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

6 months to
27 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 10 20 30
Rank change year-on-year +10 +10 -8
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 5,323 2,545 2,470
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.92% 8.91% 5.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.93% 9.78% 6.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,610 1,798 1,746
10th Percentile £375 £363 £400
25th Percentile £425 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.46% -6.82% -8.33%
75th Percentile £608 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £480 £534
% change year-on-year +4.28% -10.21% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 25 49
10th Percentile £51.24 £38.81 £51.00
25th Percentile £61.25 £48.99 £60.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £62.50 £67.00
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% -6.72% +2.13%
75th Percentile £77.50 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £83.20 £91.00 £72.89
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.50 £67.50
% change year-on-year +0.78% -4.44% +2.89%

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 41,181 26,010 36,599
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.50% 91.03% 85.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,765 16,696 23,578
10th Percentile £325 £303 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.14% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,462 1,066 2,486
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.73 £17.92 £16.00
Median hourly rate £41.94 £27.45 £36.02
Median % change year-on-year +52.79% -23.80% -2.64%
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.05 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.69 £25.15 £37.75
% change year-on-year +69.72% -33.38% +7.86%

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 27 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 27 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 27 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 +9 4,412 £525 +0.19% 1,553
UK excluding London +11 2,288 £500 +4.28% 1,043
London +10 2,256 £550 - 706
Work from Home +9 1,546 £514 -1.15% 827
North of England +12 862 £500 +1.83% 345
Yorkshire +7 477 £500 +5.26% 80
South East +12 418 £509 +1.80% 277
Midlands +7 397 £481 +4.00% 106
North West +8 322 £500 - 211
West Midlands +15 319 £488 -1.52% 67
South West +11 239 £525 -3.45% 139
Scotland +6 225 £425 -12.37% 52
East of England +16 128 £550 +18.28% 74
North East +1 78 £450 -1.10% 57
East Midlands -6 71 £440 -3.19% 39
Wales +4 38 £425 -24.51% 29
Northern Ireland +17 28 £644 +51.47% 31
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 (4.75%) Confluence
2 195 (3.66%) Apache Spark
3 150 (2.82%) Apache Airflow
4 123 (2.31%) Apache
5 76 (1.43%) SAS
6 73 (1.37%) SharePoint
7 24 (0.45%) nginx
8 23 (0.43%) CMS
9 22 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.39%) OpenStack
11 14 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
11 14 (0.26%) SharePoint Server
12 13 (0.24%) Jupyter
12 13 (0.24%) Mendix
12 13 (0.24%) WebLogic
12 13 (0.24%) WebSphere
13 12 (0.23%) Camunda
14 11 (0.21%) Anypoint
15 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
16 9 (0.17%) Adobe Experience Manager
Applications
1 29 (0.54%) Microsoft Excel
2 20 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 16 (0.30%) Chatbot
3 16 (0.30%) Microsoft Office
4 13 (0.24%) Microsoft Project
5 9 (0.17%) Adobe XD
6 7 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 6 (0.11%) Sketch
8 3 (0.056%) Simulink
9 2 (0.038%) PlantUML
10 1 (0.019%) Maya
10 1 (0.019%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 27 (0.51%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.36%) Payment Gateway
3 12 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
4 10 (0.19%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle EBS
5 6 (0.11%) SAP CRM
6 5 (0.094%) Magento
6 5 (0.094%) SAP MDG
7 4 (0.075%) Oracle ERP
7 4 (0.075%) Shopify
8 3 (0.056%) Findur
8 3 (0.056%) Oracle Applications
8 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
9 1 (0.019%) Cloudability
9 1 (0.019%) ProductWriter
9 1 (0.019%) R3 Corda
9 1 (0.019%) SAP Hybris
9 1 (0.019%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 1 (0.019%) Teamcenter
9 1 (0.019%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 2,340 (43.96%) Azure
2 2,299 (43.19%) AWS
3 1,149 (21.59%) GitHub
4 891 (16.74%) GCP
5 834 (15.67%) Azure DevOps
6 712 (13.38%) GitHub Actions
7 627 (11.78%) Serverless
8 381 (7.16%) Amazon S3
9 374 (7.03%) AWS Lambda
10 372 (6.99%) Power Platform
11 334 (6.27%) AWS CloudFormation
12 285 (5.35%) Amazon EKS
13 230 (4.32%) Azure AKS
14 222 (4.17%) OpenShift
15 220 (4.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 218 (4.10%) Azure Data Factory
17 210 (3.95%) Amazon EC2
18 192 (3.61%) Amazon ECS
18 192 (3.61%) Entra ID
19 157 (2.95%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 195 (3.66%) Firewall
2 116 (2.18%) DNS
3 111 (2.09%) Network Security
4 76 (1.43%) VPN
5 64 (1.20%) HTTP
6 39 (0.73%) WAN
7 38 (0.71%) TCP/IP
8 34 (0.64%) BGP
9 33 (0.62%) SD-WAN
9 33 (0.62%) SSL
10 30 (0.56%) OSPF
11 25 (0.47%) VXLAN
12 23 (0.43%) BIG-IP
12 23 (0.43%) Ethernet VPN
13 22 (0.41%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 22 (0.41%) Reverse Proxy
14 21 (0.39%) SAN
15 20 (0.38%) Ethernet
16 19 (0.36%) Wi-Fi
17 18 (0.34%) 3GPP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 354 (6.65%) PostgreSQL
2 278 (5.22%) Power BI
3 263 (4.94%) NoSQL
4 260 (4.88%) SQL Server
5 211 (3.96%) Data Lake
6 206 (3.87%) Relational Database
7 194 (3.64%) MongoDB
8 191 (3.59%) Data Warehouse
9 155 (2.91%) Amazon RDS
10 144 (2.71%) DynamoDB
11 125 (2.35%) Metadata
12 120 (2.25%) Big Data
12 120 (2.25%) Delta Lake
13 109 (2.05%) Azure SQL Database
14 90 (1.69%) Amazon Athena
14 90 (1.69%) MySQL
15 87 (1.63%) BigQuery
16 79 (1.48%) Amazon Redshift
17 73 (1.37%) Redis
18 71 (1.33%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 970 (18.22%) Git
2 961 (18.05%) Jenkins
3 752 (14.13%) GitLab
4 473 (8.89%) JIRA
5 197 (3.70%) Selenium
6 159 (2.99%) JUnit
7 132 (2.48%) Cucumber
8 123 (2.31%) Postman
9 105 (1.97%) JMeter
9 105 (1.97%) REST Assured
10 90 (1.69%) SonarQube
11 72 (1.35%) Bitbucket
12 69 (1.30%) Maven
13 68 (1.28%) Gatling
14 66 (1.24%) Cypress.io
14 66 (1.24%) Gradle
15 65 (1.22%) MLflow
16 64 (1.20%) Mockito
17 47 (0.88%) WebDriver
18 45 (0.85%) Artifactory
General
1 1,304 (24.50%) Social Skills
2 885 (16.63%) Finance
3 675 (12.68%) Public Sector
4 413 (7.76%) Analytical Skills
5 373 (7.01%) Banking
6 133 (2.50%) Documentation Skills
7 87 (1.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 71 (1.33%) Retail
9 68 (1.28%) Legal
10 65 (1.22%) Influencing Skills
11 61 (1.15%) Investment Banking
11 61 (1.15%) Military
12 59 (1.11%) Front Office
13 49 (0.92%) Financial Institution
14 36 (0.68%) Telecoms
15 35 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
16 34 (0.64%) Law
17 28 (0.53%) Marketing
17 28 (0.53%) Publishing
18 24 (0.45%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 1,155 (21.70%) Developer
2 804 (15.10%) Senior
3 648 (12.17%) DevOps Engineer
4 564 (10.60%) Architect
5 467 (8.77%) Lead
6 416 (7.82%) Data Engineer
7 293 (5.50%) AWS Engineer
8 281 (5.28%) Software Engineer
9 272 (5.11%) Azure Engineer
10 265 (4.98%) Java Developer
11 226 (4.25%) Cloud Engineer
12 224 (4.21%) Platform Engineer
13 203 (3.81%) Senior Developer
14 166 (3.12%) Full-Stack Developer
15 158 (2.97%) Python Developer
16 139 (2.61%) GCP Engineer
17 134 (2.52%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 132 (2.48%) AWS DevOps
19 128 (2.40%) Test Engineer
20 125 (2.35%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 592 (11.12%) REST
2 485 (9.11%) React
3 465 (8.74%) .NET
4 444 (8.34%) Spring
5 425 (7.98%) Kafka
6 417 (7.83%) RESTful
7 406 (7.63%) Spring Boot
8 382 (7.18%) Node.js
9 216 (4.06%) AngularJS
10 205 (3.85%) PySpark
11 195 (3.66%) Playwright
12 180 (3.38%) HTML
12 180 (3.38%) OAuth
13 155 (2.91%) CSS
14 147 (2.76%) YAML
15 133 (2.50%) JSON
16 128 (2.40%) OAuth2
17 125 (2.35%) OpenTelemetry
18 113 (2.12%) FastAPI
18 113 (2.12%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 991 (18.62%) Cloud Native
2 360 (6.76%) Distributed Systems
3 301 (5.65%) Product Ownership
4 134 (2.52%) Onboarding
5 119 (2.24%) Legacy Systems
6 111 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
7 97 (1.82%) Enterprise Software
8 92 (1.73%) Data Centre
9 87 (1.63%) Public Cloud
10 86 (1.62%) AI Agents
11 84 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
12 78 (1.47%) Algorithms
13 69 (1.30%) Virtual Team
14 62 (1.16%) Security Posture
15 60 (1.13%) Mobile App
16 57 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
16 57 (1.07%) Management Information System
17 49 (0.92%) Self-Motivation
18 48 (0.90%) Data Structures
19 44 (0.83%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 531 (9.98%) Linux
2 241 (4.53%) Windows
3 109 (2.05%) Unix
4 90 (1.69%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 45 (0.85%) Android
5 45 (0.85%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.79%) Apple iOS
7 41 (0.77%) VMS
8 22 (0.41%) Ubuntu
9 15 (0.28%) CentOS
10 11 (0.21%) Mac OS
11 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.15%) zOS
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) AIX
14 6 (0.11%) Rocky
14 6 (0.11%) Solaris
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.075%) Debian
16 3 (0.056%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,979 (55.96%) DevOps
2 1,781 (33.46%) Agile
3 1,649 (30.98%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,185 (22.26%) Containerisation
5 1,099 (20.65%) Test Automation
6 1,028 (19.31%) Microservices
7 903 (16.96%) Observability
8 844 (15.86%) Problem-Solving
9 807 (15.16%) AI
10 733 (13.77%) Software Engineering
11 687 (12.91%) Analytics
12 665 (12.49%) Continuous Improvement
13 587 (11.03%) Data Modelling
14 580 (10.90%) Data Pipeline
15 552 (10.37%) Platform Engineering
16 513 (9.64%) Migration
17 479 (9.00%) Scrum
18 466 (8.75%) Data Engineering
19 460 (8.64%) ETL
19 460 (8.64%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,960 (36.82%) Python
2 1,255 (23.58%) SQL
3 1,062 (19.95%) Java
4 566 (10.63%) JavaScript
5 508 (9.54%) C#
6 446 (8.38%) TypeScript
7 384 (7.21%) Bash
8 333 (6.26%) PowerShell
9 183 (3.44%) Bicep
10 151 (2.84%) Go
11 99 (1.86%) Scala
12 98 (1.84%) Shell Script
13 87 (1.63%) C++
14 71 (1.33%) Apex Code
15 69 (1.30%) Kotlin
16 65 (1.22%) Ruby
17 54 (1.01%) PL/SQL
18 43 (0.81%) T-SQL
19 41 (0.77%) Groovy
20 34 (0.64%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,462 (27.47%) Security Cleared
2 1,210 (22.73%) SC Cleared
3 285 (5.35%) Degree
4 203 (3.81%) BPSS Clearance
5 164 (3.08%) DV Cleared
6 162 (3.04%) Azure Certification
7 148 (2.78%) AWS Certification
8 144 (2.71%) Computer Science Degree
9 74 (1.39%) CISSP
10 57 (1.07%) Cisco Certification
11 54 (1.01%) CISM
12 51 (0.96%) Master's Degree
13 48 (0.90%) ISTQB
14 47 (0.88%) Microsoft Certification
15 46 (0.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 32 (0.60%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 26 (0.49%) CCSP
18 24 (0.45%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 19 (0.36%) RHCE
19 19 (0.36%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 403 (7.57%) QA
2 323 (6.07%) Data Quality
3 227 (4.26%) Accessibility
4 177 (3.33%) GDPR
5 136 (2.55%) NIST
6 114 (2.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 107 (2.01%) WCAG
8 74 (1.39%) NCSC
9 55 (1.03%) PCI DSS
10 44 (0.83%) SLA
11 26 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.41%) GRC
13 19 (0.36%) Cyber Essentials
14 17 (0.32%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.30%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.26%) MiFID
17 12 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
18 11 (0.21%) HL7
18 11 (0.21%) PSD2
19 9 (0.17%) FINRA
System Software
1 1,343 (25.23%) Docker
2 123 (2.31%) Active Directory
3 76 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
4 68 (1.28%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.62%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.56%) vSphere
7 20 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
9 10 (0.19%) Squid
10 8 (0.15%) Hyper-V
10 8 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
11 7 (0.13%) HDFS
11 7 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
11 7 (0.13%) Postfix
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 4 (0.075%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
13 4 (0.075%) NFS
13 4 (0.075%) SRDF
14 3 (0.056%) Ceph
14 3 (0.056%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,659 (31.17%) Terraform
2 1,638 (30.77%) Kubernetes
3 530 (9.96%) Ansible
4 492 (9.24%) Grafana
5 423 (7.95%) Prometheus
6 109 (2.05%) Argo
7 77 (1.45%) Istio
8 66 (1.24%) Puppet
9 58 (1.09%) Single Sign-On
10 36 (0.68%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.64%) Kibana
12 26 (0.49%) Packer
13 22 (0.41%) Nessus
14 21 (0.39%) vCenter Server
15 20 (0.38%) Control-M
16 17 (0.32%) IBM Guardium
16 17 (0.32%) Rancher
17 15 (0.28%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.28%) linkerd
17 15 (0.28%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 758 (14.24%) Microsoft
2 381 (7.16%) Databricks
3 280 (5.26%) Google
4 245 (4.60%) Oracle
5 221 (4.15%) Splunk
6 158 (2.97%) Salesforce
7 143 (2.69%) ServiceNow
8 135 (2.54%) Red Hat
9 116 (2.18%) Dynatrace
10 104 (1.95%) VMware
11 89 (1.67%) OpenAI
12 64 (1.20%) SAP
13 59 (1.11%) MuleSoft
14 57 (1.07%) IBM
15 47 (0.88%) Cisco
16 41 (0.77%) CyberArk
16 41 (0.77%) Palo Alto
17 40 (0.75%) Informatica
17 40 (0.75%) Tenable
18 38 (0.71%) AppDynamics