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 7 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,276 3,052 4,138
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.66% 10.44% 9.53%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.59% 11.48% 11.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,683 2,196 2,852
10th Percentile £386 £375 £400
25th Percentile £438 £440 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -6.30%
75th Percentile £610 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 17 119
10th Percentile £39.53 £33.10 £56.45
25th Percentile £59.94 £51.25 £61.43
Median hourly rate £70.00 £73.23 £65.50
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% +11.79% -
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.72
90th Percentile £92.50 £90.25 £85.92
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.75 £71.61 £65.50
% change year-on-year -4.00% +9.33% -

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 41,914 26,586 37,071
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.67% 90.97% 85.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,180 16,894 23,732
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,510 1,155 2,553
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.99 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +57.06% -23.32% +1.39%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.00 £60.75
90th Percentile £81.24 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £46.11 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +83.32% -34.02% +8.91%

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 7 June 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 7 June 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 7 June 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 4,485 £525 - 1,604
UK excluding London +8 2,340 £500 - 1,096
London +3 2,276 £550 - 681
Work from Home -1 1,458 £525 - 874
North of England +6 830 £500 - 312
South East 0 473 £525 +5.00% 306
Yorkshire +2 456 £500 - 83
Midlands +4 419 £488 -2.50% 134
West Midlands +2 330 £500 -4.31% 92
North West +3 308 £500 - 186
South West +13 281 £525 -4.55% 143
Scotland +3 191 £513 +7.89% 67
East of England +28 128 £525 +7.69% 82
East Midlands 0 85 £465 +0.54% 42
North East +9 84 £450 -14.29% 44
Wales +6 50 £425 +33.51% 30
Northern Ireland +8 17 £475 +15.85% 39
Channel Islands - 3 £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
1 297 (5.63%) Confluence
2 136 (2.58%) Apache Spark
3 120 (2.27%) SharePoint
4 97 (1.84%) Apache
5 95 (1.80%) Apache Airflow
6 87 (1.65%) SAS
7 45 (0.85%) CMS
8 32 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
8 32 (0.61%) nginx
9 27 (0.51%) IIS
10 24 (0.45%) Jupyter
11 19 (0.36%) OpenStack
12 15 (0.28%) Camunda
13 13 (0.25%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.23%) Mendix
14 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.15%) HCL Notes
16 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
17 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
Applications
1 76 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (1.02%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.95%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 35 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 27 (0.51%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 5 (0.095%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.076%) Notion
9 3 (0.057%) Trello
10 2 (0.038%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.038%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 65 (1.23%) Dynamics CRM
2 32 (0.61%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.25%) Oracle ERP
4 12 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.15%) Maximo
6 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.095%) Endur
8 5 (0.095%) Magento
8 5 (0.095%) Oracle EBS
9 3 (0.057%) Findur
9 3 (0.057%) NEC Housing
9 3 (0.057%) OpenText MBPM
9 3 (0.057%) Oracle BPM
9 3 (0.057%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.057%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.057%) SAP MM
9 3 (0.057%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,858 (54.17%) Azure
2 1,827 (34.63%) AWS
3 1,552 (29.42%) Azure DevOps
4 891 (16.89%) GitHub
5 683 (12.95%) GCP
6 532 (10.08%) GitHub Actions
7 484 (9.17%) Serverless
8 451 (8.55%) Power Platform
9 283 (5.36%) Amazon S3
10 258 (4.89%) AWS Lambda
11 251 (4.76%) AWS CloudFormation
12 240 (4.55%) Entra ID
13 221 (4.19%) Azure AKS
14 205 (3.89%) Amazon EKS
15 204 (3.87%) Azure Data Factory
16 171 (3.24%) PaaS
17 169 (3.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 164 (3.11%) Amazon EC2
18 164 (3.11%) Azure Monitor
19 161 (3.05%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 239 (4.53%) Firewall
2 136 (2.58%) DNS
3 110 (2.08%) Network Security
4 102 (1.93%) VPN
5 47 (0.89%) TCP/IP
6 44 (0.83%) WAN
7 36 (0.68%) SD-WAN
8 31 (0.59%) BGP
9 27 (0.51%) DHCP
9 27 (0.51%) SSL
10 26 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
11 25 (0.47%) SAN
12 24 (0.45%) HTTP
13 23 (0.44%) OSPF
14 20 (0.38%) Internet
15 19 (0.36%) IPsec
16 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 16 (0.30%) LAN
18 15 (0.28%) MPLS
19 14 (0.27%) BIG-IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 292 (5.53%) Power BI
2 272 (5.16%) SQL Server
3 245 (4.64%) PostgreSQL
4 179 (3.39%) NoSQL
5 178 (3.37%) Data Lake
6 156 (2.96%) Relational Database
7 149 (2.82%) Data Warehouse
8 138 (2.62%) MongoDB
9 117 (2.22%) Amazon RDS
10 116 (2.20%) Azure SQL Database
11 99 (1.88%) DynamoDB
12 97 (1.84%) Metadata
13 90 (1.71%) Delta Lake
14 79 (1.50%) Oracle Database
15 73 (1.38%) Big Data
16 66 (1.25%) Amazon Athena
17 65 (1.23%) Elasticsearch
18 58 (1.10%) Redis
19 55 (1.04%) Amazon Redshift
19 55 (1.04%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 750 (14.22%) Jenkins
2 654 (12.40%) Git
3 621 (11.77%) JIRA
4 557 (10.56%) GitLab
5 115 (2.18%) Selenium
6 107 (2.03%) Postman
7 89 (1.69%) SonarQube
8 82 (1.55%) JUnit
9 69 (1.31%) Bitbucket
9 69 (1.31%) REST Assured
10 63 (1.19%) Maven
11 59 (1.12%) Cucumber
12 57 (1.08%) JMeter
13 52 (0.99%) Artifactory
14 50 (0.95%) Cypress.io
15 43 (0.82%) Gatling
16 40 (0.76%) Gradle
17 39 (0.74%) Mockito
18 34 (0.64%) Visual Studio
19 32 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,307 (24.77%) Social Skills
2 938 (17.78%) Finance
3 694 (13.15%) Public Sector
4 405 (7.68%) Analytical Skills
5 332 (6.29%) Banking
6 146 (2.77%) Documentation Skills
7 93 (1.76%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 75 (1.42%) Influencing Skills
9 70 (1.33%) Legal
10 68 (1.29%) Retail
11 54 (1.02%) Marketing
12 51 (0.97%) Financial Institution
12 51 (0.97%) Organisational Skills
13 42 (0.80%) Military
14 39 (0.74%) Investment Banking
15 37 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
16 35 (0.66%) Law
17 32 (0.61%) Front Office
18 30 (0.57%) Telecoms
19 27 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,086 (20.58%) DevOps Engineer
2 772 (14.63%) Developer
3 740 (14.03%) Senior
4 617 (11.69%) Architect
5 468 (8.87%) Lead
6 344 (6.52%) Azure Engineer
7 312 (5.91%) Analyst
8 311 (5.89%) Data Engineer
9 257 (4.87%) AWS Engineer
10 197 (3.73%) Cloud Engineer
11 189 (3.58%) Platform Engineer
12 185 (3.51%) AWS DevOps
13 180 (3.41%) Solutions Architect
14 177 (3.35%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 175 (3.32%) Senior DevOps
16 173 (3.28%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 161 (3.05%) Business Analyst
18 159 (3.01%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 158 (2.99%) Java Developer
20 150 (2.84%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 481 (9.12%) REST
2 465 (8.81%) .NET
3 312 (5.91%) React
4 285 (5.40%) Spring
5 279 (5.29%) Kafka
6 275 (5.21%) Spring Boot
7 264 (5.00%) RESTful
8 246 (4.66%) Node.js
9 176 (3.34%) AngularJS
10 162 (3.07%) PySpark
11 160 (3.03%) OAuth
12 154 (2.92%) Playwright
13 136 (2.58%) JSON
14 128 (2.43%) YAML
15 114 (2.16%) SOAP
16 109 (2.07%) .NET Framework
16 109 (2.07%) OpenID
17 107 (2.03%) HTML
18 106 (2.01%) OAuth2
19 105 (1.99%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 889 (16.85%) Cloud Native
2 329 (6.24%) Product Ownership
3 209 (3.96%) Distributed Systems
4 137 (2.60%) Onboarding
5 121 (2.29%) Legacy Systems
6 111 (2.10%) Enterprise Software
6 111 (2.10%) Public Cloud
7 105 (1.99%) Hybrid Cloud
8 82 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
9 81 (1.54%) Data Centre
10 66 (1.25%) Management Information System
11 57 (1.08%) Self-Motivation
12 50 (0.95%) Mobile App
12 50 (0.95%) Security Posture
13 49 (0.93%) Virtual Team
14 47 (0.89%) AI Agents
14 47 (0.89%) Greenfield Project
15 46 (0.87%) Private Cloud
16 43 (0.82%) Data Structures
16 43 (0.82%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 460 (8.72%) Linux
2 271 (5.14%) Windows
3 98 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 78 (1.48%) Unix
5 59 (1.12%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.80%) VMS
7 27 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 22 (0.42%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.30%) Android
10 13 (0.25%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Solaris
11 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.15%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 5 (0.095%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.095%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.095%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.076%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.076%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,053 (57.87%) CI/CD
2 1,919 (36.37%) Agile
3 1,395 (26.44%) Infrastructure as Code
4 835 (15.83%) Containerisation
5 769 (14.58%) Problem-Solving
6 751 (14.23%) Test Automation
7 750 (14.22%) Microservices
8 719 (13.63%) Continuous Improvement
9 647 (12.26%) Migration
10 642 (12.17%) Observability
11 603 (11.43%) Analytics
12 601 (11.39%) Stakeholder Management
13 584 (11.07%) AI
14 578 (10.96%) Scrum
15 523 (9.91%) Platform Engineering
16 521 (9.87%) Software Engineering
17 485 (9.19%) Data Modelling
18 435 (8.24%) Technical Leadership
19 427 (8.09%) Mentoring
20 418 (7.92%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,463 (27.73%) Python
2 1,021 (19.35%) SQL
3 703 (13.32%) Java
4 494 (9.36%) C#
5 387 (7.34%) JavaScript
6 385 (7.30%) PowerShell
7 377 (7.15%) Bash
8 271 (5.14%) TypeScript
9 184 (3.49%) Bicep
10 107 (2.03%) Go
11 66 (1.25%) Scala
11 66 (1.25%) Shell Script
12 58 (1.10%) Apex Code
13 51 (0.97%) PL/SQL
14 50 (0.95%) T-SQL
15 44 (0.83%) Groovy
16 33 (0.63%) C++
17 26 (0.49%) Kotlin
18 25 (0.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 25 (0.47%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,666 (31.58%) Security Cleared
2 1,382 (26.19%) SC Cleared
3 326 (6.18%) Degree
4 220 (4.17%) Azure Certification
5 170 (3.22%) BPSS Clearance
6 163 (3.09%) DV Cleared
7 157 (2.98%) AWS Certification
8 138 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.57%) CISSP
10 63 (1.19%) Microsoft Certification
11 55 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 49 (0.93%) CISM
13 47 (0.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 45 (0.85%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.85%) Master's Degree
15 44 (0.83%) PMI Certification
16 41 (0.78%) PMP
17 26 (0.49%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 26 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
18 22 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 444 (8.42%) QA
2 248 (4.70%) Data Quality
3 180 (3.41%) GDPR
4 145 (2.75%) Accessibility
5 128 (2.43%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 119 (2.26%) NIST
7 68 (1.29%) NCSC
8 59 (1.12%) WCAG
9 47 (0.89%) PCI DSS
10 44 (0.83%) SLA
11 32 (0.61%) PMO
11 32 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.42%) GRC
13 18 (0.34%) HIPAA
14 14 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.25%) NIST 800
16 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.23%) PSD2
17 9 (0.17%) SEPA
18 8 (0.15%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 999 (18.93%) Docker
2 180 (3.41%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.50%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.66%) vSphere
6 28 (0.53%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.34%) Squid
9 16 (0.30%) Hyper-V
9 16 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 14 (0.27%) Postfix
11 8 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
12 7 (0.13%) Firmware
12 7 (0.13%) HDFS
12 7 (0.13%) RACF
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 5 (0.095%) NFS
14 5 (0.095%) SRDF
15 4 (0.076%) Microsoft App-V
15 4 (0.076%) Varnish
Systems Management
1 1,517 (28.75%) Terraform
2 1,332 (25.25%) Kubernetes
3 504 (9.55%) Ansible
4 362 (6.86%) Grafana
5 308 (5.84%) Prometheus
6 91 (1.72%) Argo
7 77 (1.46%) Single Sign-On
8 67 (1.27%) Puppet
9 62 (1.18%) Istio
10 32 (0.61%) Progress Chef
11 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Intune
12 28 (0.53%) Packer
13 25 (0.47%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.42%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 22 (0.42%) HP ALM
15 19 (0.36%) Kibana
16 18 (0.34%) Consul
17 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
17 15 (0.28%) SCCM
Vendors
1 920 (17.44%) Microsoft
2 287 (5.44%) Databricks
3 285 (5.40%) Oracle
4 252 (4.78%) Google
5 191 (3.62%) Splunk
6 178 (3.37%) ServiceNow
7 165 (3.13%) Salesforce
8 145 (2.75%) Red Hat
9 123 (2.33%) VMware
10 117 (2.22%) SAP
11 109 (2.07%) Dynatrace
12 72 (1.36%) OpenAI
13 50 (0.95%) Atlassian
14 49 (0.93%) CyberArk
14 49 (0.93%) IBM
14 49 (0.93%) Informatica
15 43 (0.82%) Cisco
16 39 (0.74%) Foundry
17 38 (0.72%) AppDynamics
17 38 (0.72%) Okta