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

6 months to
1 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,494 3,194 4,119
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.69% 10.39% 9.54%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.58% 11.43% 11.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,813 2,281 2,802
10th Percentile £381 £363 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 17 123
10th Percentile £39.02 £33.10 £56.30
25th Percentile £61.87 £51.25 £61.43
Median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £70.00
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.25 £90.25 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +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 43,674 27,949 36,811
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.97% 90.88% 85.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,163 17,650 23,450
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.79% -4.57% -4.55%
75th Percentile £621 £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 2,623 1,373 2,554
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.61 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +3.81%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.86 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +75.84% -34.42% +8.91%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 4,664 £525 - 1,720
UK excluding London +5 2,423 £500 - 1,242
London +3 2,389 £550 - 705
Work from Home 0 1,548 £525 - 965
North of England +6 869 £500 - 335
Yorkshire +2 466 £510 +2.00% 98
South East -3 456 £525 +5.00% 382
Midlands 0 431 £492 -1.60% 137
West Midlands -2 339 £500 -2.44% 82
North West +2 327 £500 +4.17% 190
South West +18 293 £523 -5.00% 158
Scotland -1 204 £493 +3.68% 55
East of England +27 140 £525 +5.00% 95
North East +9 94 £450 -13.88% 50
East Midlands +2 88 £475 +5.56% 55
Wales +4 52 £425 +39.13% 61
Northern Ireland +15 22 £475 +11.76% 42
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
1 325 (5.92%) Confluence
2 136 (2.48%) Apache Spark
3 127 (2.31%) SharePoint
4 105 (1.91%) Apache Airflow
5 97 (1.77%) Apache
6 81 (1.47%) SAS
7 49 (0.89%) CMS
8 32 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.56%) IIS
9 31 (0.56%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.56%) nginx
10 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.29%) Camunda
12 15 (0.27%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Mendix
15 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.15%) Appian
17 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 72 (1.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 60 (1.09%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.82%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 39 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
5 35 (0.64%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.073%) Notion
8 4 (0.073%) Spreadsheet
9 3 (0.055%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.055%) Trello
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 72 (1.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 36 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.15%) Maximo
6 7 (0.13%) SAP MDG
7 6 (0.11%) Magento
8 5 (0.091%) Endur
8 5 (0.091%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.091%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.091%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.055%) Findur
9 3 (0.055%) OpenText VIM for SAP
9 3 (0.055%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.055%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.055%) SAP MM
Cloud Services
1 2,953 (53.75%) Azure
2 1,933 (35.18%) AWS
3 1,631 (29.69%) Azure DevOps
4 909 (16.55%) GitHub
5 687 (12.50%) GCP
6 545 (9.92%) GitHub Actions
7 484 (8.81%) Serverless
8 465 (8.46%) Power Platform
9 305 (5.55%) Amazon S3
10 269 (4.90%) AWS Lambda
11 249 (4.53%) AWS CloudFormation
12 247 (4.50%) Entra ID
13 225 (4.10%) Azure AKS
14 215 (3.91%) Amazon EKS
15 189 (3.44%) Azure Data Factory
16 184 (3.35%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 184 (3.35%) Amazon EC2
17 177 (3.22%) Azure Monitor
18 157 (2.86%) PaaS
19 155 (2.82%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 232 (4.22%) Firewall
2 137 (2.49%) DNS
3 119 (2.17%) Network Security
4 106 (1.93%) VPN
5 49 (0.89%) WAN
6 42 (0.76%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.66%) SD-WAN
7 36 (0.66%) SSL
8 34 (0.62%) BGP
9 27 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
10 26 (0.47%) Internet
11 24 (0.44%) DHCP
11 24 (0.44%) HTTP
11 24 (0.44%) OSPF
12 23 (0.42%) SAN
13 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
13 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 17 (0.31%) IPsec
13 17 (0.31%) LAN
13 17 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 304 (5.53%) Power BI
2 282 (5.13%) SQL Server
3 259 (4.71%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.49%) NoSQL
5 174 (3.17%) Relational Database
6 166 (3.02%) MongoDB
7 162 (2.95%) Data Warehouse
8 159 (2.89%) Data Lake
9 117 (2.13%) Amazon RDS
10 106 (1.93%) Azure SQL Database
11 101 (1.84%) Metadata
12 97 (1.77%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.60%) Delta Lake
14 78 (1.42%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.29%) Amazon Athena
15 71 (1.29%) Big Data
16 68 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
17 64 (1.16%) Redis
18 61 (1.11%) Elasticsearch
19 53 (0.96%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 796 (14.49%) Jenkins
2 715 (13.01%) Git
3 670 (12.20%) JIRA
4 577 (10.50%) GitLab
5 126 (2.29%) Selenium
6 111 (2.02%) Postman
7 98 (1.78%) JUnit
8 91 (1.66%) SonarQube
9 79 (1.44%) REST Assured
10 74 (1.35%) Maven
11 73 (1.33%) Bitbucket
12 63 (1.15%) Cucumber
13 60 (1.09%) JMeter
14 53 (0.96%) Cypress.io
15 49 (0.89%) Gradle
16 44 (0.80%) Gatling
17 41 (0.75%) Mockito
18 39 (0.71%) Artifactory
19 38 (0.69%) Visual Studio
20 35 (0.64%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,361 (24.77%) Social Skills
2 1,009 (18.37%) Finance
3 764 (13.91%) Public Sector
4 439 (7.99%) Analytical Skills
5 364 (6.63%) Banking
6 133 (2.42%) Documentation Skills
7 114 (2.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 79 (1.44%) Retail
9 75 (1.37%) Influencing Skills
10 68 (1.24%) Legal
11 60 (1.09%) Organisational Skills
12 58 (1.06%) Marketing
13 45 (0.82%) Investment Banking
13 45 (0.82%) Military
14 44 (0.80%) Financial Institution
15 40 (0.73%) Law
16 37 (0.67%) Presentation Skills
17 34 (0.62%) Front Office
17 34 (0.62%) Telecoms
18 29 (0.53%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,103 (20.08%) DevOps Engineer
2 877 (15.96%) Developer
3 764 (13.91%) Senior
4 638 (11.61%) Architect
5 492 (8.96%) Lead
6 338 (6.15%) Azure Engineer
7 319 (5.81%) Data Engineer
8 310 (5.64%) Analyst
9 277 (5.04%) AWS Engineer
10 208 (3.79%) Platform Engineer
11 205 (3.73%) AWS DevOps
12 204 (3.71%) Cloud Engineer
13 192 (3.49%) Java Developer
14 191 (3.48%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 185 (3.37%) Solutions Architect
16 183 (3.33%) Senior DevOps
17 175 (3.19%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 167 (3.04%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 155 (2.82%) Business Analyst
20 153 (2.78%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 519 (9.45%) REST
2 488 (8.88%) .NET
3 322 (5.86%) Spring
4 309 (5.62%) RESTful
5 306 (5.57%) React
6 302 (5.50%) Spring Boot
7 298 (5.42%) Kafka
8 233 (4.24%) Node.js
9 172 (3.13%) AngularJS
10 167 (3.04%) PySpark
11 162 (2.95%) Playwright
12 160 (2.91%) OAuth
13 142 (2.58%) JSON
14 131 (2.38%) .NET Framework
15 130 (2.37%) SOAP
16 122 (2.22%) HTML
17 109 (1.98%) OAuth2
17 109 (1.98%) YAML
18 108 (1.97%) Middleware
18 108 (1.97%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 971 (17.67%) Cloud Native
2 372 (6.77%) Product Ownership
3 236 (4.30%) Distributed Systems
4 154 (2.80%) Onboarding
5 141 (2.57%) Enterprise Software
6 135 (2.46%) Legacy Systems
7 117 (2.13%) Hybrid Cloud
8 102 (1.86%) Public Cloud
9 82 (1.49%) Data Centre
10 81 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
11 73 (1.33%) Management Information System
12 69 (1.26%) Self-Motivation
13 65 (1.18%) Security Posture
14 61 (1.11%) Data Structures
15 56 (1.02%) Virtual Team
16 54 (0.98%) Mobile App
17 53 (0.96%) AI Agents
18 51 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
19 49 (0.89%) Replication
20 47 (0.86%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 473 (8.61%) Linux
2 285 (5.19%) Windows
3 103 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 77 (1.40%) Unix
5 65 (1.18%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.67%) VMS
7 30 (0.55%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.27%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Solaris
12 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.091%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.091%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.091%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.073%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.073%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.073%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,205 (58.34%) CI/CD
2 2,118 (38.55%) Agile
3 1,453 (26.45%) Infrastructure as Code
4 892 (16.24%) Containerisation
5 837 (15.23%) Problem-Solving
6 802 (14.60%) Test Automation
7 797 (14.51%) Continuous Improvement
8 796 (14.49%) Microservices
9 673 (12.25%) Migration
10 671 (12.21%) Stakeholder Management
11 655 (11.92%) AI
12 648 (11.79%) Scrum
13 647 (11.78%) Observability
14 606 (11.03%) Analytics
15 604 (10.99%) Platform Engineering
16 577 (10.50%) Software Engineering
17 490 (8.92%) Data Modelling
18 463 (8.43%) Technical Leadership
19 437 (7.95%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 436 (7.94%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,536 (27.96%) Python
2 1,020 (18.57%) SQL
3 752 (13.69%) Java
4 522 (9.50%) C#
5 416 (7.57%) JavaScript
6 405 (7.37%) Bash
7 384 (6.99%) PowerShell
8 287 (5.22%) TypeScript
9 198 (3.60%) Bicep
10 112 (2.04%) Go
11 69 (1.26%) Apex Code
12 65 (1.18%) Shell Script
13 64 (1.16%) Scala
14 60 (1.09%) T-SQL
15 57 (1.04%) PL/SQL
16 50 (0.91%) Groovy
17 34 (0.62%) C++
18 26 (0.47%) Kotlin
19 23 (0.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 23 (0.42%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,739 (31.65%) Security Cleared
2 1,465 (26.67%) SC Cleared
3 341 (6.21%) Degree
4 208 (3.79%) Azure Certification
5 182 (3.31%) BPSS Clearance
6 175 (3.19%) AWS Certification
7 173 (3.15%) DV Cleared
8 132 (2.40%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.51%) CISSP
10 73 (1.33%) Microsoft Certification
11 57 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 57 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 50 (0.91%) Cisco Certification
13 45 (0.82%) PMI Certification
14 44 (0.80%) Master's Degree
14 44 (0.80%) PMP
15 41 (0.75%) CISM
16 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 25 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
18 24 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 470 (8.55%) QA
2 261 (4.75%) Data Quality
3 176 (3.20%) Accessibility
4 170 (3.09%) GDPR
5 118 (2.15%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 107 (1.95%) NIST
7 70 (1.27%) NCSC
8 69 (1.26%) WCAG
9 47 (0.86%) PCI DSS
10 41 (0.75%) SLA
11 31 (0.56%) PMO
11 31 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 27 (0.49%) GRC
13 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
14 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.22%) PSD2
16 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.20%) SEPA
17 8 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,057 (19.24%) Docker
2 176 (3.20%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.51%) Virtual Machines
4 76 (1.38%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.53%) vSphere
6 27 (0.49%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 9 (0.16%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) NFS
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.091%) Firmware
13 5 (0.091%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.091%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,577 (28.70%) Terraform
2 1,403 (25.54%) Kubernetes
3 516 (9.39%) Ansible
4 360 (6.55%) Grafana
5 312 (5.68%) Prometheus
6 87 (1.58%) Argo
7 74 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
8 66 (1.20%) Puppet
9 50 (0.91%) Istio
10 35 (0.64%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.58%) Packer
12 27 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.49%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.42%) HP ALM
14 21 (0.38%) Kibana
15 19 (0.35%) Consul
16 16 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
17 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
17 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 965 (17.56%) Microsoft
2 289 (5.26%) Oracle
3 279 (5.08%) Databricks
4 260 (4.73%) Google
5 196 (3.57%) ServiceNow
6 183 (3.33%) Salesforce
7 182 (3.31%) Splunk
8 125 (2.28%) SAP
9 121 (2.20%) Dynatrace
10 117 (2.13%) Red Hat
11 115 (2.09%) VMware
12 74 (1.35%) OpenAI
13 56 (1.02%) IBM
13 56 (1.02%) Informatica
14 54 (0.98%) Atlassian
15 48 (0.87%) CyberArk
16 43 (0.78%) Cisco
17 42 (0.76%) Foundry
18 41 (0.75%) MuleSoft
18 41 (0.75%) Okta