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 8 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 19 27
Rank change year-on-year +9 +8 -3
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,822 2,939 2,658
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.16% 9.20% 6.16%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.11% 10.15% 7.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,918 2,027 1,835
10th Percentile £375 £358 £400
25th Percentile £430 £425 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £505 £550
Median % change year-on-year +3.96% -8.18% -8.33%
75th Percentile £613 £615 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £525
% change year-on-year +5.26% -9.52% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 121 35 80
10th Percentile £51.25 £43.31 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £50.63 £62.50
Median hourly rate £70.00 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.00% -3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £86.43 £71.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £66.00
% change year-on-year +3.85% -1.52% +0.60%

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 44,398 28,953 36,844
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.10% 90.63% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,615 18,257 23,517
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £517 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.28% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,640 1,439 2,494
10th Percentile £14.80 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.70 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% +1.65%

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 8 July 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 8 July 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 8 July 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 +8 4,853 £525 +2.44% 1,600
London +9 2,533 £550 +3.77% 660
UK excluding London +8 2,481 £500 +5.26% 1,232
Work from Home +8 1,747 £520 +1.46% 1,081
North of England +10 963 £500 +5.26% 328
Yorkshire +6 508 £510 +4.08% 95
South East -4 433 £525 +5.00% 370
Midlands +3 413 £490 +6.82% 144
North West +7 367 £500 +2.04% 185
West Midlands +12 340 £492 -1.59% 83
South West +10 249 £525 -1.64% 139
Scotland +5 247 £425 -14.66% 92
East of England +12 144 £550 +18.28% 83
North East +5 103 £425 - 49
East Midlands -12 66 £447 +1.71% 60
Wales +4 44 £425 -10.53% 40
Northern Ireland +27 31 £523 +22.94% 56
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 (5.08%) Confluence
2 224 (3.85%) Apache Spark
3 205 (3.52%) Apache Airflow
4 151 (2.59%) Apache
5 83 (1.43%) SAS
6 71 (1.22%) SharePoint
7 32 (0.55%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.43%) CMS
9 20 (0.34%) nginx
10 18 (0.31%) OpenStack
10 18 (0.31%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.27%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.26%) SharePoint Server
12 15 (0.26%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.24%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) Camunda
15 9 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 9 (0.15%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
Applications
1 27 (0.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 21 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 20 (0.34%) Chatbot
4 16 (0.27%) Microsoft Office
5 12 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
6 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
7 4 (0.069%) Adobe XD
7 4 (0.069%) Simulink
8 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
9 1 (0.017%) Maya
9 1 (0.017%) Sketch
9 1 (0.017%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 37 (0.64%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.34%) Payment Gateway
3 18 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
4 14 (0.24%) Oracle EBS
5 11 (0.19%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.15%) SAP CRM
7 8 (0.14%) Shopify
8 6 (0.10%) NetSuite
8 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.086%) Magento
10 4 (0.069%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.069%) Sage X3
11 3 (0.052%) Endur
11 3 (0.052%) Findur
11 3 (0.052%) SAP BPC
12 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
12 2 (0.034%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
13 1 (0.017%) Cloudability
13 1 (0.017%) SAP CX
Cloud Services
1 2,575 (44.23%) AWS
2 2,540 (43.63%) Azure
3 1,219 (20.94%) GitHub
4 984 (16.90%) GCP
5 909 (15.61%) Azure DevOps
6 772 (13.26%) GitHub Actions
7 657 (11.28%) Serverless
8 462 (7.94%) Amazon S3
9 420 (7.21%) AWS Lambda
10 419 (7.20%) Power Platform
11 319 (5.48%) AWS CloudFormation
12 296 (5.08%) Amazon EKS
13 254 (4.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 238 (4.09%) Azure AKS
15 235 (4.04%) Amazon EC2
16 217 (3.73%) Entra ID
17 197 (3.38%) Amazon ECS
18 190 (3.26%) Azure Data Factory
19 189 (3.25%) Snowflake
20 184 (3.16%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 211 (3.62%) Firewall
2 129 (2.22%) Network Security
3 127 (2.18%) DNS
4 93 (1.60%) VPN
5 63 (1.08%) HTTP
6 49 (0.84%) TCP/IP
7 47 (0.81%) WAN
8 43 (0.74%) BGP
9 39 (0.67%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.58%) OSPF
11 32 (0.55%) BIG-IP
12 31 (0.53%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 30 (0.52%) VXLAN
14 28 (0.48%) Ethernet VPN
15 27 (0.46%) SSL
16 22 (0.38%) Internet
17 21 (0.36%) 3GPP
17 21 (0.36%) Ethernet
17 21 (0.36%) Wi-Fi
18 20 (0.34%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 380 (6.53%) PostgreSQL
2 312 (5.36%) Power BI
3 269 (4.62%) SQL Server
4 266 (4.57%) NoSQL
5 248 (4.26%) Data Warehouse
6 243 (4.17%) Relational Database
7 203 (3.49%) MongoDB
8 200 (3.44%) Data Lake
9 171 (2.94%) Amazon RDS
10 152 (2.61%) DynamoDB
11 135 (2.32%) Metadata
12 129 (2.22%) Amazon Redshift
13 121 (2.08%) Big Data
14 119 (2.04%) Amazon Athena
15 116 (1.99%) Delta Lake
16 98 (1.68%) MySQL
17 96 (1.65%) BigQuery
18 93 (1.60%) Azure SQL Database
19 76 (1.31%) Redis
20 71 (1.22%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,062 (18.24%) Git
2 1,033 (17.74%) Jenkins
3 810 (13.91%) GitLab
4 553 (9.50%) JIRA
5 214 (3.68%) Selenium
6 191 (3.28%) JUnit
7 138 (2.37%) Cucumber
8 131 (2.25%) Postman
9 115 (1.98%) REST Assured
10 114 (1.96%) JMeter
11 97 (1.67%) SonarQube
12 88 (1.51%) Maven
13 86 (1.48%) Gradle
14 84 (1.44%) Bitbucket
15 80 (1.37%) Cypress.io
16 76 (1.31%) Gatling
17 70 (1.20%) Mockito
18 61 (1.05%) MLflow
19 59 (1.01%) WebDriver
20 42 (0.72%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,432 (24.60%) Social Skills
2 1,005 (17.26%) Finance
3 800 (13.74%) Public Sector
4 467 (8.02%) Analytical Skills
5 438 (7.52%) Banking
6 144 (2.47%) Documentation Skills
7 120 (2.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 101 (1.73%) Retail
9 76 (1.31%) Investment Banking
10 72 (1.24%) Legal
11 69 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
12 67 (1.15%) Military
13 64 (1.10%) Front Office
14 58 (1.00%) Telecoms
15 50 (0.86%) Law
16 48 (0.82%) Financial Institution
17 38 (0.65%) Marketing
18 31 (0.53%) Presentation Skills
18 31 (0.53%) Publishing
19 30 (0.52%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,257 (21.59%) Developer
2 928 (15.94%) Senior
3 726 (12.47%) DevOps Engineer
4 621 (10.67%) Architect
5 522 (8.97%) Lead
6 467 (8.02%) Data Engineer
7 334 (5.74%) AWS Engineer
8 319 (5.48%) Java Developer
9 312 (5.36%) Software Engineer
10 278 (4.77%) Azure Engineer
11 254 (4.36%) Cloud Engineer
12 248 (4.26%) Platform Engineer
13 230 (3.95%) Senior Developer
14 180 (3.09%) Full-Stack Developer
15 169 (2.90%) Python Developer
16 152 (2.61%) AWS DevOps
17 147 (2.52%) Solutions Architect
18 145 (2.49%) GCP Engineer
19 143 (2.46%) Test Engineer
20 140 (2.40%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 694 (11.92%) REST
2 524 (9.00%) React
3 520 (8.93%) Spring
4 510 (8.76%) .NET
5 484 (8.31%) RESTful
6 459 (7.88%) Spring Boot
7 457 (7.85%) Kafka
8 374 (6.42%) Node.js
9 227 (3.90%) Playwright
10 223 (3.83%) PySpark
11 215 (3.69%) AngularJS
12 199 (3.42%) HTML
13 189 (3.25%) OAuth
14 172 (2.95%) CSS
15 168 (2.89%) JSON
16 138 (2.37%) OAuth2
17 129 (2.22%) YAML
18 123 (2.11%) GraphQL
19 120 (2.06%) FastAPI
20 118 (2.03%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 1,171 (20.11%) Cloud Native
2 411 (7.06%) Distributed Systems
3 344 (5.91%) Product Ownership
4 173 (2.97%) Onboarding
5 148 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
6 144 (2.47%) Enterprise Software
7 121 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
8 119 (2.04%) AI Agents
9 107 (1.84%) Data Centre
10 96 (1.65%) Public Cloud
11 90 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
11 90 (1.55%) Security Posture
12 80 (1.37%) Virtual Team
13 73 (1.25%) Algorithms
14 72 (1.24%) Mobile App
15 67 (1.15%) Management Information System
16 64 (1.10%) Self-Motivation
17 60 (1.03%) Data Structures
17 60 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
18 56 (0.96%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 561 (9.64%) Linux
2 257 (4.41%) Windows
3 123 (2.11%) Unix
4 109 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 53 (0.91%) Windows Server
6 50 (0.86%) Android
7 47 (0.81%) Apple iOS
8 28 (0.48%) VMS
9 20 (0.34%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.26%) Mac OS
11 12 (0.21%) AIX
12 11 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
13 10 (0.17%) Solaris
14 9 (0.15%) CentOS
14 9 (0.15%) zOS
15 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2008
16 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
17 6 (0.10%) Rocky
18 5 (0.086%) Embedded Linux
19 4 (0.069%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,265 (56.08%) DevOps
2 2,078 (35.69%) Agile
3 1,816 (31.19%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,311 (22.52%) Containerisation
5 1,279 (21.97%) Test Automation
6 1,136 (19.51%) Microservices
7 982 (16.87%) Observability
8 947 (16.27%) AI
9 901 (15.48%) Problem-Solving
10 864 (14.84%) Software Engineering
11 761 (13.07%) Analytics
12 746 (12.81%) Continuous Improvement
13 672 (11.54%) Data Pipeline
14 669 (11.49%) Platform Engineering
15 623 (10.70%) Data Modelling
16 579 (9.95%) Migration
17 574 (9.86%) Scrum
18 550 (9.45%) Data Engineering
19 540 (9.28%) Event-Driven
20 511 (8.78%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 2,153 (36.98%) Python
2 1,340 (23.02%) SQL
3 1,195 (20.53%) Java
4 599 (10.29%) JavaScript
5 565 (9.70%) C#
6 497 (8.54%) TypeScript
7 441 (7.57%) Bash
8 361 (6.20%) PowerShell
9 208 (3.57%) Bicep
10 171 (2.94%) Go
11 100 (1.72%) Shell Script
12 97 (1.67%) Scala
13 95 (1.63%) Kotlin
14 83 (1.43%) Apex Code
15 81 (1.39%) C++
16 55 (0.94%) PL/SQL
17 52 (0.89%) Groovy
18 51 (0.88%) Ruby
19 49 (0.84%) T-SQL
20 29 (0.50%) Swift
Qualifications
1 1,646 (28.27%) Security Cleared
2 1,380 (23.70%) SC Cleared
3 304 (5.22%) Degree
4 226 (3.88%) BPSS Clearance
5 183 (3.14%) DV Cleared
6 174 (2.99%) AWS Certification
7 173 (2.97%) Azure Certification
8 148 (2.54%) Computer Science Degree
9 92 (1.58%) CISSP
10 64 (1.10%) Cisco Certification
11 54 (0.93%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 54 (0.93%) Master's Degree
12 53 (0.91%) CISM
13 49 (0.84%) Microsoft Certification
14 48 (0.82%) ISTQB
15 37 (0.64%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 28 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 28 (0.48%) CCSP
17 26 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
18 21 (0.36%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 456 (7.83%) QA
2 375 (6.44%) Data Quality
3 274 (4.71%) Accessibility
4 166 (2.85%) GDPR
5 133 (2.28%) NIST
6 113 (1.94%) WCAG
7 109 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 84 (1.44%) NCSC
9 53 (0.91%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.65%) SLA
11 26 (0.45%) GRC
12 21 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
13 17 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.29%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.26%) ISO 20022
14 15 (0.26%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
15 13 (0.22%) HL7
16 12 (0.21%) PSD2
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
18 10 (0.17%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,497 (25.71%) Docker
2 139 (2.39%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.43%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 36 (0.62%) VMware NSX
6 31 (0.53%) vSphere
7 20 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
8 19 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
9 14 (0.24%) Oracle RAC
10 13 (0.22%) Squid
11 10 (0.17%) Hyper-V
12 7 (0.12%) HDFS
12 7 (0.12%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.12%) Postfix
13 5 (0.086%) KVM
13 5 (0.086%) RACF
13 5 (0.086%) SRDF
14 4 (0.069%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 4 (0.069%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.069%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,836 (31.54%) Terraform
2 1,795 (30.83%) Kubernetes
3 530 (9.10%) Ansible
4 506 (8.69%) Grafana
5 423 (7.27%) Prometheus
6 116 (1.99%) Argo
7 65 (1.12%) Istio
8 64 (1.10%) Puppet
9 54 (0.93%) Single Sign-On
10 44 (0.76%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.53%) Kibana
11 31 (0.53%) Packer
12 25 (0.43%) Control-M
12 25 (0.43%) vCenter Server
13 21 (0.36%) Kustomize
13 21 (0.36%) Nessus
14 18 (0.31%) IBM Guardium
15 16 (0.27%) Microsoft Intune
15 16 (0.27%) Rancher
16 15 (0.26%) Jamf Pro
Vendors
1 804 (13.81%) Microsoft
2 375 (6.44%) Databricks
3 317 (5.44%) Google
4 278 (4.77%) Oracle
5 225 (3.86%) Splunk
6 194 (3.33%) Salesforce
7 142 (2.44%) ServiceNow
8 132 (2.27%) Dynatrace
9 119 (2.04%) Red Hat
10 117 (2.01%) VMware
11 82 (1.41%) OpenAI
12 74 (1.27%) SAP
13 73 (1.25%) MuleSoft
14 66 (1.13%) IBM
15 60 (1.03%) Cisco
15 60 (1.03%) Informatica
16 46 (0.79%) Palo Alto
17 45 (0.77%) Foundry
18 42 (0.72%) CyberArk
19 41 (0.70%) F5