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 20 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 17 27
Rank change year-on-year +6 +10 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,937 3,239 2,613
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.10% 9.86% 6.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.10% 10.91% 7.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,018 2,230 1,773
10th Percentile £385 £360 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -5.17%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 46 77
10th Percentile £50.25 £46.75 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 -
Median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.85% - -10.34%
75th Percentile £77.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £85.23 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +3.85% -2.99% -7.59%

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 45,331 29,700 33,127
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.72% 90.46% 85.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,838 18,524 21,130
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.58%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,836 1,729 1,767
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.31 £17.33 £18.14
Median hourly rate £41.63 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +65.54% -38.57% -0.24%
75th Percentile £67.99 £49.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +83.17% -43.53% +17.65%

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 20 August 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 20 August 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 20 August 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 +6 4,991 £525 +2.44% 1,336
London +6 2,644 £540 +2.86% 537
UK excluding London +7 2,508 £500 - 1,029
Work from Home +6 1,819 £525 +5.00% 737
North of England +8 943 £500 +0.81% 299
Yorkshire +4 471 £511 +2.25% 81
South East -4 453 £525 +5.00% 313
Midlands 0 395 £488 +2.63% 110
North West +5 364 £525 +5.85% 160
West Midlands +5 330 £488 -5.34% 81
South West +5 290 £550 +6.80% 172
Scotland 0 243 £438 -12.50% 48
East of England +10 145 £509 +1.80% 66
North East 0 119 £425 -9.09% 60
East Midlands -19 59 £475 +8.08% 28
Wales -1 44 £450 -4.00% 22
Northern Ireland +26 25 £545 +3.81% 13
Channel Islands - 2 £475 -

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
1 276 (4.65%) Confluence
2 226 (3.81%) Apache Airflow
3 205 (3.45%) Apache Spark
4 155 (2.61%) Apache
5 77 (1.30%) SharePoint
6 74 (1.25%) SAS
7 36 (0.61%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.35%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.34%) CMS
10 18 (0.30%) nginx
11 17 (0.29%) Anypoint
12 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
13 15 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
14 12 (0.20%) Camunda
15 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.15%) Mule
17 8 (0.13%) IIS
17 8 (0.13%) WebLogic
18 7 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
18 7 (0.12%) WordPress
Applications
1 24 (0.40%) Chatbot
2 21 (0.35%) Microsoft Excel
3 11 (0.19%) Microsoft Office
3 11 (0.19%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.067%) Simulink
5 4 (0.067%) Trello
6 3 (0.051%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.034%) Adobe XD
7 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.034%) Sketch
7 2 (0.034%) Windchill
8 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
8 1 (0.017%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 46 (0.77%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.32%) Payment Gateway
3 17 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
4 14 (0.24%) Oracle EBS
5 13 (0.22%) Aladdin
6 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
7 8 (0.13%) NetSuite
8 7 (0.12%) Shopify
9 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 5 (0.084%) Magento
11 4 (0.067%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.067%) Sage X3
12 3 (0.051%) Endur
12 3 (0.051%) Findur
12 3 (0.051%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
13 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
13 2 (0.034%) SAP BPC
13 2 (0.034%) SAP ERP
13 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,645 (44.55%) AWS
2 2,630 (44.30%) Azure
3 1,274 (21.46%) GitHub
4 1,003 (16.89%) GCP
5 991 (16.69%) Azure DevOps
6 838 (14.11%) GitHub Actions
7 638 (10.75%) Serverless
8 429 (7.23%) Amazon S3
8 429 (7.23%) Power Platform
9 417 (7.02%) AWS Lambda
10 321 (5.41%) Amazon EKS
11 293 (4.94%) AWS CloudFormation
12 281 (4.73%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 247 (4.16%) Azure AKS
14 240 (4.04%) Entra ID
15 228 (3.84%) Snowflake
16 211 (3.55%) Amazon EC2
17 186 (3.13%) Azure Data Factory
18 178 (3.00%) Azure Monitor
19 176 (2.96%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 233 (3.92%) Firewall
2 155 (2.61%) DNS
3 126 (2.12%) Network Security
4 97 (1.63%) VPN
5 84 (1.41%) TCP/IP
6 57 (0.96%) HTTP
7 48 (0.81%) WAN
8 46 (0.77%) BGP
9 40 (0.67%) SD-WAN
10 37 (0.62%) VXLAN
11 35 (0.59%) Ethernet VPN
12 34 (0.57%) SSL
13 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 32 (0.54%) BIG-IP
15 31 (0.52%) OSPF
16 30 (0.51%) Internet
17 29 (0.49%) DHCP
18 25 (0.42%) 5G
19 22 (0.37%) VSAN
20 18 (0.30%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 416 (7.01%) PostgreSQL
2 327 (5.51%) Power BI
3 282 (4.75%) SQL Server
4 278 (4.68%) Data Warehouse
5 261 (4.40%) NoSQL
6 249 (4.19%) Relational Database
7 239 (4.03%) MongoDB
8 208 (3.50%) Data Lake
9 174 (2.93%) Amazon RDS
10 158 (2.66%) Metadata
11 142 (2.39%) DynamoDB
12 129 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
13 124 (2.09%) MySQL
14 116 (1.95%) Delta Lake
15 114 (1.92%) BigQuery
16 104 (1.75%) Redis
17 98 (1.65%) Amazon Athena
18 95 (1.60%) Azure SQL Database
18 95 (1.60%) Big Data
19 85 (1.43%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,129 (19.02%) Git
2 1,020 (17.18%) Jenkins
3 856 (14.42%) GitLab
4 521 (8.78%) JIRA
5 212 (3.57%) Selenium
6 176 (2.96%) JUnit
7 127 (2.14%) Cucumber
8 119 (2.00%) Bitbucket
9 115 (1.94%) Postman
10 113 (1.90%) JMeter
11 112 (1.89%) Maven
12 104 (1.75%) Gradle
13 102 (1.72%) SonarQube
14 99 (1.67%) Cypress.io
15 89 (1.50%) REST Assured
16 82 (1.38%) Gatling
17 73 (1.23%) Mockito
18 60 (1.01%) Claude Code
19 50 (0.84%) WebDriver
20 48 (0.81%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,517 (25.55%) Social Skills
2 1,059 (17.84%) Finance
3 858 (14.45%) Public Sector
4 518 (8.72%) Analytical Skills
5 463 (7.80%) Banking
6 147 (2.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 127 (2.14%) Documentation Skills
8 121 (2.04%) Retail
9 80 (1.35%) Investment Banking
10 74 (1.25%) Front Office
11 70 (1.18%) Telecoms
12 69 (1.16%) Military
13 62 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
14 59 (0.99%) Legal
15 53 (0.89%) Law
16 52 (0.88%) Financial Institution
17 43 (0.72%) Marketing
18 42 (0.71%) Publishing
19 37 (0.62%) Manufacturing
20 35 (0.59%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,330 (22.40%) Developer
2 1,033 (17.40%) Senior
3 734 (12.36%) DevOps Engineer
4 619 (10.43%) Architect
5 563 (9.48%) Lead
6 449 (7.56%) Data Engineer
7 321 (5.41%) AWS Engineer
8 320 (5.39%) Java Developer
8 320 (5.39%) Software Engineer
9 292 (4.92%) Azure Engineer
10 278 (4.68%) Senior Developer
11 261 (4.40%) Platform Engineer
12 260 (4.38%) Cloud Engineer
13 188 (3.17%) Full-Stack Developer
14 162 (2.73%) Python Developer
15 154 (2.59%) Solutions Architect
16 145 (2.44%) AWS DevOps
17 141 (2.37%) Test Engineer
18 138 (2.32%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 134 (2.26%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,910 (32.17%) Terraform
2 833 (14.03%) REST
3 547 (9.21%) React
4 533 (8.98%) Kafka
5 521 (8.78%) .NET
6 511 (8.61%) Spring
7 496 (8.35%) RESTful
8 455 (7.66%) Spring Boot
9 375 (6.32%) Node.js
10 240 (4.04%) HTML
11 238 (4.01%) Playwright
12 213 (3.59%) JSON
13 209 (3.52%) PySpark
14 208 (3.50%) CSS
15 200 (3.37%) OAuth
16 191 (3.22%) AngularJS
17 152 (2.56%) OAuth2
18 127 (2.14%) YAML
19 126 (2.12%) SOAP
20 119 (2.00%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 1,228 (20.68%) Cloud Native
2 458 (7.71%) Distributed Systems
3 372 (6.27%) Product Ownership
4 210 (3.54%) Onboarding
5 201 (3.39%) Enterprise Software
6 171 (2.88%) AI Agents
7 154 (2.59%) Legacy Systems
8 140 (2.36%) Hybrid Cloud
9 99 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
9 99 (1.67%) Security Posture
10 97 (1.63%) Data Centre
11 87 (1.47%) Public Cloud
12 75 (1.26%) Enterprise Cloud
13 73 (1.23%) Virtual Team
14 69 (1.16%) Data Structures
14 69 (1.16%) Mobile App
15 67 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
15 67 (1.13%) Self-Motivation
16 66 (1.11%) Management Information System
16 66 (1.11%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 595 (10.02%) Linux
2 273 (4.60%) Windows
3 143 (2.41%) Unix
4 113 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.04%) Windows Server
6 55 (0.93%) Android
7 51 (0.86%) Apple iOS
8 29 (0.49%) VMS
9 19 (0.32%) Ubuntu
10 17 (0.29%) AIX
11 12 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
12 9 (0.15%) zOS
13 8 (0.13%) Solaris
14 7 (0.12%) CentOS
15 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
15 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.067%) Amazon Linux
16 4 (0.067%) Rocky
17 3 (0.051%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,352 (56.46%) DevOps
2 2,239 (37.71%) Agile
3 1,966 (33.11%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,359 (22.89%) Test Automation
5 1,273 (21.44%) Containerisation
6 1,197 (20.16%) Microservices
7 1,077 (18.14%) AI
8 1,063 (17.90%) Observability
9 1,006 (16.94%) Software Engineering
10 949 (15.98%) Problem-Solving
11 877 (14.77%) Continuous Improvement
12 758 (12.77%) Platform Engineering
13 746 (12.57%) Analytics
14 686 (11.55%) Data Pipeline
15 639 (10.76%) Data Modelling
15 639 (10.76%) Event-Driven
16 636 (10.71%) Stakeholder Management
17 625 (10.53%) Scrum
18 613 (10.33%) Migration
19 612 (10.31%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 2,206 (37.16%) Python
2 1,378 (23.21%) SQL
3 1,248 (21.02%) Java
4 660 (11.12%) JavaScript
5 561 (9.45%) C#
6 514 (8.66%) Bash
6 514 (8.66%) TypeScript
7 453 (7.63%) PowerShell
8 241 (4.06%) Bicep
9 159 (2.68%) Go
10 112 (1.89%) Shell Script
11 102 (1.72%) Scala
12 100 (1.68%) Kotlin
13 88 (1.48%) Apex Code
14 84 (1.41%) C++
15 66 (1.11%) Groovy
15 66 (1.11%) PL/SQL
16 52 (0.88%) Ruby
17 50 (0.84%) T-SQL
18 41 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,749 (29.46%) Security Cleared
2 1,462 (24.63%) SC Cleared
3 298 (5.02%) Degree
4 247 (4.16%) BPSS Clearance
5 222 (3.74%) DV Cleared
6 196 (3.30%) Azure Certification
7 187 (3.15%) AWS Certification
8 148 (2.49%) Computer Science Degree
9 104 (1.75%) CISSP
10 66 (1.11%) Cisco Certification
11 61 (1.03%) Microsoft Certification
12 57 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 51 (0.86%) ISTQB
14 48 (0.81%) CISM
15 42 (0.71%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 38 (0.64%) Master's Degree
17 28 (0.47%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 28 (0.47%) CCSP
18 20 (0.34%) GIAC
19 18 (0.30%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 526 (8.86%) QA
2 409 (6.89%) Data Quality
3 304 (5.12%) Accessibility
4 147 (2.48%) GDPR
5 120 (2.02%) WCAG
6 108 (1.82%) NIST
7 100 (1.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 72 (1.21%) NCSC
9 44 (0.74%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.64%) SLA
11 25 (0.42%) GRC
12 24 (0.40%) Cyber Essentials
13 20 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 18 (0.30%) ISO 20022
15 14 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 13 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
16 13 (0.22%) HL7
17 12 (0.20%) SOC 2
18 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
18 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 1,583 (26.66%) Docker
2 158 (2.66%) Active Directory
3 111 (1.87%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.25%) Virtual Machines
5 37 (0.62%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.51%) vSphere
7 20 (0.34%) Hyper-V
8 19 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 19 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
10 13 (0.22%) Squid
11 9 (0.15%) KVM
12 8 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
13 7 (0.12%) HDFS
14 5 (0.084%) Ceph
15 4 (0.067%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 4 (0.067%) NFS
15 4 (0.067%) SRDF
16 3 (0.051%) Postfix
16 3 (0.051%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 1,895 (31.92%) Kubernetes
2 559 (9.42%) Ansible
3 495 (8.34%) Grafana
4 390 (6.57%) Prometheus
5 118 (1.99%) Argo
6 68 (1.15%) Puppet
7 60 (1.01%) Istio
7 60 (1.01%) Progress Chef
8 46 (0.77%) Single Sign-On
9 37 (0.62%) Kibana
10 35 (0.59%) Packer
11 24 (0.40%) Kustomize
12 22 (0.37%) Control-M
12 22 (0.37%) Microsoft Intune
13 17 (0.29%) vCenter Server
14 15 (0.25%) Oracle RMAN
15 14 (0.24%) Rancher
16 13 (0.22%) Jamf Pro
16 13 (0.22%) Podman
16 13 (0.22%) SCCM
Vendors
1 896 (15.09%) Microsoft
2 401 (6.75%) Databricks
3 349 (5.88%) Google
4 318 (5.36%) Oracle
5 220 (3.71%) Splunk
6 203 (3.42%) Salesforce
7 156 (2.63%) Dynatrace
8 146 (2.46%) ServiceNow
9 144 (2.43%) VMware
10 106 (1.79%) Red Hat
11 91 (1.53%) MuleSoft
12 81 (1.36%) OpenAI
13 74 (1.25%) IBM
14 72 (1.21%) SAP
15 71 (1.20%) Cisco
16 70 (1.18%) Informatica
17 50 (0.84%) Foundry
18 47 (0.79%) F5
19 45 (0.76%) New Relic
20 43 (0.72%) Palo Alto