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

6 months to
15 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 5,162 2,566 2,464
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.82% 8.83% 5.77%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.83% 9.70% 6.70%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,519 1,818 1,735
10th Percentile £370 £366 £401
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £606 £630 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £495 £550
% change year-on-year +1.11% -10.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 116 28 46
10th Percentile £51.25 £27.39 £50.63
25th Percentile £61.25 £47.87 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £61.25 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.20% -5.77% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £72.30 £70.00
90th Percentile £87.50 £94.32 £72.00
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 40,228 26,443 36,791
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.35% 90.98% 86.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,265 17,000 23,677
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.94% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £626 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.58% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,380 1,081 2,436
10th Percentile £14.89 £14.42 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.38 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.75 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +47.83% -21.23% +0.29%
75th Percentile £67.31 £60.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £26.50 £38.00
% change year-on-year +69.81% -30.26% +8.57%

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 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 15 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 15 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 4,282 £525 - 1,705
London +9 2,206 £545 -0.96% 721
UK excluding London +12 2,194 £500 +1.11% 1,182
Work from Home +9 1,511 £509 -3.05% 1,287
North of England +13 805 £500 - 369
Yorkshire +9 435 £500 - 103
South East +11 404 £504 +0.80% 349
Midlands +10 393 £482 +1.47% 127
West Midlands +15 314 £489 -4.52% 72
North West +6 308 £500 - 200
South West +9 231 £525 -3.67% 156
Scotland +8 222 £438 -7.89% 63
East of England +18 121 £550 +20.22% 81
North East +5 73 £450 -5.26% 69
East Midlands -10 73 £444 -4.05% 55
Wales +7 36 £433 -19.91% 32
Northern Ireland +11 24 £650 +52.94% 16
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
1 251 (4.86%) Confluence
2 189 (3.66%) Apache Spark
3 134 (2.60%) Apache Airflow
4 117 (2.27%) Apache
5 77 (1.49%) SAS
6 68 (1.32%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
7 25 (0.48%) nginx
7 25 (0.48%) OpenStack
8 20 (0.39%) CMS
9 13 (0.25%) Mendix
9 13 (0.25%) WebLogic
10 12 (0.23%) SharePoint Server
10 12 (0.23%) WebSphere
11 11 (0.21%) Anypoint
11 11 (0.21%) Camunda
11 11 (0.21%) Jupyter
12 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
13 9 (0.17%) Appian
13 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 30 (0.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 15 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
4 13 (0.25%) Chatbot
4 13 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
5 8 (0.15%) Adobe XD
6 7 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 5 (0.097%) Sketch
8 3 (0.058%) Simulink
9 2 (0.039%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.019%) Maya
10 1 (0.019%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.39%) Payment Gateway
3 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 7 (0.14%) Aladdin
6 5 (0.097%) SAP CRM
6 5 (0.097%) SAP MDG
7 4 (0.077%) Magento
7 4 (0.077%) Shopify
8 3 (0.058%) Findur
8 3 (0.058%) Oracle Applications
8 3 (0.058%) Oracle ERP
8 3 (0.058%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.019%) Actimize
9 1 (0.019%) NetSuite
9 1 (0.019%) Oracle General Ledger
9 1 (0.019%) SAP ERP
9 1 (0.019%) SAP Hybris
9 1 (0.019%) SDL Web 8
9 1 (0.019%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 2,273 (44.03%) Azure
2 2,232 (43.24%) AWS
3 1,121 (21.72%) GitHub
4 865 (16.76%) GCP
5 812 (15.73%) Azure DevOps
6 707 (13.70%) GitHub Actions
7 625 (12.11%) Serverless
8 377 (7.30%) Amazon S3
9 371 (7.19%) AWS Lambda
10 364 (7.05%) Power Platform
11 355 (6.88%) AWS CloudFormation
12 283 (5.48%) Amazon EKS
13 227 (4.40%) Azure AKS
14 215 (4.17%) OpenShift
15 214 (4.15%) Amazon ECS
15 214 (4.15%) Azure Data Factory
16 209 (4.05%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 209 (4.05%) Amazon EC2
17 183 (3.55%) Entra ID
18 159 (3.08%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 185 (3.58%) Firewall
2 115 (2.23%) DNS
3 105 (2.03%) Network Security
4 76 (1.47%) VPN
5 64 (1.24%) HTTP
6 39 (0.76%) TCP/IP
7 32 (0.62%) WAN
8 29 (0.56%) BGP
9 28 (0.54%) SD-WAN
9 28 (0.54%) SSL
10 25 (0.48%) OSPF
11 23 (0.45%) Reverse Proxy
12 21 (0.41%) Ethernet
13 20 (0.39%) SAN
13 20 (0.39%) VXLAN
14 18 (0.35%) Ethernet VPN
15 16 (0.31%) 3GPP
16 15 (0.29%) SSH
16 15 (0.29%) Wi-Fi
17 13 (0.25%) BIG-IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 343 (6.64%) PostgreSQL
2 275 (5.33%) Power BI
3 251 (4.86%) NoSQL
4 244 (4.73%) SQL Server
5 207 (4.01%) Relational Database
6 206 (3.99%) Data Lake
7 188 (3.64%) Data Warehouse
8 182 (3.53%) MongoDB
9 146 (2.83%) Amazon RDS
10 131 (2.54%) DynamoDB
11 119 (2.31%) Big Data
11 119 (2.31%) Metadata
12 116 (2.25%) Delta Lake
13 104 (2.01%) Azure SQL Database
14 91 (1.76%) Amazon Athena
15 89 (1.72%) MySQL
16 80 (1.55%) Amazon Redshift
16 80 (1.55%) BigQuery
17 75 (1.45%) Redis
18 62 (1.20%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 951 (18.42%) Git
2 946 (18.33%) Jenkins
3 741 (14.35%) GitLab
4 462 (8.95%) JIRA
5 186 (3.60%) Selenium
6 155 (3.00%) JUnit
7 134 (2.60%) Cucumber
8 124 (2.40%) Postman
9 100 (1.94%) JMeter
10 95 (1.84%) REST Assured
11 82 (1.59%) SonarQube
12 75 (1.45%) Bitbucket
13 68 (1.32%) MLflow
14 65 (1.26%) Gatling
15 64 (1.24%) Maven
16 62 (1.20%) Cypress.io
17 61 (1.18%) Gradle
18 58 (1.12%) Mockito
19 47 (0.91%) Artifactory
20 46 (0.89%) WebDriver
General
1 1,273 (24.66%) Social Skills
2 842 (16.31%) Finance
3 650 (12.59%) Public Sector
4 418 (8.10%) Analytical Skills
5 350 (6.78%) Banking
6 131 (2.54%) Documentation Skills
7 77 (1.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 66 (1.28%) Retail
9 60 (1.16%) Legal
10 59 (1.14%) Military
11 57 (1.10%) Front Office
11 57 (1.10%) Influencing Skills
12 55 (1.07%) Investment Banking
13 47 (0.91%) Financial Institution
14 42 (0.81%) Telecoms
15 36 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
16 29 (0.56%) Law
17 27 (0.52%) Publishing
18 24 (0.46%) Marketing
19 23 (0.45%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,137 (22.03%) Developer
2 773 (14.97%) Senior
3 615 (11.91%) DevOps Engineer
4 548 (10.62%) Architect
5 427 (8.27%) Lead
6 414 (8.02%) Data Engineer
7 271 (5.25%) AWS Engineer
8 269 (5.21%) Software Engineer
9 266 (5.15%) Azure Engineer
10 260 (5.04%) Java Developer
11 222 (4.30%) Platform Engineer
12 215 (4.17%) Cloud Engineer
13 187 (3.62%) Senior Developer
14 168 (3.25%) Full-Stack Developer
15 152 (2.94%) Python Developer
16 141 (2.73%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 133 (2.58%) GCP Engineer
18 128 (2.48%) AWS DevOps
19 123 (2.38%) Test Engineer
20 120 (2.32%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 565 (10.95%) REST
2 466 (9.03%) React
3 446 (8.64%) Spring
4 440 (8.52%) .NET
5 417 (8.08%) Kafka
6 407 (7.88%) RESTful
7 400 (7.75%) Spring Boot
8 393 (7.61%) Node.js
9 205 (3.97%) AngularJS
10 200 (3.87%) Playwright
11 198 (3.84%) PySpark
12 178 (3.45%) HTML
13 168 (3.25%) OAuth
14 149 (2.89%) CSS
15 143 (2.77%) YAML
16 125 (2.42%) JSON
17 122 (2.36%) OpenTelemetry
18 116 (2.25%) OAuth2
19 110 (2.13%) FastAPI
20 102 (1.98%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 954 (18.48%) Cloud Native
2 357 (6.92%) Distributed Systems
3 286 (5.54%) Product Ownership
4 123 (2.38%) Onboarding
5 113 (2.19%) Legacy Systems
6 102 (1.98%) Hybrid Cloud
7 91 (1.76%) Enterprise Software
8 86 (1.67%) Public Cloud
9 82 (1.59%) Data Centre
9 82 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
10 79 (1.53%) Algorithms
11 72 (1.39%) AI Agents
12 69 (1.34%) Virtual Team
13 64 (1.24%) Mobile App
14 59 (1.14%) Security Posture
15 54 (1.05%) Management Information System
16 51 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
17 45 (0.87%) Self-Motivation
18 44 (0.85%) NHS
19 42 (0.81%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 537 (10.40%) Linux
2 239 (4.63%) Windows
3 107 (2.07%) Unix
4 81 (1.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 52 (1.01%) Android
6 48 (0.93%) Apple iOS
7 43 (0.83%) Windows Server
8 42 (0.81%) VMS
9 19 (0.37%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.27%) CentOS
11 11 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.15%) zOS
13 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.12%) AIX
14 6 (0.12%) Rocky
14 6 (0.12%) Solaris
14 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.077%) Debian
15 4 (0.077%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,882 (55.83%) DevOps
2 1,744 (33.79%) Agile
3 1,599 (30.98%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,190 (23.05%) Containerisation
5 1,076 (20.84%) Test Automation
6 995 (19.28%) Microservices
7 870 (16.85%) Problem-Solving
8 861 (16.68%) Observability
9 760 (14.72%) AI
10 692 (13.41%) Software Engineering
11 681 (13.19%) Analytics
12 637 (12.34%) Continuous Improvement
13 576 (11.16%) Data Modelling
14 556 (10.77%) Data Pipeline
15 525 (10.17%) Platform Engineering
16 494 (9.57%) Migration
17 467 (9.05%) Scrum
18 450 (8.72%) Data Engineering
18 450 (8.72%) ETL
19 431 (8.35%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,911 (37.02%) Python
2 1,206 (23.36%) SQL
3 1,019 (19.74%) Java
4 570 (11.04%) JavaScript
5 498 (9.65%) C#
6 445 (8.62%) TypeScript
7 379 (7.34%) Bash
8 327 (6.33%) PowerShell
9 174 (3.37%) Bicep
10 150 (2.91%) Go
11 101 (1.96%) Shell Script
12 99 (1.92%) Scala
13 84 (1.63%) C++
14 76 (1.47%) Ruby
15 67 (1.30%) Kotlin
16 65 (1.26%) Apex Code
17 55 (1.07%) PL/SQL
18 47 (0.91%) T-SQL
19 39 (0.76%) Groovy
20 33 (0.64%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,438 (27.86%) Security Cleared
2 1,188 (23.01%) SC Cleared
3 275 (5.33%) Degree
4 197 (3.82%) BPSS Clearance
5 157 (3.04%) AWS Certification
6 156 (3.02%) Azure Certification
7 153 (2.96%) Computer Science Degree
7 153 (2.96%) DV Cleared
8 74 (1.43%) CISSP
9 54 (1.05%) Cisco Certification
9 54 (1.05%) CISM
10 53 (1.03%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 52 (1.01%) Master's Degree
12 50 (0.97%) Microsoft Certification
13 45 (0.87%) ISTQB
14 30 (0.58%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 26 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 24 (0.46%) CCSP
17 20 (0.39%) RHCE
18 19 (0.37%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 413 (8.00%) QA
2 313 (6.06%) Data Quality
3 214 (4.15%) Accessibility
4 176 (3.41%) GDPR
5 139 (2.69%) NIST
6 120 (2.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 99 (1.92%) WCAG
8 73 (1.41%) NCSC
9 57 (1.10%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.76%) SLA
11 25 (0.48%) 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 15 (0.29%) MiFID
17 14 (0.27%) PSD2
18 13 (0.25%) HL7
19 12 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
19 12 (0.23%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,342 (26.00%) Docker
2 126 (2.44%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.59%) Virtual Machines
4 70 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.64%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.58%) vSphere
7 19 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 12 (0.23%) Hyper-V
8 12 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
9 8 (0.15%) HDFS
9 8 (0.15%) Squid
10 7 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
10 7 (0.14%) Oracle RAC
11 6 (0.12%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) RACF
12 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
12 4 (0.077%) NFS
12 4 (0.077%) SRDF
13 3 (0.058%) Ceph
14 2 (0.039%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,621 (31.40%) Terraform
2 1,599 (30.98%) Kubernetes
3 516 (10.00%) Ansible
4 476 (9.22%) Grafana
5 402 (7.79%) Prometheus
6 106 (2.05%) Argo
7 80 (1.55%) Istio
8 64 (1.24%) Puppet
9 51 (0.99%) Single Sign-On
10 40 (0.77%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.64%) Kibana
12 22 (0.43%) Nessus
13 21 (0.41%) Packer
13 21 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.37%) Control-M
14 19 (0.37%) Rancher
15 17 (0.33%) IBM Guardium
16 15 (0.29%) linkerd
16 15 (0.29%) NetBackup
17 14 (0.27%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 749 (14.51%) Microsoft
2 369 (7.15%) Databricks
3 269 (5.21%) Google
4 233 (4.51%) Oracle
5 218 (4.22%) Splunk
6 149 (2.89%) Salesforce
7 136 (2.63%) ServiceNow
8 127 (2.46%) Red Hat
9 111 (2.15%) Dynatrace
10 107 (2.07%) VMware
11 82 (1.59%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.20%) SAP
13 60 (1.16%) MuleSoft
14 52 (1.01%) IBM
15 45 (0.87%) Cisco
15 45 (0.87%) CyberArk
16 39 (0.76%) Informatica
16 39 (0.76%) Tenable
17 38 (0.74%) Denodo
18 37 (0.72%) AppDynamics