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 13 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 13 12
Rank change year-on-year -2 -1 +2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,688 3,783 3,725
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.36% 11.49% 9.93%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.23% 12.70% 11.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,965 2,635 2,488
10th Percentile £381 £363 £375
25th Percentile £437 £425 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £734
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 23 59
10th Percentile £37.65 £44.25 £46.18
25th Percentile £58.63 £54.88 £65.00
Median hourly rate £69.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.99% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £88.13 £73.50
90th Percentile £91.45 £95.00 £79.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -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 46,512 29,792 32,258
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.69% 90.47% 86.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,938 18,529 19,417
10th Percentile £325 £294 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £737 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,382 1,881 1,250
10th Percentile £13.63 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.00 £17.30 £20.03
Median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -10.11%
75th Percentile £65.00 £42.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.54 £65.14 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £22.27 £40.33
% change year-on-year +68.43% -44.79% -7.83%

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 13 October 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 13 October 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 13 October 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 -1 4,833 £525 - 4,016
London -1 2,581 £550 - 2,066
UK excluding London -3 2,386 £500 - 2,133
Work from Home -2 1,628 £525 - 1,868
North of England -4 794 £500 +4.17% 640
South East -11 452 £544 +8.75% 500
Midlands -7 417 £488 -5.34% 244
Yorkshire -3 377 £500 - 213
West Midlands -8 341 £490 -6.67% 144
South West +7 326 £550 - 226
North West -6 321 £519 +15.37% 328
Scotland -8 220 £475 -5.00% 168
East of England +1 147 £505 -4.94% 199
North East +9 110 £450 -18.18% 104
East Midlands -10 74 £447 +6.43% 100
Wales -9 41 £375 -7.98% 86
Northern Ireland +23 23 £600 - 82
Channel Islands - 2 £500 -

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
1 348 (6.12%) Confluence
2 161 (2.83%) SharePoint
3 136 (2.39%) Apache Spark
4 127 (2.23%) Apache
5 126 (2.22%) Apache Airflow
6 56 (0.98%) SAS
7 45 (0.79%) Jupyter
8 42 (0.74%) CMS
9 34 (0.60%) nginx
10 31 (0.55%) IIS
11 20 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.28%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
16 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 9 (0.16%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 75 (1.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 56 (0.98%) MS Visio
3 55 (0.97%) Microsoft Project
4 42 (0.74%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 39 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
6 14 (0.25%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
8 8 (0.14%) Windchill
9 5 (0.088%) Notion
9 5 (0.088%) Trello
10 3 (0.053%) Gliffy
10 3 (0.053%) Mingle
11 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
12 1 (0.018%) Sketch
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 82 (1.44%) Dynamics CRM
2 46 (0.81%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.21%) SAP MDG
5 11 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
6 10 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 9 (0.16%) Magento
8 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
9 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
10 5 (0.088%) Aladdin
10 5 (0.088%) Dynamics AX
10 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
10 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
10 5 (0.088%) Teamcenter
10 5 (0.088%) Temenos T24
11 4 (0.070%) Maximo
11 4 (0.070%) Oracle Payroll
11 4 (0.070%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.053%) Endur
12 3 (0.053%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 3,093 (54.38%) Azure
2 2,037 (35.81%) AWS
3 1,773 (31.17%) Azure DevOps
4 1,018 (17.90%) GitHub
5 778 (13.68%) GCP
6 644 (11.32%) GitHub Actions
7 504 (8.86%) Power Platform
8 487 (8.56%) Serverless
9 318 (5.59%) Amazon S3
10 292 (5.13%) AWS Lambda
11 276 (4.85%) Entra ID
12 271 (4.76%) Amazon EKS
13 262 (4.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 240 (4.22%) AWS CloudFormation
15 226 (3.97%) Azure Monitor
16 224 (3.94%) Azure AKS
17 207 (3.64%) Amazon EC2
18 199 (3.50%) Azure Data Factory
18 199 (3.50%) Dynamics 365
19 188 (3.31%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.25%) Firewall
2 190 (3.34%) DNS
3 124 (2.18%) Network Security
4 123 (2.16%) VPN
5 84 (1.48%) TCP/IP
6 56 (0.98%) DHCP
7 55 (0.97%) SSL
8 46 (0.81%) WAN
9 39 (0.69%) BGP
9 39 (0.69%) HTTP
10 31 (0.55%) Internet
11 30 (0.53%) SSH
12 28 (0.49%) OSPF
12 28 (0.49%) SD-WAN
13 21 (0.37%) LAN
13 21 (0.37%) VLAN
14 19 (0.33%) BIG-IP
14 19 (0.33%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 18 (0.32%) Wi-Fi
16 16 (0.28%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 320 (5.63%) Power BI
2 308 (5.41%) PostgreSQL
3 304 (5.34%) SQL Server
4 208 (3.66%) Data Warehouse
5 195 (3.43%) MongoDB
6 182 (3.20%) Data Lake
6 182 (3.20%) NoSQL
7 168 (2.95%) Relational Database
8 160 (2.81%) Amazon RDS
9 128 (2.25%) Metadata
10 110 (1.93%) Azure SQL Database
11 91 (1.60%) DynamoDB
11 91 (1.60%) MySQL
12 90 (1.58%) Oracle Database
13 85 (1.49%) Delta Lake
13 85 (1.49%) Redis
14 65 (1.14%) SQL Server Integration Services
15 64 (1.13%) Amazon Redshift
15 64 (1.13%) Big Data
16 58 (1.02%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 883 (15.52%) Git
2 848 (14.91%) Jenkins
3 673 (11.83%) GitLab
4 672 (11.81%) JIRA
5 149 (2.62%) Selenium
6 103 (1.81%) JUnit
7 98 (1.72%) Postman
8 97 (1.71%) Maven
9 92 (1.62%) SonarQube
10 83 (1.46%) Cucumber
11 76 (1.34%) REST Assured
12 75 (1.32%) Bitbucket
13 74 (1.30%) Cypress.io
14 68 (1.20%) Gradle
15 63 (1.11%) JMeter
16 56 (0.98%) Claude Code
17 52 (0.91%) Mockito
18 45 (0.79%) Sonatype Nexus
18 45 (0.79%) Visual Studio
19 39 (0.69%) Gatling
General
1 1,529 (26.88%) Social Skills
2 1,055 (18.55%) Finance
3 829 (14.57%) Public Sector
4 560 (9.85%) Analytical Skills
5 426 (7.49%) Banking
6 171 (3.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 115 (2.02%) Retail
8 93 (1.64%) Influencing Skills
9 80 (1.41%) Documentation Skills
10 62 (1.09%) Aerospace
11 61 (1.07%) Legal
12 60 (1.05%) Investment Banking
12 60 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
13 57 (1.00%) Marketing
14 56 (0.98%) Military
15 53 (0.93%) Telecoms
16 50 (0.88%) Manufacturing
17 49 (0.86%) Financial Institution
18 46 (0.81%) Law
18 46 (0.81%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,130 (19.87%) DevOps Engineer
2 936 (16.46%) Developer
3 865 (15.21%) Senior
4 646 (11.36%) Architect
5 551 (9.69%) Lead
6 351 (6.17%) Azure Engineer
7 321 (5.64%) Data Engineer
8 264 (4.64%) AWS Engineer
9 256 (4.50%) Analyst
10 228 (4.01%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.57%) Senior DevOps
13 198 (3.48%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 195 (3.43%) Java Developer
15 187 (3.29%) AWS DevOps
16 185 (3.25%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 176 (3.09%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 175 (3.08%) Solutions Architect
19 154 (2.71%) Senior Developer
20 143 (2.51%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,748 (30.73%) Terraform
2 702 (12.34%) REST
3 505 (8.88%) .NET
4 406 (7.14%) Kafka
5 366 (6.43%) RESTful
6 307 (5.40%) Spring
7 302 (5.31%) Spring Boot
8 299 (5.26%) React
9 207 (3.64%) OAuth
10 190 (3.34%) Node.js
11 186 (3.27%) JSON
12 159 (2.80%) Playwright
13 155 (2.73%) PySpark
14 148 (2.60%) HTML
15 141 (2.48%) OAuth2
16 137 (2.41%) .NET Framework
17 135 (2.37%) SOAP
18 134 (2.36%) CSS
18 134 (2.36%) Middleware
19 127 (2.23%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,073 (18.86%) Cloud Native
2 428 (7.52%) Product Ownership
3 276 (4.85%) Distributed Systems
4 237 (4.17%) Enterprise Software
5 221 (3.89%) Onboarding
6 162 (2.85%) Hybrid Cloud
7 152 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
8 117 (2.06%) AI Agents
9 106 (1.86%) Management Information System
10 86 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
11 82 (1.44%) Public Cloud
12 79 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
13 78 (1.37%) Security Posture
14 76 (1.34%) Data Centre
14 76 (1.34%) Data Structures
15 72 (1.27%) Replication
16 68 (1.20%) PKI
17 66 (1.16%) Enterprise Cloud
18 55 (0.97%) Virtual Team
19 52 (0.91%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 593 (10.43%) Linux
2 338 (5.94%) Windows
3 124 (2.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 118 (2.07%) Unix
5 105 (1.85%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
9 18 (0.32%) CentOS
10 12 (0.21%) zOS
11 11 (0.19%) Amazon Linux
12 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
12 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
13 8 (0.14%) AIX
13 8 (0.14%) macOS
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 4 (0.070%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.070%) Windows Server 2008
16 3 (0.053%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,549 (62.39%) CI/CD
2 2,334 (41.03%) Agile
3 1,734 (30.49%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,017 (17.88%) Stakeholder Management
5 1,001 (17.60%) Continuous Improvement
6 967 (17.00%) Containerisation
7 963 (16.93%) Test Automation
8 937 (16.47%) AI
9 921 (16.19%) Problem-Solving
10 848 (14.91%) Microservices
11 816 (14.35%) Observability
12 806 (14.17%) Platform Engineering
13 772 (13.57%) Software Engineering
14 712 (12.52%) Migration
15 695 (12.22%) Scrum
16 642 (11.29%) Technical Leadership
17 578 (10.16%) Analytics
18 531 (9.34%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 514 (9.04%) Roadmaps
20 506 (8.90%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 1,697 (29.83%) Python
2 994 (17.48%) SQL
3 834 (14.66%) Java
4 537 (9.44%) Bash
5 528 (9.28%) PowerShell
6 522 (9.18%) C#
7 475 (8.35%) JavaScript
8 341 (6.00%) TypeScript
9 278 (4.89%) Bicep
10 130 (2.29%) Go
11 85 (1.49%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.21%) Scala
13 68 (1.20%) T-SQL
14 67 (1.18%) Groovy
15 58 (1.02%) Apex Code
16 57 (1.00%) PL/SQL
17 39 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 36 (0.63%) Perl
19 35 (0.62%) C++
20 32 (0.56%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,830 (32.17%) Security Cleared
2 1,529 (26.88%) SC Cleared
3 379 (6.66%) Degree
4 256 (4.50%) Azure Certification
4 256 (4.50%) DV Cleared
5 252 (4.43%) BPSS Clearance
6 215 (3.78%) AWS Certification
7 150 (2.64%) Computer Science Degree
8 109 (1.92%) Microsoft Certification
9 81 (1.42%) CISSP
10 68 (1.20%) ISTQB
11 59 (1.04%) PMP
12 56 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
12 56 (0.98%) PMI Certification
13 49 (0.86%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 42 (0.74%) Master's Degree
15 32 (0.56%) CISM
16 28 (0.49%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 26 (0.46%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 24 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 563 (9.90%) QA
2 291 (5.12%) Data Quality
3 222 (3.90%) Accessibility
4 131 (2.30%) GDPR
5 99 (1.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.46%) WCAG
7 65 (1.14%) NIST
8 57 (1.00%) NCSC
9 48 (0.84%) PMO
10 35 (0.62%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.62%) SLA
11 26 (0.46%) GRC
12 23 (0.40%) ISO 20022
13 18 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials
14 15 (0.26%) HIPAA
14 15 (0.26%) SEPA
14 15 (0.26%) SOC 2
15 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
16 13 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,197 (21.04%) Docker
2 175 (3.08%) Active Directory
3 84 (1.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 32 (0.56%) vSphere
6 24 (0.42%) Virtual Desktop
6 24 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
7 21 (0.37%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.25%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.19%) Squid
10 10 (0.18%) IAG
10 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.14%) zsh
12 7 (0.12%) Virtual Servers
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.088%) KVM
15 4 (0.070%) BitLocker
Systems Management
1 1,584 (27.85%) Kubernetes
2 555 (9.76%) Ansible
3 382 (6.72%) Grafana
4 321 (5.64%) Prometheus
5 72 (1.27%) Argo
6 57 (1.00%) Puppet
7 51 (0.90%) Microsoft Intune
8 49 (0.86%) Progress Chef
9 43 (0.76%) Kibana
10 42 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
11 38 (0.67%) Packer
12 32 (0.56%) Istio
13 25 (0.44%) Kubeflow
14 23 (0.40%) Kustomize
15 21 (0.37%) SCCM
16 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
18 14 (0.25%) HP ALM
19 13 (0.23%) Control-M
19 13 (0.23%) Karpenter
Vendors
1 1,163 (20.45%) Microsoft
2 327 (5.75%) Google
3 319 (5.61%) Databricks
4 306 (5.38%) Oracle
5 197 (3.46%) ServiceNow
6 189 (3.32%) Splunk
7 163 (2.87%) Salesforce
8 158 (2.78%) Dynatrace
9 125 (2.20%) VMware
10 116 (2.04%) SAP
11 98 (1.72%) Red Hat
12 77 (1.35%) OpenAI
13 71 (1.25%) IBM
14 70 (1.23%) MuleSoft
15 64 (1.13%) Foundry
16 46 (0.81%) Informatica
17 44 (0.77%) Cisco
18 40 (0.70%) Atlassian
19 39 (0.69%) Okta
20 38 (0.67%) AppDynamics