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 18 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 19 27
Rank change year-on-year +9 +8 -5
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,545 2,674 2,603
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.00% 8.98% 5.93%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.97% 9.87% 6.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,732 1,867 1,805
10th Percentile £375 £362 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.95% -6.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £764
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 30 69
10th Percentile £51.50 £43.56 £51.00
25th Percentile £61.63 £50.31 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.63 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.80 £89.13 £71.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year +0.78% -4.44% +2.89%

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 42,754 27,087 37,306
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.83% 91.00% 85.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,630 17,192 23,755
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.46% -3.79% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £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 2,570 1,249 2,608
10th Percentile £14.80 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.02 £17.87 £16.02
Median hourly rate £43.96 £26.21 £37.18
Median % change year-on-year +67.72% -29.51% +6.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.25 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.32 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +17.29%

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 18 June 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 18 June 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 18 June 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 +9 4,618 £525 +0.96% 1,040
London +11 2,396 £545 +0.93% 443
UK excluding London +10 2,368 £500 +5.26% 870
Work from Home +8 1,633 £513 -0.73% 624
North of England +13 921 £500 +5.26% 228
Yorkshire +9 486 £514 +5.44% 48
South East +3 410 £513 +2.50% 265
Midlands +6 400 £484 +4.73% 79
North West +8 349 £500 +1.63% 151
West Midlands +17 323 £492 -4.00% 48
South West +12 243 £525 -3.67% 96
Scotland +6 234 £425 -13.97% 35
East of England +13 135 £550 +22.15% 68
North East +6 101 £425 - 31
East Midlands -8 70 £444 +0.49% 31
Wales +8 39 £425 -19.05% 18
Northern Ireland +23 31 £545 +28.24% 99
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
1 278 (5.01%) Confluence
2 212 (3.82%) Apache Spark
3 189 (3.41%) Apache Airflow
4 140 (2.52%) Apache
5 84 (1.51%) SAS
6 76 (1.37%) SharePoint
7 30 (0.54%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.41%) CMS
8 23 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
9 19 (0.34%) nginx
10 18 (0.32%) OpenStack
11 15 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
12 14 (0.25%) WebSphere
13 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.22%) Camunda
15 11 (0.20%) Anypoint
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Mendix
16 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 27 (0.49%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.36%) Chatbot
2 20 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 16 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
4 11 (0.20%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.072%) Adobe XD
7 3 (0.054%) Simulink
8 2 (0.036%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.036%) PlantUML
9 1 (0.018%) Maya
9 1 (0.018%) Sketch
9 1 (0.018%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 31 (0.56%) Dynamics CRM
2 21 (0.38%) Payment Gateway
3 14 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 7 (0.13%) SAP CRM
6 7 (0.13%) Shopify
7 5 (0.090%) Magento
7 5 (0.090%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.072%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
9 3 (0.054%) Findur
9 3 (0.054%) SAP BPC
10 2 (0.036%) Endur
10 2 (0.036%) Sage X3
10 2 (0.036%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 1 (0.018%) Cloudability
11 1 (0.018%) SAP CX
11 1 (0.018%) SDL Web 8
11 1 (0.018%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,420 (43.64%) AWS
2 2,409 (43.44%) Azure
3 1,170 (21.10%) GitHub
4 920 (16.59%) GCP
5 875 (15.78%) Azure DevOps
6 736 (13.27%) GitHub Actions
7 655 (11.81%) Serverless
8 424 (7.65%) Amazon S3
9 406 (7.32%) AWS Lambda
10 399 (7.20%) Power Platform
11 321 (5.79%) AWS CloudFormation
12 287 (5.18%) Amazon EKS
13 247 (4.45%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 235 (4.24%) Azure AKS
15 220 (3.97%) Amazon EC2
16 211 (3.81%) Entra ID
17 204 (3.68%) Azure Data Factory
18 196 (3.53%) Amazon ECS
19 185 (3.34%) OpenShift
20 171 (3.08%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 210 (3.79%) Firewall
2 127 (2.29%) Network Security
3 117 (2.11%) DNS
4 80 (1.44%) VPN
5 64 (1.15%) HTTP
6 43 (0.78%) TCP/IP
7 41 (0.74%) WAN
8 39 (0.70%) BGP
9 35 (0.63%) SD-WAN
10 32 (0.58%) OSPF
11 30 (0.54%) BIG-IP
11 30 (0.54%) VXLAN
12 29 (0.52%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 28 (0.50%) Ethernet VPN
14 27 (0.49%) SSL
15 21 (0.38%) 3GPP
15 21 (0.38%) Ethernet
15 21 (0.38%) SAN
15 21 (0.38%) Wi-Fi
16 18 (0.32%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 362 (6.53%) PostgreSQL
2 296 (5.34%) Power BI
3 268 (4.83%) NoSQL
4 257 (4.63%) SQL Server
5 227 (4.09%) Data Warehouse
6 220 (3.97%) Relational Database
7 207 (3.73%) Data Lake
8 196 (3.53%) MongoDB
9 159 (2.87%) Amazon RDS
10 153 (2.76%) DynamoDB
11 126 (2.27%) Metadata
12 118 (2.13%) Big Data
13 115 (2.07%) Amazon Athena
14 114 (2.06%) Amazon Redshift
15 110 (1.98%) Delta Lake
16 102 (1.84%) Azure SQL Database
17 91 (1.64%) BigQuery
17 91 (1.64%) MySQL
18 78 (1.41%) Redis
19 70 (1.26%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,014 (18.29%) Git
2 995 (17.94%) Jenkins
3 798 (14.39%) GitLab
4 513 (9.25%) JIRA
5 199 (3.59%) Selenium
6 177 (3.19%) JUnit
7 137 (2.47%) Cucumber
8 121 (2.18%) Postman
9 112 (2.02%) JMeter
10 106 (1.91%) REST Assured
11 97 (1.75%) SonarQube
12 79 (1.42%) Bitbucket
13 77 (1.39%) Gradle
14 76 (1.37%) Maven
15 72 (1.30%) Gatling
16 69 (1.24%) Cypress.io
17 67 (1.21%) Mockito
18 59 (1.06%) MLflow
19 56 (1.01%) WebDriver
20 41 (0.74%) Artifactory
General
1 1,366 (24.63%) Social Skills
2 941 (16.97%) Finance
3 753 (13.58%) Public Sector
4 426 (7.68%) Analytical Skills
5 403 (7.27%) Banking
6 139 (2.51%) Documentation Skills
7 122 (2.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 81 (1.46%) Retail
9 74 (1.33%) Legal
10 69 (1.24%) Investment Banking
11 66 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
11 66 (1.19%) Military
12 59 (1.06%) Front Office
13 50 (0.90%) Telecoms
14 47 (0.85%) Financial Institution
14 47 (0.85%) Law
15 35 (0.63%) Marketing
16 34 (0.61%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.58%) Publishing
18 23 (0.41%) Billing
Job Titles
1 1,190 (21.46%) Developer
2 880 (15.87%) Senior
3 694 (12.52%) DevOps Engineer
4 597 (10.77%) Architect
5 479 (8.64%) Lead
6 440 (7.94%) Data Engineer
7 319 (5.75%) AWS Engineer
8 300 (5.41%) Software Engineer
9 290 (5.23%) Java Developer
10 269 (4.85%) Azure Engineer
11 246 (4.44%) Cloud Engineer
12 231 (4.17%) Platform Engineer
13 220 (3.97%) Senior Developer
14 173 (3.12%) Full-Stack Developer
15 167 (3.01%) Python Developer
16 149 (2.69%) AWS DevOps
17 141 (2.54%) GCP Engineer
18 139 (2.51%) Test Engineer
19 137 (2.47%) AWS DevOps Engineer
20 136 (2.45%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 640 (11.54%) REST
2 498 (8.98%) React
3 479 (8.64%) Spring
4 468 (8.44%) .NET
5 452 (8.15%) RESTful
6 434 (7.83%) Spring Boot
7 430 (7.75%) Kafka
8 358 (6.46%) Node.js
9 215 (3.88%) AngularJS
10 212 (3.82%) PySpark
11 196 (3.53%) OAuth
11 196 (3.53%) Playwright
12 184 (3.32%) HTML
13 161 (2.90%) CSS
14 153 (2.76%) JSON
15 141 (2.54%) OAuth2
16 139 (2.51%) YAML
17 125 (2.25%) FastAPI
18 119 (2.15%) OpenID
19 117 (2.11%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 1,090 (19.66%) Cloud Native
2 393 (7.09%) Distributed Systems
3 315 (5.68%) Product Ownership
4 150 (2.71%) Onboarding
5 135 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
6 119 (2.15%) Enterprise Software
7 114 (2.06%) Hybrid Cloud
8 107 (1.93%) AI Agents
9 106 (1.91%) Data Centre
10 96 (1.73%) Public Cloud
11 85 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
12 78 (1.41%) Algorithms
13 76 (1.37%) Security Posture
14 74 (1.33%) Virtual Team
15 67 (1.21%) Management Information System
16 66 (1.19%) Mobile App
17 61 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
18 57 (1.03%) Data Structures
19 55 (0.99%) Self-Motivation
20 46 (0.83%) Enterprise Cloud
Operating Systems
1 524 (9.45%) Linux
2 252 (4.54%) Windows
3 118 (2.13%) Unix
4 105 (1.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 49 (0.88%) Android
6 47 (0.85%) Apple iOS
6 47 (0.85%) Windows Server
7 38 (0.69%) VMS
8 25 (0.45%) Ubuntu
9 15 (0.27%) CentOS
10 14 (0.25%) Mac OS
11 10 (0.18%) Solaris
11 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
13 7 (0.13%) AIX
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
13 7 (0.13%) zOS
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
15 4 (0.072%) Debian
16 3 (0.054%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,105 (56.00%) DevOps
2 1,925 (34.72%) Agile
3 1,731 (31.22%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,225 (22.09%) Containerisation
5 1,173 (21.15%) Test Automation
6 1,078 (19.44%) Microservices
7 936 (16.88%) Observability
8 895 (16.14%) AI
9 863 (15.56%) Problem-Solving
10 798 (14.39%) Software Engineering
11 730 (13.17%) Analytics
12 711 (12.82%) Continuous Improvement
13 621 (11.20%) Data Pipeline
14 612 (11.04%) Data Modelling
15 610 (11.00%) Platform Engineering
16 554 (9.99%) Migration
17 538 (9.70%) Scrum
18 522 (9.41%) Data Engineering
19 483 (8.71%) Event-Driven
20 479 (8.64%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 2,059 (37.13%) Python
2 1,309 (23.61%) SQL
3 1,124 (20.27%) Java
4 571 (10.30%) JavaScript
5 531 (9.58%) C#
6 457 (8.24%) TypeScript
7 396 (7.14%) Bash
8 350 (6.31%) PowerShell
9 193 (3.48%) Bicep
10 150 (2.71%) Go
11 95 (1.71%) Scala
12 92 (1.66%) Shell Script
13 84 (1.51%) Kotlin
14 80 (1.44%) Apex Code
14 80 (1.44%) C++
15 60 (1.08%) Ruby
16 55 (0.99%) PL/SQL
17 50 (0.90%) T-SQL
18 43 (0.78%) Groovy
19 33 (0.60%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,545 (27.86%) Security Cleared
2 1,296 (23.37%) SC Cleared
3 282 (5.09%) Degree
4 211 (3.81%) BPSS Clearance
5 179 (3.23%) Azure Certification
6 173 (3.12%) AWS Certification
7 162 (2.92%) DV Cleared
8 137 (2.47%) Computer Science Degree
9 82 (1.48%) CISSP
10 61 (1.10%) Cisco Certification
11 52 (0.94%) CISM
11 52 (0.94%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.92%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 51 (0.92%) Microsoft Certification
13 48 (0.87%) Master's Degree
14 36 (0.65%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 28 (0.50%) CCSP
16 27 (0.49%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 19 (0.34%) GIAC
18 18 (0.32%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 424 (7.65%) QA
2 353 (6.37%) Data Quality
3 249 (4.49%) Accessibility
4 170 (3.07%) GDPR
5 139 (2.51%) NIST
6 113 (2.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 109 (1.97%) WCAG
8 80 (1.44%) NCSC
9 55 (0.99%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.70%) SLA
11 25 (0.45%) GRC
12 21 (0.38%) Cyber Essentials
12 21 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.31%) ISO 20022
13 17 (0.31%) SOC 2
14 14 (0.25%) MiFID
15 13 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 11 (0.20%) PSD2
17 10 (0.18%) HL7
17 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,407 (25.37%) Docker
2 139 (2.51%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
4 77 (1.39%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.60%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.54%) vSphere
7 22 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.29%) VMware ESXi
9 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
9 11 (0.20%) Squid
10 8 (0.14%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.13%) Postfix
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.090%) KVM
13 5 (0.090%) SRDF
14 4 (0.072%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 4 (0.072%) NFS
15 3 (0.054%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,738 (31.34%) Terraform
2 1,682 (30.33%) Kubernetes
3 512 (9.23%) Ansible
4 480 (8.66%) Grafana
5 418 (7.54%) Prometheus
6 102 (1.84%) Argo
7 73 (1.32%) Istio
8 63 (1.14%) Puppet
9 58 (1.05%) Single Sign-On
10 39 (0.70%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.60%) Kibana
12 28 (0.50%) Packer
13 23 (0.41%) Control-M
13 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.40%) Nessus
15 18 (0.32%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 17 (0.31%) IBM Guardium
16 17 (0.31%) Kustomize
16 17 (0.31%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.27%) Rancher
Vendors
1 770 (13.89%) Microsoft
2 363 (6.55%) Databricks
3 299 (5.39%) Google
4 251 (4.53%) Oracle
5 212 (3.82%) Splunk
6 179 (3.23%) Salesforce
7 140 (2.52%) ServiceNow
8 132 (2.38%) Red Hat
9 127 (2.29%) Dynatrace
10 106 (1.91%) VMware
11 90 (1.62%) OpenAI
12 67 (1.21%) MuleSoft
13 65 (1.17%) SAP
14 60 (1.08%) IBM
15 52 (0.94%) Cisco
16 51 (0.92%) Informatica
17 46 (0.83%) Palo Alto
18 40 (0.72%) CyberArk
19 39 (0.70%) Tenable
20 38 (0.69%) Talend