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

6 months to
2 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,156 3,589 4,358
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.55% 10.06% 9.59%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.97% 11.53% 10.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,910 2,418 3,174
10th Percentile £363 £380 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £559 £563
Median % change year-on-year -6.04% -0.67% -6.25%
75th Percentile £618 £663 £663
90th Percentile £700 £748 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 36 88
10th Percentile - £39.88 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £53.73 £49.05
Median hourly rate £61.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £85.63 £74.11 £70.47
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -16.43% +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 32,041 31,135 40,262
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.06% 87.25% 88.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,133 18,828 26,941
10th Percentile £300 £310 £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 2,077 1,103 1,555
10th Percentile £14.58 £15.22 £14.38
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.22 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £33.00 £43.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.79% -24.14% +24.29%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.85 £32.50 £43.83
% change year-on-year -29.69% -25.84% +37.15%

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 2 December 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 2 December 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 2 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 +2 3,523 £525 -8.70% 1,549
UK excluding London +6 1,878 £500 -9.09% 1,377
London 0 1,761 £550 -5.98% 619
Work from Home +1 1,309 £525 -2.78% 925
North of England +2 609 £492 -4.00% 308
South East +2 372 £513 -14.58% 558
Midlands +16 370 £515 -1.90% 140
Yorkshire 0 311 £500 - 111
West Midlands +16 299 £525 -4.55% 91
North West +6 263 £454 -14.74% 148
South West +4 223 £538 -10.42% 165
Scotland +8 207 £475 +5.56% 79
East of England +26 109 £523 -9.13% 103
East Midlands +19 71 £418 -12.11% 43
Wales +5 43 £410 -0.61% 47
North East -8 37 £520 -11.11% 51
Northern Ireland -1 7 - - 9

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
1 258 (6.21%) Confluence
2 89 (2.14%) Apache
3 72 (1.73%) SharePoint
4 70 (1.68%) Apache Airflow
5 64 (1.54%) SAS
6 59 (1.42%) Apache Spark
7 37 (0.89%) CMS
8 36 (0.87%) nginx
9 29 (0.70%) IIS
10 28 (0.67%) OpenStack
11 27 (0.65%) JBoss
11 27 (0.65%) WebLogic
12 23 (0.55%) CICS
13 21 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
14 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
14 15 (0.36%) Mule
14 15 (0.36%) WebSphere
15 14 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
16 10 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 72 (1.73%) Microsoft Excel
2 41 (0.99%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 33 (0.79%) Microsoft Office
4 32 (0.77%) Microsoft Project
5 19 (0.46%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.38%) Chatbot
7 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 9 (0.22%) Trello
9 8 (0.19%) Weka
10 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.024%) Moqups
10 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 62 (1.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.46%) Endur
3 18 (0.43%) Aladdin
3 18 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
4 17 (0.41%) Oracle BPM
5 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
6 14 (0.34%) VisionPLUS
7 8 (0.19%) Maximo
8 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
9 5 (0.12%) NEC Housing
9 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.096%) Fidessa
10 4 (0.096%) SAP CO
10 4 (0.096%) SAP ERP
10 4 (0.096%) SAP FI
10 4 (0.096%) SAP FI/CO
10 4 (0.096%) Teamcenter
10 4 (0.096%) thinkFolio
10 4 (0.096%) Workday HCM
11 3 (0.072%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 2,040 (49.09%) Azure
2 1,571 (37.80%) AWS
3 1,112 (26.76%) Azure DevOps
4 733 (17.64%) GitHub
5 589 (14.17%) GCP
6 483 (11.62%) Serverless
7 429 (10.32%) GitHub Actions
8 282 (6.79%) Power Platform
9 267 (6.42%) AWS CloudFormation
10 265 (6.38%) AWS Lambda
11 264 (6.35%) Amazon S3
12 215 (5.17%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 197 (4.74%) Amazon EC2
14 182 (4.38%) Amazon EKS
14 182 (4.38%) Azure AKS
15 166 (3.99%) Amazon ECS
16 164 (3.95%) Azure Data Factory
17 159 (3.83%) SaaS
18 154 (3.71%) Entra ID
19 151 (3.63%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 194 (4.67%) Firewall
2 127 (3.06%) DNS
3 88 (2.12%) VPN
4 70 (1.68%) Network Security
5 64 (1.54%) SSL
6 59 (1.42%) TCP/IP
7 53 (1.28%) HTTP
8 35 (0.84%) HTTPS
9 30 (0.72%) SSH
10 28 (0.67%) SMTP
11 27 (0.65%) WAN
12 23 (0.55%) FTP
13 18 (0.43%) BGP
13 18 (0.43%) Kerberos
14 17 (0.41%) DHCP
15 16 (0.38%) OpenLDAP
16 15 (0.36%) MPLS
17 14 (0.34%) LAN
17 14 (0.34%) SD-WAN
18 12 (0.29%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 278 (6.69%) PostgreSQL
2 174 (4.19%) NoSQL
2 174 (4.19%) Power BI
3 166 (3.99%) Amazon RDS
4 152 (3.66%) SQL Server
5 121 (2.91%) MongoDB
6 105 (2.53%) Relational Database
7 99 (2.38%) Data Warehouse
8 91 (2.19%) Data Lake
9 85 (2.05%) Oracle Database
10 71 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
11 64 (1.54%) DynamoDB
12 63 (1.52%) MySQL
13 61 (1.47%) Redis
14 56 (1.35%) Amazon Aurora
15 51 (1.23%) Elasticsearch
16 47 (1.13%) Metadata
17 43 (1.03%) Big Data
17 43 (1.03%) Delta Lake
18 39 (0.94%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 797 (19.18%) Jenkins
2 663 (15.95%) Git
3 607 (14.61%) JIRA
4 534 (12.85%) GitLab
5 145 (3.49%) Selenium
6 107 (2.57%) JUnit
7 99 (2.38%) SonarQube
8 91 (2.19%) Sonatype Nexus
9 89 (2.14%) Bitbucket
10 78 (1.88%) Postman
11 68 (1.64%) Cypress.io
12 63 (1.52%) Cucumber
13 59 (1.42%) Liquibase
14 51 (1.23%) Maven
15 46 (1.11%) Gradle
15 46 (1.11%) JMeter
16 45 (1.08%) Artifactory
17 40 (0.96%) CircleCI
18 39 (0.94%) Oracle APEX
19 38 (0.91%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,300 (31.28%) Social Skills
2 765 (18.41%) Finance
3 528 (12.70%) Public Sector
4 354 (8.52%) Banking
5 333 (8.01%) Analytical Skills
6 125 (3.01%) Documentation Skills
7 71 (1.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 67 (1.61%) Financial Institution
9 66 (1.59%) Investment Banking
10 63 (1.52%) Marketing
11 55 (1.32%) Influencing Skills
11 55 (1.32%) Telecoms
12 53 (1.28%) Retail
13 44 (1.06%) Front Office
14 43 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
15 35 (0.84%) Back Office
16 31 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
17 30 (0.72%) Military
18 28 (0.67%) Manufacturing
19 26 (0.63%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 798 (19.20%) Developer
2 779 (18.74%) DevOps Engineer
3 561 (13.50%) Senior
4 358 (8.61%) Architect
5 310 (7.46%) Lead
6 259 (6.23%) AWS Engineer
7 213 (5.13%) Azure Engineer
8 198 (4.76%) AWS DevOps
9 192 (4.62%) Data Engineer
10 186 (4.48%) Analyst
11 169 (4.07%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 159 (3.83%) Senior Developer
12 159 (3.83%) Software Engineer
13 149 (3.59%) Cloud Engineer
14 144 (3.46%) Platform Engineer
15 134 (3.22%) Java Developer
16 124 (2.98%) Consultant
17 112 (2.69%) Senior DevOps
18 103 (2.48%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 102 (2.45%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 477 (11.48%) REST
2 363 (8.73%) .NET
3 311 (7.48%) RESTful
4 252 (6.06%) Node.js
4 252 (6.06%) React
5 244 (5.87%) Kafka
6 214 (5.15%) JSON
7 202 (4.86%) Spring
8 192 (4.62%) Spring Boot
9 179 (4.31%) SOAP
10 158 (3.80%) OAuth
11 156 (3.75%) HTML
12 155 (3.73%) Elastic Stack
13 152 (3.66%) AngularJS
14 143 (3.44%) XML
15 111 (2.67%) YAML
16 109 (2.62%) CSS
17 88 (2.12%) .NET Core
18 85 (2.05%) Playwright
19 84 (2.02%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 560 (13.47%) Cloud Native
2 229 (5.51%) Product Ownership
3 179 (4.31%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (3.08%) Onboarding
5 106 (2.55%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (2.43%) Public Cloud
7 76 (1.83%) Hybrid Cloud
8 70 (1.68%) Data Protection Act
9 68 (1.64%) Virtual Team
10 63 (1.52%) Mobile App
11 59 (1.42%) Replication
12 54 (1.30%) Enterprise Software
13 53 (1.28%) Greenfield Project
13 53 (1.28%) Security Posture
14 46 (1.11%) Management Information System
15 45 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
16 44 (1.06%) Data Centre
17 41 (0.99%) NHS
18 40 (0.96%) Algorithms
19 39 (0.94%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 501 (12.05%) Linux
2 240 (5.77%) Windows
3 113 (2.72%) Unix
4 58 (1.40%) Windows Server
5 56 (1.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 48 (1.15%) Android
7 47 (1.13%) VMS
8 42 (1.01%) Apple iOS
9 26 (0.63%) Ubuntu
10 23 (0.55%) Amazon Linux
11 19 (0.46%) CentOS
12 16 (0.38%) Windows 10
13 12 (0.29%) Solaris
14 11 (0.26%) zOS
15 10 (0.24%) Mac OS
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
17 3 (0.072%) Debian
18 2 (0.048%) SUSE
19 1 (0.024%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,368 (56.98%) CI/CD
2 1,806 (43.46%) Agile
3 1,080 (25.99%) Infrastructure as Code
4 830 (19.97%) Containerisation
5 815 (19.61%) Problem-Solving
6 658 (15.83%) Test Automation
7 647 (15.57%) Microservices
8 520 (12.51%) Scrum
9 450 (10.83%) Migration
10 443 (10.66%) Continuous Improvement
11 416 (10.01%) Software Engineering
12 405 (9.74%) Analytics
13 379 (9.12%) AI
14 360 (8.66%) Observability
15 324 (7.80%) Stakeholder Management
16 304 (7.31%) Mentoring
17 294 (7.07%) SDLC
18 285 (6.86%) Infrastructure Automation
19 277 (6.67%) DevSecOps
20 269 (6.47%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,326 (31.91%) Python
2 777 (18.70%) SQL
3 635 (15.28%) Java
4 432 (10.39%) JavaScript
5 409 (9.84%) C#
6 384 (9.24%) Bash
7 369 (8.88%) PowerShell
8 292 (7.03%) TypeScript
9 175 (4.21%) Go
10 118 (2.84%) Bicep
11 83 (2.00%) PL/SQL
12 72 (1.73%) Shell Script
13 61 (1.47%) Groovy
14 54 (1.30%) Perl
15 53 (1.28%) C++
16 50 (1.20%) Scala
17 44 (1.06%) Ruby
18 35 (0.84%) T-SQL
19 29 (0.70%) Kotlin
20 28 (0.67%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,138 (27.38%) Security Cleared
2 948 (22.81%) SC Cleared
3 348 (8.37%) Degree
4 191 (4.60%) Computer Science Degree
5 153 (3.68%) Azure Certification
6 152 (3.66%) AWS Certification
7 128 (3.08%) DV Cleared
8 87 (2.09%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (2.00%) Master's Degree
10 66 (1.59%) CISSP
11 62 (1.49%) Microsoft Certification
12 54 (1.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 43 (1.03%) CISM
14 39 (0.94%) ISTQB
15 36 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
16 31 (0.75%) PMI Certification
17 27 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.60%) PMP
19 15 (0.36%) ITIL Certification
19 15 (0.36%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 394 (9.48%) QA
2 155 (3.73%) GDPR
3 141 (3.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 123 (2.96%) Accessibility
5 119 (2.86%) Data Quality
6 106 (2.55%) NIST
7 48 (1.15%) NCSC
8 38 (0.91%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.70%) WCAG
10 28 (0.67%) HIPAA
11 21 (0.51%) PMO
12 20 (0.48%) SLA
13 19 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 19 (0.46%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.36%) MiFID
15 14 (0.34%) PSD2
16 13 (0.31%) ISO 20022
16 13 (0.31%) SEPA
17 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
18 10 (0.24%) GRC
System Software
1 1,068 (25.70%) Docker
2 181 (4.36%) Active Directory
3 68 (1.64%) VMware Infrastructure
4 59 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
5 26 (0.63%) vSphere
6 23 (0.55%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.31%) Postfix
8 13 (0.31%) Squid
9 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
10 11 (0.26%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.26%) Virtual Desktop
10 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 8 (0.19%) GPFS
12 8 (0.19%) Lustre
12 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
12 8 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
13 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,320 (31.76%) Terraform
2 1,213 (29.19%) Kubernetes
3 526 (12.66%) Ansible
4 325 (7.82%) Grafana
5 306 (7.36%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.90%) Argo
6 79 (1.90%) Puppet
7 68 (1.64%) Single Sign-On
8 59 (1.42%) Progress Chef
9 42 (1.01%) Kibana
10 40 (0.96%) Packer
11 31 (0.75%) Istio
12 21 (0.51%) Podman
13 20 (0.48%) ITRS Geneos
14 18 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
14 18 (0.43%) Nessus
15 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
15 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.38%) SCCM
17 15 (0.36%) logstash
Vendors
1 688 (16.55%) Microsoft
2 308 (7.41%) Oracle
3 230 (5.53%) Google
4 203 (4.88%) Splunk
5 196 (4.72%) Databricks
6 179 (4.31%) ServiceNow
7 120 (2.89%) Salesforce
8 113 (2.72%) SAP
9 104 (2.50%) VMware
10 96 (2.31%) Red Hat
11 62 (1.49%) Dynatrace
12 53 (1.28%) IBM
13 51 (1.23%) OpenAI
14 48 (1.15%) MuleSoft
15 46 (1.11%) F5
16 43 (1.03%) Cisco
17 39 (0.94%) Atlassian
18 38 (0.91%) Palo Alto
19 37 (0.89%) Talend
20 36 (0.87%) CyberArk