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

6 months to
20 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 20 29
Rank change year-on-year +9 +9 -8
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,210 2,563 2,491
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.82% 8.79% 5.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.84% 9.65% 6.80%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,565 1,806 1,758
10th Percentile £375 £364 £405
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £523 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.96% -5.00% -8.33%
75th Percentile £600 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £540
% change year-on-year +2.04% -9.26% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 26 47
10th Percentile £51.23 £31.25 £50.75
25th Percentile £61.25 £48.99 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £63.25 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.72% -2.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £79.41 £70.00
90th Percentile £86.00 £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 40,582 26,548 36,652
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.29% 91.02% 86.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,477 17,040 23,631
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £514 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.88% -2.10% -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 2,387 1,106 2,443
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.35 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.80 £18.13 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.17 £36.05
Median % change year-on-year +50.90% -21.86% +0.13%
75th Percentile £67.50 £60.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £79.70 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +78.93% -32.93% +7.14%

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 20 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 20 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 20 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 +8 4,310 £525 - 1,799
UK excluding London +12 2,227 £500 +2.04% 1,262
London +8 2,210 £545 -0.91% 796
Work from Home +9 1,516 £513 -2.38% 1,005
North of England +12 830 £500 +1.63% 358
Yorkshire +5 452 £500 +2.56% 91
South East +13 405 £503 +0.60% 398
Midlands +8 392 £478 +0.63% 118
North West +8 313 £500 - 213
West Midlands +19 310 £488 -4.88% 72
South West +6 236 £525 -3.67% 178
Scotland +7 225 £431 -10.62% 60
East of England +21 121 £550 +22.22% 116
North East +5 77 £450 -2.17% 57
East Midlands -8 75 £440 -4.14% 46
Wales +4 33 £425 -24.51% 30
Northern Ireland +13 28 £644 +51.47% 22
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
1 253 (4.86%) Confluence
2 191 (3.67%) Apache Spark
3 137 (2.63%) Apache Airflow
4 120 (2.30%) Apache
5 74 (1.42%) 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
12 12 (0.23%) Jupyter
12 12 (0.23%) WebSphere
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 (0.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 17 (0.33%) 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 (0.058%) 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 (0.12%) SAP CRM
7 5 (0.096%) Magento
7 5 (0.096%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.077%) Oracle ERP
8 4 (0.077%) Shopify
9 3 (0.058%) Findur
9 3 (0.058%) Oracle Applications
9 3 (0.058%) SAP BPC
10 1 (0.019%) Cloudability
10 1 (0.019%) Oracle Assets
10 1 (0.019%) Oracle Payables
10 1 (0.019%) Oracle Receivables
10 1 (0.019%) ProductWriter
10 1 (0.019%) R3 Corda
10 1 (0.019%) SAP Hybris
Cloud Services
1 2,300 (44.15%) Azure
2 2,263 (43.44%) AWS
3 1,123 (21.55%) GitHub
4 875 (16.79%) GCP
5 824 (15.82%) Azure DevOps
6 704 (13.51%) GitHub Actions
7 637 (12.23%) Serverless
8 375 (7.20%) Amazon S3
8 375 (7.20%) AWS Lambda
9 364 (6.99%) Power Platform
10 345 (6.62%) AWS CloudFormation
11 287 (5.51%) Amazon EKS
12 230 (4.41%) Azure AKS
13 216 (4.15%) Azure Data Factory
13 216 (4.15%) OpenShift
14 213 (4.09%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 212 (4.07%) Amazon EC2
16 203 (3.90%) Amazon ECS
17 184 (3.53%) Entra ID
18 161 (3.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 183 (3.51%) Firewall
2 112 (2.15%) DNS
3 107 (2.05%) Network Security
4 74 (1.42%) VPN
5 64 (1.23%) HTTP
6 35 (0.67%) TCP/IP
6 35 (0.67%) WAN
7 31 (0.60%) BGP
8 30 (0.58%) SD-WAN
9 29 (0.56%) SSL
10 27 (0.52%) OSPF
11 23 (0.44%) Reverse Proxy
12 22 (0.42%) VXLAN
13 20 (0.38%) Ethernet
13 20 (0.38%) Ethernet VPN
13 20 (0.38%) SAN
14 17 (0.33%) 3GPP
14 17 (0.33%) Wi-Fi
15 15 (0.29%) BIG-IP
15 15 (0.29%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 348 (6.68%) PostgreSQL
2 273 (5.24%) Power BI
3 262 (5.03%) NoSQL
4 250 (4.80%) SQL Server
5 208 (3.99%) Relational Database
6 207 (3.97%) Data Lake
7 191 (3.67%) MongoDB
8 187 (3.59%) Data Warehouse
9 154 (2.96%) Amazon RDS
10 136 (2.61%) DynamoDB
11 122 (2.34%) Metadata
12 119 (2.28%) Big Data
13 118 (2.26%) Delta Lake
14 107 (2.05%) Azure SQL Database
15 91 (1.75%) Amazon Athena
16 89 (1.71%) MySQL
17 81 (1.55%) BigQuery
18 79 (1.52%) Amazon Redshift
19 74 (1.42%) Redis
20 69 (1.32%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 960 (18.43%) Git
2 953 (18.29%) Jenkins
3 739 (14.18%) GitLab
4 460 (8.83%) JIRA
5 196 (3.76%) Selenium
6 157 (3.01%) JUnit
7 129 (2.48%) Cucumber
8 121 (2.32%) Postman
9 105 (2.02%) JMeter
10 102 (1.96%) REST Assured
11 85 (1.63%) SonarQube
12 75 (1.44%) Bitbucket
13 69 (1.32%) Gatling
14 67 (1.29%) Cypress.io
14 67 (1.29%) Maven
14 67 (1.29%) MLflow
15 64 (1.23%) Gradle
16 60 (1.15%) Mockito
17 46 (0.88%) Artifactory
17 46 (0.88%) WebDriver
General
1 1,279 (24.55%) Social Skills
2 847 (16.26%) Finance
3 665 (12.76%) Public Sector
4 417 (8.00%) Analytical Skills
5 355 (6.81%) Banking
6 132 (2.53%) Documentation Skills
7 80 (1.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 69 (1.32%) Retail
9 64 (1.23%) Legal
10 61 (1.17%) 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 38 (0.73%) Telecoms
15 35 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
16 29 (0.56%) Law
17 27 (0.52%) Publishing
18 26 (0.50%) Marketing
19 23 (0.44%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,156 (22.19%) Developer
2 790 (15.16%) Senior
3 633 (12.15%) DevOps Engineer
4 558 (10.71%) Architect
5 437 (8.39%) Lead
6 407 (7.81%) Data Engineer
7 280 (5.37%) AWS Engineer
8 274 (5.26%) Software Engineer
9 271 (5.20%) Azure Engineer
10 264 (5.07%) Java Developer
11 224 (4.30%) Cloud Engineer
12 221 (4.24%) Platform Engineer
13 198 (3.80%) Senior Developer
14 167 (3.21%) Full-Stack Developer
15 157 (3.01%) Python Developer
16 138 (2.65%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 133 (2.55%) GCP Engineer
18 129 (2.48%) AWS DevOps
19 127 (2.44%) Test Engineer
20 124 (2.38%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 582 (11.17%) REST
2 480 (9.21%) React
3 452 (8.68%) .NET
4 450 (8.64%) Spring
5 424 (8.14%) Kafka
6 415 (7.97%) RESTful
7 406 (7.79%) Spring Boot
8 394 (7.56%) Node.js
9 215 (4.13%) AngularJS
10 202 (3.88%) PySpark
11 196 (3.76%) Playwright
12 181 (3.47%) HTML
13 171 (3.28%) OAuth
14 151 (2.90%) CSS
15 143 (2.74%) YAML
16 129 (2.48%) JSON
17 123 (2.36%) OpenTelemetry
18 119 (2.28%) OAuth2
19 113 (2.17%) FastAPI
20 106 (2.03%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 970 (18.62%) Cloud Native
2 357 (6.85%) Distributed Systems
3 286 (5.49%) Product Ownership
4 127 (2.44%) Onboarding
5 119 (2.28%) Legacy Systems
6 105 (2.02%) Hybrid Cloud
7 91 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
8 84 (1.61%) Data Centre
9 82 (1.57%) Public Cloud
10 80 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
11 79 (1.52%) Algorithms
12 75 (1.44%) AI Agents
13 69 (1.32%) Virtual Team
14 62 (1.19%) Mobile App
15 61 (1.17%) Security Posture
16 55 (1.06%) Management Information System
17 53 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
18 49 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
19 44 (0.84%) NHS
20 42 (0.81%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 528 (10.13%) Linux
2 233 (4.47%) Windows
3 109 (2.09%) Unix
4 82 (1.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (0.92%) Android
6 45 (0.86%) Apple iOS
7 44 (0.84%) Windows Server
8 42 (0.81%) VMS
9 20 (0.38%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.27%) 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 (0.12%) AIX
14 6 (0.12%) Rocky
14 6 (0.12%) Solaris
14 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.077%) Debian
16 3 (0.058%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,926 (56.16%) DevOps
2 1,756 (33.70%) Agile
3 1,604 (30.79%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,199 (23.01%) Containerisation
5 1,073 (20.60%) Test Automation
6 1,019 (19.56%) Microservices
7 883 (16.95%) Observability
8 854 (16.39%) Problem-Solving
9 777 (14.91%) AI
10 703 (13.49%) Software Engineering
11 674 (12.94%) Analytics
12 648 (12.44%) Continuous Improvement
13 577 (11.07%) Data Modelling
14 556 (10.67%) Data Pipeline
15 531 (10.19%) Platform Engineering
16 497 (9.54%) Migration
17 474 (9.10%) Scrum
18 453 (8.69%) ETL
19 452 (8.68%) Data Engineering
20 436 (8.37%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,913 (36.72%) Python
2 1,225 (23.51%) SQL
3 1,042 (20.00%) Java
4 575 (11.04%) JavaScript
5 510 (9.79%) C#
6 446 (8.56%) TypeScript
7 374 (7.18%) Bash
8 323 (6.20%) PowerShell
9 179 (3.44%) Bicep
10 143 (2.74%) Go
11 101 (1.94%) Shell Script
12 99 (1.90%) Scala
13 86 (1.65%) C++
14 70 (1.34%) Ruby
15 68 (1.31%) Apex Code
15 68 (1.31%) Kotlin
16 56 (1.07%) PL/SQL
17 47 (0.90%) T-SQL
18 39 (0.75%) Groovy
19 33 (0.63%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,444 (27.72%) Security Cleared
2 1,195 (22.94%) SC Cleared
3 276 (5.30%) Degree
4 205 (3.93%) BPSS Clearance
5 162 (3.11%) Azure Certification
6 159 (3.05%) DV Cleared
7 150 (2.88%) AWS Certification
8 145 (2.78%) Computer Science Degree
9 69 (1.32%) CISSP
10 54 (1.04%) Cisco Certification
11 52 (1.00%) Master's Degree
12 50 (0.96%) CISM
12 50 (0.96%) Microsoft Certification
13 47 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 45 (0.86%) ISTQB
15 30 (0.58%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 24 (0.46%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 24 (0.46%) CCSP
17 20 (0.38%) RHCE
18 19 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 404 (7.75%) QA
2 313 (6.01%) Data Quality
3 221 (4.24%) Accessibility
4 170 (3.26%) GDPR
5 134 (2.57%) NIST
6 113 (2.17%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 101 (1.94%) 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 (0.35%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
16 15 (0.29%) MiFID
17 13 (0.25%) HL7
18 12 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
18 12 (0.23%) PSD2
19 10 (0.19%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,353 (25.97%) Docker
2 118 (2.26%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.50%) Virtual Machines
4 67 (1.29%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.63%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.56%) 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 (0.12%) RACF
13 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
13 4 (0.077%) NFS
13 4 (0.077%) SRDF
14 3 (0.058%) Ceph
15 2 (0.038%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,625 (31.19%) Kubernetes
2 1,620 (31.09%) Terraform
3 517 (9.92%) Ansible
4 486 (9.33%) Grafana
5 410 (7.87%) Prometheus
6 105 (2.02%) Argo
7 79 (1.52%) Istio
8 64 (1.23%) Puppet
9 54 (1.04%) Single Sign-On
10 38 (0.73%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.65%) 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 (0.33%) IBM Guardium
16 17 (0.33%) Rancher
17 15 (0.29%) linkerd
17 15 (0.29%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.29%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 748 (14.36%) Microsoft
2 375 (7.20%) Databricks
3 270 (5.18%) Google
4 235 (4.51%) Oracle
5 221 (4.24%) Splunk
6 153 (2.94%) Salesforce
7 141 (2.71%) ServiceNow
8 131 (2.51%) Red Hat
9 114 (2.19%) Dynatrace
10 103 (1.98%) VMware
11 85 (1.63%) OpenAI
12 61 (1.17%) SAP
13 58 (1.11%) MuleSoft
14 53 (1.02%) IBM
15 45 (0.86%) Cisco
16 41 (0.79%) CyberArk
17 40 (0.77%) Informatica
18 38 (0.73%) AppDynamics
18 38 (0.73%) Tenable
19 35 (0.67%) Denodo