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

6 months to
1 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 19 26
Rank change year-on-year +8 +7 -3
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,700 2,814 2,610
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.09% 9.15% 6.05%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.05% 10.07% 7.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,827 1,945 1,804
10th Percentile £375 £358 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £459
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.75% -8.00% -8.33%
75th Percentile £606 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £525
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 124 34 77
10th Percentile £51.25 £43.10 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £50.31 £62.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.20 £87.01 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year - -2.99% +2.13%

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 43,674 27,949 36,811
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.97% 90.88% 85.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,163 17,650 23,450
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.79% -4.57% -4.55%
75th Percentile £621 £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 2,623 1,373 2,554
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.61 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +3.81%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.86 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +75.84% -34.42% +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 1 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 1 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 1 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 4,758 £525 +2.44% 1,930
London +10 2,478 £542 +2.21% 930
UK excluding London +9 2,433 £500 +5.26% 1,263
Work from Home +8 1,701 £514 +0.29% 1,061
North of England +10 953 £500 +2.83% 317
Yorkshire +8 497 £514 +2.80% 86
South East -1 420 £525 +5.00% 419
Midlands +4 407 £488 +5.98% 141
North West +8 368 £500 +2.30% 189
West Midlands +14 333 £492 -1.60% 89
South West +11 244 £525 -1.64% 163
Scotland +4 239 £425 -14.14% 64
East of England +11 139 £550 +18.02% 77
North East +8 103 £425 +0.59% 45
East Midlands -10 67 £447 +1.71% 52
Wales +8 42 £425 -15.08% 55
Northern Ireland +24 31 £523 +22.94% 45
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
1 285 (5.00%) Confluence
2 221 (3.88%) Apache Spark
3 202 (3.54%) Apache Airflow
4 147 (2.58%) Apache
5 82 (1.44%) SAS
6 74 (1.30%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.54%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.40%) CMS
9 20 (0.35%) nginx
10 19 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
11 17 (0.30%) OpenStack
11 17 (0.30%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.26%) SharePoint Server
12 15 (0.26%) WebSphere
13 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) Camunda
15 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.14%) Adobe Experience Manager
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
Applications
1 27 (0.47%) Microsoft Excel
2 21 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 20 (0.35%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.16%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.070%) Adobe XD
8 3 (0.053%) Simulink
9 2 (0.035%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.035%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 35 (0.61%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.35%) Payment Gateway
3 15 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.21%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.14%) Shopify
7 7 (0.12%) SAP CRM
8 6 (0.11%) NetSuite
9 5 (0.088%) Magento
9 5 (0.088%) SAP MDG
10 4 (0.070%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.070%) Sage X3
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
12 2 (0.035%) Endur
12 2 (0.035%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.035%) Temenos T24
13 1 (0.018%) Cloudability
13 1 (0.018%) PeopleSoft HCM
13 1 (0.018%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 2,506 (43.96%) AWS
2 2,477 (43.46%) Azure
3 1,192 (20.91%) GitHub
4 954 (16.74%) GCP
5 901 (15.81%) Azure DevOps
6 751 (13.18%) GitHub Actions
7 657 (11.53%) Serverless
8 441 (7.74%) Amazon S3
9 412 (7.23%) Power Platform
10 410 (7.19%) AWS Lambda
11 315 (5.53%) AWS CloudFormation
12 282 (4.95%) Amazon EKS
13 249 (4.37%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 240 (4.21%) Azure AKS
15 231 (4.05%) Amazon EC2
16 212 (3.72%) Entra ID
17 196 (3.44%) Azure Data Factory
18 190 (3.33%) Amazon ECS
19 187 (3.28%) Snowflake
20 180 (3.16%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 207 (3.63%) Firewall
2 130 (2.28%) Network Security
3 119 (2.09%) DNS
4 86 (1.51%) VPN
5 62 (1.09%) HTTP
6 47 (0.82%) WAN
7 45 (0.79%) TCP/IP
8 41 (0.72%) BGP
9 39 (0.68%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.60%) OSPF
11 32 (0.56%) BIG-IP
12 31 (0.54%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 30 (0.53%) VXLAN
14 28 (0.49%) Ethernet VPN
15 27 (0.47%) SSL
16 21 (0.37%) Ethernet
16 21 (0.37%) Internet
16 21 (0.37%) Wi-Fi
17 20 (0.35%) 3GPP
17 20 (0.35%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 372 (6.53%) PostgreSQL
2 307 (5.39%) Power BI
3 269 (4.72%) NoSQL
3 269 (4.72%) SQL Server
4 245 (4.30%) Data Warehouse
5 235 (4.12%) Relational Database
6 205 (3.60%) Data Lake
7 203 (3.56%) MongoDB
8 163 (2.86%) Amazon RDS
9 152 (2.67%) DynamoDB
10 130 (2.28%) Metadata
11 127 (2.23%) Amazon Redshift
12 120 (2.11%) Big Data
13 116 (2.04%) Amazon Athena
14 112 (1.96%) Delta Lake
15 98 (1.72%) Azure SQL Database
16 95 (1.67%) BigQuery
17 94 (1.65%) MySQL
18 74 (1.30%) Redis
19 68 (1.19%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,049 (18.40%) Git
2 1,020 (17.89%) Jenkins
3 802 (14.07%) GitLab
4 540 (9.47%) JIRA
5 210 (3.68%) Selenium
6 189 (3.32%) JUnit
7 138 (2.42%) Cucumber
8 130 (2.28%) Postman
9 115 (2.02%) REST Assured
10 114 (2.00%) JMeter
11 97 (1.70%) SonarQube
12 86 (1.51%) Maven
13 83 (1.46%) Gradle
14 78 (1.37%) Bitbucket
15 77 (1.35%) Cypress.io
16 75 (1.32%) Gatling
17 71 (1.25%) Mockito
18 60 (1.05%) MLflow
19 58 (1.02%) WebDriver
20 41 (0.72%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,387 (24.33%) Social Skills
2 985 (17.28%) Finance
3 779 (13.67%) Public Sector
4 449 (7.88%) Analytical Skills
5 433 (7.60%) Banking
6 144 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
7 120 (2.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 95 (1.67%) Retail
9 77 (1.35%) Investment Banking
10 73 (1.28%) Legal
11 70 (1.23%) Influencing Skills
12 65 (1.14%) Military
13 63 (1.11%) Front Office
14 55 (0.96%) Telecoms
15 50 (0.88%) Law
16 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
17 38 (0.67%) Marketing
18 32 (0.56%) Presentation Skills
18 32 (0.56%) Publishing
19 26 (0.46%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,231 (21.60%) Developer
2 899 (15.77%) Senior
3 713 (12.51%) DevOps Engineer
4 604 (10.60%) Architect
5 501 (8.79%) Lead
6 456 (8.00%) Data Engineer
7 331 (5.81%) AWS Engineer
8 309 (5.42%) Software Engineer
9 308 (5.40%) Java Developer
10 275 (4.82%) Azure Engineer
11 248 (4.35%) Cloud Engineer
12 240 (4.21%) Platform Engineer
13 223 (3.91%) Senior Developer
14 175 (3.07%) Full-Stack Developer
15 169 (2.96%) Python Developer
16 154 (2.70%) AWS DevOps
17 142 (2.49%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 141 (2.47%) GCP Engineer
19 139 (2.44%) Solutions Architect
20 138 (2.42%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 669 (11.74%) REST
2 509 (8.93%) Spring
3 508 (8.91%) React
4 506 (8.88%) .NET
5 470 (8.25%) RESTful
6 450 (7.89%) Spring Boot
7 449 (7.88%) Kafka
8 358 (6.28%) Node.js
9 224 (3.93%) PySpark
10 218 (3.82%) Playwright
11 213 (3.74%) AngularJS
12 194 (3.40%) HTML
13 190 (3.33%) OAuth
14 170 (2.98%) CSS
15 163 (2.86%) JSON
16 138 (2.42%) OAuth2
17 134 (2.35%) YAML
18 122 (2.14%) FastAPI
18 122 (2.14%) GraphQL
19 117 (2.05%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 1,143 (20.05%) Cloud Native
2 407 (7.14%) Distributed Systems
3 339 (5.95%) Product Ownership
4 154 (2.70%) Onboarding
5 143 (2.51%) Legacy Systems
6 138 (2.42%) Enterprise Software
7 118 (2.07%) Hybrid Cloud
8 115 (2.02%) AI Agents
9 105 (1.84%) Data Centre
10 95 (1.67%) Public Cloud
11 88 (1.54%) Security Posture
12 87 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
13 77 (1.35%) Algorithms
14 76 (1.33%) Virtual Team
15 70 (1.23%) Mobile App
16 69 (1.21%) Management Information System
17 61 (1.07%) Data Structures
17 61 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
18 59 (1.04%) Self-Motivation
19 54 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 542 (9.51%) Linux
2 253 (4.44%) Windows
3 120 (2.11%) Unix
4 107 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 51 (0.89%) Windows Server
6 50 (0.88%) Android
7 46 (0.81%) Apple iOS
8 30 (0.53%) VMS
9 23 (0.40%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
11 12 (0.21%) CentOS
12 11 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
13 10 (0.18%) AIX
13 10 (0.18%) Solaris
14 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
15 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
15 7 (0.12%) zOS
16 6 (0.11%) Rocky
17 4 (0.070%) Debian
18 3 (0.053%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,205 (56.23%) DevOps
2 2,026 (35.54%) Agile
3 1,764 (30.95%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,276 (22.39%) Containerisation
5 1,239 (21.74%) Test Automation
6 1,110 (19.47%) Microservices
7 953 (16.72%) Observability
8 924 (16.21%) AI
9 886 (15.54%) Problem-Solving
10 838 (14.70%) Software Engineering
11 754 (13.23%) Analytics
12 733 (12.86%) Continuous Improvement
13 651 (11.42%) Data Pipeline
14 646 (11.33%) Platform Engineering
15 614 (10.77%) Data Modelling
16 569 (9.98%) Migration
17 565 (9.91%) Scrum
18 542 (9.51%) Data Engineering
19 522 (9.16%) Event-Driven
20 495 (8.68%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 2,105 (36.93%) Python
2 1,328 (23.30%) SQL
3 1,162 (20.39%) Java
4 587 (10.30%) JavaScript
5 562 (9.86%) C#
6 480 (8.42%) TypeScript
7 416 (7.30%) Bash
8 351 (6.16%) PowerShell
9 208 (3.65%) Bicep
10 162 (2.84%) Go
11 95 (1.67%) Shell Script
12 93 (1.63%) Scala
13 91 (1.60%) Kotlin
14 82 (1.44%) Apex Code
15 79 (1.39%) C++
16 56 (0.98%) Ruby
17 55 (0.96%) PL/SQL
18 50 (0.88%) T-SQL
19 48 (0.84%) Groovy
20 27 (0.47%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,598 (28.04%) Security Cleared
2 1,347 (23.63%) SC Cleared
3 296 (5.19%) Degree
4 217 (3.81%) BPSS Clearance
5 174 (3.05%) DV Cleared
6 172 (3.02%) AWS Certification
6 172 (3.02%) Azure Certification
7 142 (2.49%) Computer Science Degree
8 85 (1.49%) CISSP
9 64 (1.12%) Cisco Certification
10 55 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 53 (0.93%) CISM
12 50 (0.88%) Master's Degree
13 49 (0.86%) ISTQB
14 48 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
15 37 (0.65%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 28 (0.49%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 28 (0.49%) CCSP
17 21 (0.37%) GIAC
18 19 (0.33%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 447 (7.84%) QA
2 365 (6.40%) Data Quality
3 268 (4.70%) Accessibility
4 170 (2.98%) GDPR
5 136 (2.39%) NIST
6 113 (1.98%) WCAG
7 110 (1.93%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 84 (1.47%) NCSC
9 53 (0.93%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.67%) SLA
11 26 (0.46%) GRC
12 21 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
13 19 (0.33%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 17 (0.30%) SOC 2
15 16 (0.28%) ISO 20022
16 15 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 13 (0.23%) PSD2
18 12 (0.21%) EU AI Act
18 12 (0.21%) HL7
19 11 (0.19%) MiFID
System Software
1 1,460 (25.61%) Docker
2 135 (2.37%) Active Directory
3 81 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
4 78 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
5 34 (0.60%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.51%) vSphere
7 21 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.28%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.23%) Squid
10 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.14%) Hyper-V
12 7 (0.12%) HDFS
12 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 5 (0.088%) KVM
13 5 (0.088%) RACF
13 5 (0.088%) SRDF
14 4 (0.070%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 4 (0.070%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.070%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,788 (31.37%) Terraform
2 1,753 (30.75%) Kubernetes
3 520 (9.12%) Ansible
4 480 (8.42%) Grafana
5 411 (7.21%) Prometheus
6 103 (1.81%) Argo
7 66 (1.16%) Istio
8 64 (1.12%) Puppet
9 55 (0.96%) Single Sign-On
10 42 (0.74%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.56%) Kibana
12 30 (0.53%) Packer
13 24 (0.42%) Control-M
13 24 (0.42%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Nessus
15 18 (0.32%) IBM Guardium
15 18 (0.32%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.26%) Rancher
18 13 (0.23%) Active Directory Federation Services
Vendors
1 790 (13.86%) Microsoft
2 370 (6.49%) Databricks
3 307 (5.39%) Google
4 262 (4.60%) Oracle
5 217 (3.81%) Splunk
6 186 (3.26%) Salesforce
7 141 (2.47%) ServiceNow
8 131 (2.30%) Dynatrace
9 123 (2.16%) Red Hat
10 111 (1.95%) VMware
11 86 (1.51%) OpenAI
12 69 (1.21%) MuleSoft
13 67 (1.18%) SAP
14 65 (1.14%) IBM
15 59 (1.04%) Cisco
15 59 (1.04%) Informatica
16 47 (0.82%) Palo Alto
17 41 (0.72%) CyberArk
18 40 (0.70%) F5
18 40 (0.70%) Foundry