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 4 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 19 28
Rank change year-on-year +7 +9 -8
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 4,226 2,690 2,576
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.48% 8.30% 5.99%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.05% 9.39% 6.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,962 1,864 1,902
10th Percentile £363 £386 £413
25th Percentile £422 £453 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £555
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% -0.90% -7.50%
75th Percentile £600 £656 £650
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 60 20 19
10th Percentile £49.00 £26.31 £55.00
25th Percentile £61.75 £51.78 £60.88
Median hourly rate £65.00 £66.25 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year -1.89% -11.67% +14.32%
75th Percentile £67.00 £75.63 £77.50
90th Percentile £86.15 £97.18 £77.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £74.00 £75.00
% change year-on-year -12.16% -1.33% +14.32%

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 32,393 28,662 37,791
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.03% 88.45% 87.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,476 17,418 25,154
10th Percentile £304 £307 £305
25th Percentile £406 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £720 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,009 929 1,539
10th Percentile £14.64 £15.62 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.48 £18.72
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -23.53% +21.43%
75th Percentile £55.00 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.65 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.45 £44.50
% change year-on-year -21.76% -31.57% +39.45%

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 4 January 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 4 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for CI/CD in the UK

CI/CD
Top 17 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 4 January 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 3,511 £520 -7.14% 3,038
London +4 1,826 £525 -12.50% 721
UK excluding London +9 1,781 £500 - 2,623
Work from Home +10 1,343 £513 -2.38% 1,695
North of England +8 620 £496 -0.70% 617
Midlands +18 357 £515 +3.00% 445
South East +9 343 £500 -11.50% 724
Yorkshire +4 306 £500 - 281
West Midlands +16 295 £523 +2.96% 231
North West +11 247 £471 -0.84% 282
Scotland +5 221 £465 -1.27% 117
South West +18 169 £550 -8.33% 309
East of England +13 96 £588 +62.07% 342
North East +12 71 £494 -10.23% 55
East Midlands +12 62 £418 -16.50% 190
Wales -3 28 £463 -15.91% 69
Northern Ireland -11 12 - - 37

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
1 163 (3.86%) Confluence
2 119 (2.82%) Apache Airflow
3 110 (2.60%) Apache Spark
4 101 (2.39%) Apache
5 87 (2.06%) SAS
6 47 (1.11%) SharePoint
7 33 (0.78%) nginx
8 26 (0.62%) WebLogic
9 20 (0.47%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.45%) JBoss
11 18 (0.43%) CMS
12 17 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
13 16 (0.38%) IIS
14 15 (0.35%) Anypoint
15 13 (0.31%) Mule
15 13 (0.31%) WebSphere
16 10 (0.24%) Appian
16 10 (0.24%) SugarCRM
17 9 (0.21%) HCL Notes
17 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 46 (1.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
3 10 (0.24%) Mozilla Thunderbird
4 9 (0.21%) Microsoft Project
5 5 (0.12%) Adobe XD
5 5 (0.12%) Sketch
6 3 (0.071%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.024%) Oracle Smart View
7 1 (0.024%) Revit
7 1 (0.024%) Simulink
7 1 (0.024%) Trello
Business Applications
1 27 (0.64%) Dynamics CRM
2 8 (0.19%) Aladdin
3 5 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
4 4 (0.095%) Endur
4 4 (0.095%) Maximo
5 3 (0.071%) Magento
5 3 (0.071%) Oracle Applications
5 3 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
6 2 (0.047%) Fidessa
6 2 (0.047%) NetSuite
6 2 (0.047%) Oracle Payables
6 2 (0.047%) Oracle Receivables
6 2 (0.047%) SAP S/4HANA
6 2 (0.047%) Shopify
6 2 (0.047%) thinkFolio
7 1 (0.024%) ION Anvil
7 1 (0.024%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.024%) Oracle Cash Management
7 1 (0.024%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
7 1 (0.024%) Siebel CRM
Cloud Services
1 1,950 (46.14%) AWS
2 1,760 (41.65%) Azure
3 958 (22.67%) GitHub
4 699 (16.54%) GCP
5 647 (15.31%) GitHub Actions
6 645 (15.26%) Azure DevOps
7 587 (13.89%) Serverless
8 350 (8.28%) Amazon S3
9 331 (7.83%) AWS Lambda
10 326 (7.71%) AWS CloudFormation
11 242 (5.73%) OpenShift
12 235 (5.56%) Amazon EKS
13 220 (5.21%) Amazon ECS
14 218 (5.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 215 (5.09%) Power Platform
16 208 (4.92%) Amazon EC2
17 176 (4.16%) Azure AKS
18 157 (3.72%) Azure Data Factory
19 134 (3.17%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 124 (2.93%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 189 (4.47%) Firewall
2 123 (2.91%) DNS
3 81 (1.92%) Network Security
4 69 (1.63%) TCP/IP
4 69 (1.63%) VPN
5 45 (1.06%) SSL
6 43 (1.02%) HTTP
7 28 (0.66%) SSH
8 21 (0.50%) Kerberos
9 19 (0.45%) DHCP
10 16 (0.38%) WAN
10 16 (0.38%) Wireshark
11 15 (0.35%) Ethernet
11 15 (0.35%) HTTPS
11 15 (0.35%) OpenLDAP
12 11 (0.26%) FTP
12 11 (0.26%) SD-WAN
12 11 (0.26%) SMTP
13 10 (0.24%) IMAP
14 9 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 360 (8.52%) PostgreSQL
2 256 (6.06%) NoSQL
3 182 (4.31%) Amazon RDS
4 180 (4.26%) MongoDB
5 178 (4.21%) SQL Server
6 157 (3.72%) Power BI
7 149 (3.53%) Relational Database
8 143 (3.38%) Data Lake
9 132 (3.12%) Data Warehouse
10 108 (2.56%) MySQL
11 97 (2.30%) Azure SQL Database
12 92 (2.18%) DynamoDB
13 77 (1.82%) Redis
14 72 (1.70%) Delta Lake
15 67 (1.59%) Oracle Database
16 61 (1.44%) BigQuery
17 60 (1.42%) Big Data
18 52 (1.23%) Amazon Aurora
18 52 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
19 48 (1.14%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 963 (22.79%) Jenkins
2 851 (20.14%) Git
3 726 (17.18%) GitLab
4 407 (9.63%) JIRA
5 188 (4.45%) Selenium
6 148 (3.50%) Cucumber
7 143 (3.38%) JUnit
8 108 (2.56%) Cypress.io
9 107 (2.53%) Postman
10 96 (2.27%) SonarQube
11 90 (2.13%) Sonatype Nexus
12 78 (1.85%) Bitbucket
12 78 (1.85%) JMeter
13 68 (1.61%) Artifactory
13 68 (1.61%) CircleCI
14 59 (1.40%) Maven
14 59 (1.40%) REST Assured
15 57 (1.35%) MLflow
16 56 (1.33%) Gradle
17 50 (1.18%) Liquibase
General
1 1,205 (28.51%) Social Skills
2 740 (17.51%) Finance
3 558 (13.20%) Public Sector
4 358 (8.47%) Banking
5 333 (7.88%) Analytical Skills
6 99 (2.34%) Documentation Skills
7 69 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 62 (1.47%) Financial Institution
9 57 (1.35%) Military
10 55 (1.30%) Investment Banking
11 50 (1.18%) Marketing
12 48 (1.14%) Front Office
13 47 (1.11%) Telecoms
14 35 (0.83%) Presentation Skills
15 34 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
16 27 (0.64%) Manufacturing
17 26 (0.62%) Retail
18 24 (0.57%) Legal
19 21 (0.50%) Law
20 20 (0.47%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 997 (23.59%) Developer
2 580 (13.72%) Senior
3 552 (13.06%) DevOps Engineer
4 337 (7.97%) Architect
5 283 (6.70%) Data Engineer
6 281 (6.65%) Lead
7 257 (6.08%) AWS Engineer
8 249 (5.89%) Software Engineer
9 224 (5.30%) Java Developer
10 201 (4.76%) Azure Engineer
11 198 (4.69%) Platform Engineer
12 166 (3.93%) Full-Stack Developer
13 161 (3.81%) Senior Developer
14 153 (3.62%) Cloud Engineer
15 145 (3.43%) AWS DevOps
16 123 (2.91%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 121 (2.86%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 107 (2.53%) Python Engineer
19 102 (2.41%) Python Developer
20 101 (2.39%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 519 (12.28%) REST
2 436 (10.32%) React
3 426 (10.08%) Node.js
4 425 (10.06%) RESTful
5 356 (8.42%) Kafka
6 342 (8.09%) .NET
7 335 (7.93%) Spring
8 290 (6.86%) Spring Boot
9 219 (5.18%) AngularJS
10 207 (4.90%) HTML
11 180 (4.26%) CSS
12 167 (3.95%) JSON
13 164 (3.88%) OAuth
14 152 (3.60%) Elastic Stack
15 148 (3.50%) Playwright
16 127 (3.01%) PySpark
17 126 (2.98%) YAML
18 119 (2.82%) GraphQL
19 114 (2.70%) SOAP
20 107 (2.53%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 669 (15.83%) Cloud Native
2 270 (6.39%) Distributed Systems
3 191 (4.52%) Product Ownership
4 105 (2.48%) Onboarding
5 88 (2.08%) Public Cloud
6 86 (2.04%) Mobile App
7 80 (1.89%) Legacy Systems
8 74 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
9 67 (1.59%) Hybrid Cloud
10 65 (1.54%) Algorithms
11 61 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
12 52 (1.23%) AI Agents
13 51 (1.21%) Virtual Team
14 50 (1.18%) Replication
15 49 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
15 49 (1.16%) Security Posture
16 47 (1.11%) Data Centre
17 42 (0.99%) NHS
18 41 (0.97%) Private Cloud
19 38 (0.90%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 584 (13.82%) Linux
2 214 (5.06%) Windows
3 97 (2.30%) Unix
4 78 (1.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 67 (1.59%) Android
6 64 (1.51%) Apple iOS
7 49 (1.16%) VMS
8 48 (1.14%) Windows Server
9 30 (0.71%) Ubuntu
10 24 (0.57%) CentOS
11 13 (0.31%) Solaris
12 11 (0.26%) Mac OS
13 10 (0.24%) Amazon Linux
14 4 (0.095%) zOS
15 3 (0.071%) Windows Server 2016
16 2 (0.047%) Oracle Linux
16 2 (0.047%) Robot Operating System
16 2 (0.047%) SUSE
17 1 (0.024%) FreeRTOS
17 1 (0.024%) watchOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,444 (57.83%) DevOps
2 1,533 (36.28%) Agile
3 1,344 (31.80%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,091 (25.82%) Containerisation
5 925 (21.89%) Problem-Solving
6 858 (20.30%) Test Automation
7 823 (19.47%) Microservices
8 581 (13.75%) Software Engineering
9 572 (13.54%) Observability
10 480 (11.36%) Analytics
11 473 (11.19%) AI
12 436 (10.32%) Continuous Improvement
13 405 (9.58%) Migration
14 388 (9.18%) Data Pipeline
15 380 (8.99%) Full-Stack Development
16 356 (8.42%) Scrum
17 354 (8.38%) Mentoring
18 351 (8.31%) DevSecOps
19 314 (7.43%) Platform Engineering
20 313 (7.41%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,628 (38.52%) Python
2 886 (20.97%) SQL
3 877 (20.75%) Java
4 569 (13.46%) JavaScript
5 468 (11.07%) TypeScript
6 420 (9.94%) Bash
7 393 (9.30%) C#
8 311 (7.36%) PowerShell
9 218 (5.16%) Go
10 118 (2.79%) Bicep
11 111 (2.63%) Shell Script
12 104 (2.46%) C++
13 75 (1.77%) Scala
14 65 (1.54%) Ruby
15 56 (1.33%) PL/SQL
16 54 (1.28%) PHP
17 47 (1.11%) Kotlin
17 47 (1.11%) T-SQL
18 46 (1.09%) Groovy
19 45 (1.06%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,109 (26.24%) Security Cleared
2 892 (21.11%) SC Cleared
3 280 (6.63%) Degree
4 181 (4.28%) Computer Science Degree
5 168 (3.98%) AWS Certification
6 131 (3.10%) BPSS Clearance
7 127 (3.01%) Azure Certification
8 119 (2.82%) DV Cleared
9 76 (1.80%) Master's Degree
10 62 (1.47%) CISSP
11 54 (1.28%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 54 (1.28%) Microsoft Certification
12 43 (1.02%) CISM
13 29 (0.69%) ISTQB
14 27 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
14 27 (0.64%) MCP
15 25 (0.59%) Oracle Certification
16 24 (0.57%) Cisco Certification
17 17 (0.40%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 15 (0.35%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 412 (9.75%) QA
2 194 (4.59%) Data Quality
3 183 (4.33%) Accessibility
4 153 (3.62%) GDPR
5 128 (3.03%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 110 (2.60%) NIST
7 70 (1.66%) WCAG
8 53 (1.25%) NCSC
9 42 (0.99%) PCI DSS
10 21 (0.50%) HIPAA
10 21 (0.50%) PSD2
10 21 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 17 (0.40%) SLA
12 15 (0.35%) ISO 20022
12 15 (0.35%) SOC 2
13 13 (0.31%) EU AI Act
13 13 (0.31%) SEPA
14 12 (0.28%) MiFID
15 10 (0.24%) HL7
16 7 (0.17%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,379 (32.63%) Docker
2 129 (3.05%) Active Directory
3 73 (1.73%) VMware Infrastructure
4 57 (1.35%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.90%) vSphere
6 15 (0.35%) VMware NSX
7 12 (0.28%) HDFS
7 12 (0.28%) Squid
8 10 (0.24%) DFS Replication
8 10 (0.24%) Dovecot
8 10 (0.24%) Hyper-V
8 10 (0.24%) KVM
8 10 (0.24%) NFS
8 10 (0.24%) Postfix
8 10 (0.24%) Virtual Desktop
9 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
9 8 (0.19%) zsh
10 7 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
11 4 (0.095%) Veritas File System
11 4 (0.095%) Veritas Volume Manager
Systems Management
1 1,527 (36.13%) Kubernetes
2 1,469 (34.76%) Terraform
3 580 (13.72%) Ansible
4 490 (11.59%) Grafana
5 425 (10.06%) Prometheus
6 121 (2.86%) Argo
7 66 (1.56%) Puppet
8 64 (1.51%) Progress Chef
9 54 (1.28%) Istio
10 47 (1.11%) Single Sign-On
11 40 (0.95%) Kibana
12 23 (0.54%) Nessus
12 23 (0.54%) Podman
13 21 (0.50%) Packer
14 19 (0.45%) Proxmox
15 15 (0.35%) ITRS Geneos
15 15 (0.35%) NetBackup
15 15 (0.35%) vRealize
16 14 (0.33%) logstash
16 14 (0.33%) Rancher
Vendors
1 584 (13.82%) Microsoft
2 292 (6.91%) Databricks
3 262 (6.20%) Oracle
4 225 (5.32%) Google
5 214 (5.06%) Splunk
6 144 (3.41%) Red Hat
7 114 (2.70%) VMware
8 101 (2.39%) ServiceNow
9 81 (1.92%) Salesforce
10 73 (1.73%) OpenAI
11 70 (1.66%) Dynatrace
12 52 (1.23%) SAP
13 45 (1.06%) MuleSoft
14 44 (1.04%) IBM
15 42 (0.99%) Talend
16 40 (0.95%) F5
17 34 (0.80%) CyberArk
18 32 (0.76%) Cisco
19 31 (0.73%) Atlassian
19 31 (0.73%) Denodo