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

6 months to
3 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 20 30
Rank change year-on-year +8 +10 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,103 2,602 2,474
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.77% 8.88% 5.70%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.73% 9.77% 6.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,483 1,856 1,751
10th Percentile £367 £380 £400
25th Percentile £425 £435 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.10% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 107 31 35
10th Percentile £50.73 £27.13 £48.05
25th Percentile £61.25 £46.75 £56.25
Median hourly rate £67.00 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.20% -3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £75.86 £70.00
90th Percentile £87.20 £96.64 £72.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year - - -0.76%

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 40,071 26,623 37,492
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.55% 90.89% 86.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,236 17,168 24,151
10th Percentile £319 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £745 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £481 £500
% change year-on-year +1.40% -3.85% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,397 1,072 2,456
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.67 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £29.00 £35.50
Median % change year-on-year +43.29% -18.31% -1.39%
75th Percentile £66.00 £60.84 £60.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.31 £27.64 £37.18
% change year-on-year +56.68% -25.66% +6.23%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 4,239 £525 -0.94% 1,719
London +5 2,188 £540 -6.09% 740
UK excluding London +11 2,157 £500 - 1,160
Work from Home +7 1,480 £500 -4.76% 964
North of England +12 777 £500 - 338
Yorkshire +6 430 £500 -2.20% 106
South East +8 410 £500 -1.23% 334
Midlands +13 405 £487 +2.58% 142
West Midlands +18 319 £492 -0.20% 74
North West +6 294 £500 - 174
Scotland +9 225 £438 -8.81% 73
South West +4 217 £525 -4.55% 140
East of England +10 114 £550 +18.09% 103
East Midlands -7 80 £444 -4.05% 68
North East +2 62 £450 -6.49% 58
Wales +1 29 £460 -18.29% 32
Northern Ireland +9 18 £500 +17.65% 15
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
1 241 (4.72%) Confluence
2 198 (3.88%) Apache Spark
3 131 (2.57%) Apache Airflow
4 125 (2.45%) Apache
5 77 (1.51%) SAS
6 69 (1.35%) SharePoint
7 26 (0.51%) nginx
8 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
9 24 (0.47%) OpenStack
10 22 (0.43%) CMS
11 14 (0.27%) WebLogic
12 13 (0.25%) Mendix
13 12 (0.24%) Anypoint
14 11 (0.22%) HCL Notes
14 11 (0.22%) SharePoint Server
14 11 (0.22%) WebSphere
15 10 (0.20%) Camunda
15 10 (0.20%) Sitecore CMS
16 9 (0.18%) Appian
16 9 (0.18%) IIS
Applications
1 27 (0.53%) Microsoft Excel
2 18 (0.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 13 (0.25%) Microsoft Office
3 13 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
4 11 (0.22%) Chatbot
5 8 (0.16%) Adobe XD
6 6 (0.12%) MS Visio
7 5 (0.098%) Sketch
8 3 (0.059%) Simulink
9 2 (0.039%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
10 1 (0.020%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 30 (0.59%) Dynamics CRM
2 13 (0.25%) Payment Gateway
3 10 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
4 8 (0.16%) SAP S/4HANA
5 6 (0.12%) Aladdin
6 4 (0.078%) Shopify
7 3 (0.059%) Findur
7 3 (0.059%) Oracle Applications
7 3 (0.059%) Oracle ERP
7 3 (0.059%) SAP BPC
7 3 (0.059%) SAP CRM
8 2 (0.039%) Magento
8 2 (0.039%) Oracle Payables
8 2 (0.039%) Oracle Receivables
8 2 (0.039%) SAP MDG
9 1 (0.020%) Cloudability
9 1 (0.020%) Oracle Assets
9 1 (0.020%) Oracle Cash Management
9 1 (0.020%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
9 1 (0.020%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 2,262 (44.33%) Azure
2 2,251 (44.11%) AWS
3 1,117 (21.89%) GitHub
4 853 (16.72%) GCP
5 818 (16.03%) Azure DevOps
6 702 (13.76%) GitHub Actions
7 635 (12.44%) Serverless
8 388 (7.60%) AWS CloudFormation
9 385 (7.54%) Amazon S3
10 371 (7.27%) AWS Lambda
11 355 (6.96%) Power Platform
12 280 (5.49%) Amazon EKS
13 237 (4.64%) Azure AKS
14 226 (4.43%) Amazon ECS
15 217 (4.25%) OpenShift
16 215 (4.21%) Azure Data Factory
17 206 (4.04%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 198 (3.88%) Amazon EC2
19 180 (3.53%) Entra ID
20 162 (3.17%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 181 (3.55%) Firewall
2 110 (2.16%) DNS
3 100 (1.96%) Network Security
4 69 (1.35%) VPN
5 68 (1.33%) HTTP
6 35 (0.69%) TCP/IP
7 26 (0.51%) SSL
7 26 (0.51%) WAN
8 24 (0.47%) BGP
8 24 (0.47%) Reverse Proxy
9 22 (0.43%) Ethernet
9 22 (0.43%) SD-WAN
10 20 (0.39%) OSPF
10 20 (0.39%) SAN
11 17 (0.33%) SSH
12 16 (0.31%) 3GPP
13 15 (0.29%) VXLAN
14 14 (0.27%) Ethernet VPN
15 13 (0.25%) HTTPS
15 13 (0.25%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 359 (7.04%) PostgreSQL
2 271 (5.31%) Power BI
3 265 (5.19%) NoSQL
4 248 (4.86%) SQL Server
5 208 (4.08%) Data Lake
6 202 (3.96%) Relational Database
7 193 (3.78%) Data Warehouse
8 184 (3.61%) MongoDB
9 147 (2.88%) Amazon RDS
10 132 (2.59%) DynamoDB
11 121 (2.37%) Big Data
12 120 (2.35%) Metadata
13 117 (2.29%) Delta Lake
14 113 (2.21%) Azure SQL Database
15 96 (1.88%) Amazon Athena
16 92 (1.80%) MySQL
17 86 (1.69%) Amazon Redshift
18 78 (1.53%) BigQuery
19 75 (1.47%) Redis
20 56 (1.10%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 952 (18.66%) Git
2 946 (18.54%) Jenkins
3 714 (13.99%) GitLab
4 451 (8.84%) JIRA
5 183 (3.59%) Selenium
6 165 (3.23%) JUnit
7 135 (2.65%) Cucumber
8 117 (2.29%) Postman
9 100 (1.96%) JMeter
10 84 (1.65%) REST Assured
10 84 (1.65%) SonarQube
11 78 (1.53%) Bitbucket
12 71 (1.39%) MLflow
13 68 (1.33%) Cypress.io
13 68 (1.33%) Maven
14 61 (1.20%) Mockito
15 60 (1.18%) Gatling
16 56 (1.10%) Gradle
17 49 (0.96%) Artifactory
17 49 (0.96%) WebDriver
General
1 1,300 (25.48%) Social Skills
2 865 (16.95%) Finance
3 651 (12.76%) Public Sector
4 420 (8.23%) Analytical Skills
5 344 (6.74%) Banking
6 138 (2.70%) Documentation Skills
7 81 (1.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 62 (1.21%) Legal
9 61 (1.20%) Retail
10 58 (1.14%) Influencing Skills
11 57 (1.12%) Military
12 54 (1.06%) Front Office
13 50 (0.98%) Investment Banking
14 45 (0.88%) Financial Institution
15 44 (0.86%) Telecoms
16 39 (0.76%) Presentation Skills
17 34 (0.67%) Law
18 28 (0.55%) Publishing
19 24 (0.47%) Marketing
20 21 (0.41%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,150 (22.54%) Developer
2 744 (14.58%) Senior
3 603 (11.82%) DevOps Engineer
4 547 (10.72%) Architect
5 420 (8.23%) Lead
6 417 (8.17%) Data Engineer
7 269 (5.27%) AWS Engineer
8 268 (5.25%) Java Developer
9 261 (5.11%) Azure Engineer
10 250 (4.90%) Software Engineer
11 228 (4.47%) Platform Engineer
12 206 (4.04%) Cloud Engineer
13 187 (3.66%) Senior Developer
14 177 (3.47%) Full-Stack Developer
15 152 (2.98%) Python Developer
16 148 (2.90%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 136 (2.67%) AWS DevOps
18 125 (2.45%) GCP Engineer
19 120 (2.35%) AWS DevOps Engineer
20 114 (2.23%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 554 (10.86%) REST
2 465 (9.11%) React
3 455 (8.92%) Spring
4 434 (8.50%) .NET
5 418 (8.19%) Kafka
6 417 (8.17%) Node.js
6 417 (8.17%) RESTful
7 399 (7.82%) Spring Boot
8 213 (4.17%) AngularJS
9 198 (3.88%) PySpark
10 195 (3.82%) Playwright
11 179 (3.51%) HTML
12 173 (3.39%) OAuth
13 153 (3.00%) CSS
14 148 (2.90%) YAML
15 123 (2.41%) JSON
16 122 (2.39%) OpenTelemetry
17 113 (2.21%) OAuth2
18 109 (2.14%) GraphQL
19 107 (2.10%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 956 (18.73%) Cloud Native
2 346 (6.78%) Distributed Systems
3 278 (5.45%) Product Ownership
4 124 (2.43%) Onboarding
5 106 (2.08%) Legacy Systems
6 97 (1.90%) Hybrid Cloud
7 90 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
8 82 (1.61%) Public Cloud
9 78 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
10 76 (1.49%) Algorithms
11 74 (1.45%) Data Centre
12 67 (1.31%) AI Agents
12 67 (1.31%) Virtual Team
13 63 (1.23%) Mobile App
14 56 (1.10%) Security Posture
15 53 (1.04%) Management Information System
16 47 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
17 46 (0.90%) NHS
18 43 (0.84%) Private Cloud
19 41 (0.80%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 541 (10.60%) Linux
2 239 (4.68%) Windows
3 98 (1.92%) Unix
4 79 (1.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 47 (0.92%) Android
5 47 (0.92%) Apple iOS
6 41 (0.80%) VMS
7 40 (0.78%) Windows Server
8 19 (0.37%) Ubuntu
9 14 (0.27%) CentOS
10 12 (0.24%) Mac OS
11 8 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.12%) Rocky
13 6 (0.12%) Solaris
13 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
14 5 (0.098%) AIX
15 4 (0.078%) Debian
15 4 (0.078%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,842 (55.69%) DevOps
2 1,734 (33.98%) Agile
3 1,576 (30.88%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,217 (23.85%) Containerisation
5 1,063 (20.83%) Test Automation
6 995 (19.50%) Microservices
7 893 (17.50%) Problem-Solving
8 835 (16.36%) Observability
9 746 (14.62%) AI
10 699 (13.70%) Analytics
11 670 (13.13%) Software Engineering
12 630 (12.35%) Continuous Improvement
13 562 (11.01%) Data Pipeline
14 560 (10.97%) Data Modelling
15 508 (9.95%) Platform Engineering
16 497 (9.74%) Migration
17 461 (9.03%) Scrum
18 460 (9.01%) Data Engineering
19 449 (8.80%) ETL
20 432 (8.47%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,918 (37.59%) Python
2 1,206 (23.63%) SQL
3 1,019 (19.97%) Java
4 574 (11.25%) JavaScript
5 507 (9.94%) C#
6 461 (9.03%) TypeScript
7 364 (7.13%) Bash
8 308 (6.04%) PowerShell
9 169 (3.31%) Bicep
10 153 (3.00%) Go
11 103 (2.02%) Shell Script
12 99 (1.94%) Scala
13 81 (1.59%) Ruby
14 80 (1.57%) C++
15 62 (1.21%) Kotlin
16 58 (1.14%) PL/SQL
17 51 (1.00%) Apex Code
18 44 (0.86%) T-SQL
19 37 (0.73%) Groovy
20 34 (0.67%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,423 (27.89%) Security Cleared
2 1,183 (23.18%) SC Cleared
3 279 (5.47%) Degree
4 199 (3.90%) BPSS Clearance
5 166 (3.25%) AWS Certification
6 165 (3.23%) Computer Science Degree
7 154 (3.02%) Azure Certification
8 143 (2.80%) DV Cleared
9 69 (1.35%) CISSP
10 56 (1.10%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 55 (1.08%) Master's Degree
12 50 (0.98%) CISM
13 47 (0.92%) Cisco Certification
13 47 (0.92%) Microsoft Certification
14 38 (0.74%) ISTQB
15 29 (0.57%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 24 (0.47%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 22 (0.43%) Oracle Certification
18 21 (0.41%) CCSP
19 19 (0.37%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 427 (8.37%) QA
2 314 (6.15%) Data Quality
3 201 (3.94%) Accessibility
4 189 (3.70%) GDPR
5 142 (2.78%) NIST
6 132 (2.59%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 92 (1.80%) WCAG
8 73 (1.43%) NCSC
9 61 (1.20%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.76%) SLA
11 27 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.43%) GRC
13 20 (0.39%) ISO 20022
14 19 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
15 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.27%) MiFID
16 14 (0.27%) PSD2
17 13 (0.25%) HL7
18 12 (0.24%) HIPAA
18 12 (0.24%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,370 (26.85%) Docker
2 127 (2.49%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.53%) Virtual Machines
4 69 (1.35%) VMware Infrastructure
5 35 (0.69%) VMware NSX
6 32 (0.63%) vSphere
7 16 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
8 12 (0.24%) Hyper-V
8 12 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
9 8 (0.16%) HDFS
10 7 (0.14%) Oracle RAC
11 6 (0.12%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) RACF
12 4 (0.078%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
12 4 (0.078%) Microsoft App-V
12 4 (0.078%) NFS
12 4 (0.078%) SRDF
13 3 (0.059%) Ceph
13 3 (0.059%) Squid
14 2 (0.039%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,640 (32.14%) Kubernetes
2 1,628 (31.90%) Terraform
3 513 (10.05%) Ansible
4 477 (9.35%) Grafana
5 404 (7.92%) Prometheus
6 107 (2.10%) Argo
7 75 (1.47%) Istio
8 67 (1.31%) Puppet
9 46 (0.90%) Progress Chef
9 46 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
10 34 (0.67%) Kibana
11 23 (0.45%) vCenter Server
12 22 (0.43%) Nessus
13 21 (0.41%) Rancher
14 19 (0.37%) Control-M
14 19 (0.37%) Packer
15 17 (0.33%) IBM Guardium
16 15 (0.29%) linkerd
16 15 (0.29%) NetBackup
17 14 (0.27%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 754 (14.78%) Microsoft
2 379 (7.43%) Databricks
3 264 (5.17%) Google
4 240 (4.70%) Oracle
5 212 (4.15%) Splunk
6 137 (2.68%) Salesforce
7 136 (2.67%) ServiceNow
8 124 (2.43%) Red Hat
9 110 (2.16%) VMware
10 106 (2.08%) Dynatrace
11 86 (1.69%) OpenAI
12 58 (1.14%) SAP
13 56 (1.10%) MuleSoft
14 53 (1.04%) IBM
15 49 (0.96%) CyberArk
16 42 (0.82%) Cisco
17 41 (0.80%) Informatica
18 38 (0.74%) Tenable
19 37 (0.73%) AppDynamics
19 37 (0.73%) Denodo