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

6 months to
14 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,658 3,580 3,842
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.60% 10.88% 9.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.50% 12.02% 11.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,912 2,533 2,614
10th Percentile £385 £361 £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 £614 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 27 87
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.10 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.25 £51.88 £63.30
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.22
90th Percentile £86.80 £95.00 £85.41
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.28%

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 45,278 29,786 33,285
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.80% 90.49% 85.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,840 18,586 21,275
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £423 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,823 1,710 1,832
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.05
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.31 £18.46
Median hourly rate £42.30 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +68.19% -39.40% -2.35%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.25 £68.00 £74.83
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +13.33%

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 14 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 14 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 14 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 4,847 £525 - 2,438
London 0 2,527 £550 - 1,323
UK excluding London 0 2,446 £500 - 1,356
Work from Home +1 1,639 £525 +2.44% 1,153
North of England 0 830 £500 +4.17% 379
South East -9 474 £525 +5.00% 382
Midlands -3 459 £488 -2.50% 183
Yorkshire 0 412 £500 +1.75% 111
West Midlands -2 378 £490 -4.85% 116
North West -3 324 £525 +11.11% 198
South West +6 316 £525 +0.96% 169
Scotland -2 189 £498 +0.51% 98
East of England +14 137 £505 +1.00% 75
North East +13 111 £425 -19.05% 72
East Midlands -4 76 £488 +6.85% 66
Wales -6 47 £525 +40.00% 45
Northern Ireland +20 23 £475 +7.95% 30
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
1 329 (5.81%) Confluence
2 140 (2.47%) SharePoint
3 131 (2.32%) Apache Spark
4 125 (2.21%) Apache Airflow
5 112 (1.98%) Apache
6 88 (1.56%) SAS
7 43 (0.76%) CMS
8 38 (0.67%) IIS
8 38 (0.67%) Jupyter
9 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
10 23 (0.41%) nginx
11 15 (0.27%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
12 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.19%) OpenStack
13 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
13 11 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
14 9 (0.16%) Appian
15 7 (0.12%) Mendix
15 7 (0.12%) Mule
Applications
1 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
2 58 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
3 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
4 36 (0.64%) MS Visio
5 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
8 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
9 7 (0.12%) Trello
10 5 (0.088%) Notion
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 69 (1.22%) Dynamics CRM
2 38 (0.67%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.19%) Aladdin
3 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
6 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
7 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 5 (0.088%) Maximo
8 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
9 4 (0.071%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,075 (54.35%) Azure
2 2,004 (35.42%) AWS
3 1,759 (31.09%) Azure DevOps
4 973 (17.20%) GitHub
5 722 (12.76%) GCP
6 604 (10.68%) GitHub Actions
7 469 (8.29%) Power Platform
8 446 (7.88%) Serverless
9 297 (5.25%) Amazon S3
10 267 (4.72%) AWS Lambda
11 264 (4.67%) Entra ID
12 248 (4.38%) AWS CloudFormation
13 235 (4.15%) Amazon EKS
14 220 (3.89%) Azure AKS
15 212 (3.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 201 (3.55%) Azure Data Factory
17 199 (3.52%) Azure Monitor
18 180 (3.18%) Amazon EC2
19 164 (2.90%) Dynamics 365
20 157 (2.77%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 248 (4.38%) Firewall
2 163 (2.88%) DNS
3 124 (2.19%) VPN
4 112 (1.98%) Network Security
5 62 (1.10%) TCP/IP
6 51 (0.90%) WAN
7 45 (0.80%) SSL
8 44 (0.78%) DHCP
9 37 (0.65%) SD-WAN
10 32 (0.57%) BGP
10 32 (0.57%) HTTP
10 32 (0.57%) Internet
11 29 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
12 25 (0.44%) OSPF
13 22 (0.39%) SAN
13 22 (0.39%) VLAN
14 21 (0.37%) SSH
15 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 315 (5.57%) Power BI
2 294 (5.20%) SQL Server
3 285 (5.04%) PostgreSQL
4 200 (3.53%) Data Warehouse
5 188 (3.32%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.20%) Relational Database
7 177 (3.13%) MongoDB
8 162 (2.86%) Data Lake
9 122 (2.16%) Amazon RDS
10 118 (2.09%) Metadata
11 113 (2.00%) Azure SQL Database
12 90 (1.59%) DynamoDB
13 86 (1.52%) Delta Lake
14 80 (1.41%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.25%) Redis
16 70 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
17 66 (1.17%) MySQL
18 65 (1.15%) Big Data
19 57 (1.01%) Amazon Athena
20 56 (0.99%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 823 (14.55%) Jenkins
2 786 (13.89%) Git
3 683 (12.07%) JIRA
4 601 (10.62%) GitLab
5 133 (2.35%) Selenium
6 103 (1.82%) Postman
7 101 (1.79%) SonarQube
8 91 (1.61%) JUnit
9 87 (1.54%) Maven
10 84 (1.48%) Bitbucket
11 67 (1.18%) Cypress.io
11 67 (1.18%) JMeter
12 65 (1.15%) REST Assured
13 58 (1.03%) Cucumber
13 58 (1.03%) Gradle
14 49 (0.87%) Gatling
15 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
16 42 (0.74%) Mockito
17 41 (0.72%) Claude Code
18 40 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,443 (25.50%) Social Skills
2 1,015 (17.94%) Finance
3 824 (14.56%) Public Sector
4 505 (8.93%) Analytical Skills
5 373 (6.59%) Banking
6 150 (2.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 103 (1.82%) Retail
8 98 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
9 70 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
10 68 (1.20%) Legal
11 67 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
12 54 (0.95%) Marketing
13 53 (0.94%) Investment Banking
14 48 (0.85%) Telecoms
15 47 (0.83%) Aerospace
15 47 (0.83%) Military
16 45 (0.80%) Law
17 44 (0.78%) Front Office
18 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
19 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,090 (19.26%) DevOps Engineer
2 934 (16.51%) Developer
3 831 (14.69%) Senior
4 618 (10.92%) Architect
5 546 (9.65%) Lead
6 346 (6.12%) Azure Engineer
7 326 (5.76%) Data Engineer
8 284 (5.02%) Analyst
9 272 (4.81%) AWS Engineer
10 231 (4.08%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
12 202 (3.57%) Senior DevOps
13 193 (3.41%) Java Developer
14 190 (3.36%) AWS DevOps
15 186 (3.29%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 185 (3.27%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 178 (3.15%) Solutions Architect
18 177 (3.13%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 158 (2.79%) Senior Developer
20 153 (2.70%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 589 (10.41%) REST
2 486 (8.59%) .NET
3 354 (6.26%) Kafka
4 337 (5.96%) RESTful
5 301 (5.32%) Spring
6 285 (5.04%) React
7 283 (5.00%) Spring Boot
8 215 (3.80%) Node.js
9 183 (3.23%) JSON
10 166 (2.93%) Playwright
11 165 (2.92%) OAuth
12 163 (2.88%) PySpark
13 148 (2.62%) AngularJS
14 140 (2.47%) SOAP
15 135 (2.39%) .NET Framework
16 131 (2.32%) HTML
17 118 (2.09%) OAuth2
18 114 (2.01%) YAML
19 110 (1.94%) Middleware
20 108 (1.91%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,019 (18.01%) Cloud Native
2 402 (7.10%) Product Ownership
3 268 (4.74%) Distributed Systems
4 178 (3.15%) Enterprise Software
5 174 (3.08%) Onboarding
6 152 (2.69%) Legacy Systems
7 148 (2.62%) Hybrid Cloud
8 93 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
9 82 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
10 81 (1.43%) Public Cloud
11 76 (1.34%) AI Agents
12 74 (1.31%) Management Information System
13 72 (1.27%) Data Structures
14 70 (1.24%) Data Centre
14 70 (1.24%) Security Posture
15 64 (1.13%) Replication
16 60 (1.06%) Enterprise Cloud
17 55 (0.97%) Virtual Team
18 50 (0.88%) Mobile App
19 48 (0.85%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 517 (9.14%) Linux
2 307 (5.43%) Windows
3 113 (2.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 92 (1.63%) Unix
5 85 (1.50%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.58%) VMS
7 30 (0.53%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.49%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
10 9 (0.16%) Solaris
10 9 (0.16%) zOS
11 8 (0.14%) AIX
11 8 (0.14%) CentOS
11 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
12 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,342 (59.07%) CI/CD
2 2,279 (40.28%) Agile
3 1,568 (27.71%) Infrastructure as Code
4 930 (16.44%) Continuous Improvement
5 923 (16.31%) Containerisation
6 883 (15.61%) Problem-Solving
7 873 (15.43%) Test Automation
8 819 (14.48%) Microservices
9 810 (14.32%) Stakeholder Management
10 785 (13.87%) AI
11 712 (12.58%) Observability
12 696 (12.30%) Platform Engineering
13 689 (12.18%) Scrum
14 685 (12.11%) Software Engineering
15 679 (12.00%) Migration
16 608 (10.75%) Analytics
17 550 (9.72%) Technical Leadership
18 537 (9.49%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 502 (8.87%) Data Modelling
20 464 (8.20%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,608 (28.42%) Python
2 1,042 (18.42%) SQL
3 802 (14.17%) Java
4 504 (8.91%) C#
5 470 (8.31%) Bash
6 466 (8.24%) PowerShell
7 464 (8.20%) JavaScript
8 310 (5.48%) TypeScript
9 229 (4.05%) Bicep
10 97 (1.71%) Go
11 71 (1.25%) Apex Code
11 71 (1.25%) Shell Script
12 70 (1.24%) T-SQL
13 65 (1.15%) PL/SQL
14 64 (1.13%) Scala
15 59 (1.04%) Groovy
16 32 (0.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 31 (0.55%) C++
18 29 (0.51%) Perl
19 23 (0.41%) C
Qualifications
1 1,813 (32.04%) Security Cleared
2 1,531 (27.06%) SC Cleared
3 325 (5.74%) Degree
4 225 (3.98%) Azure Certification
5 223 (3.94%) BPSS Clearance
6 196 (3.46%) DV Cleared
7 189 (3.34%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.17%) Computer Science Degree
9 87 (1.54%) Microsoft Certification
10 80 (1.41%) CISSP
11 64 (1.13%) ISTQB
12 58 (1.03%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 53 (0.94%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.81%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 35 (0.62%) Master's Degree
17 33 (0.58%) CISM
18 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 27 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
20 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 515 (9.10%) QA
2 288 (5.09%) Data Quality
3 199 (3.52%) Accessibility
4 151 (2.67%) GDPR
5 97 (1.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.40%) WCAG
7 78 (1.38%) NIST
8 55 (0.97%) NCSC
9 48 (0.85%) PMO
10 38 (0.67%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.67%) SLA
11 30 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.51%) GRC
13 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.21%) HIPAA
15 11 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
15 11 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
15 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
16 9 (0.16%) PSD2
16 9 (0.16%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,115 (19.71%) Docker
2 183 (3.23%) Active Directory
3 85 (1.50%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
5 25 (0.44%) vSphere
6 18 (0.32%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
8 16 (0.28%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.23%) Squid
10 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
11 11 (0.19%) Postfix
12 9 (0.16%) IAG
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%) Firmware
16 5 (0.088%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,643 (29.04%) Terraform
2 1,486 (26.26%) Kubernetes
3 530 (9.37%) Ansible
4 366 (6.47%) Grafana
5 312 (5.51%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.48%) Argo
7 63 (1.11%) Puppet
8 58 (1.03%) Single Sign-On
9 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
10 45 (0.80%) Istio
11 39 (0.69%) Microsoft Intune
12 34 (0.60%) Packer
13 20 (0.35%) Kibana
13 20 (0.35%) Kustomize
14 19 (0.34%) SCCM
15 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
15 18 (0.32%) vCenter Server
16 16 (0.28%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
Vendors
1 1,061 (18.75%) Microsoft
2 316 (5.59%) Oracle
3 273 (4.83%) Databricks
3 273 (4.83%) Google
4 209 (3.69%) ServiceNow
5 190 (3.36%) Salesforce
6 175 (3.09%) Splunk
7 144 (2.55%) Dynatrace
8 124 (2.19%) SAP
9 118 (2.09%) VMware
10 108 (1.91%) Red Hat
11 63 (1.11%) IBM
12 62 (1.10%) Informatica
13 57 (1.01%) MuleSoft
14 56 (0.99%) OpenAI
15 52 (0.92%) Atlassian
16 50 (0.88%) Cisco
17 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
17 43 (0.76%) Foundry
17 43 (0.76%) Okta