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 28 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -4
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,207 2,985 4,036
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.66% 10.42% 9.44%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.61% 11.45% 11.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,629 2,161 2,803
10th Percentile £386 £385 £400
25th Percentile £438 £440 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £524 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.19% -4.55% -6.38%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £749
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 17 112
10th Percentile £39.53 £33.10 £56.28
25th Percentile £58.88 £51.25 £61.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £73.23 £65.25
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% +12.22% -0.38%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £77.50
90th Percentile £92.50 £89.50 £86.86
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £73.23 £65.25
% change year-on-year -7.82% +12.22% -0.38%

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 41,286 26,078 36,653
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.54% 91.02% 85.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,818 16,706 23,627
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.19% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £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 2,472 1,084 2,486
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.08 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.28 £27.52 £36.00
Median % change year-on-year +53.64% -23.57% -1.09%
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.84 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.19 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +78.93% -32.93% +7.14%

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 28 May 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 28 May 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 28 May 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 4,433 £525 -0.94% 1,244
UK excluding London +7 2,295 £500 - 903
London +4 2,261 £550 -1.79% 531
Work from Home -3 1,412 £525 - 670
North of England +6 797 £500 - 274
South East +4 481 £513 +2.50% 247
Yorkshire +1 454 £500 - 69
Midlands +3 405 £488 -2.50% 114
West Midlands +2 316 £500 -4.58% 80
South West +14 287 £525 -4.55% 115
North West +1 284 £500 - 163
Scotland +2 185 £488 +2.63% 49
East of England +16 128 £525 +3.45% 62
East Midlands +4 85 £465 +0.54% 34
North East +5 75 £450 -14.29% 45
Wales +4 49 £425 +39.13% 32
Northern Ireland +1 14 £531 +27.25% 24
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
1 290 (5.57%) Confluence
2 134 (2.57%) Apache Spark
3 122 (2.34%) SharePoint
4 91 (1.75%) Apache
5 79 (1.52%) Apache Airflow
6 78 (1.50%) SAS
7 43 (0.83%) CMS
8 30 (0.58%) nginx
9 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
10 26 (0.50%) IIS
11 21 (0.40%) OpenStack
12 17 (0.33%) Jupyter
13 15 (0.29%) Camunda
14 14 (0.27%) Mendix
15 13 (0.25%) WebSphere
16 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
17 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
18 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
19 8 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
19 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 75 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 56 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
3 49 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 35 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 26 (0.50%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.077%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.077%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.077%) Notion
6 4 (0.077%) Trello
7 2 (0.038%) Adobe XD
7 2 (0.038%) Spreadsheet
8 1 (0.019%) InDesign
8 1 (0.019%) Maya
8 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 63 (1.21%) Dynamics CRM
2 30 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 11 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
5 9 (0.17%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.17%) Maximo
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.12%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.096%) Endur
8 5 (0.096%) Magento
8 5 (0.096%) NEC Housing
8 5 (0.096%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.077%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.058%) Findur
10 3 (0.058%) OpenText MBPM
10 3 (0.058%) Oracle BPM
10 3 (0.058%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.058%) SAP MM
10 3 (0.058%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,830 (54.35%) Azure
2 1,769 (33.97%) AWS
3 1,538 (29.54%) Azure DevOps
4 877 (16.84%) GitHub
5 667 (12.81%) GCP
6 517 (9.93%) GitHub Actions
7 472 (9.06%) Serverless
8 446 (8.57%) Power Platform
9 273 (5.24%) Amazon S3
10 256 (4.92%) AWS CloudFormation
11 243 (4.67%) AWS Lambda
12 233 (4.47%) Entra ID
13 225 (4.32%) Azure AKS
14 219 (4.21%) Azure Data Factory
15 197 (3.78%) Amazon EKS
16 181 (3.48%) OpenShift
17 168 (3.23%) Azure Monitor
18 162 (3.11%) PaaS
19 156 (3.00%) Amazon EC2
20 151 (2.90%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 227 (4.36%) Firewall
2 132 (2.54%) DNS
3 104 (2.00%) Network Security
4 99 (1.90%) VPN
5 47 (0.90%) TCP/IP
6 40 (0.77%) WAN
7 35 (0.67%) SD-WAN
8 32 (0.61%) BGP
9 28 (0.54%) SSL
10 26 (0.50%) SAN
11 25 (0.48%) DHCP
12 24 (0.46%) HTTP
12 24 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
13 22 (0.42%) OSPF
14 19 (0.36%) IPsec
15 17 (0.33%) Internet
15 17 (0.33%) MPLS
16 16 (0.31%) Reverse Proxy
16 16 (0.31%) VXLAN
17 15 (0.29%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 289 (5.55%) Power BI
2 266 (5.11%) SQL Server
3 248 (4.76%) PostgreSQL
4 182 (3.50%) Data Lake
4 182 (3.50%) NoSQL
5 153 (2.94%) Relational Database
6 142 (2.73%) Data Warehouse
7 131 (2.52%) MongoDB
8 118 (2.27%) Azure SQL Database
9 109 (2.09%) Amazon RDS
10 97 (1.86%) DynamoDB
11 94 (1.81%) Delta Lake
11 94 (1.81%) Metadata
12 74 (1.42%) Big Data
12 74 (1.42%) Oracle Database
13 67 (1.29%) Elasticsearch
14 61 (1.17%) Amazon Athena
15 57 (1.09%) Redis
16 55 (1.06%) BigQuery
17 50 (0.96%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 737 (14.15%) Jenkins
2 649 (12.46%) Git
3 616 (11.83%) JIRA
4 537 (10.31%) GitLab
5 113 (2.17%) Selenium
6 107 (2.05%) Postman
7 86 (1.65%) SonarQube
8 81 (1.56%) JUnit
9 66 (1.27%) REST Assured
10 62 (1.19%) Bitbucket
11 61 (1.17%) Cucumber
11 61 (1.17%) Maven
12 56 (1.08%) JMeter
13 49 (0.94%) Artifactory
13 49 (0.94%) Cypress.io
14 43 (0.83%) Gatling
15 38 (0.73%) Mockito
16 37 (0.71%) Gradle
17 33 (0.63%) Visual Studio
18 32 (0.61%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,281 (24.60%) Social Skills
2 925 (17.76%) Finance
3 664 (12.75%) Public Sector
4 402 (7.72%) Analytical Skills
5 334 (6.41%) Banking
6 142 (2.73%) Documentation Skills
7 80 (1.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 75 (1.44%) Influencing Skills
9 70 (1.34%) Legal
10 68 (1.31%) Retail
11 52 (1.00%) Marketing
11 52 (1.00%) Organisational Skills
12 51 (0.98%) Financial Institution
13 41 (0.79%) Military
14 39 (0.75%) Investment Banking
15 38 (0.73%) Front Office
15 38 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
16 30 (0.58%) Law
17 28 (0.54%) Telecoms
18 24 (0.46%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,073 (20.61%) DevOps Engineer
2 758 (14.56%) Developer
3 727 (13.96%) Senior
4 604 (11.60%) Architect
5 454 (8.72%) Lead
6 347 (6.66%) Azure Engineer
7 311 (5.97%) Data Engineer
8 310 (5.95%) Analyst
9 250 (4.80%) AWS Engineer
10 192 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
11 182 (3.50%) Platform Engineer
12 179 (3.44%) AWS DevOps
13 176 (3.38%) Solutions Architect
14 175 (3.36%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 171 (3.28%) Senior DevOps
16 167 (3.21%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 157 (3.02%) Business Analyst
18 156 (3.00%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 151 (2.90%) Java Developer
19 151 (2.90%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 470 (9.03%) REST
2 466 (8.95%) .NET
3 314 (6.03%) React
4 283 (5.43%) Kafka
5 280 (5.38%) Spring
6 271 (5.20%) Spring Boot
7 260 (4.99%) RESTful
8 249 (4.78%) Node.js
9 171 (3.28%) AngularJS
10 159 (3.05%) PySpark
11 156 (3.00%) OAuth
11 156 (3.00%) Playwright
12 135 (2.59%) JSON
13 130 (2.50%) YAML
14 116 (2.23%) SOAP
15 111 (2.13%) Middleware
16 110 (2.11%) HTML
17 105 (2.02%) .NET Framework
18 103 (1.98%) OpenID
19 100 (1.92%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 849 (16.30%) Cloud Native
2 328 (6.30%) Product Ownership
3 202 (3.88%) Distributed Systems
4 136 (2.61%) Onboarding
5 118 (2.27%) Legacy Systems
6 108 (2.07%) Public Cloud
7 106 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
8 105 (2.02%) Enterprise Software
9 82 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
10 78 (1.50%) Data Centre
11 61 (1.17%) Management Information System
12 57 (1.09%) Self-Motivation
13 50 (0.96%) Virtual Team
14 47 (0.90%) AI Agents
14 47 (0.90%) Private Cloud
15 45 (0.86%) Greenfield Project
15 45 (0.86%) Mobile App
15 45 (0.86%) Replication
16 44 (0.85%) Low-Code
17 43 (0.83%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 457 (8.78%) Linux
2 263 (5.05%) Windows
3 87 (1.67%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.54%) Unix
5 53 (1.02%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.81%) VMS
7 26 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 18 (0.35%) Apple iOS
9 14 (0.27%) Android
10 12 (0.23%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.15%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.12%) Solaris
15 5 (0.096%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.096%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.096%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.077%) Data ONTAP
16 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.077%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,992 (57.46%) CI/CD
2 1,885 (36.20%) Agile
3 1,351 (25.95%) Infrastructure as Code
4 816 (15.67%) Containerisation
5 774 (14.86%) Problem-Solving
6 740 (14.21%) Microservices
7 737 (14.15%) Test Automation
8 698 (13.41%) Continuous Improvement
9 635 (12.20%) Migration
10 628 (12.06%) Observability
11 593 (11.39%) Analytics
12 571 (10.97%) Stakeholder Management
13 567 (10.89%) AI
14 564 (10.83%) Scrum
15 506 (9.72%) Software Engineering
16 500 (9.60%) Platform Engineering
17 491 (9.43%) Data Modelling
18 423 (8.12%) Technical Leadership
19 420 (8.07%) Mentoring
20 408 (7.84%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,429 (27.44%) Python
2 1,019 (19.57%) SQL
3 690 (13.25%) Java
4 496 (9.53%) C#
5 381 (7.32%) JavaScript
6 367 (7.05%) PowerShell
7 366 (7.03%) Bash
8 275 (5.28%) TypeScript
9 183 (3.51%) Bicep
10 109 (2.09%) Go
11 68 (1.31%) Scala
12 65 (1.25%) Shell Script
13 59 (1.13%) Apex Code
14 53 (1.02%) PL/SQL
15 47 (0.90%) T-SQL
16 46 (0.88%) Groovy
17 36 (0.69%) C++
18 27 (0.52%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 27 (0.52%) Ruby
19 24 (0.46%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,623 (31.17%) Security Cleared
2 1,341 (25.75%) SC Cleared
3 323 (6.20%) Degree
4 216 (4.15%) Azure Certification
5 164 (3.15%) BPSS Clearance
6 154 (2.96%) DV Cleared
7 141 (2.71%) AWS Certification
8 138 (2.65%) Computer Science Degree
9 79 (1.52%) CISSP
10 63 (1.21%) Microsoft Certification
11 55 (1.06%) ISTQB
12 53 (1.02%) CISM
13 46 (0.88%) Master's Degree
14 45 (0.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 45 (0.86%) Cisco Certification
15 43 (0.83%) PMI Certification
16 40 (0.77%) PMP
17 27 (0.52%) TOGAF Certification
18 25 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 22 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 432 (8.30%) QA
2 248 (4.76%) Data Quality
3 180 (3.46%) GDPR
4 140 (2.69%) Accessibility
5 128 (2.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 120 (2.30%) NIST
7 67 (1.29%) NCSC
8 56 (1.08%) WCAG
9 47 (0.90%) PCI DSS
10 43 (0.83%) SLA
11 33 (0.63%) PMO
11 33 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.42%) GRC
13 18 (0.35%) HIPAA
14 14 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.25%) NIST 800
16 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
17 11 (0.21%) PSD2
18 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
18 9 (0.17%) SEPA
System Software
1 978 (18.78%) Docker
2 173 (3.32%) Active Directory
3 76 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
4 73 (1.40%) VMware Infrastructure
5 34 (0.65%) vSphere
6 26 (0.50%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.35%) Squid
9 14 (0.27%) Postfix
10 13 (0.25%) Hyper-V
11 11 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
12 8 (0.15%) Firmware
13 7 (0.13%) HDFS
13 7 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
13 7 (0.13%) RACF
14 6 (0.12%) Corosync
14 6 (0.12%) NFS
15 5 (0.096%) Ceph
15 5 (0.096%) SRDF
16 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
Systems Management
1 1,479 (28.40%) Terraform
2 1,325 (25.45%) Kubernetes
3 504 (9.68%) Ansible
4 360 (6.91%) Grafana
5 302 (5.80%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.81%) Argo
7 75 (1.44%) Single Sign-On
8 67 (1.29%) Puppet
9 62 (1.19%) Istio
10 31 (0.60%) Progress Chef
11 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
11 29 (0.56%) Packer
12 23 (0.44%) Kibana
13 22 (0.42%) HP ALM
13 22 (0.42%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 18 (0.35%) Consul
16 15 (0.29%) SCCM
17 14 (0.27%) FortiGate
17 14 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 912 (17.51%) Microsoft
2 297 (5.70%) Databricks
3 285 (5.47%) Oracle
4 242 (4.65%) Google
5 195 (3.74%) Splunk
6 178 (3.42%) ServiceNow
7 164 (3.15%) Salesforce
8 142 (2.73%) Red Hat
9 118 (2.27%) VMware
10 116 (2.23%) SAP
11 103 (1.98%) Dynatrace
12 74 (1.42%) OpenAI
13 50 (0.96%) Atlassian
14 48 (0.92%) IBM
15 47 (0.90%) CyberArk
16 45 (0.86%) Informatica
17 44 (0.85%) Cisco
18 39 (0.75%) Foundry
19 37 (0.71%) AppDynamics
20 35 (0.67%) Okta