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 29 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,643 3,601 3,831
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.47% 10.93% 9.94%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.37% 12.08% 11.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,921 2,534 2,617
10th Percentile £385 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £729
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 28 78
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.58 £56.18
25th Percentile £55.69 £52.19 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.60 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.90% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £94.06 £95.00 £85.08
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.11 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.65% -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 45,621 29,800 32,930
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.64% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,920 18,562 20,756
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
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 2,892 1,765 1,620
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.21 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.30 £18.50
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.03
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.16% +0.31%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.12 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.15 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.11 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +90.48% -47.37% +14.67%

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 29 August 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 29 August 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 29 August 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 4,818 £525 - 3,656
London 0 2,546 £550 - 2,139
UK excluding London -1 2,416 £500 - 1,959
Work from Home +1 1,628 £525 +2.34% 1,649
North of England 0 801 £500 +5.26% 537
South East -9 464 £525 +5.00% 463
Midlands -1 449 £488 -2.50% 245
Yorkshire -1 394 £500 +2.04% 158
West Midlands -3 357 £491 -5.30% 147
South West +7 313 £550 +4.76% 295
North West -3 312 £510 +13.33% 287
Scotland -4 208 £494 +3.95% 158
East of England +13 142 £505 -3.81% 148
North East +17 112 £431 -17.07% 97
East Midlands +8 88 £459 +1.94% 98
Wales -4 49 £513 +36.67% 47
Northern Ireland +17 21 £450 +9.76% 81
Channel Islands - 5 £450 - 1

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
1 339 (6.01%) Confluence
2 154 (2.73%) SharePoint
3 126 (2.23%) Apache Airflow
3 126 (2.23%) Apache Spark
4 113 (2.00%) Apache
5 64 (1.13%) SAS
6 43 (0.76%) CMS
7 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
8 36 (0.64%) IIS
9 25 (0.44%) nginx
10 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.28%) Camunda
12 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
18 7 (0.12%) JBoss
18 7 (0.12%) Mule
Applications
1 65 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.12%) Microsoft Project
3 44 (0.78%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 32 (0.57%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 6 (0.11%) Trello
9 5 (0.089%) Notion
10 4 (0.071%) Windchill
11 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 75 (1.33%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Magento
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 7 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 4 (0.071%) Maximo
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) Infor LN
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,102 (54.97%) Azure
2 2,010 (35.62%) AWS
3 1,792 (31.76%) Azure DevOps
4 982 (17.40%) GitHub
5 713 (12.64%) GCP
6 615 (10.90%) GitHub Actions
7 488 (8.65%) Power Platform
8 458 (8.12%) Serverless
9 293 (5.19%) Amazon S3
10 277 (4.91%) AWS Lambda
11 260 (4.61%) Entra ID
12 238 (4.22%) Amazon EKS
13 237 (4.20%) AWS CloudFormation
14 226 (4.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 224 (3.97%) Azure AKS
16 219 (3.88%) Azure Monitor
17 202 (3.58%) Azure Data Factory
18 181 (3.21%) Dynamics 365
19 180 (3.19%) Amazon EC2
20 164 (2.91%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 251 (4.45%) Firewall
2 174 (3.08%) DNS
3 124 (2.20%) VPN
4 113 (2.00%) Network Security
5 68 (1.21%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.92%) WAN
7 47 (0.83%) DHCP
7 47 (0.83%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 36 (0.64%) HTTP
10 33 (0.58%) BGP
11 32 (0.57%) Internet
12 29 (0.51%) SSH
12 29 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
13 24 (0.43%) OSPF
14 21 (0.37%) SAN
14 21 (0.37%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 325 (5.76%) Power BI
2 298 (5.28%) SQL Server
3 295 (5.23%) PostgreSQL
4 209 (3.70%) Data Warehouse
5 190 (3.37%) NoSQL
6 179 (3.17%) MongoDB
7 178 (3.15%) Relational Database
8 168 (2.98%) Data Lake
9 133 (2.36%) Amazon RDS
10 124 (2.20%) Metadata
11 112 (1.98%) Azure SQL Database
12 92 (1.63%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.56%) Delta Lake
14 82 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 81 (1.44%) Redis
16 76 (1.35%) MySQL
17 68 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
18 60 (1.06%) Big Data
19 57 (1.01%) SQL Server Integration Services
20 53 (0.94%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 801 (14.19%) Jenkins
2 791 (14.02%) Git
3 677 (12.00%) JIRA
4 615 (10.90%) GitLab
5 143 (2.53%) Selenium
6 103 (1.83%) Postman
7 99 (1.75%) SonarQube
8 94 (1.67%) JUnit
9 90 (1.59%) Maven
10 80 (1.42%) Bitbucket
11 72 (1.28%) JMeter
11 72 (1.28%) REST Assured
12 71 (1.26%) Cypress.io
13 62 (1.10%) Gradle
14 58 (1.03%) Cucumber
15 50 (0.89%) Gatling
16 44 (0.78%) Claude Code
16 44 (0.78%) Mockito
17 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
18 41 (0.73%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,459 (25.86%) Social Skills
2 1,005 (17.81%) Finance
3 826 (14.64%) Public Sector
4 509 (9.02%) Analytical Skills
5 369 (6.54%) Banking
6 159 (2.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 103 (1.83%) Retail
8 94 (1.67%) Documentation Skills
9 74 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.19%) Legal
11 65 (1.15%) Organisational Skills
12 55 (0.97%) Marketing
13 50 (0.89%) Aerospace
13 50 (0.89%) Investment Banking
13 50 (0.89%) Military
13 50 (0.89%) Telecoms
14 46 (0.82%) Law
15 42 (0.74%) Financial Institution
15 42 (0.74%) Front Office
16 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,123 (19.90%) DevOps Engineer
2 918 (16.27%) Developer
3 844 (14.96%) Senior
4 632 (11.20%) Architect
5 541 (9.59%) Lead
6 357 (6.33%) Azure Engineer
7 309 (5.48%) Data Engineer
8 278 (4.93%) Analyst
9 263 (4.66%) AWS Engineer
10 235 (4.16%) Platform Engineer
11 206 (3.65%) Cloud Engineer
12 204 (3.62%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 199 (3.53%) Senior DevOps
14 190 (3.37%) Java Developer
15 184 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 183 (3.24%) AWS DevOps
17 172 (3.05%) Solutions Architect
18 170 (3.01%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 157 (2.78%) Senior Developer
20 148 (2.62%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,678 (29.74%) Terraform
2 588 (10.42%) REST
3 485 (8.59%) .NET
4 373 (6.61%) Kafka
5 346 (6.13%) RESTful
6 305 (5.40%) Spring
7 294 (5.21%) React
8 291 (5.16%) Spring Boot
9 212 (3.76%) Node.js
10 182 (3.23%) JSON
11 169 (2.99%) Playwright
12 166 (2.94%) OAuth
13 159 (2.82%) PySpark
14 137 (2.43%) .NET Framework
14 137 (2.43%) HTML
15 131 (2.32%) SOAP
16 128 (2.27%) AngularJS
17 127 (2.25%) CSS
18 119 (2.11%) OAuth2
19 117 (2.07%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,025 (18.16%) Cloud Native
2 419 (7.43%) Product Ownership
3 263 (4.66%) Distributed Systems
4 188 (3.33%) Enterprise Software
5 183 (3.24%) Onboarding
6 157 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
7 151 (2.68%) Hybrid Cloud
8 90 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
9 89 (1.58%) AI Agents
10 82 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
11 80 (1.42%) Management Information System
12 76 (1.35%) Public Cloud
13 74 (1.31%) Data Structures
14 69 (1.22%) Data Centre
15 68 (1.21%) Replication
16 66 (1.17%) Security Posture
17 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
18 56 (0.99%) Virtual Team
19 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
20 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 529 (9.37%) Linux
2 309 (5.48%) Windows
3 112 (1.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 102 (1.81%) Unix
5 92 (1.63%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.69%) VMS
7 33 (0.58%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
12 8 (0.14%) CentOS
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,362 (59.58%) CI/CD
2 2,288 (40.55%) Agile
3 1,622 (28.74%) Infrastructure as Code
4 945 (16.75%) Continuous Improvement
5 936 (16.59%) Containerisation
6 882 (15.63%) Test Automation
7 878 (15.56%) Problem-Solving
8 873 (15.47%) Stakeholder Management
9 833 (14.76%) Microservices
10 804 (14.25%) AI
11 751 (13.31%) Observability
12 743 (13.17%) Platform Engineering
13 702 (12.44%) Software Engineering
14 678 (12.01%) Scrum
15 677 (12.00%) Migration
16 589 (10.44%) Analytics
17 584 (10.35%) Technical Leadership
18 533 (9.45%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 483 (8.56%) Roadmaps
20 472 (8.36%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,614 (28.60%) Python
2 1,021 (18.09%) SQL
3 810 (14.35%) Java
4 498 (8.83%) C#
5 492 (8.72%) PowerShell
6 482 (8.54%) Bash
7 458 (8.12%) JavaScript
8 311 (5.51%) TypeScript
9 256 (4.54%) Bicep
10 100 (1.77%) Go
11 78 (1.38%) Shell Script
12 70 (1.24%) Apex Code
13 66 (1.17%) T-SQL
14 63 (1.12%) Groovy
14 63 (1.12%) Scala
15 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
16 35 (0.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 35 (0.62%) Perl
17 31 (0.55%) C++
18 25 (0.44%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,816 (32.18%) Security Cleared
2 1,533 (27.17%) SC Cleared
3 338 (5.99%) Degree
4 233 (4.13%) Azure Certification
5 227 (4.02%) BPSS Clearance
6 207 (3.67%) DV Cleared
7 188 (3.33%) AWS Certification
8 134 (2.37%) Computer Science Degree
9 101 (1.79%) Microsoft Certification
10 74 (1.31%) CISSP
11 65 (1.15%) ISTQB
12 56 (0.99%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 52 (0.92%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 25 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
20 23 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 528 (9.36%) QA
2 281 (4.98%) Data Quality
3 204 (3.62%) Accessibility
4 134 (2.37%) GDPR
5 104 (1.84%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 82 (1.45%) NIST
6 82 (1.45%) WCAG
7 54 (0.96%) NCSC
8 53 (0.94%) PMO
9 39 (0.69%) SLA
10 35 (0.62%) PCI DSS
11 29 (0.51%) GRC
12 25 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.28%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
15 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) HL7
15 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,149 (20.36%) Docker
2 174 (3.08%) Active Directory
3 92 (1.63%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.50%) Hyper-V
6 26 (0.46%) vSphere
7 20 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.19%) IAG
10 11 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.16%) Postfix
12 7 (0.12%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 5 (0.089%) Ceph
14 5 (0.089%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,520 (26.94%) Kubernetes
2 540 (9.57%) Ansible
3 373 (6.61%) Grafana
4 317 (5.62%) Prometheus
5 85 (1.51%) Argo
6 61 (1.08%) Puppet
7 54 (0.96%) Single Sign-On
8 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Microsoft Intune
10 39 (0.69%) Istio
11 36 (0.64%) Packer
12 25 (0.44%) Kibana
13 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
14 20 (0.35%) SCCM
14 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
15 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
16 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
17 14 (0.25%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,107 (19.62%) Microsoft
2 303 (5.37%) Oracle
3 289 (5.12%) Databricks
4 268 (4.75%) Google
5 200 (3.54%) ServiceNow
6 187 (3.31%) Splunk
7 185 (3.28%) Salesforce
8 145 (2.57%) Dynatrace
9 129 (2.29%) VMware
10 112 (1.98%) SAP
11 106 (1.88%) Red Hat
12 65 (1.15%) IBM
13 63 (1.12%) OpenAI
14 61 (1.08%) Informatica
14 61 (1.08%) MuleSoft
15 50 (0.89%) Cisco
16 47 (0.83%) Foundry
17 46 (0.82%) AppDynamics
18 44 (0.78%) Atlassian
19 36 (0.64%) CyberArk