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 7 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,394 3,289 3,981
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.26% 10.58% 8.81%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.93% 11.83% 10.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,073 2,272 2,886
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £428 £463 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.78%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 57 24 105
10th Percentile - £36.58 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £57.19 £56.65
Median hourly rate £52.50 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.30% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.00 £80.75 £76.53
90th Percentile £94.25 £87.50 £83.88
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £70.36 £65.00
% change year-on-year -32.49% +8.25% -0.76%

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 33,986 27,793 39,321
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.08% 89.38% 87.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,549 16,924 25,862
10th Percentile £306 £306 £300
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £716 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £477 £496 £500
% change year-on-year -3.88% -0.80% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,070 859 2,130
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.35
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -7.14% +7.69%
75th Percentile £58.75 £63.50 £61.13
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.51 £35.00
% change year-on-year -20.20% -9.97% +11.43%

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 7 February 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 7 February 2026.

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 7 February 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 3,756 £525 -8.70% 1,349
UK excluding London +7 1,971 £500 -4.76% 1,056
London -3 1,882 £538 -10.42% 526
Work from Home -3 1,256 £525 -4.55% 800
North of England +4 681 £500 -3.61% 308
South East +1 404 £525 -8.70% 345
Midlands +23 384 £513 +2.50% 112
Yorkshire +1 354 £500 -1.96% 101
West Midlands +21 307 £525 +5.00% 78
North West +4 279 £468 -10.74% 178
South West +11 240 £525 -12.50% 143
Scotland +5 189 £463 +2.78% 65
East of England +17 112 £573 +8.79% 63
East Midlands +10 77 £425 -10.53% 34
North East -3 51 £475 -9.52% 31
Wales +8 36 £425 +65.41% 26
Northern Ireland -4 9 £475 +26.67% 9

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
1 263 (5.99%) Confluence
2 90 (2.05%) SharePoint
3 87 (1.98%) Apache
3 87 (1.98%) Apache Spark
4 59 (1.34%) Apache Airflow
4 59 (1.34%) SAS
5 37 (0.84%) OpenStack
6 34 (0.77%) nginx
7 32 (0.73%) CMS
8 24 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
9 21 (0.48%) IIS
10 15 (0.34%) JBoss
11 13 (0.30%) WebLogic
12 11 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 11 (0.25%) Sitecore CMS
13 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
13 10 (0.23%) Mendix
14 8 (0.18%) CICS
14 8 (0.18%) GeoServer
14 8 (0.18%) Smallworld
Applications
1 98 (2.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 41 (0.93%) Microsoft Project
4 34 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 6 (0.14%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.091%) Trello
10 2 (0.046%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.023%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 67 (1.52%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.25%) Endur
3 10 (0.23%) Maximo
3 10 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
3 10 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
4 9 (0.20%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 6 (0.14%) VisionPLUS
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.091%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.091%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.068%) NetSuite
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.068%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.068%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.068%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.068%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.068%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,293 (52.18%) Azure
2 1,586 (36.09%) AWS
3 1,235 (28.11%) Azure DevOps
4 825 (18.78%) GitHub
5 651 (14.82%) GCP
6 530 (12.06%) Serverless
7 471 (10.72%) GitHub Actions
8 368 (8.38%) Power Platform
9 280 (6.37%) AWS CloudFormation
10 256 (5.83%) AWS Lambda
11 239 (5.44%) Amazon S3
12 219 (4.98%) Azure Data Factory
13 210 (4.78%) Azure AKS
14 198 (4.51%) Amazon EKS
15 184 (4.19%) OpenShift
16 173 (3.94%) Entra ID
17 172 (3.91%) Dynamics 365
18 169 (3.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 169 (3.85%) Amazon ECS
19 160 (3.64%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 199 (4.53%) Firewall
2 106 (2.41%) DNS
3 91 (2.07%) VPN
4 89 (2.03%) Network Security
5 50 (1.14%) TCP/IP
6 47 (1.07%) SSL
7 35 (0.80%) HTTP
8 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
9 22 (0.50%) WAN
10 18 (0.41%) DHCP
11 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
12 14 (0.32%) BGP
12 14 (0.32%) SD-WAN
13 13 (0.30%) MPLS
14 12 (0.27%) SAN
14 12 (0.27%) SSH
15 11 (0.25%) FTP
15 11 (0.25%) LAN
15 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
16 10 (0.23%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 255 (5.80%) PostgreSQL
2 235 (5.35%) Power BI
3 176 (4.01%) SQL Server
4 166 (3.78%) NoSQL
5 139 (3.16%) Data Lake
6 134 (3.05%) Amazon RDS
7 115 (2.62%) Relational Database
8 107 (2.44%) Data Warehouse
9 104 (2.37%) MongoDB
10 93 (2.12%) Azure SQL Database
11 77 (1.75%) Oracle Database
12 76 (1.73%) Elasticsearch
13 68 (1.55%) DynamoDB
14 66 (1.50%) MySQL
15 56 (1.27%) Metadata
16 53 (1.21%) Delta Lake
17 52 (1.18%) Redis
17 52 (1.18%) Tableau
18 49 (1.12%) Big Data
19 48 (1.09%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 777 (17.68%) Jenkins
2 586 (13.34%) JIRA
3 580 (13.20%) Git
4 579 (13.18%) GitLab
5 135 (3.07%) Selenium
6 96 (2.18%) JUnit
7 93 (2.12%) Postman
8 66 (1.50%) SonarQube
9 65 (1.48%) Sonatype Nexus
10 64 (1.46%) Bitbucket
10 64 (1.46%) Cucumber
11 61 (1.39%) Cypress.io
12 50 (1.14%) Artifactory
13 49 (1.12%) JMeter
14 48 (1.09%) Maven
15 45 (1.02%) REST Assured
16 42 (0.96%) Gradle
17 38 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
18 36 (0.82%) Liquibase
19 33 (0.75%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,323 (30.11%) Social Skills
2 800 (18.21%) Finance
3 561 (12.77%) Public Sector
4 368 (8.38%) Analytical Skills
5 337 (7.67%) Banking
6 154 (3.50%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.80%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.52%) Financial Institution
9 66 (1.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 65 (1.48%) Marketing
11 48 (1.09%) Retail
12 47 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
13 45 (1.02%) Front Office
13 45 (1.02%) Investment Banking
14 43 (0.98%) Telecoms
15 36 (0.82%) Military
16 33 (0.75%) Organisational Skills
17 32 (0.73%) Legal
18 30 (0.68%) Pharmaceutical
19 26 (0.59%) Law
Job Titles
1 867 (19.73%) DevOps Engineer
2 761 (17.32%) Developer
3 600 (13.65%) Senior
4 438 (9.97%) Architect
5 342 (7.78%) Lead
6 264 (6.01%) Azure Engineer
7 250 (5.69%) AWS Engineer
8 227 (5.17%) Analyst
9 226 (5.14%) Data Engineer
10 194 (4.42%) AWS DevOps
11 171 (3.89%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 159 (3.62%) Cloud Engineer
13 155 (3.53%) Software Engineer
14 148 (3.37%) Platform Engineer
15 146 (3.32%) Senior Developer
16 130 (2.96%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 129 (2.94%) Solutions Architect
18 119 (2.71%) Business Analyst
19 118 (2.69%) Senior DevOps
20 112 (2.55%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 506 (11.52%) REST
2 392 (8.92%) .NET
3 300 (6.83%) React
4 296 (6.74%) Node.js
5 251 (5.71%) Kafka
6 250 (5.69%) RESTful
7 240 (5.46%) Spring
8 222 (5.05%) Spring Boot
9 171 (3.89%) JSON
10 153 (3.48%) OAuth
11 151 (3.44%) AngularJS
12 143 (3.25%) Elastic Stack
13 134 (3.05%) SOAP
14 129 (2.94%) XML
15 128 (2.91%) HTML
16 126 (2.87%) YAML
17 113 (2.57%) Playwright
18 109 (2.48%) CSS
19 103 (2.34%) PySpark
20 99 (2.25%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 636 (14.47%) Cloud Native
2 240 (5.46%) Product Ownership
3 164 (3.73%) Distributed Systems
4 125 (2.84%) Onboarding
5 116 (2.64%) Public Cloud
6 89 (2.03%) Legacy Systems
7 82 (1.87%) Hybrid Cloud
8 73 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
9 55 (1.25%) Virtual Team
10 54 (1.23%) Management Information System
11 49 (1.12%) Data Protection Act
11 49 (1.12%) Security Posture
12 48 (1.09%) NHS
13 47 (1.07%) Data Centre
14 46 (1.05%) Private Cloud
15 42 (0.96%) Replication
16 41 (0.93%) CMDB
17 40 (0.91%) Self-Motivation
18 38 (0.86%) AI Agents
18 38 (0.86%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 485 (11.04%) Linux
2 243 (5.53%) Windows
3 106 (2.41%) Unix
4 55 (1.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (1.14%) Windows Server
6 44 (1.00%) VMS
7 29 (0.66%) Ubuntu
8 20 (0.46%) Android
8 20 (0.46%) Windows 10
9 19 (0.43%) Apple iOS
10 17 (0.39%) CentOS
11 8 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
11 8 (0.18%) Solaris
12 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.091%) Mac OS
16 3 (0.068%) zOS
17 2 (0.046%) Debian
18 1 (0.023%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,536 (57.72%) CI/CD
2 1,715 (39.03%) Agile
3 1,169 (26.60%) Infrastructure as Code
4 852 (19.39%) Problem-Solving
5 847 (19.28%) Containerisation
6 663 (15.09%) Microservices
6 663 (15.09%) Test Automation
7 528 (12.02%) Continuous Improvement
8 515 (11.72%) Analytics
9 504 (11.47%) Migration
10 474 (10.79%) Scrum
11 463 (10.54%) Observability
12 438 (9.97%) AI
13 418 (9.51%) Stakeholder Management
14 387 (8.81%) Software Engineering
15 345 (7.85%) Mentoring
16 342 (7.78%) Data Modelling
17 295 (6.71%) Business Intelligence
18 290 (6.60%) Data Pipeline
19 289 (6.58%) Platform Engineering
Programming Languages
1 1,344 (30.59%) Python
2 870 (19.80%) SQL
3 585 (13.31%) Java
4 434 (9.88%) C#
5 427 (9.72%) JavaScript
6 382 (8.69%) PowerShell
7 347 (7.90%) Bash
8 308 (7.01%) TypeScript
9 149 (3.39%) Bicep
10 141 (3.21%) Go
11 78 (1.78%) PL/SQL
12 63 (1.43%) Scala
13 58 (1.32%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.12%) Ruby
15 47 (1.07%) Groovy
16 45 (1.02%) C++
17 42 (0.96%) T-SQL
18 34 (0.77%) Perl
19 28 (0.64%) Rust
20 23 (0.52%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,344 (30.59%) Security Cleared
2 1,112 (25.31%) SC Cleared
3 376 (8.56%) Degree
4 192 (4.37%) Azure Certification
5 190 (4.32%) Computer Science Degree
6 142 (3.23%) DV Cleared
7 141 (3.21%) AWS Certification
8 108 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
9 89 (2.03%) Master's Degree
10 74 (1.68%) CISSP
11 69 (1.57%) Microsoft Certification
12 59 (1.34%) CISM
13 48 (1.09%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 48 (1.09%) ISTQB
14 39 (0.89%) PMI Certification
15 31 (0.71%) PMP
16 30 (0.68%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 28 (0.64%) Cisco Certification
18 23 (0.52%) IIBA
19 22 (0.50%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 382 (8.69%) QA
2 179 (4.07%) GDPR
3 154 (3.50%) Data Quality
4 142 (3.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 126 (2.87%) Accessibility
6 124 (2.82%) NIST
7 72 (1.64%) NCSC
8 35 (0.80%) PCI DSS
8 35 (0.80%) WCAG
9 30 (0.68%) HIPAA
10 27 (0.61%) PMO
10 27 (0.61%) SLA
11 24 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.43%) SOC 2
13 18 (0.41%) PSD2
14 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
15 14 (0.32%) SEPA
16 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
17 10 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,070 (24.35%) Docker
2 170 (3.87%) Active Directory
3 70 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.57%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.86%) vSphere
6 25 (0.57%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.41%) Virtual Desktop
8 14 (0.32%) Squid
9 13 (0.30%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.25%) DFS Replication
10 11 (0.25%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.25%) Lustre
10 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
11 9 (0.20%) GPFS
12 8 (0.18%) Postfix
13 7 (0.16%) Firmware
14 6 (0.14%) Dovecot
14 6 (0.14%) NFS
14 6 (0.14%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 6 (0.14%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,384 (31.50%) Terraform
2 1,298 (29.54%) Kubernetes
3 497 (11.31%) Ansible
4 326 (7.42%) Grafana
5 287 (6.53%) Prometheus
6 92 (2.09%) Argo
7 73 (1.66%) Puppet
8 65 (1.48%) Single Sign-On
9 43 (0.98%) Istio
10 39 (0.89%) Kibana
11 34 (0.77%) Progress Chef
12 31 (0.71%) Packer
13 21 (0.48%) Podman
14 19 (0.43%) SCCM
14 19 (0.43%) vCenter Server
15 18 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 17 (0.39%) Rancher
17 16 (0.36%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.34%) Consul
18 15 (0.34%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 762 (17.34%) Microsoft
2 288 (6.55%) Oracle
3 254 (5.78%) Databricks
4 253 (5.76%) Google
5 213 (4.85%) Splunk
6 162 (3.69%) ServiceNow
7 128 (2.91%) Red Hat
8 119 (2.71%) VMware
9 114 (2.59%) Salesforce
10 103 (2.34%) SAP
11 76 (1.73%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.41%) Dynatrace
13 54 (1.23%) CyberArk
14 47 (1.07%) Atlassian
14 47 (1.07%) IBM
15 41 (0.93%) F5
16 39 (0.89%) Cisco
17 33 (0.75%) Palo Alto
18 30 (0.68%) MuleSoft
18 30 (0.68%) Talend