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 3 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 13 22 28
Rank change year-on-year +9 +6 -9
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 4,166 2,843 2,811
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.50% 7.94% 6.24%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.92% 9.09% 7.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,891 1,953 2,067
10th Percentile £361 £388 £413
25th Percentile £425 £451 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £550 £565
Median % change year-on-year -6.82% -2.65% -5.83%
75th Percentile £600 £653 £675
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 51 44 27
10th Percentile £50.00 £31.74 £53.00
25th Percentile - £64.38 £60.88
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £75.00
Median % change year-on-year - -13.33% +14.32%
75th Percentile £67.00 £70.00 £77.50
90th Percentile £87.50 £76.75 £78.30
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £75.00
% change year-on-year - -13.33% +14.32%

All Process and 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 32,257 31,288 39,893
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.04% 87.36% 88.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,268 18,944 26,694
10th Percentile £300 £309 £310
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,091 1,103 1,539
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.23 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.19 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £43.75
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -25.71% +25.00%
75th Percentile £45.61 £63.42 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.85 £32.39 £43.95
% change year-on-year -29.45% -26.30% +40.82%

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 3 December 2025.

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 3 December 2025.

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 3 December 2025. 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 +10 3,457 £515 -7.21% 1,321
London +5 1,820 £525 -10.64% 538
UK excluding London +10 1,771 £500 - 1,182
Work from Home +10 1,365 £510 -2.86% 856
North of England +9 576 £500 +5.26% 284
Midlands +24 346 £515 +0.00% 125
South East +12 345 £500 -9.09% 489
West Midlands +20 279 £525 - 95
Yorkshire -1 272 £500 +9.89% 81
Scotland +13 247 £475 +2.70% 69
North West +14 240 £453 -8.44% 169
South West +13 163 £550 -4.35% 129
East of England +7 110 £550 +10.00% 64
East Midlands +21 67 £418 -16.50% 26
North East +13 66 £500 +5.26% 36
Wales -1 31 £456 -13.18% 31
Northern Ireland -3 10 - - 11

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
1 163 (3.91%) Confluence
2 134 (3.22%) Apache Airflow
3 112 (2.69%) Apache Spark
4 102 (2.45%) Apache
5 82 (1.97%) SAS
6 37 (0.89%) SharePoint
7 31 (0.74%) WebLogic
8 30 (0.72%) nginx
9 24 (0.58%) JBoss
10 20 (0.48%) WebSphere
11 19 (0.46%) IIS
12 18 (0.43%) Anypoint
12 18 (0.43%) CMS
13 17 (0.41%) Mule
14 16 (0.38%) OpenStack
15 11 (0.26%) WebSphere Application Server
16 10 (0.24%) Microsoft Exchange
16 10 (0.24%) SugarCRM
17 9 (0.22%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.19%) iPlanet
Applications
1 41 (0.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 18 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
4 10 (0.24%) Microsoft Project
5 9 (0.22%) Microsoft Office
6 8 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.12%) MS Visio
8 1 (0.024%) Oracle Smart View
8 1 (0.024%) Revit
8 1 (0.024%) Simulink
8 1 (0.024%) Trello
Business Applications
1 29 (0.70%) Dynamics CRM
2 13 (0.31%) Aladdin
3 7 (0.17%) Maximo
4 6 (0.14%) Endur
5 4 (0.096%) Fidessa
5 4 (0.096%) thinkFolio
6 3 (0.072%) Magento
6 3 (0.072%) Oracle BPM
6 3 (0.072%) Payment Gateway
6 3 (0.072%) SAP S/4HANA
6 3 (0.072%) Shopify
7 2 (0.048%) FLEXCUBE
7 2 (0.048%) Oracle ERP
7 2 (0.048%) Orchestrade
8 1 (0.024%) Actimize
8 1 (0.024%) NetSuite
8 1 (0.024%) OpenText MBPM
8 1 (0.024%) Remedy ITSM
8 1 (0.024%) Teamcenter
8 1 (0.024%) TrackWise
Cloud Services
1 1,945 (46.69%) AWS
2 1,658 (39.80%) Azure
3 878 (21.08%) GitHub
4 688 (16.51%) GCP
5 599 (14.38%) Azure DevOps
6 581 (13.95%) GitHub Actions
7 535 (12.84%) Serverless
8 356 (8.55%) Amazon S3
9 313 (7.51%) AWS Lambda
10 303 (7.27%) AWS CloudFormation
11 216 (5.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 215 (5.16%) Amazon EC2
13 211 (5.06%) Amazon ECS
13 211 (5.06%) Amazon EKS
14 209 (5.02%) OpenShift
15 179 (4.30%) Power Platform
16 148 (3.55%) Azure AKS
17 140 (3.36%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 124 (2.98%) Azure Data Factory
19 113 (2.71%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 172 (4.13%) Firewall
2 125 (3.00%) DNS
3 80 (1.92%) VPN
4 78 (1.87%) TCP/IP
5 73 (1.75%) Network Security
6 42 (1.01%) HTTP
7 40 (0.96%) SSL
8 23 (0.55%) DHCP
8 23 (0.55%) SSH
9 21 (0.50%) Ethernet
10 18 (0.43%) Kerberos
11 17 (0.41%) OpenLDAP
12 16 (0.38%) Wireshark
13 15 (0.36%) WAN
14 13 (0.31%) BGP
14 13 (0.31%) SMTP
15 12 (0.29%) AMQP
15 12 (0.29%) HTTPS
15 12 (0.29%) IMAP
16 11 (0.26%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 367 (8.81%) PostgreSQL
2 255 (6.12%) NoSQL
3 188 (4.51%) Amazon RDS
4 177 (4.25%) MongoDB
5 159 (3.82%) SQL Server
6 149 (3.58%) Relational Database
7 142 (3.41%) Data Warehouse
8 130 (3.12%) Power BI
9 114 (2.74%) Data Lake
10 102 (2.45%) MySQL
11 88 (2.11%) DynamoDB
12 75 (1.80%) Azure SQL Database
13 69 (1.66%) Redis
14 67 (1.61%) BigQuery
15 66 (1.58%) Delta Lake
16 64 (1.54%) Big Data
17 63 (1.51%) Oracle Database
18 50 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
19 49 (1.18%) Amazon Aurora
20 42 (1.01%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 963 (23.12%) Jenkins
2 879 (21.10%) Git
3 665 (15.96%) GitLab
4 423 (10.15%) JIRA
5 188 (4.51%) Selenium
6 161 (3.86%) JUnit
7 143 (3.43%) Cucumber
8 114 (2.74%) SonarQube
9 108 (2.59%) Cypress.io
10 102 (2.45%) Sonatype Nexus
11 101 (2.42%) Postman
12 87 (2.09%) Bitbucket
13 70 (1.68%) Artifactory
13 70 (1.68%) Maven
14 68 (1.63%) JMeter
15 63 (1.51%) CircleCI
16 58 (1.39%) Liquibase
17 57 (1.37%) Gradle
18 51 (1.22%) MLflow
19 50 (1.20%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,191 (28.59%) Social Skills
2 742 (17.81%) Finance
3 530 (12.72%) Public Sector
4 353 (8.47%) Banking
5 344 (8.26%) Analytical Skills
6 102 (2.45%) Documentation Skills
7 69 (1.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 66 (1.58%) Financial Institution
9 60 (1.44%) Investment Banking
9 60 (1.44%) Marketing
10 56 (1.34%) Military
11 53 (1.27%) Telecoms
12 47 (1.13%) Front Office
13 43 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
14 35 (0.84%) Influencing Skills
15 30 (0.72%) Manufacturing
15 30 (0.72%) Retail
16 24 (0.58%) Law
17 21 (0.50%) Electronics
18 19 (0.46%) Legal
Job Titles
1 1,008 (24.20%) Developer
2 567 (13.61%) Senior
3 554 (13.30%) DevOps Engineer
4 339 (8.14%) Architect
5 280 (6.72%) Lead
6 271 (6.51%) Data Engineer
7 269 (6.46%) AWS Engineer
8 261 (6.27%) Java Developer
9 237 (5.69%) Software Engineer
10 204 (4.90%) Platform Engineer
11 186 (4.46%) Azure Engineer
12 176 (4.22%) Full-Stack Developer
13 157 (3.77%) Senior Developer
14 147 (3.53%) AWS DevOps
15 146 (3.50%) Cloud Engineer
16 124 (2.98%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 112 (2.69%) Python Developer
18 107 (2.57%) Python Engineer
18 107 (2.57%) Site Reliability Engineer
19 90 (2.16%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 511 (12.27%) REST
2 450 (10.80%) RESTful
3 432 (10.37%) React
4 405 (9.72%) Node.js
5 357 (8.57%) Spring
6 356 (8.55%) Kafka
7 318 (7.63%) .NET
8 306 (7.35%) Spring Boot
9 218 (5.23%) HTML
10 214 (5.14%) AngularJS
11 195 (4.68%) CSS
12 175 (4.20%) JSON
13 151 (3.62%) OAuth
14 147 (3.53%) Elastic Stack
15 142 (3.41%) Playwright
16 134 (3.22%) SOAP
17 122 (2.93%) GraphQL
18 109 (2.62%) YAML
19 105 (2.52%) FastAPI
20 104 (2.50%) Jest
Miscellaneous
1 633 (15.19%) Cloud Native
2 256 (6.14%) Distributed Systems
3 209 (5.02%) Product Ownership
4 103 (2.47%) Onboarding
5 100 (2.40%) Mobile App
6 97 (2.33%) Public Cloud
7 87 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
8 75 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
9 73 (1.75%) Enterprise Software
10 70 (1.68%) Algorithms
11 68 (1.63%) Hybrid Cloud
12 63 (1.51%) Greenfield Project
13 58 (1.39%) Virtual Team
14 53 (1.27%) Replication
15 52 (1.25%) Security Posture
16 48 (1.15%) AI Agents
16 48 (1.15%) Data Centre
17 42 (1.01%) Private Cloud
18 39 (0.94%) Data Structures
19 36 (0.86%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 581 (13.95%) Linux
2 212 (5.09%) Windows
3 111 (2.66%) Unix
4 80 (1.92%) Android
5 79 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 76 (1.82%) Apple iOS
7 54 (1.30%) Windows Server
8 34 (0.82%) VMS
9 27 (0.65%) Ubuntu
10 24 (0.58%) CentOS
11 14 (0.34%) Solaris
12 12 (0.29%) Amazon Linux
13 11 (0.26%) Mac OS
14 3 (0.072%) Windows Server 2016
14 3 (0.072%) Windows Server 2019
14 3 (0.072%) zOS
15 2 (0.048%) Oracle Linux
15 2 (0.048%) Robot Operating System
15 2 (0.048%) SUSE
16 1 (0.024%) FreeRTOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,382 (57.18%) DevOps
2 1,645 (39.49%) Agile
3 1,296 (31.11%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,048 (25.16%) Containerisation
5 929 (22.30%) Problem-Solving
6 853 (20.48%) Test Automation
7 818 (19.64%) Microservices
8 587 (14.09%) Software Engineering
9 483 (11.59%) Observability
10 463 (11.11%) Analytics
11 426 (10.23%) AI
12 402 (9.65%) Migration
13 401 (9.63%) Continuous Improvement
14 396 (9.51%) Scrum
15 378 (9.07%) Full-Stack Development
16 366 (8.79%) Data Pipeline
17 349 (8.38%) DevSecOps
17 349 (8.38%) Mentoring
18 337 (8.09%) TDD
19 330 (7.92%) Continuous Integration
Programming Languages
1 1,603 (38.48%) Python
2 938 (22.52%) Java
3 824 (19.78%) SQL
4 571 (13.71%) JavaScript
5 461 (11.07%) TypeScript
6 438 (10.51%) Bash
7 406 (9.75%) C#
8 305 (7.32%) PowerShell
9 249 (5.98%) Go
10 115 (2.76%) C++
11 104 (2.50%) Bicep
12 95 (2.28%) Shell Script
13 73 (1.75%) Scala
14 55 (1.32%) Kotlin
15 53 (1.27%) PHP
16 49 (1.18%) Groovy
17 48 (1.15%) PL/SQL
18 47 (1.13%) Ruby
19 43 (1.03%) Perl
20 40 (0.96%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,048 (25.16%) Security Cleared
2 837 (20.09%) SC Cleared
3 269 (6.46%) Degree
4 179 (4.30%) Computer Science Degree
5 163 (3.91%) AWS Certification
6 122 (2.93%) DV Cleared
7 109 (2.62%) Azure Certification
8 104 (2.50%) BPSS Clearance
9 73 (1.75%) Master's Degree
10 71 (1.70%) CISSP
11 56 (1.34%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 53 (1.27%) Microsoft Certification
13 49 (1.18%) CISM
14 32 (0.77%) Cisco Certification
14 32 (0.77%) ISTQB
15 25 (0.60%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 21 (0.50%) Oracle Certification
17 18 (0.43%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 17 (0.41%) CCSP
19 14 (0.34%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 414 (9.94%) QA
2 176 (4.22%) Data Quality
3 166 (3.98%) Accessibility
4 154 (3.70%) GDPR
5 136 (3.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 116 (2.78%) NIST
7 54 (1.30%) PCI DSS
7 54 (1.30%) WCAG
8 48 (1.15%) NCSC
9 27 (0.65%) HIPAA
10 20 (0.48%) SOC 2
11 18 (0.43%) PSD2
12 16 (0.38%) SLA
13 15 (0.36%) EU AI Act
14 13 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 12 (0.29%) SEPA
16 11 (0.26%) ISO 20022
17 10 (0.24%) Cyber Essentials
17 10 (0.24%) HL7
18 9 (0.22%) MiFID
System Software
1 1,334 (32.02%) Docker
2 130 (3.12%) Active Directory
3 74 (1.78%) VMware Infrastructure
4 52 (1.25%) Virtual Machines
5 36 (0.86%) vSphere
6 13 (0.31%) Squid
7 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
7 12 (0.29%) NFS
7 12 (0.29%) Postfix
7 12 (0.29%) VMware NSX
8 11 (0.26%) HDFS
8 11 (0.26%) VMware ESXi
9 10 (0.24%) DFS Replication
9 10 (0.24%) KVM
9 10 (0.24%) Virtual Desktop
10 9 (0.22%) Hyper-V
11 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.19%) zsh
12 7 (0.17%) Firmware
13 4 (0.096%) Veritas Volume Manager
Systems Management
1 1,481 (35.55%) Kubernetes
2 1,420 (34.09%) Terraform
3 552 (13.25%) Ansible
4 461 (11.07%) Grafana
5 396 (9.51%) Prometheus
6 115 (2.76%) Argo
7 75 (1.80%) Progress Chef
8 70 (1.68%) Puppet
9 47 (1.13%) Single Sign-On
10 43 (1.03%) Istio
11 37 (0.89%) Kibana
12 30 (0.72%) Packer
13 25 (0.60%) Nessus
14 22 (0.53%) Podman
15 19 (0.46%) Proxmox
16 17 (0.41%) vCenter Server
17 16 (0.38%) ITRS Geneos
18 15 (0.36%) Kustomize
19 14 (0.34%) Kubeflow
19 14 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 555 (13.32%) Microsoft
2 255 (6.12%) Databricks
3 252 (6.05%) Oracle
4 242 (5.81%) Google
5 218 (5.23%) Splunk
6 126 (3.02%) Red Hat
7 110 (2.64%) VMware
8 105 (2.52%) ServiceNow
9 91 (2.18%) Salesforce
10 61 (1.46%) SAP
11 59 (1.42%) OpenAI
12 54 (1.30%) Dynatrace
13 47 (1.13%) IBM
14 43 (1.03%) F5
14 43 (1.03%) Talend
15 41 (0.98%) MuleSoft
16 40 (0.96%) CyberArk
17 35 (0.84%) Cisco
18 30 (0.72%) Denodo
19 29 (0.70%) Atlassian