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 19 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 19 30
Rank change year-on-year +8 +11 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,052 2,639 2,405
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.94% 8.97% 5.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.88% 9.88% 6.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,479 1,894 1,723
10th Percentile £363 £380 £405
25th Percentile £425 £438 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £509 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.05% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £538
% change year-on-year - -6.98% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 30 24
10th Percentile £50.24 £27.04 £35.90
25th Percentile £61.25 £45.63 £55.75
Median hourly rate £67.00 £64.50 £60.50
Median % change year-on-year +3.88% +6.61% -7.78%
75th Percentile £79.13 £81.60 £67.25
90th Percentile £90.00 £96.83 £73.86
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £62.00
% change year-on-year - +4.84% -5.34%

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 39,218 26,699 37,767
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.91% 90.74% 86.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,782 17,291 24,442
10th Percentile £316 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £523 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.31% -0.48% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £483 £500
% change year-on-year +0.41% -3.40% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,336 1,037 2,416
10th Percentile £14.93 £14.84 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.74 £18.51 £15.91
Median hourly rate £37.50 £30.00 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year +25.00% -14.29% -2.78%
75th Percentile £65.33 £62.50 £58.69
90th Percentile £78.13 £75.00 £71.81
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £28.88 £35.00
% change year-on-year +38.53% -17.50% -

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 19 April 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 19 April 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 19 April 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 4,221 £520 -3.70% 1,615
London +6 2,181 £525 -8.65% 637
UK excluding London +11 2,118 £500 - 1,163
Work from Home +9 1,487 £500 -4.76% 798
North of England +10 767 £500 - 344
Midlands +16 422 £488 +2.20% 141
Yorkshire +6 414 £500 -2.44% 109
South East +11 411 £500 -2.44% 317
West Midlands +18 341 £492 -0.19% 76
North West +9 300 £490 -2.00% 183
Scotland +7 203 £438 -7.89% 71
South West +4 200 £525 -5.83% 169
East of England +10 106 £565 +21.11% 104
East Midlands -1 75 £428 -7.57% 65
North East +5 61 £450 -11.11% 53
Wales 0 27 £440 -19.27% 21
Northern Ireland +10 19 £500 +17.65% 15
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
1 227 (4.49%) Confluence
2 194 (3.84%) Apache Spark
3 137 (2.71%) Apache Airflow
4 126 (2.49%) Apache
5 107 (2.12%) SAS
6 71 (1.41%) SharePoint
7 28 (0.55%) nginx
8 25 (0.49%) CMS
8 25 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.49%) OpenStack
9 18 (0.36%) WebLogic
10 13 (0.26%) Anypoint
10 13 (0.26%) Mendix
11 11 (0.22%) HCL Notes
12 10 (0.20%) SharePoint Server
12 10 (0.20%) Sitecore CMS
13 9 (0.18%) Appian
13 9 (0.18%) IIS
13 9 (0.18%) WebSphere
14 8 (0.16%) Camunda
Applications
1 38 (0.75%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 14 (0.28%) Microsoft Office
4 13 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
5 9 (0.18%) Chatbot
6 8 (0.16%) Adobe XD
7 5 (0.099%) MS Visio
7 5 (0.099%) Sketch
8 3 (0.059%) Simulink
9 2 (0.040%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
10 1 (0.020%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 35 (0.69%) Dynamics CRM
2 10 (0.20%) Oracle EBS
2 10 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
3 6 (0.12%) Aladdin
4 4 (0.079%) SAP S/4HANA
5 3 (0.059%) Findur
5 3 (0.059%) Oracle Applications
5 3 (0.059%) SAP BPC
5 3 (0.059%) Shopify
6 2 (0.040%) Oracle Payables
6 2 (0.040%) Oracle Receivables
7 1 (0.020%) Actimize
7 1 (0.020%) Cloudability
7 1 (0.020%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.020%) Oracle Cash Management
7 1 (0.020%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
7 1 (0.020%) ProductWriter
7 1 (0.020%) R3 Corda
7 1 (0.020%) SAP Hybris
7 1 (0.020%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 2,224 (44.02%) Azure
2 2,212 (43.78%) AWS
3 1,123 (22.23%) GitHub
4 828 (16.39%) GCP
5 816 (16.15%) Azure DevOps
6 704 (13.94%) GitHub Actions
7 647 (12.81%) Serverless
8 399 (7.90%) Amazon S3
9 387 (7.66%) AWS CloudFormation
10 381 (7.54%) AWS Lambda
11 346 (6.85%) Power Platform
12 276 (5.46%) Amazon EKS
13 245 (4.85%) OpenShift
14 229 (4.53%) Azure AKS
15 227 (4.49%) Amazon ECS
16 214 (4.24%) Azure Data Factory
17 202 (4.00%) Amazon EC2
18 198 (3.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 181 (3.58%) Entra ID
20 167 (3.31%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 174 (3.44%) Firewall
2 105 (2.08%) DNS
3 102 (2.02%) Network Security
4 72 (1.43%) HTTP
5 69 (1.37%) VPN
6 35 (0.69%) TCP/IP
7 28 (0.55%) SSL
8 24 (0.48%) Reverse Proxy
9 22 (0.44%) Ethernet
10 20 (0.40%) SAN
11 18 (0.36%) BGP
11 18 (0.36%) SSH
12 17 (0.34%) WAN
13 15 (0.30%) 3GPP
13 15 (0.30%) HTTPS
14 13 (0.26%) Kerberos
14 13 (0.26%) NAS
14 13 (0.26%) SD-WAN
15 12 (0.24%) DHCP
16 11 (0.22%) OSPF
Database & Business Intelligence
1 377 (7.46%) PostgreSQL
2 279 (5.52%) NoSQL
3 256 (5.07%) Power BI
4 239 (4.73%) SQL Server
5 199 (3.94%) Data Lake
6 194 (3.84%) Data Warehouse
6 194 (3.84%) MongoDB
7 191 (3.78%) Relational Database
8 154 (3.05%) Amazon RDS
9 134 (2.65%) DynamoDB
10 124 (2.45%) Azure SQL Database
11 119 (2.36%) Big Data
12 118 (2.34%) Metadata
13 114 (2.26%) Delta Lake
14 95 (1.88%) Amazon Athena
15 94 (1.86%) MySQL
16 83 (1.64%) Amazon Redshift
17 76 (1.50%) BigQuery
18 75 (1.48%) Redis
19 55 (1.09%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 963 (19.06%) Git
2 956 (18.92%) Jenkins
3 716 (14.17%) GitLab
4 462 (9.14%) JIRA
5 205 (4.06%) Selenium
6 184 (3.64%) JUnit
7 139 (2.75%) Cucumber
8 123 (2.43%) Postman
9 100 (1.98%) JMeter
10 89 (1.76%) REST Assured
11 84 (1.66%) SonarQube
12 76 (1.50%) Cypress.io
13 73 (1.44%) Bitbucket
14 68 (1.35%) Maven
15 67 (1.33%) MLflow
16 62 (1.23%) Gatling
17 61 (1.21%) Mockito
18 51 (1.01%) Gradle
19 49 (0.97%) Artifactory
20 48 (0.95%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,300 (25.73%) Social Skills
2 839 (16.61%) Finance
3 651 (12.89%) Public Sector
4 433 (8.57%) Analytical Skills
5 339 (6.71%) Banking
6 137 (2.71%) Documentation Skills
7 71 (1.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 65 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
9 58 (1.15%) Legal
10 54 (1.07%) Retail
11 53 (1.05%) Front Office
11 53 (1.05%) Military
12 49 (0.97%) Investment Banking
13 44 (0.87%) Telecoms
14 43 (0.85%) Financial Institution
15 40 (0.79%) Presentation Skills
16 33 (0.65%) Law
17 26 (0.51%) Publishing
18 25 (0.49%) Billing
18 25 (0.49%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 1,169 (23.14%) Developer
2 712 (14.09%) Senior
3 581 (11.50%) DevOps Engineer
4 526 (10.41%) Architect
5 417 (8.25%) Lead
6 410 (8.12%) Data Engineer
7 272 (5.38%) AWS Engineer
8 269 (5.32%) Java Developer
9 258 (5.11%) Azure Engineer
9 258 (5.11%) Software Engineer
10 229 (4.53%) Platform Engineer
11 201 (3.98%) Cloud Engineer
12 187 (3.70%) Full-Stack Developer
13 178 (3.52%) Senior Developer
14 154 (3.05%) Python Developer
15 142 (2.81%) Site Reliability Engineer
16 138 (2.73%) AWS DevOps
17 122 (2.41%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 119 (2.36%) GCP Engineer
19 115 (2.28%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 577 (11.42%) REST
2 487 (9.64%) React
3 448 (8.87%) Spring
4 441 (8.73%) Node.js
5 429 (8.49%) RESTful
6 428 (8.47%) Kafka
7 423 (8.37%) .NET
8 390 (7.72%) Spring Boot
9 229 (4.53%) AngularJS
10 199 (3.94%) PySpark
11 191 (3.78%) Playwright
12 183 (3.62%) HTML
13 180 (3.56%) OAuth
14 163 (3.23%) CSS
15 156 (3.09%) YAML
16 141 (2.79%) JSON
17 114 (2.26%) OpenTelemetry
18 111 (2.20%) GraphQL
18 111 (2.20%) OAuth2
19 104 (2.06%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 904 (17.89%) Cloud Native
2 336 (6.65%) Distributed Systems
3 277 (5.48%) Product Ownership
4 114 (2.26%) Onboarding
5 95 (1.88%) Legacy Systems
6 94 (1.86%) Enterprise Software
7 91 (1.80%) Hybrid Cloud
8 85 (1.68%) Public Cloud
9 79 (1.56%) Algorithms
10 69 (1.37%) Data Protection Act
10 69 (1.37%) Virtual Team
11 66 (1.31%) Mobile App
12 65 (1.29%) AI Agents
13 62 (1.23%) Data Centre
14 57 (1.13%) Security Posture
15 49 (0.97%) NHS
16 48 (0.95%) Management Information System
17 45 (0.89%) Greenfield Project
17 45 (0.89%) Private Cloud
18 42 (0.83%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 531 (10.51%) Linux
2 229 (4.53%) Windows
3 90 (1.78%) Unix
4 85 (1.68%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (0.99%) Apple iOS
6 49 (0.97%) Android
7 44 (0.87%) VMS
8 40 (0.79%) Windows Server
9 21 (0.42%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.28%) CentOS
11 10 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 6 (0.12%) Solaris
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2008
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
12 6 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.12%) zOS
13 5 (0.099%) Rocky
14 4 (0.079%) SUSE
15 3 (0.059%) Debian
15 3 (0.059%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,800 (55.42%) DevOps
2 1,739 (34.42%) Agile
3 1,540 (30.48%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,218 (24.11%) Containerisation
5 1,053 (20.84%) Test Automation
6 983 (19.46%) Microservices
7 940 (18.61%) Problem-Solving
8 806 (15.95%) Observability
9 720 (14.25%) AI
10 715 (14.15%) Analytics
11 656 (12.98%) Software Engineering
12 629 (12.45%) Continuous Improvement
13 556 (11.01%) Data Pipeline
14 541 (10.71%) Data Modelling
15 504 (9.98%) Migration
16 487 (9.64%) Platform Engineering
17 462 (9.14%) Scrum
18 459 (9.09%) Data Engineering
19 452 (8.95%) ETL
20 425 (8.41%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,913 (37.87%) Python
2 1,216 (24.07%) SQL
3 1,013 (20.05%) Java
4 585 (11.58%) JavaScript
5 502 (9.94%) C#
6 485 (9.60%) TypeScript
7 361 (7.15%) Bash
8 308 (6.10%) PowerShell
9 166 (3.29%) Bicep
10 155 (3.07%) Go
11 107 (2.12%) Scala
12 103 (2.04%) Shell Script
13 80 (1.58%) C++
14 79 (1.56%) Ruby
15 62 (1.23%) PL/SQL
16 56 (1.11%) Kotlin
17 49 (0.97%) T-SQL
18 48 (0.95%) Apex Code
19 35 (0.69%) Perl
20 34 (0.67%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 1,404 (27.79%) Security Cleared
2 1,156 (22.88%) SC Cleared
3 283 (5.60%) Degree
4 199 (3.94%) BPSS Clearance
5 166 (3.29%) Computer Science Degree
6 165 (3.27%) AWS Certification
7 150 (2.97%) Azure Certification
8 138 (2.73%) DV Cleared
9 70 (1.39%) CISSP
10 56 (1.11%) Master's Degree
11 54 (1.07%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 51 (1.01%) Microsoft Certification
13 49 (0.97%) CISM
14 42 (0.83%) Cisco Certification
15 36 (0.71%) ISTQB
16 30 (0.59%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 25 (0.49%) Oracle Certification
18 20 (0.40%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 19 (0.38%) CCSP
19 19 (0.38%) RHCE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 420 (8.31%) QA
2 317 (6.27%) Data Quality
3 202 (4.00%) Accessibility
4 187 (3.70%) GDPR
5 147 (2.91%) NIST
6 139 (2.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 95 (1.88%) WCAG
8 72 (1.43%) NCSC
9 55 (1.09%) PCI DSS
10 36 (0.71%) SLA
11 26 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 20 (0.40%) GRC
12 20 (0.40%) ISO 20022
13 18 (0.36%) SOC 2
14 17 (0.34%) PSD2
15 14 (0.28%) Cyber Essentials
15 14 (0.28%) HL7
16 12 (0.24%) MiFID
16 12 (0.24%) NIST 800
16 12 (0.24%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,393 (27.57%) Docker
2 128 (2.53%) Active Directory
3 74 (1.46%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.31%) Virtual Machines
5 39 (0.77%) vSphere
6 37 (0.73%) VMware NSX
7 14 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
8 12 (0.24%) Hyper-V
8 12 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
9 8 (0.16%) HDFS
10 7 (0.14%) Oracle RAC
11 6 (0.12%) Postfix
12 5 (0.099%) RACF
13 4 (0.079%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
13 4 (0.079%) Ceph
13 4 (0.079%) NFS
13 4 (0.079%) SRDF
14 3 (0.059%) KVM
14 3 (0.059%) Squid
15 2 (0.040%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,645 (32.56%) Kubernetes
2 1,599 (31.65%) Terraform
3 503 (9.96%) Ansible
4 468 (9.26%) Grafana
5 401 (7.94%) Prometheus
6 112 (2.22%) Argo
7 78 (1.54%) Istio
8 67 (1.33%) Puppet
9 47 (0.93%) Progress Chef
10 46 (0.91%) Single Sign-On
11 35 (0.69%) Kibana
12 26 (0.51%) vCenter Server
13 22 (0.44%) Nessus
14 21 (0.42%) Rancher
15 19 (0.38%) Control-M
15 19 (0.38%) Packer
16 17 (0.34%) IBM Guardium
17 15 (0.30%) linkerd
17 15 (0.30%) NetBackup
18 14 (0.28%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 753 (14.90%) Microsoft
2 394 (7.80%) Databricks
3 260 (5.15%) Google
4 248 (4.91%) Oracle
5 215 (4.26%) Splunk
6 142 (2.81%) ServiceNow
7 135 (2.67%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.40%) Salesforce
9 116 (2.30%) VMware
10 91 (1.80%) Dynatrace
10 91 (1.80%) OpenAI
11 56 (1.11%) SAP
12 55 (1.09%) IBM
13 50 (0.99%) MuleSoft
14 47 (0.93%) CyberArk
15 45 (0.89%) Talend
16 40 (0.79%) Cisco
17 38 (0.75%) Denodo
17 38 (0.75%) Tenable
18 35 (0.69%) Informatica