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

6 months to
23 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 19 27
Rank change year-on-year +8 +8 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,847 3,052 2,593
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.09% 9.34% 6.31%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.04% 10.34% 7.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,918 2,100 1,775
10th Percentile £375 £358 £400
25th Percentile £431 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -8.33%
75th Percentile £613 £615 £650
90th Percentile £700 £716 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £485 £525
% change year-on-year +3.09% -7.62% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 122 40 75
10th Percentile £52.50 £48.54 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 £63.75
Median hourly rate £70.00 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% - -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £83.54 £72.10
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 44,826 29,510 35,120
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.01% 90.34% 85.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,774 18,532 22,551
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.11%
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 2,642 1,578 2,152
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £13.25
25th Percentile £20.01 £17.46 £17.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £39.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -36.33% -7.06%
75th Percentile £68.55 £50.94 £62.76
90th Percentile £83.00 £69.13 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.34 £40.00
% change year-on-year +84.88% -39.15% -1.45%

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 23 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 23 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 23 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 4,865 £525 +2.44% 1,876
London +8 2,531 £550 +4.07% 969
UK excluding London +9 2,489 £500 +3.09% 1,173
Work from Home +7 1,788 £513 +2.50% 893
North of England +10 949 £500 +5.26% 354
Yorkshire +6 484 £500 +5.26% 103
South East -5 448 £525 +5.00% 343
Midlands +1 402 £477 +3.14% 141
North West +6 375 £525 +7.42% 200
West Midlands +12 334 £477 -3.64% 98
South West +9 268 £525 - 150
Scotland +6 255 £425 -15.00% 84
East of England +9 144 £543 +16.36% 60
North East +2 105 £425 - 52
East Midlands -15 61 £460 +2.22% 43
Wales -2 39 £450 -5.26% 27
Northern Ireland +26 23 £523 -0.48% 28
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
1 296 (5.06%) Confluence
2 215 (3.68%) Apache Spark
3 209 (3.57%) Apache Airflow
4 150 (2.57%) Apache
5 79 (1.35%) SAS
6 69 (1.18%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.56%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.36%) CMS
8 21 (0.36%) OpenStack
9 19 (0.32%) nginx
10 18 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
11 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.24%) Anypoint
12 14 (0.24%) WebLogic
13 10 (0.17%) Camunda
13 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Exchange
14 9 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 8 (0.14%) Mule
16 7 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.34%) Chatbot
3 17 (0.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 15 (0.26%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.068%) Simulink
8 3 (0.051%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
9 2 (0.034%) Sketch
9 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
9 2 (0.034%) Trello
10 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.017%) Maya
Business Applications
1 39 (0.67%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.34%) Payment Gateway
3 18 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
4 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
5 12 (0.21%) 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 (0.086%) 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%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,607 (44.59%) AWS
2 2,546 (43.54%) Azure
3 1,237 (21.16%) GitHub
4 995 (17.02%) GCP
5 911 (15.58%) Azure DevOps
6 789 (13.49%) GitHub Actions
7 638 (10.91%) Serverless
8 454 (7.76%) Amazon S3
9 417 (7.13%) AWS Lambda
10 409 (7.00%) Power Platform
11 312 (5.34%) Amazon EKS
12 308 (5.27%) AWS CloudFormation
13 259 (4.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 245 (4.19%) Azure AKS
15 229 (3.92%) Entra ID
16 224 (3.83%) Amazon EC2
17 193 (3.30%) Amazon ECS
17 193 (3.30%) Snowflake
18 178 (3.04%) Azure Data Factory
19 162 (2.77%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 218 (3.73%) Firewall
2 145 (2.48%) DNS
3 120 (2.05%) Network Security
4 100 (1.71%) VPN
5 70 (1.20%) TCP/IP
6 60 (1.03%) HTTP
7 45 (0.77%) 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%) VXLAN
13 30 (0.51%) OSPF
14 29 (0.50%) Ethernet VPN
14 29 (0.50%) SSL
15 26 (0.44%) Internet
16 25 (0.43%) DHCP
17 20 (0.34%) 3GPP
17 20 (0.34%) 5G
18 19 (0.32%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 401 (6.86%) PostgreSQL
2 305 (5.22%) Power BI
3 262 (4.48%) NoSQL
4 260 (4.45%) SQL Server
5 254 (4.34%) Relational Database
6 252 (4.31%) Data Warehouse
7 219 (3.75%) MongoDB
8 199 (3.40%) Data Lake
9 161 (2.75%) Amazon RDS
10 159 (2.72%) DynamoDB
11 138 (2.36%) Metadata
12 127 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
13 116 (1.98%) Big Data
14 114 (1.95%) MySQL
15 110 (1.88%) Amazon Athena
16 108 (1.85%) Delta Lake
17 103 (1.76%) BigQuery
18 90 (1.54%) Azure SQL Database
19 84 (1.44%) Redis
20 73 (1.25%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,095 (18.73%) Git
2 1,025 (17.53%) Jenkins
3 796 (13.61%) GitLab
4 550 (9.41%) JIRA
5 214 (3.66%) Selenium
6 189 (3.23%) JUnit
7 136 (2.33%) Cucumber
8 122 (2.09%) Postman
9 112 (1.92%) JMeter
10 109 (1.86%) REST Assured
11 107 (1.83%) Maven
12 101 (1.73%) SonarQube
13 99 (1.69%) Gradle
14 96 (1.64%) Bitbucket
15 88 (1.51%) Cypress.io
16 79 (1.35%) Gatling
17 72 (1.23%) Mockito
18 57 (0.97%) MLflow
18 57 (0.97%) WebDriver
19 44 (0.75%) Claude Code
General
1 1,420 (24.29%) Social Skills
2 998 (17.07%) Finance
3 814 (13.92%) Public Sector
4 478 (8.18%) Analytical Skills
5 436 (7.46%) Banking
6 134 (2.29%) Documentation Skills
7 127 (2.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 114 (1.95%) Retail
9 72 (1.23%) Investment Banking
10 69 (1.18%) Front Office
10 69 (1.18%) Legal
10 69 (1.18%) Military
11 65 (1.11%) Telecoms
12 63 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
13 51 (0.87%) Law
14 45 (0.77%) Financial Institution
15 40 (0.68%) Marketing
16 34 (0.58%) Publishing
17 32 (0.55%) Manufacturing
18 30 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,299 (22.22%) Developer
2 975 (16.68%) Senior
3 732 (12.52%) DevOps Engineer
4 606 (10.36%) Architect
5 535 (9.15%) Lead
6 452 (7.73%) Data Engineer
7 337 (5.76%) AWS Engineer
8 331 (5.66%) Java Developer
9 314 (5.37%) Software Engineer
10 274 (4.69%) Azure Engineer
11 260 (4.45%) Senior Developer
12 252 (4.31%) Platform Engineer
13 250 (4.28%) Cloud Engineer
14 185 (3.16%) Full-Stack Developer
15 159 (2.72%) Python Developer
16 152 (2.60%) AWS DevOps
17 148 (2.53%) Solutions Architect
18 140 (2.39%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 140 (2.39%) GCP Engineer
19 136 (2.33%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 749 (12.81%) REST
2 530 (9.06%) React
3 529 (9.05%) Spring
4 512 (8.76%) .NET
5 494 (8.45%) RESTful
6 483 (8.26%) Kafka
7 468 (8.00%) Spring Boot
8 382 (6.53%) Node.js
9 230 (3.93%) Playwright
10 214 (3.66%) HTML
11 211 (3.61%) PySpark
12 203 (3.47%) AngularJS
13 190 (3.25%) CSS
14 189 (3.23%) JSON
15 185 (3.16%) OAuth
16 136 (2.33%) OAuth2
17 123 (2.10%) SOAP
18 120 (2.05%) FastAPI
19 117 (2.00%) GraphQL
19 117 (2.00%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,176 (20.11%) Cloud Native
2 454 (7.76%) Distributed Systems
3 355 (6.07%) Product Ownership
4 188 (3.22%) Onboarding
5 166 (2.84%) Enterprise Software
6 145 (2.48%) Legacy Systems
7 134 (2.29%) AI Agents
8 132 (2.26%) Hybrid Cloud
9 104 (1.78%) Data Centre
10 100 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
11 98 (1.68%) Public Cloud
12 93 (1.59%) Security Posture
13 80 (1.37%) Algorithms
14 79 (1.35%) Virtual Team
15 70 (1.20%) Mobile App
15 70 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
16 67 (1.15%) Data Structures
17 65 (1.11%) Management Information System
18 61 (1.04%) Enterprise Cloud
19 58 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 574 (9.82%) Linux
2 271 (4.63%) Windows
3 129 (2.21%) Unix
4 109 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 57 (0.97%) Windows Server
6 53 (0.91%) Android
7 50 (0.86%) Apple iOS
8 27 (0.46%) VMS
9 19 (0.32%) 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%) CentOS
15 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.086%) Rocky
17 3 (0.051%) Amazon Linux
17 3 (0.051%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,290 (56.27%) DevOps
2 2,175 (37.20%) Agile
3 1,837 (31.42%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,317 (22.52%) Test Automation
5 1,302 (22.27%) Containerisation
6 1,190 (20.35%) Microservices
7 1,021 (17.46%) Observability
8 996 (17.03%) AI
9 920 (15.73%) Software Engineering
10 913 (15.61%) Problem-Solving
11 800 (13.68%) Continuous Improvement
12 752 (12.86%) Analytics
13 694 (11.87%) Platform Engineering
14 682 (11.66%) Data Pipeline
15 620 (10.60%) Data Modelling
16 616 (10.54%) Scrum
17 591 (10.11%) Migration
18 568 (9.71%) Event-Driven
19 544 (9.30%) Data Engineering
20 528 (9.03%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 2,138 (36.57%) Python
2 1,315 (22.49%) SQL
3 1,208 (20.66%) Java
4 608 (10.40%) JavaScript
5 550 (9.41%) C#
6 494 (8.45%) TypeScript
7 480 (8.21%) Bash
8 391 (6.69%) PowerShell
9 220 (3.76%) Bicep
10 168 (2.87%) Go
11 104 (1.78%) Kotlin
11 104 (1.78%) Shell Script
12 82 (1.40%) Apex Code
13 81 (1.39%) Scala
14 75 (1.28%) C++
15 61 (1.04%) PL/SQL
16 59 (1.01%) Groovy
17 53 (0.91%) Ruby
18 45 (0.77%) T-SQL
19 30 (0.51%) Swift
Qualifications
1 1,656 (28.32%) Security Cleared
2 1,385 (23.69%) SC Cleared
3 300 (5.13%) Degree
4 232 (3.97%) BPSS Clearance
5 206 (3.52%) DV Cleared
6 191 (3.27%) Azure Certification
7 180 (3.08%) AWS Certification
8 140 (2.39%) Computer Science Degree
9 95 (1.62%) CISSP
10 64 (1.09%) Cisco Certification
11 55 (0.94%) Microsoft Certification
12 51 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 51 (0.87%) CISM
13 48 (0.82%) ISTQB
14 47 (0.80%) Master's Degree
15 39 (0.67%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 29 (0.50%) CCSP
17 28 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
19 21 (0.36%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 491 (8.40%) QA
2 390 (6.67%) Data Quality
3 300 (5.13%) Accessibility
4 159 (2.72%) GDPR
5 124 (2.12%) WCAG
6 118 (2.02%) NIST
7 96 (1.64%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 74 (1.27%) NCSC
9 43 (0.74%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.60%) SLA
11 29 (0.50%) GRC
12 22 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
13 15 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
13 15 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.24%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.22%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.21%) HL7
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
18 10 (0.17%) PSD2
19 8 (0.14%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,525 (26.08%) Docker
2 160 (2.74%) Active Directory
3 98 (1.68%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 42 (0.72%) VMware NSX
6 36 (0.62%) 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 (0.086%) RACF
14 5 (0.086%) SRDF
15 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 4 (0.068%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,852 (31.67%) Terraform
2 1,804 (30.85%) Kubernetes
3 539 (9.22%) Ansible
4 512 (8.76%) Grafana
5 425 (7.27%) Prometheus
6 116 (1.98%) Argo
7 64 (1.09%) Puppet
8 60 (1.03%) Istio
9 48 (0.82%) Single Sign-On
10 45 (0.77%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.53%) Packer
12 30 (0.51%) Kibana
13 26 (0.44%) vCenter Server
14 24 (0.41%) Control-M
15 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
16 20 (0.34%) Kustomize
16 20 (0.34%) Nessus
17 17 (0.29%) IBM Guardium
18 16 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
19 15 (0.26%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 821 (14.04%) Microsoft
2 372 (6.36%) Databricks
3 328 (5.61%) Google
4 297 (5.08%) Oracle
5 215 (3.68%) Splunk
6 191 (3.27%) Salesforce
7 140 (2.39%) Dynatrace
8 138 (2.36%) ServiceNow
9 134 (2.29%) VMware
10 114 (1.95%) Red Hat
11 86 (1.47%) OpenAI
12 84 (1.44%) MuleSoft
13 76 (1.30%) SAP
14 72 (1.23%) IBM
15 65 (1.11%) Cisco
16 63 (1.08%) Informatica
17 48 (0.82%) Foundry
18 44 (0.75%) F5
18 44 (0.75%) Palo Alto
19 36 (0.62%) AppDynamics