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 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -7
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,195 3,673 4,364
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.61% 10.01% 9.62%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.99% 11.51% 10.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,934 2,462 3,183
10th Percentile £363 £381 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £557 £563
Median % change year-on-year -6.15% -1.02% -6.25%
75th Percentile £615 £663 £663
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 39 95
10th Percentile - £40.70 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £56.88 £51.63
Median hourly rate £61.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £85.63 £74.00 £75.67
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -16.43% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and 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 32,304 31,906 40,162
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.43% 86.97% 88.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,227 19,221 26,955
10th Percentile £300 £310 £308
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,107 1,156 1,551
10th Percentile £14.52 £15.22 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.52 £20.24 £19.06
Median hourly rate £25.15 £34.75 £44.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.63% -21.02% +25.71%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.00 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -29.23% -26.97% +41.14%

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 November 2025.

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 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Top 17 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 November 2025. 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 +2 3,555 £525 -8.70% 1,381
UK excluding London +4 1,890 £500 -9.09% 1,183
London 0 1,786 £550 -5.17% 582
Work from Home 0 1,337 £525 -4.55% 794
North of England +1 617 £493 -2.23% 210
South East +2 370 £500 -16.67% 498
Midlands +16 369 £515 -6.36% 131
Yorkshire -1 319 £500 - 76
West Midlands +12 297 £525 -5.15% 85
North West +4 263 £458 -14.08% 97
South West +2 221 £538 -10.42% 157
Scotland +8 213 £475 +5.56% 90
East of England +28 108 £516 -1.67% 74
East Midlands +20 72 £418 -12.11% 43
Wales +8 45 £450 +9.09% 43
North East -8 37 £520 -11.11% 38
Northern Ireland -1 7 - - 8

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
1 262 (6.25%) Confluence
2 95 (2.26%) Apache
3 71 (1.69%) SharePoint
4 69 (1.64%) Apache Airflow
5 64 (1.53%) SAS
6 59 (1.41%) Apache Spark
7 40 (0.95%) CMS
8 39 (0.93%) nginx
9 29 (0.69%) IIS
9 29 (0.69%) JBoss
10 28 (0.67%) OpenStack
11 27 (0.64%) WebLogic
12 25 (0.60%) CICS
13 22 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
14 16 (0.38%) WebSphere
15 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
15 15 (0.36%) Mule
16 14 (0.33%) Oracle SOA Suite
17 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
17 10 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 73 (1.74%) Microsoft Excel
2 40 (0.95%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 35 (0.83%) Microsoft Office
4 31 (0.74%) Microsoft Project
5 19 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.38%) Chatbot
7 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Trello
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.024%) Moqups
9 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 67 (1.60%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.48%) Endur
3 19 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
4 18 (0.43%) Oracle BPM
5 17 (0.41%) Aladdin
6 16 (0.38%) VisionPLUS
7 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
8 8 (0.19%) Maximo
9 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
10 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 4 (0.095%) Fidessa
11 4 (0.095%) NEC Housing
11 4 (0.095%) SAP CO
11 4 (0.095%) SAP ERP
11 4 (0.095%) SAP FI
11 4 (0.095%) SAP FI/CO
11 4 (0.095%) Teamcenter
11 4 (0.095%) thinkFolio
11 4 (0.095%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.072%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 2,045 (48.75%) Azure
2 1,582 (37.71%) AWS
3 1,129 (26.91%) Azure DevOps
4 735 (17.52%) GitHub
5 590 (14.06%) GCP
6 487 (11.61%) Serverless
7 428 (10.20%) GitHub Actions
8 284 (6.77%) Power Platform
9 270 (6.44%) Amazon S3
10 269 (6.41%) AWS CloudFormation
10 269 (6.41%) AWS Lambda
11 221 (5.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 199 (4.74%) Amazon EC2
13 186 (4.43%) Azure AKS
14 178 (4.24%) Amazon EKS
15 164 (3.91%) Amazon ECS
16 161 (3.84%) Azure Data Factory
16 161 (3.84%) SaaS
17 153 (3.65%) Dynamics 365
18 149 (3.55%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 204 (4.86%) Firewall
2 128 (3.05%) DNS
3 88 (2.10%) VPN
4 71 (1.69%) Network Security
5 67 (1.60%) TCP/IP
6 66 (1.57%) SSL
7 51 (1.22%) HTTP
8 35 (0.83%) HTTPS
9 32 (0.76%) SSH
10 29 (0.69%) SMTP
10 29 (0.69%) WAN
11 23 (0.55%) FTP
12 20 (0.48%) BGP
13 18 (0.43%) DHCP
13 18 (0.43%) Kerberos
14 16 (0.38%) OpenLDAP
15 15 (0.36%) LAN
15 15 (0.36%) MPLS
15 15 (0.36%) SD-WAN
16 12 (0.29%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 279 (6.65%) PostgreSQL
2 173 (4.12%) NoSQL
2 173 (4.12%) Power BI
3 168 (4.00%) Amazon RDS
4 159 (3.79%) SQL Server
5 121 (2.88%) MongoDB
6 106 (2.53%) Relational Database
7 101 (2.41%) Data Warehouse
8 95 (2.26%) Data Lake
9 89 (2.12%) Oracle Database
10 71 (1.69%) Azure SQL Database
11 69 (1.64%) DynamoDB
12 66 (1.57%) MySQL
13 61 (1.45%) Redis
14 56 (1.33%) Amazon Aurora
15 51 (1.22%) Metadata
16 50 (1.19%) Elasticsearch
17 40 (0.95%) Big Data
17 40 (0.95%) Delta Lake
18 37 (0.88%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 815 (19.43%) Jenkins
2 681 (16.23%) Git
3 616 (14.68%) JIRA
4 538 (12.82%) GitLab
5 144 (3.43%) Selenium
6 109 (2.60%) JUnit
7 100 (2.38%) SonarQube
8 96 (2.29%) Bitbucket
9 95 (2.26%) Sonatype Nexus
10 87 (2.07%) Postman
11 67 (1.60%) Cypress.io
12 62 (1.48%) Cucumber
13 61 (1.45%) Liquibase
14 57 (1.36%) Maven
15 51 (1.22%) Artifactory
16 50 (1.19%) Gradle
17 46 (1.10%) JMeter
18 43 (1.03%) Visual Studio
19 40 (0.95%) CircleCI
20 39 (0.93%) Oracle APEX
General
1 1,314 (31.32%) Social Skills
2 772 (18.40%) Finance
3 537 (12.80%) Public Sector
4 355 (8.46%) Banking
5 347 (8.27%) Analytical Skills
6 134 (3.19%) Documentation Skills
7 70 (1.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 70 (1.67%) Investment Banking
8 66 (1.57%) Marketing
9 62 (1.48%) Financial Institution
10 59 (1.41%) Telecoms
11 56 (1.33%) Retail
12 53 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
13 47 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
14 40 (0.95%) Front Office
15 35 (0.83%) Back Office
16 31 (0.74%) Pharmaceutical
17 29 (0.69%) Manufacturing
17 29 (0.69%) Military
18 27 (0.64%) Law
Job Titles
1 834 (19.88%) Developer
2 774 (18.45%) DevOps Engineer
3 567 (13.52%) Senior
4 356 (8.49%) Architect
5 315 (7.51%) Lead
6 258 (6.15%) AWS Engineer
7 210 (5.01%) Azure Engineer
8 199 (4.74%) AWS DevOps
9 193 (4.60%) Analyst
10 188 (4.48%) Data Engineer
11 169 (4.03%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 167 (3.98%) Senior Developer
13 160 (3.81%) Software Engineer
14 150 (3.58%) Cloud Engineer
15 144 (3.43%) Platform Engineer
16 139 (3.31%) Java Developer
17 126 (3.00%) Consultant
18 110 (2.62%) Senior DevOps
19 107 (2.55%) Business Analyst
20 104 (2.48%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 477 (11.37%) REST
2 378 (9.01%) .NET
3 321 (7.65%) RESTful
4 257 (6.13%) Node.js
5 256 (6.10%) React
6 240 (5.72%) Kafka
7 213 (5.08%) JSON
8 200 (4.77%) Spring
9 189 (4.51%) Spring Boot
10 180 (4.29%) SOAP
11 167 (3.98%) HTML
12 160 (3.81%) OAuth
13 158 (3.77%) Elastic Stack
14 156 (3.72%) AngularJS
15 144 (3.43%) XML
16 115 (2.74%) CSS
17 111 (2.65%) YAML
18 94 (2.24%) .NET Core
19 85 (2.03%) OAuth2
20 83 (1.98%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 558 (13.30%) Cloud Native
2 233 (5.55%) Product Ownership
3 179 (4.27%) Distributed Systems
4 126 (3.00%) Onboarding
5 109 (2.60%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (2.41%) Public Cloud
7 74 (1.76%) Hybrid Cloud
8 69 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
9 67 (1.60%) Virtual Team
10 65 (1.55%) Mobile App
11 61 (1.45%) Replication
12 53 (1.26%) Enterprise Software
12 53 (1.26%) Greenfield Project
12 53 (1.26%) Security Posture
13 51 (1.22%) Management Information System
14 45 (1.07%) Data Centre
15 44 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
16 42 (1.00%) Algorithms
17 40 (0.95%) NHS
18 39 (0.93%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 513 (12.23%) Linux
2 251 (5.98%) Windows
3 115 (2.74%) Unix
4 64 (1.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.43%) Windows Server
6 50 (1.19%) Android
7 47 (1.12%) VMS
8 43 (1.03%) Apple iOS
9 25 (0.60%) Amazon Linux
9 25 (0.60%) Ubuntu
10 20 (0.48%) CentOS
11 16 (0.38%) Solaris
11 16 (0.38%) Windows 10
12 11 (0.26%) zOS
13 10 (0.24%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 3 (0.072%) AIX
16 3 (0.072%) Debian
16 3 (0.072%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,374 (56.59%) CI/CD
2 1,848 (44.05%) Agile
3 1,087 (25.91%) Infrastructure as Code
4 829 (19.76%) Containerisation
5 825 (19.67%) Problem-Solving
6 665 (15.85%) Test Automation
7 649 (15.47%) Microservices
8 527 (12.56%) Scrum
9 460 (10.97%) Migration
10 447 (10.66%) Continuous Improvement
11 423 (10.08%) Software Engineering
12 411 (9.80%) Analytics
13 379 (9.03%) AI
14 362 (8.63%) Observability
15 326 (7.77%) Stakeholder Management
16 311 (7.41%) Mentoring
17 296 (7.06%) SDLC
18 288 (6.87%) Infrastructure Automation
19 273 (6.51%) DevSecOps
19 273 (6.51%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,351 (32.21%) Python
2 797 (19.00%) SQL
3 634 (15.11%) Java
4 442 (10.54%) JavaScript
5 426 (10.15%) C#
6 395 (9.42%) Bash
7 377 (8.99%) PowerShell
8 294 (7.01%) TypeScript
9 178 (4.24%) Go
10 119 (2.84%) Bicep
11 82 (1.95%) PL/SQL
12 72 (1.72%) Shell Script
13 64 (1.53%) Groovy
14 55 (1.31%) Perl
15 54 (1.29%) C++
16 47 (1.12%) Scala
17 45 (1.07%) Ruby
18 36 (0.86%) T-SQL
19 31 (0.74%) Kotlin
20 29 (0.69%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,129 (26.91%) Security Cleared
2 936 (22.31%) SC Cleared
3 348 (8.30%) Degree
4 187 (4.46%) Computer Science Degree
5 152 (3.62%) AWS Certification
6 150 (3.58%) Azure Certification
7 131 (3.12%) DV Cleared
8 86 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
9 82 (1.95%) Master's Degree
10 67 (1.60%) CISSP
11 64 (1.53%) Microsoft Certification
12 53 (1.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 45 (1.07%) CISM
14 38 (0.91%) ISTQB
15 36 (0.86%) Cisco Certification
16 33 (0.79%) PMI Certification
17 28 (0.67%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 27 (0.64%) PMP
19 18 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
20 15 (0.36%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 388 (9.25%) QA
2 155 (3.69%) GDPR
3 140 (3.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 131 (3.12%) Accessibility
5 115 (2.74%) Data Quality
6 106 (2.53%) NIST
7 47 (1.12%) NCSC
8 36 (0.86%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.69%) WCAG
10 28 (0.67%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.48%) PMO
11 20 (0.48%) SLA
12 19 (0.45%) SOC 2
13 17 (0.41%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 15 (0.36%) MiFID
15 14 (0.33%) PSD2
16 13 (0.31%) ISO 20022
16 13 (0.31%) SEPA
17 12 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials
18 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 1,071 (25.53%) Docker
2 186 (4.43%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.88%) VMware Infrastructure
4 60 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.64%) vSphere
6 23 (0.55%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.33%) Postfix
9 13 (0.31%) Squid
10 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
10 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
10 12 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
11 11 (0.26%) Hyper-V
11 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
12 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 9 (0.21%) VMware ESXi
14 8 (0.19%) GPFS
14 8 (0.19%) Lustre
14 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
15 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,334 (31.80%) Terraform
2 1,230 (29.32%) Kubernetes
3 539 (12.85%) Ansible
4 326 (7.77%) Grafana
5 310 (7.39%) Prometheus
6 90 (2.15%) Puppet
7 80 (1.91%) Argo
8 69 (1.64%) Single Sign-On
9 59 (1.41%) Progress Chef
10 45 (1.07%) Kibana
11 40 (0.95%) Packer
12 34 (0.81%) Istio
13 21 (0.50%) ITRS Geneos
13 21 (0.50%) Podman
14 20 (0.48%) SCCM
15 18 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
16 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
16 17 (0.41%) Nessus
16 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
17 15 (0.36%) logstash
Vendors
1 711 (16.95%) Microsoft
2 306 (7.29%) Oracle
3 233 (5.55%) Google
4 203 (4.84%) Splunk
5 186 (4.43%) Databricks
6 173 (4.12%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.88%) Salesforce
8 112 (2.67%) VMware
9 111 (2.65%) SAP
10 98 (2.34%) Red Hat
11 66 (1.57%) Dynatrace
12 59 (1.41%) MuleSoft
13 53 (1.26%) IBM
14 51 (1.22%) OpenAI
15 46 (1.10%) F5
16 43 (1.03%) Cisco
17 42 (1.00%) Atlassian
18 38 (0.91%) Palo Alto
19 37 (0.88%) Talend
20 36 (0.86%) CyberArk