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 12 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 19 29
Rank change year-on-year +7 +10 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 4,109 2,657 2,541
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.34% 8.43% 5.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.91% 9.51% 6.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,880 1,837 1,881
10th Percentile £363 £388 £413
25th Percentile £420 £453 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £558
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% -1.35% -7.08%
75th Percentile £600 £660 £656
90th Percentile £688 £760 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 57 20 19
10th Percentile £40.00 £26.31 £55.00
25th Percentile £61.25 £51.78 £60.88
Median hourly rate £65.00 £66.25 £72.00
Median % change year-on-year -1.89% -7.99% +9.75%
75th Percentile £70.00 £75.63 £77.02
90th Percentile £88.10 £97.18 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £74.00 £75.00
% change year-on-year -12.16% -1.33% +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 31,821 27,941 37,669
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.79% 88.66% 87.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,057 16,962 24,992
10th Percentile £304 £306 £304
25th Percentile £406 £413 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £744 £742
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,969 885 1,593
10th Percentile £14.60 £15.62 £14.18
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.48 £18.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.25 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.00% -20.38% +16.41%
75th Percentile £56.00 £61.76 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.49 £74.82 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.11 £43.90
% change year-on-year -20.86% -31.42% +59.64%

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 12 January 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 12 January 2026.

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 12 January 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 3,433 £519 -6.79% 2,942
London +4 1,793 £525 -12.50% 543
UK excluding London +8 1,709 £500 - 2,747
Work from Home +9 1,304 £513 -2.38% 1,529
North of England +7 607 £500 +0.05% 573
Midlands +16 350 £515 +3.00% 348
South East +9 337 £500 -9.91% 823
Yorkshire +4 298 £500 +1.01% 253
West Midlands +16 291 £525 +3.45% 137
North West +11 242 £471 -3.88% 239
Scotland +8 197 £465 -0.85% 99
South West +10 164 £550 -8.33% 367
East of England +4 84 £613 +68.97% 395
North East +11 70 £494 -10.23% 82
East Midlands +13 59 £418 -16.50% 205
Wales -6 22 £495 -10.00% 140
Northern Ireland -5 12 - - 70

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
1 159 (3.87%) Confluence
2 115 (2.80%) Apache Airflow
3 105 (2.56%) Apache Spark
4 99 (2.41%) Apache
5 87 (2.12%) SAS
6 49 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.75%) nginx
8 20 (0.49%) OpenStack
9 19 (0.46%) JBoss
10 18 (0.44%) CMS
11 16 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.37%) IIS
12 15 (0.37%) WebLogic
13 13 (0.32%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.29%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.27%) Appian
15 11 (0.27%) Mule
16 10 (0.24%) HCL Notes
16 10 (0.24%) SugarCRM
17 9 (0.22%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 46 (1.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
4 9 (0.22%) Microsoft Project
4 9 (0.22%) Mozilla Thunderbird
5 5 (0.12%) Adobe XD
5 5 (0.12%) Sketch
6 3 (0.073%) 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 26 (0.63%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (0.15%) Aladdin
3 5 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
4 3 (0.073%) Endur
4 3 (0.073%) Magento
4 3 (0.073%) Maximo
4 3 (0.073%) Oracle Applications
4 3 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
5 2 (0.049%) NetSuite
5 2 (0.049%) Oracle Payables
5 2 (0.049%) Oracle Receivables
5 2 (0.049%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.049%) Shopify
6 1 (0.024%) Adobe Campaign
6 1 (0.024%) ION Anvil
6 1 (0.024%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.024%) Oracle Cash Management
6 1 (0.024%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
6 1 (0.024%) Orchestrade
6 1 (0.024%) Siebel CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,897 (46.17%) AWS
2 1,710 (41.62%) Azure
3 932 (22.68%) GitHub
4 678 (16.50%) GCP
5 623 (15.16%) GitHub Actions
6 619 (15.06%) Azure DevOps
7 583 (14.19%) Serverless
8 343 (8.35%) Amazon S3
9 328 (7.98%) AWS Lambda
10 320 (7.79%) AWS CloudFormation
11 237 (5.77%) OpenShift
12 229 (5.57%) Amazon EKS
13 215 (5.23%) Amazon ECS
14 213 (5.18%) Power Platform
15 212 (5.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 203 (4.94%) Amazon EC2
17 176 (4.28%) Azure AKS
18 154 (3.75%) Azure Data Factory
19 130 (3.16%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 120 (2.92%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 183 (4.45%) Firewall
2 119 (2.90%) DNS
3 82 (2.00%) Network Security
4 66 (1.61%) TCP/IP
4 66 (1.61%) VPN
5 43 (1.05%) SSL
6 42 (1.02%) HTTP
7 25 (0.61%) SSH
8 19 (0.46%) DHCP
8 19 (0.46%) Kerberos
9 16 (0.39%) WAN
10 15 (0.37%) Wireshark
11 14 (0.34%) Ethernet
11 14 (0.34%) HTTPS
11 14 (0.34%) OpenLDAP
12 11 (0.27%) SD-WAN
13 10 (0.24%) FTP
13 10 (0.24%) SMTP
14 9 (0.22%) BGP
14 9 (0.22%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 342 (8.32%) PostgreSQL
2 243 (5.91%) NoSQL
3 176 (4.28%) Amazon RDS
4 169 (4.11%) MongoDB
5 164 (3.99%) SQL Server
6 155 (3.77%) Power BI
7 144 (3.50%) Relational Database
8 141 (3.43%) Data Lake
9 130 (3.16%) Data Warehouse
10 102 (2.48%) MySQL
11 95 (2.31%) Azure SQL Database
12 90 (2.19%) DynamoDB
13 75 (1.83%) Redis
14 66 (1.61%) Delta Lake
15 59 (1.44%) BigQuery
16 58 (1.41%) Oracle Database
17 57 (1.39%) Big Data
18 51 (1.24%) Amazon Aurora
19 50 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
20 48 (1.17%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 928 (22.58%) Jenkins
2 820 (19.96%) Git
3 702 (17.08%) GitLab
4 394 (9.59%) JIRA
5 186 (4.53%) Selenium
6 148 (3.60%) Cucumber
7 141 (3.43%) JUnit
8 106 (2.58%) Cypress.io
9 103 (2.51%) Postman
10 88 (2.14%) SonarQube
11 86 (2.09%) Sonatype Nexus
12 75 (1.83%) Bitbucket
13 74 (1.80%) JMeter
14 60 (1.46%) Artifactory
15 59 (1.44%) REST Assured
16 58 (1.41%) MLflow
17 56 (1.36%) Maven
18 54 (1.31%) Gradle
19 53 (1.29%) CircleCI
20 48 (1.17%) Liquibase
General
1 1,176 (28.62%) Social Skills
2 725 (17.64%) Finance
3 539 (13.12%) Public Sector
4 348 (8.47%) Banking
5 331 (8.06%) Analytical Skills
6 98 (2.39%) Documentation Skills
7 66 (1.61%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 62 (1.51%) Financial Institution
9 56 (1.36%) Military
10 52 (1.27%) Investment Banking
11 50 (1.22%) Marketing
12 47 (1.14%) Telecoms
13 45 (1.10%) Front Office
14 36 (0.88%) Influencing Skills
15 33 (0.80%) Presentation Skills
16 28 (0.68%) Manufacturing
17 25 (0.61%) Retail
18 23 (0.56%) Legal
19 21 (0.51%) Billing
20 20 (0.49%) Law
Job Titles
1 967 (23.53%) Developer
2 564 (13.73%) Senior
3 544 (13.24%) DevOps Engineer
4 313 (7.62%) Architect
5 279 (6.79%) Data Engineer
6 267 (6.50%) Lead
7 252 (6.13%) AWS Engineer
8 240 (5.84%) Software Engineer
9 217 (5.28%) Java Developer
10 199 (4.84%) Azure Engineer
11 192 (4.67%) Platform Engineer
12 161 (3.92%) Full-Stack Developer
13 153 (3.72%) Senior Developer
14 152 (3.70%) Cloud Engineer
15 143 (3.48%) AWS DevOps
16 122 (2.97%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 120 (2.92%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 101 (2.46%) Test Engineer
19 100 (2.43%) Python Developer
19 100 (2.43%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 514 (12.51%) REST
2 423 (10.29%) React
3 409 (9.95%) Node.js
4 398 (9.69%) RESTful
5 348 (8.47%) Kafka
6 328 (7.98%) Spring
7 326 (7.93%) .NET
8 283 (6.89%) Spring Boot
9 205 (4.99%) AngularJS
10 191 (4.65%) HTML
11 164 (3.99%) CSS
12 162 (3.94%) JSON
13 159 (3.87%) OAuth
14 148 (3.60%) Playwright
15 142 (3.46%) Elastic Stack
16 128 (3.12%) PySpark
17 123 (2.99%) YAML
18 116 (2.82%) GraphQL
19 110 (2.68%) SOAP
20 103 (2.51%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 659 (16.04%) Cloud Native
2 261 (6.35%) Distributed Systems
3 183 (4.45%) Product Ownership
4 106 (2.58%) Onboarding
5 85 (2.07%) Public Cloud
6 78 (1.90%) Mobile App
7 72 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
8 69 (1.68%) Legacy Systems
9 63 (1.53%) Hybrid Cloud
10 58 (1.41%) Algorithms
10 58 (1.41%) Data Protection Act
11 51 (1.24%) AI Agents
12 49 (1.19%) Security Posture
12 49 (1.19%) Virtual Team
13 48 (1.17%) Greenfield Project
13 48 (1.17%) Replication
14 45 (1.10%) Data Centre
15 42 (1.02%) NHS
16 40 (0.97%) Private Cloud
17 35 (0.85%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 563 (13.70%) Linux
2 207 (5.04%) Windows
3 96 (2.34%) Unix
4 74 (1.80%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.51%) Apple iOS
6 60 (1.46%) Android
7 48 (1.17%) VMS
8 46 (1.12%) Windows Server
9 28 (0.68%) Ubuntu
10 22 (0.54%) CentOS
11 12 (0.29%) Solaris
12 9 (0.22%) Amazon Linux
12 9 (0.22%) Mac OS
13 4 (0.097%) zOS
14 3 (0.073%) Windows Server 2016
15 2 (0.049%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.049%) SUSE
16 1 (0.024%) MVS
16 1 (0.024%) Robot Operating System
16 1 (0.024%) Windows Embedded Compact
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,376 (57.82%) DevOps
2 1,476 (35.92%) Agile
3 1,292 (31.44%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,055 (25.68%) Containerisation
5 909 (22.12%) Problem-Solving
6 836 (20.35%) Test Automation
7 779 (18.96%) Microservices
8 564 (13.73%) Observability
9 559 (13.60%) Software Engineering
10 474 (11.54%) Analytics
11 466 (11.34%) AI
12 433 (10.54%) Continuous Improvement
13 392 (9.54%) Migration
14 380 (9.25%) Data Pipeline
15 371 (9.03%) Full-Stack Development
16 347 (8.44%) Mentoring
17 344 (8.37%) DevSecOps
18 338 (8.23%) Scrum
19 312 (7.59%) Data Modelling
20 308 (7.50%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,591 (38.72%) Python
2 867 (21.10%) SQL
3 858 (20.88%) Java
4 552 (13.43%) JavaScript
5 440 (10.71%) TypeScript
6 399 (9.71%) Bash
7 377 (9.17%) C#
8 297 (7.23%) PowerShell
9 211 (5.14%) Go
10 112 (2.73%) Bicep
11 111 (2.70%) Shell Script
12 97 (2.36%) C++
13 76 (1.85%) Scala
14 66 (1.61%) Ruby
15 54 (1.31%) PHP
15 54 (1.31%) PL/SQL
16 47 (1.14%) T-SQL
17 44 (1.07%) Perl
18 42 (1.02%) Groovy
19 41 (1.00%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,076 (26.19%) Security Cleared
2 867 (21.10%) SC Cleared
3 267 (6.50%) Degree
4 169 (4.11%) Computer Science Degree
5 156 (3.80%) AWS Certification
6 128 (3.12%) BPSS Clearance
7 117 (2.85%) Azure Certification
8 115 (2.80%) DV Cleared
9 71 (1.73%) Master's Degree
10 59 (1.44%) CISSP
11 52 (1.27%) Microsoft Certification
12 48 (1.17%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 41 (1.00%) CISM
14 28 (0.68%) ISTQB
15 27 (0.66%) MCP
16 26 (0.63%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 26 (0.63%) Oracle Certification
17 24 (0.58%) Cisco Certification
18 17 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 16 (0.39%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 391 (9.52%) QA
2 194 (4.72%) Data Quality
3 180 (4.38%) Accessibility
4 150 (3.65%) GDPR
5 123 (2.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 107 (2.60%) NIST
7 72 (1.75%) WCAG
8 51 (1.24%) NCSC
9 41 (1.00%) PCI DSS
10 22 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 21 (0.51%) HIPAA
11 21 (0.51%) PSD2
12 18 (0.44%) SLA
13 15 (0.37%) ISO 20022
14 14 (0.34%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.32%) EU AI Act
15 13 (0.32%) SEPA
16 11 (0.27%) MiFID
17 10 (0.24%) HL7
18 7 (0.17%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,345 (32.73%) Docker
2 125 (3.04%) Active Directory
3 73 (1.78%) VMware Infrastructure
4 55 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.92%) vSphere
6 15 (0.37%) VMware NSX
7 12 (0.29%) HDFS
8 11 (0.27%) Squid
9 10 (0.24%) Hyper-V
9 10 (0.24%) KVM
9 10 (0.24%) NFS
9 10 (0.24%) Virtual Desktop
10 9 (0.22%) DFS Replication
10 9 (0.22%) Dovecot
10 9 (0.22%) Postfix
11 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.19%) zsh
12 7 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
13 4 (0.097%) Veritas File System
13 4 (0.097%) Veritas Volume Manager
Systems Management
1 1,473 (35.85%) Kubernetes
2 1,411 (34.34%) Terraform
3 557 (13.56%) Ansible
4 463 (11.27%) Grafana
5 400 (9.73%) Prometheus
6 116 (2.82%) Argo
7 65 (1.58%) Puppet
8 64 (1.56%) Progress Chef
9 51 (1.24%) Istio
10 48 (1.17%) Single Sign-On
11 39 (0.95%) Kibana
12 23 (0.56%) Podman
13 22 (0.54%) Nessus
14 18 (0.44%) Packer
14 18 (0.44%) Proxmox
15 15 (0.37%) NetBackup
15 15 (0.37%) vRealize
16 14 (0.34%) Rancher
17 13 (0.32%) ITRS Geneos
17 13 (0.32%) logstash
Vendors
1 569 (13.85%) Microsoft
2 286 (6.96%) Databricks
3 247 (6.01%) Oracle
4 216 (5.26%) Google
5 207 (5.04%) Splunk
6 140 (3.41%) Red Hat
7 112 (2.73%) VMware
8 106 (2.58%) ServiceNow
9 78 (1.90%) Salesforce
10 72 (1.75%) OpenAI
11 68 (1.65%) Dynatrace
12 52 (1.27%) SAP
13 43 (1.05%) MuleSoft
14 42 (1.02%) IBM
14 42 (1.02%) Talend
15 40 (0.97%) F5
16 34 (0.83%) CyberArk
17 32 (0.78%) Cisco
18 31 (0.75%) Atlassian
18 31 (0.75%) Denodo