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

6 months to
27 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 18 27
Rank change year-on-year +7 +9 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,858 3,113 2,573
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.09% 9.45% 6.41%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.06% 10.45% 7.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,931 2,146 1,762
10th Percentile £375 £358 £400
25th Percentile £431 £422 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -7.95%
75th Percentile £613 £615 £650
90th Percentile £700 £715 £774
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £525
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 42 73
10th Percentile £51.25 £44.96 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 -
Median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.85% - -1.22%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £84.00 £81.66 £71.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £67.25
% change year-on-year +3.85% -3.35% +2.51%

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 44,856 29,798 34,328
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.96% 90.42% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,798 18,719 22,071
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,670 1,616 2,026
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £13.56
25th Percentile £20.02 £17.33 £17.55
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.38 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.38 £68.75 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.82 £40.00
% change year-on-year +84.59% -40.46% -

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 4,893 £525 +2.44% 1,936
London +7 2,554 £550 +4.76% 990
UK excluding London +8 2,490 £500 +5.26% 1,180
Work from Home +7 1,787 £513 +2.50% 969
North of England +10 941 £500 +5.26% 378
Yorkshire +5 479 £502 +5.68% 107
South East -3 448 £525 +5.00% 324
Midlands +3 412 £481 +4.68% 140
North West +5 369 £525 +6.92% 204
West Midlands +17 345 £481 -2.83% 102
South West +4 272 £525 +0.48% 147
Scotland +5 251 £425 -15.00% 82
East of England +7 144 £543 +15.62% 72
North East +3 108 £425 - 68
East Midlands -12 60 £470 +6.43% 38
Wales -2 38 £450 -4.00% 28
Northern Ireland +21 23 £523 -0.48% 21
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
1 293 (5.00%) Confluence
2 212 (3.62%) Apache Spark
3 208 (3.55%) Apache Airflow
4 153 (2.61%) Apache
5 82 (1.40%) SAS
6 70 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.56%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.36%) CMS
9 20 (0.34%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.32%) nginx
11 18 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
12 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
12 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.24%) Anypoint
13 14 (0.24%) WebLogic
14 10 (0.17%) Camunda
14 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Exchange
15 9 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
16 8 (0.14%) IIS
16 8 (0.14%) Mule
Applications
1 21 (0.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.34%) Chatbot
3 16 (0.27%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 14 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
5 9 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
5 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.068%) Simulink
7 3 (0.051%) Adobe XD
7 3 (0.051%) Trello
8 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
8 2 (0.034%) Sketch
8 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.017%) Maya
Business Applications
1 40 (0.68%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.34%) Payment Gateway
3 18 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
4 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
5 12 (0.20%) Aladdin
6 10 (0.17%) SAP CRM
7 8 (0.14%) Shopify
8 7 (0.12%) NetSuite
9 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 5 (0.085%) Magento
11 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
12 3 (0.051%) Endur
12 3 (0.051%) Findur
12 3 (0.051%) SAP BPC
13 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
13 2 (0.034%) R3 Corda
13 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
13 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
13 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 2,618 (44.69%) AWS
2 2,555 (43.62%) Azure
3 1,235 (21.08%) GitHub
4 995 (16.99%) GCP
5 912 (15.57%) Azure DevOps
6 791 (13.50%) GitHub Actions
7 640 (10.93%) Serverless
8 449 (7.66%) Amazon S3
9 418 (7.14%) Power Platform
10 417 (7.12%) AWS Lambda
11 318 (5.43%) Amazon EKS
12 303 (5.17%) AWS CloudFormation
13 263 (4.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 245 (4.18%) Azure AKS
15 228 (3.89%) Entra ID
16 221 (3.77%) Amazon EC2
17 195 (3.33%) Snowflake
18 192 (3.28%) Amazon ECS
19 176 (3.00%) Azure Data Factory
20 163 (2.78%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 222 (3.79%) Firewall
2 146 (2.49%) DNS
3 120 (2.05%) Network Security
4 101 (1.72%) VPN
5 70 (1.19%) TCP/IP
6 60 (1.02%) HTTP
7 46 (0.79%) WAN
8 41 (0.70%) BGP
9 38 (0.65%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 32 (0.55%) BIG-IP
12 31 (0.53%) SSL
12 31 (0.53%) VXLAN
13 30 (0.51%) OSPF
14 29 (0.50%) Ethernet VPN
15 26 (0.44%) Internet
16 23 (0.39%) DHCP
17 20 (0.34%) 3GPP
17 20 (0.34%) 5G
18 19 (0.32%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 402 (6.86%) PostgreSQL
2 313 (5.34%) Power BI
3 263 (4.49%) NoSQL
4 259 (4.42%) SQL Server
5 256 (4.37%) Data Warehouse
6 253 (4.32%) Relational Database
7 219 (3.74%) MongoDB
8 201 (3.43%) Data Lake
9 161 (2.75%) Amazon RDS
10 157 (2.68%) DynamoDB
11 138 (2.36%) Metadata
12 127 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
13 113 (1.93%) MySQL
14 112 (1.91%) Delta Lake
15 109 (1.86%) Amazon Athena
15 109 (1.86%) Big Data
16 103 (1.76%) BigQuery
17 90 (1.54%) Azure SQL Database
18 84 (1.43%) Redis
19 73 (1.25%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,082 (18.47%) Git
2 1,019 (17.40%) Jenkins
3 796 (13.59%) GitLab
4 541 (9.24%) JIRA
5 211 (3.60%) Selenium
6 186 (3.18%) JUnit
7 134 (2.29%) Cucumber
8 119 (2.03%) Postman
9 110 (1.88%) JMeter
10 108 (1.84%) REST Assured
11 105 (1.79%) Bitbucket
11 105 (1.79%) Maven
12 100 (1.71%) SonarQube
13 96 (1.64%) Gradle
14 88 (1.50%) Cypress.io
15 80 (1.37%) Gatling
16 71 (1.21%) Mockito
17 57 (0.97%) MLflow
18 56 (0.96%) WebDriver
19 45 (0.77%) Claude Code
General
1 1,447 (24.70%) Social Skills
2 1,000 (17.07%) Finance
3 827 (14.12%) Public Sector
4 476 (8.13%) Analytical Skills
5 438 (7.48%) Banking
6 128 (2.19%) Documentation Skills
7 127 (2.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 113 (1.93%) Retail
9 71 (1.21%) Investment Banking
9 71 (1.21%) Military
10 70 (1.19%) Front Office
11 69 (1.18%) Legal
12 65 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 63 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
14 52 (0.89%) Law
15 47 (0.80%) Financial Institution
16 41 (0.70%) Marketing
17 34 (0.58%) Publishing
18 32 (0.55%) Manufacturing
19 30 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,308 (22.33%) Developer
2 975 (16.64%) Senior
3 722 (12.33%) DevOps Engineer
4 611 (10.43%) Architect
5 542 (9.25%) Lead
6 454 (7.75%) Data Engineer
7 337 (5.75%) AWS Engineer
7 337 (5.75%) Java Developer
8 316 (5.39%) Software Engineer
9 274 (4.68%) Azure Engineer
10 265 (4.52%) Platform Engineer
10 265 (4.52%) Senior Developer
11 253 (4.32%) Cloud Engineer
12 188 (3.21%) Full-Stack Developer
13 156 (2.66%) Python Developer
14 152 (2.59%) Solutions Architect
15 148 (2.53%) AWS DevOps
16 140 (2.39%) GCP Engineer
17 138 (2.36%) Test Engineer
18 137 (2.34%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 755 (12.89%) REST
2 529 (9.03%) React
3 528 (9.01%) Spring
4 516 (8.81%) .NET
5 491 (8.38%) RESTful
6 486 (8.30%) Kafka
7 466 (7.95%) Spring Boot
8 385 (6.57%) Node.js
9 231 (3.94%) Playwright
10 218 (3.72%) HTML
11 213 (3.64%) PySpark
12 199 (3.40%) AngularJS
13 194 (3.31%) CSS
14 190 (3.24%) JSON
14 190 (3.24%) OAuth
15 142 (2.42%) OAuth2
16 126 (2.15%) SOAP
17 117 (2.00%) FastAPI
18 115 (1.96%) .NET Core
18 115 (1.96%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 1,181 (20.16%) Cloud Native
2 459 (7.84%) Distributed Systems
3 356 (6.08%) Product Ownership
4 187 (3.19%) Onboarding
5 173 (2.95%) Enterprise Software
6 145 (2.48%) Legacy Systems
7 139 (2.37%) AI Agents
8 134 (2.29%) Hybrid Cloud
9 105 (1.79%) Data Centre
10 99 (1.69%) Data Protection Act
11 96 (1.64%) Public Cloud
12 92 (1.57%) Security Posture
13 80 (1.37%) Algorithms
14 75 (1.28%) Virtual Team
15 73 (1.25%) Data Structures
16 71 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
17 69 (1.18%) Mobile App
18 64 (1.09%) Management Information System
19 62 (1.06%) Enterprise Cloud
20 58 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 568 (9.70%) Linux
2 270 (4.61%) Windows
3 126 (2.15%) Unix
4 108 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 58 (0.99%) Windows Server
6 53 (0.90%) Android
7 50 (0.85%) Apple iOS
8 27 (0.46%) VMS
9 18 (0.31%) Ubuntu
10 16 (0.27%) AIX
11 15 (0.26%) Mac OS
12 10 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 9 (0.15%) Solaris
13 9 (0.15%) zOS
14 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
15 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.085%) CentOS
17 4 (0.068%) Rocky
18 3 (0.051%) Amazon Linux
18 3 (0.051%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,293 (56.21%) DevOps
2 2,181 (37.23%) Agile
3 1,845 (31.50%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,315 (22.45%) Test Automation
5 1,302 (22.23%) Containerisation
6 1,199 (20.47%) Microservices
7 1,024 (17.48%) Observability
8 1,003 (17.12%) AI
9 939 (16.03%) Software Engineering
10 919 (15.69%) Problem-Solving
11 806 (13.76%) Continuous Improvement
12 757 (12.92%) Analytics
13 707 (12.07%) Platform Engineering
14 683 (11.66%) Data Pipeline
15 625 (10.67%) Data Modelling
16 619 (10.57%) Scrum
17 595 (10.16%) Migration
18 574 (9.80%) Event-Driven
19 543 (9.27%) Data Engineering
20 531 (9.06%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 2,139 (36.51%) Python
2 1,324 (22.60%) SQL
3 1,215 (20.74%) Java
4 613 (10.46%) JavaScript
5 552 (9.42%) C#
6 495 (8.45%) TypeScript
7 482 (8.23%) Bash
8 388 (6.62%) PowerShell
9 221 (3.77%) Bicep
10 167 (2.85%) Go
11 106 (1.81%) Kotlin
12 103 (1.76%) Shell Script
13 84 (1.43%) Apex Code
14 79 (1.35%) Scala
15 76 (1.30%) C++
16 63 (1.08%) PL/SQL
17 60 (1.02%) Groovy
18 52 (0.89%) Ruby
19 45 (0.77%) T-SQL
20 31 (0.53%) Swift
Qualifications
1 1,667 (28.46%) Security Cleared
2 1,396 (23.83%) SC Cleared
3 301 (5.14%) Degree
4 231 (3.94%) BPSS Clearance
5 207 (3.53%) DV Cleared
6 191 (3.26%) Azure Certification
7 179 (3.06%) AWS Certification
8 144 (2.46%) Computer Science Degree
9 94 (1.60%) CISSP
10 63 (1.08%) Cisco Certification
11 58 (0.99%) Microsoft Certification
12 51 (0.87%) CISM
13 50 (0.85%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 47 (0.80%) ISTQB
15 46 (0.79%) Master's Degree
16 38 (0.65%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 28 (0.48%) CCSP
18 27 (0.46%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 24 (0.41%) TOGAF Certification
20 20 (0.34%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 489 (8.35%) QA
2 393 (6.71%) Data Quality
3 303 (5.17%) Accessibility
4 156 (2.66%) GDPR
5 123 (2.10%) WCAG
6 112 (1.91%) NIST
7 90 (1.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 70 (1.19%) NCSC
9 42 (0.72%) PCI DSS
10 33 (0.56%) SLA
11 28 (0.48%) GRC
12 22 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
13 15 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
15 13 (0.22%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.22%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.20%) HL7
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
18 10 (0.17%) PSD2
19 8 (0.14%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,534 (26.19%) Docker
2 157 (2.68%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.69%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.72%) VMware NSX
6 36 (0.61%) vSphere
7 21 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (0.29%) Hyper-V
8 17 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
8 17 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.22%) Squid
10 9 (0.15%) KVM
11 8 (0.14%) HDFS
12 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 6 (0.10%) Ceph
14 5 (0.085%) SRDF
15 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 4 (0.068%) NFS
15 4 (0.068%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,856 (31.68%) Terraform
2 1,807 (30.85%) Kubernetes
3 541 (9.24%) Ansible
4 505 (8.62%) Grafana
5 419 (7.15%) Prometheus
6 123 (2.10%) Argo
7 65 (1.11%) Puppet
8 59 (1.01%) Istio
9 46 (0.79%) Progress Chef
10 44 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
11 31 (0.53%) Kibana
11 31 (0.53%) Packer
12 26 (0.44%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
14 21 (0.36%) Control-M
15 20 (0.34%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.27%) Nessus
16 16 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
17 15 (0.26%) Jamf Pro
17 15 (0.26%) Podman
Vendors
1 822 (14.03%) Microsoft
2 375 (6.40%) Databricks
3 329 (5.62%) Google
4 299 (5.10%) Oracle
5 216 (3.69%) Splunk
6 193 (3.29%) Salesforce
7 144 (2.46%) Dynatrace
8 139 (2.37%) ServiceNow
9 135 (2.30%) VMware
10 114 (1.95%) Red Hat
11 86 (1.47%) OpenAI
12 84 (1.43%) MuleSoft
13 76 (1.30%) SAP
14 73 (1.25%) IBM
15 65 (1.11%) Cisco
16 64 (1.09%) Informatica
17 48 (0.82%) Foundry
18 44 (0.75%) F5
18 44 (0.75%) Palo Alto
19 37 (0.63%) Atlassian