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

6 months to
2 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,369 3,269 3,984
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.37% 10.52% 8.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.05% 11.79% 10.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,052 2,248 2,883
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £429 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £522 £563 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.29% +2.27% -7.56%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £704 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 24 103
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 £76.10
90th Percentile £95.00 £85.48 £84.14
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 33,490 27,717 39,322
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.15% 89.21% 87.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,205 16,795 25,884
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 £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £479 £499 £500
% change year-on-year -4.06% -0.15% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,020 865 2,103
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -7.14% +7.69%
75th Percentile £58.75 £62.50 £61.25
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.71 £30.98 £35.25
% change year-on-year -20.23% -12.12% +21.55%

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 2 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 2 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 2 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 +2 3,742 £525 -8.70% 1,368
UK excluding London +7 1,968 £500 -4.76% 1,077
London -3 1,869 £538 -10.42% 542
Work from Home -2 1,258 £525 -4.55% 840
North of England +4 671 £500 -2.82% 294
South East +4 401 £525 -8.70% 357
Midlands +25 392 £515 +3.00% 118
Yorkshire +1 339 £500 -1.96% 94
West Midlands +24 316 £525 +2.54% 81
North West +7 285 £470 -9.31% 168
South West +9 243 £525 -12.50% 137
Scotland +5 187 £473 +5.00% 77
East of England +14 110 £575 +9.26% 69
East Midlands +13 76 £425 -12.82% 37
North East -5 49 £475 -15.93% 33
Wales +7 34 £418 +54.63% 26
Northern Ireland -4 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
1 261 (5.97%) Confluence
2 87 (1.99%) SharePoint
3 86 (1.97%) Apache
4 82 (1.88%) Apache Spark
5 77 (1.76%) SAS
6 63 (1.44%) Apache Airflow
7 38 (0.87%) OpenStack
8 35 (0.80%) nginx
9 34 (0.78%) CMS
10 25 (0.57%) IIS
11 21 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
12 19 (0.43%) JBoss
13 13 (0.30%) 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 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 97 (2.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 37 (0.85%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.76%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 7 (0.16%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.092%) Trello
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 69 (1.58%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.37%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.25%) Endur
4 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.21%) Maximo
5 9 (0.21%) VisionPLUS
6 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.092%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.092%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.092%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.069%) Oracle Payables
9 3 (0.069%) Oracle Receivables
9 3 (0.069%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.069%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.069%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.069%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.069%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,258 (51.68%) Azure
2 1,563 (35.77%) AWS
3 1,221 (27.95%) Azure DevOps
4 807 (18.47%) GitHub
5 634 (14.51%) GCP
6 522 (11.95%) Serverless
7 461 (10.55%) GitHub Actions
8 365 (8.35%) Power Platform
9 280 (6.41%) AWS CloudFormation
10 257 (5.88%) AWS Lambda
11 234 (5.36%) Amazon S3
12 214 (4.90%) Azure Data Factory
13 202 (4.62%) Azure AKS
14 189 (4.33%) Amazon EKS
15 181 (4.14%) OpenShift
16 172 (3.94%) Dynamics 365
17 171 (3.91%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 171 (3.91%) Entra ID
18 170 (3.89%) Amazon ECS
19 159 (3.64%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 196 (4.49%) Firewall
2 104 (2.38%) DNS
3 88 (2.01%) Network Security
4 84 (1.92%) VPN
5 50 (1.14%) TCP/IP
6 44 (1.01%) SSL
7 37 (0.85%) HTTP
8 34 (0.78%) HTTPS
9 23 (0.53%) WAN
10 19 (0.43%) DHCP
11 16 (0.37%) BGP
11 16 (0.37%) Kerberos
11 16 (0.37%) SD-WAN
12 15 (0.34%) MPLS
13 14 (0.32%) SSH
14 13 (0.30%) FTP
15 12 (0.27%) LAN
15 12 (0.27%) SAN
15 12 (0.27%) SMTP
16 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 246 (5.63%) PostgreSQL
2 233 (5.33%) Power BI
3 175 (4.01%) SQL Server
4 159 (3.64%) NoSQL
5 138 (3.16%) Amazon RDS
6 135 (3.09%) Data Lake
7 116 (2.66%) Relational Database
8 106 (2.43%) Data Warehouse
9 100 (2.29%) MongoDB
10 92 (2.11%) Azure SQL Database
11 81 (1.85%) Oracle Database
12 72 (1.65%) Elasticsearch
13 65 (1.49%) DynamoDB
14 64 (1.46%) MySQL
15 57 (1.30%) Metadata
16 54 (1.24%) Tableau
17 51 (1.17%) Delta Lake
18 50 (1.14%) Redis
19 48 (1.10%) Amazon Aurora
19 48 (1.10%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 772 (17.67%) Jenkins
2 600 (13.73%) Git
3 599 (13.71%) JIRA
4 575 (13.16%) GitLab
5 130 (2.98%) Selenium
6 94 (2.15%) Postman
7 92 (2.11%) JUnit
8 70 (1.60%) SonarQube
8 70 (1.60%) Sonatype Nexus
9 66 (1.51%) Bitbucket
10 62 (1.42%) Cypress.io
11 60 (1.37%) Cucumber
12 49 (1.12%) Artifactory
13 45 (1.03%) JMeter
13 45 (1.03%) Maven
14 43 (0.98%) Gradle
15 41 (0.94%) REST Assured
16 38 (0.87%) Oracle APEX
17 36 (0.82%) Liquibase
18 34 (0.78%) CircleCI
General
1 1,320 (30.21%) Social Skills
2 798 (18.27%) Finance
3 553 (12.66%) Public Sector
4 365 (8.35%) Analytical Skills
5 343 (7.85%) Banking
6 160 (3.66%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.81%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 66 (1.51%) Financial Institution
9 66 (1.51%) Marketing
10 48 (1.10%) Front Office
10 48 (1.10%) Presentation Skills
10 48 (1.10%) Retail
11 46 (1.05%) Investment Banking
12 43 (0.98%) Telecoms
13 35 (0.80%) Military
14 32 (0.73%) Legal
15 31 (0.71%) Pharmaceutical
16 30 (0.69%) Organisational Skills
17 25 (0.57%) Law
Job Titles
1 855 (19.57%) DevOps Engineer
2 758 (17.35%) Developer
3 590 (13.50%) Senior
4 423 (9.68%) Architect
5 328 (7.51%) Lead
6 262 (6.00%) Azure Engineer
7 251 (5.75%) AWS Engineer
8 226 (5.17%) Analyst
9 224 (5.13%) Data Engineer
10 195 (4.46%) AWS DevOps
11 172 (3.94%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 157 (3.59%) Cloud Engineer
13 154 (3.52%) Software Engineer
14 149 (3.41%) Platform Engineer
15 147 (3.36%) Senior Developer
16 130 (2.98%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 127 (2.91%) Solutions Architect
18 118 (2.70%) Business Analyst
18 118 (2.70%) Senior DevOps
19 116 (2.66%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 499 (11.42%) REST
2 389 (8.90%) .NET
3 295 (6.75%) React
4 289 (6.61%) Node.js
5 249 (5.70%) RESTful
6 245 (5.61%) Kafka
7 228 (5.22%) Spring
8 210 (4.81%) Spring Boot
9 176 (4.03%) JSON
10 151 (3.46%) OAuth
11 149 (3.41%) AngularJS
12 141 (3.23%) Elastic Stack
13 133 (3.04%) XML
14 128 (2.93%) SOAP
14 128 (2.93%) YAML
15 126 (2.88%) HTML
16 112 (2.56%) Playwright
17 105 (2.40%) CSS
18 98 (2.24%) Middleware
19 97 (2.22%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 620 (14.19%) Cloud Native
2 242 (5.54%) Product Ownership
3 162 (3.71%) Distributed Systems
4 123 (2.82%) Onboarding
5 119 (2.72%) Public Cloud
6 89 (2.04%) Legacy Systems
7 78 (1.79%) Hybrid Cloud
8 72 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
9 58 (1.33%) Virtual Team
10 54 (1.24%) Management Information System
11 50 (1.14%) Data Centre
11 50 (1.14%) Data Protection Act
12 49 (1.12%) Security Posture
13 47 (1.08%) Private Cloud
14 46 (1.05%) NHS
15 45 (1.03%) Replication
16 41 (0.94%) CMDB
17 40 (0.92%) Mobile App
17 40 (0.92%) Self-Motivation
18 39 (0.89%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 484 (11.08%) Linux
2 250 (5.72%) Windows
3 107 (2.45%) Unix
4 56 (1.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 55 (1.26%) Windows Server
6 46 (1.05%) VMS
7 30 (0.69%) Ubuntu
8 21 (0.48%) Android
9 20 (0.46%) Windows 10
10 19 (0.43%) Apple iOS
11 18 (0.41%) CentOS
12 10 (0.23%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.21%) Solaris
14 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
17 4 (0.092%) Mac OS
18 3 (0.069%) zOS
19 2 (0.046%) Debian
20 1 (0.023%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,504 (57.31%) CI/CD
2 1,703 (38.98%) Agile
3 1,147 (26.25%) Infrastructure as Code
4 855 (19.57%) Problem-Solving
5 844 (19.32%) Containerisation
6 670 (15.34%) Test Automation
7 640 (14.65%) Microservices
8 524 (11.99%) Continuous Improvement
9 520 (11.90%) Analytics
10 508 (11.63%) Migration
11 484 (11.08%) Scrum
12 456 (10.44%) Observability
13 431 (9.86%) AI
14 410 (9.38%) Stakeholder Management
15 383 (8.77%) Software Engineering
16 345 (7.90%) Data Modelling
17 337 (7.71%) Mentoring
18 301 (6.89%) Business Intelligence
19 299 (6.84%) Data Pipeline
20 296 (6.78%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,318 (30.17%) Python
2 872 (19.96%) SQL
3 571 (13.07%) Java
4 435 (9.96%) C#
5 419 (9.59%) JavaScript
6 378 (8.65%) PowerShell
7 334 (7.64%) Bash
8 302 (6.91%) TypeScript
9 145 (3.32%) Bicep
10 137 (3.14%) Go
11 76 (1.74%) PL/SQL
12 65 (1.49%) Shell Script
13 61 (1.40%) Scala
14 51 (1.17%) Groovy
15 50 (1.14%) Ruby
16 45 (1.03%) C++
17 44 (1.01%) T-SQL
18 36 (0.82%) Perl
19 25 (0.57%) Rust
20 23 (0.53%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,344 (30.76%) Security Cleared
2 1,118 (25.59%) SC Cleared
3 371 (8.49%) Degree
4 189 (4.33%) Azure Certification
5 186 (4.26%) Computer Science Degree
6 140 (3.20%) AWS Certification
6 140 (3.20%) DV Cleared
7 106 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
8 88 (2.01%) Master's Degree
9 75 (1.72%) CISSP
10 67 (1.53%) Microsoft Certification
11 59 (1.35%) CISM
12 47 (1.08%) ISTQB
13 44 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 38 (0.87%) PMI Certification
15 30 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 30 (0.69%) Cisco Certification
15 30 (0.69%) PMP
16 22 (0.50%) IIBA
17 21 (0.48%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 371 (8.49%) QA
2 176 (4.03%) GDPR
3 164 (3.75%) Data Quality
4 145 (3.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 127 (2.91%) NIST
6 126 (2.88%) Accessibility
7 72 (1.65%) NCSC
8 36 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 33 (0.76%) WCAG
10 30 (0.69%) HIPAA
11 26 (0.60%) PMO
11 26 (0.60%) SLA
12 25 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 20 (0.46%) PSD2
14 18 (0.41%) ISO 20022
14 18 (0.41%) SOC 2
15 16 (0.37%) SEPA
16 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
17 9 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,091 (24.97%) Docker
2 174 (3.98%) Active Directory
3 70 (1.60%) VMware Infrastructure
4 66 (1.51%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.76%) vSphere
6 20 (0.46%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.39%) Virtual Desktop
8 14 (0.32%) Squid
9 13 (0.30%) DFS Replication
9 13 (0.30%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 12 (0.27%) Hyper-V
11 11 (0.25%) Lustre
11 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
12 9 (0.21%) 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 1,360 (31.13%) Terraform
2 1,286 (29.43%) Kubernetes
3 499 (11.42%) Ansible
4 321 (7.35%) Grafana
5 285 (6.52%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.99%) Argo
7 72 (1.65%) Puppet
8 60 (1.37%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (0.96%) Istio
10 39 (0.89%) Kibana
11 38 (0.87%) Progress Chef
12 32 (0.73%) Packer
13 21 (0.48%) Podman
14 20 (0.46%) SCCM
15 18 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 17 (0.39%) Rancher
17 16 (0.37%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.34%) Consul
18 15 (0.34%) logstash
19 14 (0.32%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 753 (17.24%) Microsoft
2 313 (7.16%) Oracle
3 247 (5.65%) Databricks
3 247 (5.65%) Google
4 220 (5.04%) Splunk
5 158 (3.62%) ServiceNow
6 127 (2.91%) Red Hat
7 116 (2.66%) VMware
8 113 (2.59%) Salesforce
9 105 (2.40%) SAP
10 75 (1.72%) OpenAI
11 65 (1.49%) Dynatrace
12 55 (1.26%) CyberArk
13 48 (1.10%) IBM
14 43 (0.98%) Atlassian
15 42 (0.96%) Talend
16 41 (0.94%) F5
17 40 (0.92%) Cisco
18 38 (0.87%) Denodo
19 32 (0.73%) Palo Alto