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

6 months to
3 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,598 3,575 3,811
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.44% 11.00% 9.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.34% 12.16% 11.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,898 2,511 2,600
10th Percentile £381 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £517 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.55% -6.00% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £730
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 28 75
10th Percentile £37.25 £33.58 £56.60
25th Percentile £55.69 £52.19 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £94.06 £95.00 £85.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.49% -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 45,377 29,398 32,720
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,769 18,279 20,543
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.49%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,906 1,760 1,592
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.73 £17.30 £18.69
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.03 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.58 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +88.14% -47.37% +14.67%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 4,776 £525 - 3,705
London 0 2,516 £550 - 2,115
UK excluding London -2 2,410 £500 - 2,028
Work from Home 0 1,608 £525 +2.14% 1,678
North of England 0 792 £500 +5.26% 568
South East -9 456 £525 +5.00% 454
Midlands -3 450 £488 -2.50% 231
Yorkshire -1 388 £500 +2.56% 157
West Midlands -4 354 £490 -5.50% 137
South West +8 311 £546 +5.05% 299
North West -3 311 £524 +16.44% 312
Scotland -3 211 £494 +3.95% 176
East of England +15 148 £505 -3.35% 180
North East +16 108 £425 -18.27% 101
East Midlands 0 92 £463 +2.78% 94
Wales -4 49 £513 +36.67% 46
Northern Ireland +20 23 £450 +2.27% 88
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 342 (6.11%) Confluence
2 147 (2.63%) SharePoint
3 127 (2.27%) Apache Airflow
4 126 (2.25%) Apache Spark
5 114 (2.04%) Apache
6 61 (1.09%) SAS
7 43 (0.77%) CMS
8 39 (0.70%) Jupyter
9 33 (0.59%) IIS
10 25 (0.45%) nginx
11 17 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.29%) Camunda
13 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
14 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
15 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
16 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
17 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
18 9 (0.16%) Appian
19 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
20 7 (0.13%) JBoss
Applications
1 66 (1.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.13%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.80%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 34 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 7 (0.13%) Trello
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
8 5 (0.089%) Windchill
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
9 1 (0.018%) Mingle
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 75 (1.34%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.63%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Magento
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.089%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 3 (0.054%) Findur
10 3 (0.054%) Infor LN
10 3 (0.054%) Maximo
10 3 (0.054%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.054%) Shopify
10 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,070 (54.84%) Azure
2 2,003 (35.78%) AWS
3 1,769 (31.60%) Azure DevOps
4 972 (17.36%) GitHub
5 714 (12.75%) GCP
6 606 (10.83%) GitHub Actions
7 489 (8.74%) Power Platform
8 456 (8.15%) Serverless
9 301 (5.38%) Amazon S3
10 282 (5.04%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.56%) Entra ID
12 241 (4.31%) Amazon EKS
13 234 (4.18%) AWS CloudFormation
14 232 (4.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 214 (3.82%) Azure AKS
16 209 (3.73%) Azure Monitor
17 202 (3.61%) Azure Data Factory
18 184 (3.29%) Amazon EC2
19 178 (3.18%) Dynamics 365
20 161 (2.88%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 253 (4.52%) Firewall
2 174 (3.11%) DNS
3 123 (2.20%) VPN
4 114 (2.04%) Network Security
5 68 (1.21%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.93%) SSL
7 51 (0.91%) WAN
8 48 (0.86%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) HTTP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 32 (0.57%) BGP
11 31 (0.55%) Internet
12 29 (0.52%) SSH
12 29 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
13 23 (0.41%) OSPF
14 21 (0.38%) VLAN
15 20 (0.36%) SAN
16 18 (0.32%) LAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 329 (5.88%) Power BI
2 298 (5.32%) SQL Server
3 296 (5.29%) PostgreSQL
4 209 (3.73%) Data Warehouse
5 186 (3.32%) NoSQL
6 178 (3.18%) MongoDB
7 175 (3.13%) Relational Database
8 171 (3.05%) Data Lake
9 136 (2.43%) Amazon RDS
10 126 (2.25%) Metadata
11 110 (1.96%) Azure SQL Database
12 92 (1.64%) Delta Lake
12 92 (1.64%) DynamoDB
13 83 (1.48%) Oracle Database
14 81 (1.45%) MySQL
15 80 (1.43%) Redis
16 68 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
17 62 (1.11%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 61 (1.09%) Big Data
19 53 (0.95%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 790 (14.11%) Git
2 789 (14.09%) Jenkins
3 682 (12.18%) JIRA
4 616 (11.00%) GitLab
5 140 (2.50%) Selenium
6 99 (1.77%) Postman
7 98 (1.75%) SonarQube
8 93 (1.66%) JUnit
9 92 (1.64%) Maven
10 79 (1.41%) Bitbucket
11 73 (1.30%) JMeter
12 72 (1.29%) REST Assured
13 70 (1.25%) Cypress.io
14 64 (1.14%) Gradle
15 58 (1.04%) Cucumber
16 50 (0.89%) Gatling
17 46 (0.82%) Claude Code
18 44 (0.79%) Mockito
19 43 (0.77%) LoadRunner
20 42 (0.75%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,455 (25.99%) Social Skills
2 992 (17.72%) Finance
3 811 (14.49%) Public Sector
4 514 (9.18%) Analytical Skills
5 369 (6.59%) Banking
6 163 (2.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 104 (1.86%) Retail
8 94 (1.68%) Documentation Skills
9 79 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
10 65 (1.16%) Legal
10 65 (1.16%) Organisational Skills
11 55 (0.98%) Marketing
12 52 (0.93%) Investment Banking
12 52 (0.93%) Military
13 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
13 51 (0.91%) Telecoms
14 46 (0.82%) Law
15 42 (0.75%) Front Office
15 42 (0.75%) Manufacturing
16 41 (0.73%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,117 (19.95%) DevOps Engineer
2 905 (16.17%) Developer
3 839 (14.99%) Senior
4 628 (11.22%) Architect
5 536 (9.57%) Lead
6 349 (6.23%) Azure Engineer
7 311 (5.56%) Data Engineer
8 277 (4.95%) Analyst
9 261 (4.66%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.18%) Platform Engineer
11 206 (3.68%) Cloud Engineer
12 201 (3.59%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 192 (3.43%) Senior DevOps
14 191 (3.41%) Java Developer
15 179 (3.20%) AWS DevOps
16 178 (3.18%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 173 (3.09%) Solutions Architect
18 168 (3.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 158 (2.82%) Senior Developer
20 142 (2.54%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,655 (29.56%) Terraform
2 587 (10.49%) REST
3 472 (8.43%) .NET
4 374 (6.68%) Kafka
5 343 (6.13%) RESTful
6 303 (5.41%) Spring
7 291 (5.20%) React
8 290 (5.18%) Spring Boot
9 205 (3.66%) Node.js
10 183 (3.27%) JSON
11 166 (2.97%) Playwright
12 164 (2.93%) OAuth
13 161 (2.88%) PySpark
14 138 (2.47%) HTML
15 128 (2.29%) CSS
16 126 (2.25%) .NET Framework
17 124 (2.22%) AngularJS
17 124 (2.22%) SOAP
18 117 (2.09%) OAuth2
19 113 (2.02%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 1,021 (18.24%) Cloud Native
2 423 (7.56%) Product Ownership
3 264 (4.72%) Distributed Systems
4 193 (3.45%) Enterprise Software
5 183 (3.27%) Onboarding
6 150 (2.68%) Hybrid Cloud
6 150 (2.68%) Legacy Systems
7 92 (1.64%) AI Agents
8 86 (1.54%) Management Information System
9 85 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
10 82 (1.46%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.36%) Public Cloud
12 75 (1.34%) Replication
13 72 (1.29%) Data Structures
14 69 (1.23%) Security Posture
15 66 (1.18%) Data Centre
16 58 (1.04%) Virtual Team
17 55 (0.98%) Enterprise Cloud
18 51 (0.91%) Mobile App
19 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 532 (9.50%) Linux
2 308 (5.50%) Windows
3 116 (2.07%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 108 (1.93%) Unix
5 97 (1.73%) Windows Server
6 41 (0.73%) VMS
7 33 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.38%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
11 9 (0.16%) CentOS
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,359 (60.00%) CI/CD
2 2,286 (40.84%) Agile
3 1,609 (28.74%) Infrastructure as Code
4 936 (16.72%) Continuous Improvement
5 926 (16.54%) Containerisation
6 882 (15.76%) Stakeholder Management
7 878 (15.68%) Problem-Solving
8 874 (15.61%) Test Automation
9 822 (14.68%) Microservices
10 819 (14.63%) AI
11 742 (13.25%) Platform Engineering
12 741 (13.24%) Observability
13 707 (12.63%) Software Engineering
14 681 (12.17%) Scrum
15 673 (12.02%) Migration
16 583 (10.41%) Technical Leadership
17 581 (10.38%) Analytics
18 530 (9.47%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 486 (8.68%) Roadmaps
20 483 (8.63%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,614 (28.83%) Python
2 1,019 (18.20%) SQL
3 811 (14.49%) Java
4 487 (8.70%) C#
5 484 (8.65%) Bash
6 483 (8.63%) PowerShell
7 458 (8.18%) JavaScript
8 308 (5.50%) TypeScript
9 250 (4.47%) Bicep
10 99 (1.77%) Go
11 81 (1.45%) Shell Script
12 70 (1.25%) T-SQL
13 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
14 66 (1.18%) Scala
15 63 (1.13%) Groovy
16 57 (1.02%) PL/SQL
17 38 (0.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 35 (0.63%) Perl
19 30 (0.54%) C++
20 22 (0.39%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,792 (32.01%) Security Cleared
2 1,510 (26.97%) SC Cleared
3 348 (6.22%) Degree
4 235 (4.20%) Azure Certification
5 230 (4.11%) BPSS Clearance
6 208 (3.72%) DV Cleared
7 187 (3.34%) AWS Certification
8 138 (2.47%) Computer Science Degree
9 107 (1.91%) Microsoft Certification
10 76 (1.36%) CISSP
11 62 (1.11%) ISTQB
12 55 (0.98%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.89%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.79%) PMP
15 42 (0.75%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 24 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
19 23 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 537 (9.59%) QA
2 286 (5.11%) Data Quality
3 201 (3.59%) Accessibility
4 134 (2.39%) GDPR
5 102 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.48%) WCAG
7 81 (1.45%) NIST
8 52 (0.93%) NCSC
8 52 (0.93%) PMO
9 39 (0.70%) SLA
10 32 (0.57%) PCI DSS
11 30 (0.54%) GRC
12 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.29%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
16 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
16 10 (0.18%) HL7
16 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,147 (20.49%) Docker
2 172 (3.07%) Active Directory
3 91 (1.63%) VMware Infrastructure
4 82 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.50%) Hyper-V
6 27 (0.48%) vSphere
7 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
8 20 (0.36%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.20%) IAG
11 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.16%) Postfix
13 7 (0.13%) KVM
13 7 (0.13%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.089%) Firmware
15 5 (0.089%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,514 (27.05%) Kubernetes
2 534 (9.54%) Ansible
3 370 (6.61%) Grafana
4 312 (5.57%) Prometheus
5 85 (1.52%) Argo
6 60 (1.07%) Puppet
7 53 (0.95%) Single Sign-On
8 49 (0.88%) Progress Chef
9 42 (0.75%) Microsoft Intune
10 35 (0.63%) Istio
11 33 (0.59%) Packer
12 26 (0.46%) Kibana
13 20 (0.36%) Kustomize
13 20 (0.36%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.34%) SCCM
15 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
16 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
16 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
17 13 (0.23%) SCOM
17 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,093 (19.52%) Microsoft
2 307 (5.48%) Oracle
3 298 (5.32%) Databricks
4 273 (4.88%) Google
5 204 (3.64%) ServiceNow
6 185 (3.30%) Salesforce
6 185 (3.30%) Splunk
7 145 (2.59%) Dynatrace
8 130 (2.32%) VMware
9 112 (2.00%) SAP
10 108 (1.93%) Red Hat
11 65 (1.16%) IBM
11 65 (1.16%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.11%) Informatica
13 60 (1.07%) MuleSoft
14 50 (0.89%) Foundry
15 48 (0.86%) Cisco
16 47 (0.84%) AppDynamics
17 43 (0.77%) Atlassian
18 36 (0.64%) CyberArk