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

6 months to
23 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,397 3,342 3,904
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.60% 10.55% 8.97%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.24% 11.85% 10.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,098 2,291 2,832
10th Percentile £373 £394 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £560 £563
Median % change year-on-year -7.14% -0.44% -6.25%
75th Percentile £613 £668 £656
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £538
% change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 25 96
10th Percentile £41.90 £36.85 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £55.94
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.84%
75th Percentile £82.00 £80.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £93.75 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.92%

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 33,213 28,195 38,072
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.59% 88.98% 87.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,058 17,139 25,095
10th Percentile £305 £306 £300
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £644
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.50% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,026 893 1,862
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £14.00
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.94 £17.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £37.01
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -12.19% +15.66%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £69.65 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.00 £30.62 £39.55
% change year-on-year -21.61% -22.59% +52.12%

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 23 January 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 23 January 2026.

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 23 January 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 +3 3,776 £525 -8.70% 2,300
UK excluding London +7 1,979 £500 -4.76% 2,164
London -1 1,892 £533 -11.25% 460
Work from Home -1 1,252 £525 -2.78% 1,218
North of England +6 684 £500 -2.20% 453
Midlands +25 403 £515 -1.44% 251
South East +1 389 £525 -10.64% 661
Yorkshire +1 354 £500 -1.72% 185
West Midlands +20 328 £525 - 113
North West +4 283 £465 -7.00% 205
South West +11 238 £525 -12.50% 297
Scotland +6 194 £475 +5.56% 107
East of England +18 109 £570 +12.32% 292
East Midlands +12 75 £425 -10.53% 134
North East -7 48 £475 -17.03% 64
Wales +3 32 £450 +66.67% 109
Northern Ireland -9 8 - - 48

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
1 265 (6.03%) Confluence
2 90 (2.05%) SharePoint
3 87 (1.98%) Apache
4 79 (1.80%) SAS
5 74 (1.68%) Apache Spark
6 61 (1.39%) Apache Airflow
7 41 (0.93%) nginx
8 37 (0.84%) CMS
9 36 (0.82%) OpenStack
10 25 (0.57%) IIS
11 21 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
12 19 (0.43%) JBoss
13 16 (0.36%) WebLogic
14 13 (0.30%) CICS
15 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.23%) Mendix
15 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.20%) iPlanet
16 9 (0.20%) Sitecore CMS
16 9 (0.20%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 94 (2.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 32 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
3 32 (0.73%) Microsoft Project
4 17 (0.39%) MS Visio
5 15 (0.34%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.20%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 5 (0.11%) Trello
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.023%) Moqups
9 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.39%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.27%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.25%) Endur
5 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.20%) Maximo
6 9 (0.20%) Oracle ERP
7 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
8 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
8 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.091%) NetSuite
9 4 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.091%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.091%) Remedy ITSM
9 4 (0.091%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.068%) Oracle Assets
10 3 (0.068%) Oracle BPM
10 3 (0.068%) Oracle Payables
10 3 (0.068%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.068%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,233 (50.78%) Azure
2 1,594 (36.25%) AWS
3 1,203 (27.36%) Azure DevOps
4 805 (18.31%) GitHub
5 635 (14.44%) GCP
6 528 (12.01%) Serverless
7 460 (10.46%) GitHub Actions
8 358 (8.14%) Power Platform
9 283 (6.44%) AWS CloudFormation
10 259 (5.89%) AWS Lambda
11 248 (5.64%) Amazon S3
12 216 (4.91%) Azure Data Factory
13 201 (4.57%) Azure AKS
14 184 (4.18%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 183 (4.16%) Amazon EKS
16 177 (4.03%) OpenShift
17 172 (3.91%) Dynamics 365
18 170 (3.87%) Entra ID
19 169 (3.84%) Amazon ECS
20 165 (3.75%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 210 (4.78%) Firewall
2 115 (2.62%) DNS
3 93 (2.12%) VPN
4 86 (1.96%) Network Security
5 60 (1.36%) TCP/IP
6 54 (1.23%) SSL
7 43 (0.98%) HTTP
8 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
9 24 (0.55%) WAN
10 18 (0.41%) BGP
10 18 (0.41%) SSH
11 17 (0.39%) FTP
11 17 (0.39%) MPLS
11 17 (0.39%) SMTP
12 16 (0.36%) DHCP
13 15 (0.34%) Kerberos
13 15 (0.34%) SD-WAN
14 13 (0.30%) LAN
15 11 (0.25%) Internet
15 11 (0.25%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 255 (5.80%) PostgreSQL
2 230 (5.23%) Power BI
3 179 (4.07%) SQL Server
4 165 (3.75%) NoSQL
5 139 (3.16%) Amazon RDS
6 134 (3.05%) Data Lake
7 113 (2.57%) Relational Database
8 108 (2.46%) Data Warehouse
9 105 (2.39%) MongoDB
10 94 (2.14%) Azure SQL Database
11 84 (1.91%) Oracle Database
12 67 (1.52%) Elasticsearch
13 65 (1.48%) DynamoDB
14 64 (1.46%) MySQL
15 55 (1.25%) Tableau
16 52 (1.18%) Amazon Aurora
16 52 (1.18%) Redis
17 50 (1.14%) Metadata
18 49 (1.11%) Delta Lake
19 43 (0.98%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 796 (18.10%) Jenkins
2 619 (14.08%) Git
3 613 (13.94%) JIRA
4 576 (13.10%) GitLab
5 137 (3.12%) Selenium
6 100 (2.27%) JUnit
7 95 (2.16%) Postman
8 77 (1.75%) SonarQube
9 73 (1.66%) Bitbucket
9 73 (1.66%) Sonatype Nexus
10 70 (1.59%) Cypress.io
11 61 (1.39%) Cucumber
12 51 (1.16%) Artifactory
13 48 (1.09%) JMeter
14 47 (1.07%) Gradle
15 46 (1.05%) Maven
16 42 (0.96%) Liquibase
17 37 (0.84%) Oracle APEX
17 37 (0.84%) REST Assured
18 36 (0.82%) CircleCI
General
1 1,337 (30.41%) Social Skills
2 799 (18.17%) Finance
3 554 (12.60%) Public Sector
4 361 (8.21%) Analytical Skills
5 360 (8.19%) Banking
6 154 (3.50%) Documentation Skills
7 75 (1.71%) Influencing Skills
8 69 (1.57%) Financial Institution
9 68 (1.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 61 (1.39%) Marketing
11 50 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
12 48 (1.09%) Investment Banking
13 47 (1.07%) Front Office
14 46 (1.05%) Retail
15 44 (1.00%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.80%) Military
17 32 (0.73%) Pharmaceutical
18 28 (0.64%) Organisational Skills
19 26 (0.59%) Back Office
19 26 (0.59%) Legal
Job Titles
1 855 (19.45%) DevOps Engineer
2 768 (17.47%) Developer
3 595 (13.53%) Senior
4 404 (9.19%) Architect
5 332 (7.55%) Lead
6 255 (5.80%) Azure Engineer
7 252 (5.73%) AWS Engineer
8 227 (5.16%) Data Engineer
9 217 (4.94%) Analyst
10 197 (4.48%) AWS DevOps
11 173 (3.93%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 162 (3.68%) Software Engineer
13 157 (3.57%) Cloud Engineer
14 149 (3.39%) Senior Developer
15 147 (3.34%) Platform Engineer
16 125 (2.84%) Consultant
17 124 (2.82%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 121 (2.75%) Senior DevOps
19 119 (2.71%) Solutions Architect
20 113 (2.57%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 500 (11.37%) REST
2 375 (8.53%) .NET
3 285 (6.48%) React
4 279 (6.35%) Node.js
5 265 (6.03%) RESTful
6 247 (5.62%) Kafka
7 225 (5.12%) Spring
8 203 (4.62%) Spring Boot
9 187 (4.25%) JSON
10 160 (3.64%) OAuth
11 152 (3.46%) AngularJS
12 142 (3.23%) Elastic Stack
13 139 (3.16%) XML
14 136 (3.09%) HTML
14 136 (3.09%) SOAP
15 132 (3.00%) YAML
16 110 (2.50%) Playwright
17 104 (2.37%) CSS
18 97 (2.21%) PySpark
19 95 (2.16%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 621 (14.12%) Cloud Native
2 239 (5.44%) Product Ownership
3 165 (3.75%) Distributed Systems
4 122 (2.77%) Onboarding
5 114 (2.59%) Public Cloud
6 90 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
7 81 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
8 74 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
9 57 (1.30%) Data Protection Act
10 56 (1.27%) Virtual Team
11 55 (1.25%) Management Information System
12 53 (1.21%) Data Centre
13 50 (1.14%) Replication
14 47 (1.07%) Private Cloud
15 45 (1.02%) Security Posture
16 44 (1.00%) Mobile App
17 42 (0.96%) NHS
18 41 (0.93%) CMDB
19 40 (0.91%) AI Agents
19 40 (0.91%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 499 (11.35%) Linux
2 254 (5.78%) Windows
3 110 (2.50%) Unix
4 58 (1.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 57 (1.30%) Windows Server
6 51 (1.16%) VMS
7 30 (0.68%) Ubuntu
8 27 (0.61%) Android
9 25 (0.57%) Apple iOS
10 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
11 18 (0.41%) CentOS
12 14 (0.32%) Amazon Linux
13 10 (0.23%) Solaris
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 5 (0.11%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.11%) zOS
16 3 (0.068%) Windows Server 2012
17 2 (0.045%) Debian
18 1 (0.023%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,508 (57.04%) CI/CD
2 1,762 (40.07%) Agile
3 1,158 (26.34%) Infrastructure as Code
4 853 (19.40%) Problem-Solving
5 851 (19.35%) Containerisation
6 679 (15.44%) Test Automation
7 670 (15.24%) Microservices
8 520 (11.83%) Continuous Improvement
9 501 (11.39%) Analytics
10 495 (11.26%) Migration
11 492 (11.19%) Scrum
12 455 (10.35%) Observability
13 422 (9.60%) AI
14 400 (9.10%) Software Engineering
15 388 (8.82%) Stakeholder Management
16 337 (7.66%) Data Modelling
17 334 (7.60%) Mentoring
18 300 (6.82%) Data Pipeline
19 298 (6.78%) Business Intelligence
20 292 (6.64%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,363 (31.00%) Python
2 877 (19.95%) SQL
3 597 (13.58%) Java
4 431 (9.80%) JavaScript
5 426 (9.69%) C#
6 382 (8.69%) PowerShell
7 352 (8.01%) Bash
8 306 (6.96%) TypeScript
9 148 (3.37%) Bicep
10 144 (3.27%) Go
11 77 (1.75%) PL/SQL
12 75 (1.71%) Shell Script
13 59 (1.34%) Scala
14 54 (1.23%) Groovy
15 50 (1.14%) Ruby
16 49 (1.11%) C++
17 44 (1.00%) T-SQL
18 43 (0.98%) Perl
19 24 (0.55%) Rust
20 22 (0.50%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,334 (30.34%) Security Cleared
2 1,109 (25.22%) SC Cleared
3 371 (8.44%) Degree
4 195 (4.43%) Computer Science Degree
5 185 (4.21%) Azure Certification
6 145 (3.30%) AWS Certification
7 140 (3.18%) DV Cleared
8 108 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (1.89%) Master's Degree
10 74 (1.68%) CISSP
11 64 (1.46%) Microsoft Certification
12 57 (1.30%) CISM
13 48 (1.09%) ISTQB
14 45 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 38 (0.86%) PMI Certification
16 30 (0.68%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 30 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
16 30 (0.68%) PMP
17 21 (0.48%) IIBA
18 20 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 384 (8.73%) QA
2 161 (3.66%) GDPR
3 156 (3.55%) Data Quality
4 142 (3.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 121 (2.75%) Accessibility
6 119 (2.71%) NIST
7 66 (1.50%) NCSC
8 36 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 31 (0.71%) WCAG
10 28 (0.64%) HIPAA
11 27 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 25 (0.57%) PMO
13 24 (0.55%) SLA
14 17 (0.39%) PSD2
14 17 (0.39%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.34%) ISO 20022
16 13 (0.30%) SEPA
17 10 (0.23%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 10 (0.23%) NIST 800
18 9 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,115 (25.36%) Docker
2 169 (3.84%) Active Directory
3 69 (1.57%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.48%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.66%) vSphere
6 18 (0.41%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.39%) DFS Replication
8 16 (0.36%) Squid
9 14 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
10 13 (0.30%) Hyper-V
11 12 (0.27%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
13 10 (0.23%) Lustre
13 10 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
14 9 (0.20%) Dovecot
14 9 (0.20%) Postfix
15 8 (0.18%) GPFS
15 8 (0.18%) NFS
15 8 (0.18%) Tivoli Directory Server
15 8 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,381 (31.41%) Terraform
2 1,288 (29.29%) Kubernetes
3 536 (12.19%) Ansible
4 330 (7.51%) Grafana
5 292 (6.64%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.91%) Argo
7 79 (1.80%) Puppet
8 59 (1.34%) Single Sign-On
9 43 (0.98%) Istio
9 43 (0.98%) Progress Chef
10 39 (0.89%) Kibana
11 33 (0.75%) Packer
12 23 (0.52%) Podman
13 19 (0.43%) SCCM
14 17 (0.39%) Rancher
15 16 (0.36%) Proxmox
16 15 (0.34%) Consul
16 15 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
17 14 (0.32%) Nessus
17 14 (0.32%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 757 (17.22%) Microsoft
2 313 (7.12%) Oracle
3 252 (5.73%) Google
4 243 (5.53%) Databricks
5 224 (5.09%) Splunk
6 164 (3.73%) ServiceNow
7 128 (2.91%) Red Hat
8 114 (2.59%) Salesforce
9 113 (2.57%) VMware
10 103 (2.34%) SAP
11 74 (1.68%) Dynatrace
12 66 (1.50%) OpenAI
13 50 (1.14%) CyberArk
14 49 (1.11%) F5
15 48 (1.09%) IBM
16 45 (1.02%) Atlassian
17 44 (1.00%) Cisco
18 42 (0.96%) Talend
19 41 (0.93%) Palo Alto
20 38 (0.86%) Denodo