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 12 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,671 3,670 3,844
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.39% 11.12% 9.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.29% 12.29% 11.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,947 2,566 2,595
10th Percentile £381 £361 £381
25th Percentile £437 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £618 £623 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 27 71
10th Percentile £37.25 £39.50 £56.00
25th Percentile £55.25 £52.75 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.22
90th Percentile £92.75 £95.00 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.49% -4.29% +7.69%

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 46,152 29,871 33,024
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.49% 85.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,085 18,553 20,430
10th Percentile £325 £300 £311
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,056 1,793 1,507
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.70
25th Percentile £17.44 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.92%
75th Percentile £67.50 £44.78 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.50 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.03 £22.58 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.32% -47.50% +7.50%

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 12 September 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 12 September 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 12 September 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 0 4,826 £525 - 2,915
London 0 2,553 £550 - 1,577
UK excluding London -4 2,425 £500 - 1,612
Work from Home +1 1,623 £525 +2.44% 2,618
North of England -2 797 £500 +5.26% 459
South East -10 456 £525 +5.00% 404
Midlands -5 442 £488 -4.88% 194
Yorkshire -2 392 £500 +3.63% 130
West Midlands -8 347 £500 -4.76% 115
South West +5 319 £550 +4.76% 224
North West -4 312 £521 +15.41% 241
Scotland -6 223 £483 +1.58% 138
East of England +7 146 £505 -3.35% 132
North East +16 108 £425 -18.27% 91
East Midlands +1 92 £463 +10.12% 78
Wales -4 48 £500 +33.33% 40
Northern Ireland +20 23 £450 +2.27% 37
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 344 (6.07%) Confluence
2 159 (2.80%) SharePoint
3 131 (2.31%) Apache Airflow
4 125 (2.20%) Apache Spark
5 112 (1.97%) Apache
6 61 (1.08%) SAS
7 42 (0.74%) CMS
8 40 (0.71%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.55%) IIS
10 28 (0.49%) nginx
11 19 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.26%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
15 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 67 (1.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
3 47 (0.83%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Trello
9 5 (0.088%) Notion
9 5 (0.088%) Windchill
10 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.035%) Mingle
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.018%) Sketch
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 78 (1.38%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.65%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.18%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS R12
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.088%) Aladdin
8 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Maximo
10 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.053%) SAP Oil and Gas
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,092 (54.52%) Azure
2 2,034 (35.87%) AWS
3 1,771 (31.23%) Azure DevOps
4 995 (17.55%) GitHub
5 743 (13.10%) GCP
6 630 (11.11%) GitHub Actions
7 490 (8.64%) Power Platform
8 471 (8.31%) Serverless
9 310 (5.47%) Amazon S3
10 293 (5.17%) AWS Lambda
11 256 (4.51%) Entra ID
12 248 (4.37%) Amazon EKS
13 243 (4.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 242 (4.27%) AWS CloudFormation
15 217 (3.83%) Azure AKS
16 207 (3.65%) Azure Monitor
17 201 (3.54%) Azure Data Factory
18 196 (3.46%) Amazon EC2
19 182 (3.21%) Dynamics 365
20 165 (2.91%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 243 (4.28%) Firewall
2 176 (3.10%) DNS
3 118 (2.08%) VPN
4 112 (1.97%) Network Security
5 67 (1.18%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.92%) SSL
7 50 (0.88%) DHCP
8 48 (0.85%) WAN
9 35 (0.62%) HTTP
10 32 (0.56%) SD-WAN
11 31 (0.55%) BGP
12 28 (0.49%) Internet
12 28 (0.49%) SSH
13 25 (0.44%) Wi-Fi
14 22 (0.39%) OSPF
15 20 (0.35%) SAN
16 19 (0.34%) VLAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 321 (5.66%) Power BI
2 306 (5.40%) PostgreSQL
3 302 (5.33%) SQL Server
4 216 (3.81%) Data Warehouse
5 188 (3.32%) MongoDB
6 186 (3.28%) NoSQL
7 181 (3.19%) Relational Database
8 179 (3.16%) Data Lake
9 145 (2.56%) Amazon RDS
10 129 (2.27%) Metadata
11 108 (1.90%) Azure SQL Database
12 94 (1.66%) DynamoDB
13 92 (1.62%) Delta Lake
14 89 (1.57%) Oracle Database
15 87 (1.53%) MySQL
16 80 (1.41%) Redis
17 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
18 62 (1.09%) Big Data
19 61 (1.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
20 54 (0.95%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 823 (14.51%) Git
2 812 (14.32%) Jenkins
3 681 (12.01%) JIRA
4 640 (11.29%) GitLab
5 137 (2.42%) Selenium
6 105 (1.85%) SonarQube
7 98 (1.73%) JUnit
8 97 (1.71%) Maven
9 96 (1.69%) Postman
10 78 (1.38%) Bitbucket
11 74 (1.30%) REST Assured
12 71 (1.25%) Cypress.io
13 68 (1.20%) Gradle
14 66 (1.16%) JMeter
15 62 (1.09%) Cucumber
16 50 (0.88%) Claude Code
17 47 (0.83%) Mockito
18 45 (0.79%) Gatling
19 44 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
20 38 (0.67%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,477 (26.04%) Social Skills
2 1,013 (17.86%) Finance
3 815 (14.37%) Public Sector
4 526 (9.28%) Analytical Skills
5 382 (6.74%) Banking
6 168 (2.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 108 (1.90%) Retail
8 88 (1.55%) Documentation Skills
9 81 (1.43%) Influencing Skills
10 64 (1.13%) Legal
10 64 (1.13%) Organisational Skills
11 54 (0.95%) Marketing
11 54 (0.95%) Military
12 51 (0.90%) Aerospace
12 51 (0.90%) Investment Banking
13 50 (0.88%) Telecoms
14 46 (0.81%) Law
15 45 (0.79%) Front Office
16 43 (0.76%) Manufacturing
17 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,141 (20.12%) DevOps Engineer
2 925 (16.31%) Developer
3 865 (15.25%) Senior
4 641 (11.30%) Architect
5 544 (9.59%) Lead
6 356 (6.28%) Azure Engineer
7 317 (5.59%) Data Engineer
8 269 (4.74%) Analyst
9 261 (4.60%) AWS Engineer
10 236 (4.16%) Platform Engineer
11 212 (3.74%) Azure DevOps Engineer
12 211 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
13 200 (3.53%) Java Developer
14 199 (3.51%) Senior DevOps
15 186 (3.28%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 180 (3.17%) Solutions Architect
17 179 (3.16%) AWS DevOps
18 167 (2.94%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 164 (2.89%) Senior Developer
20 144 (2.54%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,689 (29.78%) Terraform
2 614 (10.83%) REST
3 476 (8.39%) .NET
4 390 (6.88%) Kafka
5 358 (6.31%) RESTful
6 312 (5.50%) Spring
7 304 (5.36%) Spring Boot
8 294 (5.18%) React
9 201 (3.54%) Node.js
10 185 (3.26%) JSON
11 173 (3.05%) OAuth
12 166 (2.93%) Playwright
13 162 (2.86%) PySpark
14 143 (2.52%) HTML
15 131 (2.31%) CSS
16 126 (2.22%) .NET Framework
17 125 (2.20%) SOAP
18 124 (2.19%) AngularJS
19 121 (2.13%) OAuth2
20 112 (1.97%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,035 (18.25%) Cloud Native
2 439 (7.74%) Product Ownership
3 268 (4.73%) Distributed Systems
4 205 (3.61%) Enterprise Software
5 188 (3.32%) Onboarding
6 152 (2.68%) Hybrid Cloud
7 147 (2.59%) Legacy Systems
8 98 (1.73%) AI Agents
9 90 (1.59%) Management Information System
10 86 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
11 80 (1.41%) Self-Motivation
12 78 (1.38%) Public Cloud
12 78 (1.38%) Replication
13 74 (1.30%) Data Structures
14 71 (1.25%) Data Centre
14 71 (1.25%) Security Posture
15 63 (1.11%) Virtual Team
16 58 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
17 55 (0.97%) PKI
18 53 (0.93%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 556 (9.80%) Linux
2 313 (5.52%) Windows
3 118 (2.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 114 (2.01%) Unix
5 96 (1.69%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) VMS
7 34 (0.60%) Ubuntu
8 32 (0.56%) Apple iOS
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
11 10 (0.18%) zOS
12 9 (0.16%) Solaris
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) AIX
15 5 (0.088%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,431 (60.50%) CI/CD
2 2,311 (40.75%) Agile
3 1,663 (29.32%) Infrastructure as Code
4 971 (17.12%) Continuous Improvement
5 952 (16.79%) Containerisation
6 925 (16.31%) Stakeholder Management
7 903 (15.92%) Problem-Solving
8 899 (15.85%) Test Automation
9 843 (14.87%) AI
10 840 (14.81%) Microservices
11 761 (13.42%) Observability
12 759 (13.38%) Platform Engineering
13 732 (12.91%) Software Engineering
14 690 (12.17%) Scrum
15 678 (11.96%) Migration
16 608 (10.72%) Technical Leadership
17 588 (10.37%) Analytics
18 534 (9.42%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 493 (8.69%) Roadmaps
20 488 (8.61%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,635 (28.83%) Python
2 1,016 (17.92%) SQL
3 834 (14.71%) Java
4 501 (8.83%) Bash
4 501 (8.83%) PowerShell
5 489 (8.62%) C#
6 461 (8.13%) JavaScript
7 311 (5.48%) TypeScript
8 258 (4.55%) Bicep
9 111 (1.96%) Go
10 81 (1.43%) Shell Script
11 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
12 68 (1.20%) Apex Code
13 67 (1.18%) Scala
14 64 (1.13%) Groovy
15 60 (1.06%) PL/SQL
16 38 (0.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 35 (0.62%) Perl
18 30 (0.53%) C++
19 24 (0.42%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,829 (32.25%) Security Cleared
2 1,532 (27.01%) SC Cleared
3 351 (6.19%) Degree
4 244 (4.30%) Azure Certification
5 238 (4.20%) BPSS Clearance
6 223 (3.93%) DV Cleared
7 187 (3.30%) AWS Certification
8 139 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
9 110 (1.94%) Microsoft Certification
10 78 (1.38%) CISSP
11 59 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.90%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.81%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.69%) Master's Degree
17 32 (0.56%) CISM
18 24 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 24 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 24 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 556 (9.80%) QA
2 294 (5.18%) Data Quality
3 211 (3.72%) Accessibility
4 133 (2.35%) GDPR
5 96 (1.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 86 (1.52%) WCAG
7 82 (1.45%) NIST
8 54 (0.95%) NCSC
9 49 (0.86%) PMO
10 39 (0.69%) SLA
11 30 (0.53%) PCI DSS
12 29 (0.51%) GRC
13 24 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 19 (0.34%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
16 12 (0.21%) SEPA
17 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
18 10 (0.18%) HL7
19 9 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,173 (20.68%) Docker
2 175 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 90 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.51%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) Hyper-V
7 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
8 19 (0.34%) VMware NSX
9 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.19%) IAG
11 11 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.16%) Postfix
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) KVM
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.088%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,545 (27.24%) Kubernetes
2 546 (9.63%) Ansible
3 377 (6.65%) Grafana
4 319 (5.63%) Prometheus
5 80 (1.41%) Argo
6 64 (1.13%) Puppet
7 53 (0.93%) Single Sign-On
8 52 (0.92%) Progress Chef
9 46 (0.81%) Microsoft Intune
10 35 (0.62%) Packer
11 33 (0.58%) Istio
12 26 (0.46%) Kibana
13 22 (0.39%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.34%) Oracle RMAN
15 19 (0.34%) SCCM
16 18 (0.32%) Kubeflow
17 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,108 (19.54%) Microsoft
2 313 (5.52%) Oracle
3 307 (5.41%) Databricks
4 283 (4.99%) Google
5 209 (3.69%) ServiceNow
6 185 (3.26%) Salesforce
7 184 (3.24%) Splunk
8 147 (2.59%) Dynatrace
9 133 (2.35%) VMware
10 113 (1.99%) SAP
11 108 (1.90%) Red Hat
12 67 (1.18%) OpenAI
13 66 (1.16%) IBM
14 63 (1.11%) MuleSoft
15 59 (1.04%) Informatica
16 53 (0.93%) Foundry
17 46 (0.81%) Cisco
18 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
18 43 (0.76%) Atlassian
19 36 (0.63%) Okta