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

6 months to
16 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,610 3,675 3,800
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.34% 11.16% 9.94%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.24% 12.33% 11.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,903 2,559 2,552
10th Percentile £381 £363 £381
25th Percentile £437 £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 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 120 25 71
10th Percentile £37.25 £38.00 £57.50
25th Percentile £56.06 £52.50 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.85 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +1.27% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £92.63 £95.00 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +3.73% -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 45,839 29,816 32,769
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.46% 90.52% 85.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,855 18,531 20,147
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £404 £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 £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,070 1,799 1,460
10th Percentile £13.84 £14.25 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.36 £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 £67.50 £44.68 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.56 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +83.63% -47.37% +5.81%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 4,770 £525 - 5,505
London 0 2,516 £550 - 2,957
UK excluding London -4 2,400 £500 - 2,960
Work from Home 0 1,606 £525 +2.39% 2,530
North of England -2 781 £500 +5.26% 902
South East -10 453 £525 +5.00% 624
Midlands -5 439 £488 -4.88% 357
Yorkshire -2 395 £500 +3.09% 251
West Midlands -7 345 £492 -6.26% 217
South West +5 320 £550 +4.76% 359
North West -5 295 £525 +11.70% 511
Scotland -3 221 £475 - 280
East of England +5 146 £505 -3.35% 251
North East +16 106 £425 -18.27% 146
East Midlands +2 91 £463 +6.32% 140
Wales -6 46 £500 +33.33% 73
Northern Ireland +22 23 £450 -4.26% 123
Channel Islands - 5 £450 - 1

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
1 336 (5.99%) Confluence
2 161 (2.87%) SharePoint
3 129 (2.30%) Apache Airflow
4 124 (2.21%) Apache Spark
5 111 (1.98%) Apache
6 62 (1.11%) SAS
7 45 (0.80%) CMS
8 42 (0.75%) Jupyter
9 29 (0.52%) nginx
10 28 (0.50%) IIS
11 20 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) WebSphere
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 9 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 68 (1.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (0.96%) Microsoft Project
3 49 (0.87%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
9 7 (0.12%) Trello
10 6 (0.11%) Windchill
11 5 (0.089%) Notion
12 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 2 (0.036%) Mingle
13 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
13 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
13 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
13 1 (0.018%) Sketch
13 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 81 (1.44%) Dynamics CRM
2 36 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) 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 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
8 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.089%) Aladdin
9 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Infor LN
11 3 (0.053%) Maximo
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,031 (54.03%) Azure
2 2,024 (36.08%) AWS
3 1,734 (30.91%) Azure DevOps
4 973 (17.34%) GitHub
5 730 (13.01%) GCP
6 617 (11.00%) GitHub Actions
7 487 (8.68%) Power Platform
8 463 (8.25%) Serverless
9 310 (5.53%) Amazon S3
10 291 (5.19%) AWS Lambda
11 251 (4.47%) Entra ID
12 247 (4.40%) Amazon EKS
13 242 (4.31%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 234 (4.17%) AWS CloudFormation
15 217 (3.87%) Azure AKS
16 203 (3.62%) Azure Monitor
17 198 (3.53%) Amazon EC2
18 191 (3.40%) Azure Data Factory
19 184 (3.28%) Dynamics 365
20 168 (2.99%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 240 (4.28%) Firewall
2 176 (3.14%) DNS
3 121 (2.16%) VPN
4 111 (1.98%) Network Security
5 69 (1.23%) TCP/IP
6 54 (0.96%) SSL
7 50 (0.89%) DHCP
8 46 (0.82%) WAN
9 35 (0.62%) HTTP
10 31 (0.55%) BGP
11 29 (0.52%) SD-WAN
11 29 (0.52%) SSH
12 28 (0.50%) Internet
13 24 (0.43%) Wi-Fi
14 22 (0.39%) OSPF
15 19 (0.34%) SAN
15 19 (0.34%) VLAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 319 (5.69%) Power BI
2 305 (5.44%) PostgreSQL
3 304 (5.42%) SQL Server
4 211 (3.76%) Data Warehouse
5 187 (3.33%) MongoDB
6 183 (3.26%) NoSQL
7 177 (3.16%) Relational Database
8 172 (3.07%) Data Lake
9 147 (2.62%) Amazon RDS
10 128 (2.28%) Metadata
11 98 (1.75%) Azure SQL Database
12 94 (1.68%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.57%) MySQL
13 88 (1.57%) Oracle Database
14 87 (1.55%) Delta Lake
15 83 (1.48%) Redis
16 69 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
17 63 (1.12%) Big Data
18 61 (1.09%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 55 (0.98%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 821 (14.63%) Git
2 810 (14.44%) Jenkins
3 667 (11.89%) JIRA
4 644 (11.48%) GitLab
5 137 (2.44%) Selenium
6 103 (1.84%) SonarQube
7 99 (1.76%) Maven
8 93 (1.66%) JUnit
9 92 (1.64%) Postman
10 74 (1.32%) Bitbucket
11 71 (1.27%) REST Assured
12 69 (1.23%) Cypress.io
13 67 (1.19%) Gradle
14 64 (1.14%) Cucumber
15 63 (1.12%) JMeter
16 52 (0.93%) Claude Code
17 46 (0.82%) Mockito
18 45 (0.80%) Gatling
19 43 (0.77%) Sonatype Nexus
20 37 (0.66%) Artifactory
General
1 1,474 (26.27%) Social Skills
2 995 (17.74%) Finance
3 801 (14.28%) Public Sector
4 518 (9.23%) Analytical Skills
5 383 (6.83%) Banking
6 169 (3.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 107 (1.91%) Retail
8 84 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
8 84 (1.50%) Influencing Skills
9 67 (1.19%) Organisational Skills
10 65 (1.16%) Legal
11 56 (1.00%) Marketing
12 54 (0.96%) Aerospace
13 53 (0.94%) Military
14 52 (0.93%) Investment Banking
15 50 (0.89%) Telecoms
16 45 (0.80%) Law
17 44 (0.78%) Front Office
18 42 (0.75%) Manufacturing
19 39 (0.70%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,140 (20.32%) DevOps Engineer
2 919 (16.38%) Developer
3 850 (15.15%) Senior
4 633 (11.28%) Architect
5 536 (9.55%) Lead
6 346 (6.17%) Azure Engineer
7 307 (5.47%) Data Engineer
8 266 (4.74%) Analyst
9 258 (4.60%) AWS Engineer
10 236 (4.21%) Platform Engineer
11 208 (3.71%) Azure DevOps Engineer
12 207 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
13 202 (3.60%) Java Developer
14 199 (3.55%) Senior DevOps
15 186 (3.32%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 178 (3.17%) AWS DevOps
16 178 (3.17%) Solutions Architect
17 167 (2.98%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 160 (2.85%) Senior Developer
19 143 (2.55%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,672 (29.80%) Terraform
2 614 (10.94%) REST
3 474 (8.45%) .NET
4 383 (6.83%) Kafka
5 357 (6.36%) RESTful
6 311 (5.54%) Spring
7 305 (5.44%) Spring Boot
8 293 (5.22%) React
9 199 (3.55%) Node.js
10 182 (3.24%) JSON
11 175 (3.12%) OAuth
12 161 (2.87%) Playwright
13 159 (2.83%) PySpark
14 142 (2.53%) HTML
15 131 (2.34%) CSS
16 127 (2.26%) SOAP
17 124 (2.21%) OAuth2
18 123 (2.19%) .NET Framework
19 121 (2.16%) AngularJS
20 112 (2.00%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 1,026 (18.29%) Cloud Native
2 430 (7.66%) Product Ownership
3 269 (4.80%) Distributed Systems
4 208 (3.71%) Enterprise Software
5 195 (3.48%) Onboarding
6 152 (2.71%) Hybrid Cloud
7 144 (2.57%) Legacy Systems
8 97 (1.73%) AI Agents
9 93 (1.66%) Management Information System
10 83 (1.48%) Data Protection Act
11 76 (1.35%) Public Cloud
11 76 (1.35%) Replication
11 76 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
12 73 (1.30%) Security Posture
13 72 (1.28%) Data Structures
14 69 (1.23%) Data Centre
15 64 (1.14%) Virtual Team
16 59 (1.05%) Enterprise Cloud
17 57 (1.02%) PKI
18 53 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 553 (9.86%) Linux
2 315 (5.61%) Windows
3 119 (2.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 112 (2.00%) Unix
5 94 (1.68%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) Ubuntu
7 34 (0.61%) VMS
8 32 (0.57%) Apple iOS
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 13 (0.23%) CentOS
11 11 (0.20%) zOS
12 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.16%) Solaris
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 9 (0.16%) 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 3,406 (60.71%) CI/CD
2 2,294 (40.89%) Agile
3 1,654 (29.48%) Infrastructure as Code
4 959 (17.09%) Continuous Improvement
5 944 (16.83%) Containerisation
6 925 (16.49%) Stakeholder Management
7 898 (16.01%) Problem-Solving
8 883 (15.74%) Test Automation
9 847 (15.10%) AI
10 832 (14.83%) Microservices
11 764 (13.62%) Platform Engineering
12 759 (13.53%) Observability
13 729 (12.99%) Software Engineering
14 686 (12.23%) Scrum
15 673 (12.00%) Migration
16 611 (10.89%) Technical Leadership
17 581 (10.36%) Analytics
18 535 (9.54%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 494 (8.81%) Roadmaps
20 485 (8.65%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,621 (28.89%) Python
2 991 (17.66%) SQL
3 828 (14.76%) Java
4 498 (8.88%) Bash
5 496 (8.84%) PowerShell
6 487 (8.68%) C#
7 462 (8.24%) JavaScript
8 311 (5.54%) TypeScript
9 255 (4.55%) Bicep
10 110 (1.96%) Go
11 80 (1.43%) Shell Script
12 67 (1.19%) T-SQL
13 66 (1.18%) Apex Code
14 65 (1.16%) Scala
15 64 (1.14%) Groovy
16 61 (1.09%) PL/SQL
17 38 (0.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 35 (0.62%) Perl
19 32 (0.57%) C++
20 25 (0.45%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,805 (32.17%) Security Cleared
2 1,516 (27.02%) SC Cleared
3 354 (6.31%) Degree
4 248 (4.42%) Azure Certification
5 237 (4.22%) BPSS Clearance
6 226 (4.03%) DV Cleared
7 189 (3.37%) AWS Certification
8 142 (2.53%) Computer Science Degree
9 113 (2.01%) Microsoft Certification
10 75 (1.34%) CISSP
11 57 (1.02%) ISTQB
12 50 (0.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 50 (0.89%) Cisco Certification
13 44 (0.78%) PMP
14 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
15 40 (0.71%) Master's Degree
16 29 (0.52%) CISM
17 25 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
18 24 (0.43%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 545 (9.71%) QA
2 287 (5.12%) Data Quality
3 212 (3.78%) Accessibility
4 130 (2.32%) GDPR
5 87 (1.55%) WCAG
6 85 (1.52%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 74 (1.32%) NIST
8 53 (0.94%) NCSC
9 48 (0.86%) PMO
10 37 (0.66%) SLA
11 30 (0.53%) PCI DSS
12 29 (0.52%) GRC
13 24 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 21 (0.37%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 13 (0.23%) SEPA
16 11 (0.20%) HIPAA
17 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
17 10 (0.18%) HL7
System Software
1 1,161 (20.70%) Docker
2 167 (2.98%) Active Directory
3 91 (1.62%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 31 (0.55%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
7 25 (0.45%) Hyper-V
8 20 (0.36%) VMware NSX
9 19 (0.34%) 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%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,544 (27.52%) Kubernetes
2 546 (9.73%) Ansible
3 377 (6.72%) Grafana
4 318 (5.67%) Prometheus
5 80 (1.43%) Argo
6 64 (1.14%) Puppet
7 52 (0.93%) Progress Chef
8 51 (0.91%) Single Sign-On
9 47 (0.84%) Microsoft Intune
10 36 (0.64%) Packer
11 30 (0.53%) Istio
12 29 (0.52%) Kibana
13 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
15 20 (0.36%) Kubeflow
15 20 (0.36%) Oracle RMAN
16 19 (0.34%) SCCM
17 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,101 (19.63%) Microsoft
2 311 (5.54%) Oracle
3 297 (5.29%) Databricks
4 276 (4.92%) Google
5 208 (3.71%) ServiceNow
6 184 (3.28%) Splunk
7 180 (3.21%) Salesforce
8 146 (2.60%) Dynatrace
9 135 (2.41%) VMware
10 110 (1.96%) SAP
11 107 (1.91%) Red Hat
12 68 (1.21%) OpenAI
13 66 (1.18%) IBM
14 62 (1.11%) MuleSoft
15 53 (0.94%) Foundry
16 52 (0.93%) Informatica
17 47 (0.84%) Cisco
18 43 (0.77%) AppDynamics
19 40 (0.71%) Atlassian
20 36 (0.64%) Okta