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 26 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 21 28
Rank change year-on-year +9 +7 -8
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 4,268 2,770 2,651
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.48% 8.21% 6.06%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.03% 9.30% 6.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,989 1,919 1,945
10th Percentile £363 £385 £413
25th Percentile £423 £453 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £550 £555
Median % change year-on-year -7.27% -0.90% -7.50%
75th Percentile £600 £651 £656
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 26 24
10th Percentile £48.00 £26.41 £51.88
25th Percentile £61.50 - £61.06
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year - -13.33% +14.32%
75th Percentile £67.00 £74.33 £77.50
90th Percentile £86.30 £92.07 £78.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £67.50 £75.00
% change year-on-year -3.70% -10.00% +14.32%

All Process and 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 32,744 29,791 38,561
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.06% 88.28% 88.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,623 18,168 25,704
10th Percentile £300 £308 £306
25th Percentile £406 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £744
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,071 964 1,544
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.62 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.30 £18.93
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.29% +24.29%
75th Percentile £51.23 £62.59 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.75 £74.31 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.58 £31.50 £45.00
% change year-on-year -25.16% -30.00% +40.63%

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 26 December 2025.

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 26 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for CI/CD in the UK

CI/CD
Top 17 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 26 December 2025. 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 3,536 £515 -6.36% 4,607
London +4 1,841 £525 -11.39% 946
UK excluding London +10 1,804 £500 - 4,079
Work from Home +10 1,359 £513 -2.38% 2,414
North of England +7 621 £488 -0.26% 991
South East +10 352 £500 -9.09% 1,101
Midlands +18 351 £515 +3.00% 688
Yorkshire +3 309 £500 +2.30% 431
West Midlands +17 292 £520 -0.95% 359
North West +16 245 £466 -2.00% 486
Scotland +10 236 £465 -1.06% 172
South West +16 167 £550 -6.38% 473
East of England +10 101 £565 +13.00% 537
North East +10 71 £494 -10.23% 77
East Midlands +14 59 £420 -15.15% 288
Wales +2 30 £463 -14.94% 110
Northern Ireland -8 11 - - 61

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
1 166 (3.89%) Confluence
2 126 (2.95%) Apache Airflow
3 111 (2.60%) Apache Spark
4 103 (2.41%) Apache
5 83 (1.94%) SAS
6 42 (0.98%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.77%) nginx
8 26 (0.61%) WebLogic
9 23 (0.54%) JBoss
10 20 (0.47%) OpenStack
11 18 (0.42%) Anypoint
11 18 (0.42%) CMS
12 17 (0.40%) IIS
13 16 (0.37%) Mule
14 15 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
15 14 (0.33%) WebSphere
16 10 (0.23%) SugarCRM
17 9 (0.21%) Appian
17 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
18 8 (0.19%) HCL Notes
Applications
1 46 (1.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 18 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (0.23%) Microsoft Office
3 10 (0.23%) Mozilla Thunderbird
4 9 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 9 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
5 5 (0.12%) Adobe XD
5 5 (0.12%) Sketch
6 3 (0.070%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.023%) Oracle Smart View
7 1 (0.023%) Revit
7 1 (0.023%) Simulink
7 1 (0.023%) Trello
Business Applications
1 27 (0.63%) Dynamics CRM
2 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
3 6 (0.14%) Endur
4 5 (0.12%) Maximo
5 4 (0.094%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.094%) Payment Gateway
5 4 (0.094%) thinkFolio
6 3 (0.070%) Magento
6 3 (0.070%) Oracle Applications
6 3 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
6 3 (0.070%) SAP S/4HANA
6 3 (0.070%) Shopify
7 2 (0.047%) NetSuite
7 2 (0.047%) Oracle Payables
7 2 (0.047%) Oracle Receivables
7 2 (0.047%) Orchestrade
8 1 (0.023%) ION Anvil
8 1 (0.023%) Oracle Cash Management
8 1 (0.023%) SAP MDG
8 1 (0.023%) Siebel CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,993 (46.70%) AWS
2 1,768 (41.42%) Azure
3 953 (22.33%) GitHub
4 712 (16.68%) GCP
5 650 (15.23%) GitHub Actions
6 642 (15.04%) Azure DevOps
7 586 (13.73%) Serverless
8 355 (8.32%) Amazon S3
9 336 (7.87%) AWS Lambda
10 323 (7.57%) AWS CloudFormation
11 251 (5.88%) OpenShift
12 240 (5.62%) Amazon EKS
13 223 (5.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 222 (5.20%) Amazon ECS
15 218 (5.11%) Amazon EC2
16 202 (4.73%) Power Platform
17 169 (3.96%) Azure AKS
18 144 (3.37%) Azure Data Factory
19 142 (3.33%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 126 (2.95%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 186 (4.36%) Firewall
2 130 (3.05%) DNS
3 79 (1.85%) VPN
4 75 (1.76%) TCP/IP
5 74 (1.73%) Network Security
6 49 (1.15%) SSL
7 44 (1.03%) HTTP
8 28 (0.66%) SSH
9 21 (0.49%) DHCP
10 20 (0.47%) Kerberos
11 16 (0.37%) Ethernet
11 16 (0.37%) HTTPS
11 16 (0.37%) WAN
11 16 (0.37%) Wireshark
12 15 (0.35%) OpenLDAP
13 12 (0.28%) AMQP
14 11 (0.26%) FTP
14 11 (0.26%) SD-WAN
14 11 (0.26%) SMTP
15 10 (0.23%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 362 (8.48%) PostgreSQL
2 253 (5.93%) NoSQL
3 188 (4.40%) Amazon RDS
4 181 (4.24%) MongoDB
4 181 (4.24%) SQL Server
5 152 (3.56%) Relational Database
6 147 (3.44%) Power BI
7 139 (3.26%) Data Lake
8 135 (3.16%) Data Warehouse
9 110 (2.58%) MySQL
10 88 (2.06%) Azure SQL Database
11 86 (2.01%) DynamoDB
12 74 (1.73%) Delta Lake
13 69 (1.62%) Redis
14 67 (1.57%) Oracle Database
15 61 (1.43%) Big Data
15 61 (1.43%) BigQuery
16 53 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
17 50 (1.17%) Amazon Aurora
18 49 (1.15%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 986 (23.10%) Jenkins
2 885 (20.74%) Git
3 728 (17.06%) GitLab
4 423 (9.91%) JIRA
5 188 (4.40%) Selenium
6 145 (3.40%) Cucumber
7 142 (3.33%) JUnit
8 112 (2.62%) Cypress.io
8 112 (2.62%) Postman
9 101 (2.37%) SonarQube
10 95 (2.23%) Sonatype Nexus
11 83 (1.94%) Bitbucket
12 71 (1.66%) JMeter
13 70 (1.64%) CircleCI
14 68 (1.59%) Artifactory
15 62 (1.45%) Maven
16 58 (1.36%) REST Assured
17 57 (1.34%) Gradle
18 55 (1.29%) MLflow
19 53 (1.24%) Liquibase
General
1 1,211 (28.37%) Social Skills
2 743 (17.41%) Finance
3 560 (13.12%) Public Sector
4 362 (8.48%) Banking
5 342 (8.01%) Analytical Skills
6 99 (2.32%) Documentation Skills
7 68 (1.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 65 (1.52%) Financial Institution
9 60 (1.41%) Investment Banking
10 56 (1.31%) Military
11 53 (1.24%) Marketing
12 49 (1.15%) Telecoms
13 48 (1.12%) Front Office
14 36 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
15 34 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
16 31 (0.73%) Retail
17 28 (0.66%) Manufacturing
18 22 (0.52%) Law
19 20 (0.47%) Legal
20 19 (0.45%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 1,004 (23.52%) Developer
2 586 (13.73%) Senior
3 566 (13.26%) DevOps Engineer
4 345 (8.08%) Architect
5 284 (6.65%) Data Engineer
6 279 (6.54%) Lead
7 268 (6.28%) AWS Engineer
8 249 (5.83%) Software Engineer
9 234 (5.48%) Java Developer
10 205 (4.80%) Platform Engineer
11 201 (4.71%) Azure Engineer
12 171 (4.01%) Full-Stack Developer
13 166 (3.89%) Senior Developer
14 150 (3.51%) AWS DevOps
14 150 (3.51%) Cloud Engineer
15 128 (3.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 118 (2.76%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 112 (2.62%) Python Engineer
18 110 (2.58%) Python Developer
19 101 (2.37%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 515 (12.07%) REST
2 444 (10.40%) React
3 432 (10.12%) RESTful
4 428 (10.03%) Node.js
5 358 (8.39%) Kafka
6 344 (8.06%) .NET
7 341 (7.99%) Spring
8 298 (6.98%) Spring Boot
9 224 (5.25%) AngularJS
10 212 (4.97%) HTML
11 184 (4.31%) CSS
12 169 (3.96%) JSON
13 160 (3.75%) Elastic Stack
14 154 (3.61%) OAuth
15 150 (3.51%) Playwright
16 125 (2.93%) YAML
17 122 (2.86%) PySpark
18 118 (2.76%) GraphQL
18 118 (2.76%) SOAP
19 109 (2.55%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 660 (15.46%) Cloud Native
2 271 (6.35%) Distributed Systems
3 192 (4.50%) Product Ownership
4 109 (2.55%) Onboarding
5 91 (2.13%) Public Cloud
6 89 (2.09%) Mobile App
7 83 (1.94%) Legacy Systems
8 73 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
9 70 (1.64%) Hybrid Cloud
10 68 (1.59%) Algorithms
11 66 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
12 53 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
13 52 (1.22%) Replication
14 51 (1.19%) Security Posture
15 49 (1.15%) AI Agents
15 49 (1.15%) Data Centre
16 48 (1.12%) Virtual Team
17 44 (1.03%) Private Cloud
18 42 (0.98%) NHS
19 39 (0.91%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 605 (14.18%) Linux
2 222 (5.20%) Windows
3 105 (2.46%) Unix
4 79 (1.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.55%) Android
6 63 (1.48%) Apple iOS
7 52 (1.22%) Windows Server
8 44 (1.03%) VMS
9 28 (0.66%) Ubuntu
10 22 (0.52%) CentOS
11 13 (0.30%) Solaris
12 11 (0.26%) Mac OS
13 10 (0.23%) Amazon Linux
14 4 (0.094%) zOS
15 3 (0.070%) Windows Server 2016
16 2 (0.047%) Oracle Linux
16 2 (0.047%) Robot Operating System
16 2 (0.047%) SUSE
17 1 (0.023%) FreeRTOS
17 1 (0.023%) watchOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,469 (57.85%) DevOps
2 1,570 (36.79%) Agile
3 1,376 (32.24%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,095 (25.66%) Containerisation
5 934 (21.88%) Problem-Solving
6 854 (20.01%) Test Automation
7 831 (19.47%) Microservices
8 591 (13.85%) Software Engineering
9 554 (12.98%) Observability
10 482 (11.29%) Analytics
11 461 (10.80%) AI
12 422 (9.89%) Continuous Improvement
13 414 (9.70%) Migration
14 387 (9.07%) Data Pipeline
15 384 (9.00%) Full-Stack Development
16 373 (8.74%) Scrum
17 364 (8.53%) DevSecOps
18 353 (8.27%) Mentoring
19 323 (7.57%) Platform Engineering
20 322 (7.54%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,663 (38.96%) Python
2 911 (21.34%) Java
3 877 (20.55%) SQL
4 583 (13.66%) JavaScript
5 478 (11.20%) TypeScript
6 435 (10.19%) Bash
7 403 (9.44%) C#
8 328 (7.69%) PowerShell
9 233 (5.46%) Go
10 120 (2.81%) Bicep
11 114 (2.67%) Shell Script
12 109 (2.55%) C++
13 72 (1.69%) Scala
14 59 (1.38%) Ruby
15 55 (1.29%) PHP
15 55 (1.29%) PL/SQL
16 49 (1.15%) Kotlin
16 49 (1.15%) Perl
17 47 (1.10%) Groovy
18 43 (1.01%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,115 (26.12%) Security Cleared
2 897 (21.02%) SC Cleared
3 285 (6.68%) Degree
4 185 (4.33%) Computer Science Degree
5 170 (3.98%) AWS Certification
6 125 (2.93%) BPSS Clearance
7 122 (2.86%) Azure Certification
7 122 (2.86%) DV Cleared
8 78 (1.83%) Master's Degree
9 74 (1.73%) CISSP
10 58 (1.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 53 (1.24%) Microsoft Certification
12 52 (1.22%) CISM
13 32 (0.75%) ISTQB
14 27 (0.63%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 25 (0.59%) Cisco Certification
15 25 (0.59%) Oracle Certification
16 21 (0.49%) MCP
17 18 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 16 (0.37%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 411 (9.63%) QA
2 186 (4.36%) Data Quality
3 182 (4.26%) Accessibility
4 163 (3.82%) GDPR
5 138 (3.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 115 (2.69%) NIST
7 69 (1.62%) WCAG
8 50 (1.17%) NCSC
9 46 (1.08%) PCI DSS
10 23 (0.54%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.47%) PSD2
12 19 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.45%) SLA
13 16 (0.37%) EU AI Act
13 16 (0.37%) SOC 2
14 14 (0.33%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.28%) MiFID
15 12 (0.28%) SEPA
16 11 (0.26%) HL7
17 7 (0.16%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,390 (32.57%) Docker
2 135 (3.16%) Active Directory
3 74 (1.73%) VMware Infrastructure
4 58 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.89%) vSphere
6 15 (0.35%) VMware NSX
7 12 (0.28%) HDFS
7 12 (0.28%) Squid
8 11 (0.26%) NFS
9 10 (0.23%) DFS Replication
9 10 (0.23%) Dovecot
9 10 (0.23%) Hyper-V
9 10 (0.23%) KVM
9 10 (0.23%) Postfix
9 10 (0.23%) Virtual Desktop
10 9 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
11 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.19%) zsh
12 4 (0.094%) Veritas Volume Manager
12 4 (0.094%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,555 (36.43%) Kubernetes
2 1,509 (35.36%) Terraform
3 602 (14.10%) Ansible
4 493 (11.55%) Grafana
5 430 (10.07%) Prometheus
6 126 (2.95%) Argo
7 74 (1.73%) Progress Chef
8 68 (1.59%) Puppet
9 57 (1.34%) Istio
10 47 (1.10%) Single Sign-On
11 44 (1.03%) Kibana
12 24 (0.56%) Packer
12 24 (0.56%) Podman
13 23 (0.54%) Nessus
14 19 (0.45%) Proxmox
15 16 (0.37%) ITRS Geneos
16 15 (0.35%) NetBackup
16 15 (0.35%) vRealize
17 14 (0.33%) Rancher
17 14 (0.33%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 583 (13.66%) Microsoft
2 288 (6.75%) Databricks
3 260 (6.09%) Oracle
4 234 (5.48%) Google
5 219 (5.13%) Splunk
6 146 (3.42%) Red Hat
7 116 (2.72%) VMware
8 104 (2.44%) ServiceNow
9 86 (2.01%) Salesforce
10 69 (1.62%) OpenAI
11 65 (1.52%) Dynatrace
12 56 (1.31%) SAP
13 48 (1.12%) MuleSoft
14 45 (1.05%) IBM
15 42 (0.98%) CyberArk
15 42 (0.98%) F5
16 41 (0.96%) Talend
17 32 (0.75%) Cisco
18 30 (0.70%) Denodo
19 29 (0.68%) Atlassian