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

6 months to
3 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,407 3,258 3,966
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.38% 10.55% 8.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.06% 11.83% 10.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,082 2,241 2,868
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £430 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £563 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.07% +2.27% -7.56%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £707 £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 59 24 103
10th Percentile - £36.58 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £53.73 £56.65
Median hourly rate £55.00 £70.36 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -21.83% +8.25% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.50 £80.75 £76.10
90th Percentile £95.00 £85.48 £84.14
UK excluding London median hourly rate £48.75 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -27.78% +3.85% -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 33,753 27,550 39,300
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.16% 89.25% 87.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,385 16,677 25,860
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 £719 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £498 £500
% change year-on-year -3.66% -0.35% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,027 862 2,114
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -7.14% +8.53%
75th Percentile £58.75 £62.50 £61.13
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.00 £31.50 £35.50
% change year-on-year -20.63% -11.27% +22.41%

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 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 3 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 3 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 +3 3,771 £525 -8.70% 1,380
UK excluding London +7 1,986 £500 -4.76% 1,099
London -3 1,882 £539 -10.21% 537
Work from Home 0 1,268 £525 -4.55% 849
North of England +4 682 £500 -2.91% 300
South East +2 401 £525 -8.70% 364
Midlands +24 394 £515 +3.00% 118
Yorkshire +1 348 £500 -1.96% 97
West Midlands +25 318 £525 +3.75% 83
North West +6 287 £471 -9.21% 169
South West +9 245 £525 -12.50% 140
Scotland +5 188 £473 +5.00% 80
East of England +14 111 £575 +9.26% 70
East Midlands +13 76 £425 -12.82% 35
North East -5 49 £475 -15.93% 35
Wales +9 35 £425 +57.41% 29
Northern Ireland -4 10 £475 +26.67% 11

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 (5.95%) Confluence
2 88 (2.00%) Apache
2 88 (2.00%) SharePoint
3 83 (1.88%) Apache Spark
4 78 (1.77%) SAS
5 64 (1.45%) Apache Airflow
6 38 (0.86%) OpenStack
7 35 (0.79%) nginx
8 34 (0.77%) CMS
9 25 (0.57%) IIS
10 21 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
11 19 (0.43%) JBoss
12 13 (0.29%) WebLogic
13 11 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 11 (0.25%) CICS
14 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.23%) Mendix
14 10 (0.23%) Sitecore CMS
14 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.20%) iPlanet
Applications
1 97 (2.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 37 (0.84%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.75%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 7 (0.16%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.091%) Trello
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 69 (1.57%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.25%) Endur
4 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.20%) Maximo
5 9 (0.20%) VisionPLUS
6 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.091%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.091%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Assets
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.068%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.068%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.068%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.068%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.068%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,278 (51.69%) Azure
2 1,576 (35.76%) AWS
3 1,226 (27.82%) Azure DevOps
4 815 (18.49%) GitHub
5 641 (14.55%) GCP
6 524 (11.89%) Serverless
7 465 (10.55%) GitHub Actions
8 370 (8.40%) Power Platform
9 283 (6.42%) AWS CloudFormation
10 257 (5.83%) AWS Lambda
11 235 (5.33%) Amazon S3
12 215 (4.88%) Azure Data Factory
13 204 (4.63%) Azure AKS
14 191 (4.33%) Amazon EKS
15 186 (4.22%) OpenShift
16 172 (3.90%) Dynamics 365
17 171 (3.88%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 171 (3.88%) Entra ID
18 169 (3.83%) Amazon ECS
19 161 (3.65%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 198 (4.49%) Firewall
2 105 (2.38%) DNS
3 89 (2.02%) Network Security
4 86 (1.95%) VPN
5 50 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 46 (1.04%) SSL
7 37 (0.84%) HTTP
8 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
9 23 (0.52%) WAN
10 19 (0.43%) DHCP
11 18 (0.41%) Kerberos
12 16 (0.36%) BGP
12 16 (0.36%) SD-WAN
13 15 (0.34%) MPLS
14 14 (0.32%) SSH
15 13 (0.29%) FTP
16 12 (0.27%) LAN
16 12 (0.27%) SAN
16 12 (0.27%) SMTP
17 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 246 (5.58%) PostgreSQL
2 237 (5.38%) Power BI
3 177 (4.02%) SQL Server
4 159 (3.61%) NoSQL
5 138 (3.13%) Amazon RDS
6 137 (3.11%) Data Lake
7 117 (2.65%) Relational Database
8 108 (2.45%) Data Warehouse
9 100 (2.27%) MongoDB
10 93 (2.11%) Azure SQL Database
11 83 (1.88%) Oracle Database
12 72 (1.63%) Elasticsearch
13 65 (1.47%) MySQL
14 64 (1.45%) DynamoDB
15 57 (1.29%) Metadata
16 54 (1.23%) Tableau
17 52 (1.18%) Delta Lake
18 50 (1.13%) Redis
19 48 (1.09%) Amazon Aurora
19 48 (1.09%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 783 (17.77%) Jenkins
2 604 (13.71%) Git
3 603 (13.68%) JIRA
4 583 (13.23%) GitLab
5 134 (3.04%) Selenium
6 96 (2.18%) Postman
7 95 (2.16%) JUnit
8 70 (1.59%) SonarQube
8 70 (1.59%) Sonatype Nexus
9 66 (1.50%) Bitbucket
10 62 (1.41%) Cypress.io
11 61 (1.38%) Cucumber
12 49 (1.11%) Artifactory
13 47 (1.07%) JMeter
14 46 (1.04%) Maven
15 43 (0.98%) Gradle
15 43 (0.98%) REST Assured
16 38 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
17 36 (0.82%) Liquibase
18 34 (0.77%) CircleCI
General
1 1,325 (30.07%) Social Skills
2 804 (18.24%) Finance
3 559 (12.68%) Public Sector
4 365 (8.28%) Analytical Skills
5 345 (7.83%) Banking
6 161 (3.65%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.79%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.52%) Financial Institution
8 67 (1.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 66 (1.50%) Marketing
10 48 (1.09%) Front Office
10 48 (1.09%) Presentation Skills
10 48 (1.09%) Retail
11 46 (1.04%) Investment Banking
12 44 (1.00%) Telecoms
13 36 (0.82%) Military
14 32 (0.73%) Legal
15 31 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
15 31 (0.70%) Pharmaceutical
16 25 (0.57%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 863 (19.58%) DevOps Engineer
2 765 (17.36%) Developer
3 594 (13.48%) Senior
4 432 (9.80%) Architect
5 332 (7.53%) Lead
6 262 (5.95%) Azure Engineer
7 253 (5.74%) AWS Engineer
8 228 (5.17%) Data Engineer
9 226 (5.13%) Analyst
10 197 (4.47%) AWS DevOps
11 174 (3.95%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 158 (3.59%) Cloud Engineer
13 154 (3.49%) Software Engineer
14 150 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
15 147 (3.34%) Senior Developer
16 130 (2.95%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 129 (2.93%) Solutions Architect
18 119 (2.70%) Business Analyst
19 118 (2.68%) Senior DevOps
20 116 (2.63%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 505 (11.46%) REST
2 393 (8.92%) .NET
3 297 (6.74%) React
4 292 (6.63%) Node.js
5 253 (5.74%) RESTful
6 247 (5.60%) Kafka
7 231 (5.24%) Spring
8 213 (4.83%) Spring Boot
9 178 (4.04%) JSON
10 156 (3.54%) OAuth
11 150 (3.40%) AngularJS
12 141 (3.20%) Elastic Stack
13 134 (3.04%) XML
14 130 (2.95%) SOAP
15 128 (2.90%) YAML
16 126 (2.86%) HTML
17 112 (2.54%) Playwright
18 105 (2.38%) CSS
19 100 (2.27%) Middleware
20 98 (2.22%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 629 (14.27%) Cloud Native
2 243 (5.51%) Product Ownership
3 162 (3.68%) Distributed Systems
4 123 (2.79%) Onboarding
5 120 (2.72%) Public Cloud
6 89 (2.02%) Legacy Systems
7 80 (1.82%) Hybrid Cloud
8 73 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
9 58 (1.32%) Virtual Team
10 54 (1.23%) Management Information System
11 51 (1.16%) Data Centre
12 50 (1.13%) Data Protection Act
13 49 (1.11%) Security Posture
14 47 (1.07%) Private Cloud
15 46 (1.04%) NHS
16 45 (1.02%) Replication
17 41 (0.93%) CMDB
18 40 (0.91%) Mobile App
18 40 (0.91%) Self-Motivation
19 39 (0.88%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 487 (11.05%) Linux
2 251 (5.70%) Windows
3 108 (2.45%) Unix
4 56 (1.27%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 56 (1.27%) Windows Server
5 46 (1.04%) VMS
6 30 (0.68%) Ubuntu
7 21 (0.48%) Android
8 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
9 19 (0.43%) Apple iOS
10 18 (0.41%) CentOS
11 10 (0.23%) Amazon Linux
12 9 (0.20%) Solaris
13 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.091%) Mac OS
16 4 (0.091%) zOS
17 2 (0.045%) Debian
18 1 (0.023%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,533 (57.48%) CI/CD
2 1,718 (38.98%) Agile
3 1,158 (26.28%) Infrastructure as Code
4 857 (19.45%) Problem-Solving
5 851 (19.31%) Containerisation
6 678 (15.38%) Test Automation
7 647 (14.68%) Microservices
8 529 (12.00%) Analytics
9 525 (11.91%) Continuous Improvement
10 513 (11.64%) Migration
11 486 (11.03%) Scrum
12 459 (10.42%) Observability
13 435 (9.87%) AI
14 413 (9.37%) Stakeholder Management
15 384 (8.71%) Software Engineering
16 349 (7.92%) Data Modelling
17 339 (7.69%) Mentoring
18 305 (6.92%) Business Intelligence
19 304 (6.90%) Data Pipeline
20 296 (6.72%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,332 (30.22%) Python
2 880 (19.97%) SQL
3 578 (13.12%) Java
4 439 (9.96%) C#
5 421 (9.55%) JavaScript
6 378 (8.58%) PowerShell
7 336 (7.62%) Bash
8 303 (6.88%) TypeScript
9 145 (3.29%) Bicep
10 137 (3.11%) Go
11 76 (1.72%) PL/SQL
12 66 (1.50%) Shell Script
13 62 (1.41%) Scala
14 51 (1.16%) Groovy
15 50 (1.13%) Ruby
16 45 (1.02%) C++
17 44 (1.00%) T-SQL
18 36 (0.82%) Perl
19 25 (0.57%) Rust
20 23 (0.52%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,352 (30.68%) Security Cleared
2 1,123 (25.48%) SC Cleared
3 371 (8.42%) Degree
4 189 (4.29%) Azure Certification
5 186 (4.22%) Computer Science Degree
6 141 (3.20%) DV Cleared
7 140 (3.18%) AWS Certification
8 106 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
9 88 (2.00%) Master's Degree
10 75 (1.70%) CISSP
11 67 (1.52%) Microsoft Certification
12 59 (1.34%) CISM
13 47 (1.07%) ISTQB
14 44 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 38 (0.86%) PMI Certification
16 30 (0.68%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 30 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
16 30 (0.68%) PMP
17 22 (0.50%) IIBA
18 21 (0.48%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 373 (8.46%) QA
2 178 (4.04%) GDPR
3 167 (3.79%) Data Quality
4 145 (3.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 127 (2.88%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.88%) NIST
6 72 (1.63%) NCSC
7 36 (0.82%) PCI DSS
8 33 (0.75%) WCAG
9 30 (0.68%) HIPAA
10 26 (0.59%) PMO
10 26 (0.59%) SLA
11 25 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 20 (0.45%) PSD2
13 18 (0.41%) ISO 20022
13 18 (0.41%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.36%) SEPA
15 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
16 9 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,098 (24.91%) Docker
2 175 (3.97%) Active Directory
3 71 (1.61%) VMware Infrastructure
4 69 (1.57%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.79%) vSphere
6 22 (0.50%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.41%) Virtual Desktop
8 14 (0.32%) Squid
9 13 (0.29%) DFS Replication
9 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 12 (0.27%) Hyper-V
11 11 (0.25%) Lustre
11 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
12 9 (0.20%) GPFS
13 8 (0.18%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.16%) Dovecot
14 7 (0.16%) Firmware
14 7 (0.16%) NFS
14 7 (0.16%) Postfix
14 7 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,373 (31.15%) Terraform
2 1,302 (29.54%) Kubernetes
3 502 (11.39%) Ansible
4 322 (7.31%) Grafana
5 285 (6.47%) Prometheus
6 89 (2.02%) Argo
7 72 (1.63%) Puppet
8 62 (1.41%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (0.95%) Istio
10 39 (0.88%) Kibana
11 38 (0.86%) Progress Chef
12 32 (0.73%) Packer
13 21 (0.48%) Podman
14 20 (0.45%) SCCM
15 18 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 17 (0.39%) Rancher
17 16 (0.36%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 16 (0.36%) vCenter Server
18 15 (0.34%) Consul
18 15 (0.34%) logstash
Vendors
1 763 (17.31%) Microsoft
2 315 (7.15%) Oracle
3 252 (5.72%) Google
4 250 (5.67%) Databricks
5 221 (5.01%) Splunk
6 160 (3.63%) ServiceNow
7 128 (2.90%) Red Hat
8 118 (2.68%) VMware
9 113 (2.56%) Salesforce
10 105 (2.38%) SAP
11 76 (1.72%) OpenAI
12 65 (1.47%) Dynatrace
13 55 (1.25%) CyberArk
14 50 (1.13%) IBM
15 43 (0.98%) Atlassian
16 42 (0.95%) Talend
17 41 (0.93%) F5
18 40 (0.91%) Cisco
19 38 (0.86%) Denodo
20 32 (0.73%) Palo Alto