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

6 months to
6 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 5,893 3,202 2,568
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.06% 9.73% 6.57%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.02% 10.76% 7.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,964 2,213 1,747
10th Percentile £378 £358 £400
25th Percentile £433 £420 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -6.78%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £706 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £491 £525
% change year-on-year +1.83% -6.48% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 43 76
10th Percentile £51.25 £45.41 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 -
Median hourly rate £68.22 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.95% - -8.45%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.80 £80.37 £72.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +3.85% -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 45,262 29,771 33,475
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.91% 90.46% 85.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,917 18,660 21,435
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,788 1,660 1,878
10th Percentile £14.46 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.33 £17.30 £18.15
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.63% -5.12%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £64.13
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.30 £40.94
% change year-on-year +88.67% -43.09% +3.38%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 +7 4,950 £525 +2.44% 3,063
London +6 2,590 £538 +2.23% 1,737
UK excluding London +8 2,513 £500 +1.83% 1,643
Work from Home +6 1,812 £514 +2.80% 1,436
North of England +9 940 £500 +5.26% 496
Yorkshire +5 466 £513 +7.89% 148
South East -5 452 £525 +5.00% 425
Midlands +1 423 £488 +5.41% 175
North West +4 372 £525 +8.25% 280
West Midlands +12 360 £487 -5.49% 115
South West +5 280 £525 +0.96% 211
Scotland +4 245 £425 -15.00% 142
East of England +9 144 £509 +5.12% 96
North East +1 113 £425 -7.61% 69
East Midlands -18 56 £500 +13.77% 60
Wales -1 38 £450 -4.00% 44
Northern Ireland +24 24 £545 +3.81% 64
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 (5.02%) Confluence
2 217 (3.68%) Apache Airflow
3 206 (3.50%) Apache Spark
4 154 (2.61%) Apache
5 89 (1.51%) SAS
6 71 (1.20%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.58%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.36%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.34%) CMS
10 17 (0.29%) Anypoint
10 17 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.27%) nginx
11 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
11 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
12 13 (0.22%) WebLogic
13 10 (0.17%) Camunda
13 10 (0.17%) Mule
14 8 (0.14%) IIS
14 8 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
15 7 (0.12%) WordPress
Applications
1 24 (0.41%) Chatbot
2 21 (0.36%) Microsoft Excel
3 13 (0.22%) Microsoft Office
4 11 (0.19%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
6 5 (0.085%) Microsoft Project
7 4 (0.068%) Simulink
7 4 (0.068%) Trello
8 2 (0.034%) Adobe XD
8 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
8 2 (0.034%) Sketch
8 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.017%) Maya
Business Applications
1 45 (0.76%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.31%) Payment Gateway
2 18 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.24%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.22%) Aladdin
5 10 (0.17%) SAP CRM
6 8 (0.14%) Shopify
7 7 (0.12%) NetSuite
8 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.085%) Magento
10 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
11 3 (0.051%) Endur
11 3 (0.051%) Findur
11 3 (0.051%) SAP BPC
11 3 (0.051%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
12 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
12 2 (0.034%) SAP ERP
12 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,601 (44.14%) AWS
2 2,580 (43.78%) Azure
3 1,254 (21.28%) GitHub
4 1,000 (16.97%) GCP
5 957 (16.24%) Azure DevOps
6 809 (13.73%) GitHub Actions
7 634 (10.76%) Serverless
8 448 (7.60%) Amazon S3
9 421 (7.14%) Power Platform
10 415 (7.04%) AWS Lambda
11 318 (5.40%) Amazon EKS
12 298 (5.06%) AWS CloudFormation
13 275 (4.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 244 (4.14%) Azure AKS
15 235 (3.99%) Entra ID
16 218 (3.70%) Amazon EC2
17 211 (3.58%) Snowflake
18 192 (3.26%) Amazon ECS
19 188 (3.19%) Azure Data Factory
20 164 (2.78%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 229 (3.89%) Firewall
2 150 (2.55%) DNS
3 120 (2.04%) Network Security
4 98 (1.66%) VPN
5 78 (1.32%) TCP/IP
6 62 (1.05%) HTTP
7 47 (0.80%) WAN
8 41 (0.70%) BGP
9 39 (0.66%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 32 (0.54%) BIG-IP
11 32 (0.54%) SSL
11 32 (0.54%) VXLAN
12 30 (0.51%) Ethernet VPN
12 30 (0.51%) OSPF
13 29 (0.49%) Internet
14 26 (0.44%) DHCP
15 23 (0.39%) 5G
16 21 (0.36%) VSAN
17 20 (0.34%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 402 (6.82%) PostgreSQL
2 323 (5.48%) Power BI
3 278 (4.72%) Data Warehouse
4 262 (4.45%) SQL Server
5 260 (4.41%) NoSQL
6 247 (4.19%) Relational Database
7 226 (3.84%) MongoDB
8 211 (3.58%) Data Lake
9 160 (2.72%) Amazon RDS
10 154 (2.61%) DynamoDB
11 150 (2.55%) Metadata
12 126 (2.14%) Amazon Redshift
13 117 (1.99%) Delta Lake
14 113 (1.92%) MySQL
15 108 (1.83%) Amazon Athena
16 105 (1.78%) BigQuery
17 102 (1.73%) Big Data
18 98 (1.66%) Azure SQL Database
19 88 (1.49%) Redis
20 72 (1.22%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 1,120 (19.01%) Git
2 1,017 (17.26%) Jenkins
3 821 (13.93%) GitLab
4 547 (9.28%) JIRA
5 211 (3.58%) Selenium
6 194 (3.29%) JUnit
7 134 (2.27%) Cucumber
8 115 (1.95%) Postman
9 114 (1.93%) JMeter
10 113 (1.92%) Bitbucket
11 111 (1.88%) Maven
12 108 (1.83%) SonarQube
13 97 (1.65%) Gradle
14 93 (1.58%) REST Assured
15 89 (1.51%) Cypress.io
16 83 (1.41%) Gatling
17 75 (1.27%) Mockito
18 55 (0.93%) WebDriver
19 53 (0.90%) MLflow
20 48 (0.81%) Claude Code
General
1 1,462 (24.81%) Social Skills
2 1,025 (17.39%) Finance
3 843 (14.31%) Public Sector
4 491 (8.33%) Analytical Skills
5 441 (7.48%) Banking
6 135 (2.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 123 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
7 123 (2.09%) Retail
8 75 (1.27%) Investment Banking
9 69 (1.17%) Front Office
9 69 (1.17%) Military
10 68 (1.15%) Telecoms
11 67 (1.14%) Influencing Skills
12 61 (1.04%) Legal
13 52 (0.88%) Law
14 51 (0.87%) Financial Institution
15 42 (0.71%) Marketing
16 37 (0.63%) Aerospace
16 37 (0.63%) Manufacturing
16 37 (0.63%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,336 (22.67%) Developer
2 995 (16.88%) Senior
3 711 (12.07%) DevOps Engineer
4 612 (10.39%) Architect
5 558 (9.47%) Lead
6 455 (7.72%) Data Engineer
7 331 (5.62%) Java Developer
8 329 (5.58%) AWS Engineer
9 321 (5.45%) Software Engineer
10 280 (4.75%) Senior Developer
11 279 (4.73%) Azure Engineer
12 263 (4.46%) Platform Engineer
13 257 (4.36%) Cloud Engineer
14 198 (3.36%) Full-Stack Developer
15 158 (2.68%) Python Developer
16 157 (2.66%) Solutions Architect
17 145 (2.46%) AWS DevOps
18 138 (2.34%) GCP Engineer
19 134 (2.27%) AWS DevOps Engineer
20 133 (2.26%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 786 (13.34%) REST
2 532 (9.03%) React
3 523 (8.87%) .NET
4 522 (8.86%) Spring
5 489 (8.30%) RESTful
6 483 (8.20%) Kafka
7 452 (7.67%) Spring Boot
8 390 (6.62%) Node.js
9 238 (4.04%) Playwright
10 227 (3.85%) HTML
11 211 (3.58%) PySpark
12 201 (3.41%) CSS
13 197 (3.34%) JSON
14 196 (3.33%) OAuth
15 195 (3.31%) AngularJS
16 148 (2.51%) OAuth2
17 130 (2.21%) SOAP
18 118 (2.00%) .NET Core
19 113 (1.92%) FastAPI
19 113 (1.92%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,209 (20.52%) Cloud Native
2 458 (7.77%) Distributed Systems
3 361 (6.13%) Product Ownership
4 189 (3.21%) Onboarding
5 182 (3.09%) Enterprise Software
6 152 (2.58%) AI Agents
7 151 (2.56%) Legacy Systems
8 136 (2.31%) Hybrid Cloud
9 102 (1.73%) Data Centre
10 96 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
11 95 (1.61%) Security Posture
12 93 (1.58%) Public Cloud
13 73 (1.24%) Mobile App
14 72 (1.22%) Virtual Team
15 71 (1.20%) Algorithms
15 71 (1.20%) Data Structures
16 68 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
17 67 (1.14%) Management Information System
18 65 (1.10%) Enterprise Cloud
19 61 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 576 (9.77%) Linux
2 269 (4.56%) Windows
3 136 (2.31%) Unix
4 108 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 61 (1.04%) Windows Server
6 57 (0.97%) Android
7 54 (0.92%) Apple iOS
8 25 (0.42%) VMS
9 20 (0.34%) Ubuntu
10 16 (0.27%) AIX
11 15 (0.25%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
13 8 (0.14%) Solaris
13 8 (0.14%) zOS
14 6 (0.10%) CentOS
14 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
15 5 (0.085%) Rocky
15 5 (0.085%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.068%) Amazon Linux
16 4 (0.068%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,325 (56.42%) DevOps
2 2,218 (37.64%) Agile
3 1,887 (32.02%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,333 (22.62%) Test Automation
5 1,287 (21.84%) Containerisation
6 1,196 (20.30%) Microservices
7 1,037 (17.60%) Observability
8 1,036 (17.58%) AI
9 969 (16.44%) Software Engineering
10 928 (15.75%) Problem-Solving
11 848 (14.39%) Continuous Improvement
12 764 (12.96%) Analytics
13 725 (12.30%) Platform Engineering
14 703 (11.93%) Data Pipeline
15 645 (10.95%) Data Modelling
16 634 (10.76%) Scrum
17 596 (10.11%) Event-Driven
17 596 (10.11%) Migration
18 579 (9.83%) Stakeholder Management
19 561 (9.52%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 2,147 (36.43%) Python
2 1,332 (22.60%) SQL
3 1,219 (20.69%) Java
4 635 (10.78%) JavaScript
5 561 (9.52%) C#
6 504 (8.55%) TypeScript
7 499 (8.47%) Bash
8 415 (7.04%) PowerShell
9 234 (3.97%) Bicep
10 159 (2.70%) Go
11 109 (1.85%) Kotlin
12 106 (1.80%) Shell Script
13 94 (1.60%) Scala
14 84 (1.43%) Apex Code
15 79 (1.34%) C++
16 62 (1.05%) Groovy
17 60 (1.02%) PL/SQL
18 50 (0.85%) Ruby
19 48 (0.81%) T-SQL
20 34 (0.58%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,702 (28.88%) Security Cleared
2 1,432 (24.30%) SC Cleared
3 295 (5.01%) Degree
4 237 (4.02%) BPSS Clearance
5 212 (3.60%) DV Cleared
6 198 (3.36%) Azure Certification
7 185 (3.14%) AWS Certification
8 147 (2.49%) Computer Science Degree
9 100 (1.70%) CISSP
10 65 (1.10%) Cisco Certification
11 57 (0.97%) Microsoft Certification
12 52 (0.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 48 (0.81%) CISM
14 47 (0.80%) ISTQB
15 41 (0.70%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 39 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 29 (0.49%) CCSP
19 24 (0.41%) TOGAF Certification
20 20 (0.34%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 503 (8.54%) QA
2 406 (6.89%) Data Quality
3 304 (5.16%) Accessibility
4 151 (2.56%) GDPR
5 130 (2.21%) WCAG
6 112 (1.90%) NIST
7 95 (1.61%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 74 (1.26%) NCSC
9 42 (0.71%) PCI DSS
10 31 (0.53%) SLA
11 25 (0.42%) GRC
12 24 (0.41%) Cyber Essentials
13 19 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
15 13 (0.22%) HL7
16 12 (0.20%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.20%) SOC 2
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
18 9 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
19 8 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,558 (26.44%) Docker
2 159 (2.70%) Active Directory
3 99 (1.68%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.27%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.64%) VMware NSX
6 32 (0.54%) vSphere
7 20 (0.34%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
8 16 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.22%) Squid
10 8 (0.14%) HDFS
10 8 (0.14%) KVM
11 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.12%) Postfix
12 5 (0.085%) Ceph
12 5 (0.085%) SRDF
13 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 4 (0.068%) NFS
14 2 (0.034%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,861 (31.58%) Terraform
2 1,827 (31.00%) Kubernetes
3 540 (9.16%) Ansible
4 497 (8.43%) Grafana
5 403 (6.84%) Prometheus
6 117 (1.99%) Argo
7 67 (1.14%) Puppet
8 60 (1.02%) Istio
9 53 (0.90%) Progress Chef
10 43 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
11 33 (0.56%) Kibana
12 32 (0.54%) Packer
13 23 (0.39%) Control-M
13 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
14 20 (0.34%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.32%) vCenter Server
16 15 (0.25%) Jamf Pro
16 15 (0.25%) Nessus
16 15 (0.25%) Oracle RMAN
17 14 (0.24%) Rancher
Vendors
1 850 (14.42%) Microsoft
2 388 (6.58%) Databricks
3 348 (5.91%) Google
4 297 (5.04%) Oracle
5 210 (3.56%) Splunk
6 196 (3.33%) Salesforce
7 149 (2.53%) Dynatrace
8 139 (2.36%) ServiceNow
9 133 (2.26%) VMware
10 105 (1.78%) Red Hat
11 89 (1.51%) MuleSoft
12 79 (1.34%) OpenAI
13 72 (1.22%) SAP
14 68 (1.15%) IBM
15 66 (1.12%) Cisco
15 66 (1.12%) Informatica
16 46 (0.78%) F5
16 46 (0.78%) Foundry
17 44 (0.75%) Palo Alto
18 43 (0.73%) Denodo