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

6 months to
20 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +3 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,391 3,096 4,156
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.64% 10.37% 9.47%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.54% 11.39% 11.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,764 2,224 2,846
10th Percentile £385 £366 £400
25th Percentile £438 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.98%
75th Percentile £613 £626 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £726
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 16 125
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.35
25th Percentile £61.87 £51.25 £61.60
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +12.59% +2.89%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.81 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £66.50
% change year-on-year - +5.26% +1.53%

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 42,996 27,186 37,276
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.90% 91.05% 84.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,808 17,251 23,716
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.19% -4.48% -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 2,575 1,262 2,618
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.73
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.82 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.50 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +72.39% -32.00% +7.05%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.19 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.93% -34.02% +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 20 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 20 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 20 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 +3 4,574 £525 - 1,142
UK excluding London +5 2,381 £500 - 919
London +4 2,341 £550 - 440
Work from Home -1 1,493 £525 - 678
North of England +7 849 £500 - 277
Yorkshire +2 458 £513 +2.50% 80
South East -4 453 £511 +2.25% 283
Midlands 0 430 £488 -2.50% 103
West Midlands -1 340 £500 -3.24% 63
North West +2 318 £500 +1.63% 159
South West +13 289 £510 -7.27% 114
Scotland +1 203 £500 +1.21% 43
East of England +19 135 £525 +7.69% 63
North East +7 91 £450 -14.29% 42
East Midlands -1 86 £468 +2.86% 40
Wales +5 50 £425 +39.13% 30
Northern Ireland +10 20 £475 +11.76% 28
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
1 327 (6.07%) Confluence
2 138 (2.56%) Apache Spark
3 122 (2.26%) SharePoint
4 103 (1.91%) Apache Airflow
5 96 (1.78%) Apache
6 86 (1.60%) SAS
7 48 (0.89%) CMS
8 33 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.58%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.58%) nginx
10 29 (0.54%) IIS
11 19 (0.35%) OpenStack
12 17 (0.32%) Camunda
13 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
14 13 (0.24%) Palantir Foundry
15 10 (0.19%) Mendix
15 10 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
17 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
17 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 78 (1.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
3 51 (0.95%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 38 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
5 29 (0.54%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.19%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.074%) Notion
9 3 (0.056%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.056%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 67 (1.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 34 (0.63%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.19%) 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 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.093%) Endur
8 5 (0.093%) Magento
8 5 (0.093%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.093%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.093%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.093%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.056%) Findur
9 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.056%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.056%) SAP MM
9 3 (0.056%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,892 (53.64%) Azure
2 1,892 (35.10%) AWS
3 1,594 (29.57%) Azure DevOps
4 883 (16.38%) GitHub
5 673 (12.48%) GCP
6 526 (9.76%) GitHub Actions
7 484 (8.98%) Serverless
8 456 (8.46%) Power Platform
9 297 (5.51%) Amazon S3
10 269 (4.99%) AWS Lambda
11 246 (4.56%) AWS CloudFormation
12 245 (4.54%) Entra ID
13 223 (4.14%) Azure AKS
14 214 (3.97%) Amazon EKS
15 189 (3.51%) Azure Data Factory
16 184 (3.41%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 175 (3.25%) Amazon EC2
18 165 (3.06%) Azure Monitor
19 162 (3.01%) PaaS
20 152 (2.82%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 238 (4.41%) Firewall
2 137 (2.54%) DNS
3 118 (2.19%) Network Security
4 107 (1.98%) VPN
5 48 (0.89%) WAN
6 44 (0.82%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.67%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.63%) BGP
9 30 (0.56%) SSL
10 27 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 24 (0.45%) OSPF
12 23 (0.43%) DHCP
12 23 (0.43%) HTTP
12 23 (0.43%) SAN
13 22 (0.41%) Internet
14 18 (0.33%) IPsec
15 17 (0.32%) BIG-IP
15 17 (0.32%) LAN
15 17 (0.32%) MPLS
15 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 296 (5.49%) Power BI
2 259 (4.80%) SQL Server
3 249 (4.62%) PostgreSQL
4 191 (3.54%) NoSQL
5 170 (3.15%) Relational Database
6 162 (3.01%) Data Lake
7 156 (2.89%) Data Warehouse
7 156 (2.89%) MongoDB
8 116 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
9 105 (1.95%) Azure SQL Database
10 98 (1.82%) DynamoDB
10 98 (1.82%) Metadata
11 86 (1.60%) Delta Lake
12 75 (1.39%) Oracle Database
13 73 (1.35%) Amazon Athena
14 71 (1.32%) Big Data
15 67 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
16 66 (1.22%) Redis
17 60 (1.11%) Elasticsearch
18 49 (0.91%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 769 (14.26%) Jenkins
2 682 (12.65%) Git
3 665 (12.34%) JIRA
4 580 (10.76%) GitLab
5 115 (2.13%) Selenium
6 102 (1.89%) Postman
7 91 (1.69%) JUnit
8 90 (1.67%) SonarQube
9 73 (1.35%) Bitbucket
10 70 (1.30%) Maven
10 70 (1.30%) REST Assured
11 60 (1.11%) Cucumber
12 58 (1.08%) JMeter
13 49 (0.91%) Cypress.io
14 47 (0.87%) Gradle
15 43 (0.80%) Gatling
16 40 (0.74%) Artifactory
17 39 (0.72%) Mockito
18 38 (0.70%) Visual Studio
19 32 (0.59%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,341 (24.87%) Social Skills
2 982 (18.22%) Finance
3 747 (13.86%) Public Sector
4 418 (7.75%) Analytical Skills
5 350 (6.49%) Banking
6 136 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
7 110 (2.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 76 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
9 74 (1.37%) Retail
10 69 (1.28%) Legal
11 58 (1.08%) Marketing
12 57 (1.06%) Organisational Skills
13 49 (0.91%) Military
14 45 (0.83%) Financial Institution
15 38 (0.70%) Investment Banking
15 38 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
16 37 (0.69%) Law
17 33 (0.61%) Telecoms
18 31 (0.58%) Front Office
19 28 (0.52%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,098 (20.37%) DevOps Engineer
2 830 (15.40%) Developer
3 757 (14.04%) Senior
4 636 (11.80%) Architect
5 479 (8.89%) Lead
6 338 (6.27%) Azure Engineer
7 320 (5.94%) Analyst
8 316 (5.86%) Data Engineer
9 269 (4.99%) AWS Engineer
10 199 (3.69%) AWS DevOps
10 199 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
11 195 (3.62%) Platform Engineer
12 186 (3.45%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 180 (3.34%) Java Developer
13 180 (3.34%) Senior DevOps
13 180 (3.34%) Solutions Architect
14 178 (3.30%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 164 (3.04%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 160 (2.97%) Business Analyst
17 150 (2.78%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 492 (9.13%) REST
2 462 (8.57%) .NET
3 309 (5.73%) React
3 309 (5.73%) Spring
4 295 (5.47%) Spring Boot
5 294 (5.45%) RESTful
6 286 (5.31%) Kafka
7 232 (4.30%) Node.js
8 171 (3.17%) AngularJS
9 165 (3.06%) PySpark
10 155 (2.88%) OAuth
11 149 (2.76%) Playwright
12 136 (2.52%) JSON
13 122 (2.26%) .NET Framework
14 120 (2.23%) SOAP
15 118 (2.19%) YAML
16 114 (2.11%) HTML
17 109 (2.02%) Middleware
17 109 (2.02%) OpenID
18 105 (1.95%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 939 (17.42%) Cloud Native
2 358 (6.64%) Product Ownership
3 230 (4.27%) Distributed Systems
4 151 (2.80%) Onboarding
5 128 (2.37%) Legacy Systems
6 127 (2.36%) Enterprise Software
7 113 (2.10%) Hybrid Cloud
8 104 (1.93%) Public Cloud
9 86 (1.60%) Data Centre
10 80 (1.48%) Data Protection Act
11 71 (1.32%) Management Information System
12 66 (1.22%) Self-Motivation
13 58 (1.08%) Security Posture
14 57 (1.06%) Data Structures
15 53 (0.98%) Mobile App
16 52 (0.96%) AI Agents
17 51 (0.95%) Virtual Team
18 49 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
19 43 (0.80%) NHS
20 42 (0.78%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 460 (8.53%) Linux
2 276 (5.12%) Windows
3 101 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.48%) Unix
5 57 (1.06%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.72%) VMS
7 29 (0.54%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.45%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.28%) Android
10 14 (0.26%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.093%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.093%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.074%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.074%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.074%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,121 (57.89%) CI/CD
2 2,055 (38.12%) Agile
3 1,425 (26.43%) Infrastructure as Code
4 849 (15.75%) Containerisation
5 805 (14.93%) Problem-Solving
6 778 (14.43%) Microservices
7 767 (14.23%) Continuous Improvement
8 763 (14.15%) Test Automation
9 657 (12.19%) Migration
10 655 (12.15%) Stakeholder Management
11 630 (11.69%) Observability
12 626 (11.61%) AI
13 616 (11.43%) Analytics
13 616 (11.43%) Scrum
14 560 (10.39%) Platform Engineering
15 550 (10.20%) Software Engineering
16 493 (9.14%) Data Modelling
17 454 (8.42%) Technical Leadership
18 437 (8.11%) Roadmaps
19 426 (7.90%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,504 (27.90%) Python
2 1,011 (18.75%) SQL
3 733 (13.60%) Java
4 503 (9.33%) C#
5 400 (7.42%) JavaScript
6 377 (6.99%) Bash
7 366 (6.79%) PowerShell
8 268 (4.97%) TypeScript
9 185 (3.43%) Bicep
10 110 (2.04%) Go
11 67 (1.24%) Apex Code
12 63 (1.17%) Scala
12 63 (1.17%) Shell Script
13 53 (0.98%) T-SQL
14 50 (0.93%) PL/SQL
15 45 (0.83%) Groovy
16 33 (0.61%) C++
17 26 (0.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 25 (0.46%) Ruby
19 24 (0.45%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,706 (31.65%) Security Cleared
2 1,434 (26.60%) SC Cleared
3 327 (6.07%) Degree
4 211 (3.91%) Azure Certification
5 172 (3.19%) AWS Certification
6 168 (3.12%) BPSS Clearance
7 165 (3.06%) DV Cleared
8 127 (2.36%) Computer Science Degree
9 86 (1.60%) CISSP
10 70 (1.30%) Microsoft Certification
11 59 (1.09%) ISTQB
12 52 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 47 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
13 47 (0.87%) CISM
14 45 (0.83%) PMI Certification
15 44 (0.82%) Master's Degree
16 43 (0.80%) PMP
17 27 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 454 (8.42%) QA
2 263 (4.88%) Data Quality
3 174 (3.23%) GDPR
4 163 (3.02%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 117 (2.17%) NIST
7 73 (1.35%) NCSC
8 65 (1.21%) WCAG
9 49 (0.91%) PCI DSS
10 44 (0.82%) SLA
11 32 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.54%) PMO
13 25 (0.46%) 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 (0.19%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,012 (18.77%) Docker
2 182 (3.38%) Active Directory
3 76 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
3 76 (1.41%) VMware Infrastructure
4 30 (0.56%) vSphere
5 27 (0.50%) VMware NSX
6 19 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
7 17 (0.32%) Squid
7 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
8 16 (0.30%) Hyper-V
9 14 (0.26%) Postfix
10 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 7 (0.13%) RACF
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) Firmware
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 5 (0.093%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.093%) NFS
13 5 (0.093%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,536 (28.49%) Terraform
2 1,347 (24.99%) Kubernetes
3 519 (9.63%) Ansible
4 355 (6.59%) Grafana
5 307 (5.69%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.54%) Argo
7 76 (1.41%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.28%) Puppet
9 52 (0.96%) Istio
10 32 (0.59%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.58%) Packer
12 28 (0.52%) Microsoft Intune
13 26 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.41%) HP ALM
15 21 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 18 (0.33%) Consul
16 18 (0.33%) Kibana
17 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
18 13 (0.24%) FortiGate
18 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 938 (17.40%) Microsoft
2 274 (5.08%) Databricks
3 273 (5.06%) Oracle
4 254 (4.71%) Google
5 188 (3.49%) ServiceNow
6 181 (3.36%) Splunk
7 180 (3.34%) Salesforce
8 130 (2.41%) Red Hat
9 121 (2.24%) SAP
10 114 (2.11%) VMware
11 111 (2.06%) Dynatrace
12 77 (1.43%) OpenAI
13 58 (1.08%) Atlassian
14 55 (1.02%) IBM
15 54 (1.00%) Informatica
16 48 (0.89%) CyberArk
17 42 (0.78%) Cisco
18 40 (0.74%) MuleSoft
18 40 (0.74%) Okta
19 39 (0.72%) Foundry