DevOps Contract Job Trends

DevOps
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring DevOps skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 19 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -7
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,170 3,613 4,409
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.68% 9.97% 9.52%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.01% 11.55% 10.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,916 2,410 3,220
10th Percentile £363 £377 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £551 £568
Median % change year-on-year -4.63% -3.00% -5.42%
75th Percentile £615 £656 £673
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 43 40 98
10th Percentile - £40.98 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £58.92 £51.44
Median hourly rate £60.00 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.29% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £80.00 £74.00 £76.53
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.08 £78.98
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.75 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -18.93% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

DevOps 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 32,049 31,289 41,011
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.77% 86.33% 88.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,064 18,819 27,584
10th Percentile £300 £310 £308
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,120 1,102 1,587
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.11 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.14 £19.03
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -21.35% +27.14%
75th Percentile £45.00 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £33.54 £44.50
% change year-on-year -31.43% -24.63% +50.85%

DevOps
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing DevOps relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

DevOps job vacancy trend in the UK

DevOps
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DevOps.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DevOps

DevOps
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing DevOps over the 6 months to 19 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DevOps.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing DevOps

DevOps
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing DevOps over the 6 months to 19 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
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 DevOps within the UK over the 6 months to 19 November 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 +2 3,530 £525 -8.70% 2,696
UK excluding London +5 1,899 £500 -9.09% 1,569
London 0 1,759 £550 -4.35% 1,374
Work from Home +1 1,339 £525 -2.78% 1,509
North of England +3 613 £492 -3.05% 413
South East +1 377 £513 -12.77% 465
Midlands +14 371 £515 -6.36% 189
Yorkshire -1 327 £500 - 108
West Midlands +12 300 £525 -8.70% 132
North West +5 257 £452 -15.21% 257
Scotland +9 220 £475 +5.56% 116
South West +1 216 £538 -10.42% 212
East of England +26 110 £525 +5.00% 113
East Midlands +19 71 £418 +4.38% 56
Wales +10 45 £430 +4.24% 59
North East -10 31 £550 -6.78% 49
Northern Ireland -8 6 - - 32

DevOps
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
1 260 (6.24%) Confluence
2 100 (2.40%) Apache
3 72 (1.73%) Apache Airflow
4 67 (1.61%) SharePoint
5 64 (1.53%) SAS
6 56 (1.34%) Apache Spark
7 41 (0.98%) CMS
8 39 (0.94%) nginx
9 32 (0.77%) IIS
10 29 (0.70%) JBoss
11 28 (0.67%) OpenStack
12 27 (0.65%) WebLogic
13 26 (0.62%) CICS
14 21 (0.50%) WebSphere
15 19 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
16 16 (0.38%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
17 15 (0.36%) Mule
18 12 (0.29%) Oracle Service Bus
18 12 (0.29%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 73 (1.75%) Microsoft Excel
2 40 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 34 (0.82%) Microsoft Office
4 32 (0.77%) Microsoft Project
5 18 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.36%) Chatbot
7 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Trello
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.024%) Moqups
9 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.58%) Dynamics CRM
2 22 (0.53%) Endur
3 21 (0.50%) Oracle BPM
4 19 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
5 17 (0.41%) Aladdin
5 17 (0.41%) VisionPLUS
6 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
7 13 (0.31%) Maximo
8 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
9 6 (0.14%) FLEXCUBE
9 6 (0.14%) Oracle EBS
10 5 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
10 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 4 (0.096%) Fidessa
11 4 (0.096%) SAP ERP
11 4 (0.096%) Teamcenter
11 4 (0.096%) thinkFolio
11 4 (0.096%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.072%) SAP CO
12 3 (0.072%) SAP FI
Cloud Services
1 2,027 (48.61%) Azure
2 1,572 (37.70%) AWS
3 1,113 (26.69%) Azure DevOps
4 710 (17.03%) GitHub
5 573 (13.74%) GCP
6 470 (11.27%) Serverless
7 402 (9.64%) GitHub Actions
8 282 (6.76%) Power Platform
9 271 (6.50%) Amazon S3
10 264 (6.33%) AWS CloudFormation
10 264 (6.33%) AWS Lambda
11 220 (5.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 206 (4.94%) Amazon EC2
13 174 (4.17%) Azure AKS
14 168 (4.03%) Amazon EKS
15 160 (3.84%) Amazon ECS
16 158 (3.79%) SaaS
17 155 (3.72%) Azure Data Factory
18 150 (3.60%) Virtual Private Cloud
19 148 (3.55%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 209 (5.01%) Firewall
2 133 (3.19%) DNS
3 90 (2.16%) VPN
4 73 (1.75%) SSL
5 70 (1.68%) TCP/IP
6 69 (1.65%) Network Security
7 52 (1.25%) HTTP
8 38 (0.91%) HTTPS
9 34 (0.82%) SSH
10 31 (0.74%) SMTP
10 31 (0.74%) WAN
11 24 (0.58%) FTP
12 21 (0.50%) BGP
13 19 (0.46%) Kerberos
14 18 (0.43%) DHCP
15 17 (0.41%) LAN
16 16 (0.38%) OpenLDAP
17 15 (0.36%) MPLS
17 15 (0.36%) SD-WAN
18 12 (0.29%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 283 (6.79%) PostgreSQL
2 174 (4.17%) Amazon RDS
3 172 (4.12%) NoSQL
4 170 (4.08%) Power BI
5 168 (4.03%) SQL Server
6 122 (2.93%) MongoDB
7 103 (2.47%) Data Warehouse
8 101 (2.42%) Relational Database
9 89 (2.13%) Data Lake
9 89 (2.13%) Oracle Database
10 71 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
10 71 (1.70%) DynamoDB
11 66 (1.58%) MySQL
12 62 (1.49%) Redis
13 55 (1.32%) Amazon Aurora
14 50 (1.20%) Elasticsearch
15 48 (1.15%) Metadata
16 39 (0.94%) Delta Lake
17 38 (0.91%) Big Data
18 36 (0.86%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 807 (19.35%) Jenkins
2 684 (16.40%) Git
3 613 (14.70%) JIRA
4 528 (12.66%) GitLab
5 146 (3.50%) Selenium
6 111 (2.66%) JUnit
7 107 (2.57%) SonarQube
8 100 (2.40%) Sonatype Nexus
9 96 (2.30%) Bitbucket
10 88 (2.11%) Postman
11 68 (1.63%) Cypress.io
12 62 (1.49%) Cucumber
12 62 (1.49%) Liquibase
13 59 (1.41%) Maven
14 50 (1.20%) Artifactory
15 49 (1.18%) Gradle
16 46 (1.10%) Visual Studio
17 45 (1.08%) JMeter
18 40 (0.96%) CircleCI
19 39 (0.94%) Oracle APEX
General
1 1,313 (31.49%) Social Skills
2 758 (18.18%) Finance
3 518 (12.42%) Public Sector
4 363 (8.71%) Banking
5 354 (8.49%) Analytical Skills
6 133 (3.19%) Documentation Skills
7 73 (1.75%) Investment Banking
8 70 (1.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 63 (1.51%) Marketing
10 61 (1.46%) Financial Institution
11 60 (1.44%) Telecoms
12 58 (1.39%) Retail
13 50 (1.20%) Influencing Skills
14 48 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
15 38 (0.91%) Front Office
16 32 (0.77%) Back Office
16 32 (0.77%) Military
16 32 (0.77%) Pharmaceutical
17 28 (0.67%) Law
17 28 (0.67%) Legal
Job Titles
1 823 (19.74%) Developer
2 760 (18.23%) DevOps Engineer
3 546 (13.09%) Senior
4 348 (8.35%) Architect
5 322 (7.72%) Lead
6 259 (6.21%) AWS Engineer
7 208 (4.99%) Azure Engineer
8 200 (4.80%) AWS DevOps
9 194 (4.65%) Analyst
10 190 (4.56%) Data Engineer
11 169 (4.05%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 163 (3.91%) Senior Developer
12 163 (3.91%) Software Engineer
13 151 (3.62%) Cloud Engineer
14 143 (3.43%) Platform Engineer
15 137 (3.29%) Java Developer
16 129 (3.09%) Consultant
17 109 (2.61%) Business Analyst
18 107 (2.57%) Senior DevOps
19 101 (2.42%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 474 (11.37%) REST
2 363 (8.71%) .NET
3 318 (7.63%) RESTful
4 255 (6.12%) React
5 252 (6.04%) Node.js
6 231 (5.54%) Kafka
7 208 (4.99%) JSON
8 186 (4.46%) SOAP
9 184 (4.41%) Spring
10 181 (4.34%) Spring Boot
11 163 (3.91%) HTML
12 157 (3.76%) OAuth
13 152 (3.65%) Elastic Stack
14 151 (3.62%) AngularJS
15 147 (3.53%) XML
16 115 (2.76%) CSS
17 111 (2.66%) YAML
18 94 (2.25%) Web Services
19 86 (2.06%) .NET Core
20 84 (2.01%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 540 (12.95%) Cloud Native
2 230 (5.52%) Product Ownership
3 171 (4.10%) Distributed Systems
4 127 (3.05%) Onboarding
5 110 (2.64%) Legacy Systems
6 99 (2.37%) Public Cloud
7 72 (1.73%) Hybrid Cloud
8 69 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
9 68 (1.63%) Virtual Team
10 66 (1.58%) Mobile App
11 62 (1.49%) Replication
12 53 (1.27%) Enterprise Software
12 53 (1.27%) Greenfield Project
13 52 (1.25%) Security Posture
14 50 (1.20%) Management Information System
15 47 (1.13%) Algorithms
16 43 (1.03%) Data Centre
17 39 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
18 38 (0.91%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
19 36 (0.86%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 522 (12.52%) Linux
2 256 (6.14%) Windows
3 116 (2.78%) Unix
4 65 (1.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 62 (1.49%) Windows Server
6 52 (1.25%) Android
7 46 (1.10%) Apple iOS
7 46 (1.10%) VMS
8 26 (0.62%) Amazon Linux
9 24 (0.58%) Ubuntu
10 22 (0.53%) CentOS
11 16 (0.38%) Solaris
11 16 (0.38%) Windows 10
12 12 (0.29%) Mac OS
13 11 (0.26%) zOS
14 7 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 3 (0.072%) AIX
16 3 (0.072%) Debian
16 3 (0.072%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,341 (56.14%) CI/CD
2 1,841 (44.15%) Agile
3 1,069 (25.64%) Infrastructure as Code
4 821 (19.69%) Problem-Solving
5 789 (18.92%) Containerisation
6 665 (15.95%) Test Automation
7 621 (14.89%) Microservices
8 526 (12.61%) Scrum
9 456 (10.94%) Migration
10 444 (10.65%) Continuous Improvement
11 422 (10.12%) Software Engineering
12 406 (9.74%) Analytics
13 370 (8.87%) AI
14 353 (8.47%) Observability
15 319 (7.65%) Mentoring
16 317 (7.60%) Stakeholder Management
17 301 (7.22%) SDLC
18 284 (6.81%) Infrastructure Automation
19 269 (6.45%) DevSecOps
20 266 (6.38%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,344 (32.23%) Python
2 798 (19.14%) SQL
3 620 (14.87%) Java
4 443 (10.62%) JavaScript
5 405 (9.71%) C#
6 395 (9.47%) Bash
7 378 (9.06%) PowerShell
8 286 (6.86%) TypeScript
9 176 (4.22%) Go
10 114 (2.73%) Bicep
11 81 (1.94%) PL/SQL
12 78 (1.87%) Shell Script
13 64 (1.53%) Groovy
14 58 (1.39%) Perl
15 52 (1.25%) C++
16 51 (1.22%) Scala
17 44 (1.06%) Ruby
18 36 (0.86%) T-SQL
19 32 (0.77%) Kotlin
20 27 (0.65%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,110 (26.62%) Security Cleared
2 924 (22.16%) SC Cleared
3 339 (8.13%) Degree
4 182 (4.36%) Computer Science Degree
5 156 (3.74%) AWS Certification
6 146 (3.50%) Azure Certification
7 130 (3.12%) DV Cleared
8 81 (1.94%) BPSS Clearance
9 76 (1.82%) Master's Degree
10 69 (1.65%) CISSP
11 63 (1.51%) Microsoft Certification
12 54 (1.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 46 (1.10%) CISM
14 41 (0.98%) ISTQB
15 35 (0.84%) Cisco Certification
16 31 (0.74%) PMI Certification
17 29 (0.70%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 27 (0.65%) PMP
19 18 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
20 17 (0.41%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 384 (9.21%) QA
2 149 (3.57%) GDPR
3 140 (3.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 130 (3.12%) Accessibility
5 119 (2.85%) Data Quality
6 106 (2.54%) NIST
7 47 (1.13%) NCSC
8 36 (0.86%) PCI DSS
9 27 (0.65%) HIPAA
10 26 (0.62%) WCAG
11 20 (0.48%) SLA
11 20 (0.48%) SOC 2
12 18 (0.43%) PMO
13 16 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 13 (0.31%) Cyber Essentials
14 13 (0.31%) MiFID
14 13 (0.31%) PSD2
14 13 (0.31%) SEPA
15 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 1,044 (25.04%) Docker
2 189 (4.53%) Active Directory
3 81 (1.94%) VMware Infrastructure
4 56 (1.34%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.70%) vSphere
6 24 (0.58%) DFS Replication
7 16 (0.38%) Postfix
8 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.31%) Squid
9 13 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
10 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
10 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
11 11 (0.26%) Hyper-V
11 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
12 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
13 8 (0.19%) GPFS
13 8 (0.19%) Lustre
13 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,308 (31.37%) Terraform
2 1,208 (28.97%) Kubernetes
3 540 (12.95%) Ansible
4 324 (7.77%) Grafana
5 312 (7.48%) Prometheus
6 87 (2.09%) Puppet
7 79 (1.89%) Argo
8 69 (1.65%) Single Sign-On
9 58 (1.39%) Progress Chef
10 45 (1.08%) Kibana
11 40 (0.96%) Packer
12 30 (0.72%) Istio
13 22 (0.53%) ITRS Geneos
14 21 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
14 21 (0.50%) Podman
15 20 (0.48%) SCCM
16 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
16 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
17 16 (0.38%) Nessus
18 15 (0.36%) logstash
Vendors
1 707 (16.95%) Microsoft
2 304 (7.29%) Oracle
3 225 (5.40%) Google
4 203 (4.87%) Splunk
5 179 (4.29%) Databricks
6 174 (4.17%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.90%) Salesforce
8 113 (2.71%) VMware
9 107 (2.57%) SAP
10 96 (2.30%) Red Hat
11 63 (1.51%) Dynatrace
12 61 (1.46%) IBM
13 59 (1.41%) MuleSoft
14 47 (1.13%) Cisco
14 47 (1.13%) OpenAI
15 46 (1.10%) Atlassian
15 46 (1.10%) F5
16 38 (0.91%) Palo Alto
17 37 (0.89%) Talend
18 35 (0.84%) Denodo