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

6 months to
27 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 5,911 3,260 2,644
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.01% 9.95% 6.81%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.02% 11.00% 7.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,997 2,237 1,782
10th Percentile £381 £361 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -5.17%
75th Percentile £613 £613 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 116 48 76
10th Percentile £47.13 £47.64 £51.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £55.00 -
Median hourly rate £70.00 £65.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% - -11.56%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £91.88 £84.32 £72.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £65.00 £66.00
% change year-on-year +7.69% -1.52% -8.97%

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 45,399 29,629 33,143
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.55% 90.46% 85.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,782 18,436 20,950
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £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 £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,881 1,773 1,687
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £13.86
25th Percentile £17.87 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +6.25%

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 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 27 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 27 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 +6 4,957 £525 +2.44% 4,690
London +5 2,645 £538 +2.38% 2,861
UK excluding London +6 2,483 £500 - 2,480
Work from Home +6 1,829 £525 +5.00% 2,117
North of England +7 937 £500 +2.56% 684
Yorkshire +5 465 £505 +1.92% 180
South East -4 444 £525 +5.00% 539
Midlands +1 378 £488 +2.63% 255
North West +4 364 £525 +6.71% 383
West Midlands +4 317 £488 -5.98% 163
South West +6 287 £550 +5.77% 360
Scotland 0 259 £425 -14.66% 299
East of England +4 143 £509 +1.80% 188
North East 0 119 £425 -7.61% 125
East Midlands -22 55 £449 +4.42% 91
Wales -3 44 £450 -2.70% 58
Northern Ireland +19 24 £545 +3.81% 112
Channel Islands - 2 £475 -

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
1 268 (4.53%) Confluence
2 226 (3.82%) Apache Airflow
3 198 (3.35%) Apache Spark
4 157 (2.66%) Apache
5 77 (1.30%) SharePoint
6 66 (1.12%) SAS
7 36 (0.61%) Jupyter
8 23 (0.39%) OpenStack
9 22 (0.37%) CMS
10 20 (0.34%) nginx
11 17 (0.29%) Anypoint
12 16 (0.27%) Camunda
12 16 (0.27%) SharePoint Server
13 14 (0.24%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.15%) Mule
16 8 (0.14%) IIS
17 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
17 7 (0.12%) WordPress
18 6 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
Applications
1 23 (0.39%) Chatbot
2 21 (0.36%) Microsoft Excel
3 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Office
3 10 (0.17%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 9 (0.15%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.068%) Simulink
5 4 (0.068%) Trello
6 2 (0.034%) Adobe XD
6 2 (0.034%) CPLEX
6 2 (0.034%) Microsoft Project
6 2 (0.034%) Sketch
6 2 (0.034%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.034%) Windchill
7 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
7 1 (0.017%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 48 (0.81%) Dynamics CRM
2 21 (0.36%) Payment Gateway
3 16 (0.27%) SAP S/4HANA
4 13 (0.22%) Aladdin
4 13 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
5 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
6 8 (0.14%) NetSuite
7 7 (0.12%) Shopify
8 6 (0.10%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.085%) Magento
10 4 (0.068%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.068%) Sage X3
10 4 (0.068%) Temenos T24
11 3 (0.051%) Endur
11 3 (0.051%) Findur
11 3 (0.051%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 2 (0.034%) Distributed Ledger
12 2 (0.034%) Finacle
12 2 (0.034%) Salesforce CRM
12 2 (0.034%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,645 (44.75%) AWS
2 2,620 (44.32%) Azure
3 1,265 (21.40%) GitHub
4 1,002 (16.95%) Azure DevOps
5 988 (16.71%) GCP
6 827 (13.99%) GitHub Actions
7 648 (10.96%) Serverless
8 438 (7.41%) Power Platform
9 430 (7.27%) Amazon S3
10 426 (7.21%) AWS Lambda
11 323 (5.46%) Amazon EKS
12 286 (4.84%) AWS CloudFormation
13 285 (4.82%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 247 (4.18%) Azure AKS
15 239 (4.04%) Snowflake
16 234 (3.96%) Entra ID
17 212 (3.59%) Amazon EC2
18 183 (3.10%) Azure Data Factory
19 182 (3.08%) Azure Monitor
20 179 (3.03%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 228 (3.86%) Firewall
2 157 (2.66%) DNS
3 125 (2.11%) Network Security
4 94 (1.59%) VPN
5 80 (1.35%) TCP/IP
6 60 (1.02%) HTTP
7 48 (0.81%) WAN
8 44 (0.74%) BGP
9 40 (0.68%) SD-WAN
10 37 (0.63%) VXLAN
11 35 (0.59%) Ethernet VPN
12 34 (0.58%) SSL
13 33 (0.56%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 32 (0.54%) BIG-IP
15 30 (0.51%) Internet
15 30 (0.51%) OSPF
16 29 (0.49%) DHCP
17 27 (0.46%) 5G
18 20 (0.34%) SSH
18 20 (0.34%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 418 (7.07%) PostgreSQL
2 333 (5.63%) Power BI
3 291 (4.92%) SQL Server
4 283 (4.79%) Data Warehouse
5 260 (4.40%) Relational Database
6 258 (4.36%) NoSQL
7 244 (4.13%) MongoDB
8 212 (3.59%) Data Lake
9 181 (3.06%) Amazon RDS
10 167 (2.83%) Metadata
11 141 (2.39%) DynamoDB
12 129 (2.18%) MySQL
13 128 (2.17%) Amazon Redshift
14 117 (1.98%) Delta Lake
15 115 (1.95%) BigQuery
16 106 (1.79%) Redis
17 97 (1.64%) Azure SQL Database
18 95 (1.61%) Big Data
19 94 (1.59%) Amazon Athena
20 89 (1.51%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,127 (19.07%) Git
2 1,001 (16.93%) Jenkins
3 866 (14.65%) GitLab
4 503 (8.51%) JIRA
5 220 (3.72%) Selenium
6 182 (3.08%) JUnit
7 129 (2.18%) Cucumber
8 116 (1.96%) Maven
9 113 (1.91%) Bitbucket
10 110 (1.86%) Gradle
10 110 (1.86%) Postman
11 109 (1.84%) JMeter
12 105 (1.78%) SonarQube
13 98 (1.66%) Cypress.io
14 93 (1.57%) REST Assured
15 84 (1.42%) Gatling
16 75 (1.27%) Mockito
17 63 (1.07%) Claude Code
18 48 (0.81%) WebDriver
19 46 (0.78%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,525 (25.80%) Social Skills
2 1,061 (17.95%) Finance
3 855 (14.46%) Public Sector
4 517 (8.75%) Analytical Skills
5 467 (7.90%) Banking
6 147 (2.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 126 (2.13%) Documentation Skills
8 118 (2.00%) Retail
9 81 (1.37%) Investment Banking
10 76 (1.29%) Front Office
11 73 (1.23%) Telecoms
12 65 (1.10%) Military
13 60 (1.02%) Legal
14 59 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
15 53 (0.90%) Law
16 49 (0.83%) Financial Institution
17 43 (0.73%) Marketing
17 43 (0.73%) Publishing
18 39 (0.66%) Manufacturing
19 35 (0.59%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,327 (22.45%) Developer
2 1,043 (17.65%) Senior
3 751 (12.71%) DevOps Engineer
4 619 (10.47%) Architect
5 553 (9.36%) Lead
6 440 (7.44%) Data Engineer
7 324 (5.48%) Java Developer
8 317 (5.36%) AWS Engineer
9 313 (5.30%) Software Engineer
10 295 (4.99%) Azure Engineer
11 276 (4.67%) Senior Developer
12 255 (4.31%) Cloud Engineer
13 254 (4.30%) Platform Engineer
14 189 (3.20%) Full-Stack Developer
15 161 (2.72%) Python Developer
16 157 (2.66%) Solutions Architect
17 146 (2.47%) AWS DevOps
18 144 (2.44%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 141 (2.39%) Test Engineer
20 138 (2.33%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,916 (32.41%) Terraform
2 838 (14.18%) REST
3 557 (9.42%) React
4 556 (9.41%) Kafka
5 524 (8.86%) Spring
6 512 (8.66%) .NET
7 502 (8.49%) RESTful
8 468 (7.92%) Spring Boot
9 364 (6.16%) Node.js
10 244 (4.13%) HTML
11 238 (4.03%) Playwright
12 222 (3.76%) CSS
13 217 (3.67%) JSON
14 208 (3.52%) PySpark
15 204 (3.45%) OAuth
16 175 (2.96%) AngularJS
17 155 (2.62%) OAuth2
18 129 (2.18%) YAML
19 127 (2.15%) SOAP
20 118 (2.00%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 1,240 (20.98%) Cloud Native
2 456 (7.71%) Distributed Systems
3 385 (6.51%) Product Ownership
4 218 (3.69%) Onboarding
5 206 (3.49%) Enterprise Software
6 182 (3.08%) AI Agents
7 159 (2.69%) Legacy Systems
8 135 (2.28%) Hybrid Cloud
9 99 (1.67%) Data Centre
10 97 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
10 97 (1.64%) Security Posture
11 82 (1.39%) Public Cloud
12 74 (1.25%) Data Structures
13 72 (1.22%) Enterprise Cloud
14 69 (1.17%) Mobile App
15 68 (1.15%) NHS
15 68 (1.15%) Virtual Team
16 67 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
17 66 (1.12%) Management Information System
17 66 (1.12%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 587 (9.93%) Linux
2 253 (4.28%) Windows
3 142 (2.40%) Unix
4 114 (1.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.07%) Windows Server
6 55 (0.93%) Android
7 50 (0.85%) Apple iOS
8 30 (0.51%) VMS
9 22 (0.37%) Ubuntu
10 17 (0.29%) AIX
11 12 (0.20%) Mac OS
12 9 (0.15%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) CentOS
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 6 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.085%) Windows Server 2008
17 4 (0.068%) Rocky
18 3 (0.051%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,347 (56.62%) DevOps
2 2,234 (37.79%) Agile
3 1,973 (33.38%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,368 (23.14%) Test Automation
5 1,273 (21.54%) Containerisation
6 1,204 (20.37%) Microservices
7 1,085 (18.36%) Observability
8 1,081 (18.29%) AI
9 1,009 (17.07%) Software Engineering
10 941 (15.92%) Problem-Solving
11 876 (14.82%) Continuous Improvement
12 781 (13.21%) Platform Engineering
13 730 (12.35%) Analytics
14 668 (11.30%) Data Pipeline
15 663 (11.22%) Stakeholder Management
16 646 (10.93%) Event-Driven
17 636 (10.76%) Data Modelling
18 634 (10.73%) Technical Leadership
19 621 (10.51%) Migration
20 619 (10.47%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 2,211 (37.40%) Python
2 1,377 (23.30%) SQL
3 1,269 (21.47%) Java
4 652 (11.03%) JavaScript
5 539 (9.12%) C#
6 517 (8.75%) Bash
7 516 (8.73%) TypeScript
8 455 (7.70%) PowerShell
9 250 (4.23%) Bicep
10 158 (2.67%) Go
11 113 (1.91%) Shell Script
12 104 (1.76%) Scala
13 100 (1.69%) Kotlin
14 87 (1.47%) Apex Code
15 75 (1.27%) C++
16 69 (1.17%) Groovy
17 61 (1.03%) PL/SQL
18 55 (0.93%) Ruby
19 49 (0.83%) T-SQL
20 44 (0.74%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,725 (29.18%) Security Cleared
2 1,437 (24.31%) SC Cleared
3 304 (5.14%) Degree
4 252 (4.26%) BPSS Clearance
5 226 (3.82%) DV Cleared
6 203 (3.43%) Azure Certification
7 184 (3.11%) AWS Certification
8 154 (2.61%) Computer Science Degree
9 100 (1.69%) CISSP
10 64 (1.08%) Microsoft Certification
11 61 (1.03%) Cisco Certification
12 56 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.85%) ISTQB
14 47 (0.80%) CISM
15 40 (0.68%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 37 (0.63%) Master's Degree
17 27 (0.46%) CCSP
18 24 (0.41%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 20 (0.34%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
20 19 (0.32%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 531 (8.98%) QA
2 415 (7.02%) Data Quality
3 312 (5.28%) Accessibility
4 142 (2.40%) GDPR
5 127 (2.15%) WCAG
6 104 (1.76%) NIST
7 95 (1.61%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 69 (1.17%) NCSC
9 38 (0.64%) PCI DSS
9 38 (0.64%) SLA
10 24 (0.41%) GRC
11 23 (0.39%) Cyber Essentials
12 21 (0.36%) ISO 20022
13 19 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.27%) HL7
15 13 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
15 13 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
16 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.19%) EU AI Act
17 10 (0.17%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,583 (26.78%) Docker
2 156 (2.64%) Active Directory
3 111 (1.88%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.29%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.59%) VMware NSX
6 30 (0.51%) vSphere
7 20 (0.34%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.34%) VMware ESXi
8 18 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
9 15 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
9 15 (0.25%) Squid
10 8 (0.14%) KVM
10 8 (0.14%) Microsoft App-V
11 5 (0.085%) Ceph
12 4 (0.068%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 4 (0.068%) HDFS
12 4 (0.068%) NFS
12 4 (0.068%) Postfix
13 3 (0.051%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 3 (0.051%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 1,907 (32.26%) Kubernetes
2 552 (9.34%) Ansible
3 483 (8.17%) Grafana
4 385 (6.51%) Prometheus
5 120 (2.03%) Argo
6 65 (1.10%) Puppet
7 57 (0.96%) Progress Chef
8 54 (0.91%) Istio
9 45 (0.76%) Single Sign-On
10 39 (0.66%) Kibana
11 36 (0.61%) Packer
12 24 (0.41%) Kustomize
13 21 (0.36%) Control-M
13 21 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
14 18 (0.30%) vCenter Server
15 14 (0.24%) Oracle RMAN
16 13 (0.22%) Podman
16 13 (0.22%) SCCM
17 12 (0.20%) Jamf Pro
18 10 (0.17%) Rancher
Vendors
1 898 (15.19%) Microsoft
2 412 (6.97%) Databricks
3 344 (5.82%) Google
4 323 (5.46%) Oracle
5 215 (3.64%) Splunk
6 197 (3.33%) Salesforce
7 153 (2.59%) Dynatrace
8 146 (2.47%) VMware
9 141 (2.39%) ServiceNow
10 103 (1.74%) Red Hat
11 94 (1.59%) MuleSoft
12 86 (1.45%) OpenAI
13 80 (1.35%) IBM
14 71 (1.20%) Informatica
15 70 (1.18%) SAP
16 66 (1.12%) Cisco
17 50 (0.85%) Foundry
18 46 (0.78%) F5
19 44 (0.74%) New Relic
20 41 (0.69%) Palo Alto