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

6 months to
21 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,665 3,578 3,835
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.58% 10.92% 9.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.49% 12.06% 11.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,932 2,532 2,615
10th Percentile £385 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
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 £718 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 27 82
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.10 £56.25
25th Percentile £55.88 £51.88 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.25 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £88.00 £95.00 £85.00
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 45,356 29,667 33,233
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.68% 90.51% 85.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,834 18,495 21,131
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.58%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,855 1,741 1,763
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.31 £17.33 £18.00
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -37.90% -1.22%
75th Percentile £67.94 £49.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.00 £41.50
% change year-on-year +83.17% -42.17% +12.54%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 +3 4,847 £525 - 1,150
London +1 2,550 £550 - 453
UK excluding London +1 2,430 £500 - 903
Work from Home +1 1,625 £525 +1.45% 640
North of England 0 805 £500 +3.09% 246
South East -8 472 £525 +5.00% 289
Midlands +1 461 £488 -2.50% 125
Yorkshire 0 396 £500 +1.42% 70
West Midlands 0 367 £490 -5.50% 83
North West -3 315 £524 +10.32% 131
South West +3 314 £525 +1.45% 128
Scotland -2 195 £498 +4.74% 39
East of England +18 137 £505 +1.00% 54
North East +15 111 £425 -19.05% 48
East Midlands +5 90 £470 +1.62% 42
Wales -4 50 £513 +36.67% 28
Northern Ireland +17 23 £475 +7.95% 8
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 338 (5.97%) Confluence
2 149 (2.63%) SharePoint
3 126 (2.22%) Apache Spark
4 123 (2.17%) Apache Airflow
5 111 (1.96%) Apache
6 72 (1.27%) SAS
7 43 (0.76%) CMS
8 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
9 38 (0.67%) IIS
10 24 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
11 23 (0.41%) nginx
12 14 (0.25%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
13 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
15 11 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 7 (0.12%) Mendix
17 7 (0.12%) Mule
Applications
1 64 (1.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.09%) Microsoft Project
3 42 (0.74%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 32 (0.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Trello
9 5 (0.088%) Notion
10 4 (0.071%) Windchill
11 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 72 (1.27%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.65%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
7 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.088%) Maximo
9 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,115 (54.99%) Azure
2 2,021 (35.68%) AWS
3 1,789 (31.58%) Azure DevOps
4 984 (17.37%) GitHub
5 723 (12.76%) GCP
6 614 (10.84%) GitHub Actions
7 480 (8.47%) Power Platform
8 457 (8.07%) Serverless
9 290 (5.12%) Amazon S3
10 276 (4.87%) AWS Lambda
11 262 (4.62%) Entra ID
12 243 (4.29%) AWS CloudFormation
13 236 (4.17%) Amazon EKS
14 224 (3.95%) Azure AKS
15 219 (3.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 210 (3.71%) Azure Monitor
17 199 (3.51%) Azure Data Factory
18 178 (3.14%) Amazon EC2
19 172 (3.04%) Dynamics 365
20 160 (2.82%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 248 (4.38%) Firewall
2 165 (2.91%) DNS
3 123 (2.17%) VPN
4 110 (1.94%) Network Security
5 64 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 54 (0.95%) WAN
7 46 (0.81%) SSL
8 43 (0.76%) DHCP
9 39 (0.69%) SD-WAN
10 35 (0.62%) BGP
11 32 (0.56%) HTTP
11 32 (0.56%) Internet
12 29 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
13 26 (0.46%) OSPF
14 23 (0.41%) SAN
14 23 (0.41%) SSH
15 21 (0.37%) VLAN
16 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 17 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 319 (5.63%) Power BI
2 301 (5.31%) PostgreSQL
3 296 (5.23%) SQL Server
4 204 (3.60%) Data Warehouse
5 192 (3.39%) NoSQL
6 180 (3.18%) Relational Database
7 178 (3.14%) MongoDB
8 162 (2.86%) Data Lake
9 128 (2.26%) Amazon RDS
10 121 (2.14%) Metadata
11 110 (1.94%) Azure SQL Database
12 93 (1.64%) DynamoDB
13 84 (1.48%) Delta Lake
14 82 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 80 (1.41%) Redis
16 72 (1.27%) Amazon Redshift
16 72 (1.27%) MySQL
17 64 (1.13%) Big Data
18 59 (1.04%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 52 (0.92%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 813 (14.35%) Jenkins
2 789 (13.93%) Git
3 689 (12.16%) JIRA
4 606 (10.70%) GitLab
5 139 (2.45%) Selenium
6 103 (1.82%) Postman
7 97 (1.71%) SonarQube
8 90 (1.59%) Bitbucket
8 90 (1.59%) JUnit
9 86 (1.52%) Maven
10 72 (1.27%) JMeter
11 71 (1.25%) Cypress.io
12 68 (1.20%) REST Assured
13 59 (1.04%) Cucumber
14 58 (1.02%) Gradle
15 50 (0.88%) Gatling
16 44 (0.78%) LoadRunner
17 43 (0.76%) Claude Code
18 42 (0.74%) Mockito
19 41 (0.72%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,452 (25.63%) Social Skills
2 1,014 (17.90%) Finance
3 838 (14.79%) Public Sector
4 508 (8.97%) Analytical Skills
5 372 (6.57%) Banking
6 157 (2.77%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 106 (1.87%) Retail
8 101 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.25%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.18%) Legal
10 67 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
11 54 (0.95%) Marketing
12 51 (0.90%) Investment Banking
13 48 (0.85%) Aerospace
13 48 (0.85%) Telecoms
14 46 (0.81%) Military
15 45 (0.79%) Law
16 44 (0.78%) Front Office
17 41 (0.72%) Financial Institution
17 41 (0.72%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,106 (19.52%) DevOps Engineer
2 931 (16.43%) Developer
3 838 (14.79%) Senior
4 630 (11.12%) Architect
5 545 (9.62%) Lead
6 351 (6.20%) Azure Engineer
7 313 (5.53%) Data Engineer
8 273 (4.82%) Analyst
9 262 (4.62%) AWS Engineer
10 229 (4.04%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
12 199 (3.51%) Senior DevOps
13 196 (3.46%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 192 (3.39%) Java Developer
15 184 (3.25%) AWS DevOps
16 183 (3.23%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 176 (3.11%) Solutions Architect
18 171 (3.02%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 158 (2.79%) Senior Developer
20 150 (2.65%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,651 (29.14%) Terraform
2 599 (10.57%) REST
3 496 (8.76%) .NET
4 358 (6.32%) Kafka
5 348 (6.14%) RESTful
6 301 (5.31%) Spring
7 286 (5.05%) React
8 283 (5.00%) Spring Boot
9 212 (3.74%) Node.js
10 187 (3.30%) JSON
11 174 (3.07%) Playwright
12 166 (2.93%) OAuth
13 162 (2.86%) PySpark
14 144 (2.54%) AngularJS
15 138 (2.44%) SOAP
16 137 (2.42%) .NET Framework
16 137 (2.42%) HTML
17 121 (2.14%) OAuth2
18 116 (2.05%) YAML
19 114 (2.01%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 1,026 (18.11%) Cloud Native
2 419 (7.40%) Product Ownership
3 268 (4.73%) Distributed Systems
4 189 (3.34%) Enterprise Software
5 177 (3.12%) Onboarding
6 158 (2.79%) Legacy Systems
7 148 (2.61%) Hybrid Cloud
8 92 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
9 85 (1.50%) AI Agents
10 83 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
11 75 (1.32%) Management Information System
11 75 (1.32%) Public Cloud
12 70 (1.24%) Data Structures
13 69 (1.22%) Data Centre
14 67 (1.18%) Security Posture
15 65 (1.15%) Replication
16 64 (1.13%) Enterprise Cloud
17 57 (1.01%) Virtual Team
18 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
19 50 (0.88%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 511 (9.02%) Linux
2 312 (5.51%) Windows
3 112 (1.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 101 (1.78%) Unix
5 87 (1.54%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.65%) VMS
7 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
8 30 (0.53%) Ubuntu
9 19 (0.34%) Android
10 9 (0.16%) Solaris
10 9 (0.16%) zOS
11 8 (0.14%) AIX
11 8 (0.14%) Amazon Linux
11 8 (0.14%) CentOS
11 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
12 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,365 (59.40%) CI/CD
2 2,296 (40.53%) Agile
3 1,596 (28.17%) Infrastructure as Code
4 940 (16.59%) Continuous Improvement
5 935 (16.50%) Containerisation
6 891 (15.73%) Test Automation
7 879 (15.52%) Problem-Solving
8 853 (15.06%) Stakeholder Management
9 831 (14.67%) Microservices
10 793 (14.00%) AI
11 727 (12.83%) Observability
12 709 (12.52%) Platform Engineering
13 695 (12.27%) Software Engineering
14 686 (12.11%) Scrum
15 685 (12.09%) Migration
16 591 (10.43%) Analytics
17 572 (10.10%) Technical Leadership
18 538 (9.50%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 484 (8.54%) Data Modelling
20 470 (8.30%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,604 (28.31%) Python
2 1,038 (18.32%) SQL
3 806 (14.23%) Java
4 511 (9.02%) C#
5 481 (8.49%) PowerShell
6 470 (8.30%) Bash
7 467 (8.24%) JavaScript
8 311 (5.49%) TypeScript
9 242 (4.27%) Bicep
10 96 (1.69%) Go
11 78 (1.38%) Shell Script
12 72 (1.27%) Apex Code
13 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
14 64 (1.13%) PL/SQL
15 62 (1.09%) Scala
16 60 (1.06%) Groovy
17 31 (0.55%) C++
17 31 (0.55%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 31 (0.55%) Perl
18 24 (0.42%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,830 (32.30%) Security Cleared
2 1,547 (27.31%) SC Cleared
3 325 (5.74%) Degree
4 226 (3.99%) Azure Certification
5 225 (3.97%) BPSS Clearance
6 196 (3.46%) DV Cleared
7 192 (3.39%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.17%) Computer Science Degree
9 91 (1.61%) Microsoft Certification
10 76 (1.34%) CISSP
11 65 (1.15%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 54 (0.95%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.79%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 38 (0.67%) Master's Degree
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
20 25 (0.44%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 535 (9.44%) QA
2 283 (5.00%) Data Quality
3 201 (3.55%) Accessibility
4 139 (2.45%) GDPR
5 99 (1.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 78 (1.38%) WCAG
7 77 (1.36%) NIST
8 52 (0.92%) NCSC
9 48 (0.85%) PMO
10 41 (0.72%) SLA
11 35 (0.62%) PCI DSS
12 31 (0.55%) GRC
13 28 (0.49%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.25%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
16 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
17 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
17 10 (0.18%) HL7
17 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,127 (19.89%) Docker
2 176 (3.11%) Active Directory
3 90 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.48%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.26%) Virtual Desktop
9 13 (0.23%) Squid
10 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
11 10 (0.18%) IAG
12 9 (0.16%) Postfix
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.12%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) Corosync
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
15 6 (0.11%) NFS
16 5 (0.088%) Ceph
16 5 (0.088%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,493 (26.35%) Kubernetes
2 535 (9.44%) Ansible
3 374 (6.60%) Grafana
4 314 (5.54%) Prometheus
5 85 (1.50%) Argo
6 62 (1.09%) Puppet
7 57 (1.01%) Single Sign-On
8 49 (0.86%) Progress Chef
9 42 (0.74%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Intune
11 33 (0.58%) Packer
12 22 (0.39%) Kibana
13 20 (0.35%) Kustomize
13 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.34%) SCCM
15 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
16 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,087 (19.19%) Microsoft
2 314 (5.54%) Oracle
3 285 (5.03%) Databricks
4 275 (4.85%) Google
5 206 (3.64%) ServiceNow
6 188 (3.32%) Salesforce
7 177 (3.12%) Splunk
8 145 (2.56%) Dynatrace
9 123 (2.17%) VMware
10 114 (2.01%) SAP
11 106 (1.87%) Red Hat
12 65 (1.15%) Informatica
13 62 (1.09%) IBM
14 59 (1.04%) MuleSoft
14 59 (1.04%) OpenAI
15 53 (0.94%) Cisco
16 52 (0.92%) Atlassian
17 46 (0.81%) AppDynamics
17 46 (0.81%) Foundry
18 41 (0.72%) Okta