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 24 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,616 3,435 4,015
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.64% 10.51% 9.83%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.52% 11.63% 11.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,881 2,447 2,760
10th Percentile £385 £363 £385
25th Percentile £438 £425 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -5.50% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £495 £525
% change year-on-year +1.11% -5.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 116 25 100
10th Percentile £36.13 £38.00 £56.48
25th Percentile £61.00 £52.50 £64.15
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £77.50
90th Percentile £93.44 £91.00 £85.83
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%

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 44,871 29,543 34,928
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.02% 90.39% 85.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,803 18,563 22,435
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.46%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,660 1,589 2,131
10th Percentile £14.85 £14.20 £13.46
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.44 £17.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -6.98%
75th Percentile £68.13 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £83.00 £69.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.34 £40.00
% change year-on-year +82.83% -39.15% -1.95%

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 24 July 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 24 July 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 24 July 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 +4 4,793 £525 - 1,807
UK excluding London +4 2,472 £500 +1.11% 1,219
London +2 2,456 £550 - 800
Work from Home 0 1,603 £525 +2.39% 862
North of England +4 868 £500 +2.83% 372
South East -9 461 £525 +5.00% 304
Midlands +1 453 £490 +3.16% 179
Yorkshire +2 446 £500 - 88
West Midlands -1 365 £500 - 125
North West 0 340 £524 +10.32% 202
South West +14 323 £518 -1.43% 169
Scotland 0 200 £483 +1.63% 69
East of England +21 139 £510 +2.00% 72
North East +11 101 £425 -18.66% 84
East Midlands 0 83 £488 +5.41% 54
Wales -6 46 £425 +32.57% 34
Northern Ireland +20 22 £475 +7.95% 36
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
1 342 (6.09%) Confluence
2 135 (2.40%) Apache Spark
3 133 (2.37%) SharePoint
4 111 (1.98%) Apache Airflow
5 105 (1.87%) Apache
6 81 (1.44%) SAS
7 45 (0.80%) CMS
8 36 (0.64%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 27 (0.48%) nginx
11 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.25%) Camunda
12 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 8 (0.14%) Anypoint
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 64 (1.14%) Microsoft Project
2 63 (1.12%) Microsoft Excel
3 40 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
4 34 (0.61%) MS Visio
5 33 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
10 4 (0.071%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 67 (1.19%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.071%) Endur
8 4 (0.071%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.053%) Findur
9 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.053%) Shopify
9 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,019 (53.76%) Azure
2 2,009 (35.77%) AWS
3 1,688 (30.06%) Azure DevOps
4 944 (16.81%) GitHub
5 719 (12.80%) GCP
6 579 (10.31%) GitHub Actions
7 456 (8.12%) Serverless
8 451 (8.03%) Power Platform
9 305 (5.43%) Amazon S3
10 274 (4.88%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.54%) Entra ID
12 253 (4.50%) AWS CloudFormation
13 230 (4.10%) Amazon EKS
13 230 (4.10%) Azure AKS
14 197 (3.51%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 195 (3.47%) Azure Monitor
16 181 (3.22%) Amazon EC2
17 178 (3.17%) Azure Data Factory
18 156 (2.78%) PaaS
19 154 (2.74%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 237 (4.22%) Firewall
2 154 (2.74%) DNS
3 120 (2.14%) Network Security
4 118 (2.10%) VPN
5 55 (0.98%) TCP/IP
6 48 (0.85%) WAN
7 41 (0.73%) SSL
8 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
9 35 (0.62%) DHCP
10 33 (0.59%) BGP
11 30 (0.53%) Internet
12 27 (0.48%) HTTP
12 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.45%) OSPF
14 21 (0.37%) SAN
15 18 (0.32%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.30%) MPLS
16 17 (0.30%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 305 (5.43%) Power BI
2 287 (5.11%) SQL Server
3 277 (4.93%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.42%) NoSQL
5 185 (3.29%) Relational Database
6 178 (3.17%) MongoDB
7 175 (3.12%) Data Warehouse
8 155 (2.76%) Data Lake
9 119 (2.12%) Amazon RDS
10 108 (1.92%) Metadata
11 105 (1.87%) DynamoDB
12 102 (1.82%) Azure SQL Database
13 85 (1.51%) Oracle Database
14 82 (1.46%) Delta Lake
15 71 (1.26%) Big Data
16 69 (1.23%) Redis
17 67 (1.19%) Amazon Redshift
18 66 (1.18%) Amazon Athena
18 66 (1.18%) MySQL
19 56 (1.00%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 814 (14.49%) Jenkins
2 756 (13.46%) Git
3 688 (12.25%) JIRA
4 575 (10.24%) GitLab
5 133 (2.37%) Selenium
6 105 (1.87%) Postman
7 99 (1.76%) JUnit
8 96 (1.71%) SonarQube
9 82 (1.46%) Maven
10 78 (1.39%) Bitbucket
11 75 (1.34%) REST Assured
12 60 (1.07%) Cucumber
12 60 (1.07%) JMeter
13 59 (1.05%) Cypress.io
14 54 (0.96%) Gradle
15 46 (0.82%) Gatling
15 46 (0.82%) Mockito
16 37 (0.66%) Visual Studio
17 35 (0.62%) LoadRunner
17 35 (0.62%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,381 (24.59%) Social Skills
2 1,010 (17.98%) Finance
3 816 (14.53%) Public Sector
4 465 (8.28%) Analytical Skills
5 365 (6.50%) Banking
6 128 (2.28%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 110 (1.96%) Documentation Skills
8 95 (1.69%) Retail
9 68 (1.21%) Influencing Skills
9 68 (1.21%) Legal
9 68 (1.21%) Organisational Skills
10 57 (1.01%) Marketing
11 50 (0.89%) Military
12 45 (0.80%) Law
13 44 (0.78%) Investment Banking
13 44 (0.78%) Telecoms
14 40 (0.71%) Financial Institution
15 39 (0.69%) Front Office
15 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
16 35 (0.62%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,123 (20.00%) DevOps Engineer
2 927 (16.51%) Developer
3 797 (14.19%) Senior
4 630 (11.22%) Architect
5 520 (9.26%) Lead
6 339 (6.04%) Azure Engineer
7 313 (5.57%) Data Engineer
8 297 (5.29%) Analyst
9 282 (5.02%) AWS Engineer
10 236 (4.20%) Platform Engineer
11 212 (3.77%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.61%) Java Developer
13 199 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
14 196 (3.49%) AWS DevOps
15 187 (3.33%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 185 (3.29%) Solutions Architect
17 183 (3.26%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 183 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 149 (2.65%) Senior Developer
18 149 (2.65%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 563 (10.02%) REST
2 486 (8.65%) .NET
3 331 (5.89%) RESTful
4 325 (5.79%) Kafka
5 324 (5.77%) Spring
6 307 (5.47%) Spring Boot
7 297 (5.29%) React
8 225 (4.01%) Node.js
9 167 (2.97%) JSON
10 164 (2.92%) PySpark
11 163 (2.90%) OAuth
12 162 (2.88%) Playwright
13 157 (2.80%) AngularJS
14 144 (2.56%) SOAP
15 138 (2.46%) .NET Framework
16 129 (2.30%) HTML
17 111 (1.98%) OAuth2
18 110 (1.96%) Middleware
19 107 (1.91%) CSS
19 107 (1.91%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,002 (17.84%) Cloud Native
2 400 (7.12%) Product Ownership
3 270 (4.81%) Distributed Systems
4 167 (2.97%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.85%) Enterprise Software
6 152 (2.71%) Legacy Systems
7 129 (2.30%) Hybrid Cloud
8 94 (1.67%) Public Cloud
9 91 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
10 85 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.37%) Data Centre
12 73 (1.30%) Management Information System
13 70 (1.25%) Data Structures
13 70 (1.25%) Security Posture
14 62 (1.10%) Replication
15 61 (1.09%) AI Agents
16 60 (1.07%) Virtual Team
17 55 (0.98%) Enterprise Cloud
18 50 (0.89%) Mobile App
18 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 488 (8.69%) Linux
2 290 (5.16%) Windows
3 103 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 81 (1.44%) Unix
5 72 (1.28%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.61%) VMS
7 27 (0.48%) Ubuntu
8 25 (0.45%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.28%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) AIX
13 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
13 6 (0.11%) CentOS
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
14 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,299 (58.74%) CI/CD
2 2,233 (39.76%) Agile
3 1,522 (27.10%) Infrastructure as Code
4 941 (16.76%) Containerisation
5 863 (15.37%) Continuous Improvement
6 849 (15.12%) Problem-Solving
7 843 (15.01%) Test Automation
8 827 (14.73%) Microservices
9 745 (13.27%) Stakeholder Management
10 730 (13.00%) AI
11 703 (12.52%) Observability
12 693 (12.34%) Scrum
13 677 (12.05%) Migration
14 667 (11.88%) Platform Engineering
15 651 (11.59%) Software Engineering
16 598 (10.65%) Analytics
17 495 (8.81%) Technical Leadership
18 490 (8.73%) Data Modelling
18 490 (8.73%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 464 (8.26%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,565 (27.87%) Python
2 1,017 (18.11%) SQL
3 795 (14.16%) Java
4 503 (8.96%) C#
5 447 (7.96%) Bash
6 428 (7.62%) JavaScript
7 414 (7.37%) PowerShell
8 297 (5.29%) TypeScript
9 207 (3.69%) Bicep
10 113 (2.01%) Go
11 68 (1.21%) Apex Code
11 68 (1.21%) PL/SQL
12 66 (1.18%) Shell Script
12 66 (1.18%) T-SQL
13 55 (0.98%) Groovy
14 51 (0.91%) Scala
15 28 (0.50%) C++
15 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
16 24 (0.43%) C
16 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,766 (31.45%) Security Cleared
2 1,479 (26.34%) SC Cleared
3 334 (5.95%) Degree
4 224 (3.99%) Azure Certification
5 209 (3.72%) BPSS Clearance
6 195 (3.47%) DV Cleared
7 189 (3.37%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
9 81 (1.44%) Microsoft Certification
10 80 (1.42%) CISSP
11 58 (1.03%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 55 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) Master's Degree
15 43 (0.77%) PMP
16 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
17 35 (0.62%) CISM
18 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.43%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 497 (8.85%) QA
2 268 (4.77%) Data Quality
3 192 (3.42%) Accessibility
4 170 (3.03%) GDPR
5 93 (1.66%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 82 (1.46%) NIST
7 75 (1.34%) WCAG
8 53 (0.94%) NCSC
9 43 (0.77%) PMO
10 41 (0.73%) PCI DSS
11 36 (0.64%) SLA
12 30 (0.53%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 13 (0.23%) HIPAA
15 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.20%) SOC 2
16 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.18%) PSD2
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,103 (19.64%) Docker
2 181 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.48%) Virtual Machines
4 80 (1.42%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.57%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.30%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
7 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
8 15 (0.27%) Squid
9 14 (0.25%) Postfix
10 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) IAG
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) NFS
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,624 (28.92%) Terraform
2 1,447 (25.77%) Kubernetes
3 529 (9.42%) Ansible
4 374 (6.66%) Grafana
5 320 (5.70%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.67%) Argo
7 66 (1.18%) Single Sign-On
8 62 (1.10%) Puppet
9 44 (0.78%) Istio
10 42 (0.75%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.61%) Microsoft Intune
12 31 (0.55%) Packer
13 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.36%) HP ALM
15 17 (0.30%) Kibana
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) SCCM
17 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
18 14 (0.25%) Active Directory Federation Services
19 13 (0.23%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 1,007 (17.93%) Microsoft
2 321 (5.72%) Oracle
3 265 (4.72%) Google
4 264 (4.70%) Databricks
5 203 (3.61%) ServiceNow
6 185 (3.29%) Splunk
7 183 (3.26%) Salesforce
8 131 (2.33%) Dynatrace
8 131 (2.33%) SAP
9 119 (2.12%) VMware
10 108 (1.92%) Red Hat
11 70 (1.25%) OpenAI
12 63 (1.12%) IBM
13 58 (1.03%) Informatica
14 54 (0.96%) Atlassian
15 49 (0.87%) MuleSoft
16 47 (0.84%) Cisco
17 44 (0.78%) Foundry
18 42 (0.75%) Okta
19 37 (0.66%) CyberArk