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 7 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,677 3,572 3,870
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.63% 10.87% 9.92%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.51% 12.02% 11.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,931 2,550 2,634
10th Percentile £385 £360 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.40% -5.86% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £493 £550
% change year-on-year +1.44% -10.38% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 124 26 88
10th Percentile £35.67 £32.63 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.25 £51.56 £64.15
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £86.37 £74.11
90th Percentile £87.10 £93.75 £85.37
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -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 45,370 29,720 33,385
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.93% 90.44% 85.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,958 18,627 21,372
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £729 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,804 1,656 1,869
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.25 £17.33 £18.13
Median hourly rate £42.68 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +69.69% -37.63% -5.12%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £64.25
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.51
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.30 £40.94
% change year-on-year +88.67% -43.09% +2.35%

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 7 August 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 7 August 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 7 August 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 4,860 £525 - 2,468
London +1 2,520 £550 - 1,334
UK excluding London +1 2,470 £500 +1.44% 1,362
Work from Home +1 1,620 £525 +2.44% 1,155
North of England -1 837 £500 +5.26% 399
South East -10 472 £525 +5.00% 366
Midlands -2 462 £490 -2.00% 193
Yorkshire +2 413 £500 +3.36% 117
West Midlands -2 379 £492 -4.47% 129
North West -2 331 £525 +12.90% 205
South West +11 322 £525 +0.96% 163
Scotland -1 202 £490 -2.00% 90
East of England +13 140 £505 +1.00% 80
North East +15 110 £425 -19.05% 79
East Midlands -1 78 £488 +7.26% 64
Wales -3 44 £460 +38.90% 41
Northern Ireland +20 22 £475 +7.95% 36
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
1 342 (6.02%) Confluence
2 134 (2.36%) SharePoint
3 133 (2.34%) Apache Spark
4 123 (2.17%) Apache Airflow
5 108 (1.90%) Apache
6 87 (1.53%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 37 (0.65%) IIS
9 36 (0.63%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
11 24 (0.42%) nginx
12 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
13 15 (0.26%) Camunda
14 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
14 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
16 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
18 8 (0.14%) Mendix
18 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
Applications
1 63 (1.11%) Microsoft Project
2 59 (1.04%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
4 37 (0.65%) MS Visio
5 27 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Trello
9 5 (0.088%) Notion
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 70 (1.23%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 5 (0.088%) Maximo
7 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.088%) SAP ERP
8 4 (0.070%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Findur
9 3 (0.053%) Shopify
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,075 (54.17%) Azure
2 1,997 (35.18%) AWS
3 1,753 (30.88%) Azure DevOps
4 972 (17.12%) GitHub
5 729 (12.84%) GCP
6 599 (10.55%) GitHub Actions
7 462 (8.14%) Power Platform
8 443 (7.80%) Serverless
9 297 (5.23%) Amazon S3
10 267 (4.70%) AWS Lambda
11 263 (4.63%) Entra ID
12 251 (4.42%) AWS CloudFormation
13 233 (4.10%) Amazon EKS
14 226 (3.98%) Azure AKS
15 208 (3.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 202 (3.56%) Azure Monitor
17 192 (3.38%) Azure Data Factory
18 178 (3.14%) Amazon EC2
19 161 (2.84%) Dynamics 365
20 152 (2.68%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 247 (4.35%) Firewall
2 164 (2.89%) DNS
3 124 (2.18%) VPN
4 113 (1.99%) Network Security
5 64 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.86%) WAN
7 44 (0.78%) SSL
8 42 (0.74%) DHCP
9 36 (0.63%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.58%) BGP
11 32 (0.56%) HTTP
11 32 (0.56%) Internet
12 28 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.44%) OSPF
14 21 (0.37%) SAN
14 21 (0.37%) SSH
15 20 (0.35%) VLAN
16 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 315 (5.55%) Power BI
2 294 (5.18%) SQL Server
3 277 (4.88%) PostgreSQL
4 197 (3.47%) Data Warehouse
5 193 (3.40%) NoSQL
6 184 (3.24%) Relational Database
7 177 (3.12%) MongoDB
8 164 (2.89%) Data Lake
9 115 (2.03%) Amazon RDS
9 115 (2.03%) Metadata
10 111 (1.96%) Azure SQL Database
11 99 (1.74%) DynamoDB
12 91 (1.60%) Delta Lake
13 82 (1.44%) Oracle Database
14 71 (1.25%) Redis
15 70 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
15 70 (1.23%) MySQL
16 68 (1.20%) Big Data
17 62 (1.09%) Amazon Athena
18 55 (0.97%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 814 (14.34%) Jenkins
2 787 (13.86%) Git
3 693 (12.21%) JIRA
4 591 (10.41%) GitLab
5 132 (2.33%) Selenium
6 105 (1.85%) SonarQube
7 103 (1.81%) Postman
8 91 (1.60%) JUnit
9 86 (1.51%) Maven
10 84 (1.48%) Bitbucket
11 68 (1.20%) REST Assured
12 66 (1.16%) Cypress.io
12 66 (1.16%) JMeter
13 58 (1.02%) Cucumber
14 55 (0.97%) Gradle
15 49 (0.86%) Gatling
16 45 (0.79%) Mockito
17 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
18 40 (0.70%) Visual Studio
19 37 (0.65%) Claude Code
General
1 1,419 (25.00%) Social Skills
2 1,013 (17.84%) Finance
3 831 (14.64%) Public Sector
4 503 (8.86%) Analytical Skills
5 376 (6.62%) Banking
6 146 (2.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 106 (1.87%) Retail
8 99 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.25%) Influencing Skills
10 70 (1.23%) Organisational Skills
11 66 (1.16%) Legal
12 55 (0.97%) Marketing
13 50 (0.88%) Investment Banking
14 48 (0.85%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.81%) Military
16 45 (0.79%) Aerospace
17 44 (0.78%) Law
18 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
19 42 (0.74%) Front Office
20 41 (0.72%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,102 (19.41%) DevOps Engineer
2 940 (16.56%) Developer
3 825 (14.53%) Senior
4 629 (11.08%) Architect
5 547 (9.64%) Lead
6 346 (6.09%) Azure Engineer
7 328 (5.78%) Data Engineer
8 288 (5.07%) Analyst
9 273 (4.81%) AWS Engineer
10 232 (4.09%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.68%) Cloud Engineer
12 201 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
13 196 (3.45%) Java Developer
14 191 (3.36%) AWS DevOps
15 189 (3.33%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 185 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 182 (3.21%) Solutions Architect
18 178 (3.14%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 151 (2.66%) Senior Developer
19 151 (2.66%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 582 (10.25%) REST
2 489 (8.61%) .NET
3 342 (6.02%) RESTful
4 337 (5.94%) Kafka
5 303 (5.34%) Spring
6 292 (5.14%) React
7 283 (4.99%) Spring Boot
8 220 (3.88%) Node.js
9 176 (3.10%) JSON
10 171 (3.01%) PySpark
11 170 (2.99%) OAuth
12 168 (2.96%) Playwright
13 151 (2.66%) AngularJS
14 142 (2.50%) SOAP
15 139 (2.45%) .NET Framework
16 132 (2.33%) HTML
17 120 (2.11%) OAuth2
18 111 (1.96%) YAML
19 110 (1.94%) Middleware
20 109 (1.92%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,021 (17.98%) Cloud Native
2 407 (7.17%) Product Ownership
3 270 (4.76%) Distributed Systems
4 170 (2.99%) Enterprise Software
4 170 (2.99%) Onboarding
5 157 (2.77%) Legacy Systems
6 142 (2.50%) Hybrid Cloud
7 91 (1.60%) Data Protection Act
8 86 (1.51%) Public Cloud
9 84 (1.48%) Self-Motivation
10 77 (1.36%) Management Information System
11 73 (1.29%) Data Structures
12 72 (1.27%) Data Centre
13 68 (1.20%) Security Posture
14 67 (1.18%) AI Agents
15 63 (1.11%) Replication
16 58 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
17 55 (0.97%) Mobile App
17 55 (0.97%) Virtual Team
18 48 (0.85%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 503 (8.86%) Linux
2 309 (5.44%) Windows
3 106 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 86 (1.51%) Unix
5 83 (1.46%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.58%) VMS
7 29 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.49%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
13 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
13 7 (0.12%) CentOS
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.070%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.070%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,347 (58.96%) CI/CD
2 2,274 (40.06%) Agile
3 1,557 (27.43%) Infrastructure as Code
4 939 (16.54%) Containerisation
5 918 (16.17%) Continuous Improvement
6 878 (15.47%) Problem-Solving
7 877 (15.45%) Test Automation
8 824 (14.51%) Microservices
9 788 (13.88%) Stakeholder Management
10 783 (13.79%) AI
11 722 (12.72%) Observability
12 707 (12.45%) Scrum
13 691 (12.17%) Platform Engineering
14 679 (11.96%) Software Engineering
15 674 (11.87%) Migration
16 618 (10.89%) Analytics
17 537 (9.46%) Technical Leadership
18 527 (9.28%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 507 (8.93%) Data Modelling
20 467 (8.23%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,608 (28.32%) Python
2 1,045 (18.41%) SQL
3 797 (14.04%) Java
4 513 (9.04%) C#
5 467 (8.23%) Bash
6 461 (8.12%) JavaScript
7 445 (7.84%) PowerShell
8 316 (5.57%) TypeScript
9 226 (3.98%) Bicep
10 105 (1.85%) Go
11 70 (1.23%) Apex Code
11 70 (1.23%) Shell Script
11 70 (1.23%) T-SQL
12 65 (1.14%) PL/SQL
13 58 (1.02%) Scala
14 56 (0.99%) Groovy
15 33 (0.58%) C++
16 30 (0.53%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 27 (0.48%) C
17 27 (0.48%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,806 (31.81%) Security Cleared
2 1,525 (26.86%) SC Cleared
3 330 (5.81%) Degree
4 227 (4.00%) Azure Certification
5 221 (3.89%) BPSS Clearance
6 193 (3.40%) AWS Certification
6 193 (3.40%) DV Cleared
7 128 (2.25%) Computer Science Degree
8 84 (1.48%) Microsoft Certification
9 82 (1.44%) CISSP
10 63 (1.11%) ISTQB
11 59 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 56 (0.99%) Cisco Certification
13 46 (0.81%) PMP
14 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
15 38 (0.67%) Master's Degree
16 33 (0.58%) CISM
17 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 516 (9.09%) QA
2 288 (5.07%) Data Quality
3 196 (3.45%) Accessibility
4 154 (2.71%) GDPR
5 95 (1.67%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.39%) WCAG
7 76 (1.34%) NIST
8 55 (0.97%) NCSC
9 47 (0.83%) PMO
10 39 (0.69%) PCI DSS
11 35 (0.62%) SLA
12 28 (0.49%) GRC
12 28 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
16 9 (0.16%) PSD2
16 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,131 (19.92%) Docker
2 182 (3.21%) Active Directory
3 84 (1.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 82 (1.44%) Virtual Machines
5 26 (0.46%) vSphere
6 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
9 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
10 12 (0.21%) Postfix
11 8 (0.14%) IAG
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 5 (0.088%) Firmware
14 5 (0.088%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,639 (28.87%) Terraform
2 1,466 (25.82%) Kubernetes
3 534 (9.41%) Ansible
4 371 (6.54%) Grafana
5 314 (5.53%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.50%) Argo
7 63 (1.11%) Puppet
8 60 (1.06%) Single Sign-On
9 46 (0.81%) Progress Chef
10 44 (0.78%) Istio
11 35 (0.62%) Microsoft Intune
12 33 (0.58%) Packer
13 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
14 18 (0.32%) Kibana
14 18 (0.32%) SCCM
15 17 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
16 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
17 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
18 13 (0.23%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 1,038 (18.28%) Microsoft
2 314 (5.53%) Oracle
3 280 (4.93%) Databricks
4 276 (4.86%) Google
5 206 (3.63%) ServiceNow
6 188 (3.31%) Salesforce
7 178 (3.14%) Splunk
8 142 (2.50%) Dynatrace
9 125 (2.20%) SAP
10 118 (2.08%) VMware
11 107 (1.88%) Red Hat
12 64 (1.13%) IBM
13 60 (1.06%) Informatica
13 60 (1.06%) OpenAI
14 54 (0.95%) Atlassian
14 54 (0.95%) MuleSoft
15 49 (0.86%) Cisco
16 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
17 42 (0.74%) Foundry
18 41 (0.72%) Okta