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

6 months to
17 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,661 3,592 3,818
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.58% 10.85% 9.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.48% 11.99% 11.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,922 2,544 2,618
10th Percentile £385 £363 £382
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 27 83
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.10 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.25 £51.88 £63.30
Median hourly rate £67.86 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +1.28% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £88.00 £95.00 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -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 45,350 29,954 33,125
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.75% 90.50% 85.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,857 18,668 21,203
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £424 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.31%
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 2,845 1,726 1,796
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.03
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.31 £18.23
Median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.97
Median % change year-on-year +67.00% -38.61% -1.28%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.25 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +13.33%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 4,850 £525 - 1,144
London 0 2,531 £550 - 433
UK excluding London +1 2,444 £500 - 918
Work from Home +1 1,632 £525 +2.34% 657
North of England 0 824 £500 +4.17% 251
South East -7 478 £525 +5.00% 289
Midlands 0 458 £488 -2.50% 123
Yorkshire 0 409 £500 +1.46% 67
West Midlands -1 376 £490 -4.85% 77
North West -1 321 £525 +11.11% 129
South West +7 316 £525 +0.96% 128
Scotland -3 187 £500 +3.20% 49
East of England +15 138 £505 +1.00% 50
North East +15 111 £425 -19.05% 57
East Midlands -1 78 £488 +6.85% 45
Wales -5 48 £513 +36.67% 28
Northern Ireland +20 23 £475 +7.95% 7
Channel Islands - 4 £475 -

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
1 332 (5.86%) Confluence
2 140 (2.47%) SharePoint
3 129 (2.28%) Apache Spark
4 123 (2.17%) Apache Airflow
5 111 (1.96%) Apache
6 86 (1.52%) SAS
7 42 (0.74%) CMS
8 38 (0.67%) IIS
8 38 (0.67%) Jupyter
9 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
10 22 (0.39%) nginx
11 15 (0.26%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
12 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.19%) OpenStack
13 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
13 11 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
14 9 (0.16%) Appian
15 7 (0.12%) Mule
15 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
2 60 (1.06%) Microsoft Excel
3 39 (0.69%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 28 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
8 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
9 7 (0.12%) Trello
10 5 (0.088%) Notion
11 3 (0.053%) Windchill
12 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 69 (1.22%) Dynamics CRM
2 38 (0.67%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.19%) Aladdin
3 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
4 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
7 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
9 5 (0.088%) Maximo
9 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 4 (0.071%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,086 (54.51%) Azure
2 2,007 (35.45%) AWS
3 1,768 (31.23%) Azure DevOps
4 971 (17.15%) GitHub
5 721 (12.74%) GCP
6 604 (10.67%) GitHub Actions
7 469 (8.28%) Power Platform
8 444 (7.84%) Serverless
9 292 (5.16%) Amazon S3
10 265 (4.68%) Entra ID
11 264 (4.66%) AWS Lambda
12 246 (4.35%) AWS CloudFormation
13 233 (4.12%) Amazon EKS
14 219 (3.87%) Azure AKS
15 213 (3.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 202 (3.57%) Azure Data Factory
17 200 (3.53%) Azure Monitor
18 178 (3.14%) Amazon EC2
19 164 (2.90%) Dynamics 365
20 157 (2.77%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 249 (4.40%) Firewall
2 161 (2.84%) DNS
3 123 (2.17%) VPN
4 111 (1.96%) Network Security
5 61 (1.08%) TCP/IP
6 51 (0.90%) WAN
7 45 (0.79%) SSL
8 43 (0.76%) DHCP
9 37 (0.65%) SD-WAN
10 32 (0.57%) BGP
10 32 (0.57%) HTTP
10 32 (0.57%) Internet
11 29 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
12 25 (0.44%) OSPF
13 22 (0.39%) SAN
13 22 (0.39%) VLAN
14 21 (0.37%) SSH
15 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 315 (5.56%) Power BI
2 293 (5.18%) SQL Server
3 290 (5.12%) PostgreSQL
4 199 (3.52%) Data Warehouse
5 191 (3.37%) NoSQL
6 183 (3.23%) Relational Database
7 175 (3.09%) MongoDB
8 162 (2.86%) Data Lake
9 124 (2.19%) Amazon RDS
10 117 (2.07%) Metadata
11 112 (1.98%) Azure SQL Database
12 91 (1.61%) DynamoDB
13 86 (1.52%) Delta Lake
14 80 (1.41%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.25%) Redis
16 68 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
17 67 (1.18%) MySQL
18 65 (1.15%) Big Data
19 56 (0.99%) SQL Server Integration Services
20 54 (0.95%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 818 (14.45%) Jenkins
2 788 (13.92%) Git
3 688 (12.15%) JIRA
4 603 (10.65%) GitLab
5 134 (2.37%) Selenium
6 101 (1.78%) SonarQube
7 100 (1.77%) Postman
8 93 (1.64%) JUnit
9 87 (1.54%) Maven
10 83 (1.47%) Bitbucket
11 67 (1.18%) Cypress.io
11 67 (1.18%) JMeter
12 64 (1.13%) REST Assured
13 58 (1.02%) Gradle
14 57 (1.01%) Cucumber
15 49 (0.87%) Gatling
16 44 (0.78%) Mockito
17 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
18 42 (0.74%) Claude Code
19 40 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,447 (25.56%) Social Skills
2 1,013 (17.89%) Finance
3 827 (14.61%) Public Sector
4 501 (8.85%) Analytical Skills
5 370 (6.54%) Banking
6 153 (2.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 105 (1.85%) Retail
8 98 (1.73%) Documentation Skills
9 70 (1.24%) Influencing Skills
10 68 (1.20%) Legal
11 67 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
12 53 (0.94%) Marketing
13 52 (0.92%) Investment Banking
14 47 (0.83%) Aerospace
14 47 (0.83%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.81%) Military
16 44 (0.78%) Front Office
16 44 (0.78%) Law
17 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
18 41 (0.72%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,090 (19.25%) DevOps Engineer
2 938 (16.57%) Developer
3 832 (14.70%) Senior
4 617 (10.90%) Architect
5 544 (9.61%) Lead
6 348 (6.15%) Azure Engineer
7 323 (5.71%) Data Engineer
8 283 (5.00%) Analyst
9 268 (4.73%) AWS Engineer
10 229 (4.05%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.59%) Senior DevOps
13 195 (3.44%) Java Developer
14 188 (3.32%) AWS DevOps
15 187 (3.30%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 186 (3.29%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 175 (3.09%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 174 (3.07%) Solutions Architect
19 158 (2.79%) Senior Developer
20 150 (2.65%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 587 (10.37%) REST
2 483 (8.53%) .NET
3 354 (6.25%) Kafka
4 341 (6.02%) RESTful
5 303 (5.35%) Spring
6 285 (5.03%) Spring Boot
7 284 (5.02%) React
8 213 (3.76%) Node.js
9 182 (3.21%) JSON
10 166 (2.93%) OAuth
11 165 (2.91%) Playwright
12 161 (2.84%) PySpark
13 146 (2.58%) AngularJS
14 137 (2.42%) SOAP
15 135 (2.38%) .NET Framework
16 132 (2.33%) HTML
17 121 (2.14%) OAuth2
18 116 (2.05%) YAML
19 109 (1.93%) CSS
20 107 (1.89%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 1,024 (18.09%) Cloud Native
2 399 (7.05%) Product Ownership
3 268 (4.73%) Distributed Systems
4 180 (3.18%) Enterprise Software
5 176 (3.11%) Onboarding
6 156 (2.76%) Legacy Systems
7 148 (2.61%) Hybrid Cloud
8 93 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
9 81 (1.43%) Self-Motivation
10 78 (1.38%) Public Cloud
11 77 (1.36%) AI Agents
12 75 (1.32%) Management Information System
13 72 (1.27%) Data Structures
14 70 (1.24%) Security Posture
15 69 (1.22%) Data Centre
16 64 (1.13%) Enterprise Cloud
16 64 (1.13%) Replication
17 54 (0.95%) Virtual Team
18 52 (0.92%) Mobile App
19 48 (0.85%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 517 (9.13%) Linux
2 313 (5.53%) Windows
3 112 (1.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 96 (1.70%) Unix
5 86 (1.52%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.60%) VMS
7 30 (0.53%) Apple iOS
7 30 (0.53%) Ubuntu
8 18 (0.32%) Android
9 9 (0.16%) Solaris
9 9 (0.16%) zOS
10 8 (0.14%) AIX
10 8 (0.14%) CentOS
10 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
11 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
12 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
12 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
13 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
14 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
14 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,336 (58.93%) CI/CD
2 2,289 (40.43%) Agile
3 1,572 (27.77%) Infrastructure as Code
4 930 (16.43%) Containerisation
5 927 (16.38%) Continuous Improvement
6 885 (15.63%) Problem-Solving
7 876 (15.47%) Test Automation
8 820 (14.49%) Stakeholder Management
9 818 (14.45%) Microservices
10 783 (13.83%) AI
11 715 (12.63%) Observability
12 697 (12.31%) Platform Engineering
13 687 (12.14%) Scrum
14 683 (12.07%) Migration
15 681 (12.03%) Software Engineering
16 609 (10.76%) Analytics
17 557 (9.84%) Technical Leadership
18 537 (9.49%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 496 (8.76%) Data Modelling
20 466 (8.23%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,598 (28.23%) Python
2 1,042 (18.41%) SQL
3 806 (14.24%) Java
4 501 (8.85%) C#
5 470 (8.30%) PowerShell
6 468 (8.27%) Bash
7 459 (8.11%) JavaScript
8 308 (5.44%) TypeScript
9 231 (4.08%) Bicep
10 96 (1.70%) Go
11 72 (1.27%) Shell Script
12 70 (1.24%) Apex Code
12 70 (1.24%) T-SQL
13 65 (1.15%) PL/SQL
14 62 (1.10%) Scala
15 59 (1.04%) Groovy
16 32 (0.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 31 (0.55%) C++
18 29 (0.51%) Perl
19 23 (0.41%) C
Qualifications
1 1,819 (32.13%) Security Cleared
2 1,537 (27.15%) SC Cleared
3 326 (5.76%) Degree
4 225 (3.97%) BPSS Clearance
5 223 (3.94%) Azure Certification
6 197 (3.48%) DV Cleared
7 187 (3.30%) AWS Certification
8 122 (2.16%) Computer Science Degree
9 87 (1.54%) Microsoft Certification
10 78 (1.38%) CISSP
11 65 (1.15%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 53 (0.94%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.81%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 36 (0.64%) Master's Degree
17 33 (0.58%) CISM
18 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 27 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
20 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 523 (9.24%) QA
2 283 (5.00%) Data Quality
3 199 (3.52%) Accessibility
4 149 (2.63%) GDPR
5 101 (1.78%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.40%) NIST
6 79 (1.40%) WCAG
7 55 (0.97%) NCSC
8 48 (0.85%) PMO
9 40 (0.71%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.67%) SLA
11 31 (0.55%) GRC
12 30 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 12 (0.21%) HIPAA
14 11 (0.19%) Actionable Recommendations
14 11 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
14 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.19%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) HL7
15 9 (0.16%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,114 (19.68%) Docker
2 183 (3.23%) Active Directory
3 84 (1.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
6 24 (0.42%) vSphere
7 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
7 17 (0.30%) VMware NSX
8 16 (0.28%) VMware ESXi
9 13 (0.23%) Squid
10 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
11 11 (0.19%) Postfix
12 9 (0.16%) IAG
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.12%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) Corosync
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
15 6 (0.11%) NFS
16 5 (0.088%) Firmware
16 5 (0.088%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,637 (28.92%) Terraform
2 1,486 (26.25%) Kubernetes
3 529 (9.34%) Ansible
4 364 (6.43%) Grafana
5 311 (5.49%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.48%) Argo
7 63 (1.11%) Puppet
8 58 (1.02%) Single Sign-On
9 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
10 44 (0.78%) Istio
11 39 (0.69%) Microsoft Intune
12 34 (0.60%) Packer
13 20 (0.35%) Kibana
13 20 (0.35%) Kustomize
14 19 (0.34%) SCCM
15 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
16 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
17 16 (0.28%) Kubeflow
18 15 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
19 13 (0.23%) Control-M
Vendors
1 1,065 (18.81%) Microsoft
2 314 (5.55%) Oracle
3 277 (4.89%) Databricks
4 276 (4.88%) Google
5 211 (3.73%) ServiceNow
6 188 (3.32%) Salesforce
7 175 (3.09%) Splunk
8 143 (2.53%) Dynatrace
9 124 (2.19%) SAP
10 118 (2.08%) VMware
11 107 (1.89%) Red Hat
12 63 (1.11%) IBM
13 62 (1.10%) Informatica
14 57 (1.01%) MuleSoft
15 55 (0.97%) OpenAI
16 52 (0.92%) Atlassian
17 50 (0.88%) Cisco
18 44 (0.78%) Foundry
19 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
20 42 (0.74%) Okta