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 28 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 14 14
Rank change year-on-year -1 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,579 3,691 3,764
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.26% 11.25% 9.86%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.17% 12.41% 11.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,884 2,579 2,500
10th Percentile £381 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £622 £615 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 119 24 66
10th Percentile £38.05 £45.13 £55.00
25th Percentile £58.88 £55.81 £65.31
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £78.13 £87.81 £74.00
90th Percentile £92.75 £95.00 £85.00
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 45,850 29,737 32,777
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.30% 90.62% 85.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,722 18,491 19,844
10th Percentile £325 £294 £308
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,198 1,854 1,372
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.25 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.23 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £39.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +55.07% -40.82% -1.16%
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.72 £65.00 £74.49
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +79.25% -48.10% +1.18%

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 28 September 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 28 September 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 28 September 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 4,739 £525 - 3,846
London -1 2,496 £550 - 1,879
UK excluding London -4 2,385 £500 - 2,105
Work from Home -1 1,579 £525 +2.44% 1,812
North of England -2 783 £500 +5.26% 659
South East -13 444 £525 +5.00% 432
Midlands -4 427 £488 -4.88% 263
Yorkshire -2 386 £500 +3.09% 198
West Midlands -8 343 £500 -4.76% 158
South West +3 316 £550 +4.27% 272
North West -3 304 £528 +16.45% 365
Scotland -3 225 £475 -5.00% 161
East of England +9 158 £505 -3.81% 176
North East +12 110 £450 -18.18% 100
East Midlands -4 81 £455 +1.11% 105
Wales -8 45 £400 +6.67% 72
Northern Ireland +23 23 £450 - 81
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
1 334 (5.99%) Confluence
2 158 (2.83%) SharePoint
3 128 (2.29%) Apache Spark
4 127 (2.28%) Apache Airflow
5 111 (1.99%) Apache
6 54 (0.97%) SAS
7 44 (0.79%) CMS
7 44 (0.79%) Jupyter
8 28 (0.50%) nginx
9 26 (0.47%) IIS
10 20 (0.36%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.29%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
12 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
13 12 (0.22%) Anypoint
14 11 (0.20%) WebSphere
15 10 (0.18%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 10 (0.18%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 8 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 65 (1.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 51 (0.91%) MS Visio
3 48 (0.86%) Microsoft Project
4 36 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 13 (0.23%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
7 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.14%) Windchill
8 5 (0.090%) Notion
8 5 (0.090%) Trello
9 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.036%) Gliffy
9 2 (0.036%) Mingle
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 81 (1.45%) Dynamics CRM
2 44 (0.79%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 12 (0.22%) SAP MDG
6 10 (0.18%) Magento
7 9 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 7 (0.13%) Oracle EBS R12
9 6 (0.11%) Aladdin
9 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
9 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
10 5 (0.090%) OpenText MBPM
10 5 (0.090%) Oracle BPM
11 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
11 4 (0.072%) Temenos T24
11 4 (0.072%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.054%) Endur
12 3 (0.054%) Maximo
12 3 (0.054%) Oracle Payroll
12 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,013 (54.01%) Azure
2 2,013 (36.08%) AWS
3 1,721 (30.85%) Azure DevOps
4 962 (17.24%) GitHub
5 738 (13.23%) GCP
6 611 (10.95%) GitHub Actions
7 487 (8.73%) Power Platform
8 455 (8.16%) Serverless
9 303 (5.43%) Amazon S3
10 284 (5.09%) AWS Lambda
11 256 (4.59%) Amazon EKS
12 251 (4.50%) Entra ID
13 247 (4.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 235 (4.21%) AWS CloudFormation
15 211 (3.78%) Azure AKS
16 205 (3.67%) Azure Monitor
17 194 (3.48%) Amazon EC2
18 188 (3.37%) Dynamics 365
19 187 (3.35%) Azure Data Factory
20 169 (3.03%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 243 (4.36%) Firewall
2 170 (3.05%) DNS
3 119 (2.13%) VPN
4 112 (2.01%) Network Security
5 74 (1.33%) TCP/IP
6 54 (0.97%) SSL
7 51 (0.91%) DHCP
8 45 (0.81%) WAN
9 38 (0.68%) HTTP
10 36 (0.65%) BGP
11 28 (0.50%) Internet
11 28 (0.50%) SSH
12 27 (0.48%) OSPF
12 27 (0.48%) SD-WAN
13 23 (0.41%) Wi-Fi
14 21 (0.38%) LAN
14 21 (0.38%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) SAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 316 (5.66%) Power BI
2 299 (5.36%) PostgreSQL
3 290 (5.20%) SQL Server
4 211 (3.78%) Data Warehouse
5 185 (3.32%) MongoDB
6 181 (3.24%) NoSQL
7 178 (3.19%) Data Lake
8 160 (2.87%) Relational Database
9 146 (2.62%) Amazon RDS
10 123 (2.20%) Metadata
11 95 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
12 91 (1.63%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.58%) Oracle Database
14 87 (1.56%) Delta Lake
14 87 (1.56%) MySQL
15 84 (1.51%) Redis
16 68 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
17 64 (1.15%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 60 (1.08%) Big Data
19 57 (1.02%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 838 (15.02%) Git
2 790 (14.16%) Jenkins
3 653 (11.70%) JIRA
4 646 (11.58%) GitLab
5 144 (2.58%) Selenium
6 98 (1.76%) JUnit
6 98 (1.76%) Postman
7 96 (1.72%) Maven
7 96 (1.72%) SonarQube
8 75 (1.34%) REST Assured
9 74 (1.33%) Cucumber
10 70 (1.25%) Bitbucket
10 70 (1.25%) Cypress.io
11 68 (1.22%) Gradle
12 66 (1.18%) JMeter
13 53 (0.95%) Claude Code
14 48 (0.86%) Mockito
15 42 (0.75%) Gatling
15 42 (0.75%) Visual Studio
16 40 (0.72%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,453 (26.04%) Social Skills
2 999 (17.91%) Finance
3 803 (14.39%) Public Sector
4 525 (9.41%) Analytical Skills
5 391 (7.01%) Banking
6 171 (3.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 109 (1.95%) Retail
8 90 (1.61%) Influencing Skills
9 81 (1.45%) Documentation Skills
10 63 (1.13%) Legal
11 58 (1.04%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (1.00%) Aerospace
13 55 (0.99%) Marketing
14 54 (0.97%) Military
15 49 (0.88%) Investment Banking
15 49 (0.88%) Telecoms
16 48 (0.86%) Manufacturing
17 43 (0.77%) Law
18 39 (0.70%) Financial Institution
18 39 (0.70%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 1,132 (20.29%) DevOps Engineer
2 912 (16.35%) Developer
3 846 (15.16%) Senior
4 639 (11.45%) Architect
5 529 (9.48%) Lead
6 345 (6.18%) Azure Engineer
7 301 (5.40%) Data Engineer
8 269 (4.82%) Analyst
9 256 (4.59%) AWS Engineer
10 229 (4.10%) Platform Engineer
11 205 (3.67%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.64%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 197 (3.53%) Senior DevOps
14 196 (3.51%) Java Developer
15 182 (3.26%) AWS DevOps
15 182 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 175 (3.14%) Solutions Architect
17 171 (3.07%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 152 (2.72%) Senior Developer
19 140 (2.51%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,682 (30.15%) Terraform
2 632 (11.33%) REST
3 470 (8.42%) .NET
4 384 (6.88%) Kafka
5 359 (6.43%) RESTful
6 303 (5.43%) Spring
7 299 (5.36%) Spring Boot
8 290 (5.20%) React
9 198 (3.55%) Node.js
10 190 (3.41%) OAuth
11 180 (3.23%) JSON
12 156 (2.80%) Playwright
13 151 (2.71%) PySpark
14 146 (2.62%) HTML
15 134 (2.40%) SOAP
16 133 (2.38%) OAuth2
17 132 (2.37%) CSS
18 129 (2.31%) .NET Framework
19 124 (2.22%) Middleware
20 117 (2.10%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,037 (18.59%) Cloud Native
2 426 (7.64%) Product Ownership
3 266 (4.77%) Distributed Systems
4 211 (3.78%) Enterprise Software
5 207 (3.71%) Onboarding
6 149 (2.67%) Hybrid Cloud
7 145 (2.60%) Legacy Systems
8 108 (1.94%) AI Agents
9 93 (1.67%) Management Information System
10 87 (1.56%) Self-Motivation
11 78 (1.40%) Public Cloud
12 75 (1.34%) Data Structures
13 74 (1.33%) Data Protection Act
13 74 (1.33%) Replication
13 74 (1.33%) Security Posture
14 73 (1.31%) Data Centre
15 62 (1.11%) Enterprise Cloud
16 60 (1.08%) PKI
16 60 (1.08%) Virtual Team
17 53 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 563 (10.09%) Linux
2 313 (5.61%) Windows
3 121 (2.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 109 (1.95%) Unix
5 97 (1.74%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.65%) Ubuntu
7 31 (0.56%) VMS
8 30 (0.54%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.38%) Android
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 12 (0.22%) zOS
12 11 (0.20%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.14%) Solaris
15 7 (0.13%) AIX
16 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
17 5 (0.090%) Windows Server 2008
18 4 (0.072%) Alpine Linux
18 4 (0.072%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,421 (61.32%) CI/CD
2 2,280 (40.87%) Agile
3 1,667 (29.88%) Infrastructure as Code
4 958 (17.17%) Stakeholder Management
5 951 (17.05%) Continuous Improvement
6 947 (16.97%) Containerisation
7 905 (16.22%) Test Automation
8 882 (15.81%) AI
9 876 (15.70%) Problem-Solving
10 825 (14.79%) Microservices
11 780 (13.98%) Observability
12 776 (13.91%) Platform Engineering
13 729 (13.07%) Software Engineering
14 690 (12.37%) Scrum
15 682 (12.22%) Migration
16 624 (11.18%) Technical Leadership
17 572 (10.25%) Analytics
18 524 (9.39%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 489 (8.77%) Roadmaps
20 481 (8.62%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,608 (28.82%) Python
2 969 (17.37%) SQL
3 817 (14.64%) Java
4 490 (8.78%) Bash
5 489 (8.77%) C#
6 488 (8.75%) PowerShell
7 461 (8.26%) JavaScript
8 311 (5.57%) TypeScript
9 262 (4.70%) Bicep
10 127 (2.28%) Go
11 77 (1.38%) Shell Script
12 68 (1.22%) Scala
13 67 (1.20%) T-SQL
14 60 (1.08%) PL/SQL
15 59 (1.06%) Apex Code
16 57 (1.02%) Groovy
17 39 (0.70%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 34 (0.61%) Perl
19 32 (0.57%) C++
20 26 (0.47%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,801 (32.28%) Security Cleared
2 1,511 (27.08%) SC Cleared
3 360 (6.45%) Degree
4 249 (4.46%) Azure Certification
5 244 (4.37%) BPSS Clearance
6 238 (4.27%) DV Cleared
7 193 (3.46%) AWS Certification
8 142 (2.55%) Computer Science Degree
9 113 (2.03%) Microsoft Certification
10 73 (1.31%) CISSP
11 61 (1.09%) ISTQB
12 53 (0.95%) Cisco Certification
13 50 (0.90%) PMP
14 47 (0.84%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 45 (0.81%) PMI Certification
16 41 (0.73%) Master's Degree
17 28 (0.50%) CISM
18 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 23 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 23 (0.41%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 551 (9.88%) QA
2 278 (4.98%) Data Quality
3 212 (3.80%) Accessibility
4 124 (2.22%) GDPR
5 88 (1.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 82 (1.47%) WCAG
7 70 (1.25%) NIST
8 53 (0.95%) NCSC
9 45 (0.81%) PMO
10 36 (0.65%) SLA
11 29 (0.52%) GRC
11 29 (0.52%) PCI DSS
12 22 (0.39%) ISO 20022
13 20 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
14 15 (0.27%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 13 (0.23%) SEPA
15 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
16 11 (0.20%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,154 (20.68%) Docker
2 158 (2.83%) Active Directory
3 88 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
5 32 (0.57%) vSphere
6 25 (0.45%) VMware ESXi
7 23 (0.41%) Hyper-V
8 19 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
9 15 (0.27%) VMware NSX
10 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
10 11 (0.20%) Squid
11 10 (0.18%) IAG
12 8 (0.14%) Postfix
12 8 (0.14%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.090%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,535 (27.51%) Kubernetes
2 533 (9.55%) Ansible
3 369 (6.61%) Grafana
4 318 (5.70%) Prometheus
5 74 (1.33%) Argo
6 56 (1.00%) Puppet
7 47 (0.84%) Microsoft Intune
8 46 (0.82%) Progress Chef
9 43 (0.77%) Single Sign-On
10 39 (0.70%) Packer
11 34 (0.61%) Kibana
12 29 (0.52%) Istio
13 22 (0.39%) Kubeflow
14 21 (0.38%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
16 18 (0.32%) Oracle RMAN
17 16 (0.29%) HP ALM
17 16 (0.29%) SCCM
18 13 (0.23%) Consul
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,098 (19.68%) Microsoft
2 303 (5.43%) Databricks
3 301 (5.40%) Oracle
4 295 (5.29%) Google
5 204 (3.66%) ServiceNow
6 190 (3.41%) Splunk
7 171 (3.07%) Salesforce
8 145 (2.60%) Dynatrace
9 131 (2.35%) VMware
10 115 (2.06%) SAP
11 99 (1.77%) Red Hat
12 74 (1.33%) IBM
12 74 (1.33%) OpenAI
13 65 (1.17%) MuleSoft
14 56 (1.00%) Foundry
15 51 (0.91%) Cisco
16 45 (0.81%) Informatica
17 41 (0.73%) AppDynamics
17 41 (0.73%) Okta
18 36 (0.65%) Atlassian