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 16 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,307 3,360 3,903
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.58% 10.55% 9.16%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.19% 11.88% 10.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,021 2,308 2,839
10th Percentile £370 £388 £410
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £563 £563
Median % change year-on-year -7.56% - -6.25%
75th Percentile £614 £670 £656
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £545
% change year-on-year -4.76% -3.67% -0.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 26 83
10th Percentile £41.90 £37.13 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £53.50
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.50 £79.62 £70.00
90th Percentile £94.50 £80.75 £77.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.84%

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 32,654 28,287 37,362
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.81% 88.79% 87.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,662 17,217 24,715
10th Percentile £304 £306 £304
25th Percentile £406 £413 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,980 898 1,602
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.75 £18.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -19.75% +16.41%
75th Percentile £56.06 £62.24 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.80 £74.91 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.45 £43.83
% change year-on-year -21.76% -30.52% +51.12%

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 16 January 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 16 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Top 17 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 16 January 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 3,696 £525 -8.70% 1,598
UK excluding London +7 1,936 £500 -4.76% 1,378
London -2 1,848 £540 -9.24% 447
Work from Home 0 1,233 £525 -2.78% 900
North of England +5 664 £492 -3.77% 317
South East 0 390 £525 -12.50% 450
Midlands +22 388 £515 -1.67% 164
Yorkshire +1 345 £500 -1.96% 126
West Midlands +20 317 £525 - 89
North West +5 274 £455 -9.00% 151
South West +9 236 £525 -11.02% 168
Scotland +6 188 £475 +5.56% 61
East of England +17 101 £558 +9.85% 158
East Midlands +14 71 £425 -10.53% 72
North East -9 46 £475 -17.21% 41
Wales +6 35 £485 +79.63% 62
Northern Ireland -6 8 - - 26

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
1 261 (6.06%) Confluence
2 87 (2.02%) SharePoint
3 83 (1.93%) Apache
4 78 (1.81%) SAS
5 66 (1.53%) Apache Spark
6 65 (1.51%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.77%) CMS
7 33 (0.77%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.74%) nginx
9 24 (0.56%) IIS
10 20 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.44%) JBoss
12 18 (0.42%) WebLogic
13 16 (0.37%) CICS
14 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.23%) Mendix
14 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.21%) iPlanet
15 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
16 8 (0.19%) Smallworld
Applications
1 91 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 31 (0.72%) Microsoft Project
4 27 (0.63%) Microsoft Office
5 16 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.35%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.21%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 5 (0.12%) Trello
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) Moqups
10 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 63 (1.46%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.39%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.33%) VisionPLUS
4 12 (0.28%) Endur
5 11 (0.26%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.21%) Maximo
6 9 (0.21%) Oracle ERP
7 7 (0.16%) NEC Housing
8 5 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 5 (0.12%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.093%) NetSuite
9 4 (0.093%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.093%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.093%) Remedy ITSM
9 4 (0.093%) SAP ERP
9 4 (0.093%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.070%) SAP CO
10 3 (0.070%) SAP FI
10 3 (0.070%) SAP FI/CO
Cloud Services
1 2,181 (50.64%) Azure
2 1,578 (36.64%) AWS
3 1,166 (27.07%) Azure DevOps
4 800 (18.57%) GitHub
5 631 (14.65%) GCP
6 516 (11.98%) Serverless
7 470 (10.91%) GitHub Actions
8 344 (7.99%) Power Platform
9 270 (6.27%) AWS CloudFormation
10 258 (5.99%) AWS Lambda
11 244 (5.67%) Amazon S3
12 207 (4.81%) Azure Data Factory
13 201 (4.67%) Azure AKS
14 191 (4.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 175 (4.06%) Amazon EKS
16 169 (3.92%) OpenShift
17 166 (3.85%) Amazon ECS
17 166 (3.85%) Dynamics 365
17 166 (3.85%) Entra ID
18 165 (3.83%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 204 (4.74%) Firewall
2 110 (2.55%) DNS
3 87 (2.02%) VPN
4 81 (1.88%) Network Security
5 54 (1.25%) TCP/IP
6 53 (1.23%) SSL
7 42 (0.98%) HTTP
8 34 (0.79%) HTTPS
9 22 (0.51%) WAN
10 19 (0.44%) BGP
11 18 (0.42%) SSH
12 17 (0.39%) FTP
12 17 (0.39%) MPLS
12 17 (0.39%) SMTP
13 16 (0.37%) DHCP
14 15 (0.35%) Kerberos
14 15 (0.35%) SD-WAN
15 13 (0.30%) OpenLDAP
16 11 (0.26%) Internet
17 10 (0.23%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 258 (5.99%) PostgreSQL
2 225 (5.22%) Power BI
3 171 (3.97%) SQL Server
4 165 (3.83%) NoSQL
5 137 (3.18%) Amazon RDS
6 129 (3.00%) Data Lake
7 111 (2.58%) Relational Database
8 109 (2.53%) MongoDB
9 104 (2.41%) Data Warehouse
10 90 (2.09%) Azure SQL Database
11 84 (1.95%) Oracle Database
12 67 (1.56%) DynamoDB
13 65 (1.51%) MySQL
14 57 (1.32%) Elasticsearch
15 55 (1.28%) Tableau
16 53 (1.23%) Amazon Aurora
17 52 (1.21%) Redis
18 48 (1.11%) Metadata
19 43 (1.00%) Delta Lake
20 41 (0.95%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 786 (18.25%) Jenkins
2 618 (14.35%) Git
3 605 (14.05%) JIRA
4 575 (13.35%) GitLab
5 133 (3.09%) Selenium
6 97 (2.25%) JUnit
7 91 (2.11%) Postman
8 74 (1.72%) SonarQube
8 74 (1.72%) Sonatype Nexus
9 72 (1.67%) Cypress.io
10 69 (1.60%) Bitbucket
11 59 (1.37%) Cucumber
12 51 (1.18%) Artifactory
13 49 (1.14%) Liquibase
14 46 (1.07%) JMeter
15 45 (1.04%) Gradle
16 44 (1.02%) CircleCI
17 41 (0.95%) Maven
18 37 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
19 34 (0.79%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,304 (30.28%) Social Skills
2 779 (18.09%) Finance
3 545 (12.65%) Public Sector
4 368 (8.54%) Banking
5 339 (7.87%) Analytical Skills
6 141 (3.27%) Documentation Skills
7 70 (1.63%) Financial Institution
8 68 (1.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 65 (1.51%) Influencing Skills
10 59 (1.37%) Marketing
11 50 (1.16%) Investment Banking
12 48 (1.11%) Front Office
12 48 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
13 47 (1.09%) Retail
14 44 (1.02%) Telecoms
15 36 (0.84%) Military
16 34 (0.79%) Pharmaceutical
17 30 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
18 27 (0.63%) Back Office
19 25 (0.58%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 843 (19.57%) DevOps Engineer
2 752 (17.46%) Developer
3 597 (13.86%) Senior
4 376 (8.73%) Architect
5 334 (7.75%) Lead
6 246 (5.71%) AWS Engineer
7 243 (5.64%) Azure Engineer
8 219 (5.08%) Data Engineer
9 212 (4.92%) Analyst
10 190 (4.41%) AWS DevOps
11 171 (3.97%) Software Engineer
12 165 (3.83%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 158 (3.67%) Cloud Engineer
14 152 (3.53%) Senior Developer
15 143 (3.32%) Platform Engineer
16 127 (2.95%) Consultant
17 122 (2.83%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 122 (2.83%) Senior DevOps
18 116 (2.69%) Solutions Architect
19 113 (2.62%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 494 (11.47%) REST
2 371 (8.61%) .NET
3 272 (6.32%) React
4 270 (6.27%) RESTful
5 269 (6.25%) Node.js
6 250 (5.80%) Kafka
7 216 (5.02%) Spring
8 199 (4.62%) Spring Boot
9 193 (4.48%) JSON
10 155 (3.60%) OAuth
11 144 (3.34%) AngularJS
12 142 (3.30%) SOAP
13 140 (3.25%) Elastic Stack
14 139 (3.23%) XML
15 131 (3.04%) HTML
16 130 (3.02%) YAML
17 105 (2.44%) Playwright
18 99 (2.30%) CSS
19 92 (2.14%) Middleware
20 91 (2.11%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 607 (14.09%) Cloud Native
2 235 (5.46%) Product Ownership
3 165 (3.83%) Distributed Systems
4 117 (2.72%) Onboarding
5 113 (2.62%) Public Cloud
6 90 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
7 79 (1.83%) Hybrid Cloud
8 72 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
9 57 (1.32%) Virtual Team
10 55 (1.28%) Data Protection Act
11 54 (1.25%) Data Centre
11 54 (1.25%) Management Information System
12 49 (1.14%) Replication
13 45 (1.04%) Mobile App
13 45 (1.04%) Security Posture
14 43 (1.00%) NHS
14 43 (1.00%) Private Cloud
15 41 (0.95%) CMDB
15 41 (0.95%) Self-Motivation
16 37 (0.86%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 491 (11.40%) Linux
2 244 (5.67%) Windows
3 110 (2.55%) Unix
4 54 (1.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 54 (1.25%) Windows Server
5 49 (1.14%) VMS
6 30 (0.70%) Android
7 29 (0.67%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.60%) Apple iOS
9 19 (0.44%) Windows 10
10 17 (0.39%) CentOS
11 14 (0.33%) Amazon Linux
12 10 (0.23%) Solaris
13 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.14%) zOS
14 5 (0.12%) Mac OS
15 2 (0.046%) Debian
15 2 (0.046%) Windows Server 2012
16 1 (0.023%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,468 (57.30%) CI/CD
2 1,741 (40.42%) Agile
3 1,134 (26.33%) Infrastructure as Code
4 845 (19.62%) Containerisation
5 820 (19.04%) Problem-Solving
6 656 (15.23%) Microservices
6 656 (15.23%) Test Automation
7 501 (11.63%) Continuous Improvement
8 487 (11.31%) Migration
9 484 (11.24%) Analytics
10 481 (11.17%) Scrum
11 440 (10.22%) Observability
12 414 (9.61%) Software Engineering
13 413 (9.59%) AI
14 364 (8.45%) Stakeholder Management
15 328 (7.62%) Mentoring
16 318 (7.38%) Data Modelling
17 292 (6.78%) Data Pipeline
18 289 (6.71%) Business Intelligence
18 289 (6.71%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,340 (31.11%) Python
2 850 (19.74%) SQL
3 598 (13.88%) Java
4 422 (9.80%) JavaScript
5 411 (9.54%) C#
6 376 (8.73%) PowerShell
7 351 (8.15%) Bash
8 303 (7.04%) TypeScript
9 156 (3.62%) Go
10 146 (3.39%) Bicep
11 79 (1.83%) PL/SQL
12 76 (1.76%) Shell Script
13 52 (1.21%) C++
13 52 (1.21%) Ruby
14 50 (1.16%) Groovy
15 49 (1.14%) Scala
16 42 (0.98%) Perl
17 41 (0.95%) T-SQL
18 24 (0.56%) PHP
18 24 (0.56%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,283 (29.79%) Security Cleared
2 1,064 (24.70%) SC Cleared
3 369 (8.57%) Degree
4 199 (4.62%) Computer Science Degree
5 180 (4.18%) Azure Certification
6 140 (3.25%) DV Cleared
7 139 (3.23%) AWS Certification
8 101 (2.35%) BPSS Clearance
9 86 (2.00%) Master's Degree
10 74 (1.72%) CISSP
11 64 (1.49%) Microsoft Certification
12 57 (1.32%) CISM
13 45 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 44 (1.02%) ISTQB
15 36 (0.84%) PMI Certification
16 29 (0.67%) Cisco Certification
16 29 (0.67%) PMP
17 26 (0.60%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 18 (0.42%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 17 (0.39%) IIBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 392 (9.10%) QA
2 162 (3.76%) GDPR
3 151 (3.51%) Data Quality
4 143 (3.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 120 (2.79%) Accessibility
6 117 (2.72%) NIST
7 57 (1.32%) NCSC
8 35 (0.81%) PCI DSS
9 33 (0.77%) WCAG
10 27 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 25 (0.58%) HIPAA
11 25 (0.58%) PMO
12 24 (0.56%) SLA
13 17 (0.39%) PSD2
14 16 (0.37%) ISO 20022
14 16 (0.37%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.30%) SEPA
16 10 (0.23%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 9 (0.21%) HL7
17 9 (0.21%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,116 (25.91%) Docker
2 172 (3.99%) Active Directory
3 65 (1.51%) VMware Infrastructure
4 60 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.67%) vSphere
6 17 (0.39%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
9 13 (0.30%) Hyper-V
10 12 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.26%) Squid
11 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
12 10 (0.23%) Lustre
12 10 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.21%) Dovecot
13 9 (0.21%) Postfix
14 8 (0.19%) GPFS
14 8 (0.19%) NFS
14 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
15 7 (0.16%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,363 (31.65%) Terraform
2 1,285 (29.84%) Kubernetes
3 536 (12.44%) Ansible
4 324 (7.52%) Grafana
5 295 (6.85%) Prometheus
6 82 (1.90%) Argo
7 77 (1.79%) Puppet
8 51 (1.18%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (1.02%) Progress Chef
10 41 (0.95%) Istio
11 39 (0.91%) Kibana
12 30 (0.70%) Packer
13 25 (0.58%) Podman
14 19 (0.44%) SCCM
15 17 (0.39%) Rancher
16 16 (0.37%) Proxmox
17 15 (0.35%) Microsoft Intune
18 14 (0.33%) Nessus
18 14 (0.33%) NetBackup
19 13 (0.30%) CA Endevor
Vendors
1 732 (17.00%) Microsoft
2 317 (7.36%) Oracle
3 247 (5.73%) Google
4 231 (5.36%) Databricks
5 214 (4.97%) Splunk
6 166 (3.85%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.81%) Red Hat
8 109 (2.53%) Salesforce
8 109 (2.53%) VMware
9 101 (2.35%) SAP
10 74 (1.72%) Dynatrace
11 63 (1.46%) OpenAI
12 48 (1.11%) IBM
13 47 (1.09%) F5
14 43 (1.00%) Atlassian
14 43 (1.00%) Cisco
15 41 (0.95%) CyberArk
15 41 (0.95%) Talend
16 39 (0.91%) Palo Alto
17 37 (0.86%) Denodo