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

6 months to
28 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,440 3,296 3,935
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.57% 10.53% 8.91%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.24% 11.82% 10.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,110 2,267 2,844
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £427 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £560 £560
Median % change year-on-year -7.14% - -6.67%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £655
90th Percentile £710 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £534
% change year-on-year -4.76% -1.69% -2.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 58 24 102
10th Percentile - £36.58 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £53.73 £56.54
Median hourly rate £53.75 £70.36 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -23.61% +8.25% -0.92%
75th Percentile £82.75 £80.19 £70.94
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £80.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £70.36 £65.00
% change year-on-year -32.49% +8.25% -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 33,541 27,883 38,559
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.38% 89.07% 87.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,255 16,908 25,386
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 £643
90th Percentile £722 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £499 £500
% change year-on-year -3.81% -0.20% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,020 876 1,970
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.50
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.85
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.98
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -9.67% +12.44%
75th Percentile £58.00 £62.50 £62.49
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.71 £30.45 £37.50
% change year-on-year -18.85% -18.80% +44.23%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 3,792 £525 -8.70% 1,546
UK excluding London +7 1,993 £500 -4.76% 1,348
London -1 1,904 £538 -10.42% 462
Work from Home -1 1,273 £525 -2.78% 906
North of England +5 683 £500 -2.20% 313
South East +2 398 £525 -8.70% 469
Midlands +25 391 £517 +2.12% 152
Yorkshire 0 350 £500 -0.74% 118
West Midlands +22 316 £525 +1.25% 86
North West +6 286 £463 -8.78% 155
South West +9 242 £525 -12.50% 155
Scotland +5 204 £475 +5.56% 78
East of England +21 108 £570 +10.68% 135
East Midlands +10 75 £425 -12.82% 63
North East -6 48 £475 -15.93% 41
Wales +2 33 £425 +57.41% 50
Northern Ireland -8 9 £475 +26.67% 21

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
1 267 (6.01%) Confluence
2 87 (1.96%) Apache
2 87 (1.96%) SharePoint
3 81 (1.82%) Apache Spark
4 77 (1.73%) SAS
5 63 (1.42%) Apache Airflow
6 40 (0.90%) nginx
7 37 (0.83%) OpenStack
8 35 (0.79%) CMS
9 25 (0.56%) IIS
10 21 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.43%) JBoss
12 13 (0.29%) WebLogic
13 12 (0.27%) CICS
14 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.23%) Mendix
14 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.20%) iPlanet
15 9 (0.20%) Sitecore CMS
15 9 (0.20%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 99 (2.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 37 (0.83%) Microsoft Project
4 34 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.34%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 4 (0.090%) Trello
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.25%) Endur
3 11 (0.25%) VisionPLUS
4 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.20%) Maximo
6 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.090%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.090%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.090%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.090%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Assets
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Payables
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Receivables
9 3 (0.068%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.068%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.068%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,266 (51.04%) Azure
2 1,607 (36.19%) AWS
3 1,221 (27.50%) Azure DevOps
4 820 (18.47%) GitHub
5 649 (14.62%) GCP
6 534 (12.03%) Serverless
7 470 (10.59%) GitHub Actions
8 363 (8.18%) Power Platform
9 287 (6.46%) AWS CloudFormation
10 265 (5.97%) AWS Lambda
11 250 (5.63%) Amazon S3
12 216 (4.86%) Azure Data Factory
13 202 (4.55%) Azure AKS
14 188 (4.23%) Amazon EKS
15 183 (4.12%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 183 (4.12%) OpenShift
16 174 (3.92%) Entra ID
17 171 (3.85%) Amazon ECS
17 171 (3.85%) Dynamics 365
18 166 (3.74%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 213 (4.80%) Firewall
2 114 (2.57%) DNS
3 93 (2.09%) VPN
4 88 (1.98%) Network Security
5 60 (1.35%) TCP/IP
6 52 (1.17%) SSL
7 39 (0.88%) HTTP
8 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
9 24 (0.54%) WAN
10 19 (0.43%) DHCP
11 17 (0.38%) BGP
12 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
12 16 (0.36%) MPLS
12 16 (0.36%) SD-WAN
12 16 (0.36%) SSH
13 15 (0.34%) FTP
13 15 (0.34%) SMTP
14 13 (0.29%) LAN
15 12 (0.27%) SAN
16 10 (0.23%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 250 (5.63%) PostgreSQL
2 233 (5.25%) Power BI
3 175 (3.94%) SQL Server
4 161 (3.63%) NoSQL
5 141 (3.18%) Amazon RDS
6 135 (3.04%) Data Lake
7 115 (2.59%) Relational Database
8 110 (2.48%) Data Warehouse
9 103 (2.32%) MongoDB
10 95 (2.14%) Azure SQL Database
11 80 (1.80%) Oracle Database
12 68 (1.53%) DynamoDB
12 68 (1.53%) Elasticsearch
13 63 (1.42%) MySQL
14 56 (1.26%) Metadata
15 55 (1.24%) Tableau
16 52 (1.17%) Redis
17 50 (1.13%) Amazon Aurora
17 50 (1.13%) Delta Lake
18 47 (1.06%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 803 (18.09%) Jenkins
2 614 (13.83%) Git
3 611 (13.76%) JIRA
4 581 (13.09%) GitLab
5 133 (3.00%) Selenium
6 96 (2.16%) Postman
7 94 (2.12%) JUnit
8 77 (1.73%) SonarQube
9 73 (1.64%) Sonatype Nexus
10 72 (1.62%) Bitbucket
11 68 (1.53%) Cypress.io
12 60 (1.35%) Cucumber
13 51 (1.15%) Artifactory
14 49 (1.10%) Gradle
15 48 (1.08%) JMeter
15 48 (1.08%) Maven
16 41 (0.92%) Liquibase
17 39 (0.88%) REST Assured
18 38 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
19 37 (0.83%) CircleCI
General
1 1,338 (30.14%) Social Skills
2 812 (18.29%) Finance
3 560 (12.61%) Public Sector
4 368 (8.29%) Analytical Skills
5 355 (8.00%) Banking
6 161 (3.63%) Documentation Skills
7 80 (1.80%) Influencing Skills
8 69 (1.55%) Financial Institution
8 69 (1.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 61 (1.37%) Marketing
10 49 (1.10%) Presentation Skills
11 48 (1.08%) Front Office
11 48 (1.08%) Investment Banking
11 48 (1.08%) Retail
12 44 (0.99%) Telecoms
13 37 (0.83%) Military
14 33 (0.74%) Pharmaceutical
15 29 (0.65%) Legal
15 29 (0.65%) Organisational Skills
16 26 (0.59%) Law
Job Titles
1 877 (19.75%) DevOps Engineer
2 771 (17.36%) Developer
3 600 (13.51%) Senior
4 416 (9.37%) Architect
5 332 (7.48%) Lead
6 262 (5.90%) Azure Engineer
7 255 (5.74%) AWS Engineer
8 228 (5.14%) Data Engineer
9 223 (5.02%) Analyst
10 198 (4.46%) AWS DevOps
11 174 (3.92%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 162 (3.65%) Cloud Engineer
13 161 (3.63%) Software Engineer
14 149 (3.36%) Senior Developer
15 148 (3.33%) Platform Engineer
16 130 (2.93%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 125 (2.82%) Solutions Architect
18 121 (2.73%) Consultant
19 119 (2.68%) Senior DevOps
20 118 (2.66%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 505 (11.37%) REST
2 382 (8.60%) .NET
3 296 (6.67%) React
4 287 (6.46%) Node.js
5 265 (5.97%) RESTful
6 249 (5.61%) Kafka
7 228 (5.14%) Spring
8 208 (4.68%) Spring Boot
9 184 (4.14%) JSON
10 161 (3.63%) OAuth
11 152 (3.42%) AngularJS
12 142 (3.20%) Elastic Stack
13 138 (3.11%) XML
14 133 (3.00%) HTML
15 132 (2.97%) SOAP
16 129 (2.91%) YAML
17 112 (2.52%) Playwright
18 105 (2.36%) CSS
19 98 (2.21%) Middleware
20 97 (2.18%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 634 (14.28%) Cloud Native
2 241 (5.43%) Product Ownership
3 162 (3.65%) Distributed Systems
4 119 (2.68%) Onboarding
5 117 (2.64%) Public Cloud
6 90 (2.03%) Legacy Systems
7 80 (1.80%) Hybrid Cloud
8 71 (1.60%) Enterprise Software
9 59 (1.33%) Virtual Team
10 58 (1.31%) Data Protection Act
11 54 (1.22%) Management Information System
12 52 (1.17%) Data Centre
13 49 (1.10%) Security Posture
14 48 (1.08%) Private Cloud
14 48 (1.08%) Replication
15 46 (1.04%) Mobile App
16 44 (0.99%) NHS
17 41 (0.92%) AI Agents
17 41 (0.92%) CMDB
17 41 (0.92%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 497 (11.19%) Linux
2 256 (5.77%) Windows
3 111 (2.50%) Unix
4 58 (1.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 57 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 49 (1.10%) VMS
7 30 (0.68%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.59%) Android
9 23 (0.52%) Apple iOS
10 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
11 18 (0.41%) CentOS
12 12 (0.27%) Amazon Linux
13 10 (0.23%) Solaris
14 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.11%) zOS
17 4 (0.090%) Mac OS
17 4 (0.090%) Windows Server 2012
18 2 (0.045%) Debian
19 1 (0.023%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,548 (57.39%) CI/CD
2 1,761 (39.66%) Agile
3 1,171 (26.37%) Infrastructure as Code
4 859 (19.35%) Problem-Solving
5 855 (19.26%) Containerisation
6 684 (15.41%) Test Automation
7 658 (14.82%) Microservices
8 530 (11.94%) Continuous Improvement
9 510 (11.49%) Analytics
10 508 (11.44%) Migration
11 491 (11.06%) Scrum
12 461 (10.38%) Observability
13 426 (9.59%) AI
14 401 (9.03%) Stakeholder Management
15 400 (9.01%) Software Engineering
16 347 (7.82%) Data Modelling
17 335 (7.55%) Mentoring
18 301 (6.78%) Data Pipeline
19 298 (6.71%) Business Intelligence
20 296 (6.67%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,365 (30.74%) Python
2 882 (19.86%) SQL
3 595 (13.40%) Java
4 429 (9.66%) C#
5 427 (9.62%) JavaScript
6 388 (8.74%) PowerShell
7 353 (7.95%) Bash
8 312 (7.03%) TypeScript
9 150 (3.38%) Bicep
10 143 (3.22%) Go
11 77 (1.73%) PL/SQL
12 71 (1.60%) Shell Script
13 60 (1.35%) Scala
14 53 (1.19%) Groovy
15 51 (1.15%) Ruby
16 47 (1.06%) C++
17 44 (0.99%) T-SQL
18 41 (0.92%) Perl
19 25 (0.56%) Rust
20 21 (0.47%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,347 (30.34%) Security Cleared
2 1,122 (25.27%) SC Cleared
3 380 (8.56%) Degree
4 196 (4.41%) Computer Science Degree
5 188 (4.23%) Azure Certification
6 143 (3.22%) AWS Certification
7 140 (3.15%) DV Cleared
8 110 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
9 84 (1.89%) Master's Degree
10 76 (1.71%) CISSP
11 64 (1.44%) Microsoft Certification
12 60 (1.35%) CISM
13 47 (1.06%) ISTQB
14 45 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 38 (0.86%) PMI Certification
16 31 (0.70%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 30 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
17 30 (0.68%) PMP
18 22 (0.50%) IIBA
19 20 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 379 (8.54%) QA
2 173 (3.90%) GDPR
3 164 (3.69%) Data Quality
4 149 (3.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 127 (2.86%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.86%) NIST
6 70 (1.58%) NCSC
7 36 (0.81%) PCI DSS
8 34 (0.77%) WCAG
9 28 (0.63%) HIPAA
10 27 (0.61%) PMO
10 27 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 26 (0.59%) SLA
12 18 (0.41%) SOC 2
13 17 (0.38%) PSD2
14 15 (0.34%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.29%) SEPA
16 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
17 9 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,116 (25.14%) Docker
2 177 (3.99%) Active Directory
3 71 (1.60%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
5 30 (0.68%) vSphere
6 18 (0.41%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.34%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.34%) Squid
7 15 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.29%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 11 (0.25%) Lustre
9 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
10 9 (0.20%) GPFS
11 8 (0.18%) Dovecot
11 8 (0.18%) NFS
11 8 (0.18%) Postfix
11 8 (0.18%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
12 7 (0.16%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,395 (31.42%) Terraform
2 1,299 (29.26%) Kubernetes
3 528 (11.89%) Ansible
4 334 (7.52%) Grafana
5 297 (6.69%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.89%) Argo
7 76 (1.71%) Puppet
8 60 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (0.99%) Istio
10 40 (0.90%) Progress Chef
11 38 (0.86%) Kibana
12 32 (0.72%) Packer
13 22 (0.50%) Podman
14 20 (0.45%) SCCM
15 17 (0.38%) Rancher
16 16 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
17 15 (0.34%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.34%) Consul
17 15 (0.34%) Proxmox
18 14 (0.32%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 758 (17.07%) Microsoft
2 313 (7.05%) Oracle
3 254 (5.72%) Google
4 245 (5.52%) Databricks
5 229 (5.16%) Splunk
6 161 (3.63%) ServiceNow
7 129 (2.91%) Red Hat
8 115 (2.59%) Salesforce
9 114 (2.57%) VMware
10 103 (2.32%) SAP
11 73 (1.64%) Dynatrace
12 67 (1.51%) OpenAI
13 56 (1.26%) CyberArk
14 50 (1.13%) F5
15 48 (1.08%) IBM
16 45 (1.01%) Atlassian
17 42 (0.95%) Talend
18 41 (0.92%) Palo Alto
19 40 (0.90%) Cisco
20 38 (0.86%) Denodo