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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 17 26
Rank change year-on-year +6 +9 -1
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,940 3,271 2,662
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.07% 9.99% 6.89%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.09% 11.04% 8.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,018 2,242 1,804
10th Percentile £381 £361 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -7.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £759
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 47 73
10th Percentile £48.00 £48.99 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 -
Median hourly rate £70.00 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% - -12.75%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £93.75 £84.78 £71.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +7.69% -2.99% -8.84%

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 45,369 29,617 32,996
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.56% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,730 18,446 20,728
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,902 1,758 1,607
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.78 £17.30 £18.82
Median hourly rate £41.09 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.39% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.88 £47.09 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.56 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +92.49% -47.37% +14.67%

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 1 September 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 1 September 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 1 September 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 4,988 £525 +2.44% 4,616
London +5 2,654 £538 +2.38% 2,813
UK excluding London +6 2,504 £500 - 2,501
Work from Home +6 1,844 £525 +5.00% 2,127
North of England +6 946 £500 +5.26% 689
Yorkshire +5 473 £507 +6.57% 182
South East -5 455 £533 +6.50% 508
Midlands -3 379 £488 +1.77% 249
North West +5 363 £525 +7.42% 392
West Midlands +2 317 £488 -6.56% 160
South West +6 288 £550 +5.26% 351
Scotland -1 257 £425 -15.00% 343
East of England +7 147 £510 +1.90% 188
North East -1 121 £425 -5.56% 118
East Midlands -19 56 £450 +4.77% 88
Wales -3 42 £450 -2.70% 51
Northern Ireland +22 23 £545 +9.00% 137
Channel Islands - 2 £475 -

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
1 264 (4.44%) Confluence
2 224 (3.77%) Apache Airflow
3 197 (3.32%) Apache Spark
4 159 (2.68%) Apache
5 83 (1.40%) SharePoint
6 64 (1.08%) SAS
7 36 (0.61%) Jupyter
8 24 (0.40%) CMS
9 22 (0.37%) OpenStack
10 20 (0.34%) nginx
11 17 (0.29%) Camunda
12 16 (0.27%) Anypoint
13 14 (0.24%) Palantir Foundry
13 14 (0.24%) SharePoint Server
14 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.15%) Mule
16 8 (0.13%) WordPress
17 7 (0.12%) IIS
17 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
18 6 (0.10%) JBoss
Applications
1 23 (0.39%) Chatbot
2 21 (0.35%) Microsoft Excel
3 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Office
3 10 (0.17%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 6 (0.10%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.067%) Simulink
5 4 (0.067%) Trello
6 2 (0.034%) Adobe XD
6 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.034%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.034%) Sketch
6 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.034%) Windchill
7 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
7 1 (0.017%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 49 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
2 22 (0.37%) Payment Gateway
3 15 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
4 14 (0.24%) Aladdin
5 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
6 11 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
7 8 (0.13%) NetSuite
8 7 (0.12%) Shopify
9 6 (0.10%) Magento
9 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 4 (0.067%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.067%) Sage X3
10 4 (0.067%) Temenos T24
11 3 (0.051%) Endur
11 3 (0.051%) Findur
11 3 (0.051%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
12 2 (0.034%) Remedy ITSM
12 2 (0.034%) SAP ERP
12 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,655 (44.70%) AWS
2 2,619 (44.09%) Azure
3 1,276 (21.48%) GitHub
4 998 (16.80%) Azure DevOps
5 986 (16.60%) GCP
6 832 (14.01%) GitHub Actions
7 658 (11.08%) Serverless
8 436 (7.34%) Power Platform
9 433 (7.29%) Amazon S3
10 430 (7.24%) AWS Lambda
11 322 (5.42%) Amazon EKS
12 289 (4.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 284 (4.78%) AWS CloudFormation
14 240 (4.04%) Entra ID
15 238 (4.01%) Azure AKS
16 233 (3.92%) Snowflake
17 211 (3.55%) Amazon EC2
18 184 (3.10%) Azure Monitor
19 183 (3.08%) Amazon ECS
19 183 (3.08%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 232 (3.91%) Firewall
2 157 (2.64%) DNS
3 121 (2.04%) Network Security
4 94 (1.58%) VPN
5 80 (1.35%) TCP/IP
6 55 (0.93%) HTTP
7 49 (0.82%) WAN
8 42 (0.71%) BGP
9 41 (0.69%) SD-WAN
10 35 (0.59%) VXLAN
11 33 (0.56%) Ethernet VPN
11 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 33 (0.56%) SSL
12 32 (0.54%) BIG-IP
13 31 (0.52%) DHCP
14 29 (0.49%) Internet
15 28 (0.47%) OSPF
16 26 (0.44%) 5G
17 20 (0.34%) VLAN
17 20 (0.34%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 417 (7.02%) PostgreSQL
2 333 (5.61%) Power BI
3 285 (4.80%) SQL Server
4 284 (4.78%) Data Warehouse
5 265 (4.46%) Relational Database
6 256 (4.31%) NoSQL
7 238 (4.01%) MongoDB
8 219 (3.69%) Data Lake
9 186 (3.13%) Amazon RDS
10 169 (2.85%) Metadata
11 144 (2.42%) DynamoDB
12 133 (2.24%) MySQL
13 128 (2.15%) Amazon Redshift
14 121 (2.04%) Delta Lake
15 116 (1.95%) BigQuery
16 106 (1.78%) Redis
17 96 (1.62%) Amazon Athena
18 94 (1.58%) Big Data
19 93 (1.57%) Azure SQL Database
20 91 (1.53%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,144 (19.26%) Git
2 1,003 (16.89%) Jenkins
3 871 (14.66%) GitLab
4 501 (8.43%) JIRA
5 229 (3.86%) Selenium
6 183 (3.08%) JUnit
7 128 (2.15%) Cucumber
8 121 (2.04%) Maven
9 113 (1.90%) Postman
9 113 (1.90%) SonarQube
10 111 (1.87%) Gradle
11 109 (1.84%) JMeter
12 108 (1.82%) Bitbucket
13 100 (1.68%) Cypress.io
14 93 (1.57%) REST Assured
15 83 (1.40%) Gatling
16 76 (1.28%) Mockito
17 65 (1.09%) Claude Code
18 48 (0.81%) WebDriver
19 47 (0.79%) MLflow
General
1 1,533 (25.81%) Social Skills
2 1,072 (18.05%) Finance
3 855 (14.39%) Public Sector
4 517 (8.70%) Analytical Skills
5 471 (7.93%) Banking
6 147 (2.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 123 (2.07%) Documentation Skills
8 118 (1.99%) Retail
9 82 (1.38%) Investment Banking
10 76 (1.28%) Front Office
11 71 (1.20%) Telecoms
12 69 (1.16%) Military
13 59 (0.99%) Legal
14 57 (0.96%) Influencing Skills
15 55 (0.93%) Law
16 51 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 44 (0.74%) Publishing
18 43 (0.72%) Marketing
19 41 (0.69%) Manufacturing
20 35 (0.59%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,330 (22.39%) Developer
2 1,046 (17.61%) Senior
3 759 (12.78%) DevOps Engineer
4 610 (10.27%) Architect
5 552 (9.29%) Lead
6 443 (7.46%) Data Engineer
7 325 (5.47%) Java Developer
8 319 (5.37%) Software Engineer
9 316 (5.32%) AWS Engineer
10 297 (5.00%) Azure Engineer
11 277 (4.66%) Senior Developer
12 259 (4.36%) Cloud Engineer
13 258 (4.34%) Platform Engineer
14 184 (3.10%) Full-Stack Developer
15 159 (2.68%) Python Developer
16 156 (2.63%) Solutions Architect
17 146 (2.46%) AWS DevOps
17 146 (2.46%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 145 (2.44%) Test Engineer
19 136 (2.29%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,936 (32.59%) Terraform
2 855 (14.39%) REST
3 562 (9.46%) Kafka
4 557 (9.38%) React
5 528 (8.89%) Spring
6 512 (8.62%) .NET
7 505 (8.50%) RESTful
8 471 (7.93%) Spring Boot
9 362 (6.09%) Node.js
10 246 (4.14%) HTML
11 241 (4.06%) Playwright
12 227 (3.82%) CSS
13 219 (3.69%) JSON
14 211 (3.55%) PySpark
15 208 (3.50%) OAuth
16 172 (2.90%) AngularJS
17 159 (2.68%) OAuth2
18 127 (2.14%) SOAP
19 126 (2.12%) YAML
20 118 (1.99%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 1,247 (20.99%) Cloud Native
2 455 (7.66%) Distributed Systems
3 383 (6.45%) Product Ownership
4 219 (3.69%) Onboarding
5 209 (3.52%) Enterprise Software
6 191 (3.22%) AI Agents
7 158 (2.66%) Legacy Systems
8 134 (2.26%) Hybrid Cloud
9 98 (1.65%) Security Posture
10 97 (1.63%) Data Centre
11 96 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
12 85 (1.43%) Public Cloud
13 74 (1.25%) Data Structures
14 72 (1.21%) Enterprise Cloud
15 70 (1.18%) Management Information System
16 68 (1.14%) NHS
17 67 (1.13%) Virtual Team
18 66 (1.11%) Greenfield Project
18 66 (1.11%) Mobile App
19 62 (1.04%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 603 (10.15%) Linux
2 255 (4.29%) Windows
3 149 (2.51%) Unix
4 119 (2.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.13%) Windows Server
6 55 (0.93%) Android
7 50 (0.84%) Apple iOS
8 32 (0.54%) VMS
9 22 (0.37%) Ubuntu
10 17 (0.29%) AIX
11 14 (0.24%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.15%) zOS
13 8 (0.13%) CentOS
13 8 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
14 7 (0.12%) Rocky
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.084%) Windows Server 2008
17 3 (0.051%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,351 (56.41%) DevOps
2 2,251 (37.90%) Agile
3 2,006 (33.77%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,378 (23.20%) Test Automation
5 1,277 (21.50%) Containerisation
6 1,204 (20.27%) Microservices
7 1,102 (18.55%) Observability
8 1,098 (18.48%) AI
9 1,028 (17.31%) Software Engineering
10 938 (15.79%) Problem-Solving
11 885 (14.90%) Continuous Improvement
12 788 (13.27%) Platform Engineering
13 727 (12.24%) Analytics
14 672 (11.31%) Stakeholder Management
15 664 (11.18%) Data Pipeline
16 653 (10.99%) Event-Driven
17 638 (10.74%) Technical Leadership
18 635 (10.69%) Data Modelling
19 631 (10.62%) Scrum
20 614 (10.34%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 2,240 (37.71%) Python
2 1,380 (23.23%) SQL
3 1,274 (21.45%) Java
4 661 (11.13%) JavaScript
5 534 (8.99%) C#
6 526 (8.86%) Bash
7 514 (8.65%) TypeScript
8 460 (7.74%) PowerShell
9 252 (4.24%) Bicep
10 158 (2.66%) Go
11 121 (2.04%) Shell Script
12 107 (1.80%) Scala
13 100 (1.68%) Kotlin
14 85 (1.43%) Apex Code
15 73 (1.23%) C++
16 71 (1.20%) Groovy
17 59 (0.99%) PL/SQL
18 53 (0.89%) Ruby
19 49 (0.82%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 48 (0.81%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,733 (29.18%) Security Cleared
2 1,441 (24.26%) SC Cleared
3 305 (5.13%) Degree
4 255 (4.29%) BPSS Clearance
5 233 (3.92%) DV Cleared
6 199 (3.35%) Azure Certification
7 186 (3.13%) AWS Certification
8 155 (2.61%) Computer Science Degree
9 102 (1.72%) CISSP
10 66 (1.11%) Microsoft Certification
11 62 (1.04%) Cisco Certification
12 56 (0.94%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 53 (0.89%) ISTQB
14 50 (0.84%) CISM
15 42 (0.71%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 36 (0.61%) Master's Degree
17 29 (0.49%) CCSP
18 24 (0.40%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 20 (0.34%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
20 18 (0.30%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 535 (9.01%) QA
2 423 (7.12%) Data Quality
3 316 (5.32%) Accessibility
4 141 (2.37%) GDPR
5 131 (2.21%) WCAG
6 106 (1.78%) NIST
7 97 (1.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 71 (1.20%) NCSC
9 35 (0.59%) PCI DSS
10 34 (0.57%) SLA
11 24 (0.40%) Cyber Essentials
12 23 (0.39%) GRC
13 21 (0.35%) ISO 20022
14 19 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 15 (0.25%) HL7
16 13 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
17 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
17 11 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 11 (0.19%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,589 (26.75%) Docker
2 157 (2.64%) Active Directory
3 114 (1.92%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.31%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.59%) VMware NSX
6 33 (0.56%) vSphere
7 24 (0.40%) VMware ESXi
8 22 (0.37%) Hyper-V
9 18 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
10 15 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 15 (0.25%) Squid
11 9 (0.15%) KVM
12 8 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.084%) Ceph
14 4 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.067%) HDFS
14 4 (0.067%) NFS
14 4 (0.067%) Postfix
15 3 (0.051%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 3 (0.051%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 1,921 (32.34%) Kubernetes
2 567 (9.55%) Ansible
3 486 (8.18%) Grafana
4 387 (6.52%) Prometheus
5 121 (2.04%) Argo
6 65 (1.09%) Puppet
7 57 (0.96%) Progress Chef
8 52 (0.88%) Istio
9 45 (0.76%) Single Sign-On
10 38 (0.64%) Kibana
11 36 (0.61%) Packer
12 25 (0.42%) Kustomize
13 22 (0.37%) Control-M
13 22 (0.37%) Microsoft Intune
14 18 (0.30%) vCenter Server
15 17 (0.29%) Podman
16 14 (0.24%) Oracle RMAN
16 14 (0.24%) SCCM
17 12 (0.20%) Jamf Pro
18 10 (0.17%) Rancher
Vendors
1 909 (15.30%) Microsoft
2 418 (7.04%) Databricks
3 353 (5.94%) Google
4 325 (5.47%) Oracle
5 213 (3.59%) Splunk
6 196 (3.30%) Salesforce
7 153 (2.58%) VMware
8 151 (2.54%) Dynatrace
9 138 (2.32%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.78%) Red Hat
11 93 (1.57%) MuleSoft
12 90 (1.52%) OpenAI
13 83 (1.40%) IBM
14 73 (1.23%) Informatica
15 69 (1.16%) SAP
16 64 (1.08%) Cisco
17 55 (0.93%) Foundry
18 46 (0.77%) F5
19 43 (0.72%) New Relic
20 41 (0.69%) Palo Alto