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 1 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,409 3,296 3,988
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.44% 10.49% 8.88%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.12% 11.77% 10.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,080 2,270 2,886
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £428 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £563 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.56% +2.23% -8.29%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £533
% change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 24 101
10th Percentile - £36.58 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £53.73 £56.65
Median hourly rate £55.00 £70.36 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -21.83% +8.25% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.50 £80.75 £71.90
90th Percentile £95.00 £85.48 £81.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.75 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -27.78% +3.85% -0.76%

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 33,610 27,994 39,212
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.22% 89.12% 87.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,285 16,989 25,814
10th Percentile £305 £307 £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 £638
90th Percentile £719 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.35% -0.05% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,025 871 2,057
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.41
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.70
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -7.14% +7.69%
75th Percentile £58.65 £62.50 £61.75
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.85
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.71 £30.78 £36.00
% change year-on-year -19.72% -14.50% +24.57%

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 1 February 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 1 February 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 1 February 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 3,772 £525 -8.70% 1,336
UK excluding London +7 1,981 £500 -4.76% 1,051
London -3 1,889 £538 -10.42% 523
Work from Home -1 1,277 £525 -4.55% 798
North of England +4 675 £500 -2.44% 283
South East +3 403 £525 -8.70% 358
Midlands +27 395 £515 +3.00% 118
Yorkshire 0 341 £500 -1.48% 94
West Midlands +26 318 £525 +2.54% 81
North West +6 287 £470 -9.31% 158
South West +6 243 £525 -12.50% 130
Scotland +5 191 £473 +5.00% 69
East of England +18 110 £575 +9.26% 68
East Midlands +16 77 £425 -12.82% 36
North East -6 49 £475 -15.93% 32
Wales +6 34 £418 +54.63% 26
Northern Ireland -3 10 £475 +26.67% 12

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
1 263 (5.97%) Confluence
2 87 (1.97%) SharePoint
3 86 (1.95%) Apache
4 83 (1.88%) Apache Spark
5 77 (1.75%) SAS
6 63 (1.43%) Apache Airflow
7 41 (0.93%) nginx
8 39 (0.88%) OpenStack
9 34 (0.77%) CMS
10 25 (0.57%) IIS
11 21 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
12 19 (0.43%) JBoss
13 13 (0.29%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 10 (0.23%) CICS
15 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.23%) Mendix
15 10 (0.23%) Sitecore CMS
15 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.20%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 97 (2.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 37 (0.84%) Microsoft Project
4 34 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.34%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 7 (0.16%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.091%) Trello
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 69 (1.56%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.25%) Endur
4 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.20%) Maximo
5 9 (0.20%) VisionPLUS
6 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.091%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.091%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.091%) SAP ERP
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%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.068%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,271 (51.51%) Azure
2 1,586 (35.97%) AWS
3 1,228 (27.85%) Azure DevOps
4 821 (18.62%) GitHub
5 639 (14.49%) GCP
6 530 (12.02%) Serverless
7 468 (10.61%) GitHub Actions
8 366 (8.30%) Power Platform
9 282 (6.40%) AWS CloudFormation
10 264 (5.99%) AWS Lambda
11 236 (5.35%) Amazon S3
12 215 (4.88%) Azure Data Factory
13 203 (4.60%) Azure AKS
14 190 (4.31%) Amazon EKS
15 182 (4.13%) OpenShift
16 173 (3.92%) Dynamics 365
17 172 (3.90%) Amazon ECS
17 172 (3.90%) Entra ID
18 171 (3.88%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 159 (3.61%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 196 (4.45%) Firewall
2 104 (2.36%) DNS
3 88 (2.00%) Network Security
4 84 (1.91%) VPN
5 50 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 44 (1.00%) SSL
7 37 (0.84%) HTTP
8 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
9 23 (0.52%) WAN
10 19 (0.43%) DHCP
11 16 (0.36%) BGP
11 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
11 16 (0.36%) SD-WAN
12 15 (0.34%) MPLS
13 14 (0.32%) SSH
14 13 (0.29%) FTP
14 13 (0.29%) SMTP
15 12 (0.27%) LAN
15 12 (0.27%) SAN
16 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 249 (5.65%) PostgreSQL
2 233 (5.28%) Power BI
3 176 (3.99%) SQL Server
4 159 (3.61%) NoSQL
5 139 (3.15%) Amazon RDS
6 135 (3.06%) Data Lake
7 121 (2.74%) Relational Database
8 108 (2.45%) Data Warehouse
9 100 (2.27%) MongoDB
10 92 (2.09%) Azure SQL Database
11 82 (1.86%) Oracle Database
12 72 (1.63%) Elasticsearch
13 66 (1.50%) DynamoDB
14 64 (1.45%) MySQL
15 57 (1.29%) Metadata
16 54 (1.22%) Tableau
17 52 (1.18%) Delta Lake
17 52 (1.18%) Redis
18 48 (1.09%) Amazon Aurora
18 48 (1.09%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 780 (17.69%) Jenkins
2 610 (13.84%) JIRA
3 603 (13.68%) Git
4 578 (13.11%) GitLab
5 134 (3.04%) Selenium
6 95 (2.15%) JUnit
6 95 (2.15%) Postman
7 72 (1.63%) SonarQube
8 71 (1.61%) Sonatype Nexus
9 70 (1.59%) Bitbucket
10 65 (1.47%) Cypress.io
11 61 (1.38%) Cucumber
12 51 (1.16%) Artifactory
13 47 (1.07%) Maven
14 46 (1.04%) JMeter
15 44 (1.00%) Gradle
16 42 (0.95%) REST Assured
17 38 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
18 36 (0.82%) CircleCI
18 36 (0.82%) Liquibase
General
1 1,333 (30.23%) Social Skills
2 810 (18.37%) Finance
3 561 (12.72%) Public Sector
4 368 (8.35%) Analytical Skills
5 352 (7.98%) Banking
6 161 (3.65%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.79%) Influencing Skills
8 70 (1.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 66 (1.50%) Financial Institution
9 66 (1.50%) Marketing
10 49 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
11 48 (1.09%) Front Office
11 48 (1.09%) Retail
12 47 (1.07%) Investment Banking
13 43 (0.98%) Telecoms
14 35 (0.79%) Military
15 32 (0.73%) Legal
16 31 (0.70%) Pharmaceutical
17 30 (0.68%) Organisational Skills
18 25 (0.57%) Law
Job Titles
1 861 (19.53%) DevOps Engineer
2 769 (17.44%) Developer
3 595 (13.50%) Senior
4 425 (9.64%) Architect
5 330 (7.48%) Lead
6 262 (5.94%) Azure Engineer
7 255 (5.78%) AWS Engineer
8 227 (5.15%) Data Engineer
9 226 (5.13%) Analyst
10 197 (4.47%) AWS DevOps
11 174 (3.95%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 159 (3.61%) Cloud Engineer
13 156 (3.54%) Software Engineer
14 151 (3.42%) Senior Developer
15 149 (3.38%) Platform Engineer
16 131 (2.97%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 128 (2.90%) Solutions Architect
18 119 (2.70%) Senior DevOps
19 118 (2.68%) Business Analyst
20 116 (2.63%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 508 (11.52%) REST
2 390 (8.85%) .NET
3 300 (6.80%) React
4 291 (6.60%) Node.js
5 257 (5.83%) RESTful
6 247 (5.60%) Kafka
7 231 (5.24%) Spring
8 213 (4.83%) Spring Boot
9 182 (4.13%) JSON
10 158 (3.58%) OAuth
11 152 (3.45%) AngularJS
12 142 (3.22%) Elastic Stack
13 138 (3.13%) XML
14 133 (3.02%) HTML
14 133 (3.02%) SOAP
15 129 (2.93%) YAML
16 114 (2.59%) Playwright
17 107 (2.43%) CSS
18 99 (2.25%) Middleware
18 99 (2.25%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 627 (14.22%) Cloud Native
2 246 (5.58%) Product Ownership
3 163 (3.70%) Distributed Systems
4 123 (2.79%) Onboarding
5 119 (2.70%) Public Cloud
6 89 (2.02%) Legacy Systems
7 78 (1.77%) Hybrid Cloud
8 73 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
9 58 (1.32%) Virtual Team
10 56 (1.27%) Data Protection Act
11 54 (1.22%) Management Information System
12 50 (1.13%) Data Centre
13 49 (1.11%) Security Posture
14 48 (1.09%) Private Cloud
15 47 (1.07%) NHS
16 45 (1.02%) Replication
17 41 (0.93%) CMDB
17 41 (0.93%) Mobile App
17 41 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
18 39 (0.88%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 490 (11.11%) Linux
2 252 (5.72%) Windows
3 107 (2.43%) Unix
4 56 (1.27%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 56 (1.27%) Windows Server
5 46 (1.04%) VMS
6 30 (0.68%) Ubuntu
7 22 (0.50%) Android
8 20 (0.45%) Apple iOS
8 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
9 18 (0.41%) CentOS
10 10 (0.23%) Amazon Linux
11 9 (0.20%) Solaris
12 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.091%) Mac OS
16 3 (0.068%) zOS
17 2 (0.045%) Debian
18 1 (0.023%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,536 (57.52%) CI/CD
2 1,728 (39.19%) Agile
3 1,158 (26.26%) Infrastructure as Code
4 862 (19.55%) Problem-Solving
5 858 (19.46%) Containerisation
6 676 (15.33%) Test Automation
7 653 (14.81%) Microservices
8 527 (11.95%) Continuous Improvement
9 523 (11.86%) Analytics
10 509 (11.54%) Migration
11 488 (11.07%) Scrum
12 463 (10.50%) Observability
13 434 (9.84%) AI
14 413 (9.37%) Stakeholder Management
15 389 (8.82%) Software Engineering
16 346 (7.85%) Data Modelling
17 341 (7.73%) Mentoring
18 301 (6.83%) Business Intelligence
18 301 (6.83%) Data Pipeline
19 296 (6.71%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,332 (30.21%) Python
2 875 (19.85%) SQL
3 584 (13.25%) Java
4 439 (9.96%) C#
5 424 (9.62%) JavaScript
6 380 (8.62%) PowerShell
7 337 (7.64%) Bash
8 310 (7.03%) TypeScript
9 146 (3.31%) Bicep
10 138 (3.13%) Go
11 76 (1.72%) PL/SQL
12 67 (1.52%) Shell Script
13 61 (1.38%) Scala
14 51 (1.16%) Groovy
15 50 (1.13%) Ruby
16 45 (1.02%) C++
17 44 (1.00%) T-SQL
18 36 (0.82%) Perl
19 25 (0.57%) Rust
20 23 (0.52%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,354 (30.71%) Security Cleared
2 1,124 (25.49%) SC Cleared
3 381 (8.64%) Degree
4 194 (4.40%) Computer Science Degree
5 191 (4.33%) Azure Certification
6 142 (3.22%) AWS Certification
7 141 (3.20%) DV Cleared
8 106 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
9 88 (2.00%) Master's Degree
10 75 (1.70%) CISSP
11 67 (1.52%) Microsoft Certification
12 59 (1.34%) CISM
13 47 (1.07%) ISTQB
14 44 (1.00%) 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 21 (0.48%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 377 (8.55%) QA
2 176 (3.99%) GDPR
3 164 (3.72%) Data Quality
4 145 (3.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 127 (2.88%) NIST
6 126 (2.86%) Accessibility
7 72 (1.63%) NCSC
8 36 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 33 (0.75%) WCAG
10 30 (0.68%) HIPAA
11 27 (0.61%) PMO
12 26 (0.59%) SLA
13 25 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 20 (0.45%) PSD2
15 18 (0.41%) ISO 20022
15 18 (0.41%) SOC 2
16 16 (0.36%) SEPA
17 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
18 9 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,104 (25.04%) Docker
2 175 (3.97%) Active Directory
3 70 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.50%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.75%) vSphere
6 20 (0.45%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.39%) Virtual Desktop
8 14 (0.32%) Squid
9 13 (0.29%) DFS Replication
9 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 12 (0.27%) Hyper-V
11 11 (0.25%) Lustre
11 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
12 9 (0.20%) GPFS
13 8 (0.18%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.16%) Dovecot
14 7 (0.16%) Firmware
14 7 (0.16%) NFS
14 7 (0.16%) Postfix
14 7 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,373 (31.14%) Terraform
2 1,293 (29.33%) Kubernetes
3 504 (11.43%) Ansible
4 324 (7.35%) Grafana
5 288 (6.53%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.97%) Argo
7 73 (1.66%) Puppet
8 60 (1.36%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (0.95%) Istio
10 39 (0.88%) Kibana
10 39 (0.88%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.73%) Packer
12 22 (0.50%) Podman
13 20 (0.45%) SCCM
14 18 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
15 17 (0.39%) Rancher
16 16 (0.36%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.34%) Consul
17 15 (0.34%) logstash
18 14 (0.32%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 758 (17.19%) Microsoft
2 314 (7.12%) Oracle
3 250 (5.67%) Databricks
4 248 (5.62%) Google
5 223 (5.06%) Splunk
6 158 (3.58%) ServiceNow
7 127 (2.88%) Red Hat
8 116 (2.63%) VMware
9 113 (2.56%) Salesforce
10 107 (2.43%) SAP
11 75 (1.70%) OpenAI
12 68 (1.54%) Dynatrace
13 55 (1.25%) CyberArk
14 48 (1.09%) IBM
15 43 (0.98%) Atlassian
16 42 (0.95%) Talend
17 41 (0.93%) F5
18 40 (0.91%) Cisco
19 38 (0.86%) Denodo
20 32 (0.73%) Palo Alto