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

6 months to
25 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 20 30
Rank change year-on-year +10 +10 -8
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,257 2,559 2,472
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.86% 8.89% 5.80%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.87% 9.76% 6.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,577 1,806 1,748
10th Percentile £375 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -6.36% -8.33%
75th Percentile £601 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £480 £534
% change year-on-year +4.17% -10.11% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 26 49
10th Percentile £51.23 £31.25 £51.00
25th Percentile £61.25 £48.99 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.00 £59.63 £67.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.37% -11.01% +2.13%
75th Percentile £77.50 £68.69 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.40 £90.63 £72.89
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 40,852 26,213 36,586
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.38% 91.03% 85.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,586 16,831 23,574
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 £498 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.74% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,418 1,066 2,483
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.13 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.13 £27.59 £36.05
Median % change year-on-year +52.71% -23.47% -0.22%
75th Percentile £67.50 £58.73 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.69 £25.15 £38.00
% change year-on-year +73.72% -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 25 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 25 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 25 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 4,353 £525 - 1,320
UK excluding London +11 2,251 £500 +4.17% 977
London +9 2,228 £545 -0.91% 560
Work from Home +9 1,526 £513 -2.01% 726
North of England +12 843 £500 +1.63% 312
Yorkshire +6 464 £500 +2.56% 71
South East +10 412 £504 +0.80% 282
Midlands +10 393 £481 +4.00% 81
West Midlands +14 314 £488 -2.50% 51
North West +6 312 £500 - 185
South West +12 239 £525 -3.23% 136
Scotland +7 224 £425 -12.37% 40
East of England +11 125 £550 +18.28% 65
North East +2 80 £450 -1.10% 59
East Midlands -6 72 £444 -3.32% 30
Wales +5 34 £425 -24.51% 26
Northern Ireland +16 27 £644 +51.47% 47
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
1 256 (4.87%) Confluence
2 189 (3.60%) Apache Spark
3 146 (2.78%) Apache Airflow
4 120 (2.28%) Apache
5 76 (1.45%) SAS
6 73 (1.39%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.48%) nginx
8 24 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
9 21 (0.40%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.36%) CMS
11 13 (0.25%) Jupyter
11 13 (0.25%) Mendix
11 13 (0.25%) SharePoint Server
11 13 (0.25%) WebLogic
11 13 (0.25%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.21%) Anypoint
12 11 (0.21%) Camunda
12 11 (0.21%) Palantir Foundry
13 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
14 9 (0.17%) Appian
Applications
1 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 17 (0.32%) Microsoft Office
4 16 (0.30%) Chatbot
5 13 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
6 8 (0.15%) Adobe XD
7 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
8 5 (0.095%) Sketch
9 3 (0.057%) Simulink
10 2 (0.038%) PlantUML
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 26 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.36%) Payment Gateway
3 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.19%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 6 (0.11%) SAP CRM
6 5 (0.095%) Magento
6 5 (0.095%) SAP MDG
7 4 (0.076%) Oracle ERP
7 4 (0.076%) Shopify
8 3 (0.057%) Findur
8 3 (0.057%) Oracle Applications
8 3 (0.057%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.019%) Cloudability
9 1 (0.019%) Oracle Assets
9 1 (0.019%) Oracle Payables
9 1 (0.019%) Oracle Receivables
9 1 (0.019%) ProductWriter
9 1 (0.019%) R3 Corda
9 1 (0.019%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 2,311 (43.96%) Azure
2 2,288 (43.52%) AWS
3 1,136 (21.61%) GitHub
4 882 (16.78%) GCP
5 821 (15.62%) Azure DevOps
6 705 (13.41%) GitHub Actions
7 629 (11.96%) Serverless
8 377 (7.17%) Amazon S3
9 371 (7.06%) AWS Lambda
10 363 (6.91%) Power Platform
11 338 (6.43%) AWS CloudFormation
12 287 (5.46%) Amazon EKS
13 227 (4.32%) Azure AKS
14 220 (4.18%) OpenShift
15 216 (4.11%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 215 (4.09%) Azure Data Factory
17 213 (4.05%) Amazon EC2
18 196 (3.73%) Amazon ECS
19 188 (3.58%) Entra ID
20 157 (2.99%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 190 (3.61%) Firewall
2 114 (2.17%) DNS
3 109 (2.07%) Network Security
4 77 (1.46%) VPN
5 64 (1.22%) HTTP
6 38 (0.72%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.68%) WAN
8 34 (0.65%) SSL
9 32 (0.61%) BGP
10 31 (0.59%) SD-WAN
11 28 (0.53%) OSPF
12 23 (0.44%) VXLAN
13 21 (0.40%) Ethernet VPN
13 21 (0.40%) Reverse Proxy
14 20 (0.38%) BIG-IP
14 20 (0.38%) Ethernet
14 20 (0.38%) SAN
15 19 (0.36%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.32%) 3GPP
16 17 (0.32%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 352 (6.70%) PostgreSQL
2 271 (5.16%) Power BI
3 265 (5.04%) NoSQL
4 251 (4.77%) SQL Server
5 206 (3.92%) Data Lake
5 206 (3.92%) Relational Database
6 198 (3.77%) MongoDB
7 189 (3.60%) Data Warehouse
8 156 (2.97%) Amazon RDS
9 140 (2.66%) DynamoDB
10 125 (2.38%) Metadata
11 118 (2.24%) Big Data
11 118 (2.24%) Delta Lake
12 105 (2.00%) Azure SQL Database
13 90 (1.71%) Amazon Athena
14 88 (1.67%) MySQL
15 82 (1.56%) BigQuery
16 78 (1.48%) Amazon Redshift
17 74 (1.41%) Redis
18 69 (1.31%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 960 (18.26%) Git
2 958 (18.22%) Jenkins
3 749 (14.25%) GitLab
4 472 (8.98%) JIRA
5 198 (3.77%) Selenium
6 157 (2.99%) JUnit
7 132 (2.51%) Cucumber
8 124 (2.36%) Postman
9 106 (2.02%) JMeter
10 103 (1.96%) REST Assured
11 89 (1.69%) SonarQube
12 74 (1.41%) Bitbucket
13 68 (1.29%) Gatling
14 67 (1.27%) Cypress.io
15 65 (1.24%) Gradle
15 65 (1.24%) Maven
15 65 (1.24%) MLflow
16 62 (1.18%) Mockito
17 48 (0.91%) WebDriver
18 46 (0.88%) Artifactory
General
1 1,275 (24.25%) Social Skills
2 865 (16.45%) Finance
3 665 (12.65%) Public Sector
4 411 (7.82%) Analytical Skills
5 366 (6.96%) Banking
6 130 (2.47%) Documentation Skills
7 84 (1.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 70 (1.33%) Retail
9 67 (1.27%) Legal
10 64 (1.22%) Influencing Skills
11 61 (1.16%) Military
12 60 (1.14%) Investment Banking
13 58 (1.10%) Front Office
14 47 (0.89%) Financial Institution
15 37 (0.70%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
17 33 (0.63%) Law
18 27 (0.51%) Marketing
18 27 (0.51%) Publishing
19 23 (0.44%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,155 (21.97%) Developer
2 784 (14.91%) Senior
3 635 (12.08%) DevOps Engineer
4 564 (10.73%) Architect
5 455 (8.66%) Lead
6 413 (7.86%) Data Engineer
7 282 (5.36%) AWS Engineer
8 276 (5.25%) Software Engineer
9 265 (5.04%) Azure Engineer
10 263 (5.00%) Java Developer
11 226 (4.30%) Cloud Engineer
12 223 (4.24%) Platform Engineer
13 200 (3.80%) Senior Developer
14 168 (3.20%) Full-Stack Developer
15 158 (3.01%) Python Developer
16 138 (2.63%) GCP Engineer
17 136 (2.59%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 129 (2.45%) AWS DevOps
19 128 (2.43%) Test Engineer
20 124 (2.36%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 588 (11.19%) REST
2 481 (9.15%) React
3 457 (8.69%) .NET
4 452 (8.60%) Spring
5 426 (8.10%) Kafka
6 418 (7.95%) RESTful
7 409 (7.78%) Spring Boot
8 390 (7.42%) Node.js
9 213 (4.05%) AngularJS
10 198 (3.77%) PySpark
11 195 (3.71%) Playwright
12 182 (3.46%) HTML
13 179 (3.40%) OAuth
14 152 (2.89%) CSS
15 144 (2.74%) YAML
16 130 (2.47%) JSON
17 127 (2.42%) OAuth2
18 126 (2.40%) OpenTelemetry
19 113 (2.15%) FastAPI
20 111 (2.11%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 979 (18.62%) Cloud Native
2 356 (6.77%) Distributed Systems
3 291 (5.54%) Product Ownership
4 132 (2.51%) Onboarding
5 121 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
6 107 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
7 93 (1.77%) Enterprise Software
8 90 (1.71%) Data Centre
9 82 (1.56%) Public Cloud
10 80 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
11 78 (1.48%) AI Agents
11 78 (1.48%) Algorithms
12 69 (1.31%) Virtual Team
13 62 (1.18%) Mobile App
14 61 (1.16%) Security Posture
15 57 (1.08%) Management Information System
16 56 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
17 47 (0.89%) Self-Motivation
18 45 (0.86%) Data Structures
18 45 (0.86%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 523 (9.95%) Linux
2 232 (4.41%) Windows
3 110 (2.09%) Unix
4 87 (1.65%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (0.91%) Android
6 44 (0.84%) Apple iOS
7 43 (0.82%) Windows Server
8 41 (0.78%) VMS
9 21 (0.40%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.29%) CentOS
11 11 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.15%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
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 2,949 (56.10%) DevOps
2 1,755 (33.38%) Agile
3 1,621 (30.84%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,193 (22.69%) Containerisation
5 1,087 (20.68%) Test Automation
6 1,026 (19.52%) Microservices
7 890 (16.93%) Observability
8 838 (15.94%) Problem-Solving
9 786 (14.95%) AI
10 718 (13.66%) Software Engineering
11 672 (12.78%) Analytics
12 654 (12.44%) Continuous Improvement
13 580 (11.03%) Data Modelling
14 567 (10.79%) Data Pipeline
15 542 (10.31%) Platform Engineering
16 507 (9.64%) Migration
17 471 (8.96%) Scrum
18 456 (8.67%) Data Engineering
19 453 (8.62%) ETL
20 448 (8.52%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,929 (36.69%) Python
2 1,233 (23.45%) SQL
3 1,057 (20.11%) Java
4 569 (10.82%) JavaScript
5 502 (9.55%) C#
6 448 (8.52%) TypeScript
7 374 (7.11%) Bash
8 321 (6.11%) PowerShell
9 181 (3.44%) Bicep
10 147 (2.80%) Go
11 99 (1.88%) Scala
12 98 (1.86%) Shell Script
13 87 (1.65%) C++
14 69 (1.31%) Apex Code
15 68 (1.29%) Kotlin
16 65 (1.24%) Ruby
17 53 (1.01%) PL/SQL
18 43 (0.82%) T-SQL
19 39 (0.74%) Groovy
20 34 (0.65%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,450 (27.58%) Security Cleared
2 1,201 (22.85%) SC Cleared
3 279 (5.31%) Degree
4 201 (3.82%) BPSS Clearance
5 162 (3.08%) DV Cleared
6 159 (3.02%) Azure Certification
7 148 (2.82%) AWS Certification
8 145 (2.76%) Computer Science Degree
9 71 (1.35%) CISSP
10 55 (1.05%) Cisco Certification
11 52 (0.99%) CISM
12 50 (0.95%) Master's Degree
13 47 (0.89%) ISTQB
13 47 (0.89%) Microsoft Certification
14 46 (0.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 31 (0.59%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 25 (0.48%) CCSP
17 24 (0.46%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 21 (0.40%) RHCE
19 19 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 406 (7.72%) QA
2 317 (6.03%) Data Quality
3 225 (4.28%) Accessibility
4 173 (3.29%) GDPR
5 134 (2.55%) NIST
6 114 (2.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 101 (1.92%) WCAG
8 75 (1.43%) NCSC
9 56 (1.07%) PCI DSS
10 41 (0.78%) SLA
11 26 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.42%) GRC
13 19 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
14 18 (0.34%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.30%) 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%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,345 (25.58%) Docker
2 121 (2.30%) Active Directory
3 75 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
4 66 (1.26%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.63%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.57%) vSphere
7 20 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.25%) 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
14 3 (0.057%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,636 (31.12%) Terraform
2 1,628 (30.97%) Kubernetes
3 525 (9.99%) Ansible
4 490 (9.32%) Grafana
5 419 (7.97%) Prometheus
6 108 (2.05%) Argo
7 78 (1.48%) Istio
8 67 (1.27%) Puppet
9 57 (1.08%) Single Sign-On
10 36 (0.68%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.63%) Kibana
12 23 (0.44%) Packer
13 22 (0.42%) Nessus
14 21 (0.40%) vCenter Server
15 20 (0.38%) Control-M
16 17 (0.32%) IBM Guardium
16 17 (0.32%) Rancher
17 15 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.29%) linkerd
17 15 (0.29%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 742 (14.11%) Microsoft
2 376 (7.15%) Databricks
3 274 (5.21%) Google
4 241 (4.58%) Oracle
5 222 (4.22%) Splunk
6 154 (2.93%) Salesforce
7 143 (2.72%) ServiceNow
8 136 (2.59%) Red Hat
9 114 (2.17%) Dynatrace
10 102 (1.94%) VMware
11 87 (1.65%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.18%) SAP
13 59 (1.12%) MuleSoft
14 57 (1.08%) IBM
15 47 (0.89%) Cisco
16 41 (0.78%) CyberArk
17 40 (0.76%) Informatica
18 39 (0.74%) Tenable
19 38 (0.72%) AppDynamics
19 38 (0.72%) Palo Alto