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 18 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,649 3,408 4,082
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.68% 10.47% 9.69%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.55% 11.59% 11.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,909 2,436 2,789
10th Percentile £385 £363 £385
25th Percentile £440 £425 £456
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 £725 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 24 112
10th Percentile £37.55 £37.25 £56.50
25th Percentile £61.87 £52.19 £61.51
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £84.10 £77.50
90th Percentile £93.81 £88.38 £86.86
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%

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 45,026 29,407 35,968
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.11% 90.34% 85.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,974 18,494 23,016
10th Percentile £325 £300 £301
25th Percentile £419 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,654 1,554 2,302
10th Percentile £14.87 £14.20 £13.00
25th Percentile £20.01 £17.37 £16.71
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.50 £51.55 £62.00
90th Percentile £82.46 £70.00 £73.48
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.33 £38.20
% change year-on-year +84.96% -36.30% -4.51%

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 18 July 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 18 July 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 18 July 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 4,794 £525 - 1,101
UK excluding London +5 2,482 £500 - 807
London +2 2,462 £550 - 452
Work from Home +1 1,633 £525 +1.84% 568
North of England +5 867 £500 +2.04% 232
South East -8 460 £525 +5.00% 239
Yorkshire +2 455 £500 - 56
Midlands +1 452 £491 -0.81% 120
West Midlands -2 361 £500 - 87
North West -5 333 £523 +10.11% 128
South West +14 316 £525 -0.94% 110
Scotland +1 212 £475 -1.96% 33
East of England +23 148 £525 +5.00% 50
North East +13 98 £425 -18.66% 50
East Midlands +1 86 £488 +5.41% 33
Wales -5 48 £425 +38.10% 25
Northern Ireland +16 22 £475 +11.76% 17
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
1 337 (5.97%) Confluence
2 139 (2.46%) Apache Spark
3 137 (2.43%) SharePoint
4 112 (1.98%) Apache Airflow
5 106 (1.88%) Apache
6 78 (1.38%) SAS
7 50 (0.89%) CMS
8 37 (0.65%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
9 35 (0.62%) nginx
10 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.28%) Camunda
11 16 (0.28%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
13 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
14 9 (0.16%) Appian
14 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
15 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 7 (0.12%) JBoss
Applications
1 70 (1.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.15%) Microsoft Project
3 46 (0.81%) Microsoft Office
4 39 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 36 (0.64%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
10 4 (0.071%) Notion
11 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 72 (1.27%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.71%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) Endur
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 3 (0.053%) Findur
8 3 (0.053%) Infor LN
8 3 (0.053%) OpenText VIM for SAP
8 3 (0.053%) Salesforce CRM
8 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
Cloud Services
1 3,048 (53.96%) Azure
2 2,018 (35.72%) AWS
3 1,690 (29.92%) Azure DevOps
4 950 (16.82%) GitHub
5 715 (12.66%) GCP
6 581 (10.29%) GitHub Actions
7 470 (8.32%) Serverless
8 464 (8.21%) Power Platform
9 318 (5.63%) Amazon S3
10 281 (4.97%) AWS Lambda
11 257 (4.55%) AWS CloudFormation
12 246 (4.35%) Entra ID
13 224 (3.97%) Amazon EKS
14 221 (3.91%) Azure AKS
15 196 (3.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 193 (3.42%) Amazon EC2
17 188 (3.33%) Azure Monitor
18 181 (3.20%) Azure Data Factory
19 161 (2.85%) Dynamics 365
20 160 (2.83%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 238 (4.21%) Firewall
2 153 (2.71%) DNS
3 117 (2.07%) Network Security
4 116 (2.05%) VPN
5 56 (0.99%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 38 (0.67%) SSL
8 35 (0.62%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.60%) BGP
10 32 (0.57%) DHCP
11 29 (0.51%) Internet
12 27 (0.48%) HTTP
12 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.44%) SAN
14 24 (0.42%) OSPF
15 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) MPLS
16 17 (0.30%) VLAN
16 17 (0.30%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 305 (5.40%) Power BI
2 289 (5.12%) SQL Server
3 269 (4.76%) PostgreSQL
4 186 (3.29%) NoSQL
5 184 (3.26%) Relational Database
6 173 (3.06%) Data Warehouse
7 170 (3.01%) MongoDB
8 155 (2.74%) Data Lake
9 122 (2.16%) Amazon RDS
10 106 (1.88%) Metadata
11 102 (1.81%) DynamoDB
12 100 (1.77%) Azure SQL Database
13 86 (1.52%) Oracle Database
14 83 (1.47%) Delta Lake
15 74 (1.31%) Big Data
16 68 (1.20%) Amazon Athena
16 68 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
17 67 (1.19%) Redis
18 63 (1.12%) Elasticsearch
19 59 (1.04%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 817 (14.46%) Jenkins
2 758 (13.42%) Git
3 693 (12.27%) JIRA
4 578 (10.23%) GitLab
5 136 (2.41%) Selenium
6 110 (1.95%) Postman
7 98 (1.73%) JUnit
8 97 (1.72%) SonarQube
9 81 (1.43%) Maven
10 79 (1.40%) REST Assured
11 76 (1.35%) Bitbucket
12 63 (1.12%) Cucumber
12 63 (1.12%) Cypress.io
13 59 (1.04%) JMeter
14 54 (0.96%) Gradle
15 44 (0.78%) Gatling
16 43 (0.76%) Mockito
17 39 (0.69%) Visual Studio
18 37 (0.65%) Artifactory
19 33 (0.58%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,401 (24.80%) Social Skills
2 1,023 (18.11%) Finance
3 811 (14.36%) Public Sector
4 470 (8.32%) Analytical Skills
5 358 (6.34%) Banking
6 127 (2.25%) Documentation Skills
7 125 (2.21%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 90 (1.59%) Retail
9 74 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
10 69 (1.22%) Legal
11 64 (1.13%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (0.99%) Marketing
13 48 (0.85%) Military
14 43 (0.76%) Investment Banking
14 43 (0.76%) Law
15 42 (0.74%) Telecoms
16 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
17 35 (0.62%) Front Office
18 32 (0.57%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,132 (20.04%) DevOps Engineer
2 934 (16.53%) Developer
3 786 (13.91%) Senior
4 640 (11.33%) Architect
5 515 (9.12%) Lead
6 344 (6.09%) Azure Engineer
7 318 (5.63%) Data Engineer
8 305 (5.40%) Analyst
9 283 (5.01%) AWS Engineer
10 231 (4.09%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.59%) Java Developer
13 202 (3.58%) AWS DevOps
14 197 (3.49%) Senior DevOps
15 188 (3.33%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 187 (3.31%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 183 (3.24%) Solutions Architect
18 181 (3.20%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 155 (2.74%) Business Analyst
20 147 (2.60%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 548 (9.70%) REST
2 497 (8.80%) .NET
3 328 (5.81%) RESTful
4 327 (5.79%) Spring
5 317 (5.61%) React
6 315 (5.58%) Kafka
7 308 (5.45%) Spring Boot
8 239 (4.23%) Node.js
9 170 (3.01%) AngularJS
10 166 (2.94%) Playwright
11 164 (2.90%) OAuth
11 164 (2.90%) PySpark
12 160 (2.83%) JSON
13 135 (2.39%) SOAP
14 133 (2.35%) .NET Framework
14 133 (2.35%) HTML
15 114 (2.02%) OAuth2
16 110 (1.95%) CSS
17 108 (1.91%) Middleware
18 105 (1.86%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 995 (17.61%) Cloud Native
2 391 (6.92%) Product Ownership
3 254 (4.50%) Distributed Systems
4 174 (3.08%) Onboarding
5 154 (2.73%) Enterprise Software
6 153 (2.71%) Legacy Systems
7 124 (2.20%) Hybrid Cloud
8 97 (1.72%) Public Cloud
9 89 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
10 81 (1.43%) Self-Motivation
11 79 (1.40%) Data Centre
12 68 (1.20%) Management Information System
12 68 (1.20%) Security Posture
13 67 (1.19%) Data Structures
14 61 (1.08%) Replication
15 60 (1.06%) Virtual Team
16 59 (1.04%) AI Agents
17 55 (0.97%) Mobile App
18 54 (0.96%) Enterprise Cloud
19 53 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 486 (8.60%) Linux
2 295 (5.22%) Windows
3 105 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.40%) Unix
5 70 (1.24%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) VMS
7 28 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) Solaris
11 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) CentOS
12 8 (0.14%) zOS
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) AIX
14 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.071%) Windows 10
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,307 (58.54%) CI/CD
2 2,235 (39.56%) Agile
3 1,522 (26.94%) Infrastructure as Code
4 932 (16.50%) Containerisation
5 862 (15.26%) Problem-Solving
6 851 (15.06%) Continuous Improvement
7 840 (14.87%) Test Automation
8 825 (14.60%) Microservices
9 729 (12.90%) Stakeholder Management
10 714 (12.64%) AI
11 693 (12.27%) Observability
12 688 (12.18%) Migration
13 687 (12.16%) Scrum
14 651 (11.52%) Platform Engineering
15 625 (11.06%) Software Engineering
16 586 (10.37%) Analytics
17 493 (8.73%) Technical Leadership
18 486 (8.60%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 485 (8.59%) Data Modelling
20 454 (8.04%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,575 (27.88%) Python
2 1,025 (18.14%) SQL
3 787 (13.93%) Java
4 514 (9.10%) C#
5 439 (7.77%) Bash
6 434 (7.68%) JavaScript
7 408 (7.22%) PowerShell
8 306 (5.42%) TypeScript
9 197 (3.49%) Bicep
10 116 (2.05%) Go
11 70 (1.24%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.22%) PL/SQL
13 68 (1.20%) T-SQL
14 67 (1.19%) Shell Script
15 61 (1.08%) Scala
16 54 (0.96%) Groovy
17 29 (0.51%) C++
18 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
19 24 (0.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 23 (0.41%) C
Qualifications
1 1,789 (31.67%) Security Cleared
2 1,501 (26.57%) SC Cleared
3 339 (6.00%) Degree
4 217 (3.84%) Azure Certification
5 206 (3.65%) BPSS Clearance
6 190 (3.36%) AWS Certification
7 189 (3.35%) DV Cleared
8 129 (2.28%) Computer Science Degree
9 79 (1.40%) CISSP
10 76 (1.35%) Microsoft Certification
11 63 (1.12%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 55 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
14 47 (0.83%) Master's Degree
15 44 (0.78%) PMI Certification
15 44 (0.78%) PMP
16 35 (0.62%) CISM
17 33 (0.58%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 27 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
19 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 498 (8.82%) QA
2 262 (4.64%) Data Quality
3 195 (3.45%) Accessibility
4 168 (2.97%) GDPR
5 104 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 93 (1.65%) NIST
7 78 (1.38%) WCAG
8 64 (1.13%) NCSC
9 41 (0.73%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.69%) PMO
11 37 (0.65%) SLA
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
16 12 (0.21%) SOC 2
17 10 (0.18%) PSD2
18 9 (0.16%) ISO 20022
18 9 (0.16%) SEPA
19 8 (0.14%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 1,098 (19.44%) Docker
2 178 (3.15%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
4 81 (1.43%) VMware Infrastructure
5 31 (0.55%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.35%) Squid
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.28%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) IAG
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
14 6 (0.11%) RACF
15 5 (0.089%) Firmware
15 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,628 (28.82%) Terraform
2 1,445 (25.58%) Kubernetes
3 530 (9.38%) Ansible
4 386 (6.83%) Grafana
5 331 (5.86%) Prometheus
6 95 (1.68%) Argo
7 75 (1.33%) Single Sign-On
8 61 (1.08%) Puppet
9 45 (0.80%) Istio
10 39 (0.69%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.57%) Microsoft Intune
11 32 (0.57%) Packer
12 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 19 (0.34%) Consul
14 19 (0.34%) Kibana
15 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
16 15 (0.27%) SCCM
Vendors
1 1,008 (17.84%) Microsoft
2 319 (5.65%) Oracle
3 270 (4.78%) Databricks
4 259 (4.58%) Google
5 201 (3.56%) ServiceNow
6 189 (3.35%) Splunk
7 185 (3.27%) Salesforce
8 131 (2.32%) SAP
9 129 (2.28%) Dynatrace
10 120 (2.12%) VMware
11 115 (2.04%) Red Hat
12 70 (1.24%) OpenAI
13 62 (1.10%) IBM
14 57 (1.01%) Informatica
15 54 (0.96%) Atlassian
16 48 (0.85%) Cisco
16 48 (0.85%) Foundry
17 46 (0.81%) CyberArk
18 44 (0.78%) MuleSoft
19 43 (0.76%) Okta