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

6 months to
3 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 9 19 29
Rank change year-on-year +10 +10 -7
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,384 2,544 2,492
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.02% 8.84% 5.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.02% 9.72% 6.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,653 1,788 1,742
10th Percentile £375 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.46% -6.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £605 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £736 £761
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £534
% change year-on-year +5.26% -11.05% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 28 54
10th Percentile £51.25 £41.66 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £49.75 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £59.63 £66.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.21% -9.66% +0.60%
75th Percentile £77.50 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.00 £89.88 £72.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year +0.78% -4.44% +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 41,363 26,184 36,825
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.68% 91.01% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,810 16,717 23,641
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -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 2,496 1,118 2,535
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.98 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.69 £27.85 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +53.27% -23.70% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.84 £57.19 £60.75
90th Percentile £81.14 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +8.91%

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 June 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 June 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 June 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 +10 4,464 £525 +0.96% 1,952
UK excluding London +12 2,299 £500 +5.26% 1,278
London +10 2,292 £541 -1.66% 882
Work from Home +8 1,583 £514 -0.87% 1,456
North of England +13 882 £500 +4.17% 402
Yorkshire +7 475 £502 +5.68% 94
South East +9 410 £513 +2.50% 338
Midlands +7 401 £477 +3.14% 133
North West +12 334 £500 +0.81% 253
West Midlands +19 324 £488 -2.01% 78
South West +11 236 £525 -1.64% 153
Scotland +7 223 £425 -11.46% 77
East of England +10 127 £550 +22.22% 97
North East +5 90 £438 -2.72% 57
East Midlands -10 70 £443 -2.64% 55
Wales +8 38 £425 -21.30% 38
Northern Ireland +18 29 £644 +51.47% 57
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
1 262 (4.87%) Confluence
2 201 (3.73%) Apache Spark
3 168 (3.12%) Apache Airflow
4 133 (2.47%) Apache
5 81 (1.50%) SAS
6 73 (1.36%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.46%) nginx
8 24 (0.45%) CMS
8 24 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
9 20 (0.37%) Jupyter
9 20 (0.37%) OpenStack
10 15 (0.28%) SharePoint Server
11 14 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.24%) WebLogic
12 13 (0.24%) WebSphere
13 12 (0.22%) Camunda
14 11 (0.20%) Anypoint
14 11 (0.20%) Mendix
15 9 (0.17%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 9 (0.17%) Appian
Applications
1 29 (0.54%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 17 (0.32%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Office
5 11 (0.20%) 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 20 (0.37%) Payment Gateway
3 13 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
4 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.17%) Aladdin
6 7 (0.13%) SAP CRM
7 6 (0.11%) Shopify
8 5 (0.093%) Magento
8 5 (0.093%) SAP MDG
9 3 (0.056%) Findur
9 3 (0.056%) Oracle Applications
9 3 (0.056%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
10 1 (0.019%) Endur
10 1 (0.019%) NetSuite
10 1 (0.019%) ProductWriter
10 1 (0.019%) SAP ERP
10 1 (0.019%) SAP Hybris
10 1 (0.019%) SDL Web 8
10 1 (0.019%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,364 (43.91%) Azure
2 2,342 (43.50%) AWS
3 1,165 (21.64%) GitHub
4 904 (16.79%) GCP
5 849 (15.77%) Azure DevOps
6 733 (13.61%) GitHub Actions
7 641 (11.91%) Serverless
8 400 (7.43%) Amazon S3
9 390 (7.24%) AWS Lambda
10 379 (7.04%) Power Platform
11 330 (6.13%) AWS CloudFormation
12 293 (5.44%) Amazon EKS
13 240 (4.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 234 (4.35%) Azure AKS
15 221 (4.10%) Amazon EC2
16 214 (3.97%) Azure Data Factory
17 201 (3.73%) OpenShift
18 195 (3.62%) Amazon ECS
19 191 (3.55%) Entra ID
20 166 (3.08%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 205 (3.81%) Firewall
2 118 (2.19%) DNS
3 116 (2.15%) Network Security
4 77 (1.43%) VPN
5 64 (1.19%) HTTP
6 41 (0.76%) TCP/IP
7 40 (0.74%) WAN
8 36 (0.67%) BGP
9 34 (0.63%) SD-WAN
10 31 (0.58%) OSPF
11 29 (0.54%) SSL
12 27 (0.50%) VXLAN
13 26 (0.48%) BIG-IP
14 25 (0.46%) Ethernet VPN
14 25 (0.46%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 22 (0.41%) SAN
16 21 (0.39%) Ethernet
17 20 (0.37%) Reverse Proxy
17 20 (0.37%) Wi-Fi
18 19 (0.35%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 353 (6.56%) PostgreSQL
2 282 (5.24%) Power BI
3 264 (4.90%) SQL Server
4 262 (4.87%) NoSQL
5 209 (3.88%) Data Warehouse
5 209 (3.88%) Relational Database
6 207 (3.84%) Data Lake
7 190 (3.53%) MongoDB
8 164 (3.05%) Amazon RDS
9 152 (2.82%) DynamoDB
10 124 (2.30%) Metadata
11 122 (2.27%) Big Data
12 114 (2.12%) Delta Lake
13 112 (2.08%) Azure SQL Database
14 98 (1.82%) Amazon Athena
15 90 (1.67%) MySQL
16 89 (1.65%) Amazon Redshift
17 88 (1.63%) BigQuery
18 72 (1.34%) Amazon Aurora
19 70 (1.30%) Redis
Development Applications
1 975 (18.11%) Git
2 966 (17.94%) Jenkins
3 779 (14.47%) GitLab
4 488 (9.06%) JIRA
5 204 (3.79%) Selenium
6 166 (3.08%) JUnit
7 138 (2.56%) Cucumber
8 122 (2.27%) Postman
9 110 (2.04%) JMeter
10 105 (1.95%) REST Assured
11 92 (1.71%) SonarQube
12 74 (1.37%) Bitbucket
13 71 (1.32%) Gradle
14 70 (1.30%) Gatling
15 68 (1.26%) Maven
16 66 (1.23%) Cypress.io
17 65 (1.21%) Mockito
18 62 (1.15%) MLflow
19 54 (1.00%) WebDriver
20 46 (0.85%) Artifactory
General
1 1,317 (24.46%) Social Skills
2 896 (16.64%) Finance
3 692 (12.85%) Public Sector
4 418 (7.76%) Analytical Skills
5 374 (6.95%) Banking
6 138 (2.56%) Documentation Skills
7 102 (1.89%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 74 (1.37%) Retail
9 71 (1.32%) Legal
10 64 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
11 62 (1.15%) Investment Banking
12 58 (1.08%) Front Office
12 58 (1.08%) Military
13 48 (0.89%) Financial Institution
14 42 (0.78%) Law
15 39 (0.72%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.65%) Presentation Skills
17 30 (0.56%) Marketing
17 30 (0.56%) Publishing
18 23 (0.43%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,148 (21.32%) Developer
2 832 (15.45%) Senior
3 661 (12.28%) DevOps Engineer
4 576 (10.70%) Architect
5 468 (8.69%) Lead
6 430 (7.99%) Data Engineer
7 298 (5.53%) AWS Engineer
8 288 (5.35%) Software Engineer
9 268 (4.98%) Azure Engineer
10 263 (4.88%) Java Developer
11 239 (4.44%) Cloud Engineer
12 222 (4.12%) Platform Engineer
13 203 (3.77%) Senior Developer
14 165 (3.06%) Full-Stack Developer
15 160 (2.97%) Python Developer
16 141 (2.62%) GCP Engineer
17 135 (2.51%) AWS DevOps
18 133 (2.47%) Test Engineer
19 126 (2.34%) Solutions Architect
20 125 (2.32%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 594 (11.03%) REST
2 490 (9.10%) React
3 467 (8.67%) .NET
4 447 (8.30%) Spring
5 424 (7.88%) RESTful
6 418 (7.76%) Kafka
7 404 (7.50%) Spring Boot
8 375 (6.97%) Node.js
9 219 (4.07%) AngularJS
10 206 (3.83%) PySpark
11 195 (3.62%) Playwright
12 184 (3.42%) OAuth
13 180 (3.34%) HTML
14 156 (2.90%) CSS
15 144 (2.67%) YAML
16 135 (2.51%) JSON
17 132 (2.45%) OAuth2
18 123 (2.28%) OpenTelemetry
19 118 (2.19%) OpenID
20 117 (2.17%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 1,033 (19.19%) Cloud Native
2 362 (6.72%) Distributed Systems
3 302 (5.61%) Product Ownership
4 135 (2.51%) Onboarding
5 124 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
6 112 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
7 101 (1.88%) Enterprise Software
8 97 (1.80%) Data Centre
9 91 (1.69%) AI Agents
9 91 (1.69%) Public Cloud
10 85 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
11 76 (1.41%) Algorithms
12 72 (1.34%) Virtual Team
13 70 (1.30%) Security Posture
14 66 (1.23%) Mobile App
15 63 (1.17%) Management Information System
16 57 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
17 50 (0.93%) Data Structures
17 50 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
18 43 (0.80%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 531 (9.86%) Linux
2 245 (4.55%) Windows
3 111 (2.06%) Unix
4 101 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (0.93%) Android
6 46 (0.85%) Windows Server
7 45 (0.84%) Apple iOS
8 38 (0.71%) VMS
9 22 (0.41%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.28%) CentOS
11 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 10 (0.19%) Solaris
13 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.15%) Windows Server 2008
14 8 (0.15%) zOS
15 7 (0.13%) AIX
15 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 4 (0.074%) Debian
18 3 (0.056%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,014 (55.98%) DevOps
2 1,808 (33.58%) Agile
3 1,676 (31.13%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,189 (22.08%) Containerisation
5 1,125 (20.90%) Test Automation
6 1,031 (19.15%) Microservices
7 922 (17.12%) Observability
8 840 (15.60%) Problem-Solving
9 824 (15.30%) AI
10 748 (13.89%) Software Engineering
11 702 (13.04%) Analytics
12 680 (12.63%) Continuous Improvement
13 598 (11.11%) Data Modelling
14 597 (11.09%) Data Pipeline
15 567 (10.53%) Platform Engineering
16 531 (9.86%) Migration
17 495 (9.19%) Scrum
18 480 (8.92%) Data Engineering
19 475 (8.82%) ETL
20 468 (8.69%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,978 (36.74%) Python
2 1,290 (23.96%) SQL
3 1,072 (19.91%) Java
4 562 (10.44%) JavaScript
5 510 (9.47%) C#
6 448 (8.32%) TypeScript
7 396 (7.36%) Bash
8 356 (6.61%) PowerShell
9 187 (3.47%) Bicep
10 146 (2.71%) Go
11 101 (1.88%) Shell Script
12 96 (1.78%) Scala
13 86 (1.60%) C++
14 76 (1.41%) Kotlin
15 71 (1.32%) Apex Code
16 60 (1.11%) Ruby
17 56 (1.04%) PL/SQL
18 47 (0.87%) T-SQL
19 38 (0.71%) Groovy
20 35 (0.65%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,490 (27.67%) Security Cleared
2 1,239 (23.01%) SC Cleared
3 289 (5.37%) Degree
4 209 (3.88%) BPSS Clearance
5 176 (3.27%) Azure Certification
6 164 (3.05%) AWS Certification
7 157 (2.92%) DV Cleared
8 141 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
9 77 (1.43%) CISSP
10 57 (1.06%) Cisco Certification
11 52 (0.97%) Master's Degree
12 50 (0.93%) CISM
13 47 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 45 (0.84%) ISTQB
14 45 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
15 33 (0.61%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 26 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 26 (0.48%) CCSP
17 19 (0.35%) DBS Check
17 19 (0.35%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 420 (7.80%) QA
2 325 (6.04%) Data Quality
3 231 (4.29%) Accessibility
4 176 (3.27%) GDPR
5 136 (2.53%) NIST
6 113 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 109 (2.02%) WCAG
8 76 (1.41%) NCSC
9 53 (0.98%) PCI DSS
10 43 (0.80%) SLA
11 23 (0.43%) GRC
11 23 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 21 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials
13 17 (0.32%) ISO 20022
14 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
15 14 (0.26%) MiFID
16 12 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 12 (0.22%) PSD2
17 10 (0.19%) HL7
18 9 (0.17%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,365 (25.35%) Docker
2 124 (2.30%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
4 73 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.61%) VMware NSX
6 32 (0.59%) vSphere
7 20 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 11 (0.20%) Squid
10 10 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.17%) Hyper-V
12 7 (0.13%) HDFS
12 7 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.13%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.093%) SRDF
15 4 (0.074%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
15 4 (0.074%) NFS
16 3 (0.056%) Ceph
16 3 (0.056%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,675 (31.11%) Terraform
2 1,637 (30.40%) Kubernetes
3 515 (9.57%) Ansible
4 488 (9.06%) Grafana
5 421 (7.82%) Prometheus
6 108 (2.01%) Argo
7 79 (1.47%) Istio
8 66 (1.23%) Puppet
9 57 (1.06%) Single Sign-On
10 42 (0.78%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.63%) Kibana
12 26 (0.48%) Packer
13 23 (0.43%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.41%) Control-M
14 22 (0.41%) Nessus
15 17 (0.32%) IBM Guardium
16 16 (0.30%) NetBackup
16 16 (0.30%) Rancher
17 15 (0.28%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.28%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 753 (13.99%) Microsoft
2 374 (6.95%) Databricks
3 290 (5.39%) Google
4 258 (4.79%) Oracle
5 214 (3.97%) Splunk
6 158 (2.93%) Salesforce
7 141 (2.62%) Red Hat
8 138 (2.56%) ServiceNow
9 118 (2.19%) Dynatrace
10 106 (1.97%) VMware
11 87 (1.62%) OpenAI
12 64 (1.19%) SAP
13 59 (1.10%) IBM
13 59 (1.10%) MuleSoft
14 48 (0.89%) Cisco
15 45 (0.84%) Informatica
16 43 (0.80%) Palo Alto
17 41 (0.76%) CyberArk
18 40 (0.74%) Tenable
19 38 (0.71%) AppDynamics