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

6 months to
7 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,043 3,044 3,972
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.57% 10.39% 9.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.52% 11.43% 10.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,522 2,236 2,734
10th Percentile £381 £393 £400
25th Percentile £438 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £532 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.52% -3.36% -5.17%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £505 £530
% change year-on-year -0.99% -4.72% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 109 20 107
10th Percentile £39.53 £34.53 £56.25
25th Percentile £55.00 £55.00 £61.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £71.61 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -5.74% +10.17% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £84.10 £77.50
90th Percentile £94.00 £88.00 £87.18
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.25 £68.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year -3.64% +5.77% -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 40,275 26,638 37,488
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.44% 90.95% 86.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,293 17,157 24,168
10th Percentile £320 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £745 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £480 £500
% change year-on-year +1.56% -4.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,413 1,083 2,449
10th Percentile £14.84 £14.63 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.75 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £41.56 £29.00 £35.96
Median % change year-on-year +43.29% -19.35% -0.11%
75th Percentile £67.25 £61.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £79.40 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.69 £27.94 £37.50
% change year-on-year +56.37% -25.49% +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 7 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 7 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 7 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 4,308 £525 -4.55% 1,431
UK excluding London +11 2,213 £500 -0.99% 1,055
London +3 2,208 £538 -6.43% 564
Work from Home -3 1,352 £525 - 755
North of England +5 737 £500 -3.80% 293
South East +3 471 £505 -8.18% 328
Midlands +1 406 £488 -2.50% 112
Yorkshire +2 404 £500 -3.80% 75
West Midlands +3 311 £500 -4.31% 56
South West +15 289 £510 -9.73% 122
North West +3 276 £500 - 150
Scotland +3 179 £475 +0.42% 63
East of England +25 127 £525 +3.45% 95
East Midlands 0 92 £465 -0.80% 56
North East +9 67 £475 -13.64% 69
Wales +2 39 £425 +39.13% 39
Northern Ireland -4 10 £475 +13.77% 20
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
1 282 (5.59%) Confluence
2 132 (2.62%) Apache Spark
3 114 (2.26%) SharePoint
4 86 (1.71%) Apache
5 81 (1.61%) SAS
6 68 (1.35%) Apache Airflow
7 35 (0.69%) CMS
8 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
9 30 (0.59%) nginx
10 26 (0.52%) OpenStack
11 23 (0.46%) IIS
12 15 (0.30%) Mendix
13 10 (0.20%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 10 (0.20%) HCL Notes
13 10 (0.20%) WebSphere
14 9 (0.18%) Camunda
14 9 (0.18%) Sitecore CMS
15 8 (0.16%) ArcGIS
15 8 (0.16%) Jupyter
16 7 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 73 (1.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.23%) Microsoft Project
3 47 (0.93%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 33 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 24 (0.48%) MS Visio
6 5 (0.099%) Chatbot
7 4 (0.079%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.079%) Trello
8 3 (0.059%) Weka
9 2 (0.040%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.040%) Spreadsheet
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
Business Applications
1 67 (1.33%) Dynamics CRM
2 25 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.28%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 9 (0.18%) Maximo
4 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
5 7 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 7 (0.14%) Remedy ITSM
6 6 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
7 5 (0.099%) Oracle EBS
7 5 (0.099%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.079%) Endur
8 4 (0.079%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.059%) Findur
9 3 (0.059%) Magento
9 3 (0.059%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.059%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.059%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.059%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.059%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,756 (54.65%) Azure
2 1,711 (33.93%) AWS
3 1,508 (29.90%) Azure DevOps
4 867 (17.19%) GitHub
5 664 (13.17%) GCP
6 509 (10.09%) GitHub Actions
6 509 (10.09%) Serverless
7 426 (8.45%) Power Platform
8 274 (5.43%) AWS CloudFormation
9 268 (5.31%) Amazon S3
10 255 (5.06%) AWS Lambda
11 235 (4.66%) Azure AKS
12 230 (4.56%) Entra ID
13 226 (4.48%) Azure Data Factory
14 202 (4.01%) Amazon EKS
15 174 (3.45%) Azure Monitor
15 174 (3.45%) OpenShift
16 165 (3.27%) PaaS
17 153 (3.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 153 (3.03%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 212 (4.20%) Firewall
2 121 (2.40%) DNS
3 98 (1.94%) Network Security
4 90 (1.78%) VPN
5 39 (0.77%) TCP/IP
6 34 (0.67%) WAN
7 30 (0.59%) SD-WAN
8 29 (0.58%) HTTP
9 25 (0.50%) BGP
9 25 (0.50%) SSL
10 22 (0.44%) DHCP
11 21 (0.42%) SAN
12 19 (0.38%) IPsec
13 18 (0.36%) Wi-Fi
14 16 (0.32%) MPLS
14 16 (0.32%) OSPF
14 16 (0.32%) Reverse Proxy
15 14 (0.28%) LAN
16 11 (0.22%) Internet
16 11 (0.22%) OpenVPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 281 (5.57%) Power BI
2 249 (4.94%) SQL Server
3 246 (4.88%) PostgreSQL
4 179 (3.55%) NoSQL
5 175 (3.47%) Data Lake
6 151 (2.99%) Relational Database
7 139 (2.76%) Data Warehouse
8 118 (2.34%) Azure SQL Database
9 114 (2.26%) MongoDB
10 107 (2.12%) Amazon RDS
11 99 (1.96%) DynamoDB
12 93 (1.84%) Metadata
13 91 (1.80%) Delta Lake
14 75 (1.49%) Big Data
15 71 (1.41%) Elasticsearch
15 71 (1.41%) Oracle Database
16 65 (1.29%) Amazon Athena
17 54 (1.07%) Redis
18 52 (1.03%) BigQuery
19 50 (0.99%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 733 (14.53%) Jenkins
2 643 (12.75%) Git
3 609 (12.08%) JIRA
4 510 (10.11%) GitLab
5 102 (2.02%) Selenium
6 97 (1.92%) Postman
7 82 (1.63%) JUnit
7 82 (1.63%) SonarQube
8 72 (1.43%) Bitbucket
9 60 (1.19%) Maven
10 52 (1.03%) JMeter
11 51 (1.01%) Artifactory
11 51 (1.01%) REST Assured
12 49 (0.97%) Cucumber
12 49 (0.97%) Cypress.io
13 37 (0.73%) Gatling
13 37 (0.73%) Mockito
14 32 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
15 31 (0.61%) Gradle
16 28 (0.56%) TestRail
General
1 1,278 (25.34%) Social Skills
2 924 (18.32%) Finance
3 631 (12.51%) Public Sector
4 410 (8.13%) Analytical Skills
5 324 (6.42%) Banking
6 150 (2.97%) Documentation Skills
7 76 (1.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 67 (1.33%) Influencing Skills
9 61 (1.21%) Legal
9 61 (1.21%) Retail
10 53 (1.05%) Financial Institution
10 53 (1.05%) Marketing
11 50 (0.99%) Organisational Skills
12 44 (0.87%) Front Office
13 42 (0.83%) Presentation Skills
14 38 (0.75%) Investment Banking
15 37 (0.73%) Telecoms
16 34 (0.67%) Military
17 26 (0.52%) Law
18 24 (0.48%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,021 (20.25%) DevOps Engineer
2 753 (14.93%) Developer
3 710 (14.08%) Senior
4 574 (11.38%) Architect
5 411 (8.15%) Lead
6 345 (6.84%) Azure Engineer
7 315 (6.25%) Data Engineer
8 301 (5.97%) Analyst
9 238 (4.72%) AWS Engineer
10 182 (3.61%) Cloud Engineer
11 181 (3.59%) AWS DevOps
12 180 (3.57%) Platform Engineer
13 170 (3.37%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 170 (3.37%) Solutions Architect
14 165 (3.27%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 156 (3.09%) Senior DevOps
16 150 (2.97%) Software Engineer
17 145 (2.88%) Business Analyst
17 145 (2.88%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 140 (2.78%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 462 (9.16%) REST
2 450 (8.92%) .NET
3 297 (5.89%) React
4 283 (5.61%) Kafka
5 282 (5.59%) Node.js
6 281 (5.57%) Spring
7 265 (5.25%) Spring Boot
8 256 (5.08%) RESTful
9 181 (3.59%) AngularJS
10 152 (3.01%) PySpark
11 150 (2.97%) OAuth
11 150 (2.97%) Playwright
12 140 (2.78%) JSON
13 133 (2.64%) YAML
14 119 (2.36%) Middleware
15 115 (2.28%) HTML
16 109 (2.16%) SOAP
17 102 (2.02%) .NET Framework
18 101 (2.00%) CSS
19 99 (1.96%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 811 (16.08%) Cloud Native
2 321 (6.37%) Product Ownership
3 188 (3.73%) Distributed Systems
4 135 (2.68%) Onboarding
5 105 (2.08%) Public Cloud
6 103 (2.04%) Legacy Systems
7 98 (1.94%) Enterprise Software
8 93 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
9 80 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
10 60 (1.19%) Data Centre
11 56 (1.11%) Management Information System
12 51 (1.01%) Virtual Team
13 49 (0.97%) Private Cloud
13 49 (0.97%) Self-Motivation
14 43 (0.85%) Data Structures
15 41 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
15 41 (0.81%) NHS
15 41 (0.81%) Replication
16 40 (0.79%) AI Agents
16 40 (0.79%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 447 (8.86%) Linux
2 253 (5.02%) Windows
3 79 (1.57%) Unix
4 78 (1.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 44 (0.87%) VMS
5 44 (0.87%) Windows Server
6 22 (0.44%) Ubuntu
7 15 (0.30%) Apple iOS
8 14 (0.28%) Android
9 11 (0.22%) CentOS
10 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
11 8 (0.16%) Windows 10
12 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.12%) Solaris
14 5 (0.099%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.079%) Amazon Linux
15 4 (0.079%) Mac OS
15 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2008
16 3 (0.059%) Oracle Linux
16 3 (0.059%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,872 (56.95%) CI/CD
2 1,870 (37.08%) Agile
3 1,285 (25.48%) Infrastructure as Code
4 850 (16.86%) Containerisation
5 805 (15.96%) Problem-Solving
6 736 (14.59%) Microservices
7 724 (14.36%) Test Automation
8 660 (13.09%) Continuous Improvement
9 610 (12.10%) Migration
10 594 (11.78%) Analytics
11 593 (11.76%) Observability
12 536 (10.63%) Scrum
13 534 (10.59%) Stakeholder Management
14 510 (10.11%) AI
15 477 (9.46%) Software Engineering
16 473 (9.38%) Data Modelling
17 440 (8.72%) Platform Engineering
18 395 (7.83%) Data Pipeline
19 389 (7.71%) Mentoring
20 386 (7.65%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,405 (27.86%) Python
2 1,017 (20.17%) SQL
3 659 (13.07%) Java
4 503 (9.97%) C#
5 386 (7.65%) JavaScript
6 353 (7.00%) PowerShell
7 342 (6.78%) Bash
8 288 (5.71%) TypeScript
9 171 (3.39%) Bicep
10 112 (2.22%) Go
11 70 (1.39%) Scala
12 66 (1.31%) PL/SQL
13 63 (1.25%) Shell Script
14 46 (0.91%) Groovy
15 42 (0.83%) Apex Code
15 42 (0.83%) T-SQL
16 39 (0.77%) C++
17 31 (0.61%) Ruby
18 27 (0.54%) Perl
19 24 (0.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,604 (31.81%) Security Cleared
2 1,342 (26.61%) SC Cleared
3 322 (6.39%) Degree
4 211 (4.18%) Azure Certification
5 153 (3.03%) BPSS Clearance
6 151 (2.99%) Computer Science Degree
7 149 (2.95%) DV Cleared
8 138 (2.74%) AWS Certification
9 76 (1.51%) CISSP
10 58 (1.15%) Microsoft Certification
11 55 (1.09%) ISTQB
12 54 (1.07%) Master's Degree
13 53 (1.05%) CISM
14 49 (0.97%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 46 (0.91%) PMI Certification
16 41 (0.81%) Cisco Certification
16 41 (0.81%) PMP
17 30 (0.59%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.52%) TOGAF Certification
19 22 (0.44%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 448 (8.88%) QA
2 241 (4.78%) Data Quality
3 186 (3.69%) GDPR
4 138 (2.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 131 (2.60%) Accessibility
6 125 (2.48%) NIST
7 64 (1.27%) NCSC
8 47 (0.93%) PCI DSS
9 46 (0.91%) WCAG
10 38 (0.75%) PMO
11 33 (0.65%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 33 (0.65%) SLA
12 20 (0.40%) HIPAA
13 19 (0.38%) GRC
14 15 (0.30%) ISO 20022
14 15 (0.30%) NIST 800
15 14 (0.28%) PSD2
16 12 (0.24%) SEPA
16 12 (0.24%) SOC 2
17 9 (0.18%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 994 (19.71%) Docker
2 176 (3.49%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.57%) Virtual Machines
4 71 (1.41%) VMware Infrastructure
5 34 (0.67%) vSphere
6 29 (0.58%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.26%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.26%) Squid
9 12 (0.24%) Postfix
10 10 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
11 8 (0.16%) Firmware
11 8 (0.16%) HDFS
12 6 (0.12%) Corosync
12 6 (0.12%) Lustre
12 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.12%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 5 (0.099%) Ceph
13 5 (0.099%) NFS
13 5 (0.099%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,440 (28.55%) Terraform
2 1,324 (26.25%) Kubernetes
3 481 (9.54%) Ansible
4 349 (6.92%) Grafana
5 290 (5.75%) Prometheus
6 101 (2.00%) Argo
7 71 (1.41%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.37%) Puppet
9 63 (1.25%) Istio
10 28 (0.56%) Progress Chef
11 27 (0.54%) Packer
12 26 (0.52%) Microsoft Intune
13 24 (0.48%) Kibana
14 23 (0.46%) vCenter Server
15 21 (0.42%) HP ALM
16 19 (0.38%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 19 (0.38%) Rancher
17 15 (0.30%) FortiGate
18 14 (0.28%) Consul
18 14 (0.28%) SCCM
Vendors
1 881 (17.47%) Microsoft
2 296 (5.87%) Oracle
3 282 (5.59%) Databricks
4 238 (4.72%) Google
5 198 (3.93%) Splunk
6 177 (3.51%) ServiceNow
7 152 (3.01%) Salesforce
8 139 (2.76%) Red Hat
9 120 (2.38%) VMware
10 116 (2.30%) SAP
11 99 (1.96%) Dynatrace
12 73 (1.45%) OpenAI
13 60 (1.19%) CyberArk
14 49 (0.97%) Atlassian
15 43 (0.85%) Cisco
15 43 (0.85%) IBM
15 43 (0.85%) Informatica
16 39 (0.77%) AppDynamics
17 36 (0.71%) Denodo
18 35 (0.69%) Talend