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

6 months to
11 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 4,133 2,678 2,535
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.36% 8.43% 5.90%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.93% 9.50% 6.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,898 1,856 1,876
10th Percentile £363 £388 £413
25th Percentile £420 £455 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £558
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% -1.35% -7.08%
75th Percentile £600 £660 £656
90th Percentile £688 £755 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 56 20 18
10th Percentile £40.00 £26.31 £54.38
25th Percentile £61.25 £51.78 £60.69
Median hourly rate £65.00 £66.25 £73.50
Median % change year-on-year -1.89% -9.86% +12.03%
75th Percentile £71.07 £75.63 £77.26
90th Percentile £88.25 £97.18 £77.50
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 31,966 28,176 37,671
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.84% 88.65% 87.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,158 17,120 25,014
10th Percentile £304 £306 £305
25th Percentile £406 £413 £416
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £744 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,974 895 1,590
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.62 £14.18
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.50 £18.35
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -19.75% +16.41%
75th Percentile £55.00 £62.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.59 £75.00 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.41 £43.90
% change year-on-year -21.64% -30.74% +59.64%

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 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 11 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 11 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 3,444 £519 -7.00% 2,964
London +4 1,798 £525 -12.50% 553
UK excluding London +8 1,726 £500 - 2,763
Work from Home +9 1,311 £513 -2.38% 1,542
North of England +7 609 £500 +0.10% 569
Midlands +18 352 £515 +3.00% 351
South East +12 339 £500 -11.11% 827
Yorkshire +4 300 £500 +1.01% 251
West Midlands +15 291 £525 +3.45% 140
North West +12 242 £471 -2.38% 236
Scotland +8 209 £464 -1.12% 100
South West +15 163 £550 -8.33% 372
East of England +4 84 £613 +68.97% 399
North East +11 71 £500 -9.09% 82
East Midlands +13 61 £418 -16.50% 205
Wales -6 22 £495 -10.00% 140
Northern Ireland -6 12 - - 71

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
1 161 (3.90%) Confluence
2 116 (2.81%) Apache Airflow
3 105 (2.54%) Apache Spark
4 99 (2.40%) Apache
5 87 (2.11%) SAS
6 49 (1.19%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.75%) nginx
8 21 (0.51%) WebLogic
9 20 (0.48%) OpenStack
10 19 (0.46%) JBoss
11 18 (0.44%) CMS
12 16 (0.39%) Microsoft Exchange
13 15 (0.36%) IIS
14 14 (0.34%) Anypoint
15 12 (0.29%) Mule
15 12 (0.29%) WebSphere
16 11 (0.27%) Appian
17 10 (0.24%) HCL Notes
17 10 (0.24%) SugarCRM
18 9 (0.22%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 46 (1.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.39%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (0.24%) Chatbot
3 10 (0.24%) Microsoft Office
4 9 (0.22%) Microsoft Project
4 9 (0.22%) Mozilla Thunderbird
5 5 (0.12%) Adobe XD
5 5 (0.12%) Sketch
6 3 (0.073%) 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 26 (0.63%) Dynamics CRM
2 6 (0.15%) Aladdin
3 5 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
4 3 (0.073%) Endur
4 3 (0.073%) Magento
4 3 (0.073%) Maximo
4 3 (0.073%) Oracle Applications
4 3 (0.073%) Oracle ERP
5 2 (0.048%) NetSuite
5 2 (0.048%) Oracle Payables
5 2 (0.048%) Oracle Receivables
5 2 (0.048%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.048%) Shopify
6 1 (0.024%) Cerner Millennium
6 1 (0.024%) ION Anvil
6 1 (0.024%) Oracle General Ledger
6 1 (0.024%) Orchestrade
6 1 (0.024%) Siebel CRM
6 1 (0.024%) Teamcenter
6 1 (0.024%) thinkFolio
Cloud Services
1 1,913 (46.29%) AWS
2 1,718 (41.57%) Azure
3 943 (22.82%) GitHub
4 678 (16.40%) GCP
5 632 (15.29%) GitHub Actions
6 623 (15.07%) Azure DevOps
7 585 (14.15%) Serverless
8 345 (8.35%) Amazon S3
9 330 (7.98%) AWS Lambda
10 321 (7.77%) AWS CloudFormation
11 238 (5.76%) OpenShift
12 230 (5.56%) Amazon EKS
13 216 (5.23%) Amazon ECS
14 215 (5.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 213 (5.15%) Power Platform
16 204 (4.94%) Amazon EC2
17 176 (4.26%) Azure AKS
18 155 (3.75%) Azure Data Factory
19 131 (3.17%) Virtual Private Cloud
20 120 (2.90%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 183 (4.43%) Firewall
2 119 (2.88%) DNS
3 82 (1.98%) Network Security
4 66 (1.60%) TCP/IP
4 66 (1.60%) VPN
5 43 (1.04%) SSL
6 42 (1.02%) HTTP
7 25 (0.60%) SSH
8 19 (0.46%) DHCP
8 19 (0.46%) Kerberos
9 16 (0.39%) WAN
10 15 (0.36%) Wireshark
11 14 (0.34%) Ethernet
11 14 (0.34%) HTTPS
11 14 (0.34%) OpenLDAP
12 11 (0.27%) SD-WAN
13 10 (0.24%) FTP
13 10 (0.24%) SMTP
14 9 (0.22%) IMAP
14 9 (0.22%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 346 (8.37%) PostgreSQL
2 245 (5.93%) NoSQL
3 177 (4.28%) Amazon RDS
4 170 (4.11%) MongoDB
4 170 (4.11%) SQL Server
5 155 (3.75%) Power BI
6 145 (3.51%) Relational Database
7 141 (3.41%) Data Lake
8 130 (3.15%) Data Warehouse
9 103 (2.49%) MySQL
10 95 (2.30%) Azure SQL Database
11 91 (2.20%) DynamoDB
12 77 (1.86%) Redis
13 66 (1.60%) Delta Lake
14 62 (1.50%) Oracle Database
15 59 (1.43%) BigQuery
16 57 (1.38%) Big Data
17 51 (1.23%) Amazon Aurora
18 50 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
19 48 (1.16%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 933 (22.57%) Jenkins
2 828 (20.03%) Git
3 704 (17.03%) GitLab
4 397 (9.61%) JIRA
5 186 (4.50%) Selenium
6 148 (3.58%) Cucumber
7 141 (3.41%) JUnit
8 106 (2.56%) Cypress.io
9 104 (2.52%) Postman
10 88 (2.13%) SonarQube
11 86 (2.08%) Sonatype Nexus
12 76 (1.84%) Bitbucket
13 74 (1.79%) JMeter
14 60 (1.45%) Artifactory
15 59 (1.43%) CircleCI
15 59 (1.43%) REST Assured
16 57 (1.38%) MLflow
17 56 (1.35%) Maven
18 54 (1.31%) Gradle
19 48 (1.16%) Liquibase
General
1 1,181 (28.57%) Social Skills
2 726 (17.57%) Finance
3 542 (13.11%) Public Sector
4 348 (8.42%) Banking
5 332 (8.03%) Analytical Skills
6 99 (2.40%) Documentation Skills
7 67 (1.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 62 (1.50%) Financial Institution
9 55 (1.33%) Military
10 52 (1.26%) Investment Banking
11 50 (1.21%) Marketing
12 47 (1.14%) Telecoms
13 45 (1.09%) Front Office
14 36 (0.87%) Influencing Skills
15 33 (0.80%) Presentation Skills
16 27 (0.65%) Manufacturing
17 26 (0.63%) Retail
18 23 (0.56%) Legal
19 21 (0.51%) Billing
20 20 (0.48%) Law
Job Titles
1 973 (23.54%) Developer
2 570 (13.79%) Senior
3 545 (13.19%) DevOps Engineer
4 320 (7.74%) Architect
5 280 (6.77%) Data Engineer
6 274 (6.63%) Lead
7 253 (6.12%) AWS Engineer
8 242 (5.86%) Software Engineer
9 218 (5.27%) Java Developer
10 199 (4.81%) Azure Engineer
11 192 (4.65%) Platform Engineer
12 162 (3.92%) Full-Stack Developer
13 155 (3.75%) Senior Developer
14 152 (3.68%) Cloud Engineer
15 144 (3.48%) AWS DevOps
16 122 (2.95%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 120 (2.90%) Site Reliability Engineer
18 101 (2.44%) Python Engineer
18 101 (2.44%) Test Engineer
19 100 (2.42%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 515 (12.46%) REST
2 426 (10.31%) React
3 414 (10.02%) Node.js
4 402 (9.73%) RESTful
5 351 (8.49%) Kafka
6 329 (7.96%) Spring
7 328 (7.94%) .NET
8 284 (6.87%) Spring Boot
9 205 (4.96%) AngularJS
10 193 (4.67%) HTML
11 166 (4.02%) CSS
12 162 (3.92%) JSON
13 160 (3.87%) OAuth
14 148 (3.58%) Playwright
15 144 (3.48%) Elastic Stack
16 127 (3.07%) PySpark
17 124 (3.00%) YAML
18 117 (2.83%) GraphQL
19 111 (2.69%) SOAP
20 104 (2.52%) FastAPI
Miscellaneous
1 660 (15.97%) Cloud Native
2 262 (6.34%) Distributed Systems
3 184 (4.45%) Product Ownership
4 106 (2.56%) Onboarding
5 86 (2.08%) Public Cloud
6 80 (1.94%) Mobile App
7 75 (1.81%) Legacy Systems
8 72 (1.74%) Enterprise Software
9 63 (1.52%) Hybrid Cloud
10 58 (1.40%) Data Protection Act
11 57 (1.38%) Algorithms
12 51 (1.23%) AI Agents
13 49 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
13 49 (1.19%) Security Posture
14 48 (1.16%) Replication
14 48 (1.16%) Virtual Team
15 45 (1.09%) Data Centre
16 42 (1.02%) NHS
17 40 (0.97%) Private Cloud
18 35 (0.85%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 564 (13.65%) Linux
2 206 (4.98%) Windows
3 96 (2.32%) Unix
4 74 (1.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.50%) Android
5 62 (1.50%) Apple iOS
6 48 (1.16%) VMS
7 46 (1.11%) Windows Server
8 28 (0.68%) Ubuntu
9 22 (0.53%) CentOS
10 12 (0.29%) Solaris
11 10 (0.24%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.22%) Amazon Linux
13 4 (0.097%) zOS
14 3 (0.073%) Windows Server 2016
15 2 (0.048%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.048%) SUSE
16 1 (0.024%) MVS
16 1 (0.024%) Robot Operating System
16 1 (0.024%) Windows Embedded Compact
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,385 (57.71%) DevOps
2 1,490 (36.05%) Agile
3 1,303 (31.53%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,058 (25.60%) Containerisation
5 918 (22.21%) Problem-Solving
6 840 (20.32%) Test Automation
7 785 (18.99%) Microservices
8 566 (13.69%) Observability
9 563 (13.62%) Software Engineering
10 475 (11.49%) Analytics
11 467 (11.30%) AI
12 433 (10.48%) Continuous Improvement
13 392 (9.48%) Migration
14 381 (9.22%) Data Pipeline
15 374 (9.05%) Full-Stack Development
16 349 (8.44%) Mentoring
17 346 (8.37%) Scrum
18 345 (8.35%) DevSecOps
19 312 (7.55%) Data Modelling
20 309 (7.48%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,595 (38.59%) Python
2 869 (21.03%) SQL
3 860 (20.81%) Java
4 555 (13.43%) JavaScript
5 451 (10.91%) TypeScript
6 403 (9.75%) Bash
7 378 (9.15%) C#
8 297 (7.19%) PowerShell
9 213 (5.15%) Go
10 113 (2.73%) Bicep
11 111 (2.69%) Shell Script
12 96 (2.32%) C++
13 76 (1.84%) Scala
14 66 (1.60%) Ruby
15 54 (1.31%) PHP
15 54 (1.31%) PL/SQL
16 47 (1.14%) T-SQL
17 45 (1.09%) Perl
18 42 (1.02%) Groovy
18 42 (1.02%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,081 (26.16%) Security Cleared
2 873 (21.12%) SC Cleared
3 271 (6.56%) Degree
4 173 (4.19%) Computer Science Degree
5 159 (3.85%) AWS Certification
6 128 (3.10%) BPSS Clearance
7 117 (2.83%) Azure Certification
8 114 (2.76%) DV Cleared
9 73 (1.77%) Master's Degree
10 60 (1.45%) CISSP
11 52 (1.26%) Microsoft Certification
12 50 (1.21%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 42 (1.02%) CISM
14 29 (0.70%) ISTQB
15 27 (0.65%) MCP
16 26 (0.63%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 26 (0.63%) Oracle Certification
17 24 (0.58%) Cisco Certification
18 17 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 16 (0.39%) OCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 396 (9.58%) QA
2 194 (4.69%) Data Quality
3 180 (4.36%) Accessibility
4 151 (3.65%) GDPR
5 124 (3.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 108 (2.61%) NIST
7 72 (1.74%) WCAG
8 51 (1.23%) NCSC
9 42 (1.02%) PCI DSS
10 22 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 21 (0.51%) HIPAA
11 21 (0.51%) PSD2
12 18 (0.44%) SLA
13 15 (0.36%) ISO 20022
14 14 (0.34%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.31%) EU AI Act
15 13 (0.31%) SEPA
16 11 (0.27%) MiFID
17 10 (0.24%) HL7
18 7 (0.17%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,350 (32.66%) Docker
2 125 (3.02%) Active Directory
3 73 (1.77%) VMware Infrastructure
4 55 (1.33%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.92%) vSphere
6 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
7 12 (0.29%) HDFS
8 11 (0.27%) Squid
9 10 (0.24%) Hyper-V
9 10 (0.24%) KVM
9 10 (0.24%) NFS
9 10 (0.24%) Virtual Desktop
10 9 (0.22%) DFS Replication
10 9 (0.22%) Dovecot
10 9 (0.22%) Postfix
11 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.19%) zsh
12 7 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
13 4 (0.097%) Veritas Volume Manager
13 4 (0.097%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,486 (35.95%) Kubernetes
2 1,425 (34.48%) Terraform
3 560 (13.55%) Ansible
4 471 (11.40%) Grafana
5 408 (9.87%) Prometheus
6 116 (2.81%) Argo
7 65 (1.57%) Puppet
8 64 (1.55%) Progress Chef
9 51 (1.23%) Istio
10 48 (1.16%) Single Sign-On
11 39 (0.94%) Kibana
12 23 (0.56%) Podman
13 22 (0.53%) Nessus
14 20 (0.48%) Packer
15 18 (0.44%) Proxmox
16 15 (0.36%) NetBackup
16 15 (0.36%) vRealize
17 14 (0.34%) Rancher
18 13 (0.31%) Control-M
18 13 (0.31%) logstash
Vendors
1 570 (13.79%) Microsoft
2 285 (6.90%) Databricks
3 252 (6.10%) Oracle
4 217 (5.25%) Google
5 208 (5.03%) Splunk
6 141 (3.41%) Red Hat
7 112 (2.71%) VMware
8 105 (2.54%) ServiceNow
9 78 (1.89%) Salesforce
10 72 (1.74%) OpenAI
11 68 (1.65%) Dynatrace
12 52 (1.26%) SAP
13 44 (1.06%) MuleSoft
14 42 (1.02%) IBM
14 42 (1.02%) Talend
15 40 (0.97%) F5
16 35 (0.85%) CyberArk
17 32 (0.77%) Cisco
18 31 (0.75%) Atlassian
18 31 (0.75%) Denodo