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

6 months to
15 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,629 3,602 3,808
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.34% 11.10% 9.98%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.25% 12.26% 11.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,928 2,512 2,564
10th Percentile £381 £361 £383
25th Percentile £435 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £734
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 25 71
10th Percentile £37.25 £38.00 £57.50
25th Percentile £55.50 £52.50 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.00 £95.00 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.22 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.81% -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 45,945 29,375 32,666
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.44% 90.50% 85.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,954 18,237 20,159
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,063 1,777 1,475
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.42 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.47 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £66.70 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.08 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +78.13% -47.67% +6.17%

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 15 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 15 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 15 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 0 4,787 £525 - 5,190
London 0 2,529 £550 - 2,792
UK excluding London -4 2,408 £500 - 2,802
Work from Home 0 1,614 £525 +1.40% 2,413
North of England -3 786 £500 +5.26% 860
South East -12 451 £525 +5.00% 602
Midlands -5 445 £488 -5.11% 321
Yorkshire -2 395 £500 +3.09% 235
West Midlands -7 350 £492 -6.26% 203
South West +3 318 £550 +4.76% 355
North West -4 300 £525 +13.51% 486
Scotland -2 222 £475 - 264
East of England 0 145 £505 -3.35% 242
North East +16 106 £425 -18.27% 145
East Midlands +2 92 £463 +10.12% 118
Wales -5 47 £500 +33.33% 75
Northern Ireland +22 23 £450 -4.26% 95
Channel Islands - 5 £450 -

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
1 339 (6.02%) Confluence
2 161 (2.86%) SharePoint
3 130 (2.31%) Apache Airflow
4 123 (2.19%) Apache Spark
5 110 (1.95%) Apache
6 62 (1.10%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 40 (0.71%) Jupyter
9 29 (0.52%) IIS
10 28 (0.50%) nginx
11 19 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
13 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
13 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 10 (0.18%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 68 (1.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 59 (1.05%) Microsoft Project
3 49 (0.87%) MS Visio
4 39 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Trello
9 6 (0.11%) Windchill
10 5 (0.089%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
11 2 (0.036%) Mingle
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
12 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
12 1 (0.018%) Sketch
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 81 (1.44%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.18%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS R12
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.089%) Aladdin
8 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
10 3 (0.053%) Infor LN
10 3 (0.053%) Maximo
10 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.053%) SAP Oil and Gas
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,056 (54.29%) Azure
2 2,023 (35.94%) AWS
3 1,749 (31.07%) Azure DevOps
4 983 (17.46%) GitHub
5 733 (13.02%) GCP
6 621 (11.03%) GitHub Actions
7 490 (8.70%) Power Platform
8 466 (8.28%) Serverless
9 309 (5.49%) Amazon S3
10 291 (5.17%) AWS Lambda
11 249 (4.42%) Entra ID
12 245 (4.35%) Amazon EKS
13 242 (4.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 237 (4.21%) AWS CloudFormation
15 217 (3.86%) Azure AKS
16 205 (3.64%) Azure Monitor
17 194 (3.45%) Amazon EC2
17 194 (3.45%) Azure Data Factory
18 183 (3.25%) Dynamics 365
19 168 (2.98%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 240 (4.26%) Firewall
2 173 (3.07%) DNS
3 120 (2.13%) VPN
4 112 (1.99%) Network Security
5 68 (1.21%) TCP/IP
6 54 (0.96%) SSL
7 49 (0.87%) DHCP
8 48 (0.85%) WAN
9 34 (0.60%) HTTP
10 31 (0.55%) BGP
10 31 (0.55%) SD-WAN
11 28 (0.50%) Internet
11 28 (0.50%) SSH
12 24 (0.43%) Wi-Fi
13 22 (0.39%) OSPF
14 19 (0.34%) SAN
14 19 (0.34%) VLAN
15 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
15 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 322 (5.72%) Power BI
2 305 (5.42%) PostgreSQL
3 304 (5.40%) SQL Server
4 214 (3.80%) Data Warehouse
5 186 (3.30%) MongoDB
5 186 (3.30%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.22%) Relational Database
7 174 (3.09%) Data Lake
8 143 (2.54%) Amazon RDS
9 128 (2.27%) Metadata
10 103 (1.83%) Azure SQL Database
11 94 (1.67%) DynamoDB
12 88 (1.56%) Delta Lake
13 87 (1.55%) MySQL
13 87 (1.55%) Oracle Database
14 81 (1.44%) Redis
15 69 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
16 63 (1.12%) Big Data
17 61 (1.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 56 (0.99%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 818 (14.53%) Git
2 808 (14.35%) Jenkins
3 671 (11.92%) JIRA
4 639 (11.35%) GitLab
5 135 (2.40%) Selenium
6 103 (1.83%) SonarQube
7 98 (1.74%) Maven
8 94 (1.67%) JUnit
9 92 (1.63%) Postman
10 76 (1.35%) Bitbucket
11 71 (1.26%) REST Assured
12 69 (1.23%) Cypress.io
13 68 (1.21%) Gradle
14 63 (1.12%) Cucumber
14 63 (1.12%) JMeter
15 51 (0.91%) Claude Code
16 47 (0.83%) Mockito
17 45 (0.80%) Gatling
18 43 (0.76%) Sonatype Nexus
19 37 (0.66%) Artifactory
General
1 1,474 (26.19%) Social Skills
2 1,004 (17.84%) Finance
3 810 (14.39%) Public Sector
4 521 (9.26%) Analytical Skills
5 383 (6.80%) Banking
6 169 (3.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 107 (1.90%) Retail
8 86 (1.53%) Documentation Skills
9 83 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
10 65 (1.15%) Legal
10 65 (1.15%) Organisational Skills
11 55 (0.98%) Marketing
12 53 (0.94%) Military
13 52 (0.92%) Investment Banking
14 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
15 49 (0.87%) Telecoms
16 45 (0.80%) Law
17 44 (0.78%) Front Office
18 42 (0.75%) Manufacturing
19 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,137 (20.20%) DevOps Engineer
2 923 (16.40%) Developer
3 857 (15.22%) Senior
4 634 (11.26%) Architect
5 536 (9.52%) Lead
6 349 (6.20%) Azure Engineer
7 312 (5.54%) Data Engineer
8 271 (4.81%) Analyst
9 258 (4.58%) AWS Engineer
10 235 (4.17%) Platform Engineer
11 208 (3.70%) Azure DevOps Engineer
11 208 (3.70%) Cloud Engineer
12 199 (3.54%) Java Developer
12 199 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
13 186 (3.30%) Senior DevOps Engineer
14 179 (3.18%) AWS DevOps
14 179 (3.18%) Solutions Architect
15 167 (2.97%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 163 (2.90%) Senior Developer
17 143 (2.54%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,673 (29.72%) Terraform
2 608 (10.80%) REST
3 476 (8.46%) .NET
4 389 (6.91%) Kafka
5 357 (6.34%) RESTful
6 307 (5.45%) Spring
7 301 (5.35%) Spring Boot
8 295 (5.24%) React
9 199 (3.54%) Node.js
10 187 (3.32%) JSON
11 174 (3.09%) OAuth
12 165 (2.93%) Playwright
13 158 (2.81%) PySpark
14 143 (2.54%) HTML
15 131 (2.33%) CSS
16 126 (2.24%) .NET Framework
17 125 (2.22%) SOAP
18 123 (2.19%) OAuth2
19 121 (2.15%) AngularJS
20 113 (2.01%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,030 (18.30%) Cloud Native
2 435 (7.73%) Product Ownership
3 271 (4.81%) Distributed Systems
4 207 (3.68%) Enterprise Software
5 190 (3.38%) Onboarding
6 152 (2.70%) Hybrid Cloud
7 143 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
8 97 (1.72%) AI Agents
9 91 (1.62%) Management Information System
10 85 (1.51%) Data Protection Act
11 77 (1.37%) Public Cloud
12 76 (1.35%) Replication
13 75 (1.33%) Self-Motivation
14 73 (1.30%) Data Structures
15 72 (1.28%) Security Posture
16 70 (1.24%) Data Centre
17 64 (1.14%) Virtual Team
18 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
19 56 (0.99%) PKI
20 53 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 551 (9.79%) Linux
2 312 (5.54%) Windows
3 118 (2.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 111 (1.97%) Unix
5 94 (1.67%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.60%) Ubuntu
6 34 (0.60%) VMS
7 32 (0.57%) Apple iOS
8 22 (0.39%) Android
9 12 (0.21%) CentOS
10 11 (0.20%) zOS
11 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
12 9 (0.16%) Solaris
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) AIX
15 5 (0.089%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,403 (60.45%) CI/CD
2 2,302 (40.90%) Agile
3 1,651 (29.33%) Infrastructure as Code
4 962 (17.09%) Continuous Improvement
5 949 (16.86%) Containerisation
6 927 (16.47%) Stakeholder Management
7 903 (16.04%) Problem-Solving
8 888 (15.78%) Test Automation
9 843 (14.98%) AI
10 832 (14.78%) Microservices
11 761 (13.52%) Observability
11 761 (13.52%) Platform Engineering
12 729 (12.95%) Software Engineering
13 684 (12.15%) Scrum
14 673 (11.96%) Migration
15 604 (10.73%) Technical Leadership
16 584 (10.37%) Analytics
17 534 (9.49%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 494 (8.78%) Roadmaps
19 489 (8.69%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,619 (28.76%) Python
2 1,002 (17.80%) SQL
3 824 (14.64%) Java
4 498 (8.85%) Bash
4 498 (8.85%) PowerShell
5 490 (8.70%) C#
6 462 (8.21%) JavaScript
7 314 (5.58%) TypeScript
8 255 (4.53%) Bicep
9 111 (1.97%) Go
10 78 (1.39%) Shell Script
11 69 (1.23%) T-SQL
12 66 (1.17%) Apex Code
13 65 (1.15%) Scala
14 63 (1.12%) Groovy
15 60 (1.07%) PL/SQL
16 38 (0.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 35 (0.62%) Perl
18 30 (0.53%) C++
19 24 (0.43%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,814 (32.23%) Security Cleared
2 1,523 (27.06%) SC Cleared
3 351 (6.24%) Degree
4 244 (4.33%) Azure Certification
5 238 (4.23%) BPSS Clearance
6 222 (3.94%) DV Cleared
7 187 (3.32%) AWS Certification
8 140 (2.49%) Computer Science Degree
9 112 (1.99%) Microsoft Certification
10 76 (1.35%) CISSP
11 57 (1.01%) ISTQB
12 50 (0.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 50 (0.89%) Cisco Certification
13 46 (0.82%) PMP
14 42 (0.75%) PMI Certification
15 40 (0.71%) Master's Degree
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
17 25 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
18 24 (0.43%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 551 (9.79%) QA
2 291 (5.17%) Data Quality
3 212 (3.77%) Accessibility
4 133 (2.36%) GDPR
5 87 (1.55%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 87 (1.55%) WCAG
6 76 (1.35%) NIST
7 52 (0.92%) NCSC
8 49 (0.87%) PMO
9 37 (0.66%) SLA
10 30 (0.53%) PCI DSS
11 29 (0.52%) GRC
12 24 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 20 (0.36%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 13 (0.23%) SEPA
15 11 (0.20%) HIPAA
16 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
16 10 (0.18%) HL7
System Software
1 1,165 (20.70%) Docker
2 169 (3.00%) Active Directory
3 91 (1.62%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 30 (0.53%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
7 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
8 20 (0.36%) VMware NSX
9 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.20%) IAG
11 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.16%) Postfix
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) KVM
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.089%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 1,540 (27.36%) Kubernetes
2 543 (9.65%) Ansible
3 376 (6.68%) Grafana
4 318 (5.65%) Prometheus
5 80 (1.42%) Argo
6 64 (1.14%) Puppet
7 52 (0.92%) Progress Chef
8 51 (0.91%) Single Sign-On
9 47 (0.83%) Microsoft Intune
10 36 (0.64%) Packer
11 31 (0.55%) Istio
12 27 (0.48%) Kibana
13 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.34%) Oracle RMAN
15 19 (0.34%) SCCM
16 18 (0.32%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,107 (19.67%) Microsoft
2 311 (5.52%) Oracle
3 300 (5.33%) Databricks
4 279 (4.96%) Google
5 209 (3.71%) ServiceNow
6 184 (3.27%) Splunk
7 181 (3.22%) Salesforce
8 146 (2.59%) Dynatrace
9 134 (2.38%) VMware
10 112 (1.99%) SAP
11 108 (1.92%) Red Hat
12 67 (1.19%) OpenAI
13 66 (1.17%) IBM
14 62 (1.10%) MuleSoft
15 58 (1.03%) Informatica
16 53 (0.94%) Foundry
17 47 (0.83%) Cisco
18 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
19 41 (0.73%) Atlassian
20 36 (0.64%) Okta