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

6 months to
30 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 20 28
Rank change year-on-year +8 +8 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 4,246 2,751 2,600
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.48% 8.26% 6.01%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.03% 9.36% 6.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,982 1,909 1,911
10th Percentile £363 £385 £413
25th Percentile £423 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £550 £553
Median % change year-on-year -7.27% -0.45% -7.92%
75th Percentile £600 £651 £653
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 23 22
10th Percentile £48.00 £26.36 £56.43
25th Percentile £61.50 £62.50 £61.44
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year - -13.33% +14.32%
75th Percentile £67.00 £74.72 £77.50
90th Percentile £86.30 £94.81 £78.68
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £68.75 £75.00
% change year-on-year -5.45% -8.33% +14.32%

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 32,589 29,397 38,047
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.09% 88.30% 88.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,542 17,920 25,365
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 £724 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,036 949 1,516
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.62 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.30 £19.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.95
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -26.05% +25.57%
75th Percentile £52.52 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.00 £74.77 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.58 £30.62 £45.00
% change year-on-year -23.00% -31.97% +42.45%

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 30 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 30 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 30 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 +9 3,520 £515 -6.36% 9,591
London +3 1,833 £525 -10.26% 1,413
UK excluding London +10 1,789 £500 - 8,997
Work from Home +10 1,355 £510 -2.86% 5,614
North of England +6 622 £488 - 2,094
Midlands +20 354 £515 +3.00% 1,644
South East +6 344 £500 -9.09% 2,181
Yorkshire +2 308 £500 +2.56% 901
West Midlands +19 293 £520 +2.47% 851
North West +13 247 £466 -2.00% 1,051
Scotland +8 229 £465 -1.27% 434
South West +22 168 £550 -8.33% 1,004
East of England +11 97 £573 +30.86% 1,355
North East +12 71 £494 -10.23% 144
East Midlands +13 61 £418 -16.50% 693
Wales -1 29 £469 -13.79% 244
Northern Ireland -12 11 - - 158

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
1 164 (3.86%) Confluence
2 120 (2.83%) Apache Airflow
3 110 (2.59%) Apache Spark
4 102 (2.40%) Apache
5 84 (1.98%) SAS
6 43 (1.01%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.78%) nginx
8 26 (0.61%) WebLogic
9 22 (0.52%) JBoss
10 20 (0.47%) OpenStack
11 18 (0.42%) Anypoint
11 18 (0.42%) CMS
12 16 (0.38%) IIS
12 16 (0.38%) Mule
13 15 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
14 13 (0.31%) WebSphere
15 10 (0.24%) SugarCRM
16 9 (0.21%) Appian
16 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
17 8 (0.19%) HCL Notes
Applications
1 45 (1.06%) Microsoft Excel
2 17 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (0.24%) Mozilla Thunderbird
4 9 (0.21%) Chatbot
4 9 (0.21%) Microsoft Office
4 9 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
5 5 (0.12%) Adobe XD
5 5 (0.12%) Sketch
6 3 (0.071%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.024%) Oracle Smart View
7 1 (0.024%) Revit
7 1 (0.024%) Simulink
7 1 (0.024%) Trello
Business Applications
1 27 (0.64%) Dynamics CRM
2 10 (0.24%) Aladdin
3 4 (0.094%) Endur
3 4 (0.094%) Fidessa
3 4 (0.094%) Maximo
3 4 (0.094%) Payment Gateway
3 4 (0.094%) thinkFolio
4 3 (0.071%) Magento
4 3 (0.071%) Oracle Applications
4 3 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
4 3 (0.071%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.047%) NetSuite
5 2 (0.047%) Oracle Payables
5 2 (0.047%) Oracle Receivables
5 2 (0.047%) Orchestrade
5 2 (0.047%) Shopify
6 1 (0.024%) Actimize
6 1 (0.024%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.024%) Teamcenter
6 1 (0.024%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 1,978 (46.59%) AWS
2 1,763 (41.52%) Azure
3 949 (22.35%) GitHub
4 712 (16.77%) GCP
5 647 (15.24%) GitHub Actions
6 637 (15.00%) Azure DevOps
7 586 (13.80%) Serverless
8 355 (8.36%) Amazon S3
9 335 (7.89%) AWS Lambda
10 327 (7.70%) AWS CloudFormation
11 244 (5.75%) OpenShift
12 237 (5.58%) Amazon EKS
13 225 (5.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 220 (5.18%) Amazon ECS
15 218 (5.13%) Amazon EC2
16 204 (4.80%) Power Platform
17 171 (4.03%) Azure AKS
18 149 (3.51%) Azure Data Factory
19 142 (3.34%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 126 (2.97%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 189 (4.45%) Firewall
2 127 (2.99%) DNS
3 79 (1.86%) VPN
4 77 (1.81%) Network Security
5 72 (1.70%) TCP/IP
6 47 (1.11%) SSL
7 44 (1.04%) HTTP
8 28 (0.66%) SSH
9 21 (0.49%) Kerberos
10 18 (0.42%) DHCP
11 16 (0.38%) HTTPS
11 16 (0.38%) WAN
11 16 (0.38%) Wireshark
12 15 (0.35%) Ethernet
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 (0.24%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 363 (8.55%) PostgreSQL
2 255 (6.01%) NoSQL
3 187 (4.40%) Amazon RDS
4 180 (4.24%) MongoDB
5 179 (4.22%) SQL Server
6 151 (3.56%) Relational Database
7 148 (3.49%) Power BI
8 139 (3.27%) Data Lake
9 133 (3.13%) Data Warehouse
10 110 (2.59%) MySQL
11 91 (2.14%) Azure SQL Database
12 89 (2.10%) DynamoDB
13 72 (1.70%) Delta Lake
14 71 (1.67%) Redis
15 67 (1.58%) Oracle Database
16 61 (1.44%) Big Data
16 61 (1.44%) BigQuery
17 53 (1.25%) Amazon Redshift
18 50 (1.18%) Amazon Aurora
19 49 (1.15%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 977 (23.01%) Jenkins
2 873 (20.56%) Git
3 729 (17.17%) GitLab
4 422 (9.94%) JIRA
5 188 (4.43%) Selenium
6 146 (3.44%) Cucumber
7 144 (3.39%) JUnit
8 113 (2.66%) Postman
9 111 (2.61%) Cypress.io
10 100 (2.36%) SonarQube
11 94 (2.21%) Sonatype Nexus
12 80 (1.88%) Bitbucket
13 74 (1.74%) JMeter
14 69 (1.63%) CircleCI
15 68 (1.60%) Artifactory
16 62 (1.46%) Maven
17 58 (1.37%) REST Assured
18 57 (1.34%) Gradle
19 55 (1.30%) MLflow
20 53 (1.25%) Liquibase
General
1 1,215 (28.62%) Social Skills
2 738 (17.38%) Finance
3 561 (13.21%) Public Sector
4 359 (8.46%) Banking
5 337 (7.94%) Analytical Skills
6 99 (2.33%) Documentation Skills
7 68 (1.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 63 (1.48%) Financial Institution
9 58 (1.37%) Investment Banking
10 54 (1.27%) Military
11 52 (1.22%) Marketing
12 48 (1.13%) Front Office
13 47 (1.11%) Telecoms
14 35 (0.82%) Presentation Skills
15 34 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
16 29 (0.68%) Retail
17 28 (0.66%) Manufacturing
18 22 (0.52%) Law
19 19 (0.45%) Electronics
19 19 (0.45%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,001 (23.58%) Developer
2 580 (13.66%) Senior
3 567 (13.35%) DevOps Engineer
4 342 (8.05%) Architect
5 278 (6.55%) Lead
6 277 (6.52%) Data Engineer
7 263 (6.19%) AWS Engineer
8 246 (5.79%) Software Engineer
9 233 (5.49%) Java Developer
10 200 (4.71%) Azure Engineer
11 198 (4.66%) Platform Engineer
12 168 (3.96%) Full-Stack Developer
13 165 (3.89%) Senior Developer
14 150 (3.53%) AWS DevOps
15 148 (3.49%) Cloud Engineer
16 128 (3.01%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 119 (2.80%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 108 (2.54%) Python Engineer
19 106 (2.50%) Python Developer
20 100 (2.36%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 519 (12.22%) REST
2 441 (10.39%) React
3 431 (10.15%) Node.js
3 431 (10.15%) RESTful
4 360 (8.48%) Kafka
5 340 (8.01%) .NET
5 340 (8.01%) Spring
6 297 (6.99%) Spring Boot
7 222 (5.23%) AngularJS
8 211 (4.97%) HTML
9 183 (4.31%) CSS
10 169 (3.98%) JSON
11 159 (3.74%) Elastic Stack
12 156 (3.67%) OAuth
13 149 (3.51%) Playwright
14 122 (2.87%) YAML
15 121 (2.85%) PySpark
16 119 (2.80%) GraphQL
17 118 (2.78%) SOAP
18 106 (2.50%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 666 (15.69%) Cloud Native
2 273 (6.43%) Distributed Systems
3 193 (4.55%) Product Ownership
4 107 (2.52%) Onboarding
5 89 (2.10%) Mobile App
5 89 (2.10%) Public Cloud
6 80 (1.88%) Legacy Systems
7 72 (1.70%) Enterprise Software
8 70 (1.65%) Hybrid Cloud
9 68 (1.60%) Algorithms
10 65 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
11 52 (1.22%) Greenfield Project
12 51 (1.20%) Replication
12 51 (1.20%) Security Posture
13 50 (1.18%) AI Agents
13 50 (1.18%) Virtual Team
14 49 (1.15%) Data Centre
15 43 (1.01%) Private Cloud
16 42 (0.99%) NHS
17 38 (0.89%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 597 (14.06%) Linux
2 215 (5.06%) Windows
3 100 (2.36%) Unix
4 78 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 66 (1.55%) Android
6 63 (1.48%) Apple iOS
7 50 (1.18%) Windows Server
8 46 (1.08%) VMS
9 28 (0.66%) Ubuntu
10 22 (0.52%) CentOS
11 13 (0.31%) Solaris
12 11 (0.26%) Mac OS
13 10 (0.24%) Amazon Linux
14 4 (0.094%) zOS
15 3 (0.071%) Windows Server 2016
16 2 (0.047%) Oracle Linux
16 2 (0.047%) Robot Operating System
16 2 (0.047%) SUSE
17 1 (0.024%) MVS
17 1 (0.024%) Windows Embedded Compact
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,466 (58.08%) DevOps
2 1,559 (36.72%) Agile
3 1,365 (32.15%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,091 (25.69%) Containerisation
5 931 (21.93%) Problem-Solving
6 860 (20.25%) Test Automation
7 835 (19.67%) Microservices
8 589 (13.87%) Software Engineering
9 559 (13.17%) Observability
10 482 (11.35%) Analytics
11 461 (10.86%) AI
12 428 (10.08%) Continuous Improvement
13 409 (9.63%) Migration
14 381 (8.97%) Data Pipeline
15 380 (8.95%) Full-Stack Development
16 369 (8.69%) Scrum
17 363 (8.55%) DevSecOps
18 351 (8.27%) Mentoring
19 316 (7.44%) Platform Engineering
20 315 (7.42%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,637 (38.55%) Python
2 904 (21.29%) Java
3 874 (20.58%) SQL
4 573 (13.50%) JavaScript
5 475 (11.19%) TypeScript
6 431 (10.15%) Bash
7 393 (9.26%) C#
8 319 (7.51%) PowerShell
9 229 (5.39%) Go
10 118 (2.78%) Bicep
11 113 (2.66%) Shell Script
12 107 (2.52%) C++
13 72 (1.70%) Scala
14 60 (1.41%) Ruby
15 55 (1.30%) PHP
15 55 (1.30%) PL/SQL
16 49 (1.15%) Kotlin
17 46 (1.08%) Groovy
17 46 (1.08%) Perl
18 45 (1.06%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,107 (26.07%) Security Cleared
2 887 (20.89%) SC Cleared
3 286 (6.74%) Degree
4 187 (4.40%) Computer Science Degree
5 171 (4.03%) AWS Certification
6 130 (3.06%) BPSS Clearance
7 125 (2.94%) Azure Certification
8 121 (2.85%) DV Cleared
9 78 (1.84%) Master's Degree
10 73 (1.72%) CISSP
11 58 (1.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 53 (1.25%) Microsoft Certification
13 51 (1.20%) CISM
14 34 (0.80%) ISTQB
15 27 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 25 (0.59%) Cisco Certification
16 25 (0.59%) Oracle Certification
17 21 (0.49%) MCP
18 18 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 16 (0.38%) CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 409 (9.63%) QA
2 187 (4.40%) Data Quality
3 183 (4.31%) Accessibility
4 162 (3.82%) GDPR
5 137 (3.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 116 (2.73%) NIST
7 69 (1.63%) WCAG
8 50 (1.18%) NCSC
9 46 (1.08%) PCI DSS
10 22 (0.52%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.47%) PSD2
12 19 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.40%) SLA
14 16 (0.38%) EU AI Act
14 16 (0.38%) SOC 2
15 14 (0.33%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.28%) MiFID
16 12 (0.28%) SEPA
17 11 (0.26%) HL7
18 7 (0.16%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,388 (32.69%) Docker
2 134 (3.16%) Active Directory
3 74 (1.74%) VMware Infrastructure
4 60 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.89%) vSphere
6 15 (0.35%) VMware NSX
7 12 (0.28%) HDFS
7 12 (0.28%) Squid
8 10 (0.24%) DFS Replication
8 10 (0.24%) Dovecot
8 10 (0.24%) Hyper-V
8 10 (0.24%) KVM
8 10 (0.24%) NFS
8 10 (0.24%) Postfix
9 9 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
10 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
10 8 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
10 8 (0.19%) zsh
11 4 (0.094%) Veritas File System
11 4 (0.094%) Veritas Volume Manager
Systems Management
1 1,545 (36.39%) Kubernetes
2 1,496 (35.23%) Terraform
3 592 (13.94%) Ansible
4 495 (11.66%) Grafana
5 431 (10.15%) Prometheus
6 125 (2.94%) Argo
7 72 (1.70%) Progress Chef
8 66 (1.55%) Puppet
9 57 (1.34%) Istio
10 47 (1.11%) Single Sign-On
11 42 (0.99%) Kibana
12 24 (0.57%) Podman
13 23 (0.54%) Nessus
14 22 (0.52%) Packer
15 19 (0.45%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.38%) ITRS Geneos
17 15 (0.35%) NetBackup
17 15 (0.35%) vRealize
18 14 (0.33%) logstash
18 14 (0.33%) Rancher
Vendors
1 581 (13.68%) Microsoft
2 291 (6.85%) Databricks
3 260 (6.12%) Oracle
4 238 (5.61%) Google
5 218 (5.13%) Splunk
6 141 (3.32%) Red Hat
7 115 (2.71%) VMware
8 104 (2.45%) ServiceNow
9 83 (1.95%) Salesforce
10 70 (1.65%) OpenAI
11 67 (1.58%) Dynatrace
12 54 (1.27%) SAP
13 48 (1.13%) MuleSoft
14 45 (1.06%) IBM
15 42 (0.99%) Talend
16 41 (0.97%) CyberArk
17 40 (0.94%) F5
18 32 (0.75%) Cisco
19 31 (0.73%) Denodo
20 29 (0.68%) Atlassian