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

6 months to
15 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 16 26
Rank change year-on-year +5 +10 0
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 6,071 3,332 2,695
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.16% 10.27% 7.07%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.21% 11.34% 8.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,106 2,254 1,827
10th Percentile £377 £361 £396
25th Percentile £436 £423 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.49% -6.86% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £759
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £523
% change year-on-year - -4.31% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 47 69
10th Percentile £45.20 £50.75 £62.40
25th Percentile £60.58 £60.38 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year +3.85% -3.70% -10.00%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £95.00 £69.10 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £68.75
% change year-on-year +3.85% -5.45% -8.33%

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 45,945 29,375 32,666
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.44% 90.50% 85.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,954 18,237 20,159
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
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 3,063 1,777 1,475
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.42 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.47 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £66.70 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.08 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +78.13% -47.67% +6.17%

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 15 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 15 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 15 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 5,084 £525 +2.44% 6,876
London +4 2,699 £537 +2.33% 4,020
UK excluding London +7 2,568 £500 - 3,649
Work from Home +6 1,870 £525 +5.00% 3,128
North of England +4 973 £500 +5.04% 1,027
Yorkshire +7 497 £500 - 276
South East +2 463 £533 +6.50% 708
Midlands -4 377 £488 -2.50% 365
North West +1 361 £525 +7.97% 601
West Midlands -1 319 £490 -7.55% 243
South West +3 289 £550 +2.33% 451
Scotland 0 273 £425 -15.00% 509
East of England +3 154 £507 +1.40% 304
North East 0 126 £425 -5.03% 156
East Midlands -20 54 £463 +7.81% 121
Wales +2 47 £425 -5.56% 74
Northern Ireland +23 24 £591 +18.25% 224
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
1 280 (4.61%) Confluence
2 232 (3.82%) Apache Airflow
3 196 (3.23%) Apache Spark
4 161 (2.65%) Apache
5 95 (1.56%) SharePoint
6 65 (1.07%) SAS
7 36 (0.59%) Jupyter
8 28 (0.46%) CMS
9 23 (0.38%) nginx
10 18 (0.30%) Camunda
10 18 (0.30%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.26%) Anypoint
12 13 (0.21%) Palantir Foundry
12 13 (0.21%) SharePoint Server
13 9 (0.15%) Mule
13 9 (0.15%) WebSphere
13 9 (0.15%) WordPress
14 8 (0.13%) WebLogic
15 6 (0.099%) Microsoft Exchange
15 6 (0.099%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 23 (0.38%) Chatbot
2 21 (0.35%) Microsoft Excel
3 10 (0.16%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 9 (0.15%) Microsoft Office
5 7 (0.12%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.066%) Trello
7 3 (0.049%) Adobe XD
7 3 (0.049%) Simulink
7 3 (0.049%) Sketch
7 3 (0.049%) Windchill
8 2 (0.033%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.033%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.033%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.016%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.016%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 52 (0.86%) Dynamics CRM
2 23 (0.38%) Payment Gateway
3 17 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
5 10 (0.16%) Aladdin
5 10 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.13%) NetSuite
7 6 (0.099%) Magento
7 6 (0.099%) SAP MDG
7 6 (0.099%) Shopify
8 5 (0.082%) Temenos T24
9 4 (0.066%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.066%) Sage X3
10 3 (0.049%) Endur
10 3 (0.049%) Finacle
10 3 (0.049%) FLEXCUBE
10 3 (0.049%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 2 (0.033%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.033%) Salesforce CRM
11 2 (0.033%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,693 (44.36%) AWS
2 2,633 (43.37%) Azure
3 1,290 (21.25%) GitHub
4 1,015 (16.72%) GCP
5 986 (16.24%) Azure DevOps
6 846 (13.94%) GitHub Actions
7 651 (10.72%) Serverless
8 443 (7.30%) Amazon S3
9 440 (7.25%) Power Platform
10 437 (7.20%) AWS Lambda
11 331 (5.45%) Amazon EKS
12 304 (5.01%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 283 (4.66%) AWS CloudFormation
14 246 (4.05%) Entra ID
15 239 (3.94%) Azure AKS
15 239 (3.94%) Snowflake
16 219 (3.61%) Amazon EC2
17 200 (3.29%) Amazon ECS
18 186 (3.06%) Azure Data Factory
19 180 (2.96%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 235 (3.87%) Firewall
2 160 (2.64%) DNS
3 130 (2.14%) Network Security
4 91 (1.50%) VPN
5 87 (1.43%) TCP/IP
6 51 (0.84%) HTTP
7 49 (0.81%) WAN
8 41 (0.68%) SD-WAN
9 39 (0.64%) BGP
9 39 (0.64%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
10 38 (0.63%) BIG-IP
11 33 (0.54%) SSL
11 33 (0.54%) VXLAN
12 32 (0.53%) DHCP
13 31 (0.51%) Ethernet VPN
14 30 (0.49%) Internet
15 26 (0.43%) 5G
16 25 (0.41%) OSPF
17 21 (0.35%) VLAN
18 20 (0.33%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 431 (7.10%) PostgreSQL
2 333 (5.49%) Power BI
3 293 (4.83%) Data Warehouse
4 286 (4.71%) SQL Server
5 285 (4.69%) Relational Database
6 256 (4.22%) MongoDB
7 254 (4.18%) NoSQL
8 223 (3.67%) Data Lake
9 189 (3.11%) Amazon RDS
10 173 (2.85%) Metadata
11 143 (2.36%) DynamoDB
12 139 (2.29%) MySQL
13 126 (2.08%) BigQuery
14 122 (2.01%) Amazon Redshift
15 119 (1.96%) Delta Lake
16 107 (1.76%) Redis
17 94 (1.55%) Amazon Athena
18 92 (1.52%) Amazon Aurora
19 88 (1.45%) Azure SQL Database
20 87 (1.43%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 1,198 (19.73%) Git
2 1,016 (16.74%) Jenkins
3 896 (14.76%) GitLab
4 518 (8.53%) JIRA
5 231 (3.80%) Selenium
6 190 (3.13%) JUnit
7 138 (2.27%) Maven
8 135 (2.22%) Cucumber
9 123 (2.03%) SonarQube
10 121 (1.99%) Gradle
11 108 (1.78%) Bitbucket
12 106 (1.75%) Postman
13 102 (1.68%) JMeter
14 96 (1.58%) Cypress.io
14 96 (1.58%) REST Assured
15 85 (1.40%) Mockito
16 82 (1.35%) Gatling
17 72 (1.19%) Claude Code
18 48 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
19 45 (0.74%) WebDriver
General
1 1,581 (26.04%) Social Skills
2 1,129 (18.60%) Finance
3 872 (14.36%) Public Sector
4 526 (8.66%) Analytical Skills
5 511 (8.42%) Banking
6 160 (2.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 121 (1.99%) Retail
8 107 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
9 86 (1.42%) Investment Banking
10 84 (1.38%) Front Office
11 81 (1.33%) Military
12 66 (1.09%) Telecoms
13 57 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
14 54 (0.89%) Law
15 52 (0.86%) Legal
16 48 (0.79%) Financial Institution
17 47 (0.77%) Marketing
17 47 (0.77%) Publishing
18 41 (0.68%) Manufacturing
19 38 (0.63%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,378 (22.70%) Developer
2 1,092 (17.99%) Senior
3 779 (12.83%) DevOps Engineer
4 610 (10.05%) Architect
5 563 (9.27%) Lead
6 453 (7.46%) Data Engineer
7 342 (5.63%) Java Developer
8 324 (5.34%) Software Engineer
9 312 (5.14%) AWS Engineer
10 297 (4.89%) Senior Developer
11 294 (4.84%) Azure Engineer
12 268 (4.41%) Cloud Engineer
13 254 (4.18%) Platform Engineer
14 177 (2.92%) Full-Stack Developer
15 166 (2.73%) Python Developer
16 156 (2.57%) Solutions Architect
17 149 (2.45%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 147 (2.42%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
19 146 (2.40%) Test Engineer
20 145 (2.39%) AWS DevOps
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,966 (32.38%) Terraform
2 902 (14.86%) REST
3 591 (9.73%) Kafka
4 556 (9.16%) React
5 537 (8.85%) Spring
6 527 (8.68%) RESTful
7 516 (8.50%) .NET
8 491 (8.09%) Spring Boot
9 359 (5.91%) Node.js
10 256 (4.22%) HTML
11 247 (4.07%) Playwright
12 234 (3.85%) CSS
13 225 (3.71%) JSON
14 214 (3.52%) OAuth
14 214 (3.52%) PySpark
15 176 (2.90%) AngularJS
16 161 (2.65%) OAuth2
17 139 (2.29%) SOAP
18 123 (2.03%) YAML
19 122 (2.01%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 1,289 (21.23%) Cloud Native
2 471 (7.76%) Distributed Systems
3 413 (6.80%) Product Ownership
4 232 (3.82%) Onboarding
5 228 (3.76%) Enterprise Software
6 208 (3.43%) AI Agents
7 155 (2.55%) Legacy Systems
8 134 (2.21%) Hybrid Cloud
9 108 (1.78%) Security Posture
10 99 (1.63%) Data Centre
10 99 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
11 92 (1.52%) Public Cloud
12 78 (1.28%) Data Structures
13 76 (1.25%) Management Information System
14 75 (1.24%) Virtual Team
15 73 (1.20%) Greenfield Project
16 70 (1.15%) Enterprise Cloud
17 69 (1.14%) NHS
18 68 (1.12%) Private Cloud
19 67 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 635 (10.46%) Linux
2 270 (4.45%) Windows
3 161 (2.65%) Unix
4 127 (2.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.09%) Windows Server
6 55 (0.91%) Android
7 48 (0.79%) Apple iOS
8 31 (0.51%) VMS
9 23 (0.38%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.25%) AIX
10 15 (0.25%) Mac OS
11 13 (0.21%) CentOS
12 11 (0.18%) zOS
13 8 (0.13%) Rocky
13 8 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 6 (0.099%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.082%) Windows Server 2008
17 3 (0.049%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,403 (56.05%) DevOps
2 2,330 (38.38%) Agile
3 2,091 (34.44%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,444 (23.79%) Test Automation
5 1,320 (21.74%) Containerisation
6 1,234 (20.33%) Microservices
7 1,157 (19.06%) AI
8 1,153 (18.99%) Observability
9 1,087 (17.90%) Software Engineering
10 974 (16.04%) Problem-Solving
11 926 (15.25%) Continuous Improvement
12 826 (13.61%) Platform Engineering
13 733 (12.07%) Stakeholder Management
14 731 (12.04%) Analytics
15 695 (11.45%) Event-Driven
16 679 (11.18%) Data Pipeline
17 671 (11.05%) Technical Leadership
18 664 (10.94%) Scrum
19 648 (10.67%) Data Modelling
20 623 (10.26%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 2,315 (38.13%) Python
2 1,385 (22.81%) SQL
3 1,310 (21.58%) Java
4 684 (11.27%) JavaScript
5 551 (9.08%) C#
6 543 (8.94%) TypeScript
7 538 (8.86%) Bash
8 472 (7.77%) PowerShell
9 255 (4.20%) Bicep
10 172 (2.83%) Go
11 124 (2.04%) Shell Script
12 114 (1.88%) Scala
13 105 (1.73%) Kotlin
14 79 (1.30%) Apex Code
15 78 (1.28%) C++
16 72 (1.19%) Groovy
17 59 (0.97%) PL/SQL
18 52 (0.86%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 50 (0.82%) Ruby
20 48 (0.79%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,786 (29.42%) Security Cleared
2 1,478 (24.35%) SC Cleared
3 317 (5.22%) Degree
4 262 (4.32%) BPSS Clearance
5 259 (4.27%) DV Cleared
6 207 (3.41%) Azure Certification
7 186 (3.06%) AWS Certification
8 158 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
9 105 (1.73%) CISSP
10 71 (1.17%) Microsoft Certification
11 60 (0.99%) Cisco Certification
12 52 (0.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 51 (0.84%) ISTQB
14 49 (0.81%) CISM
15 43 (0.71%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 38 (0.63%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.49%) CCSP
18 23 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 20 (0.33%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
19 20 (0.33%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 556 (9.16%) QA
2 443 (7.30%) Data Quality
3 330 (5.44%) Accessibility
4 135 (2.22%) WCAG
5 127 (2.09%) GDPR
6 92 (1.52%) NIST
7 80 (1.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 73 (1.20%) NCSC
9 31 (0.51%) PCI DSS
10 28 (0.46%) SLA
11 26 (0.43%) GRC
12 24 (0.40%) ISO 20022
13 23 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
14 15 (0.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 12 (0.20%) Actionable Recommendations
15 12 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.20%) HL7
15 12 (0.20%) SOC 2
16 11 (0.18%) EU AI Act
17 10 (0.16%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
System Software
1 1,620 (26.68%) Docker
2 160 (2.64%) Active Directory
3 119 (1.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.24%) Virtual Machines
5 34 (0.56%) VMware NSX
6 31 (0.51%) vSphere
7 27 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
8 20 (0.33%) Hyper-V
9 16 (0.26%) 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 6 (0.099%) Ceph
14 4 (0.066%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.066%) HDFS
14 4 (0.066%) NFS
14 4 (0.066%) Postfix
15 3 (0.049%) RACF
15 3 (0.049%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 1,981 (32.63%) Kubernetes
2 578 (9.52%) Ansible
3 491 (8.09%) Grafana
4 388 (6.39%) Prometheus
5 118 (1.94%) Argo
6 65 (1.07%) Puppet
7 57 (0.94%) Progress Chef
8 48 (0.79%) Single Sign-On
9 47 (0.77%) Istio
10 39 (0.64%) Kibana
11 37 (0.61%) Packer
12 26 (0.43%) Kustomize
13 25 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
14 22 (0.36%) Control-M
15 18 (0.30%) Podman
16 17 (0.28%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.25%) SCCM
18 14 (0.23%) Oracle RMAN
19 13 (0.21%) Jamf Pro
20 12 (0.20%) Karpenter
Vendors
1 942 (15.52%) Microsoft
2 429 (7.07%) Databricks
3 371 (6.11%) Google
4 331 (5.45%) Oracle
5 216 (3.56%) Splunk
6 189 (3.11%) Salesforce
7 160 (2.64%) VMware
8 152 (2.50%) Dynatrace
9 138 (2.27%) ServiceNow
10 106 (1.75%) Red Hat
11 96 (1.58%) OpenAI
12 93 (1.53%) MuleSoft
13 90 (1.48%) IBM
14 69 (1.14%) Informatica
14 69 (1.14%) SAP
15 61 (1.00%) Cisco
16 59 (0.97%) Foundry
17 53 (0.87%) F5
18 41 (0.68%) Palo Alto
18 41 (0.68%) Talend