment Gateway
3 12 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.19%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 6 (0.11%) SAP CRM
6 5 (0.093%) Magento
6 5 (0.093%) SAP MDG
6 5 (0.093%) Shopify
7 4 (0.075%) Oracle ERP
8 3 (0.056%) Findur
8 3 (0.056%) Oracle Applications
8 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.019%) Cloudability
9 1 (0.019%) Oracle Payables
9 1 (0.019%) Oracle Receivables
9 1 (0.019%) ProductWriter
9 1 (0.019%) R3 Corda
9 1 (0.019%) SAP Hybris
9 1 (0.019%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,350 (43.93%) Azure
2 2,317 (43.32%) AWS
3 1,155 (21.59%) GitHub
4 889 (16.62%) GCP
5 844 (15.78%) Azure DevOps
6 719 (13.44%) GitHub Actions
7 633 (11.83%) Serverless
8 383 (7.16%) Amazon S3
9 380 (7.10%) Power Platform
10 378 (7.07%) AWS Lambda
11 337 (6.30%) AWS CloudFormation
12 287 (5.37%) Amazon EKS
13 232 (4.34%) Azure AKS
14 223 (4.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 223 (4.17%) OpenShift
15 218 (4.08%) Azure Data Factory
16 212 (3.96%) Amazon EC2
17 193 (3.61%) Amazon ECS
17 193 (3.61%) Entra ID
18 160 (2.99%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 200 (3.74%) Firewall
2 119 (2.22%) DNS
3 112 (2.09%) Network Security
4 77 (1.44%) VPN
5 64 (1.20%) HTTP
6 41 (0.77%) TCP/IP
7 39 (0.73%) WAN
8 34 (0.64%) BGP
9 33 (0.62%) SD-WAN
10 32 (0.60%) SSL
11 30 (0.56%) OSPF
12 25 (0.47%) BIG-IP
12 25 (0.47%) VXLAN
13 24 (0.45%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 23 (0.43%) Ethernet VPN
15 22 (0.41%) Reverse Proxy
15 22 (0.41%) SAN
16 21 (0.39%) Ethernet
17 19 (0.36%) Wi-Fi
18 18 (0.34%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 354 (6.62%) PostgreSQL
2 285 (5.33%) Power BI
3 266 (4.97%) NoSQL
4 262 (4.90%) SQL Server
5 211 (3.94%) Data Lake
6 209 (3.91%) Relational Database
7 196 (3.66%) Data Warehouse
8 193 (3.61%) MongoDB
9 159 (2.97%) Amazon RDS
10 148 (2.77%) DynamoDB
11 123 (2.30%) Metadata
12 121 (2.26%) Big Data
13 116 (2.17%) Delta Lake
14 112 (2.09%) Azure SQL Database
15 90 (1.68%) Amazon Athena
16 89 (1.66%) MySQL
17 88 (1.65%) BigQuery
18 80 (1.50%) Amazon Redshift
19 73 (1.36%) Redis
20 71 (1.33%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 972 (18.17%) Git
2 969 (18.12%) Jenkins
3 756 (14.13%) GitLab
4 476 (8.90%) JIRA
5 200 (3.74%) Selenium
6 161 (3.01%) JUnit
7 135 (2.52%) Cucumber
8 123 (2.30%) Postman
9 105 (1.96%) JMeter
9 105 (1.96%) REST Assured
10 90 (1.68%) SonarQube
11 73 (1.36%) Bitbucket
12 69 (1.29%) Gatling
12 69 (1.29%) Maven
13 67 (1.25%) Gradle
14 66 (1.23%) Cypress.io
15 65 (1.22%) Mockito
16 64 (1.20%) MLflow
17 49 (0.92%) WebDriver
18 45 (0.84%) Artifactory
General
1 1,309 (24.47%) Social Skills
2 885 (16.55%) Finance
3 676 (12.64%) Public Sector
4 413 (7.72%) Analytical Skills
5 371 (6.94%) Banking
6 134 (2.51%) Documentation Skills
7 87 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 72 (1.35%) Retail
9 67 (1.25%) Legal
10 64 (1.20%) Influencing Skills
11 62 (1.16%) Military
12 60 (1.12%) Investment Banking
13 59 (1.10%) Front Office
14 46 (0.86%) Financial Institution
15 36 (0.67%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.65%) Law
16 35 (0.65%) Presentation Skills
17 28 (0.52%) Marketing
17 28 (0.52%) Publishing
18 24 (0.45%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,158 (21.65%) Developer
2 813 (15.20%) Senior
3 655 (12.25%) DevOps Engineer
4 564 (10.54%) Architect
5 469 (8.77%) Lead
6 417 (7.80%) Data Engineer
7 296 (5.53%) AWS Engineer
8 284 (5.31%) Software Engineer
9 271 (5.07%) Azure Engineer
10 266 (4.97%) Java Developer
11 232 (4.34%) Cloud Engineer
12 225 (4.21%) Platform Engineer
13 206 (3.85%) Senior Developer
14 169 (3.16%) Full-Stack Developer
15 158 (2.95%) Python Developer
16 137 (2.56%) GCP Engineer
17 134 (2.51%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 133 (2.49%) AWS DevOps
19 128 (2.39%) Test Engineer
20 126 (2.36%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 594 (11.10%) REST
2 492 (9.20%) React
3 468 (8.75%) .NET
4 445 (8.32%) Spring
5 427 (7.98%) Kafka
6 417 (7.80%) RESTful
7 407 (7.61%) Spring Boot
8 383 (7.16%) Node.js
9 218 (4.08%) AngularJS
10 201 (3.76%) PySpark
11 196 (3.66%) Playwright
12 182 (3.40%) OAuth
13 181 (3.38%) HTML
14 156 (2.92%) CSS
15 145 (2.71%) YAML
16 133 (2.49%) JSON
17 130 (2.43%) OAuth2
18 124 (2.32%) OpenTelemetry
19 114 (2.13%) OpenID
20 113 (2.11%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 1,005 (18.79%) Cloud Native
2 361 (6.75%) Distributed Systems
3 301 (5.63%) Product Ownership
4 134 (2.51%) Onboarding
5 121 (2.26%) Legacy Systems
6 114 (2.13%) Hybrid Cloud
7 97 (1.81%) Enterprise Software
8 95 (1.78%) Data Centre
9 90 (1.68%) AI Agents
10 89 (1.66%) Public Cloud
11 83 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
12 77 (1.44%) Algorithms
13 70 (1.31%) Virtual Team
14 65 (1.22%) Security Posture
15 60 (1.12%) Mobile App
16 59 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
16 59 (1.10%) Management Information System
17 50 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
18 48 (0.90%) Data Structures
19 43 (0.80%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 538 (10.06%) Linux
2 244 (4.56%) Windows
3 110 (2.06%) Unix
4 94 (1.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 45 (0.84%) Android
6 44 (0.82%) Windows Server
7 42 (0.79%) Apple iOS
8 41 (0.77%) VMS
9 22 (0.41%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.28%) CentOS
11 11 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 8 (0.15%) zOS
14 7 (0.13%) AIX
14 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
15 6 (0.11%) Rocky
15 6 (0.11%) Solaris
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.075%) Debian
17 3 (0.056%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,992 (55.94%) DevOps
2 1,790 (33.46%) Agile
3 1,662 (31.07%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,190 (22.25%) Containerisation
5 1,104 (20.64%) Test Automation
6 1,027 (19.20%) Microservices
7 910 (17.01%) Observability
8 845 (15.80%) Problem-Solving
9 804 (15.03%) AI
10 739 (13.82%) Software Engineering
11 689 (12.88%) Analytics
12 667 (12.47%) Continuous Improvement
13 590 (11.03%) Data Modelling
14 582 (10.88%) Data Pipeline
15 561 (10.49%) Platform Engineering
16 520 (9.72%) Migration
17 484 (9.05%) Scrum
18 467 (8.73%) Data Engineering
18 467 (8.73%) Mentoring
19 463 (8.66%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 1,970 (36.83%) Python
2 1,267 (23.69%) SQL
3 1,071 (20.02%) Java
4 568 (10.62%) JavaScript
5 512 (9.57%) C#
6 450 (8.41%) TypeScript
7 393 (7.35%) Bash
8 342 (6.39%) PowerShell
9 186 (3.48%) Bicep
10 150 (2.80%) Go
11 100 (1.87%) Shell Script
12 98 (1.83%) Scala
13 88 (1.65%) C++
14 71 (1.33%) Apex Code
15 68 (1.27%) Kotlin
16 65 (1.22%) Ruby
17 55 (1.03%) PL/SQL
18 45 (0.84%) T-SQL
19 41 (0.77%) Groovy
20 34 (0.64%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,462 (27.33%) Security Cleared
2 1,205 (22.53%) SC Cleared
3 289 (5.40%) Degree
4 206 (3.85%) BPSS Clearance
5 169 (3.16%) Azure Certification
6 163 (3.05%) DV Cleared
7 151 (2.82%) AWS Certification
8 146 (2.73%) Computer Science Degree
9 77 (1.44%) CISSP
10 57 (1.07%) Cisco Certification
11 54 (1.01%) CISM
12 52 (0.97%) Master's Degree
13 48 (0.90%) ISTQB
14 47 (0.88%) Microsoft Certification
15 45 (0.84%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 32 (0.60%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 26 (0.49%) CCSP
18 24 (0.45%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 19 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
20 18 (0.34%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 402 (7.52%) QA
2 321 (6.00%) Data Quality
3 227 (4.24%) Accessibility
4 177 (3.31%) GDPR
5 137 (2.56%) NIST
6 114 (2.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 107 (2.00%) WCAG
8 75 (1.40%) NCSC
9 54 (1.01%) PCI DSS
10 44 (0.82%) SLA
11 25 (0.47%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.41%) GRC
13 21 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials
14 17 (0.32%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.26%) MiFID
17 12 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
18 11 (0.21%) PSD2
19 10 (0.19%) HL7
20 9 (0.17%) FINRA
System Software
1 1,355 (25.33%) Docker
2 125 (2.34%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
4 69 (1.29%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.60%) VMware NSX
6 31 (0.58%) vSphere
7 20 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
9 11 (0.21%) Squid
10 9 (0.17%) Hyper-V
10 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 7 (0.13%) HDFS
11 7 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.13%) Postfix
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.093%) SRDF
14 4 (0.075%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 4 (0.075%) NFS
15 3 (0.056%) Ceph
15 3 (0.056%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,672 (31.26%) Terraform
2 1,647 (30.79%) Kubernetes
3 529 (9.89%) Ansible
4 493 (9.22%) Grafana
5 424 (7.93%) Prometheus
6 110 (2.06%) Argo
7 78 (1.46%) Istio
8 65 (1.22%) Puppet
9 58 (1.08%) Single Sign-On
10 40 (0.75%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.64%) Kibana
12 26 (0.49%) Packer
13 22 (0.41%) Nessus
13 22 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.37%) Control-M
15 17 (0.32%) IBM Guardium
15 17 (0.32%) Rancher
16 16 (0.30%) NetBackup
17 15 (0.28%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.28%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 764 (14.28%) Microsoft
2 376 (7.03%) Databricks
3 285 (5.33%) Google
4 248 (4.64%) Oracle
5 218 (4.08%) Splunk
6 157 (2.94%) Salesforce
7 139 (2.60%) ServiceNow
8 138 (2.58%) Red Hat
9 114 (2.13%) Dynatrace
10 104 (1.94%) VMware
11 88 (1.65%) OpenAI
12 63 (1.18%) SAP
13 59 (1.10%) MuleSoft
14 57 (1.07%) IBM
15 47 (0.88%) Cisco
16 41 (0.77%) CyberArk
16 41 (0.77%) Informatica
16 41 (0.77%) Palo Alto
17 39 (0.73%) Tenable
18 38 (0.71%) AppDynamics