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

6 months to
10 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 9 19 29
Rank change year-on-year +10 +10 -7
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,433 2,615 2,548
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.98% 8.90% 5.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.96% 9.78% 6.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,667 1,824 1,773
10th Percentile £375 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £511 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.81% -7.14% -8.33%
75th Percentile £606 £621 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £773
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £526
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.61% -4.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 29 59
10th Percentile £51.25 £42.61 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £50.00 £61.13
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -7.41% +2.89%
75th Percentile £77.50 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.60 £89.50 £72.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year - -7.14% +6.70%

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 41,920 26,731 37,187
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.71% 91.01% 85.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,154 16,984 23,772
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £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 2,513 1,182 2,587
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.28 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +61.14% -25.26% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.84 £56.00 £61.16
90th Percentile £81.24 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% +8.91%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 +10 4,511 £525 +1.94% 1,422
London +10 2,330 £541 +0.16% 566
UK excluding London +11 2,326 £500 +5.26% 1,032
Work from Home +8 1,594 £514 +0.29% 862
North of England +13 898 £500 +4.17% 311
Yorkshire +8 481 £514 +8.21% 73
South East +8 414 £510 +6.69% 318
Midlands +6 394 £488 +5.41% 98
North West +7 339 £500 - 196
West Midlands +15 316 £492 -1.60% 60
South West +11 234 £525 - 124
Scotland +6 229 £425 -14.14% 50
East of England +11 130 £550 +22.15% 97
North East +7 93 £438 +0.63% 44
East Midlands -8 71 £443 -1.67% 38
Wales +9 39 £425 -21.30% 21
Northern Ireland +23 32 £545 +28.24% 28
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
1 267 (4.91%) Confluence
2 209 (3.85%) Apache Spark
3 181 (3.33%) Apache Airflow
4 135 (2.48%) Apache
5 84 (1.55%) SAS
6 73 (1.34%) SharePoint
7 24 (0.44%) CMS
7 24 (0.44%) Jupyter
8 22 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
9 19 (0.35%) nginx
9 19 (0.35%) OpenStack
10 15 (0.28%) SharePoint Server
11 14 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
11 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
12 13 (0.24%) WebLogic
13 12 (0.22%) Camunda
14 9 (0.17%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 9 (0.17%) Appian
14 9 (0.17%) Mendix
14 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 28 (0.52%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 18 (0.33%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
5 11 (0.20%) Microsoft Project
6 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.074%) Adobe XD
8 3 (0.055%) Simulink
9 2 (0.037%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.037%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 28 (0.52%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.37%) Payment Gateway
3 13 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
4 11 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.17%) Aladdin
6 7 (0.13%) SAP CRM
6 7 (0.13%) Shopify
7 5 (0.092%) Magento
7 5 (0.092%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.074%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.055%) Findur
9 3 (0.055%) NetSuite
9 3 (0.055%) Oracle Applications
9 3 (0.055%) SAP BPC
10 2 (0.037%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 1 (0.018%) Cloudability
11 1 (0.018%) ProductWriter
11 1 (0.018%) R3 Corda
11 1 (0.018%) SAP CX
11 1 (0.018%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,382 (43.84%) AWS
2 2,357 (43.38%) Azure
3 1,162 (21.39%) GitHub
4 926 (17.04%) GCP
5 844 (15.53%) Azure DevOps
6 734 (13.51%) GitHub Actions
7 644 (11.85%) Serverless
8 413 (7.60%) Amazon S3
9 401 (7.38%) AWS Lambda
10 384 (7.07%) Power Platform
11 330 (6.07%) AWS CloudFormation
12 292 (5.37%) Amazon EKS
13 242 (4.45%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 231 (4.25%) Azure AKS
15 213 (3.92%) Amazon EC2
16 204 (3.75%) Azure Data Factory
17 194 (3.57%) Amazon ECS
17 194 (3.57%) Entra ID
18 190 (3.50%) OpenShift
19 170 (3.13%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 211 (3.88%) Firewall
2 118 (2.17%) Network Security
3 116 (2.14%) DNS
4 76 (1.40%) VPN
5 61 (1.12%) HTTP
6 42 (0.77%) TCP/IP
7 40 (0.74%) WAN
8 38 (0.70%) BGP
9 35 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 32 (0.59%) OSPF
11 29 (0.53%) VXLAN
12 28 (0.52%) BIG-IP
13 27 (0.50%) Ethernet VPN
13 27 (0.50%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 27 (0.50%) SSL
14 22 (0.40%) SAN
15 21 (0.39%) Ethernet
15 21 (0.39%) Wi-Fi
16 20 (0.37%) 3GPP
17 17 (0.31%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 360 (6.63%) PostgreSQL
2 288 (5.30%) Power BI
3 262 (4.82%) SQL Server
4 260 (4.79%) NoSQL
5 214 (3.94%) Data Lake
6 213 (3.92%) Data Warehouse
7 211 (3.88%) Relational Database
8 190 (3.50%) MongoDB
9 159 (2.93%) Amazon RDS
10 153 (2.82%) DynamoDB
11 126 (2.32%) Metadata
12 121 (2.23%) Big Data
13 113 (2.08%) Delta Lake
14 111 (2.04%) Amazon Athena
15 103 (1.90%) Amazon Redshift
15 103 (1.90%) Azure SQL Database
16 95 (1.75%) MySQL
17 93 (1.71%) BigQuery
18 74 (1.36%) Redis
19 71 (1.31%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 982 (18.07%) Git
2 980 (18.04%) Jenkins
3 774 (14.25%) GitLab
4 497 (9.15%) JIRA
5 204 (3.75%) Selenium
6 168 (3.09%) JUnit
7 140 (2.58%) Cucumber
8 125 (2.30%) Postman
9 112 (2.06%) REST Assured
10 111 (2.04%) JMeter
11 91 (1.67%) SonarQube
12 76 (1.40%) Bitbucket
13 73 (1.34%) Gradle
14 71 (1.31%) Gatling
14 71 (1.31%) Maven
15 67 (1.23%) Cypress.io
16 64 (1.18%) Mockito
17 60 (1.10%) MLflow
18 54 (0.99%) WebDriver
19 41 (0.75%) Artifactory
General
1 1,333 (24.54%) Social Skills
2 904 (16.64%) Finance
3 718 (13.22%) Public Sector
4 416 (7.66%) Analytical Skills
5 380 (6.99%) Banking
6 140 (2.58%) Documentation Skills
7 109 (2.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 78 (1.44%) Retail
9 71 (1.31%) Legal
10 67 (1.23%) Influencing Skills
11 63 (1.16%) Military
12 61 (1.12%) Investment Banking
13 57 (1.05%) Front Office
14 46 (0.85%) Financial Institution
15 44 (0.81%) Law
15 44 (0.81%) Telecoms
16 33 (0.61%) Marketing
16 33 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.59%) Publishing
18 24 (0.44%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,158 (21.31%) Developer
2 852 (15.68%) Senior
3 676 (12.44%) DevOps Engineer
4 579 (10.66%) Architect
5 475 (8.74%) Lead
6 428 (7.88%) Data Engineer
7 315 (5.80%) AWS Engineer
8 290 (5.34%) Software Engineer
9 276 (5.08%) Java Developer
10 266 (4.90%) Azure Engineer
11 241 (4.44%) Cloud Engineer
12 226 (4.16%) Platform Engineer
13 209 (3.85%) Senior Developer
14 170 (3.13%) Full-Stack Developer
15 165 (3.04%) Python Developer
16 145 (2.67%) AWS DevOps
17 143 (2.63%) GCP Engineer
18 138 (2.54%) Test Engineer
19 135 (2.48%) AWS DevOps Engineer
20 131 (2.41%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 609 (11.21%) REST
2 491 (9.04%) React
3 470 (8.65%) .NET
4 464 (8.54%) Spring
5 434 (7.99%) RESTful
6 425 (7.82%) Kafka
7 424 (7.80%) Spring Boot
8 361 (6.64%) Node.js
9 220 (4.05%) AngularJS
10 205 (3.77%) PySpark
11 196 (3.61%) Playwright
12 187 (3.44%) OAuth
13 184 (3.39%) HTML
14 161 (2.96%) CSS
15 139 (2.56%) JSON
16 138 (2.54%) YAML
17 133 (2.45%) OAuth2
18 123 (2.26%) FastAPI
19 122 (2.25%) OpenTelemetry
20 120 (2.21%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 1,056 (19.44%) Cloud Native
2 374 (6.88%) Distributed Systems
3 307 (5.65%) Product Ownership
4 139 (2.56%) Onboarding
5 132 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
6 111 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
7 108 (1.99%) Enterprise Software
8 100 (1.84%) Data Centre
9 98 (1.80%) AI Agents
10 94 (1.73%) Public Cloud
11 83 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
12 74 (1.36%) Virtual Team
13 72 (1.33%) Security Posture
14 71 (1.31%) Algorithms
15 68 (1.25%) Mobile App
16 64 (1.18%) Management Information System
17 61 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
18 51 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
19 50 (0.92%) Data Structures
20 44 (0.81%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 515 (9.48%) Linux
2 242 (4.45%) Windows
3 118 (2.17%) Unix
4 99 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (0.92%) Android
6 47 (0.87%) Apple iOS
7 45 (0.83%) Windows Server
8 39 (0.72%) VMS
9 22 (0.40%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.26%) CentOS
11 11 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 10 (0.18%) Solaris
13 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.15%) Windows Server 2008
15 7 (0.13%) AIX
15 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
15 7 (0.13%) zOS
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 4 (0.074%) Debian
18 3 (0.055%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,035 (55.86%) DevOps
2 1,849 (34.03%) Agile
3 1,699 (31.27%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,205 (22.18%) Containerisation
5 1,141 (21.00%) Test Automation
6 1,062 (19.55%) Microservices
7 938 (17.26%) Observability
8 868 (15.98%) AI
9 845 (15.55%) Problem-Solving
10 768 (14.14%) Software Engineering
11 718 (13.22%) Analytics
12 692 (12.74%) Continuous Improvement
13 608 (11.19%) Data Pipeline
14 599 (11.03%) Data Modelling
15 588 (10.82%) Platform Engineering
16 534 (9.83%) Migration
17 518 (9.53%) Scrum
18 500 (9.20%) Data Engineering
19 476 (8.76%) Mentoring
20 473 (8.71%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 2,025 (37.27%) Python
2 1,296 (23.85%) SQL
3 1,103 (20.30%) Java
4 567 (10.44%) JavaScript
5 518 (9.53%) C#
6 456 (8.39%) TypeScript
7 391 (7.20%) Bash
8 350 (6.44%) PowerShell
9 184 (3.39%) Bicep
10 145 (2.67%) Go
11 99 (1.82%) Shell Script
12 97 (1.79%) Scala
13 81 (1.49%) Kotlin
14 79 (1.45%) C++
15 70 (1.29%) Apex Code
16 61 (1.12%) Ruby
17 59 (1.09%) PL/SQL
18 48 (0.88%) T-SQL
19 41 (0.75%) Groovy
20 35 (0.64%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,508 (27.76%) Security Cleared
2 1,262 (23.23%) SC Cleared
3 276 (5.08%) Degree
4 213 (3.92%) BPSS Clearance
5 174 (3.20%) Azure Certification
6 169 (3.11%) AWS Certification
7 160 (2.94%) DV Cleared
8 137 (2.52%) Computer Science Degree
9 79 (1.45%) CISSP
10 59 (1.09%) Cisco Certification
11 51 (0.94%) CISM
11 51 (0.94%) ISTQB
12 50 (0.92%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 46 (0.85%) Master's Degree
14 45 (0.83%) Microsoft Certification
15 34 (0.63%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 28 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 27 (0.50%) CCSP
18 19 (0.35%) TOGAF Certification
19 17 (0.31%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 425 (7.82%) QA
2 339 (6.24%) Data Quality
3 235 (4.33%) Accessibility
4 174 (3.20%) GDPR
5 138 (2.54%) NIST
6 112 (2.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 107 (1.97%) WCAG
8 80 (1.47%) NCSC
9 53 (0.98%) PCI DSS
10 42 (0.77%) SLA
11 25 (0.46%) GRC
12 22 (0.40%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 20 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
14 17 (0.31%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.29%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.26%) MiFID
17 12 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 12 (0.22%) PSD2
18 10 (0.18%) HL7
18 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,376 (25.33%) Docker
2 125 (2.30%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
3 77 (1.42%) VMware Infrastructure
4 34 (0.63%) VMware NSX
5 31 (0.57%) vSphere
6 21 (0.39%) Virtual Desktop
7 16 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
8 11 (0.20%) Squid
9 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
10 8 (0.15%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.13%) Postfix
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.092%) SRDF
14 4 (0.074%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 4 (0.074%) NFS
15 3 (0.055%) Ceph
15 3 (0.055%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,702 (31.33%) Terraform
2 1,656 (30.48%) Kubernetes
3 509 (9.37%) Ansible
4 485 (8.93%) Grafana
5 421 (7.75%) Prometheus
6 110 (2.02%) Argo
7 79 (1.45%) Istio
8 61 (1.12%) Puppet
9 58 (1.07%) Single Sign-On
10 38 (0.70%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.59%) Kibana
12 27 (0.50%) Packer
13 23 (0.42%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.40%) Control-M
14 22 (0.40%) Nessus
15 17 (0.31%) IBM Guardium
16 16 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Intune
16 16 (0.29%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 745 (13.71%) Microsoft
2 364 (6.70%) Databricks
3 302 (5.56%) Google
4 258 (4.75%) Oracle
5 217 (3.99%) Splunk
6 163 (3.00%) Salesforce
7 141 (2.60%) ServiceNow
8 135 (2.48%) Red Hat
9 124 (2.28%) Dynatrace
10 110 (2.02%) VMware
11 87 (1.60%) OpenAI
12 65 (1.20%) SAP
13 60 (1.10%) IBM
14 56 (1.03%) MuleSoft
15 51 (0.94%) Cisco
16 45 (0.83%) Informatica
17 44 (0.81%) Palo Alto
18 41 (0.75%) CyberArk
19 40 (0.74%) Tenable
20 38 (0.70%) AppDynamics