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

6 months to
9 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 19 27
Rank change year-on-year +9 +8 -3
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,870 2,968 2,676
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.18% 9.19% 6.17%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.13% 10.15% 7.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,956 2,043 1,848
10th Percentile £375 £358 £400
25th Percentile £430 £425 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.75% -8.00% -8.33%
75th Percentile £613 £615 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £525
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 40 80
10th Percentile £51.25 £44.31 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.63 £51.25 £62.50
Median hourly rate £70.00 £64.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.53% -0.77% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £83.54 £71.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £66.00
% change year-on-year +3.85% -1.52% +0.60%

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 44,694 29,246 37,042
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.15% 90.54% 85.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,812 18,436 23,663
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,657 1,477 2,496
10th Percentile £14.94 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.61 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% -3.62%

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 9 July 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 9 July 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 9 July 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 4,888 £525 +2.44% 2,056
London +8 2,550 £550 +3.77% 964
UK excluding London +10 2,505 £500 +5.26% 1,499
Work from Home +8 1,759 £520 +1.46% 912
North of England +10 967 £500 +5.26% 350
Yorkshire +7 508 £510 +4.08% 99
South East +1 437 £525 +5.00% 371
Midlands +3 415 £489 +6.46% 142
North West +8 370 £500 +2.04% 204
West Midlands +13 342 £492 -1.60% 96
South West +8 256 £525 -1.64% 386
Scotland +6 253 £425 -15.00% 90
East of England +8 146 £550 +18.09% 73
North East +8 104 £425 - 48
East Midlands -10 66 £447 +1.71% 45
Wales +3 44 £425 -10.53% 39
Northern Ireland +28 31 £523 +22.94% 62
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
1 297 (5.06%) Confluence
2 224 (3.82%) Apache Spark
3 205 (3.49%) Apache Airflow
4 154 (2.62%) Apache
5 84 (1.43%) SAS
6 70 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 32 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.43%) CMS
9 20 (0.34%) nginx
10 19 (0.32%) OpenStack
11 18 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
12 16 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
13 15 (0.26%) SharePoint Server
13 15 (0.26%) WebLogic
14 13 (0.22%) Anypoint
15 12 (0.20%) Camunda
16 9 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
16 9 (0.15%) Sitecore CMS
17 8 (0.14%) Mule
Applications
1 27 (0.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 21 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 20 (0.34%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.20%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.068%) Adobe XD
7 4 (0.068%) Simulink
8 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
9 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.017%) Maya
9 1 (0.017%) Sketch
9 1 (0.017%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 37 (0.63%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.34%) Payment Gateway
3 18 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
4 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
5 11 (0.19%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.15%) SAP CRM
7 8 (0.14%) Shopify
8 6 (0.10%) NetSuite
8 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.085%) Magento
10 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
11 3 (0.051%) Endur
11 3 (0.051%) Findur
11 3 (0.051%) SAP BPC
12 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
12 2 (0.034%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
13 1 (0.017%) Cloudability
13 1 (0.017%) SAP CX
Cloud Services
1 2,601 (44.31%) AWS
2 2,557 (43.56%) Azure
3 1,230 (20.95%) GitHub
4 989 (16.85%) GCP
5 916 (15.60%) Azure DevOps
6 780 (13.29%) GitHub Actions
7 660 (11.24%) Serverless
8 469 (7.99%) Amazon S3
9 423 (7.21%) AWS Lambda
10 422 (7.19%) Power Platform
11 321 (5.47%) AWS CloudFormation
12 300 (5.11%) Amazon EKS
13 257 (4.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 239 (4.07%) Azure AKS
15 237 (4.04%) Amazon EC2
16 218 (3.71%) Entra ID
17 200 (3.41%) Amazon ECS
18 189 (3.22%) Azure Data Factory
18 189 (3.22%) Snowflake
19 184 (3.13%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 214 (3.65%) Firewall
2 131 (2.23%) DNS
3 130 (2.21%) Network Security
4 94 (1.60%) VPN
5 63 (1.07%) HTTP
6 52 (0.89%) TCP/IP
7 47 (0.80%) WAN
8 43 (0.73%) BGP
9 39 (0.66%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.58%) OSPF
11 32 (0.55%) BIG-IP
12 31 (0.53%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 30 (0.51%) VXLAN
14 28 (0.48%) Ethernet VPN
15 27 (0.46%) SSL
16 22 (0.37%) Internet
17 21 (0.36%) 3GPP
17 21 (0.36%) Ethernet
17 21 (0.36%) Wi-Fi
18 20 (0.34%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 386 (6.58%) PostgreSQL
2 312 (5.32%) Power BI
3 268 (4.57%) SQL Server
4 266 (4.53%) NoSQL
5 249 (4.24%) Data Warehouse
6 247 (4.21%) Relational Database
7 204 (3.48%) MongoDB
8 199 (3.39%) Data Lake
9 171 (2.91%) Amazon RDS
10 152 (2.59%) DynamoDB
11 137 (2.33%) Metadata
12 130 (2.21%) Amazon Redshift
13 121 (2.06%) Big Data
14 119 (2.03%) Amazon Athena
15 115 (1.96%) Delta Lake
16 99 (1.69%) MySQL
17 96 (1.64%) BigQuery
18 94 (1.60%) Azure SQL Database
19 77 (1.31%) Redis
20 71 (1.21%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,070 (18.23%) Git
2 1,040 (17.72%) Jenkins
3 815 (13.88%) GitLab
4 557 (9.49%) JIRA
5 216 (3.68%) Selenium
6 192 (3.27%) JUnit
7 138 (2.35%) Cucumber
8 133 (2.27%) Postman
9 116 (1.98%) JMeter
9 116 (1.98%) REST Assured
10 97 (1.65%) SonarQube
11 89 (1.52%) Maven
12 87 (1.48%) Gradle
13 85 (1.45%) Bitbucket
14 83 (1.41%) Cypress.io
15 78 (1.33%) Gatling
16 70 (1.19%) Mockito
17 60 (1.02%) MLflow
17 60 (1.02%) WebDriver
18 42 (0.72%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,439 (24.51%) Social Skills
2 1,010 (17.21%) Finance
3 805 (13.71%) Public Sector
4 470 (8.01%) Analytical Skills
5 440 (7.50%) Banking
6 144 (2.45%) Documentation Skills
7 121 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 102 (1.74%) Retail
9 76 (1.29%) Investment Banking
10 72 (1.23%) Legal
11 69 (1.18%) Influencing Skills
12 67 (1.14%) Military
13 64 (1.09%) Front Office
14 58 (0.99%) Telecoms
15 50 (0.85%) Law
16 47 (0.80%) Financial Institution
17 40 (0.68%) Marketing
18 31 (0.53%) Manufacturing
18 31 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.53%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,275 (21.72%) Developer
2 936 (15.95%) Senior
3 735 (12.52%) DevOps Engineer
4 623 (10.61%) Architect
5 526 (8.96%) Lead
6 467 (7.96%) Data Engineer
7 338 (5.76%) AWS Engineer
8 324 (5.52%) Java Developer
9 314 (5.35%) Software Engineer
10 278 (4.74%) Azure Engineer
11 255 (4.34%) Cloud Engineer
12 248 (4.22%) Platform Engineer
13 233 (3.97%) Senior Developer
14 181 (3.08%) Full-Stack Developer
15 169 (2.88%) Python Developer
16 155 (2.64%) AWS DevOps
17 147 (2.50%) Solutions Architect
18 145 (2.47%) GCP Engineer
19 144 (2.45%) Test Engineer
20 143 (2.44%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 702 (11.96%) REST
2 527 (8.98%) React
3 526 (8.96%) Spring
4 514 (8.76%) .NET
5 489 (8.33%) RESTful
6 464 (7.90%) Spring Boot
7 462 (7.87%) Kafka
8 377 (6.42%) Node.js
9 228 (3.88%) Playwright
10 223 (3.80%) PySpark
11 217 (3.70%) AngularJS
12 201 (3.42%) HTML
13 190 (3.24%) OAuth
14 174 (2.96%) CSS
15 170 (2.90%) JSON
16 139 (2.37%) OAuth2
17 130 (2.21%) YAML
18 125 (2.13%) GraphQL
19 120 (2.04%) SOAP
20 119 (2.03%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 1,178 (20.07%) Cloud Native
2 417 (7.10%) Distributed Systems
3 348 (5.93%) Product Ownership
4 176 (3.00%) Onboarding
5 150 (2.56%) Legacy Systems
6 147 (2.50%) Enterprise Software
7 121 (2.06%) Hybrid Cloud
8 120 (2.04%) AI Agents
9 110 (1.87%) Data Centre
10 96 (1.64%) Public Cloud
11 90 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
11 90 (1.53%) Security Posture
12 81 (1.38%) Virtual Team
13 76 (1.29%) Algorithms
14 72 (1.23%) Mobile App
15 66 (1.12%) Management Information System
16 64 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
17 63 (1.07%) Data Structures
18 60 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
19 56 (0.95%) Enterprise Cloud
Operating Systems
1 568 (9.68%) Linux
2 261 (4.45%) Windows
3 124 (2.11%) Unix
4 109 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 53 (0.90%) Windows Server
6 50 (0.85%) Android
7 47 (0.80%) Apple iOS
8 28 (0.48%) VMS
9 20 (0.34%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.26%) Mac OS
11 12 (0.20%) AIX
12 11 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
13 10 (0.17%) Solaris
14 9 (0.15%) CentOS
14 9 (0.15%) zOS
15 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
16 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
17 6 (0.10%) Rocky
18 5 (0.085%) Embedded Linux
19 4 (0.068%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,292 (56.08%) DevOps
2 2,104 (35.84%) Agile
3 1,833 (31.23%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,326 (22.59%) Containerisation
5 1,288 (21.94%) Test Automation
6 1,150 (19.59%) Microservices
7 992 (16.90%) Observability
8 953 (16.24%) AI
9 909 (15.49%) Problem-Solving
10 875 (14.91%) Software Engineering
11 763 (13.00%) Analytics
12 757 (12.90%) Continuous Improvement
13 678 (11.55%) Platform Engineering
14 676 (11.52%) Data Pipeline
15 625 (10.65%) Data Modelling
16 585 (9.97%) Scrum
17 583 (9.93%) Migration
18 551 (9.39%) Data Engineering
19 548 (9.34%) Event-Driven
20 513 (8.74%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 2,173 (37.02%) Python
2 1,341 (22.84%) SQL
3 1,212 (20.65%) Java
4 603 (10.27%) JavaScript
5 568 (9.68%) C#
6 502 (8.55%) TypeScript
7 451 (7.68%) Bash
8 366 (6.24%) PowerShell
9 208 (3.54%) Bicep
10 171 (2.91%) Go
11 100 (1.70%) Shell Script
12 98 (1.67%) Scala
13 95 (1.62%) Kotlin
14 85 (1.45%) Apex Code
15 81 (1.38%) C++
16 57 (0.97%) PL/SQL
17 54 (0.92%) Groovy
18 52 (0.89%) Ruby
19 49 (0.83%) T-SQL
20 29 (0.49%) Swift
Qualifications
1 1,666 (28.38%) Security Cleared
2 1,398 (23.82%) SC Cleared
3 305 (5.20%) Degree
4 231 (3.94%) BPSS Clearance
5 189 (3.22%) DV Cleared
6 175 (2.98%) AWS Certification
7 174 (2.96%) Azure Certification
8 149 (2.54%) Computer Science Degree
9 93 (1.58%) CISSP
10 64 (1.09%) Cisco Certification
11 55 (0.94%) Master's Degree
12 54 (0.92%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 53 (0.90%) CISM
14 51 (0.87%) Microsoft Certification
15 49 (0.83%) ISTQB
16 37 (0.63%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 28 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 28 (0.48%) CCSP
18 27 (0.46%) TOGAF Certification
19 21 (0.36%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 464 (7.90%) QA
2 375 (6.39%) Data Quality
3 277 (4.72%) Accessibility
4 165 (2.81%) GDPR
5 132 (2.25%) NIST
6 113 (1.93%) WCAG
7 107 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 83 (1.41%) NCSC
9 52 (0.89%) PCI DSS
10 37 (0.63%) SLA
11 26 (0.44%) GRC
12 21 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
13 17 (0.29%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.27%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 15 (0.26%) ISO 20022
15 15 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 13 (0.22%) HL7
17 12 (0.20%) PSD2
18 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
19 10 (0.17%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,508 (25.69%) Docker
2 142 (2.42%) Active Directory
3 87 (1.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.35%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.65%) VMware NSX
6 33 (0.56%) vSphere
7 21 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 19 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 14 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
10 13 (0.22%) Hyper-V
10 13 (0.22%) Squid
11 7 (0.12%) HDFS
11 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.12%) Postfix
12 5 (0.085%) KVM
12 5 (0.085%) RACF
12 5 (0.085%) SRDF
13 4 (0.068%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
13 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 4 (0.068%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,854 (31.58%) Terraform
2 1,807 (30.78%) Kubernetes
3 536 (9.13%) Ansible
4 510 (8.69%) Grafana
5 427 (7.27%) Prometheus
6 117 (1.99%) Argo
7 65 (1.11%) Istio
7 65 (1.11%) Puppet
8 54 (0.92%) Single Sign-On
9 45 (0.77%) Progress Chef
10 31 (0.53%) Kibana
10 31 (0.53%) Packer
11 25 (0.43%) Control-M
11 25 (0.43%) vCenter Server
12 21 (0.36%) Kustomize
12 21 (0.36%) Nessus
13 18 (0.31%) IBM Guardium
14 16 (0.27%) Microsoft Intune
14 16 (0.27%) Rancher
15 15 (0.26%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 813 (13.85%) Microsoft
2 377 (6.42%) Databricks
3 319 (5.43%) Google
4 280 (4.77%) Oracle
5 225 (3.83%) Splunk
6 199 (3.39%) Salesforce
7 141 (2.40%) ServiceNow
8 132 (2.25%) Dynatrace
9 121 (2.06%) VMware
10 119 (2.03%) Red Hat
11 82 (1.40%) OpenAI
12 76 (1.29%) MuleSoft
12 76 (1.29%) SAP
13 66 (1.12%) IBM
14 61 (1.04%) Informatica
15 60 (1.02%) Cisco
16 46 (0.78%) Foundry
16 46 (0.78%) Palo Alto
17 42 (0.72%) CyberArk
18 41 (0.70%) F5