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

6 months to
24 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +3 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,444 3,122 4,126
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.69% 10.40% 9.49%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.59% 11.42% 11.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,802 2,238 2,824
10th Percentile £381 £366 £400
25th Percentile £438 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.66%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £727
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 16 123
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.30
25th Percentile £61.87 £49.06 £61.43
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +6.70%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.63 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year -7.89% +12.59% +2.97%

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 43,234 27,342 36,961
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 91.04% 85.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,976 17,315 23,545
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.09% -4.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £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 2,595 1,301 2,587
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.65
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.79 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £72.50 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.08 £38.12
% change year-on-year +77.47% -34.22% +17.29%

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 24 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 24 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 24 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 +4 4,612 £525 - 952
UK excluding London +5 2,401 £500 - 800
London +4 2,364 £550 - 355
Work from Home 0 1,526 £525 - 550
North of England +7 854 £500 - 233
Yorkshire +2 458 £513 +2.50% 63
South East -3 448 £513 +2.50% 261
Midlands 0 439 £490 -2.00% 91
West Midlands -1 348 £500 -2.44% 52
North West +2 322 £500 +2.09% 138
South West +14 289 £515 -6.36% 87
Scotland +2 210 £500 +5.26% 32
East of England +26 137 £525 +7.69% 63
North East +10 92 £450 -13.88% 35
East Midlands +1 87 £468 +2.86% 39
Wales +6 51 £425 +39.13% 28
Northern Ireland +12 21 £475 +11.76% 24
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
1 326 (5.99%) Confluence
2 140 (2.57%) Apache Spark
3 127 (2.33%) SharePoint
4 105 (1.93%) Apache Airflow
5 96 (1.76%) Apache
6 83 (1.52%) SAS
7 48 (0.88%) CMS
8 33 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.57%) nginx
10 29 (0.53%) IIS
11 17 (0.31%) Camunda
11 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
12 14 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
14 10 (0.18%) Mendix
15 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
16 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
16 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 78 (1.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.05%) Microsoft Project
3 51 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 38 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
5 31 (0.57%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.073%) Notion
9 3 (0.055%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.055%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 70 (1.29%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Maximo
5 9 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 7 (0.13%) SAP MDG
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
9 5 (0.092%) Endur
9 5 (0.092%) Magento
9 5 (0.092%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.092%) Oracle BPM
9 5 (0.092%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 3 (0.055%) Findur
10 3 (0.055%) OpenText VIM for SAP
10 3 (0.055%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.055%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.055%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,920 (53.64%) Azure
2 1,919 (35.25%) AWS
3 1,615 (29.67%) Azure DevOps
4 891 (16.37%) GitHub
5 681 (12.51%) GCP
6 534 (9.81%) GitHub Actions
7 489 (8.98%) Serverless
8 461 (8.47%) Power Platform
9 306 (5.62%) Amazon S3
10 272 (5.00%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.65%) AWS CloudFormation
12 244 (4.48%) Entra ID
13 225 (4.13%) Azure AKS
14 216 (3.97%) Amazon EKS
15 190 (3.49%) Azure Data Factory
16 187 (3.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 180 (3.31%) Amazon EC2
18 166 (3.05%) Azure Monitor
19 159 (2.92%) OpenShift
20 157 (2.88%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 234 (4.30%) Firewall
2 135 (2.48%) DNS
3 118 (2.17%) Network Security
4 107 (1.97%) VPN
5 48 (0.88%) WAN
6 42 (0.77%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.66%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.62%) BGP
9 30 (0.55%) SSL
10 27 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 24 (0.44%) OSPF
12 23 (0.42%) HTTP
12 23 (0.42%) Internet
13 22 (0.40%) DHCP
13 22 (0.40%) SAN
14 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
14 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 17 (0.31%) IPsec
14 17 (0.31%) LAN
14 17 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 300 (5.51%) Power BI
2 262 (4.81%) SQL Server
3 254 (4.67%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.53%) NoSQL
5 175 (3.21%) Relational Database
6 164 (3.01%) Data Lake
7 158 (2.90%) MongoDB
8 157 (2.88%) Data Warehouse
9 122 (2.24%) Amazon RDS
10 107 (1.97%) Azure SQL Database
11 100 (1.84%) DynamoDB
11 100 (1.84%) Metadata
12 88 (1.62%) Delta Lake
13 76 (1.40%) Oracle Database
14 73 (1.34%) Big Data
15 72 (1.32%) Amazon Athena
16 68 (1.25%) Amazon Redshift
16 68 (1.25%) Redis
17 60 (1.10%) Elasticsearch
18 52 (0.96%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 784 (14.40%) Jenkins
2 690 (12.67%) Git
3 668 (12.27%) JIRA
4 580 (10.65%) GitLab
5 120 (2.20%) Selenium
6 108 (1.98%) Postman
7 94 (1.73%) JUnit
8 91 (1.67%) SonarQube
9 73 (1.34%) REST Assured
10 72 (1.32%) Bitbucket
11 71 (1.30%) Maven
12 63 (1.16%) Cucumber
13 59 (1.08%) JMeter
14 50 (0.92%) Cypress.io
15 48 (0.88%) Gradle
16 43 (0.79%) Gatling
17 41 (0.75%) Mockito
18 39 (0.72%) Artifactory
19 38 (0.70%) Visual Studio
20 32 (0.59%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,357 (24.93%) Social Skills
2 996 (18.30%) Finance
3 764 (14.03%) Public Sector
4 426 (7.83%) Analytical Skills
5 358 (6.58%) Banking
6 133 (2.44%) Documentation Skills
7 113 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 75 (1.38%) Influencing Skills
8 75 (1.38%) Retail
9 69 (1.27%) Legal
10 58 (1.07%) Marketing
11 57 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
12 47 (0.86%) Military
13 46 (0.84%) Financial Institution
14 40 (0.73%) Investment Banking
15 38 (0.70%) Law
15 38 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
16 32 (0.59%) Telecoms
17 31 (0.57%) Front Office
18 28 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,101 (20.22%) DevOps Engineer
2 839 (15.41%) Developer
3 767 (14.09%) Senior
4 639 (11.74%) Architect
5 483 (8.87%) Lead
6 340 (6.25%) Azure Engineer
7 320 (5.88%) Analyst
8 319 (5.86%) Data Engineer
9 273 (5.01%) AWS Engineer
10 204 (3.75%) Cloud Engineer
11 201 (3.69%) AWS DevOps
12 198 (3.64%) Platform Engineer
13 187 (3.43%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 185 (3.40%) Senior DevOps
15 184 (3.38%) Solutions Architect
16 183 (3.36%) Java Developer
17 177 (3.25%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 169 (3.10%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 158 (2.90%) Business Analyst
20 155 (2.85%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 506 (9.29%) REST
2 469 (8.61%) .NET
3 313 (5.75%) React
4 312 (5.73%) Spring
5 300 (5.51%) RESTful
6 298 (5.47%) Spring Boot
7 293 (5.38%) Kafka
8 231 (4.24%) Node.js
9 172 (3.16%) AngularJS
10 168 (3.09%) PySpark
11 160 (2.94%) OAuth
12 152 (2.79%) Playwright
13 138 (2.53%) JSON
14 125 (2.30%) SOAP
15 124 (2.28%) .NET Framework
16 117 (2.15%) HTML
17 115 (2.11%) YAML
18 110 (2.02%) Middleware
19 109 (2.00%) OpenID
20 106 (1.95%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 955 (17.54%) Cloud Native
2 367 (6.74%) Product Ownership
3 234 (4.30%) Distributed Systems
4 149 (2.74%) Onboarding
5 130 (2.39%) Enterprise Software
6 129 (2.37%) Legacy Systems
7 113 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
8 107 (1.97%) Public Cloud
9 83 (1.52%) Data Centre
10 79 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
11 75 (1.38%) Management Information System
12 66 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
13 64 (1.18%) Security Posture
14 57 (1.05%) Data Structures
15 56 (1.03%) Virtual Team
16 54 (0.99%) AI Agents
16 54 (0.99%) Mobile App
17 49 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
18 46 (0.84%) NHS
19 44 (0.81%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 469 (8.61%) Linux
2 275 (5.05%) Windows
3 105 (1.93%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 78 (1.43%) Unix
5 58 (1.07%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.64%) VMS
7 30 (0.55%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.28%) Android
10 14 (0.26%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.092%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.092%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.073%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.073%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.073%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,158 (58.01%) CI/CD
2 2,087 (38.34%) Agile
3 1,436 (26.38%) Infrastructure as Code
4 869 (15.96%) Containerisation
5 819 (15.04%) Problem-Solving
6 783 (14.38%) Microservices
7 779 (14.31%) Continuous Improvement
8 777 (14.27%) Test Automation
9 672 (12.34%) Migration
10 667 (12.25%) Stakeholder Management
11 642 (11.79%) AI
11 642 (11.79%) Observability
12 634 (11.65%) Scrum
13 614 (11.28%) Analytics
14 581 (10.67%) Platform Engineering
15 565 (10.38%) Software Engineering
16 493 (9.06%) Data Modelling
17 465 (8.54%) Technical Leadership
18 438 (8.05%) Roadmaps
19 437 (8.03%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,527 (28.05%) Python
2 1,016 (18.66%) SQL
3 739 (13.57%) Java
4 511 (9.39%) C#
5 407 (7.48%) JavaScript
6 388 (7.13%) Bash
7 372 (6.83%) PowerShell
8 274 (5.03%) TypeScript
9 192 (3.53%) Bicep
10 113 (2.08%) Go
11 67 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 65 (1.19%) Shell Script
13 63 (1.16%) Scala
14 53 (0.97%) T-SQL
15 52 (0.96%) PL/SQL
16 48 (0.88%) Groovy
17 35 (0.64%) C++
18 26 (0.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 24 (0.44%) Kotlin
19 24 (0.44%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,719 (31.58%) Security Cleared
2 1,448 (26.60%) SC Cleared
3 333 (6.12%) Degree
4 211 (3.88%) Azure Certification
5 177 (3.25%) BPSS Clearance
6 176 (3.23%) AWS Certification
7 166 (3.05%) DV Cleared
8 132 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
9 84 (1.54%) CISSP
10 73 (1.34%) Microsoft Certification
11 59 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 56 (1.03%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 47 (0.86%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.84%) PMI Certification
15 45 (0.83%) CISM
15 45 (0.83%) PMP
16 44 (0.81%) Master's Degree
17 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 458 (8.41%) QA
2 264 (4.85%) Data Quality
3 174 (3.20%) GDPR
4 167 (3.07%) Accessibility
5 126 (2.31%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 115 (2.11%) NIST
7 73 (1.34%) NCSC
8 65 (1.19%) WCAG
9 50 (0.92%) PCI DSS
10 42 (0.77%) SLA
11 33 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.53%) PMO
13 26 (0.48%) GRC
14 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.20%) NIST 800
16 11 (0.20%) PSD2
17 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,032 (18.96%) Docker
2 178 (3.27%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
4 74 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
5 28 (0.51%) vSphere
6 26 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (0.31%) Squid
8 17 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.26%) Postfix
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) Firmware
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.092%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.092%) NFS
13 5 (0.092%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,561 (28.67%) Terraform
2 1,375 (25.26%) Kubernetes
3 516 (9.48%) Ansible
4 356 (6.54%) Grafana
5 310 (5.69%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.52%) Argo
7 74 (1.36%) Single Sign-On
8 68 (1.25%) Puppet
9 51 (0.94%) Istio
10 34 (0.62%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.57%) Packer
12 27 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
13 26 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 23 (0.42%) HP ALM
15 22 (0.40%) Kibana
16 18 (0.33%) Consul
17 17 (0.31%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
19 13 (0.24%) FortiGate
19 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 948 (17.41%) Microsoft
2 278 (5.11%) Oracle
3 276 (5.07%) Databricks
4 261 (4.79%) Google
5 192 (3.53%) ServiceNow
6 183 (3.36%) Splunk
7 181 (3.32%) Salesforce
8 129 (2.37%) Red Hat
9 123 (2.26%) SAP
10 119 (2.19%) Dynatrace
11 113 (2.08%) VMware
12 80 (1.47%) OpenAI
13 57 (1.05%) IBM
14 56 (1.03%) Atlassian
15 54 (0.99%) Informatica
16 48 (0.88%) CyberArk
17 42 (0.77%) Cisco
18 41 (0.75%) Okta
19 40 (0.73%) Foundry
19 40 (0.73%) MuleSoft