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 11 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 17 27
Rank change year-on-year +6 +10 -2
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,918 3,212 2,577
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.08% 9.75% 6.62%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.06% 10.78% 7.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,985 2,217 1,748
10th Percentile £380 £358 £400
25th Percentile £435 £421 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -7.27% -6.38%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £694 £701 £765
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 46 77
10th Percentile £51.50 £44.51 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.63 £55.00 -
Median hourly rate £69.00 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.15% - -10.34%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £88.80 £85.23 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £65.00 £66.00
% change year-on-year +3.85% -1.52% -2.66%

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 45,312 29,789 33,296
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.84% 90.47% 85.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,886 18,626 21,285
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £421 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £727 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,829 1,693 1,837
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.05
25th Percentile £19.00 £17.30 £18.35
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -38.57% -1.35%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.13 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.74 £42.50
% change year-on-year +93.36% -46.51% +17.24%

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 11 August 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 11 August 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 11 August 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 4,973 £525 +2.44% 3,068
London +6 2,613 £538 +2.38% 1,780
UK excluding London +6 2,513 £500 - 1,614
Work from Home +6 1,829 £520 +4.00% 1,429
North of England +9 943 £500 +2.56% 464
Yorkshire +5 472 £507 +3.73% 127
South East -6 452 £525 +5.00% 420
Midlands -1 415 £486 +5.08% 167
North West +5 369 £525 +6.92% 265
West Midlands +10 353 £481 -6.60% 108
South West +5 283 £525 +0.48% 214
Scotland 0 239 £425 -15.00% 153
East of England +6 146 £510 +2.00% 99
North East 0 113 £425 -7.61% 73
East Midlands -20 55 £488 +12.13% 59
Wales 0 41 £450 -4.00% 45
Northern Ireland +26 25 £545 +3.81% 62
Channel Islands - 1 £500 - 1

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
1 288 (4.87%) Confluence
2 221 (3.73%) Apache Airflow
3 202 (3.41%) Apache Spark
4 155 (2.62%) Apache
5 89 (1.50%) SAS
6 73 (1.23%) SharePoint
7 34 (0.57%) Jupyter
8 21 (0.35%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.34%) CMS
10 17 (0.29%) Anypoint
10 17 (0.29%) nginx
10 17 (0.29%) Palantir Foundry
11 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
11 16 (0.27%) WebSphere
12 13 (0.22%) WebLogic
13 11 (0.19%) Camunda
14 9 (0.15%) Mule
15 8 (0.14%) IIS
16 7 (0.12%) Microsoft Exchange
16 7 (0.12%) WordPress
Applications
1 25 (0.42%) Chatbot
2 21 (0.35%) Microsoft Excel
3 13 (0.22%) Microsoft Office
4 11 (0.19%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.068%) Simulink
6 4 (0.068%) Trello
7 3 (0.051%) Microsoft Project
8 2 (0.034%) Adobe XD
8 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
8 2 (0.034%) PlantUML
8 2 (0.034%) Sketch
8 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.017%) Maya
Business Applications
1 45 (0.76%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.30%) Payment Gateway
2 18 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.24%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.22%) Aladdin
5 11 (0.19%) SAP CRM
6 7 (0.12%) NetSuite
6 7 (0.12%) Shopify
7 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.084%) Magento
9 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
10 3 (0.051%) Endur
10 3 (0.051%) Findur
10 3 (0.051%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.051%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
11 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
11 2 (0.034%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 2,616 (44.20%) AWS
2 2,600 (43.93%) Azure
3 1,275 (21.54%) GitHub
4 1,004 (16.97%) GCP
5 972 (16.42%) Azure DevOps
6 826 (13.96%) GitHub Actions
7 639 (10.80%) Serverless
8 445 (7.52%) Amazon S3
9 429 (7.25%) Power Platform
10 417 (7.05%) AWS Lambda
11 320 (5.41%) Amazon EKS
12 300 (5.07%) AWS CloudFormation
13 282 (4.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 244 (4.12%) Azure AKS
15 235 (3.97%) Entra ID
16 223 (3.77%) Snowflake
17 218 (3.68%) Amazon EC2
18 189 (3.19%) Azure Data Factory
19 188 (3.18%) Amazon ECS
20 167 (2.82%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 236 (3.99%) Firewall
2 153 (2.59%) DNS
3 123 (2.08%) Network Security
4 97 (1.64%) VPN
5 80 (1.35%) TCP/IP
6 59 (1.00%) HTTP
7 47 (0.79%) WAN
8 42 (0.71%) BGP
9 39 (0.66%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
10 33 (0.56%) VXLAN
11 32 (0.54%) BIG-IP
11 32 (0.54%) SSL
12 31 (0.52%) Ethernet VPN
13 30 (0.51%) Internet
13 30 (0.51%) OSPF
14 29 (0.49%) DHCP
15 23 (0.39%) 5G
16 21 (0.35%) VSAN
17 19 (0.32%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 408 (6.89%) PostgreSQL
2 329 (5.56%) Power BI
3 282 (4.77%) Data Warehouse
4 270 (4.56%) SQL Server
5 254 (4.29%) NoSQL
6 249 (4.21%) Relational Database
7 227 (3.84%) MongoDB
8 211 (3.57%) Data Lake
9 171 (2.89%) Amazon RDS
10 152 (2.57%) Metadata
11 144 (2.43%) DynamoDB
12 127 (2.15%) Amazon Redshift
13 119 (2.01%) MySQL
14 116 (1.96%) Delta Lake
15 109 (1.84%) BigQuery
16 102 (1.72%) Amazon Athena
16 102 (1.72%) Big Data
17 97 (1.64%) Azure SQL Database
18 94 (1.59%) Redis
19 81 (1.37%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,129 (19.08%) Git
2 1,034 (17.47%) Jenkins
3 835 (14.11%) GitLab
4 536 (9.06%) JIRA
5 222 (3.75%) Selenium
6 188 (3.18%) JUnit
7 136 (2.30%) Cucumber
8 115 (1.94%) Bitbucket
9 114 (1.93%) Postman
10 113 (1.91%) JMeter
11 112 (1.89%) Maven
12 106 (1.79%) SonarQube
13 101 (1.71%) Gradle
14 92 (1.55%) Cypress.io
15 90 (1.52%) REST Assured
16 83 (1.40%) Gatling
17 72 (1.22%) Mockito
18 56 (0.95%) WebDriver
19 55 (0.93%) Claude Code
20 49 (0.83%) MLflow
General
1 1,486 (25.11%) Social Skills
2 1,035 (17.49%) Finance
3 852 (14.40%) Public Sector
4 495 (8.36%) Analytical Skills
5 451 (7.62%) Banking
6 138 (2.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 123 (2.08%) Documentation Skills
8 121 (2.04%) Retail
9 76 (1.28%) Investment Banking
10 70 (1.18%) Front Office
11 69 (1.17%) Military
12 68 (1.15%) Telecoms
13 66 (1.12%) Influencing Skills
14 60 (1.01%) Legal
15 52 (0.88%) Financial Institution
15 52 (0.88%) Law
16 42 (0.71%) Marketing
17 38 (0.64%) Aerospace
18 36 (0.61%) Manufacturing
18 36 (0.61%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 1,323 (22.36%) Developer
2 1,019 (17.22%) Senior
3 714 (12.06%) DevOps Engineer
4 608 (10.27%) Architect
5 568 (9.60%) Lead
6 462 (7.81%) Data Engineer
7 326 (5.51%) AWS Engineer
8 324 (5.47%) Java Developer
9 323 (5.46%) Software Engineer
10 284 (4.80%) Azure Engineer
11 278 (4.70%) Senior Developer
12 265 (4.48%) Platform Engineer
13 260 (4.39%) Cloud Engineer
14 191 (3.23%) Full-Stack Developer
15 159 (2.69%) Python Developer
16 154 (2.60%) Solutions Architect
17 146 (2.47%) AWS DevOps
18 139 (2.35%) GCP Engineer
19 137 (2.31%) Test Engineer
20 135 (2.28%) AWS DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 788 (13.32%) REST
2 540 (9.12%) React
3 523 (8.84%) .NET
4 521 (8.80%) Spring
5 502 (8.48%) Kafka
6 486 (8.21%) RESTful
7 451 (7.62%) Spring Boot
8 384 (6.49%) Node.js
9 237 (4.00%) Playwright
10 232 (3.92%) HTML
11 212 (3.58%) PySpark
12 202 (3.41%) CSS
13 199 (3.36%) JSON
14 198 (3.35%) AngularJS
15 196 (3.31%) OAuth
16 151 (2.55%) OAuth2
17 127 (2.15%) SOAP
18 116 (1.96%) YAML
19 114 (1.93%) .NET Core
20 109 (1.84%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 1,215 (20.53%) Cloud Native
2 453 (7.65%) Distributed Systems
3 369 (6.24%) Product Ownership
4 193 (3.26%) Onboarding
5 190 (3.21%) Enterprise Software
6 160 (2.70%) AI Agents
7 152 (2.57%) Legacy Systems
8 137 (2.31%) Hybrid Cloud
9 99 (1.67%) Data Centre
9 99 (1.67%) Security Posture
10 91 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
11 90 (1.52%) Public Cloud
12 71 (1.20%) Data Structures
12 71 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
13 69 (1.17%) Virtual Team
14 68 (1.15%) Management Information System
15 67 (1.13%) Algorithms
15 67 (1.13%) Mobile App
16 66 (1.12%) Enterprise Cloud
17 64 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 586 (9.90%) Linux
2 271 (4.58%) Windows
3 138 (2.33%) Unix
4 115 (1.94%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.05%) Windows Server
6 56 (0.95%) Android
7 52 (0.88%) Apple iOS
8 26 (0.44%) VMS
9 20 (0.34%) Ubuntu
10 16 (0.27%) AIX
11 13 (0.22%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
12 9 (0.15%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) Solaris
14 6 (0.10%) CentOS
14 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2008
15 5 (0.084%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.084%) Rocky
15 5 (0.084%) Windows Server 2016
16 4 (0.068%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,354 (56.67%) DevOps
2 2,229 (37.66%) Agile
3 1,922 (32.48%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,363 (23.03%) Test Automation
5 1,285 (21.71%) Containerisation
6 1,201 (20.29%) Microservices
7 1,051 (17.76%) AI
8 1,040 (17.57%) Observability
9 989 (16.71%) Software Engineering
10 936 (15.82%) Problem-Solving
11 864 (14.60%) Continuous Improvement
12 762 (12.88%) Analytics
13 732 (12.37%) Platform Engineering
14 708 (11.96%) Data Pipeline
15 651 (11.00%) Data Modelling
16 638 (10.78%) Scrum
17 605 (10.22%) Migration
18 600 (10.14%) Event-Driven
19 597 (10.09%) Stakeholder Management
20 573 (9.68%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 2,186 (36.94%) Python
2 1,357 (22.93%) SQL
3 1,236 (20.89%) Java
4 660 (11.15%) JavaScript
5 562 (9.50%) C#
6 512 (8.65%) Bash
7 504 (8.52%) TypeScript
8 433 (7.32%) PowerShell
9 232 (3.92%) Bicep
10 158 (2.67%) Go
11 108 (1.82%) Shell Script
12 100 (1.69%) Kotlin
13 97 (1.64%) Scala
14 84 (1.42%) Apex Code
15 82 (1.39%) C++
16 67 (1.13%) Groovy
17 61 (1.03%) PL/SQL
18 52 (0.88%) Ruby
19 48 (0.81%) T-SQL
20 38 (0.64%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,736 (29.33%) Security Cleared
2 1,462 (24.70%) SC Cleared
3 295 (4.98%) Degree
4 242 (4.09%) BPSS Clearance
5 213 (3.60%) DV Cleared
6 197 (3.33%) Azure Certification
7 188 (3.18%) AWS Certification
8 149 (2.52%) Computer Science Degree
9 104 (1.76%) CISSP
10 65 (1.10%) Cisco Certification
11 58 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
12 56 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.84%) ISTQB
14 49 (0.83%) CISM
15 42 (0.71%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 38 (0.64%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 29 (0.49%) CCSP
19 23 (0.39%) TOGAF Certification
20 21 (0.35%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 508 (8.58%) QA
2 413 (6.98%) Data Quality
3 306 (5.17%) Accessibility
4 152 (2.57%) GDPR
5 129 (2.18%) WCAG
6 113 (1.91%) NIST
7 100 (1.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 76 (1.28%) NCSC
9 43 (0.73%) PCI DSS
10 32 (0.54%) SLA
11 25 (0.42%) Cyber Essentials
11 25 (0.42%) GRC
12 20 (0.34%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.27%) ISO 20022
14 14 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
15 13 (0.22%) HL7
16 12 (0.20%) SOC 2
17 11 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
17 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
18 10 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,574 (26.60%) Docker
2 157 (2.65%) Active Directory
3 105 (1.77%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.25%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.64%) VMware NSX
6 31 (0.52%) vSphere
7 22 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 20 (0.34%) Hyper-V
9 16 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
9 16 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
10 13 (0.22%) Squid
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
11 8 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
12 7 (0.12%) HDFS
13 5 (0.084%) Postfix
13 5 (0.084%) SRDF
14 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 4 (0.068%) Ceph
14 4 (0.068%) NFS
15 3 (0.051%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 1,889 (31.92%) Terraform
2 1,856 (31.36%) Kubernetes
3 540 (9.12%) Ansible
4 488 (8.25%) Grafana
5 397 (6.71%) Prometheus
6 118 (1.99%) Argo
7 70 (1.18%) Puppet
8 61 (1.03%) Istio
9 57 (0.96%) Progress Chef
10 43 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
11 34 (0.57%) Kibana
11 34 (0.57%) Packer
12 23 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
13 22 (0.37%) Kustomize
14 20 (0.34%) Control-M
15 18 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 15 (0.25%) Oracle RMAN
17 14 (0.24%) Jamf Pro
17 14 (0.24%) Rancher
18 13 (0.22%) SCCM
Vendors
1 863 (14.58%) Microsoft
2 388 (6.56%) Databricks
3 346 (5.85%) Google
4 303 (5.12%) Oracle
5 211 (3.57%) Splunk
6 197 (3.33%) Salesforce
7 152 (2.57%) Dynatrace
8 140 (2.37%) ServiceNow
9 138 (2.33%) VMware
10 110 (1.86%) Red Hat
11 90 (1.52%) MuleSoft
12 78 (1.32%) OpenAI
13 76 (1.28%) IBM
14 72 (1.22%) SAP
15 67 (1.13%) Cisco
15 67 (1.13%) Informatica
16 50 (0.84%) Foundry
17 46 (0.78%) F5
18 44 (0.74%) Palo Alto
19 43 (0.73%) Denodo