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 27 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,444 3,144 4,143
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.68% 10.37% 9.56%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.56% 11.38% 11.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,784 2,247 2,823
10th Percentile £381 £363 £400
25th Percentile £438 £430 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.17%
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 16 125
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.35
25th Percentile £61.87 £49.06 £61.60
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +6.70%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.25 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £68.75
% change year-on-year -7.89% +10.55% +4.96%

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 43,335 27,616 36,962
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.01% 91.08% 85.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,981 17,460 23,548
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.98% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,593 1,327 2,546
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.72
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.44 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +4.17%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.77 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.83 £38.12
% change year-on-year +79.22% -34.86% +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 27 June 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 27 June 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 27 June 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 4,611 £525 - 1,127
UK excluding London +5 2,391 £500 - 882
London +3 2,369 £550 - 451
Work from Home +1 1,539 £525 - 628
North of England +7 853 £500 - 244
Yorkshire +2 459 £513 +2.50% 66
South East -4 448 £513 +2.50% 285
Midlands -1 432 £492 -1.60% 102
West Midlands -1 343 £500 -2.44% 64
North West +1 318 £500 +3.09% 136
South West +15 285 £515 -6.36% 107
Scotland +1 207 £493 +1.65% 37
East of England +24 138 £525 +5.00% 71
North East +10 94 £450 -13.88% 45
East Midlands +1 85 £481 +6.94% 38
Wales +4 51 £425 +38.10% 31
Northern Ireland +13 21 £475 +11.76% 28
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
1 323 (5.93%) Confluence
2 138 (2.53%) Apache Spark
3 126 (2.31%) SharePoint
4 105 (1.93%) Apache Airflow
5 97 (1.78%) Apache
6 83 (1.52%) SAS
7 48 (0.88%) CMS
8 32 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.57%) IIS
9 31 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.57%) nginx
10 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.29%) Camunda
12 15 (0.28%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.17%) Mendix
15 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
16 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
17 6 (0.11%) Appian
Applications
1 73 (1.34%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.05%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.83%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 39 (0.72%) Microsoft Office
5 34 (0.62%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.073%) Notion
9 3 (0.055%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.055%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 72 (1.32%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.17%) 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
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.092%) Endur
8 5 (0.092%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.092%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.092%) 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 ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,924 (53.71%) Azure
2 1,925 (35.36%) AWS
3 1,608 (29.54%) Azure DevOps
4 902 (16.57%) GitHub
5 679 (12.47%) GCP
6 539 (9.90%) GitHub Actions
7 488 (8.96%) Serverless
8 457 (8.39%) Power Platform
9 307 (5.64%) Amazon S3
10 273 (5.01%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.65%) AWS CloudFormation
12 246 (4.52%) Entra ID
13 226 (4.15%) Azure AKS
14 215 (3.95%) Amazon EKS
15 188 (3.45%) Azure Data Factory
16 187 (3.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 181 (3.32%) Amazon EC2
18 173 (3.18%) Azure Monitor
19 159 (2.92%) PaaS
20 156 (2.87%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 232 (4.26%) Firewall
2 138 (2.53%) DNS
3 116 (2.13%) Network Security
4 105 (1.93%) VPN
5 48 (0.88%) WAN
6 42 (0.77%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.66%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.62%) BGP
9 33 (0.61%) SSL
10 27 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 24 (0.44%) DHCP
11 24 (0.44%) Internet
11 24 (0.44%) OSPF
12 23 (0.42%) HTTP
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
1 297 (5.46%) Power BI
2 275 (5.05%) SQL Server
3 261 (4.79%) PostgreSQL
4 195 (3.58%) NoSQL
5 174 (3.20%) Relational Database
6 165 (3.03%) MongoDB
7 158 (2.90%) Data Warehouse
8 157 (2.88%) Data Lake
9 120 (2.20%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.93%) Azure SQL Database
11 101 (1.86%) DynamoDB
12 99 (1.82%) Metadata
13 87 (1.60%) Delta Lake
14 75 (1.38%) Oracle Database
15 73 (1.34%) Big Data
16 72 (1.32%) Amazon Athena
17 68 (1.25%) Amazon Redshift
17 68 (1.25%) Redis
18 61 (1.12%) Elasticsearch
19 53 (0.97%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 793 (14.57%) Jenkins
2 705 (12.95%) Git
3 665 (12.22%) JIRA
4 579 (10.64%) GitLab
5 125 (2.30%) Selenium
6 110 (2.02%) Postman
7 95 (1.75%) JUnit
8 91 (1.67%) SonarQube
9 78 (1.43%) REST Assured
10 74 (1.36%) Bitbucket
11 71 (1.30%) Maven
12 62 (1.14%) Cucumber
13 60 (1.10%) JMeter
14 51 (0.94%) Cypress.io
15 48 (0.88%) Gradle
16 44 (0.81%) Gatling
17 41 (0.75%) Mockito
18 40 (0.73%) Artifactory
19 38 (0.70%) Visual Studio
20 35 (0.64%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,349 (24.78%) Social Skills
2 998 (18.33%) Finance
3 758 (13.92%) Public Sector
4 428 (7.86%) Analytical Skills
5 360 (6.61%) Banking
6 132 (2.42%) Documentation Skills
7 114 (2.09%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 78 (1.43%) Retail
9 77 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.23%) Legal
11 58 (1.07%) Marketing
11 58 (1.07%) Organisational Skills
12 47 (0.86%) Military
13 44 (0.81%) Investment Banking
14 43 (0.79%) Financial Institution
15 40 (0.73%) Law
16 36 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
17 33 (0.61%) Front Office
18 32 (0.59%) Telecoms
19 28 (0.51%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,096 (20.13%) DevOps Engineer
2 859 (15.78%) Developer
3 757 (13.91%) Senior
4 631 (11.59%) Architect
5 487 (8.95%) Lead
6 334 (6.14%) Azure Engineer
7 317 (5.82%) Data Engineer
8 314 (5.77%) Analyst
9 276 (5.07%) AWS Engineer
10 204 (3.75%) AWS DevOps
11 201 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
12 200 (3.67%) Platform Engineer
13 190 (3.49%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 188 (3.45%) Java Developer
15 183 (3.36%) Senior DevOps
15 183 (3.36%) Solutions Architect
16 174 (3.20%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 167 (3.07%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 155 (2.85%) Business Analyst
18 155 (2.85%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 511 (9.39%) REST
2 482 (8.85%) .NET
3 317 (5.82%) Spring
4 308 (5.66%) React
5 305 (5.60%) RESTful
6 299 (5.49%) Spring Boot
7 294 (5.40%) Kafka
8 232 (4.26%) Node.js
9 171 (3.14%) AngularJS
10 164 (3.01%) PySpark
11 162 (2.98%) OAuth
12 159 (2.92%) Playwright
13 141 (2.59%) JSON
14 128 (2.35%) .NET Framework
14 128 (2.35%) SOAP
15 116 (2.13%) HTML
16 111 (2.04%) OpenID
17 110 (2.02%) OAuth2
18 108 (1.98%) Middleware
19 107 (1.97%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 967 (17.76%) Cloud Native
2 372 (6.83%) Product Ownership
3 236 (4.34%) Distributed Systems
4 150 (2.76%) Onboarding
5 134 (2.46%) Legacy Systems
6 132 (2.42%) Enterprise Software
7 114 (2.09%) Hybrid Cloud
8 102 (1.87%) Public Cloud
9 83 (1.52%) Data Centre
10 80 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
11 74 (1.36%) Management Information System
12 68 (1.25%) Self-Motivation
13 65 (1.19%) Security Posture
14 59 (1.08%) Data Structures
15 56 (1.03%) Virtual Team
16 54 (0.99%) Mobile App
17 52 (0.96%) AI Agents
18 50 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
19 47 (0.86%) NHS
20 46 (0.84%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 471 (8.65%) Linux
2 278 (5.11%) Windows
3 104 (1.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.45%) Unix
5 62 (1.14%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.64%) VMS
7 30 (0.55%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.28%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.092%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.092%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.073%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.073%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.073%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,170 (58.23%) CI/CD
2 2,104 (38.65%) Agile
3 1,438 (26.41%) Infrastructure as Code
4 882 (16.20%) Containerisation
5 825 (15.15%) Problem-Solving
6 791 (14.53%) Microservices
6 791 (14.53%) Test Automation
7 781 (14.35%) Continuous Improvement
8 672 (12.34%) Migration
9 660 (12.12%) Stakeholder Management
10 645 (11.85%) AI
11 642 (11.79%) Scrum
12 641 (11.77%) Observability
13 606 (11.13%) Analytics
14 588 (10.80%) Platform Engineering
15 566 (10.40%) Software Engineering
16 488 (8.96%) Data Modelling
17 458 (8.41%) Technical Leadership
18 438 (8.05%) Roadmaps
19 430 (7.90%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,521 (27.94%) Python
2 1,013 (18.61%) SQL
3 746 (13.70%) Java
4 518 (9.52%) C#
5 411 (7.55%) JavaScript
6 393 (7.22%) Bash
7 376 (6.91%) PowerShell
8 279 (5.12%) TypeScript
9 191 (3.51%) Bicep
10 112 (2.06%) Go
11 68 (1.25%) Apex Code
12 66 (1.21%) Shell Script
13 64 (1.18%) Scala
14 56 (1.03%) T-SQL
15 53 (0.97%) PL/SQL
16 49 (0.90%) Groovy
17 34 (0.62%) C++
18 25 (0.46%) Kotlin
19 23 (0.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 21 (0.39%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,721 (31.61%) Security Cleared
2 1,453 (26.69%) SC Cleared
3 333 (6.12%) Degree
4 205 (3.77%) Azure Certification
5 177 (3.25%) BPSS Clearance
6 175 (3.21%) AWS Certification
7 165 (3.03%) DV Cleared
8 130 (2.39%) Computer Science Degree
9 81 (1.49%) CISSP
10 72 (1.32%) Microsoft Certification
11 57 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 57 (1.05%) ISTQB
12 49 (0.90%) Cisco Certification
13 45 (0.83%) PMI Certification
14 44 (0.81%) PMP
15 42 (0.77%) Master's Degree
16 41 (0.75%) CISM
17 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 468 (8.60%) QA
2 258 (4.74%) Data Quality
3 172 (3.16%) Accessibility
4 171 (3.14%) GDPR
5 121 (2.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 109 (2.00%) NIST
7 69 (1.27%) NCSC
8 66 (1.21%) WCAG
9 50 (0.92%) PCI DSS
10 41 (0.75%) SLA
11 31 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.53%) PMO
13 26 (0.48%) GRC
14 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.22%) PSD2
17 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
17 11 (0.20%) SEPA
18 8 (0.15%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 1,051 (19.31%) Docker
2 176 (3.23%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
4 75 (1.38%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.53%) vSphere
6 26 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.33%) Squid
7 18 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.26%) Postfix
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.092%) Firmware
13 5 (0.092%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.092%) NFS
13 5 (0.092%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,560 (28.66%) Terraform
2 1,395 (25.62%) Kubernetes
3 509 (9.35%) Ansible
4 356 (6.54%) Grafana
5 307 (5.64%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.56%) Argo
7 75 (1.38%) Single Sign-On
8 66 (1.21%) Puppet
9 50 (0.92%) Istio
10 35 (0.64%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.57%) Packer
12 27 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
13 26 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 24 (0.44%) HP ALM
15 22 (0.40%) Kibana
16 18 (0.33%) Consul
17 16 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
19 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 946 (17.38%) Microsoft
2 282 (5.18%) Oracle
3 277 (5.09%) Databricks
4 258 (4.74%) Google
5 195 (3.58%) ServiceNow
6 182 (3.34%) Salesforce
6 182 (3.34%) Splunk
7 123 (2.26%) SAP
8 120 (2.20%) Dynatrace
9 118 (2.17%) Red Hat
10 113 (2.08%) VMware
11 75 (1.38%) OpenAI
12 55 (1.01%) Atlassian
12 55 (1.01%) Informatica
13 54 (0.99%) IBM
14 47 (0.86%) CyberArk
15 42 (0.77%) Cisco
16 41 (0.75%) Okta
17 40 (0.73%) Foundry
18 39 (0.72%) MuleSoft