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 20 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,602 3,433 4,062
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.61% 10.47% 9.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.49% 11.59% 11.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,867 2,450 2,785
10th Percentile £385 £363 £386
25th Percentile £440 £425 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £729
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 24 108
10th Percentile £37.25 £37.25 £56.25
25th Percentile £61.81 £52.19 £61.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £84.10 £74.58
90th Percentile £93.63 £88.38 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%

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 44,857 29,633 35,662
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.35% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,817 18,625 22,863
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.02%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,658 1,571 2,253
10th Percentile £14.84 £14.20 £13.00
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.44 £16.82
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%
75th Percentile £68.50 £51.05 £62.00
90th Percentile £82.41 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +87.50% -37.04% -6.09%

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 20 July 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 20 July 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 20 July 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 4,758 £525 - 1,122
UK excluding London +5 2,465 £500 - 822
London +2 2,439 £550 - 456
Work from Home 0 1,615 £525 +1.35% 571
North of England +5 856 £500 +2.04% 237
South East -9 459 £525 +5.00% 242
Midlands +2 450 £488 -1.52% 124
Yorkshire +2 447 £500 - 59
West Midlands -3 358 £500 - 89
North West -2 330 £519 +9.30% 127
South West +14 317 £518 -3.94% 111
Scotland 0 208 £475 -1.96% 30
East of England +24 145 £525 +5.00% 50
North East +12 98 £425 -18.66% 53
East Midlands 0 87 £488 +5.41% 35
Wales -4 48 £425 +37.10% 25
Northern Ireland +18 22 £475 +11.76% 21
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
1 334 (5.96%) Confluence
2 136 (2.43%) Apache Spark
2 136 (2.43%) SharePoint
3 112 (2.00%) Apache Airflow
4 103 (1.84%) Apache
5 78 (1.39%) SAS
6 51 (0.91%) CMS
7 37 (0.66%) IIS
8 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
9 33 (0.59%) nginx
10 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.29%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.29%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.25%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
15 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 69 (1.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.16%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.80%) Microsoft Office
4 38 (0.68%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 35 (0.62%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
10 4 (0.071%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 68 (1.21%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.71%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) Endur
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 3 (0.054%) Findur
8 3 (0.054%) Infor LN
8 3 (0.054%) OpenText VIM for SAP
8 3 (0.054%) Salesforce CRM
8 3 (0.054%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,024 (53.98%) Azure
2 2,003 (35.76%) AWS
3 1,676 (29.92%) Azure DevOps
4 944 (16.85%) GitHub
5 703 (12.55%) GCP
6 578 (10.32%) GitHub Actions
7 460 (8.21%) Serverless
8 456 (8.14%) Power Platform
9 312 (5.57%) Amazon S3
10 274 (4.89%) AWS Lambda
11 249 (4.44%) AWS CloudFormation
12 247 (4.41%) Entra ID
13 221 (3.95%) Amazon EKS
14 220 (3.93%) Azure AKS
15 192 (3.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 188 (3.36%) Amazon EC2
17 187 (3.34%) Azure Monitor
18 180 (3.21%) Azure Data Factory
19 159 (2.84%) OpenShift
20 156 (2.78%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 238 (4.25%) Firewall
2 153 (2.73%) DNS
3 117 (2.09%) Network Security
4 116 (2.07%) VPN
5 56 (1.00%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 38 (0.68%) SSL
8 35 (0.62%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.61%) BGP
10 32 (0.57%) DHCP
11 29 (0.52%) Internet
12 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
13 26 (0.46%) HTTP
14 25 (0.45%) SAN
15 24 (0.43%) OSPF
16 18 (0.32%) LAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) MPLS
17 17 (0.30%) VLAN
17 17 (0.30%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 301 (5.37%) Power BI
2 287 (5.12%) SQL Server
3 268 (4.78%) PostgreSQL
4 186 (3.32%) NoSQL
5 184 (3.28%) Relational Database
6 173 (3.09%) Data Warehouse
7 169 (3.02%) MongoDB
8 154 (2.75%) Data Lake
9 120 (2.14%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.87%) Metadata
11 102 (1.82%) DynamoDB
12 99 (1.77%) Azure SQL Database
13 85 (1.52%) Oracle Database
14 83 (1.48%) Delta Lake
15 74 (1.32%) Big Data
16 68 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
17 67 (1.20%) Amazon Athena
18 66 (1.18%) Redis
19 64 (1.14%) Elasticsearch
20 60 (1.07%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 809 (14.44%) Jenkins
2 745 (13.30%) Git
3 683 (12.19%) JIRA
4 572 (10.21%) GitLab
5 135 (2.41%) Selenium
6 109 (1.95%) Postman
7 97 (1.73%) JUnit
8 96 (1.71%) SonarQube
9 79 (1.41%) Maven
10 78 (1.39%) REST Assured
11 76 (1.36%) Bitbucket
12 63 (1.12%) Cucumber
13 62 (1.11%) Cypress.io
14 59 (1.05%) JMeter
15 53 (0.95%) Gradle
16 44 (0.79%) Gatling
16 44 (0.79%) Mockito
17 39 (0.70%) Visual Studio
18 37 (0.66%) Artifactory
19 33 (0.59%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,386 (24.74%) Social Skills
2 1,015 (18.12%) Finance
3 802 (14.32%) Public Sector
4 468 (8.35%) Analytical Skills
5 357 (6.37%) Banking
6 125 (2.23%) Documentation Skills
6 125 (2.23%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 90 (1.61%) Retail
8 73 (1.30%) Influencing Skills
9 69 (1.23%) Legal
10 64 (1.14%) Organisational Skills
11 56 (1.00%) Marketing
12 48 (0.86%) Military
13 43 (0.77%) Investment Banking
13 43 (0.77%) Law
13 43 (0.77%) Telecoms
14 39 (0.70%) Financial Institution
14 39 (0.70%) Manufacturing
15 35 (0.62%) Front Office
16 32 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,121 (20.01%) DevOps Engineer
2 919 (16.40%) Developer
3 783 (13.98%) Senior
4 637 (11.37%) Architect
5 511 (9.12%) Lead
6 342 (6.10%) Azure Engineer
7 315 (5.62%) Data Engineer
8 302 (5.39%) Analyst
9 278 (4.96%) AWS Engineer
10 228 (4.07%) Platform Engineer
11 208 (3.71%) Cloud Engineer
12 200 (3.57%) Java Developer
13 197 (3.52%) Senior DevOps
14 196 (3.50%) AWS DevOps
15 187 (3.34%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 183 (3.27%) Solutions Architect
17 182 (3.25%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 181 (3.23%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 155 (2.77%) Business Analyst
20 147 (2.62%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 538 (9.60%) REST
2 494 (8.82%) .NET
3 324 (5.78%) RESTful
4 320 (5.71%) Spring
5 312 (5.57%) Kafka
6 309 (5.52%) React
7 302 (5.39%) Spring Boot
8 232 (4.14%) Node.js
9 165 (2.95%) AngularJS
9 165 (2.95%) Playwright
10 163 (2.91%) PySpark
11 161 (2.87%) OAuth
12 159 (2.84%) JSON
13 134 (2.39%) SOAP
14 132 (2.36%) .NET Framework
14 132 (2.36%) HTML
15 113 (2.02%) OAuth2
16 110 (1.96%) CSS
17 109 (1.95%) Middleware
18 102 (1.82%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 987 (17.62%) Cloud Native
2 392 (7.00%) Product Ownership
3 255 (4.55%) Distributed Systems
4 172 (3.07%) Onboarding
5 155 (2.77%) Enterprise Software
6 151 (2.70%) Legacy Systems
7 124 (2.21%) Hybrid Cloud
8 95 (1.70%) Public Cloud
9 89 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
10 81 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
11 79 (1.41%) Data Centre
12 68 (1.21%) Security Posture
13 67 (1.20%) Data Structures
13 67 (1.20%) Management Information System
14 61 (1.09%) Replication
15 59 (1.05%) AI Agents
15 59 (1.05%) Virtual Team
16 55 (0.98%) Mobile App
17 54 (0.96%) Enterprise Cloud
18 52 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 482 (8.60%) Linux
2 292 (5.21%) Windows
3 104 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.41%) Unix
5 69 (1.23%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.61%) VMS
7 27 (0.48%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) zOS
13 7 (0.12%) CentOS
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) AIX
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.071%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,280 (58.55%) CI/CD
2 2,218 (39.59%) Agile
3 1,510 (26.95%) Infrastructure as Code
4 924 (16.49%) Containerisation
5 852 (15.21%) Problem-Solving
6 845 (15.08%) Continuous Improvement
7 832 (14.85%) Test Automation
8 816 (14.57%) Microservices
9 725 (12.94%) Stakeholder Management
10 714 (12.75%) AI
11 686 (12.25%) Scrum
12 684 (12.21%) Observability
13 678 (12.10%) Migration
14 649 (11.59%) Platform Engineering
15 624 (11.14%) Software Engineering
16 582 (10.39%) Analytics
17 493 (8.80%) Technical Leadership
18 486 (8.68%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 484 (8.64%) Data Modelling
20 455 (8.12%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,563 (27.90%) Python
2 1,017 (18.15%) SQL
3 780 (13.92%) Java
4 510 (9.10%) C#
5 440 (7.85%) Bash
6 432 (7.71%) JavaScript
7 405 (7.23%) PowerShell
8 301 (5.37%) TypeScript
9 195 (3.48%) Bicep
10 115 (2.05%) Go
11 70 (1.25%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.23%) PL/SQL
13 67 (1.20%) Shell Script
13 67 (1.20%) T-SQL
14 59 (1.05%) Scala
15 53 (0.95%) Groovy
16 29 (0.52%) C++
17 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
18 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 23 (0.41%) C
Qualifications
1 1,770 (31.60%) Security Cleared
2 1,486 (26.53%) SC Cleared
3 337 (6.02%) Degree
4 215 (3.84%) Azure Certification
5 203 (3.62%) BPSS Clearance
6 190 (3.39%) DV Cleared
7 189 (3.37%) AWS Certification
8 125 (2.23%) Computer Science Degree
9 79 (1.41%) CISSP
10 76 (1.36%) Microsoft Certification
11 60 (1.07%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 55 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.80%) Master's Degree
15 43 (0.77%) PMI Certification
15 43 (0.77%) PMP
16 35 (0.62%) CISM
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 494 (8.82%) QA
2 260 (4.64%) Data Quality
3 194 (3.46%) Accessibility
4 167 (2.98%) GDPR
5 104 (1.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 93 (1.66%) NIST
7 76 (1.36%) WCAG
8 63 (1.12%) NCSC
9 42 (0.75%) PCI DSS
10 40 (0.71%) PMO
11 37 (0.66%) SLA
12 29 (0.52%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.29%) HIPAA
15 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.21%) SOC 2
16 10 (0.18%) PSD2
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.16%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,083 (19.33%) Docker
2 178 (3.18%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
4 81 (1.45%) VMware Infrastructure
5 31 (0.55%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) IAG
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) RACF
15 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,607 (28.69%) Terraform
2 1,432 (25.56%) Kubernetes
3 524 (9.35%) Ansible
4 381 (6.80%) Grafana
5 325 (5.80%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.70%) Argo
7 75 (1.34%) Single Sign-On
8 60 (1.07%) Puppet
9 45 (0.80%) Istio
10 39 (0.70%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.57%) Microsoft Intune
12 30 (0.54%) Packer
13 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) HP ALM
15 19 (0.34%) Kibana
16 17 (0.30%) Consul
17 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
18 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
18 15 (0.27%) SCCM
Vendors
1 997 (17.80%) Microsoft
2 319 (5.69%) Oracle
3 267 (4.77%) Databricks
4 255 (4.55%) Google
5 201 (3.59%) ServiceNow
6 188 (3.36%) Splunk
7 185 (3.30%) Salesforce
8 131 (2.34%) SAP
9 129 (2.30%) Dynatrace
10 120 (2.14%) VMware
11 113 (2.02%) Red Hat
12 70 (1.25%) OpenAI
13 61 (1.09%) IBM
14 57 (1.02%) Informatica
15 54 (0.96%) Atlassian
16 48 (0.86%) Cisco
17 47 (0.84%) Foundry
18 45 (0.80%) CyberArk
18 45 (0.80%) MuleSoft
19 43 (0.77%) Okta