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

6 months to
10 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,643 3,358 4,161
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.72% 10.38% 9.64%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.59% 11.47% 11.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,910 2,404 2,833
10th Percentile £385 £363 £391
25th Percentile £439 £425 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £728
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 23 122
10th Percentile £38.25 £36.50 £56.28
25th Percentile £61.87 £51.88 £61.34
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £85.23 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.25 £88.50 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%

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 44,833 29,276 36,875
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.19% 90.47% 85.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,910 18,456 23,540
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.48% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,660 1,489 2,488
10th Percentile £14.95 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.44 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% -3.62%

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 10 July 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 10 July 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 10 July 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 4,774 £525 - 1,353
UK excluding London +6 2,484 £500 - 1,016
London +3 2,446 £550 - 531
Work from Home 0 1,614 £525 - 738
North of England +5 881 £500 - 295
Yorkshire +3 471 £500 - 77
South East -5 463 £525 +5.00% 279
Midlands -1 442 £500 - 130
West Midlands -4 351 £500 -1.43% 84
North West -2 332 £510 +7.37% 168
South West +16 305 £523 -5.00% 138
Scotland +1 214 £475 -4.23% 47
East of England +17 148 £525 +5.00% 77
North East +13 97 £425 -18.27% 51
East Midlands -2 86 £488 +8.33% 46
Wales +2 54 £425 +38.10% 33
Northern Ireland +16 22 £475 +11.76% 38
Channel Islands - 3 £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
1 329 (5.83%) Confluence
2 139 (2.46%) Apache Spark
3 131 (2.32%) SharePoint
4 108 (1.91%) Apache Airflow
5 104 (1.84%) Apache
6 82 (1.45%) SAS
7 50 (0.89%) CMS
8 35 (0.62%) IIS
9 34 (0.60%) Jupyter
10 32 (0.57%) nginx
11 31 (0.55%) Microsoft Exchange
12 17 (0.30%) OpenStack
13 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
14 15 (0.27%) Camunda
14 15 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
17 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
18 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
Applications
1 75 (1.33%) Microsoft Excel
2 64 (1.13%) Microsoft Project
3 43 (0.76%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 42 (0.74%) Microsoft Office
5 36 (0.64%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 4 (0.071%) Notion
10 3 (0.053%) Adobe XD
10 3 (0.053%) Trello
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 73 (1.29%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Magento
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Endur
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 3 (0.053%) OpenText VIM for SAP
8 3 (0.053%) Salesforce CRM
8 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
8 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
8 3 (0.053%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 3,028 (53.66%) Azure
2 2,010 (35.62%) AWS
3 1,671 (29.61%) Azure DevOps
4 938 (16.62%) GitHub
5 712 (12.62%) GCP
6 567 (10.05%) GitHub Actions
7 484 (8.58%) Serverless
8 473 (8.38%) Power Platform
9 319 (5.65%) Amazon S3
10 280 (4.96%) AWS Lambda
11 259 (4.59%) AWS CloudFormation
12 251 (4.45%) Entra ID
13 224 (3.97%) Azure AKS
14 222 (3.93%) Amazon EKS
15 192 (3.40%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 191 (3.38%) Amazon EC2
17 186 (3.30%) Azure Monitor
18 183 (3.24%) Azure Data Factory
19 161 (2.85%) OpenShift
19 161 (2.85%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 234 (4.15%) Firewall
2 146 (2.59%) DNS
3 118 (2.09%) Network Security
4 110 (1.95%) VPN
5 50 (0.89%) WAN
6 44 (0.78%) TCP/IP
7 38 (0.67%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.60%) BGP
10 28 (0.50%) HTTP
10 28 (0.50%) Internet
11 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
12 26 (0.46%) DHCP
13 24 (0.43%) OSPF
14 23 (0.41%) SAN
15 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.30%) IPsec
16 17 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 309 (5.48%) Power BI
2 287 (5.09%) SQL Server
3 268 (4.75%) PostgreSQL
4 191 (3.38%) NoSQL
5 184 (3.26%) Relational Database
6 170 (3.01%) Data Warehouse
7 168 (2.98%) MongoDB
8 156 (2.76%) Data Lake
9 122 (2.16%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.86%) Azure SQL Database
11 101 (1.79%) Metadata
12 100 (1.77%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.58%) Delta Lake
14 80 (1.42%) Oracle Database
15 73 (1.29%) Big Data
16 71 (1.26%) Amazon Athena
17 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
18 66 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
18 66 (1.17%) Redis
19 53 (0.94%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 820 (14.53%) Jenkins
2 744 (13.18%) Git
3 691 (12.25%) JIRA
4 585 (10.37%) GitLab
5 129 (2.29%) Selenium
6 116 (2.06%) Postman
7 98 (1.74%) JUnit
8 92 (1.63%) SonarQube
9 80 (1.42%) REST Assured
10 76 (1.35%) Bitbucket
11 75 (1.33%) Maven
12 62 (1.10%) Cucumber
12 62 (1.10%) JMeter
13 56 (0.99%) Cypress.io
14 50 (0.89%) Gradle
15 47 (0.83%) Gatling
16 41 (0.73%) Mockito
17 38 (0.67%) Artifactory
17 38 (0.67%) Visual Studio
18 36 (0.64%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,410 (24.99%) Social Skills
2 1,028 (18.22%) Finance
3 789 (13.98%) Public Sector
4 462 (8.19%) Analytical Skills
5 368 (6.52%) Banking
6 135 (2.39%) Documentation Skills
7 120 (2.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 86 (1.52%) Retail
9 73 (1.29%) Influencing Skills
10 69 (1.22%) Legal
11 62 (1.10%) Organisational Skills
12 58 (1.03%) Marketing
13 47 (0.83%) Military
14 45 (0.80%) Investment Banking
15 42 (0.74%) Law
16 41 (0.73%) Financial Institution
17 37 (0.66%) Manufacturing
18 36 (0.64%) Front Office
18 36 (0.64%) Presentation Skills
19 35 (0.62%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 1,135 (20.11%) DevOps Engineer
2 924 (16.37%) Developer
3 785 (13.91%) Senior
4 648 (11.48%) Architect
5 506 (8.97%) Lead
6 341 (6.04%) Azure Engineer
7 327 (5.79%) Data Engineer
8 307 (5.44%) Analyst
9 283 (5.02%) AWS Engineer
10 220 (3.90%) Platform Engineer
11 213 (3.77%) Cloud Engineer
12 208 (3.69%) AWS DevOps
13 202 (3.58%) Java Developer
14 195 (3.46%) Senior DevOps
15 194 (3.44%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 188 (3.33%) Solutions Architect
17 179 (3.17%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 179 (3.17%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 157 (2.78%) Software Engineer
19 156 (2.76%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 545 (9.66%) REST
2 499 (8.84%) .NET
3 329 (5.83%) Spring
4 328 (5.81%) RESTful
5 311 (5.51%) React
6 310 (5.49%) Kafka
7 306 (5.42%) Spring Boot
8 243 (4.31%) Node.js
9 171 (3.03%) AngularJS
10 168 (2.98%) OAuth
11 167 (2.96%) Playwright
11 167 (2.96%) PySpark
12 155 (2.75%) JSON
13 136 (2.41%) SOAP
14 132 (2.34%) .NET Framework
15 128 (2.27%) HTML
16 114 (2.02%) OAuth2
17 109 (1.93%) Middleware
17 109 (1.93%) OpenID
18 108 (1.91%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,010 (17.90%) Cloud Native
2 381 (6.75%) Product Ownership
3 243 (4.31%) Distributed Systems
4 169 (2.99%) Onboarding
5 149 (2.64%) Enterprise Software
6 145 (2.57%) Legacy Systems
7 119 (2.11%) Hybrid Cloud
8 101 (1.79%) Public Cloud
9 87 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
10 80 (1.42%) Data Centre
11 76 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
12 73 (1.29%) Management Information System
13 67 (1.19%) Security Posture
14 61 (1.08%) Data Structures
15 58 (1.03%) Virtual Team
16 57 (1.01%) AI Agents
17 56 (0.99%) Mobile App
17 56 (0.99%) Replication
18 52 (0.92%) Enterprise Cloud
19 51 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 486 (8.61%) Linux
2 296 (5.25%) Windows
3 101 (1.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.40%) Unix
5 66 (1.17%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) VMS
7 27 (0.48%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.43%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.27%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) CentOS
13 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) zOS
14 5 (0.089%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,314 (58.73%) CI/CD
2 2,192 (38.84%) Agile
3 1,522 (26.97%) Infrastructure as Code
4 950 (16.84%) Containerisation
5 868 (15.38%) Problem-Solving
6 840 (14.89%) Test Automation
7 833 (14.76%) Continuous Improvement
8 821 (14.55%) Microservices
9 698 (12.37%) Stakeholder Management
10 683 (12.10%) Migration
10 683 (12.10%) Observability
11 681 (12.07%) AI
12 673 (11.93%) Scrum
13 641 (11.36%) Platform Engineering
14 611 (10.83%) Software Engineering
15 602 (10.67%) Analytics
16 489 (8.67%) Data Modelling
17 488 (8.65%) Technical Leadership
18 478 (8.47%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 455 (8.06%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,581 (28.02%) Python
2 1,034 (18.32%) SQL
3 783 (13.88%) Java
4 525 (9.30%) C#
5 433 (7.67%) JavaScript
6 422 (7.48%) Bash
7 394 (6.98%) PowerShell
8 303 (5.37%) TypeScript
9 198 (3.51%) Bicep
10 116 (2.06%) Go
11 70 (1.24%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.22%) Scala
13 67 (1.19%) Shell Script
14 65 (1.15%) PL/SQL
15 63 (1.12%) T-SQL
16 53 (0.94%) Groovy
17 34 (0.60%) C++
18 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
19 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 22 (0.39%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,794 (31.79%) Security Cleared
2 1,513 (26.81%) SC Cleared
3 344 (6.10%) Degree
4 211 (3.74%) Azure Certification
5 203 (3.60%) BPSS Clearance
6 184 (3.26%) AWS Certification
7 180 (3.19%) DV Cleared
8 134 (2.37%) Computer Science Degree
9 82 (1.45%) CISSP
10 77 (1.36%) Microsoft Certification
11 59 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 59 (1.05%) ISTQB
12 53 (0.94%) Cisco Certification
13 48 (0.85%) Master's Degree
14 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
14 43 (0.76%) PMP
15 39 (0.69%) CISM
16 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
18 24 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 489 (8.67%) QA
2 263 (4.66%) Data Quality
3 188 (3.33%) Accessibility
4 169 (2.99%) GDPR
5 112 (1.98%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 100 (1.77%) NIST
7 73 (1.29%) WCAG
8 67 (1.19%) NCSC
9 45 (0.80%) PCI DSS
10 39 (0.69%) SLA
11 37 (0.66%) PMO
12 29 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 27 (0.48%) GRC
14 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
17 12 (0.21%) PSD2
18 11 (0.19%) ISO 20022
18 11 (0.19%) SEPA
19 9 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 1,098 (19.46%) Docker
2 180 (3.19%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
4 78 (1.38%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.51%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.35%) Squid
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.28%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) IAG
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) NFS
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.089%) Firmware
13 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,633 (28.94%) Terraform
2 1,465 (25.96%) Kubernetes
3 525 (9.30%) Ansible
4 376 (6.66%) Grafana
5 327 (5.79%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.63%) Argo
7 74 (1.31%) Single Sign-On
8 65 (1.15%) Puppet
9 49 (0.87%) Istio
10 38 (0.67%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.58%) Packer
12 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 21 (0.37%) Kibana
15 19 (0.34%) Consul
16 17 (0.30%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 13 (0.23%) HAProxy
18 13 (0.23%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 995 (17.63%) Microsoft
2 310 (5.49%) Oracle
3 279 (4.94%) Databricks
4 262 (4.64%) Google
5 201 (3.56%) ServiceNow
6 190 (3.37%) Splunk
7 183 (3.24%) Salesforce
8 131 (2.32%) SAP
9 125 (2.22%) Dynatrace
10 116 (2.06%) VMware
11 110 (1.95%) Red Hat
12 71 (1.26%) OpenAI
13 58 (1.03%) IBM
13 58 (1.03%) Informatica
14 53 (0.94%) Atlassian
15 49 (0.87%) CyberArk
16 48 (0.85%) Foundry
17 44 (0.78%) MuleSoft
18 43 (0.76%) Cisco
18 43 (0.76%) Okta