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

6 months to
1 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,322 3,429 4,021
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.65% 10.34% 9.36%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.23% 11.70% 10.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,031 2,359 2,922
10th Percentile £363 £381 £408
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £563 £563
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% - -6.25%
75th Percentile £615 £671 £659
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £540 £550
% change year-on-year -7.41% -1.82% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 26 87
10th Percentile - £37.13 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £48.09
Median hourly rate £55.00 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.52% +3.85% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.00 £79.62 £70.00
90th Percentile £94.50 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.76%

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 32,670 29,303 37,803
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.06% 88.34% 87.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,630 17,837 25,180
10th Percentile £304 £308 £306
25th Percentile £406 £413 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,024 946 1,523
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.62 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.30 £18.98
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -26.97% +27.14%
75th Percentile £52.72 £62.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.25 £74.60 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.58 £30.45 £45.21
% change year-on-year -22.58% -32.65% +44.86%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 +2 3,698 £525 -8.70% 1,689
UK excluding London +6 1,947 £500 -7.41% 1,252
London -3 1,839 £550 -6.38% 638
Work from Home 0 1,276 £525 -2.78% 886
North of England +5 650 £487 -4.28% 366
South East +1 397 £516 -14.00% 404
Midlands +19 389 £515 -1.90% 146
Yorkshire +1 338 £500 -1.96% 150
West Midlands +19 316 £525 -3.77% 97
North West +7 271 £455 -9.00% 179
South West +8 238 £538 -10.42% 146
Scotland +6 192 £475 +5.56% 70
East of England +23 108 £550 +6.80% 98
East Midlands +22 73 £428 -10.00% 45
North East -6 43 £488 -14.85% 41
Wales +5 37 £475 +126.19% 25
Northern Ireland -8 8 - - 19

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
1 260 (6.02%) Confluence
2 82 (1.90%) Apache
3 80 (1.85%) SharePoint
4 75 (1.74%) SAS
5 69 (1.60%) Apache Airflow
6 67 (1.55%) Apache Spark
7 36 (0.83%) CMS
8 34 (0.79%) nginx
9 32 (0.74%) OpenStack
10 25 (0.58%) IIS
11 23 (0.53%) WebLogic
12 22 (0.51%) JBoss
13 19 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
14 16 (0.37%) CICS
15 13 (0.30%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 11 (0.25%) Mule
16 11 (0.25%) WebSphere
17 9 (0.21%) Anypoint
17 9 (0.21%) iPlanet
17 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 81 (1.87%) Microsoft Excel
2 49 (1.13%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 33 (0.76%) Microsoft Project
4 25 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
5 15 (0.35%) Chatbot
6 14 (0.32%) MS Visio
7 10 (0.23%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 7 (0.16%) Trello
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.023%) Moqups
10 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 63 (1.46%) Dynamics CRM
2 19 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.35%) Aladdin
4 14 (0.32%) Endur
4 14 (0.32%) VisionPLUS
5 12 (0.28%) Oracle BPM
6 11 (0.25%) Remedy ITSM
7 8 (0.19%) Maximo
8 7 (0.16%) NEC Housing
8 7 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
9 5 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
9 5 (0.12%) Oracle EBS
9 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.093%) Fidessa
10 4 (0.093%) NetSuite
10 4 (0.093%) SAP ERP
10 4 (0.093%) Teamcenter
10 4 (0.093%) thinkFolio
11 3 (0.069%) SAP CO
11 3 (0.069%) SAP FI/CO
Cloud Services
1 2,177 (50.37%) Azure
2 1,599 (37.00%) AWS
3 1,167 (27.00%) Azure DevOps
4 798 (18.46%) GitHub
5 621 (14.37%) GCP
6 515 (11.92%) Serverless
7 476 (11.01%) GitHub Actions
8 321 (7.43%) Power Platform
9 277 (6.41%) AWS CloudFormation
10 265 (6.13%) AWS Lambda
11 260 (6.02%) Amazon S3
12 202 (4.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 200 (4.63%) Azure AKS
14 198 (4.58%) Azure Data Factory
15 188 (4.35%) Amazon EKS
16 176 (4.07%) Amazon EC2
17 172 (3.98%) OpenShift
18 171 (3.96%) Amazon ECS
19 160 (3.70%) Dynamics 365
20 157 (3.63%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 202 (4.67%) Firewall
2 124 (2.87%) DNS
3 87 (2.01%) VPN
4 74 (1.71%) Network Security
5 62 (1.43%) SSL
6 60 (1.39%) TCP/IP
7 49 (1.13%) HTTP
8 35 (0.81%) HTTPS
9 25 (0.58%) SSH
10 22 (0.51%) WAN
11 20 (0.46%) FTP
11 20 (0.46%) SMTP
12 19 (0.44%) BGP
13 17 (0.39%) DHCP
13 17 (0.39%) Kerberos
13 17 (0.39%) MPLS
14 15 (0.35%) SD-WAN
15 14 (0.32%) OpenLDAP
16 13 (0.30%) Internet
17 10 (0.23%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 285 (6.59%) PostgreSQL
2 210 (4.86%) Power BI
3 176 (4.07%) SQL Server
4 173 (4.00%) NoSQL
5 154 (3.56%) Amazon RDS
6 122 (2.82%) Data Lake
7 121 (2.80%) MongoDB
8 109 (2.52%) Relational Database
9 107 (2.48%) Data Warehouse
10 92 (2.13%) Oracle Database
11 85 (1.97%) Azure SQL Database
12 72 (1.67%) MySQL
13 68 (1.57%) DynamoDB
14 58 (1.34%) Elasticsearch
15 57 (1.32%) Amazon Aurora
15 57 (1.32%) Redis
16 52 (1.20%) Tableau
17 48 (1.11%) Metadata
18 47 (1.09%) Amazon Athena
18 47 (1.09%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 806 (18.65%) Jenkins
2 655 (15.16%) Git
3 617 (14.28%) JIRA
4 579 (13.40%) GitLab
5 137 (3.17%) Selenium
6 96 (2.22%) JUnit
7 88 (2.04%) Postman
7 88 (2.04%) SonarQube
8 79 (1.83%) Bitbucket
9 77 (1.78%) Sonatype Nexus
10 73 (1.69%) Cypress.io
11 61 (1.41%) Cucumber
12 57 (1.32%) Artifactory
13 52 (1.20%) Liquibase
14 47 (1.09%) CircleCI
14 47 (1.09%) JMeter
15 45 (1.04%) Gradle
16 41 (0.95%) Maven
17 38 (0.88%) Oracle APEX
17 38 (0.88%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,333 (30.84%) Social Skills
2 779 (18.02%) Finance
3 563 (13.03%) Public Sector
4 368 (8.51%) Banking
5 341 (7.89%) Analytical Skills
6 137 (3.17%) Documentation Skills
7 69 (1.60%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 68 (1.57%) Financial Institution
9 62 (1.43%) Influencing Skills
9 62 (1.43%) Marketing
10 61 (1.41%) Investment Banking
11 49 (1.13%) Front Office
12 48 (1.11%) Retail
12 48 (1.11%) Telecoms
13 44 (1.02%) Presentation Skills
14 32 (0.74%) Military
14 32 (0.74%) Pharmaceutical
15 31 (0.72%) Back Office
16 29 (0.67%) Organisational Skills
17 27 (0.62%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 834 (19.30%) DevOps Engineer
2 784 (18.14%) Developer
3 592 (13.70%) Senior
4 374 (8.65%) Architect
5 325 (7.52%) Lead
6 253 (5.85%) AWS Engineer
7 240 (5.55%) Azure Engineer
8 212 (4.91%) Data Engineer
9 197 (4.56%) Analyst
10 195 (4.51%) AWS DevOps
11 172 (3.98%) Software Engineer
12 168 (3.89%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 162 (3.75%) Senior Developer
14 153 (3.54%) Cloud Engineer
15 146 (3.38%) Platform Engineer
16 124 (2.87%) Consultant
16 124 (2.87%) Senior DevOps
17 119 (2.75%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 118 (2.73%) Java Developer
19 114 (2.64%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 501 (11.59%) REST
2 380 (8.79%) .NET
3 294 (6.80%) RESTful
4 278 (6.43%) Node.js
5 275 (6.36%) React
6 259 (5.99%) Kafka
7 212 (4.91%) JSON
8 207 (4.79%) Spring
9 192 (4.44%) Spring Boot
10 162 (3.75%) AngularJS
11 161 (3.73%) OAuth
12 159 (3.68%) SOAP
13 157 (3.63%) Elastic Stack
14 148 (3.42%) XML
15 145 (3.35%) HTML
16 130 (3.01%) YAML
17 101 (2.34%) CSS
18 100 (2.31%) Playwright
19 93 (2.15%) .NET Core
20 89 (2.06%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 589 (13.63%) Cloud Native
2 238 (5.51%) Product Ownership
3 178 (4.12%) Distributed Systems
4 126 (2.92%) Onboarding
5 109 (2.52%) Public Cloud
6 98 (2.27%) Legacy Systems
7 78 (1.80%) Hybrid Cloud
8 66 (1.53%) Enterprise Software
9 63 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
10 60 (1.39%) Virtual Team
11 54 (1.25%) Mobile App
11 54 (1.25%) Replication
12 49 (1.13%) Management Information System
13 48 (1.11%) Data Centre
13 48 (1.11%) Security Posture
14 45 (1.04%) Self-Motivation
15 44 (1.02%) Greenfield Project
16 42 (0.97%) CMDB
16 42 (0.97%) NHS
17 41 (0.95%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 518 (11.99%) Linux
2 247 (5.71%) Windows
3 112 (2.59%) Unix
4 56 (1.30%) Windows Server
5 55 (1.27%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 54 (1.25%) VMS
7 38 (0.88%) Android
8 30 (0.69%) Apple iOS
9 29 (0.67%) Ubuntu
10 19 (0.44%) Windows 10
11 17 (0.39%) Amazon Linux
12 16 (0.37%) CentOS
13 11 (0.25%) Solaris
14 7 (0.16%) Mac OS
15 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
15 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.14%) zOS
16 2 (0.046%) Debian
16 2 (0.046%) Windows Server 2012
17 1 (0.023%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,460 (56.92%) CI/CD
2 1,804 (41.74%) Agile
3 1,143 (26.45%) Infrastructure as Code
4 873 (20.20%) Containerisation
5 824 (19.07%) Problem-Solving
6 681 (15.76%) Microservices
7 661 (15.29%) Test Automation
8 501 (11.59%) Scrum
9 487 (11.27%) Migration
10 470 (10.87%) Continuous Improvement
11 457 (10.57%) Analytics
12 437 (10.11%) Observability
13 433 (10.02%) Software Engineering
14 421 (9.74%) AI
15 351 (8.12%) Stakeholder Management
16 323 (7.47%) Mentoring
17 308 (7.13%) Data Modelling
18 289 (6.69%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 287 (6.64%) Data Pipeline
20 284 (6.57%) DevSecOps
Programming Languages
1 1,369 (31.68%) Python
2 847 (19.60%) SQL
3 610 (14.11%) Java
4 429 (9.93%) JavaScript
5 424 (9.81%) C#
6 385 (8.91%) PowerShell
7 372 (8.61%) Bash
8 316 (7.31%) TypeScript
9 164 (3.79%) Go
10 136 (3.15%) Bicep
11 89 (2.06%) PL/SQL
12 77 (1.78%) Shell Script
13 57 (1.32%) Groovy
14 53 (1.23%) C++
15 52 (1.20%) Ruby
16 47 (1.09%) Scala
17 45 (1.04%) Perl
18 39 (0.90%) T-SQL
19 28 (0.65%) Kotlin
20 26 (0.60%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,249 (28.90%) Security Cleared
2 1,032 (23.88%) SC Cleared
3 373 (8.63%) Degree
4 207 (4.79%) Computer Science Degree
5 183 (4.23%) Azure Certification
6 152 (3.52%) AWS Certification
7 138 (3.19%) DV Cleared
8 105 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
9 90 (2.08%) Master's Degree
10 71 (1.64%) CISSP
11 63 (1.46%) Microsoft Certification
12 55 (1.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (1.16%) CISM
14 42 (0.97%) ISTQB
15 38 (0.88%) PMI Certification
16 30 (0.69%) PMP
17 29 (0.67%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 29 (0.67%) Cisco Certification
18 17 (0.39%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
18 17 (0.39%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 401 (9.28%) QA
2 166 (3.84%) GDPR
3 141 (3.26%) Data Quality
4 139 (3.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 123 (2.85%) Accessibility
6 112 (2.59%) NIST
7 53 (1.23%) NCSC
8 34 (0.79%) WCAG
9 33 (0.76%) PCI DSS
10 25 (0.58%) HIPAA
11 24 (0.56%) PMO
12 23 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 22 (0.51%) SLA
14 15 (0.35%) PSD2
15 14 (0.32%) ISO 20022
15 14 (0.32%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.30%) MiFID
17 11 (0.25%) SEPA
18 10 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
18 10 (0.23%) HL7
System Software
1 1,132 (26.19%) Docker
2 170 (3.93%) Active Directory
3 64 (1.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 60 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.67%) vSphere
6 20 (0.46%) DFS Replication
7 16 (0.37%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (0.28%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.28%) Oracle RAC
9 12 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 12 (0.28%) Squid
10 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.23%) Dovecot
11 10 (0.23%) Lustre
11 10 (0.23%) Postfix
12 8 (0.19%) GPFS
12 8 (0.19%) NFS
12 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
13 7 (0.16%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,380 (31.93%) Terraform
2 1,295 (29.96%) Kubernetes
3 550 (12.73%) Ansible
4 342 (7.91%) Grafana
5 314 (7.27%) Prometheus
6 89 (2.06%) Argo
7 77 (1.78%) Puppet
8 55 (1.27%) Single Sign-On
9 53 (1.23%) Progress Chef
10 44 (1.02%) Istio
11 43 (0.99%) Kibana
12 34 (0.79%) Packer
13 25 (0.58%) Podman
14 20 (0.46%) SCCM
15 17 (0.39%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.37%) ITRS Geneos
16 16 (0.37%) Microsoft Intune
16 16 (0.37%) Nessus
16 16 (0.37%) Rancher
17 15 (0.35%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 725 (16.77%) Microsoft
2 332 (7.68%) Oracle
3 235 (5.44%) Google
4 224 (5.18%) Databricks
5 219 (5.07%) Splunk
6 168 (3.89%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.80%) Red Hat
8 109 (2.52%) Salesforce
8 109 (2.52%) VMware
9 103 (2.38%) SAP
10 77 (1.78%) Dynatrace
11 57 (1.32%) OpenAI
12 50 (1.16%) IBM
13 47 (1.09%) F5
14 42 (0.97%) Atlassian
14 42 (0.97%) Cisco
15 39 (0.90%) Palo Alto
16 38 (0.88%) MuleSoft
16 38 (0.88%) Talend
17 37 (0.86%) CyberArk