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 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,128 3,618 4,378
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.55% 10.06% 9.59%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.97% 11.53% 10.82%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,891 2,440 3,188
10th Percentile £363 £380 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £560 £563
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -0.44% -6.25%
75th Percentile £617 £663 £663
90th Percentile £700 £748 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 37 88
10th Percentile - £40.15 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £56.25 £49.05
Median hourly rate £61.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £85.63 £74.00 £70.47
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -16.43% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and 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 31,830 31,370 40,452
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.08% 87.18% 88.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,997 18,966 27,094
10th Percentile £300 £310 £310
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.59% -3.00%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,072 1,117 1,558
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.22 £14.33
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.24 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £33.00 £43.42
Median % change year-on-year -23.79% -23.99% +24.04%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.63 £32.50 £43.90
% change year-on-year -30.37% -25.97% +36.12%

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 December 2025.

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 December 2025.

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 December 2025. 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 +2 3,498 £525 -8.70% 1,253
UK excluding London +4 1,864 £500 -9.09% 1,102
London 0 1,750 £550 -5.98% 488
Work from Home +1 1,303 £525 -3.49% 777
North of England 0 607 £492 -3.53% 251
Midlands +15 368 £515 -1.90% 116
South East +1 366 £513 -14.58% 420
Yorkshire -1 310 £500 - 83
West Midlands +14 298 £525 -4.55% 74
North West +7 262 £454 -13.52% 125
South West +2 220 £538 -10.42% 143
Scotland +7 206 £475 +5.56% 72
East of England +26 109 £523 -12.92% 83
East Midlands +22 70 £418 -12.11% 39
Wales +6 43 £410 -0.61% 45
North East -9 37 £520 -11.11% 45
Northern Ireland -2 7 - - 6

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
1 258 (6.25%) Confluence
2 88 (2.13%) Apache
3 70 (1.70%) Apache Airflow
3 70 (1.70%) SharePoint
4 64 (1.55%) SAS
5 58 (1.41%) Apache Spark
6 37 (0.90%) CMS
7 36 (0.87%) nginx
8 29 (0.70%) IIS
9 28 (0.68%) OpenStack
10 27 (0.65%) JBoss
10 27 (0.65%) WebLogic
11 23 (0.56%) CICS
12 21 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
13 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
13 15 (0.36%) Mule
13 15 (0.36%) WebSphere
14 14 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
15 10 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 71 (1.72%) Microsoft Excel
2 40 (0.97%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 33 (0.80%) Microsoft Office
4 32 (0.78%) Microsoft Project
5 19 (0.46%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.39%) Chatbot
7 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 9 (0.22%) Trello
9 8 (0.19%) Weka
10 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.024%) Moqups
10 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 62 (1.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.46%) Endur
3 18 (0.44%) Aladdin
3 18 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
4 17 (0.41%) Oracle BPM
5 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
6 14 (0.34%) VisionPLUS
7 8 (0.19%) Maximo
8 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
9 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.097%) Fidessa
10 4 (0.097%) NEC Housing
10 4 (0.097%) SAP CO
10 4 (0.097%) SAP ERP
10 4 (0.097%) SAP FI
10 4 (0.097%) SAP FI/CO
10 4 (0.097%) Teamcenter
10 4 (0.097%) thinkFolio
10 4 (0.097%) Workday HCM
11 3 (0.073%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 2,023 (49.01%) Azure
2 1,563 (37.86%) AWS
3 1,102 (26.70%) Azure DevOps
4 729 (17.66%) GitHub
5 587 (14.22%) GCP
6 482 (11.68%) Serverless
7 426 (10.32%) GitHub Actions
8 277 (6.71%) Power Platform
9 266 (6.44%) AWS CloudFormation
10 265 (6.42%) AWS Lambda
11 263 (6.37%) Amazon S3
12 215 (5.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 196 (4.75%) Amazon EC2
14 181 (4.38%) Amazon EKS
14 181 (4.38%) Azure AKS
15 166 (4.02%) Amazon ECS
16 164 (3.97%) Azure Data Factory
17 157 (3.80%) SaaS
18 153 (3.71%) Entra ID
19 149 (3.61%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 194 (4.70%) Firewall
2 127 (3.08%) DNS
3 87 (2.11%) VPN
4 70 (1.70%) Network Security
5 64 (1.55%) SSL
6 59 (1.43%) TCP/IP
7 53 (1.28%) HTTP
8 35 (0.85%) HTTPS
9 30 (0.73%) SSH
10 28 (0.68%) SMTP
11 27 (0.65%) WAN
12 23 (0.56%) FTP
13 18 (0.44%) BGP
13 18 (0.44%) Kerberos
14 17 (0.41%) DHCP
15 16 (0.39%) OpenLDAP
16 15 (0.36%) MPLS
17 14 (0.34%) LAN
17 14 (0.34%) SD-WAN
18 12 (0.29%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 278 (6.73%) PostgreSQL
2 173 (4.19%) NoSQL
3 170 (4.12%) Power BI
4 166 (4.02%) Amazon RDS
5 153 (3.71%) SQL Server
6 120 (2.91%) MongoDB
7 105 (2.54%) Relational Database
8 99 (2.40%) Data Warehouse
9 90 (2.18%) Data Lake
10 85 (2.06%) Oracle Database
11 71 (1.72%) Azure SQL Database
12 64 (1.55%) DynamoDB
13 63 (1.53%) MySQL
14 61 (1.48%) Redis
15 56 (1.36%) Amazon Aurora
16 51 (1.24%) Elasticsearch
17 47 (1.14%) Metadata
18 42 (1.02%) Big Data
18 42 (1.02%) Delta Lake
19 37 (0.90%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 797 (19.31%) Jenkins
2 662 (16.04%) Git
3 604 (14.63%) JIRA
4 534 (12.94%) GitLab
5 144 (3.49%) Selenium
6 107 (2.59%) JUnit
7 99 (2.40%) SonarQube
8 91 (2.20%) Sonatype Nexus
9 89 (2.16%) Bitbucket
10 78 (1.89%) Postman
11 68 (1.65%) Cypress.io
12 63 (1.53%) Cucumber
13 59 (1.43%) Liquibase
14 51 (1.24%) Maven
15 46 (1.11%) Gradle
15 46 (1.11%) JMeter
16 45 (1.09%) Artifactory
17 40 (0.97%) CircleCI
18 39 (0.94%) Oracle APEX
19 38 (0.92%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,295 (31.37%) Social Skills
2 760 (18.41%) Finance
3 526 (12.74%) Public Sector
4 354 (8.58%) Banking
5 331 (8.02%) Analytical Skills
6 124 (3.00%) Documentation Skills
7 70 (1.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 67 (1.62%) Financial Institution
9 66 (1.60%) Investment Banking
10 63 (1.53%) Marketing
11 55 (1.33%) Telecoms
12 54 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
13 52 (1.26%) Retail
14 44 (1.07%) Front Office
15 43 (1.04%) Presentation Skills
16 35 (0.85%) Back Office
17 31 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
18 29 (0.70%) Military
19 28 (0.68%) Manufacturing
20 25 (0.61%) Law
Job Titles
1 796 (19.28%) Developer
2 773 (18.73%) DevOps Engineer
3 553 (13.40%) Senior
4 355 (8.60%) Architect
5 309 (7.49%) Lead
6 258 (6.25%) AWS Engineer
7 212 (5.14%) Azure Engineer
8 197 (4.77%) AWS DevOps
9 191 (4.63%) Data Engineer
10 183 (4.43%) Analyst
11 168 (4.07%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 158 (3.83%) Senior Developer
12 158 (3.83%) Software Engineer
13 148 (3.59%) Cloud Engineer
14 144 (3.49%) Platform Engineer
15 134 (3.25%) Java Developer
16 124 (3.00%) Consultant
17 110 (2.66%) Senior DevOps
18 102 (2.47%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 102 (2.47%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 474 (11.48%) REST
2 361 (8.75%) .NET
3 310 (7.51%) RESTful
4 251 (6.08%) React
5 249 (6.03%) Node.js
6 242 (5.86%) Kafka
7 213 (5.16%) JSON
8 201 (4.87%) Spring
9 190 (4.60%) Spring Boot
10 178 (4.31%) SOAP
11 158 (3.83%) OAuth
12 157 (3.80%) HTML
13 155 (3.75%) Elastic Stack
14 152 (3.68%) AngularJS
15 143 (3.46%) XML
16 110 (2.66%) CSS
16 110 (2.66%) YAML
17 88 (2.13%) .NET Core
18 85 (2.06%) Playwright
19 84 (2.03%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 558 (13.52%) Cloud Native
2 228 (5.52%) Product Ownership
3 178 (4.31%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (3.10%) Onboarding
5 106 (2.57%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (2.45%) Public Cloud
7 76 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
8 70 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
9 68 (1.65%) Virtual Team
10 63 (1.53%) Mobile App
11 59 (1.43%) Replication
12 54 (1.31%) Enterprise Software
13 53 (1.28%) Greenfield Project
13 53 (1.28%) Security Posture
14 46 (1.11%) Management Information System
15 45 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
16 44 (1.07%) Data Centre
17 41 (0.99%) NHS
18 39 (0.94%) Algorithms
19 38 (0.92%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 498 (12.06%) Linux
2 239 (5.79%) Windows
3 112 (2.71%) Unix
4 58 (1.41%) Windows Server
5 56 (1.36%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 48 (1.16%) Android
7 47 (1.14%) VMS
8 42 (1.02%) Apple iOS
9 25 (0.61%) Ubuntu
10 23 (0.56%) Amazon Linux
11 19 (0.46%) CentOS
12 16 (0.39%) Windows 10
13 12 (0.29%) Solaris
14 11 (0.27%) zOS
15 10 (0.24%) Mac OS
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
17 3 (0.073%) Debian
18 2 (0.048%) SUSE
19 1 (0.024%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,357 (57.10%) CI/CD
2 1,801 (43.63%) Agile
3 1,076 (26.07%) Infrastructure as Code
4 827 (20.03%) Containerisation
5 808 (19.57%) Problem-Solving
6 654 (15.84%) Test Automation
7 640 (15.50%) Microservices
8 519 (12.57%) Scrum
9 448 (10.85%) Migration
10 442 (10.71%) Continuous Improvement
11 415 (10.05%) Software Engineering
12 401 (9.71%) Analytics
13 376 (9.11%) AI
14 357 (8.65%) Observability
15 323 (7.82%) Stakeholder Management
16 303 (7.34%) Mentoring
17 294 (7.12%) SDLC
18 285 (6.90%) Infrastructure Automation
19 277 (6.71%) DevSecOps
20 268 (6.49%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,322 (32.03%) Python
2 774 (18.75%) SQL
3 630 (15.26%) Java
4 431 (10.44%) JavaScript
5 407 (9.86%) C#
6 383 (9.28%) Bash
7 368 (8.91%) PowerShell
8 290 (7.03%) TypeScript
9 175 (4.24%) Go
10 118 (2.86%) Bicep
11 82 (1.99%) PL/SQL
12 72 (1.74%) Shell Script
13 61 (1.48%) Groovy
14 54 (1.31%) Perl
15 53 (1.28%) C++
16 50 (1.21%) Scala
17 44 (1.07%) Ruby
18 35 (0.85%) T-SQL
19 29 (0.70%) Kotlin
20 28 (0.68%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,130 (27.37%) Security Cleared
2 942 (22.82%) SC Cleared
3 348 (8.43%) Degree
4 191 (4.63%) Computer Science Degree
5 153 (3.71%) Azure Certification
6 152 (3.68%) AWS Certification
7 126 (3.05%) DV Cleared
8 86 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (2.01%) Master's Degree
10 65 (1.57%) CISSP
11 62 (1.50%) Microsoft Certification
12 54 (1.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 42 (1.02%) CISM
14 39 (0.94%) ISTQB
15 36 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
16 31 (0.75%) PMI Certification
17 27 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.61%) PMP
19 15 (0.36%) ITIL Certification
19 15 (0.36%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 393 (9.52%) QA
2 153 (3.71%) GDPR
3 140 (3.39%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 123 (2.98%) Accessibility
5 117 (2.83%) Data Quality
6 105 (2.54%) NIST
7 48 (1.16%) NCSC
8 38 (0.92%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.70%) WCAG
10 28 (0.68%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.48%) PMO
11 20 (0.48%) SLA
12 19 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.46%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.36%) MiFID
14 14 (0.34%) PSD2
15 13 (0.31%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.31%) SEPA
16 11 (0.27%) EU AI Act
17 10 (0.24%) GRC
System Software
1 1,063 (25.75%) Docker
2 181 (4.38%) Active Directory
3 68 (1.65%) VMware Infrastructure
4 59 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
5 26 (0.63%) vSphere
6 23 (0.56%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.31%) Postfix
8 13 (0.31%) Squid
9 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
10 11 (0.27%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
10 11 (0.27%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 8 (0.19%) GPFS
12 8 (0.19%) Lustre
12 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
12 8 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
13 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,314 (31.83%) Terraform
2 1,208 (29.26%) Kubernetes
3 525 (12.72%) Ansible
4 325 (7.87%) Grafana
5 306 (7.41%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.91%) Puppet
7 78 (1.89%) Argo
8 68 (1.65%) Single Sign-On
9 59 (1.43%) Progress Chef
10 42 (1.02%) Kibana
11 39 (0.94%) Packer
12 31 (0.75%) Istio
13 21 (0.51%) Podman
14 20 (0.48%) ITRS Geneos
15 18 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
16 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
16 17 (0.41%) Nessus
16 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
17 16 (0.39%) SCCM
18 15 (0.36%) logstash
Vendors
1 686 (16.62%) Microsoft
2 304 (7.36%) Oracle
3 229 (5.55%) Google
4 202 (4.89%) Splunk
5 194 (4.70%) Databricks
6 177 (4.29%) ServiceNow
7 120 (2.91%) Salesforce
8 112 (2.71%) SAP
9 103 (2.50%) VMware
10 96 (2.33%) Red Hat
11 62 (1.50%) Dynatrace
12 53 (1.28%) IBM
13 50 (1.21%) OpenAI
14 48 (1.16%) MuleSoft
15 46 (1.11%) F5
16 43 (1.04%) Cisco
17 39 (0.94%) Atlassian
18 38 (0.92%) Palo Alto
19 37 (0.90%) Talend
20 36 (0.87%) CyberArk