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

6 months to
30 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 14 14
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,646 3,708 3,714
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.29% 11.29% 9.88%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.18% 12.45% 11.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,932 2,587 2,462
10th Percentile £381 £362 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £623 £618 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 24 65
10th Percentile £38.05 £45.13 £54.50
25th Percentile £58.88 £55.81 £65.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £78.13 £87.81 £74.00
90th Percentile £92.75 £95.00 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +7.69%

All Process & 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 46,343 29,774 32,275
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.43% 90.67% 85.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,026 18,502 19,486
10th Percentile £325 £296 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £731 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,222 1,849 1,345
10th Percentile £13.70 £14.29 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.19 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £38.86 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +54.51% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £74.48
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.27 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +75.98% -48.10% +1.18%

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 30 September 2026.

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 30 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
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 DevOps within the UK over the 6 months to 30 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 -1 4,793 £525 - 3,914
London -3 2,525 £550 - 1,897
UK excluding London -4 2,409 £500 - 2,171
Work from Home -1 1,597 £525 +1.69% 1,875
North of England -2 796 £500 +5.26% 681
South East -13 449 £535 +7.00% 438
Midlands -5 429 £488 -4.88% 267
Yorkshire -2 391 £500 +3.09% 211
West Midlands -9 345 £500 -4.76% 167
South West +5 322 £550 +3.04% 289
North West -1 311 £528 +16.45% 369
Scotland -2 224 £475 -5.00% 168
East of England +6 159 £505 -3.81% 188
North East +11 111 £450 -18.18% 106
East Midlands -1 81 £455 +1.11% 100
Wales -8 45 £400 +6.67% 73
Northern Ireland +21 23 £450 - 83
Channel Islands - 2 £500 -

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
1 340 (6.02%) Confluence
2 160 (2.83%) SharePoint
3 129 (2.28%) Apache Spark
4 127 (2.25%) Apache Airflow
5 115 (2.04%) Apache
6 54 (0.96%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
7 44 (0.78%) Jupyter
8 30 (0.53%) IIS
9 28 (0.50%) nginx
10 20 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.28%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
12 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
15 10 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 10 (0.18%) Oracle Workflow
15 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
Applications
1 65 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 52 (0.92%) MS Visio
3 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Project
4 36 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 13 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
7 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.14%) Windchill
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
8 5 (0.089%) Trello
9 3 (0.053%) Mingle
10 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.035%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.018%) Sketch
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 82 (1.45%) Dynamics CRM
2 45 (0.80%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 12 (0.21%) SAP MDG
6 10 (0.18%) Magento
7 9 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
9 6 (0.11%) Aladdin
9 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
9 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
10 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
10 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
10 5 (0.089%) Temenos T24
11 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.071%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.053%) Endur
12 3 (0.053%) Maximo
12 3 (0.053%) Oracle Payroll
12 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,044 (53.91%) Azure
2 2,042 (36.17%) AWS
3 1,740 (30.82%) Azure DevOps
4 977 (17.30%) GitHub
5 750 (13.28%) GCP
6 619 (10.96%) GitHub Actions
7 490 (8.68%) Power Platform
8 466 (8.25%) Serverless
9 308 (5.46%) Amazon S3
10 291 (5.15%) AWS Lambda
11 260 (4.61%) Amazon EKS
12 255 (4.52%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 254 (4.50%) Entra ID
14 240 (4.25%) AWS CloudFormation
15 212 (3.75%) Azure AKS
16 206 (3.65%) Azure Monitor
17 200 (3.54%) Amazon EC2
18 190 (3.37%) Dynamics 365
19 189 (3.35%) Azure Data Factory
20 174 (3.08%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 245 (4.34%) Firewall
2 172 (3.05%) DNS
3 122 (2.16%) VPN
4 114 (2.02%) Network Security
5 75 (1.33%) TCP/IP
6 55 (0.97%) SSL
7 51 (0.90%) DHCP
8 45 (0.80%) WAN
9 38 (0.67%) HTTP
10 36 (0.64%) BGP
11 28 (0.50%) Internet
11 28 (0.50%) SSH
12 27 (0.48%) OSPF
12 27 (0.48%) SD-WAN
13 23 (0.41%) Wi-Fi
14 21 (0.37%) LAN
14 21 (0.37%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) SAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 317 (5.61%) Power BI
2 300 (5.31%) PostgreSQL
3 293 (5.19%) SQL Server
4 215 (3.81%) Data Warehouse
5 185 (3.28%) MongoDB
6 182 (3.22%) NoSQL
7 181 (3.21%) Data Lake
8 162 (2.87%) Relational Database
9 149 (2.64%) Amazon RDS
10 124 (2.20%) Metadata
11 96 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
12 94 (1.66%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.56%) Oracle Database
14 87 (1.54%) Delta Lake
14 87 (1.54%) MySQL
15 84 (1.49%) Redis
16 68 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
17 64 (1.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 60 (1.06%) Big Data
19 57 (1.01%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 854 (15.13%) Git
2 805 (14.26%) Jenkins
3 662 (11.73%) JIRA
4 656 (11.62%) GitLab
5 146 (2.59%) Selenium
6 102 (1.81%) JUnit
7 99 (1.75%) Maven
7 99 (1.75%) SonarQube
8 97 (1.72%) Postman
9 77 (1.36%) Cucumber
10 75 (1.33%) REST Assured
11 70 (1.24%) Bitbucket
12 69 (1.22%) Cypress.io
13 68 (1.20%) Gradle
14 65 (1.15%) JMeter
15 54 (0.96%) Claude Code
16 50 (0.89%) Mockito
17 43 (0.76%) Sonatype Nexus
18 42 (0.74%) Gatling
18 42 (0.74%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,467 (25.98%) Social Skills
2 1,014 (17.96%) Finance
3 813 (14.40%) Public Sector
4 530 (9.39%) Analytical Skills
5 402 (7.12%) Banking
6 172 (3.05%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 110 (1.95%) Retail
8 91 (1.61%) Influencing Skills
9 84 (1.49%) Documentation Skills
10 63 (1.12%) Legal
11 58 (1.03%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (0.99%) Aerospace
12 56 (0.99%) Marketing
13 55 (0.97%) Military
14 52 (0.92%) Investment Banking
14 52 (0.92%) Telecoms
15 48 (0.85%) Manufacturing
16 43 (0.76%) Law
17 41 (0.73%) Financial Institution
17 41 (0.73%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 1,143 (20.24%) DevOps Engineer
2 923 (16.35%) Developer
3 856 (15.16%) Senior
4 646 (11.44%) Architect
5 539 (9.55%) Lead
6 348 (6.16%) Azure Engineer
7 301 (5.33%) Data Engineer
8 274 (4.85%) Analyst
9 259 (4.59%) AWS Engineer
10 228 (4.04%) Platform Engineer
11 206 (3.65%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.60%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 202 (3.58%) Senior DevOps
14 199 (3.52%) Java Developer
15 186 (3.29%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 185 (3.28%) AWS DevOps
17 178 (3.15%) Solutions Architect
18 174 (3.08%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 154 (2.73%) Senior Developer
20 146 (2.59%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,702 (30.15%) Terraform
2 644 (11.41%) REST
3 480 (8.50%) .NET
4 392 (6.94%) Kafka
5 365 (6.46%) RESTful
6 311 (5.51%) Spring
7 306 (5.42%) Spring Boot
8 294 (5.21%) React
9 201 (3.56%) Node.js
10 191 (3.38%) OAuth
11 180 (3.19%) JSON
12 158 (2.80%) Playwright
13 151 (2.67%) PySpark
14 148 (2.62%) HTML
15 135 (2.39%) SOAP
16 134 (2.37%) CSS
17 133 (2.36%) OAuth2
18 131 (2.32%) .NET Framework
19 127 (2.25%) Middleware
20 120 (2.13%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,055 (18.69%) Cloud Native
2 430 (7.62%) Product Ownership
3 270 (4.78%) Distributed Systems
4 217 (3.84%) Enterprise Software
5 211 (3.74%) Onboarding
6 150 (2.66%) Hybrid Cloud
7 149 (2.64%) Legacy Systems
8 110 (1.95%) AI Agents
9 96 (1.70%) Management Information System
10 87 (1.54%) Self-Motivation
11 80 (1.42%) Public Cloud
12 75 (1.33%) Data Protection Act
12 75 (1.33%) Data Structures
13 74 (1.31%) Replication
13 74 (1.31%) Security Posture
14 73 (1.29%) Data Centre
15 62 (1.10%) Enterprise Cloud
16 61 (1.08%) PKI
17 60 (1.06%) Virtual Team
18 53 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 571 (10.11%) Linux
2 320 (5.67%) Windows
3 121 (2.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 112 (1.98%) Unix
5 98 (1.74%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.64%) Ubuntu
7 33 (0.58%) VMS
8 30 (0.53%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 12 (0.21%) zOS
12 11 (0.19%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) Solaris
15 7 (0.12%) AIX
16 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
17 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
18 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
18 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,471 (61.48%) CI/CD
2 2,310 (40.91%) Agile
3 1,691 (29.95%) Infrastructure as Code
4 973 (17.23%) Stakeholder Management
5 965 (17.09%) Containerisation
6 964 (17.07%) Continuous Improvement
7 920 (16.29%) Test Automation
8 893 (15.82%) AI
9 882 (15.62%) Problem-Solving
10 842 (14.91%) Microservices
11 791 (14.01%) Observability
12 785 (13.90%) Platform Engineering
13 745 (13.20%) Software Engineering
14 701 (12.42%) Scrum
15 693 (12.27%) Migration
16 630 (11.16%) Technical Leadership
17 578 (10.24%) Analytics
18 530 (9.39%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 494 (8.75%) Roadmaps
20 484 (8.57%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,630 (28.87%) Python
2 981 (17.38%) SQL
3 833 (14.75%) Java
4 502 (8.89%) Bash
5 499 (8.84%) C#
6 494 (8.75%) PowerShell
7 464 (8.22%) JavaScript
8 317 (5.61%) TypeScript
9 265 (4.69%) Bicep
10 129 (2.28%) Go
11 78 (1.38%) Shell Script
12 68 (1.20%) Scala
13 67 (1.19%) T-SQL
14 60 (1.06%) PL/SQL
15 59 (1.04%) Apex Code
16 58 (1.03%) Groovy
17 39 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 34 (0.60%) Perl
19 33 (0.58%) C++
20 27 (0.48%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,818 (32.20%) Security Cleared
2 1,525 (27.01%) SC Cleared
3 363 (6.43%) Degree
4 250 (4.43%) Azure Certification
5 246 (4.36%) BPSS Clearance
6 240 (4.25%) DV Cleared
7 195 (3.45%) AWS Certification
8 144 (2.55%) Computer Science Degree
9 113 (2.00%) Microsoft Certification
10 74 (1.31%) CISSP
11 61 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 53 (0.94%) Cisco Certification
13 50 (0.89%) PMP
14 47 (0.83%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 45 (0.80%) PMI Certification
16 41 (0.73%) Master's Degree
17 28 (0.50%) CISM
18 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 23 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 23 (0.41%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 558 (9.88%) QA
2 281 (4.98%) Data Quality
3 218 (3.86%) Accessibility
4 124 (2.20%) GDPR
5 91 (1.61%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.47%) WCAG
7 70 (1.24%) NIST
8 56 (0.99%) NCSC
9 45 (0.80%) PMO
10 36 (0.64%) SLA
11 31 (0.55%) PCI DSS
12 29 (0.51%) GRC
13 23 (0.41%) ISO 20022
14 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 15 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
15 15 (0.27%) HIPAA
16 14 (0.25%) SEPA
17 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
17 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
18 12 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,172 (20.76%) Docker
2 162 (2.87%) Active Directory
3 88 (1.56%) VMware Infrastructure
4 81 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
5 32 (0.57%) vSphere
6 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
7 23 (0.41%) Hyper-V
8 19 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
9 15 (0.27%) VMware NSX
10 11 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
10 11 (0.19%) Squid
11 10 (0.18%) IAG
12 8 (0.14%) Postfix
12 8 (0.14%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.089%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,561 (27.65%) Kubernetes
2 537 (9.51%) Ansible
3 376 (6.66%) Grafana
4 324 (5.74%) Prometheus
5 76 (1.35%) Argo
6 57 (1.01%) Puppet
7 47 (0.83%) Microsoft Intune
7 47 (0.83%) Progress Chef
8 43 (0.76%) Single Sign-On
9 39 (0.69%) Packer
10 35 (0.62%) Kibana
11 32 (0.57%) Istio
12 22 (0.39%) Kubeflow
13 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
14 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
15 18 (0.32%) Oracle RMAN
16 16 (0.28%) SCCM
17 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
18 13 (0.23%) Consul
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,110 (19.66%) Microsoft
2 305 (5.40%) Databricks
3 304 (5.38%) Oracle
4 302 (5.35%) Google
5 204 (3.61%) ServiceNow
6 190 (3.37%) Splunk
7 174 (3.08%) Salesforce
8 147 (2.60%) Dynatrace
9 131 (2.32%) VMware
10 116 (2.05%) SAP
11 99 (1.75%) Red Hat
12 74 (1.31%) IBM
12 74 (1.31%) OpenAI
13 65 (1.15%) MuleSoft
14 56 (0.99%) Foundry
15 51 (0.90%) Cisco
16 45 (0.80%) Informatica
17 42 (0.74%) AppDynamics
18 41 (0.73%) Okta
19 38 (0.67%) Atlassian