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

6 months to
18 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 20 29
Rank change year-on-year +8 +9 -8
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,169 2,598 2,490
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.78% 8.84% 5.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.79% 9.72% 6.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,529 1,835 1,757
10th Percentile £374 £364 £405
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -4.55% -8.33%
75th Percentile £606 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £741 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £491 £540
% change year-on-year +1.83% -9.07% -1.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 27 47
10th Percentile £51.23 £27.35 £50.75
25th Percentile £61.25 £46.75 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -3.85% -0.92%
75th Percentile £77.50 £75.86 £70.00
90th Percentile £87.20 £94.92 £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 40,423 26,734 36,712
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.29% 90.97% 86.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,371 17,185 23,631
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.94% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £493 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.68% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,395 1,096 2,442
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.35 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.72 £18.22 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.18 £36.02
Median % change year-on-year +50.82% -21.77% +1.04%
75th Percentile £67.50 £60.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.23 £37.50
% change year-on-year +78.39% -32.73% +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 18 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 18 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 18 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 +7 4,292 £525 - 1,647
UK excluding London +10 2,205 £500 +1.83% 1,152
London +9 2,205 £541 -1.66% 692
Work from Home +8 1,510 £510 -2.86% 1,311
North of England +11 813 £500 +2.30% 352
Yorkshire +8 441 £500 +5.26% 91
South East +13 408 £503 +0.60% 348
Midlands +10 393 £481 +1.32% 121
West Midlands +17 313 £489 -4.66% 68
North West +6 309 £500 - 201
South West +12 232 £525 -3.67% 159
Scotland +8 222 £438 -8.85% 58
East of England +24 121 £550 +20.22% 83
North East +3 75 £450 -2.17% 63
East Midlands -9 74 £443 -4.32% 53
Wales +3 33 £425 -27.47% 25
Northern Ireland +15 26 £638 +50.00% 17
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
1 249 (4.82%) Confluence
2 188 (3.64%) Apache Spark
3 134 (2.59%) Apache Airflow
4 117 (2.26%) Apache
5 76 (1.47%) SAS
6 70 (1.35%) SharePoint
7 25 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
7 25 (0.48%) nginx
8 23 (0.44%) OpenStack
9 20 (0.39%) CMS
10 13 (0.25%) Mendix
10 13 (0.25%) WebLogic
11 12 (0.23%) SharePoint Server
11 12 (0.23%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.21%) Anypoint
12 11 (0.21%) Camunda
12 11 (0.21%) Jupyter
13 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
14 9 (0.17%) Appian
14 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
Applications
1 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Excel
2 19 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 15 (0.29%) Microsoft Office
4 13 (0.25%) Chatbot
4 13 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
5 8 (0.15%) Adobe XD
6 7 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 5 (0.097%) Sketch
8 3 (0.058%) Simulink
9 2 (0.039%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.019%) Maya
10 1 (0.019%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 25 (0.48%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.39%) Payment Gateway
3 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 5 (0.097%) SAP CRM
6 5 (0.097%) SAP MDG
7 4 (0.077%) Magento
7 4 (0.077%) Shopify
8 3 (0.058%) Findur
8 3 (0.058%) Oracle Applications
8 3 (0.058%) Oracle ERP
8 3 (0.058%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.019%) Cloudability
9 1 (0.019%) NetSuite
9 1 (0.019%) Oracle General Ledger
9 1 (0.019%) R3 Corda
9 1 (0.019%) SAP ERP
9 1 (0.019%) SAP Hybris
9 1 (0.019%) SDL Web 8
Cloud Services
1 2,283 (44.17%) Azure
2 2,242 (43.37%) AWS
3 1,118 (21.63%) GitHub
4 868 (16.79%) GCP
5 812 (15.71%) Azure DevOps
6 705 (13.64%) GitHub Actions
7 623 (12.05%) Serverless
8 372 (7.20%) Amazon S3
9 367 (7.10%) AWS Lambda
10 362 (7.00%) Power Platform
11 354 (6.85%) AWS CloudFormation
12 285 (5.51%) Amazon EKS
13 229 (4.43%) Azure AKS
14 215 (4.16%) OpenShift
15 214 (4.14%) Azure Data Factory
16 209 (4.04%) Amazon EC2
17 208 (4.02%) Amazon ECS
18 207 (4.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 184 (3.56%) Entra ID
20 161 (3.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 187 (3.62%) Firewall
2 116 (2.24%) DNS
3 105 (2.03%) Network Security
4 76 (1.47%) VPN
5 64 (1.24%) HTTP
6 39 (0.75%) TCP/IP
7 33 (0.64%) WAN
8 30 (0.58%) BGP
9 29 (0.56%) SD-WAN
10 28 (0.54%) SSL
11 26 (0.50%) OSPF
12 23 (0.44%) Reverse Proxy
13 21 (0.41%) VXLAN
14 20 (0.39%) Ethernet
14 20 (0.39%) SAN
15 19 (0.37%) Ethernet VPN
16 17 (0.33%) 3GPP
16 17 (0.33%) Wi-Fi
17 15 (0.29%) SSH
18 14 (0.27%) BIG-IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 342 (6.62%) PostgreSQL
2 272 (5.26%) Power BI
3 254 (4.91%) NoSQL
4 244 (4.72%) SQL Server
5 208 (4.02%) Relational Database
6 206 (3.99%) Data Lake
7 189 (3.66%) MongoDB
8 187 (3.62%) Data Warehouse
9 147 (2.84%) Amazon RDS
10 130 (2.51%) DynamoDB
11 119 (2.30%) Metadata
12 118 (2.28%) Big Data
13 116 (2.24%) Delta Lake
14 106 (2.05%) Azure SQL Database
15 91 (1.76%) Amazon Athena
16 88 (1.70%) MySQL
17 80 (1.55%) Amazon Redshift
17 80 (1.55%) BigQuery
18 75 (1.45%) Redis
19 63 (1.22%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 952 (18.42%) Git
2 945 (18.28%) Jenkins
3 738 (14.28%) GitLab
4 457 (8.84%) JIRA
5 192 (3.71%) Selenium
6 154 (2.98%) JUnit
7 131 (2.53%) Cucumber
8 122 (2.36%) Postman
9 102 (1.97%) JMeter
10 100 (1.93%) REST Assured
11 81 (1.57%) SonarQube
12 75 (1.45%) Bitbucket
13 68 (1.32%) Gatling
13 68 (1.32%) MLflow
14 63 (1.22%) Gradle
14 63 (1.22%) Maven
15 62 (1.20%) Cypress.io
16 58 (1.12%) Mockito
17 47 (0.91%) Artifactory
18 46 (0.89%) WebDriver
General
1 1,271 (24.59%) Social Skills
2 838 (16.21%) Finance
3 658 (12.73%) Public Sector
4 417 (8.07%) Analytical Skills
5 350 (6.77%) Banking
6 133 (2.57%) Documentation Skills
7 77 (1.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 68 (1.32%) Retail
9 61 (1.18%) Legal
10 59 (1.14%) Military
11 57 (1.10%) Front Office
11 57 (1.10%) Influencing Skills
12 55 (1.06%) Investment Banking
13 47 (0.91%) Financial Institution
14 38 (0.74%) Telecoms
15 34 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
16 29 (0.56%) Law
17 27 (0.52%) Publishing
18 25 (0.48%) Marketing
19 23 (0.44%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,143 (22.11%) Developer
2 780 (15.09%) Senior
3 619 (11.98%) DevOps Engineer
4 549 (10.62%) Architect
5 431 (8.34%) Lead
6 409 (7.91%) Data Engineer
7 274 (5.30%) AWS Engineer
8 271 (5.24%) Software Engineer
9 268 (5.18%) Azure Engineer
10 258 (4.99%) Java Developer
11 222 (4.29%) Platform Engineer
12 217 (4.20%) Cloud Engineer
13 191 (3.70%) Senior Developer
14 169 (3.27%) Full-Stack Developer
15 156 (3.02%) Python Developer
16 143 (2.77%) Site Reliability Engineer
17 134 (2.59%) GCP Engineer
18 128 (2.48%) AWS DevOps
19 125 (2.42%) Test Engineer
20 120 (2.32%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 568 (10.99%) REST
2 473 (9.15%) React
3 445 (8.61%) .NET
3 445 (8.61%) Spring
4 419 (8.11%) Kafka
5 408 (7.89%) RESTful
6 402 (7.78%) Spring Boot
7 393 (7.60%) Node.js
8 209 (4.04%) AngularJS
9 199 (3.85%) Playwright
10 198 (3.83%) PySpark
11 178 (3.44%) HTML
12 167 (3.23%) OAuth
13 149 (2.88%) CSS
14 142 (2.75%) YAML
15 127 (2.46%) JSON
16 124 (2.40%) OpenTelemetry
17 117 (2.26%) OAuth2
18 113 (2.19%) FastAPI
19 104 (2.01%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 963 (18.63%) Cloud Native
2 354 (6.85%) Distributed Systems
3 283 (5.47%) Product Ownership
4 125 (2.42%) Onboarding
5 114 (2.21%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (1.95%) Hybrid Cloud
7 89 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
8 86 (1.66%) Public Cloud
9 84 (1.63%) Data Centre
10 81 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
11 79 (1.53%) Algorithms
12 74 (1.43%) AI Agents
13 70 (1.35%) Virtual Team
14 63 (1.22%) Mobile App
15 58 (1.12%) Security Posture
16 54 (1.04%) Management Information System
17 51 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
18 45 (0.87%) Self-Motivation
19 44 (0.85%) NHS
20 42 (0.81%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 532 (10.29%) Linux
2 236 (4.57%) Windows
3 108 (2.09%) Unix
4 82 (1.59%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (0.97%) Android
6 46 (0.89%) Apple iOS
7 44 (0.85%) Windows Server
8 42 (0.81%) VMS
9 20 (0.39%) Ubuntu
10 14 (0.27%) CentOS
11 11 (0.21%) Mac OS
12 8 (0.15%) zOS
13 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 7 (0.14%) 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 2,890 (55.91%) DevOps
2 1,737 (33.60%) Agile
3 1,602 (30.99%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,194 (23.10%) Containerisation
5 1,072 (20.74%) Test Automation
6 994 (19.23%) Microservices
7 867 (16.77%) Observability
8 864 (16.72%) Problem-Solving
9 760 (14.70%) AI
10 696 (13.46%) Software Engineering
11 676 (13.08%) Analytics
12 641 (12.40%) Continuous Improvement
13 574 (11.10%) Data Modelling
14 555 (10.74%) Data Pipeline
15 523 (10.12%) Platform Engineering
16 495 (9.58%) Migration
17 465 (9.00%) Scrum
18 448 (8.67%) ETL
19 447 (8.65%) Data Engineering
20 434 (8.40%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,915 (37.05%) Python
2 1,211 (23.43%) SQL
3 1,023 (19.79%) Java
4 570 (11.03%) JavaScript
5 504 (9.75%) C#
6 446 (8.63%) TypeScript
7 376 (7.27%) Bash
8 328 (6.35%) PowerShell
9 177 (3.42%) Bicep
10 147 (2.84%) Go
11 102 (1.97%) Shell Script
12 99 (1.92%) Scala
13 84 (1.63%) C++
14 71 (1.37%) Ruby
15 68 (1.32%) Kotlin
16 66 (1.28%) Apex Code
17 54 (1.04%) PL/SQL
18 46 (0.89%) T-SQL
19 39 (0.75%) Groovy
20 33 (0.64%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,447 (27.99%) Security Cleared
2 1,193 (23.08%) SC Cleared
3 273 (5.28%) Degree
4 198 (3.83%) BPSS Clearance
5 157 (3.04%) Azure Certification
6 156 (3.02%) DV Cleared
7 154 (2.98%) AWS Certification
8 148 (2.86%) Computer Science Degree
9 73 (1.41%) CISSP
10 54 (1.04%) CISM
11 53 (1.03%) Cisco Certification
12 51 (0.99%) Master's Degree
12 51 (0.99%) Microsoft Certification
13 50 (0.97%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 46 (0.89%) ISTQB
15 29 (0.56%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 23 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 23 (0.44%) CCSP
17 20 (0.39%) RHCE
18 19 (0.37%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 406 (7.85%) QA
2 313 (6.06%) Data Quality
3 217 (4.20%) Accessibility
4 175 (3.39%) GDPR
5 139 (2.69%) NIST
6 119 (2.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 101 (1.95%) WCAG
8 71 (1.37%) NCSC
9 57 (1.10%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.75%) SLA
11 26 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 21 (0.41%) GRC
13 20 (0.39%) ISO 20022
14 19 (0.37%) Cyber Essentials
15 16 (0.31%) SOC 2
16 15 (0.29%) MiFID
17 14 (0.27%) PSD2
18 13 (0.25%) HL7
19 12 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
19 12 (0.23%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,346 (26.04%) Docker
2 127 (2.46%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.53%) Virtual Machines
4 71 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.64%) VMware NSX
6 29 (0.56%) vSphere
7 19 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 12 (0.23%) Hyper-V
8 12 (0.23%) VMware ESXi
9 8 (0.15%) HDFS
9 8 (0.15%) Squid
10 7 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
10 7 (0.14%) Oracle RAC
11 6 (0.12%) Postfix
11 6 (0.12%) RACF
12 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
12 4 (0.077%) NFS
12 4 (0.077%) SRDF
13 3 (0.058%) Ceph
14 2 (0.039%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,623 (31.40%) Terraform
2 1,602 (30.99%) Kubernetes
3 520 (10.06%) Ansible
4 482 (9.32%) Grafana
5 409 (7.91%) Prometheus
6 104 (2.01%) Argo
7 80 (1.55%) Istio
8 65 (1.26%) Puppet
9 51 (0.99%) Single Sign-On
10 40 (0.77%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.62%) Kibana
12 22 (0.43%) Nessus
13 21 (0.41%) Packer
13 21 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.37%) Control-M
15 18 (0.35%) Rancher
16 17 (0.33%) IBM Guardium
17 15 (0.29%) linkerd
17 15 (0.29%) NetBackup
18 14 (0.27%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 749 (14.49%) Microsoft
2 368 (7.12%) Databricks
3 271 (5.24%) Google
4 233 (4.51%) Oracle
5 220 (4.26%) Splunk
6 152 (2.94%) Salesforce
7 139 (2.69%) ServiceNow
8 128 (2.48%) Red Hat
9 114 (2.21%) Dynatrace
10 107 (2.07%) VMware
11 84 (1.63%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.20%) SAP
13 58 (1.12%) MuleSoft
14 52 (1.01%) IBM
15 46 (0.89%) CyberArk
16 45 (0.87%) Cisco
17 39 (0.75%) Tenable
18 38 (0.74%) AppDynamics
18 38 (0.74%) Informatica
19 37 (0.72%) Denodo