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

6 months to
8 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 16 26
Rank change year-on-year +5 +10 0
Contract jobs citing CI/CD 6,024 3,286 2,661
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.14% 10.12% 6.98%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.18% 11.20% 8.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,076 2,233 1,811
10th Percentile £381 £360 £400
25th Percentile £438 £423 £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 £760
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £520
% change year-on-year - -3.85% -5.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 48 70
10th Percentile £45.16 £49.70 £55.90
25th Percentile £60.66 £58.38 £65.00
Median hourly rate £69.00 £65.00 £66.00
Median % change year-on-year +6.15% -1.52% -12.00%
75th Percentile £77.50 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £95.00 £84.32 £71.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.61 £65.00 £67.00
% change year-on-year +5.55% -2.99% -10.07%

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 45,722 29,342 32,587
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.57% 90.39% 85.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,938 18,213 20,366
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.23%
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 2,944 1,739 1,516
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.22 £14.77
25th Percentile £17.64 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -41.51% +3.24%
75th Percentile £67.99 £45.87 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +87.80% -47.37% +8.72%

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 8 September 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 8 September 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 8 September 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 5,049 £525 +2.44% 4,824
London +5 2,680 £538 +1.42% 3,037
UK excluding London +6 2,552 £500 - 2,454
Work from Home +6 1,855 £525 +5.00% 5,797
North of England +5 964 £500 +5.26% 672
Yorkshire +7 482 £513 +7.89% 178
South East -1 458 £533 +6.50% 488
Midlands -4 381 £488 -1.52% 232
North West +3 370 £525 +9.38% 394
West Midlands +1 318 £488 -7.14% 147
South West +5 292 £550 +4.76% 349
Scotland -1 269 £431 -13.75% 365
East of England +4 152 £508 +1.60% 213
North East -1 123 £425 -5.03% 105
East Midlands -16 57 £450 +4.77% 84
Wales +2 45 £438 -4.11% 40
Northern Ireland +23 25 £545 +9.00% 111
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
1 274 (4.55%) Confluence
2 230 (3.82%) Apache Airflow
3 201 (3.34%) Apache Spark
4 162 (2.69%) Apache
5 86 (1.43%) SharePoint
6 63 (1.05%) SAS
7 36 (0.60%) Jupyter
8 26 (0.43%) CMS
9 21 (0.35%) nginx
10 20 (0.33%) OpenStack
11 18 (0.30%) Camunda
12 16 (0.27%) Anypoint
13 14 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
13 14 (0.23%) SharePoint Server
14 10 (0.17%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.15%) Mule
16 8 (0.13%) WordPress
17 7 (0.12%) IIS
17 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
18 6 (0.100%) Apache Superset
Applications
1 22 (0.37%) Chatbot
1 22 (0.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (0.18%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 10 (0.17%) Microsoft Office
4 6 (0.100%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.066%) Simulink
5 4 (0.066%) Trello
6 3 (0.050%) Adobe XD
6 3 (0.050%) Sketch
7 2 (0.033%) CPLEX
7 2 (0.033%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.033%) Spreadsheet
7 2 (0.033%) Windchill
8 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
8 1 (0.017%) Mozilla Thunderbird
Business Applications
1 50 (0.83%) Dynamics CRM
2 23 (0.38%) Payment Gateway
3 15 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.20%) SAP CRM
5 11 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
6 10 (0.17%) Aladdin
7 8 (0.13%) NetSuite
8 7 (0.12%) Shopify
9 6 (0.100%) Magento
9 6 (0.100%) SAP MDG
10 5 (0.083%) Temenos T24
11 4 (0.066%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.066%) Sage X3
12 3 (0.050%) Endur
12 3 (0.050%) Finacle
12 3 (0.050%) Findur
12 3 (0.050%) FLEXCUBE
12 3 (0.050%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
13 2 (0.033%) Distributed Ledger
13 2 (0.033%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,678 (44.46%) AWS
2 2,640 (43.82%) Azure
3 1,293 (21.46%) GitHub
4 1,006 (16.70%) Azure DevOps
5 1,000 (16.60%) GCP
6 842 (13.98%) GitHub Actions
7 659 (10.94%) Serverless
8 440 (7.30%) Power Platform
9 438 (7.27%) Amazon S3
9 438 (7.27%) AWS Lambda
10 323 (5.36%) Amazon EKS
11 297 (4.93%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 280 (4.65%) AWS CloudFormation
13 246 (4.08%) Entra ID
14 241 (4.00%) Snowflake
15 235 (3.90%) Azure AKS
16 212 (3.52%) Amazon EC2
17 192 (3.19%) Azure Data Factory
18 189 (3.14%) Amazon ECS
19 182 (3.02%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 233 (3.87%) Firewall
2 162 (2.69%) DNS
3 127 (2.11%) Network Security
4 92 (1.53%) VPN
5 80 (1.33%) TCP/IP
6 54 (0.90%) HTTP
7 49 (0.81%) WAN
8 41 (0.68%) SD-WAN
9 40 (0.66%) BGP
10 36 (0.60%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
11 35 (0.58%) BIG-IP
12 33 (0.55%) SSL
12 33 (0.55%) VXLAN
13 32 (0.53%) DHCP
14 31 (0.51%) Ethernet VPN
15 28 (0.46%) Internet
16 27 (0.45%) 5G
17 26 (0.43%) OSPF
18 20 (0.33%) VLAN
18 20 (0.33%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 425 (7.06%) PostgreSQL
2 336 (5.58%) Power BI
3 290 (4.81%) Data Warehouse
4 284 (4.71%) SQL Server
5 275 (4.57%) Relational Database
6 253 (4.20%) NoSQL
7 246 (4.08%) MongoDB
8 223 (3.70%) Data Lake
9 188 (3.12%) Amazon RDS
10 170 (2.82%) Metadata
11 145 (2.41%) DynamoDB
12 136 (2.26%) MySQL
13 126 (2.09%) Amazon Redshift
14 123 (2.04%) Delta Lake
15 119 (1.98%) BigQuery
16 106 (1.76%) Redis
17 95 (1.58%) Amazon Athena
17 95 (1.58%) Azure SQL Database
17 95 (1.58%) Big Data
18 93 (1.54%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 1,172 (19.46%) Git
2 1,003 (16.65%) Jenkins
3 890 (14.77%) GitLab
4 515 (8.55%) JIRA
5 237 (3.93%) Selenium
6 193 (3.20%) JUnit
7 134 (2.22%) Cucumber
8 126 (2.09%) Maven
9 118 (1.96%) SonarQube
10 115 (1.91%) Gradle
11 112 (1.86%) JMeter
11 112 (1.86%) Postman
12 109 (1.81%) Bitbucket
13 97 (1.61%) Cypress.io
13 97 (1.61%) REST Assured
14 84 (1.39%) Mockito
15 83 (1.38%) Gatling
16 67 (1.11%) Claude Code
17 49 (0.81%) Sonatype Nexus
17 49 (0.81%) WebDriver
General
1 1,556 (25.83%) Social Skills
2 1,091 (18.11%) Finance
3 865 (14.36%) Public Sector
4 530 (8.80%) Analytical Skills
5 489 (8.12%) Banking
6 153 (2.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 123 (2.04%) Retail
8 118 (1.96%) Documentation Skills
9 86 (1.43%) Investment Banking
10 79 (1.31%) Front Office
11 73 (1.21%) Telecoms
12 70 (1.16%) Military
13 59 (0.98%) Legal
14 55 (0.91%) Influencing Skills
14 55 (0.91%) Law
15 50 (0.83%) Financial Institution
16 45 (0.75%) Marketing
17 44 (0.73%) Publishing
18 40 (0.66%) Manufacturing
19 35 (0.58%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,353 (22.46%) Developer
2 1,080 (17.93%) Senior
3 771 (12.80%) DevOps Engineer
4 617 (10.24%) Architect
5 557 (9.25%) Lead
6 458 (7.60%) Data Engineer
7 331 (5.49%) Java Developer
8 319 (5.30%) AWS Engineer
9 317 (5.26%) Software Engineer
10 297 (4.93%) Azure Engineer
11 291 (4.83%) Senior Developer
12 260 (4.32%) Cloud Engineer
13 258 (4.28%) Platform Engineer
14 179 (2.97%) Full-Stack Developer
15 166 (2.76%) Python Developer
16 158 (2.62%) Solutions Architect
17 148 (2.46%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 147 (2.44%) AWS DevOps
18 147 (2.44%) Test Engineer
19 140 (2.32%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,941 (32.22%) Terraform
2 880 (14.61%) REST
3 578 (9.59%) Kafka
4 555 (9.21%) React
5 532 (8.83%) Spring
6 511 (8.48%) .NET
6 511 (8.48%) RESTful
7 478 (7.93%) Spring Boot
8 351 (5.83%) Node.js
9 250 (4.15%) HTML
10 242 (4.02%) Playwright
11 231 (3.83%) CSS
12 222 (3.69%) JSON
13 215 (3.57%) PySpark
14 210 (3.49%) OAuth
15 175 (2.91%) AngularJS
16 160 (2.66%) OAuth2
17 136 (2.26%) SOAP
18 124 (2.06%) YAML
19 119 (1.98%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 1,273 (21.13%) Cloud Native
2 462 (7.67%) Distributed Systems
3 397 (6.59%) Product Ownership
4 221 (3.67%) Onboarding
5 216 (3.59%) Enterprise Software
6 196 (3.25%) AI Agents
7 158 (2.62%) Legacy Systems
8 134 (2.22%) Hybrid Cloud
9 102 (1.69%) Security Posture
10 98 (1.63%) Data Centre
10 98 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
11 87 (1.44%) Public Cloud
12 81 (1.34%) Data Structures
13 75 (1.25%) Management Information System
14 71 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
15 70 (1.16%) Enterprise Cloud
15 70 (1.16%) NHS
15 70 (1.16%) Virtual Team
16 67 (1.11%) Mobile App
17 65 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 607 (10.08%) Linux
2 256 (4.25%) Windows
3 155 (2.57%) Unix
4 123 (2.04%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 68 (1.13%) Windows Server
6 57 (0.95%) Android
7 51 (0.85%) Apple iOS
8 32 (0.53%) VMS
9 21 (0.35%) Ubuntu
10 15 (0.25%) AIX
11 14 (0.23%) Mac OS
12 10 (0.17%) CentOS
12 10 (0.17%) zOS
13 8 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 6 (0.100%) Rocky
15 6 (0.100%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.083%) Windows Server 2008
17 3 (0.050%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,385 (56.19%) DevOps
2 2,283 (37.90%) Agile
3 2,042 (33.90%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,414 (23.47%) Test Automation
5 1,303 (21.63%) Containerisation
6 1,218 (20.22%) Microservices
7 1,125 (18.68%) Observability
8 1,120 (18.59%) AI
9 1,047 (17.38%) Software Engineering
10 951 (15.79%) Problem-Solving
11 900 (14.94%) Continuous Improvement
12 803 (13.33%) Platform Engineering
13 737 (12.23%) Analytics
14 695 (11.54%) Stakeholder Management
15 682 (11.32%) Data Pipeline
16 678 (11.25%) Event-Driven
17 656 (10.89%) Data Modelling
18 653 (10.84%) Technical Leadership
19 645 (10.71%) Scrum
20 625 (10.38%) Migration
Programming Languages
1 2,288 (37.98%) Python
2 1,395 (23.16%) SQL
3 1,286 (21.35%) Java
4 669 (11.11%) JavaScript
5 534 (8.86%) C#
6 528 (8.76%) Bash
7 524 (8.70%) TypeScript
8 457 (7.59%) PowerShell
9 253 (4.20%) Bicep
10 162 (2.69%) Go
11 125 (2.08%) Shell Script
12 111 (1.84%) Scala
13 104 (1.73%) Kotlin
14 83 (1.38%) Apex Code
15 70 (1.16%) C++
15 70 (1.16%) Groovy
16 58 (0.96%) PL/SQL
17 53 (0.88%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 53 (0.88%) Ruby
18 48 (0.80%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 1,765 (29.30%) Security Cleared
2 1,458 (24.20%) SC Cleared
3 313 (5.20%) Degree
4 257 (4.27%) BPSS Clearance
5 251 (4.17%) DV Cleared
6 204 (3.39%) Azure Certification
7 188 (3.12%) AWS Certification
8 158 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
9 104 (1.73%) CISSP
10 69 (1.15%) Microsoft Certification
11 61 (1.01%) Cisco Certification
12 54 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 53 (0.88%) ISTQB
14 50 (0.83%) CISM
15 43 (0.71%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 37 (0.61%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.50%) CCSP
18 23 (0.38%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 20 (0.33%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
20 19 (0.32%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 546 (9.06%) QA
2 439 (7.29%) Data Quality
3 321 (5.33%) Accessibility
4 136 (2.26%) GDPR
5 132 (2.19%) WCAG
6 102 (1.69%) NIST
7 94 (1.56%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 71 (1.18%) NCSC
9 32 (0.53%) PCI DSS
9 32 (0.53%) SLA
10 24 (0.40%) Cyber Essentials
10 24 (0.40%) GRC
11 23 (0.38%) ISO 20022
12 16 (0.27%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 15 (0.25%) HL7
14 13 (0.22%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.20%) Actionable Recommendations
15 12 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.18%) EU AI Act
16 11 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
System Software
1 1,608 (26.69%) Docker
2 160 (2.66%) Active Directory
3 116 (1.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.26%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.58%) VMware NSX
6 32 (0.53%) vSphere
7 26 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
8 21 (0.35%) Hyper-V
9 17 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
10 15 (0.25%) Squid
11 14 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.15%) KVM
13 8 (0.13%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.100%) Ceph
15 4 (0.066%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 4 (0.066%) HDFS
15 4 (0.066%) NFS
15 4 (0.066%) Postfix
16 3 (0.050%) Slurm Workload Manager
16 3 (0.050%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 1,941 (32.22%) Kubernetes
2 567 (9.41%) Ansible
3 485 (8.05%) Grafana
4 386 (6.41%) Prometheus
5 120 (1.99%) Argo
6 61 (1.01%) Puppet
7 56 (0.93%) Progress Chef
8 48 (0.80%) Istio
9 45 (0.75%) Single Sign-On
10 37 (0.61%) Kibana
11 36 (0.60%) Packer
12 26 (0.43%) Kustomize
13 23 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
14 21 (0.35%) Control-M
15 18 (0.30%) vCenter Server
16 17 (0.28%) Podman
17 14 (0.23%) SCCM
18 13 (0.22%) Oracle RMAN
19 12 (0.20%) Jamf Pro
19 12 (0.20%) Karpenter
Vendors
1 925 (15.36%) Microsoft
2 433 (7.19%) Databricks
3 360 (5.98%) Google
4 328 (5.44%) Oracle
5 214 (3.55%) Splunk
6 194 (3.22%) Salesforce
7 156 (2.59%) VMware
8 150 (2.49%) Dynatrace
9 138 (2.29%) ServiceNow
10 108 (1.79%) Red Hat
11 93 (1.54%) MuleSoft
12 92 (1.53%) OpenAI
13 88 (1.46%) IBM
14 73 (1.21%) Informatica
15 69 (1.15%) SAP
16 61 (1.01%) Cisco
17 58 (0.96%) Foundry
18 49 (0.81%) F5
19 43 (0.71%) New Relic
20 41 (0.68%) Talend