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 30 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,143 3,648 4,392
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.56% 10.06% 9.59%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.96% 11.54% 10.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,900 2,457 3,201
10th Percentile £363 £380 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £558 £563
Median % change year-on-year -5.83% -0.89% -6.25%
75th Percentile £616 £663 £663
90th Percentile £700 £746 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 37 88
10th Percentile - £40.15 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £56.25 £49.05
Median hourly rate £61.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £85.63 £74.00 £70.47
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -16.43% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and 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 31,961 31,602 40,569
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.17% 87.15% 88.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,061 19,103 27,192
10th Percentile £300 £310 £310
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,078 1,129 1,558
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.22 £14.33
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.19 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £33.00 £43.63
Median % change year-on-year -23.79% -24.36% +24.64%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.74 £32.50 £44.25
% change year-on-year -30.05% -26.55% +38.28%

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 30 November 2025.

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 30 November 2025.

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 30 November 2025. 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 3,509 £525 -8.70% 1,174
UK excluding London +4 1,874 £500 -9.09% 1,057
London 0 1,754 £550 -5.98% 493
Work from Home 0 1,309 £525 -2.78% 625
North of England +1 610 £492 -3.29% 191
South East +1 369 £513 -14.58% 441
Midlands +16 368 £515 -1.90% 119
Yorkshire 0 310 £500 - 74
West Midlands +14 298 £525 -4.55% 75
North West +6 265 £453 -13.71% 82
South West +2 221 £538 -10.42% 143
Scotland +8 209 £475 +5.56% 79
East of England +27 109 £523 -9.13% 68
East Midlands +17 70 £418 -12.11% 42
Wales +7 43 £410 -0.61% 40
North East -9 37 £520 -11.11% 36
Northern Ireland -1 7 - - 7

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
1 259 (6.25%) Confluence
2 91 (2.20%) Apache
3 71 (1.71%) Apache Airflow
4 70 (1.69%) SharePoint
5 64 (1.54%) SAS
6 58 (1.40%) Apache Spark
7 37 (0.89%) CMS
8 36 (0.87%) nginx
9 30 (0.72%) IIS
10 28 (0.68%) OpenStack
11 27 (0.65%) JBoss
11 27 (0.65%) WebLogic
12 23 (0.56%) CICS
13 22 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
14 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
14 15 (0.36%) Mule
14 15 (0.36%) WebSphere
15 14 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
16 10 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 71 (1.71%) Microsoft Excel
2 40 (0.97%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 35 (0.84%) Microsoft Office
4 32 (0.77%) Microsoft Project
5 19 (0.46%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.39%) Chatbot
7 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 9 (0.22%) Trello
9 8 (0.19%) Weka
10 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.024%) Moqups
10 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 62 (1.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.46%) Endur
3 18 (0.43%) Aladdin
3 18 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
4 17 (0.41%) Oracle BPM
5 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
6 14 (0.34%) VisionPLUS
7 8 (0.19%) Maximo
8 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
9 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.097%) Fidessa
10 4 (0.097%) NEC Housing
10 4 (0.097%) SAP CO
10 4 (0.097%) SAP ERP
10 4 (0.097%) SAP FI
10 4 (0.097%) SAP FI/CO
10 4 (0.097%) Teamcenter
10 4 (0.097%) thinkFolio
10 4 (0.097%) Workday HCM
11 3 (0.072%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 2,028 (48.95%) Azure
2 1,571 (37.92%) AWS
3 1,106 (26.70%) Azure DevOps
4 730 (17.62%) GitHub
5 587 (14.17%) GCP
6 483 (11.66%) Serverless
7 426 (10.28%) GitHub Actions
8 277 (6.69%) Power Platform
9 267 (6.44%) AWS CloudFormation
10 266 (6.42%) AWS Lambda
11 265 (6.40%) Amazon S3
12 218 (5.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 198 (4.78%) Amazon EC2
14 182 (4.39%) Amazon EKS
15 181 (4.37%) Azure AKS
16 166 (4.01%) Amazon ECS
16 166 (4.01%) Azure Data Factory
17 159 (3.84%) SaaS
18 153 (3.69%) Entra ID
19 149 (3.60%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 194 (4.68%) Firewall
2 129 (3.11%) DNS
3 87 (2.10%) VPN
4 70 (1.69%) Network Security
5 64 (1.54%) SSL
6 59 (1.42%) TCP/IP
7 52 (1.26%) HTTP
8 35 (0.84%) HTTPS
9 30 (0.72%) SSH
10 29 (0.70%) SMTP
11 28 (0.68%) WAN
12 23 (0.56%) FTP
13 18 (0.43%) BGP
13 18 (0.43%) DHCP
13 18 (0.43%) Kerberos
14 16 (0.39%) OpenLDAP
15 15 (0.36%) LAN
15 15 (0.36%) MPLS
16 14 (0.34%) SD-WAN
17 12 (0.29%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 279 (6.73%) PostgreSQL
2 174 (4.20%) NoSQL
3 170 (4.10%) Power BI
4 168 (4.06%) Amazon RDS
5 155 (3.74%) SQL Server
6 120 (2.90%) MongoDB
7 105 (2.53%) Relational Database
8 99 (2.39%) Data Warehouse
9 91 (2.20%) Data Lake
10 87 (2.10%) Oracle Database
11 72 (1.74%) Azure SQL Database
12 66 (1.59%) DynamoDB
13 65 (1.57%) MySQL
14 61 (1.47%) Redis
15 57 (1.38%) Amazon Aurora
16 51 (1.23%) Elasticsearch
17 47 (1.13%) Metadata
18 42 (1.01%) Big Data
18 42 (1.01%) Delta Lake
19 37 (0.89%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 798 (19.26%) Jenkins
2 664 (16.03%) Git
3 604 (14.58%) JIRA
4 536 (12.94%) GitLab
5 144 (3.48%) Selenium
6 107 (2.58%) JUnit
7 99 (2.39%) SonarQube
8 92 (2.22%) Sonatype Nexus
9 89 (2.15%) Bitbucket
10 78 (1.88%) Postman
11 68 (1.64%) Cypress.io
12 62 (1.50%) Cucumber
13 59 (1.42%) Liquibase
14 51 (1.23%) Maven
15 46 (1.11%) Gradle
15 46 (1.11%) JMeter
16 45 (1.09%) Artifactory
17 40 (0.97%) CircleCI
18 39 (0.94%) Oracle APEX
19 38 (0.92%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,301 (31.40%) Social Skills
2 764 (18.44%) Finance
3 529 (12.77%) Public Sector
4 354 (8.54%) Banking
5 333 (8.04%) Analytical Skills
6 124 (2.99%) Documentation Skills
7 70 (1.69%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 67 (1.62%) Financial Institution
9 66 (1.59%) Investment Banking
10 64 (1.54%) Marketing
11 57 (1.38%) Telecoms
12 56 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
13 52 (1.26%) Retail
14 45 (1.09%) Presentation Skills
15 44 (1.06%) Front Office
16 35 (0.84%) Back Office
17 31 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
18 29 (0.70%) Manufacturing
18 29 (0.70%) Military
19 25 (0.60%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 799 (19.29%) Developer
2 774 (18.68%) DevOps Engineer
3 555 (13.40%) Senior
4 357 (8.62%) Architect
5 311 (7.51%) Lead
6 259 (6.25%) AWS Engineer
7 212 (5.12%) Azure Engineer
8 199 (4.80%) AWS DevOps
9 192 (4.63%) Data Engineer
10 185 (4.47%) Analyst
11 169 (4.08%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 160 (3.86%) Senior Developer
12 160 (3.86%) Software Engineer
13 148 (3.57%) Cloud Engineer
14 144 (3.48%) Platform Engineer
15 134 (3.23%) Java Developer
16 124 (2.99%) Consultant
17 109 (2.63%) Senior DevOps
18 102 (2.46%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 102 (2.46%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 473 (11.42%) REST
2 363 (8.76%) .NET
3 311 (7.51%) RESTful
4 251 (6.06%) React
5 249 (6.01%) Node.js
6 243 (5.87%) Kafka
7 213 (5.14%) JSON
8 201 (4.85%) Spring
9 190 (4.59%) Spring Boot
10 178 (4.30%) SOAP
11 158 (3.81%) OAuth
12 157 (3.79%) HTML
13 155 (3.74%) Elastic Stack
14 153 (3.69%) AngularJS
15 143 (3.45%) XML
16 112 (2.70%) YAML
17 110 (2.66%) CSS
18 89 (2.15%) .NET Core
19 84 (2.03%) OAuth2
19 84 (2.03%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 559 (13.49%) Cloud Native
2 230 (5.55%) Product Ownership
3 178 (4.30%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (3.09%) Onboarding
5 106 (2.56%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (2.44%) Public Cloud
7 76 (1.83%) Hybrid Cloud
8 71 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
9 68 (1.64%) Virtual Team
10 63 (1.52%) Mobile App
11 61 (1.47%) Replication
12 54 (1.30%) Enterprise Software
13 53 (1.28%) Greenfield Project
13 53 (1.28%) Security Posture
14 49 (1.18%) Management Information System
15 45 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
16 44 (1.06%) Data Centre
17 41 (0.99%) NHS
18 39 (0.94%) Algorithms
19 37 (0.89%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 502 (12.12%) Linux
2 241 (5.82%) Windows
3 112 (2.70%) Unix
4 59 (1.42%) Windows Server
5 57 (1.38%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 48 (1.16%) Android
7 47 (1.13%) VMS
8 42 (1.01%) Apple iOS
9 25 (0.60%) Ubuntu
10 23 (0.56%) Amazon Linux
11 20 (0.48%) CentOS
12 16 (0.39%) Windows 10
13 12 (0.29%) Solaris
14 11 (0.27%) zOS
15 10 (0.24%) Mac OS
16 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
17 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
18 3 (0.072%) Debian
19 2 (0.048%) SUSE
20 1 (0.024%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,366 (57.11%) CI/CD
2 1,811 (43.71%) Agile
3 1,080 (26.07%) Infrastructure as Code
4 829 (20.01%) Containerisation
5 811 (19.58%) Problem-Solving
6 655 (15.81%) Test Automation
7 642 (15.50%) Microservices
8 520 (12.55%) Scrum
9 451 (10.89%) Migration
10 446 (10.77%) Continuous Improvement
11 418 (10.09%) Software Engineering
12 402 (9.70%) Analytics
13 377 (9.10%) AI
14 358 (8.64%) Observability
15 326 (7.87%) Stakeholder Management
16 307 (7.41%) Mentoring
17 293 (7.07%) SDLC
18 286 (6.90%) Infrastructure Automation
19 277 (6.69%) DevSecOps
20 269 (6.49%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,330 (32.10%) Python
2 778 (18.78%) SQL
3 631 (15.23%) Java
4 431 (10.40%) JavaScript
5 408 (9.85%) C#
6 386 (9.32%) Bash
7 372 (8.98%) PowerShell
8 291 (7.02%) TypeScript
9 176 (4.25%) Go
10 118 (2.85%) Bicep
11 82 (1.98%) PL/SQL
12 72 (1.74%) Shell Script
13 61 (1.47%) Groovy
14 54 (1.30%) Perl
15 53 (1.28%) C++
16 51 (1.23%) Scala
17 44 (1.06%) Ruby
18 36 (0.87%) T-SQL
19 29 (0.70%) Kotlin
19 29 (0.70%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,132 (27.32%) Security Cleared
2 942 (22.74%) SC Cleared
3 350 (8.45%) Degree
4 191 (4.61%) Computer Science Degree
5 154 (3.72%) Azure Certification
6 152 (3.67%) AWS Certification
7 128 (3.09%) DV Cleared
8 86 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (2.00%) Master's Degree
10 65 (1.57%) CISSP
11 63 (1.52%) Microsoft Certification
12 54 (1.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 43 (1.04%) CISM
14 39 (0.94%) ISTQB
15 37 (0.89%) Cisco Certification
16 31 (0.75%) PMI Certification
17 27 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.60%) PMP
19 17 (0.41%) ITIL Certification
20 15 (0.36%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 393 (9.49%) QA
2 154 (3.72%) GDPR
3 141 (3.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 123 (2.97%) Accessibility
5 117 (2.82%) Data Quality
6 105 (2.53%) NIST
7 48 (1.16%) NCSC
8 39 (0.94%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.70%) WCAG
10 28 (0.68%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.48%) PMO
11 20 (0.48%) SLA
12 19 (0.46%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.46%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.36%) MiFID
14 14 (0.34%) PSD2
15 13 (0.31%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.31%) SEPA
16 11 (0.27%) EU AI Act
17 10 (0.24%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 1,066 (25.73%) Docker
2 183 (4.42%) Active Directory
3 71 (1.71%) VMware Infrastructure
4 59 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.65%) vSphere
6 23 (0.56%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.31%) Postfix
8 13 (0.31%) Squid
9 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
10 11 (0.27%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
10 11 (0.27%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 9 (0.22%) VMware ESXi
13 8 (0.19%) GPFS
13 8 (0.19%) Lustre
13 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.17%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,322 (31.91%) Terraform
2 1,214 (29.30%) Kubernetes
3 530 (12.79%) Ansible
4 325 (7.84%) Grafana
5 307 (7.41%) Prometheus
6 79 (1.91%) Argo
6 79 (1.91%) Puppet
7 68 (1.64%) Single Sign-On
8 59 (1.42%) Progress Chef
9 42 (1.01%) Kibana
10 39 (0.94%) Packer
11 32 (0.77%) Istio
12 21 (0.51%) Podman
13 20 (0.48%) ITRS Geneos
14 18 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
15 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
15 17 (0.41%) Nessus
15 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.39%) SCCM
17 15 (0.36%) logstash
Vendors
1 692 (16.70%) Microsoft
2 307 (7.41%) Oracle
3 229 (5.53%) Google
4 202 (4.88%) Splunk
5 195 (4.71%) Databricks
6 179 (4.32%) ServiceNow
7 120 (2.90%) Salesforce
8 113 (2.73%) SAP
9 106 (2.56%) VMware
10 96 (2.32%) Red Hat
11 62 (1.50%) Dynatrace
12 53 (1.28%) IBM
13 50 (1.21%) OpenAI
14 48 (1.16%) MuleSoft
15 46 (1.11%) F5
16 45 (1.09%) Cisco
17 39 (0.94%) Atlassian
18 38 (0.92%) Palo Alto
19 37 (0.89%) Talend
20 36 (0.87%) CyberArk