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 10 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 16 26
Rank change year-on-year +5 +10 0
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 6,061 3,350 2,669
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.12% 10.16% 6.97%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.14% 11.23% 8.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,087 2,278 1,805
10th Percentile £381 £360 £400
25th Percentile £438 £423 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -7.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £759
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £523
% change year-on-year - -4.31% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 49 70
10th Percentile £45.20 £49.80 £55.90
25th Percentile £60.50 £59.50 £65.00
Median hourly rate £69.00 £65.00 £66.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.15% -1.52% -12.00%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £95.00 £83.87 £71.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.22 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +4.95% -2.99% -10.67%

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 46,112 29,840 32,750
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.46% 85.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,098 18,520 20,299
10th Percentile £325 £300 £312
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
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 3,038 1,780 1,507
10th Percentile £13.87 £14.23 £14.70
25th Percentile £17.38 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +2.87%
75th Percentile £67.50 £45.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.03 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +76.89% -47.37% +8.65%

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 10 September 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 10 September 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 10 September 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 5,075 £525 +2.44% 4,436
London +5 2,697 £537 +2.29% 2,752
UK excluding London +6 2,561 £500 - 2,313
Work from Home +6 1,862 £525 +5.00% 2,016
North of England +5 969 £500 +5.26% 618
Yorkshire +6 487 £502 +4.20% 168
South East +2 463 £535 +7.00% 483
Midlands -4 379 £488 -2.50% 235
North West +2 371 £525 +10.53% 359
West Midlands 0 316 £488 -7.14% 152
South West +10 291 £550 +4.76% 317
Scotland 0 269 £438 -12.50% 343
East of England +2 152 £507 +1.40% 184
North East -1 122 £425 -5.03% 96
East Midlands -23 58 £456 +6.23% 82
Wales +3 46 £425 -5.56% 43
Northern Ireland +23 25 £545 +9.00% 106
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
1 280 (4.62%) Confluence
2 230 (3.79%) Apache Airflow
3 203 (3.35%) Apache Spark
4 161 (2.66%) Apache
5 87 (1.44%) SharePoint
6 63 (1.04%) SAS
7 36 (0.59%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.43%) CMS
9 21 (0.35%) nginx
10 20 (0.33%) OpenStack
11 18 (0.30%) Camunda
12 16 (0.26%) Anypoint
13 14 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 13 (0.21%) SharePoint Server
15 10 (0.16%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.15%) Mule
17 8 (0.13%) WebLogic
17 8 (0.13%) WordPress
18 7 (0.12%) IIS
19 6 (0.099%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 22 (0.36%) Chatbot
1 22 (0.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (0.18%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (0.16%) Microsoft Office
4 6 (0.099%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.066%) Simulink
5 4 (0.066%) Trello
6 3 (0.049%) Adobe XD
6 3 (0.049%) Sketch
7 2 (0.033%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.033%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.033%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.033%) Windchill
8 1 (0.016%) EngageOne
8 1 (0.016%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 50 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
2 23 (0.38%) Payment Gateway
3 16 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
5 10 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.13%) NetSuite
7 7 (0.12%) Shopify
8 6 (0.099%) Magento
8 6 (0.099%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.082%) Temenos T24
10 4 (0.066%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.066%) Sage X3
11 3 (0.049%) Endur
11 3 (0.049%) Finacle
11 3 (0.049%) Findur
11 3 (0.049%) FLEXCUBE
11 3 (0.049%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.033%) Distributed Ledger
12 2 (0.033%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 2,696 (44.48%) AWS
2 2,642 (43.59%) Azure
3 1,303 (21.50%) GitHub
4 1,012 (16.70%) GCP
5 993 (16.38%) Azure DevOps
6 854 (14.09%) GitHub Actions
7 655 (10.81%) Serverless
8 441 (7.28%) Amazon S3
9 437 (7.21%) Power Platform
10 436 (7.19%) AWS Lambda
11 328 (5.41%) Amazon EKS
12 298 (4.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 280 (4.62%) AWS CloudFormation
14 245 (4.04%) Entra ID
15 243 (4.01%) Snowflake
16 234 (3.86%) Azure AKS
17 218 (3.60%) Amazon EC2
18 194 (3.20%) Amazon ECS
18 194 (3.20%) Azure Data Factory
19 181 (2.99%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 232 (3.83%) Firewall
2 162 (2.67%) DNS
3 128 (2.11%) Network Security
4 92 (1.52%) VPN
5 80 (1.32%) TCP/IP
6 54 (0.89%) HTTP
7 48 (0.79%) WAN
8 40 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 39 (0.64%) BGP
10 36 (0.59%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 35 (0.58%) BIG-IP
12 33 (0.54%) SSL
12 33 (0.54%) VXLAN
13 32 (0.53%) DHCP
14 31 (0.51%) Ethernet VPN
15 29 (0.48%) Internet
16 28 (0.46%) 5G
17 25 (0.41%) OSPF
18 20 (0.33%) 3GPP
18 20 (0.33%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 428 (7.06%) PostgreSQL
2 332 (5.48%) Power BI
3 294 (4.85%) Data Warehouse
4 287 (4.74%) SQL Server
5 279 (4.60%) Relational Database
6 253 (4.17%) NoSQL
7 251 (4.14%) MongoDB
8 225 (3.71%) Data Lake
9 189 (3.12%) Amazon RDS
10 171 (2.82%) Metadata
11 145 (2.39%) DynamoDB
12 137 (2.26%) MySQL
13 126 (2.08%) Amazon Redshift
14 121 (2.00%) BigQuery
14 121 (2.00%) Delta Lake
15 104 (1.72%) Redis
16 93 (1.53%) Amazon Athena
16 93 (1.53%) Azure SQL Database
16 93 (1.53%) Big Data
17 91 (1.50%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,179 (19.45%) Git
2 1,011 (16.68%) Jenkins
3 900 (14.85%) GitLab
4 522 (8.61%) JIRA
5 236 (3.89%) Selenium
6 198 (3.27%) JUnit
7 133 (2.19%) Cucumber
8 131 (2.16%) Maven
9 121 (2.00%) SonarQube
10 118 (1.95%) Gradle
11 112 (1.85%) Postman
12 109 (1.80%) JMeter
13 108 (1.78%) Bitbucket
14 99 (1.63%) REST Assured
15 98 (1.62%) Cypress.io
16 88 (1.45%) Mockito
17 82 (1.35%) Gatling
18 70 (1.15%) Claude Code
19 48 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
19 48 (0.79%) WebDriver
General
1 1,557 (25.69%) Social Skills
2 1,112 (18.35%) Finance
3 871 (14.37%) Public Sector
4 533 (8.79%) Analytical Skills
5 500 (8.25%) Banking
6 154 (2.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 125 (2.06%) Retail
8 115 (1.90%) Documentation Skills
9 87 (1.44%) Investment Banking
10 83 (1.37%) Front Office
11 72 (1.19%) Military
12 70 (1.15%) Telecoms
13 55 (0.91%) Influencing Skills
13 55 (0.91%) Law
13 55 (0.91%) Legal
14 50 (0.82%) Financial Institution
15 46 (0.76%) Publishing
16 45 (0.74%) Marketing
17 42 (0.69%) Manufacturing
18 38 (0.63%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,370 (22.60%) Developer
2 1,091 (18.00%) Senior
3 768 (12.67%) DevOps Engineer
4 610 (10.06%) Architect
5 562 (9.27%) Lead
6 464 (7.66%) Data Engineer
7 341 (5.63%) Java Developer
8 318 (5.25%) AWS Engineer
8 318 (5.25%) Software Engineer
9 297 (4.90%) Azure Engineer
10 295 (4.87%) Senior Developer
11 265 (4.37%) Cloud Engineer
12 259 (4.27%) Platform Engineer
13 175 (2.89%) Full-Stack Developer
14 167 (2.76%) Python Developer
15 153 (2.52%) Solutions Architect
16 149 (2.46%) Test Engineer
17 147 (2.43%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 145 (2.39%) AWS DevOps
19 144 (2.38%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,950 (32.17%) Terraform
2 890 (14.68%) REST
3 583 (9.62%) Kafka
4 553 (9.12%) React
5 542 (8.94%) Spring
6 524 (8.65%) RESTful
7 516 (8.51%) .NET
8 492 (8.12%) Spring Boot
9 352 (5.81%) Node.js
10 251 (4.14%) HTML
11 245 (4.04%) Playwright
12 232 (3.83%) CSS
13 222 (3.66%) JSON
14 219 (3.61%) PySpark
15 210 (3.46%) OAuth
16 179 (2.95%) AngularJS
17 160 (2.64%) OAuth2
18 139 (2.29%) SOAP
19 124 (2.05%) YAML
20 120 (1.98%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 1,292 (21.32%) Cloud Native
2 464 (7.66%) Distributed Systems
3 402 (6.63%) Product Ownership
4 222 (3.66%) Onboarding
5 219 (3.61%) Enterprise Software
6 202 (3.33%) AI Agents
7 161 (2.66%) Legacy Systems
8 135 (2.23%) Hybrid Cloud
9 104 (1.72%) Security Posture
10 97 (1.60%) Data Protection Act
11 94 (1.55%) Data Centre
12 88 (1.45%) Public Cloud
13 81 (1.34%) Data Structures
14 75 (1.24%) Management Information System
15 73 (1.20%) Virtual Team
16 71 (1.17%) Greenfield Project
16 71 (1.17%) NHS
17 70 (1.15%) Enterprise Cloud
18 69 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
19 67 (1.11%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 615 (10.15%) Linux
2 261 (4.31%) Windows
3 159 (2.62%) Unix
4 124 (2.05%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 70 (1.15%) Windows Server
6 57 (0.94%) Android
7 50 (0.82%) Apple iOS
8 32 (0.53%) VMS
9 20 (0.33%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.25%) AIX
11 14 (0.23%) Mac OS
12 10 (0.16%) CentOS
12 10 (0.16%) zOS
13 8 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 6 (0.099%) Rocky
15 6 (0.099%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.082%) Windows Server 2008
17 3 (0.049%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,401 (56.11%) DevOps
2 2,305 (38.03%) Agile
3 2,057 (33.94%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,440 (23.76%) Test Automation
5 1,317 (21.73%) Containerisation
6 1,233 (20.34%) Microservices
7 1,136 (18.74%) AI
8 1,134 (18.71%) Observability
9 1,066 (17.59%) Software Engineering
10 957 (15.79%) Problem-Solving
11 910 (15.01%) Continuous Improvement
12 812 (13.40%) Platform Engineering
13 736 (12.14%) Analytics
14 702 (11.58%) Stakeholder Management
15 690 (11.38%) Data Pipeline
16 685 (11.30%) Event-Driven
17 662 (10.92%) Scrum
18 660 (10.89%) Data Modelling
19 656 (10.82%) Technical Leadership
20 625 (10.31%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 2,311 (38.13%) Python
2 1,395 (23.02%) SQL
3 1,306 (21.55%) Java
4 670 (11.05%) JavaScript
5 538 (8.88%) C#
6 534 (8.81%) TypeScript
7 527 (8.69%) Bash
8 462 (7.62%) PowerShell
9 251 (4.14%) Bicep
10 171 (2.82%) Go
11 126 (2.08%) Shell Script
12 114 (1.88%) Scala
13 106 (1.75%) Kotlin
14 83 (1.37%) Apex Code
15 72 (1.19%) C++
16 69 (1.14%) Groovy
17 59 (0.97%) PL/SQL
18 53 (0.87%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 53 (0.87%) Ruby
19 48 (0.79%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,776 (29.30%) Security Cleared
2 1,466 (24.19%) SC Cleared
3 314 (5.18%) Degree
4 258 (4.26%) BPSS Clearance
5 255 (4.21%) DV Cleared
6 204 (3.37%) Azure Certification
7 189 (3.12%) AWS Certification
8 157 (2.59%) Computer Science Degree
9 106 (1.75%) CISSP
10 67 (1.11%) Microsoft Certification
11 61 (1.01%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (0.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 53 (0.87%) ISTQB
14 50 (0.82%) CISM
15 43 (0.71%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 36 (0.59%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.49%) CCSP
18 23 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 20 (0.33%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
19 20 (0.33%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 554 (9.14%) QA
2 443 (7.31%) Data Quality
3 326 (5.38%) Accessibility
4 133 (2.19%) WCAG
5 128 (2.11%) GDPR
6 98 (1.62%) NIST
7 88 (1.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 71 (1.17%) NCSC
9 32 (0.53%) PCI DSS
10 30 (0.49%) SLA
11 24 (0.40%) Cyber Essentials
11 24 (0.40%) GRC
12 23 (0.38%) ISO 20022
13 15 (0.25%) HL7
13 15 (0.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 13 (0.21%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.20%) Actionable Recommendations
15 12 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.18%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
System Software
1 1,618 (26.70%) Docker
2 159 (2.62%) Active Directory
3 115 (1.90%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.22%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.58%) VMware NSX
6 32 (0.53%) vSphere
7 26 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
8 20 (0.33%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
10 15 (0.25%) Squid
11 14 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.15%) KVM
13 8 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.099%) Ceph
15 4 (0.066%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 4 (0.066%) HDFS
15 4 (0.066%) NFS
15 4 (0.066%) Postfix
16 3 (0.049%) Virtual Servers
16 3 (0.049%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 1,960 (32.34%) Kubernetes
2 569 (9.39%) Ansible
3 483 (7.97%) Grafana
4 383 (6.32%) Prometheus
5 121 (2.00%) Argo
6 61 (1.01%) Puppet
7 56 (0.92%) Progress Chef
8 48 (0.79%) Istio
9 45 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
10 37 (0.61%) Kibana
11 36 (0.59%) Packer
12 26 (0.43%) Kustomize
13 24 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
14 22 (0.36%) Control-M
15 18 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 17 (0.28%) Podman
17 15 (0.25%) SCCM
18 14 (0.23%) Oracle RMAN
19 12 (0.20%) Jamf Pro
19 12 (0.20%) Karpenter
Vendors
1 920 (15.18%) Microsoft
2 434 (7.16%) Databricks
3 365 (6.02%) Google
4 332 (5.48%) Oracle
5 212 (3.50%) Splunk
6 195 (3.22%) Salesforce
7 155 (2.56%) VMware
8 147 (2.43%) Dynatrace
9 136 (2.24%) ServiceNow
10 108 (1.78%) Red Hat
11 94 (1.55%) MuleSoft
11 94 (1.55%) OpenAI
12 89 (1.47%) IBM
13 71 (1.17%) Informatica
14 68 (1.12%) SAP
15 61 (1.01%) Cisco
16 59 (0.97%) Foundry
17 49 (0.81%) F5
18 41 (0.68%) New Relic
18 41 (0.68%) Talend