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

6 months to
25 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 19 27
Rank change year-on-year +9 +8 -4
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,635 2,745 2,608
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.07% 9.11% 5.99%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.03% 10.01% 7.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,790 1,903 1,807
10th Percentile £375 £360 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £512 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -6.91% -8.33%
75th Percentile £608 £625 £651
90th Percentile £700 £735 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £526
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.61% -4.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 32 73
10th Percentile £51.25 £42.70 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £49.75 £62.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £65.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £87.60 £88.17 £71.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year - -2.99% +2.13%

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 43,238 27,425 37,092
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.97% 91.06% 85.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,959 17,371 23,647
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.78% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £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 2,600 1,291 2,584
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.65
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.70 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.88 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £71.25 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.04 £38.12
% change year-on-year +79.73% -34.32% +17.29%

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 25 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 25 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 25 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 +8 4,700 £525 +1.94% 1,184
London +9 2,444 £540 +0.47% 530
UK excluding London +9 2,406 £500 +5.26% 865
Work from Home +8 1,690 £514 -0.44% 642
North of England +11 936 £500 +3.09% 232
Yorkshire +7 489 £515 +2.93% 52
South East -2 413 £520 +4.00% 296
Midlands +5 410 £488 +5.69% 99
North West +7 360 £500 +2.04% 148
West Midlands +15 333 £492 -1.60% 64
South West +5 243 £525 -1.64% 103
Scotland +6 237 £425 -14.14% 49
East of England +12 137 £550 +22.22% 69
North East +8 102 £425 +0.59% 36
East Midlands -9 70 £445 +1.25% 35
Wales +9 41 £425 -17.11% 24
Northern Ireland +23 31 £545 +28.24% 12
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
1 279 (4.95%) Confluence
2 220 (3.90%) Apache Spark
3 199 (3.53%) Apache Airflow
4 146 (2.59%) Apache
5 85 (1.51%) SAS
6 75 (1.33%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.41%) CMS
9 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
10 20 (0.35%) nginx
11 17 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
12 16 (0.28%) OpenStack
13 15 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
14 14 (0.25%) WebSphere
15 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
16 12 (0.21%) Camunda
17 11 (0.20%) Anypoint
18 9 (0.16%) Appian
18 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
19 8 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
Applications
1 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Excel
2 21 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 20 (0.35%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
6 7 (0.12%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.071%) Adobe XD
8 3 (0.053%) Simulink
9 2 (0.035%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.035%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 34 (0.60%) Dynamics CRM
2 21 (0.37%) Payment Gateway
3 15 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.21%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.14%) Shopify
7 7 (0.12%) SAP CRM
8 5 (0.089%) Magento
8 5 (0.089%) NetSuite
8 5 (0.089%) SAP MDG
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Sage X3
10 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
11 2 (0.035%) Endur
11 2 (0.035%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 1 (0.018%) Remedy ITSM
12 1 (0.018%) SAP ERP
12 1 (0.018%) SDL Web 8
12 1 (0.018%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,473 (43.89%) AWS
2 2,453 (43.53%) Azure
3 1,183 (20.99%) GitHub
4 938 (16.65%) GCP
5 894 (15.87%) Azure DevOps
6 747 (13.26%) GitHub Actions
7 655 (11.62%) Serverless
8 438 (7.77%) Amazon S3
9 410 (7.28%) AWS Lambda
10 407 (7.22%) Power Platform
11 320 (5.68%) AWS CloudFormation
12 282 (5.00%) Amazon EKS
13 252 (4.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 239 (4.24%) Azure AKS
15 227 (4.03%) Amazon EC2
16 209 (3.71%) Entra ID
17 201 (3.57%) Azure Data Factory
18 191 (3.39%) Amazon ECS
19 185 (3.28%) OpenShift
20 180 (3.19%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 212 (3.76%) Firewall
2 129 (2.29%) Network Security
3 120 (2.13%) DNS
4 84 (1.49%) VPN
5 64 (1.14%) HTTP
6 44 (0.78%) WAN
7 43 (0.76%) TCP/IP
8 41 (0.73%) BGP
9 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.60%) OSPF
11 32 (0.57%) BIG-IP
12 31 (0.55%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 30 (0.53%) VXLAN
14 28 (0.50%) Ethernet VPN
15 26 (0.46%) SSL
16 21 (0.37%) 3GPP
16 21 (0.37%) Ethernet
16 21 (0.37%) Wi-Fi
17 20 (0.35%) Internet
17 20 (0.35%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 372 (6.60%) PostgreSQL
2 304 (5.39%) Power BI
3 272 (4.83%) NoSQL
4 260 (4.61%) SQL Server
5 236 (4.19%) Data Warehouse
6 229 (4.06%) Relational Database
7 208 (3.69%) Data Lake
8 198 (3.51%) MongoDB
9 164 (2.91%) Amazon RDS
10 157 (2.79%) DynamoDB
11 127 (2.25%) Metadata
12 126 (2.24%) Amazon Redshift
13 121 (2.15%) Big Data
14 117 (2.08%) Amazon Athena
15 110 (1.95%) Delta Lake
16 101 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
17 95 (1.69%) MySQL
18 91 (1.61%) BigQuery
19 81 (1.44%) Redis
20 70 (1.24%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,027 (18.23%) Git
2 1,014 (17.99%) Jenkins
3 803 (14.25%) GitLab
4 528 (9.37%) JIRA
5 204 (3.62%) Selenium
6 187 (3.32%) JUnit
7 141 (2.50%) Cucumber
8 127 (2.25%) Postman
9 113 (2.01%) JMeter
10 111 (1.97%) REST Assured
11 97 (1.72%) SonarQube
12 82 (1.46%) Maven
13 81 (1.44%) Gradle
14 80 (1.42%) Bitbucket
15 72 (1.28%) Gatling
15 72 (1.28%) Mockito
16 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
17 62 (1.10%) MLflow
18 57 (1.01%) WebDriver
19 39 (0.69%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,385 (24.58%) Social Skills
2 969 (17.20%) Finance
3 773 (13.72%) Public Sector
4 436 (7.74%) Analytical Skills
5 425 (7.54%) Banking
6 140 (2.48%) Documentation Skills
7 121 (2.15%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 91 (1.61%) Retail
9 75 (1.33%) Legal
10 74 (1.31%) Investment Banking
11 70 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
12 65 (1.15%) Military
13 60 (1.06%) Front Office
14 54 (0.96%) Telecoms
15 50 (0.89%) Financial Institution
16 49 (0.87%) Law
17 38 (0.67%) Marketing
18 33 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
18 33 (0.59%) Publishing
19 26 (0.46%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,204 (21.37%) Developer
2 887 (15.74%) Senior
3 702 (12.46%) DevOps Engineer
4 605 (10.74%) Architect
5 490 (8.70%) Lead
6 456 (8.09%) Data Engineer
7 323 (5.73%) AWS Engineer
8 308 (5.47%) Software Engineer
9 301 (5.34%) Java Developer
10 273 (4.84%) Azure Engineer
11 248 (4.40%) Cloud Engineer
12 230 (4.08%) Platform Engineer
13 219 (3.89%) Senior Developer
14 172 (3.05%) Full-Stack Developer
15 164 (2.91%) Python Developer
16 149 (2.64%) AWS DevOps
17 140 (2.48%) GCP Engineer
18 138 (2.45%) Test Engineer
19 137 (2.43%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 137 (2.43%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 658 (11.68%) REST
2 505 (8.96%) React
3 497 (8.82%) Spring
4 488 (8.66%) .NET
5 461 (8.18%) RESTful
6 443 (7.86%) Spring Boot
7 435 (7.72%) Kafka
8 355 (6.30%) Node.js
9 225 (3.99%) PySpark
10 209 (3.71%) AngularJS
11 203 (3.60%) Playwright
12 197 (3.50%) OAuth
13 186 (3.30%) HTML
14 161 (2.86%) CSS
15 156 (2.77%) JSON
16 139 (2.47%) OAuth2
17 137 (2.43%) YAML
18 123 (2.18%) FastAPI
19 118 (2.09%) OpenID
20 117 (2.08%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 1,126 (19.98%) Cloud Native
2 404 (7.17%) Distributed Systems
3 331 (5.87%) Product Ownership
4 150 (2.66%) Onboarding
5 140 (2.48%) Legacy Systems
6 124 (2.20%) Enterprise Software
7 117 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
8 112 (1.99%) AI Agents
9 106 (1.88%) Data Centre
10 97 (1.72%) Public Cloud
11 86 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
12 84 (1.49%) Security Posture
13 80 (1.42%) Virtual Team
14 76 (1.35%) Algorithms
15 70 (1.24%) Management Information System
15 70 (1.24%) Mobile App
16 61 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
17 58 (1.03%) Self-Motivation
18 57 (1.01%) Data Structures
19 53 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 533 (9.46%) Linux
2 250 (4.44%) Windows
3 116 (2.06%) Unix
4 108 (1.92%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (0.89%) Android
6 49 (0.87%) Windows Server
7 48 (0.85%) Apple iOS
8 32 (0.57%) VMS
9 25 (0.44%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.27%) Mac OS
11 14 (0.25%) CentOS
12 11 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
13 10 (0.18%) Solaris
14 8 (0.14%) AIX
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
15 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
15 7 (0.12%) zOS
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 4 (0.071%) Debian
18 3 (0.053%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,162 (56.11%) DevOps
2 1,988 (35.28%) Agile
3 1,735 (30.79%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,251 (22.20%) Containerisation
5 1,211 (21.49%) Test Automation
6 1,099 (19.50%) Microservices
7 937 (16.63%) Observability
8 913 (16.20%) AI
9 874 (15.51%) Problem-Solving
10 823 (14.61%) Software Engineering
11 749 (13.29%) Analytics
12 724 (12.85%) Continuous Improvement
13 646 (11.46%) Data Pipeline
14 627 (11.13%) Platform Engineering
15 625 (11.09%) Data Modelling
16 569 (10.10%) Migration
17 555 (9.85%) Scrum
18 537 (9.53%) Data Engineering
19 505 (8.96%) Event-Driven
20 492 (8.73%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 2,084 (36.98%) Python
2 1,325 (23.51%) SQL
3 1,150 (20.41%) Java
4 576 (10.22%) JavaScript
5 556 (9.87%) C#
6 462 (8.20%) TypeScript
7 401 (7.12%) Bash
8 342 (6.07%) PowerShell
9 196 (3.48%) Bicep
10 158 (2.80%) Go
11 94 (1.67%) Scala
11 94 (1.67%) Shell Script
12 87 (1.54%) Kotlin
13 80 (1.42%) Apex Code
14 79 (1.40%) C++
15 60 (1.06%) Ruby
16 54 (0.96%) PL/SQL
17 49 (0.87%) T-SQL
18 47 (0.83%) Groovy
19 29 (0.51%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,581 (28.06%) Security Cleared
2 1,327 (23.55%) SC Cleared
3 292 (5.18%) Degree
4 215 (3.82%) BPSS Clearance
5 174 (3.09%) AWS Certification
5 174 (3.09%) Azure Certification
6 169 (3.00%) DV Cleared
7 140 (2.48%) Computer Science Degree
8 85 (1.51%) CISSP
9 64 (1.14%) Cisco Certification
10 54 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 53 (0.94%) CISM
12 52 (0.92%) ISTQB
13 49 (0.87%) Master's Degree
13 49 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
14 37 (0.66%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 28 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 28 (0.50%) CCSP
16 21 (0.37%) GIAC
17 18 (0.32%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 439 (7.79%) QA
2 362 (6.42%) Data Quality
3 255 (4.53%) Accessibility
4 170 (3.02%) GDPR
5 142 (2.52%) NIST
6 114 (2.02%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 108 (1.92%) WCAG
8 83 (1.47%) NCSC
9 56 (0.99%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.67%) SLA
11 26 (0.46%) GRC
12 21 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
13 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
15 16 (0.28%) ISO 20022
16 15 (0.27%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 13 (0.23%) PSD2
18 12 (0.21%) HL7
18 12 (0.21%) MiFID
19 11 (0.20%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,434 (25.45%) Docker
2 134 (2.38%) Active Directory
3 81 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
4 77 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.59%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.51%) vSphere
7 22 (0.39%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
9 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
10 10 (0.18%) Squid
11 8 (0.14%) Hyper-V
12 7 (0.12%) HDFS
12 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 5 (0.089%) KVM
13 5 (0.089%) RACF
13 5 (0.089%) SRDF
14 4 (0.071%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
15 3 (0.053%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 3 (0.053%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 1,759 (31.22%) Terraform
2 1,720 (30.52%) Kubernetes
3 513 (9.10%) Ansible
4 472 (8.38%) Grafana
5 407 (7.22%) Prometheus
6 100 (1.77%) Argo
7 68 (1.21%) Istio
8 64 (1.14%) Puppet
9 56 (0.99%) Single Sign-On
10 41 (0.73%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.60%) Kibana
12 29 (0.51%) Packer
13 23 (0.41%) Control-M
13 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Nessus
15 17 (0.30%) IBM Guardium
15 17 (0.30%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.27%) Rancher
18 14 (0.25%) Active Directory Federation Services
Vendors
1 779 (13.82%) Microsoft
2 371 (6.58%) Databricks
3 311 (5.52%) Google
4 260 (4.61%) Oracle
5 213 (3.78%) Splunk
6 183 (3.25%) Salesforce
7 141 (2.50%) ServiceNow
8 130 (2.31%) Red Hat
9 128 (2.27%) Dynatrace
10 109 (1.93%) VMware
11 91 (1.61%) OpenAI
12 68 (1.21%) MuleSoft
13 66 (1.17%) SAP
14 62 (1.10%) IBM
15 57 (1.01%) Informatica
16 55 (0.98%) Cisco
17 48 (0.85%) Palo Alto
18 40 (0.71%) CyberArk
19 39 (0.69%) F5
19 39 (0.69%) Talend