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 21 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 20 29
Rank change year-on-year +10 +9 -8
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,232 2,557 2,477
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.84% 8.79% 5.82%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.86% 9.65% 6.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,577 1,802 1,749
10th Percentile £375 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.48% -5.45% -8.33%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £534
% change year-on-year +2.04% -8.24% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 116 26 47
10th Percentile £51.23 £31.25 £50.75
25th Percentile £61.25 £48.99 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.25 £63.25 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.32% -2.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £79.41 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.50 £95.53 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £67.25
% change year-on-year - -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 40,694 26,498 36,630
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.34% 91.04% 86.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,533 17,004 23,615
10th Percentile £325 £303 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,389 1,106 2,441
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.35 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.13 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.79% -23.29% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.50 £59.98 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -33.82% +8.57%

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 21 May 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 21 May 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 21 May 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 4,331 £525 - 1,688
UK excluding London +11 2,238 £500 +2.04% 1,229
London +9 2,220 £545 -0.91% 726
Work from Home +9 1,522 £513 -2.38% 999
North of England +13 832 £500 +0.81% 344
Yorkshire +6 457 £500 - 87
South East +13 411 £505 +1.00% 383
Midlands +8 394 £481 +1.26% 109
West Midlands +13 312 £488 -4.88% 64
North West +8 309 £500 - 198
South West +14 239 £525 -3.67% 167
Scotland +8 225 £431 -10.16% 58
East of England +18 120 £550 +20.22% 110
North East +5 79 £450 -2.17% 62
East Midlands -8 75 £440 -4.14% 45
Wales +5 33 £425 -24.51% 30
Northern Ireland +13 28 £644 +51.47% 46
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
1 255 (4.87%) Confluence
2 193 (3.69%) Apache Spark
3 138 (2.64%) Apache Airflow
4 120 (2.29%) Apache
5 76 (1.45%) SAS
6 72 (1.38%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.48%) nginx
8 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
9 22 (0.42%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.36%) CMS
11 13 (0.25%) Mendix
11 13 (0.25%) SharePoint Server
11 13 (0.25%) WebLogic
11 13 (0.25%) WebSphere
12 12 (0.23%) Jupyter
13 11 (0.21%) Anypoint
13 11 (0.21%) Camunda
14 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
15 9 (0.17%) Appian
15 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Office
4 13 (0.25%) Chatbot
4 13 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
5 8 (0.15%) Adobe XD
6 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 5 (0.096%) Sketch
8 3 (0.057%) Simulink
9 2 (0.038%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.019%) Maya
10 1 (0.019%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.36%) Payment Gateway
3 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 6 (0.11%) SAP CRM
7 5 (0.096%) Magento
7 5 (0.096%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.076%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.076%) Shopify
9 3 (0.057%) Findur
9 3 (0.057%) Oracle Applications
9 3 (0.057%) SAP BPC
10 1 (0.019%) Actimize
10 1 (0.019%) Endur
10 1 (0.019%) NetSuite
10 1 (0.019%) SAP ERP
10 1 (0.019%) SDL Web 8
10 1 (0.019%) Teamcenter
10 1 (0.019%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 2,305 (44.06%) Azure
2 2,271 (43.41%) AWS
3 1,136 (21.71%) GitHub
4 877 (16.76%) GCP
5 822 (15.71%) Azure DevOps
6 709 (13.55%) GitHub Actions
7 638 (12.19%) Serverless
8 378 (7.22%) Amazon S3
9 376 (7.19%) AWS Lambda
10 364 (6.96%) Power Platform
11 343 (6.56%) AWS CloudFormation
12 289 (5.52%) Amazon EKS
13 228 (4.36%) Azure AKS
14 218 (4.17%) OpenShift
15 216 (4.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 216 (4.13%) Azure Data Factory
16 210 (4.01%) Amazon EC2
17 203 (3.88%) Amazon ECS
18 186 (3.56%) Entra ID
19 161 (3.08%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 188 (3.59%) Firewall
2 112 (2.14%) DNS
3 109 (2.08%) Network Security
4 76 (1.45%) VPN
5 64 (1.22%) HTTP
6 37 (0.71%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.69%) WAN
8 32 (0.61%) BGP
9 31 (0.59%) SD-WAN
9 31 (0.59%) SSL
10 28 (0.54%) OSPF
11 23 (0.44%) Reverse Proxy
11 23 (0.44%) VXLAN
12 21 (0.40%) Ethernet VPN
13 20 (0.38%) Ethernet
13 20 (0.38%) SAN
14 17 (0.32%) 3GPP
14 17 (0.32%) BIG-IP
14 17 (0.32%) Wi-Fi
15 16 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 353 (6.75%) PostgreSQL
2 273 (5.22%) Power BI
3 266 (5.08%) NoSQL
4 249 (4.76%) SQL Server
5 208 (3.98%) Relational Database
6 207 (3.96%) Data Lake
7 193 (3.69%) MongoDB
8 186 (3.56%) Data Warehouse
9 155 (2.96%) Amazon RDS
10 136 (2.60%) DynamoDB
11 124 (2.37%) Metadata
12 120 (2.29%) Big Data
13 117 (2.24%) Delta Lake
14 107 (2.05%) Azure SQL Database
15 91 (1.74%) Amazon Athena
16 90 (1.72%) MySQL
17 82 (1.57%) BigQuery
18 79 (1.51%) Amazon Redshift
19 74 (1.41%) Redis
20 71 (1.36%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 966 (18.46%) Git
2 964 (18.43%) Jenkins
3 745 (14.24%) GitLab
4 465 (8.89%) JIRA
5 199 (3.80%) Selenium
6 158 (3.02%) JUnit
7 130 (2.48%) Cucumber
8 121 (2.31%) Postman
9 104 (1.99%) JMeter
9 104 (1.99%) REST Assured
10 89 (1.70%) SonarQube
11 75 (1.43%) Bitbucket
12 68 (1.30%) Gatling
13 67 (1.28%) Cypress.io
14 66 (1.26%) Maven
14 66 (1.26%) MLflow
15 64 (1.22%) Gradle
16 61 (1.17%) Mockito
17 46 (0.88%) WebDriver
18 45 (0.86%) Artifactory
General
1 1,279 (24.45%) Social Skills
2 854 (16.32%) Finance
3 669 (12.79%) Public Sector
4 415 (7.93%) Analytical Skills
5 359 (6.86%) Banking
6 131 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
7 82 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 70 (1.34%) Retail
9 65 (1.24%) Legal
10 64 (1.22%) Influencing Skills
11 59 (1.13%) Military
12 57 (1.09%) Front Office
12 57 (1.09%) Investment Banking
13 47 (0.90%) Financial Institution
14 37 (0.71%) Telecoms
15 35 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
16 31 (0.59%) Law
17 27 (0.52%) Publishing
18 26 (0.50%) Marketing
19 23 (0.44%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,153 (22.04%) Developer
2 791 (15.12%) Senior
3 638 (12.19%) DevOps Engineer
4 564 (10.78%) Architect
5 445 (8.51%) Lead
6 406 (7.76%) Data Engineer
7 279 (5.33%) AWS Engineer
8 274 (5.24%) Software Engineer
9 269 (5.14%) Azure Engineer
10 263 (5.03%) Java Developer
11 221 (4.22%) Cloud Engineer
12 220 (4.20%) Platform Engineer
13 199 (3.80%) Senior Developer
14 168 (3.21%) Full-Stack Developer
15 156 (2.98%) Python Developer
16 136 (2.60%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 135 (2.58%) GCP Engineer
18 129 (2.47%) AWS DevOps
19 126 (2.41%) Test Engineer
20 124 (2.37%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 584 (11.16%) REST
2 482 (9.21%) React
3 454 (8.68%) .NET
4 453 (8.66%) Spring
5 429 (8.20%) Kafka
6 420 (8.03%) RESTful
7 410 (7.84%) Spring Boot
8 392 (7.49%) Node.js
9 216 (4.13%) AngularJS
10 200 (3.82%) PySpark
11 197 (3.77%) Playwright
12 182 (3.48%) HTML
13 175 (3.34%) OAuth
14 152 (2.91%) CSS
15 143 (2.73%) YAML
16 128 (2.45%) JSON
17 125 (2.39%) OpenTelemetry
18 123 (2.35%) OAuth2
19 113 (2.16%) FastAPI
20 108 (2.06%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 973 (18.60%) Cloud Native
2 361 (6.90%) Distributed Systems
3 290 (5.54%) Product Ownership
4 132 (2.52%) Onboarding
5 118 (2.26%) Legacy Systems
6 106 (2.03%) Hybrid Cloud
7 91 (1.74%) Enterprise Software
8 88 (1.68%) Data Centre
9 82 (1.57%) Public Cloud
10 81 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
11 78 (1.49%) Algorithms
12 75 (1.43%) AI Agents
13 69 (1.32%) Virtual Team
14 63 (1.20%) Mobile App
15 61 (1.17%) Security Posture
16 55 (1.05%) Management Information System
17 54 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
18 50 (0.96%) Self-Motivation
19 44 (0.84%) NHS
20 43 (0.82%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 527 (10.07%) Linux
2 230 (4.40%) Windows
3 109 (2.08%) Unix
4 84 (1.61%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (0.92%) Android
6 45 (0.86%) Apple iOS
7 42 (0.80%) VMS
8 40 (0.76%) Windows Server
9 21 (0.40%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.29%) CentOS
11 11 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.15%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.11%) AIX
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
14 6 (0.11%) Solaris
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.076%) Debian
16 3 (0.057%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,943 (56.25%) DevOps
2 1,764 (33.72%) Agile
3 1,611 (30.79%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,203 (22.99%) Containerisation
5 1,076 (20.57%) Test Automation
6 1,025 (19.59%) Microservices
7 885 (16.92%) Observability
8 853 (16.30%) Problem-Solving
9 779 (14.89%) AI
10 708 (13.53%) Software Engineering
11 673 (12.86%) Analytics
12 652 (12.46%) Continuous Improvement
13 583 (11.14%) Data Modelling
14 559 (10.68%) Data Pipeline
15 534 (10.21%) Platform Engineering
16 503 (9.61%) Migration
17 474 (9.06%) Scrum
18 455 (8.70%) Data Engineering
19 452 (8.64%) ETL
20 438 (8.37%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,916 (36.62%) Python
2 1,225 (23.41%) SQL
3 1,053 (20.13%) Java
4 576 (11.01%) JavaScript
5 506 (9.67%) C#
6 449 (8.58%) TypeScript
7 377 (7.21%) Bash
8 320 (6.12%) PowerShell
9 177 (3.38%) Bicep
10 146 (2.79%) Go
11 99 (1.89%) Scala
11 99 (1.89%) Shell Script
12 86 (1.64%) C++
13 68 (1.30%) Apex Code
13 68 (1.30%) Kotlin
13 68 (1.30%) Ruby
14 55 (1.05%) PL/SQL
15 46 (0.88%) T-SQL
16 39 (0.75%) Groovy
17 33 (0.63%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,448 (27.68%) Security Cleared
2 1,197 (22.88%) SC Cleared
3 281 (5.37%) Degree
4 205 (3.92%) BPSS Clearance
5 159 (3.04%) Azure Certification
5 159 (3.04%) DV Cleared
6 149 (2.85%) AWS Certification
6 149 (2.85%) Computer Science Degree
7 69 (1.32%) CISSP
8 54 (1.03%) Cisco Certification
9 51 (0.97%) Master's Degree
10 50 (0.96%) CISM
11 49 (0.94%) Microsoft Certification
12 46 (0.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 45 (0.86%) ISTQB
14 30 (0.57%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 24 (0.46%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 24 (0.46%) CCSP
16 20 (0.38%) RHCE
17 19 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 407 (7.78%) QA
2 314 (6.00%) Data Quality
3 221 (4.22%) Accessibility
4 171 (3.27%) GDPR
5 134 (2.56%) NIST
6 114 (2.18%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 101 (1.93%) WCAG
8 71 (1.36%) NCSC
9 56 (1.07%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.75%) SLA
11 26 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 21 (0.40%) GRC
13 19 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
14 18 (0.34%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
16 15 (0.29%) MiFID
17 12 (0.23%) HL7
17 12 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
17 12 (0.23%) PSD2
18 10 (0.19%) HIPAA
System Software
1 1,354 (25.88%) Docker
2 117 (2.24%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.53%) Virtual Machines
4 66 (1.26%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.63%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.55%) vSphere
7 20 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 12 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
9 9 (0.17%) Squid
10 8 (0.15%) Hyper-V
11 7 (0.13%) HDFS
11 7 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
11 7 (0.13%) Postfix
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 4 (0.076%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
13 4 (0.076%) NFS
13 4 (0.076%) SRDF
14 3 (0.057%) Ceph
15 2 (0.038%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,633 (31.21%) Kubernetes
2 1,623 (31.02%) Terraform
3 525 (10.03%) Ansible
4 490 (9.37%) Grafana
5 416 (7.95%) Prometheus
6 107 (2.05%) Argo
7 77 (1.47%) Istio
8 67 (1.28%) Puppet
9 55 (1.05%) Single Sign-On
10 37 (0.71%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.63%) Kibana
12 23 (0.44%) Packer
13 22 (0.42%) Nessus
14 21 (0.40%) vCenter Server
15 19 (0.36%) Control-M
16 17 (0.32%) IBM Guardium
16 17 (0.32%) Rancher
17 15 (0.29%) linkerd
17 15 (0.29%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.29%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 748 (14.30%) Microsoft
2 375 (7.17%) Databricks
3 271 (5.18%) Google
4 235 (4.49%) Oracle
5 222 (4.24%) Splunk
6 153 (2.92%) Salesforce
7 142 (2.71%) ServiceNow
8 133 (2.54%) Red Hat
9 113 (2.16%) Dynatrace
10 102 (1.95%) VMware
11 85 (1.62%) OpenAI
12 61 (1.17%) SAP
13 58 (1.11%) MuleSoft
14 54 (1.03%) IBM
15 47 (0.90%) Cisco
16 41 (0.78%) CyberArk
17 40 (0.76%) Informatica
18 39 (0.75%) Tenable
19 38 (0.73%) AppDynamics
19 38 (0.73%) Palo Alto