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

6 months to
6 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,650 3,571 3,890
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.60% 10.85% 9.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.48% 11.99% 11.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,909 2,548 2,649
10th Percentile £385 £360 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £490 £550
% change year-on-year +2.04% -10.91% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 26 88
10th Percentile £35.45 £32.63 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.25 £51.56 £64.15
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £86.37 £74.11
90th Percentile £87.40 £93.75 £85.37
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -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 45,262 29,771 33,475
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.91% 90.46% 85.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,917 18,660 21,435
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
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 2,788 1,660 1,878
10th Percentile £14.46 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.33 £17.30 £18.15
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.63% -5.12%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £64.13
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.30 £40.94
% change year-on-year +88.67% -43.09% +3.38%

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 6 August 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 6 August 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 6 August 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 +2 4,839 £525 - 2,477
London +1 2,504 £550 - 1,334
UK excluding London +2 2,468 £500 +2.04% 1,369
Work from Home +1 1,613 £525 +2.44% 1,165
North of England 0 837 £500 +5.26% 399
South East -9 469 £525 +5.00% 370
Midlands -1 466 £490 -2.00% 192
Yorkshire +2 412 £500 +3.36% 121
West Midlands -2 383 £492 -4.47% 128
North West -4 333 £525 +12.90% 203
South West +11 322 £525 +0.96% 165
Scotland +1 202 £488 -2.50% 84
East of England +17 138 £505 +1.00% 79
North East +13 109 £431 -17.46% 77
East Midlands +1 78 £488 +8.33% 64
Wales -5 44 £460 +43.49% 44
Northern Ireland +19 22 £475 +7.95% 40
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
1 346 (6.12%) Confluence
2 135 (2.39%) SharePoint
3 131 (2.32%) Apache Spark
4 121 (2.14%) Apache Airflow
5 106 (1.88%) Apache
6 87 (1.54%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 37 (0.65%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
10 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
10 25 (0.44%) nginx
11 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
17 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 64 (1.13%) Microsoft Project
2 59 (1.04%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
4 37 (0.65%) MS Visio
5 27 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 11 (0.19%) Chatbot
7 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
8 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
9 7 (0.12%) Trello
10 5 (0.088%) Notion
11 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 68 (1.20%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 5 (0.088%) Maximo
7 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.088%) SAP ERP
8 4 (0.071%) Endur
9 3 (0.053%) Findur
9 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,059 (54.14%) Azure
2 1,993 (35.27%) AWS
3 1,743 (30.85%) Azure DevOps
4 964 (17.06%) GitHub
5 724 (12.81%) GCP
6 594 (10.51%) GitHub Actions
7 457 (8.09%) Power Platform
8 445 (7.88%) Serverless
9 301 (5.33%) Amazon S3
10 269 (4.76%) AWS Lambda
11 261 (4.62%) Entra ID
12 249 (4.41%) AWS CloudFormation
13 233 (4.12%) Amazon EKS
14 226 (4.00%) Azure AKS
15 210 (3.72%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 199 (3.52%) Azure Monitor
17 192 (3.40%) Azure Data Factory
18 181 (3.20%) Amazon EC2
19 159 (2.81%) Dynamics 365
20 150 (2.65%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 244 (4.32%) Firewall
2 163 (2.88%) DNS
3 122 (2.16%) VPN
4 112 (1.98%) Network Security
5 63 (1.12%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 44 (0.78%) SSL
8 40 (0.71%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.58%) BGP
11 32 (0.57%) HTTP
11 32 (0.57%) Internet
12 28 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.44%) OSPF
14 21 (0.37%) SAN
14 21 (0.37%) SSH
15 20 (0.35%) VLAN
16 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 312 (5.52%) Power BI
2 291 (5.15%) SQL Server
3 278 (4.92%) PostgreSQL
4 196 (3.47%) Data Warehouse
5 194 (3.43%) NoSQL
6 182 (3.22%) Relational Database
7 178 (3.15%) MongoDB
8 162 (2.87%) Data Lake
9 117 (2.07%) Amazon RDS
10 115 (2.04%) Metadata
11 109 (1.93%) Azure SQL Database
12 101 (1.79%) DynamoDB
13 90 (1.59%) Delta Lake
14 81 (1.43%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.26%) Redis
16 70 (1.24%) MySQL
17 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
18 66 (1.17%) Big Data
19 62 (1.10%) Amazon Athena
20 54 (0.96%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 812 (14.37%) Jenkins
2 781 (13.82%) Git
3 694 (12.28%) JIRA
4 586 (10.37%) GitLab
5 130 (2.30%) Selenium
6 106 (1.88%) SonarQube
7 104 (1.84%) Postman
8 94 (1.66%) JUnit
9 85 (1.50%) Maven
10 84 (1.49%) Bitbucket
11 68 (1.20%) REST Assured
12 66 (1.17%) Cypress.io
13 65 (1.15%) JMeter
14 58 (1.03%) Cucumber
15 52 (0.92%) Gradle
16 48 (0.85%) Gatling
17 47 (0.83%) Mockito
18 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
19 38 (0.67%) Visual Studio
20 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
General
1 1,411 (24.97%) Social Skills
2 1,006 (17.81%) Finance
3 833 (14.74%) Public Sector
4 497 (8.80%) Analytical Skills
5 368 (6.51%) Banking
6 143 (2.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 105 (1.86%) Retail
8 99 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
10 69 (1.22%) Organisational Skills
11 67 (1.19%) Legal
12 55 (0.97%) Marketing
13 49 (0.87%) Investment Banking
14 47 (0.83%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.81%) Military
16 44 (0.78%) Aerospace
16 44 (0.78%) Law
17 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
18 41 (0.73%) Front Office
18 41 (0.73%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,097 (19.42%) DevOps Engineer
2 940 (16.64%) Developer
3 815 (14.42%) Senior
4 627 (11.10%) Architect
5 541 (9.58%) Lead
6 344 (6.09%) Azure Engineer
7 328 (5.81%) Data Engineer
8 286 (5.06%) Analyst
9 274 (4.85%) AWS Engineer
10 230 (4.07%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.70%) Cloud Engineer
12 200 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
13 198 (3.50%) Java Developer
14 191 (3.38%) AWS DevOps
15 188 (3.33%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 184 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 182 (3.22%) Solutions Architect
18 178 (3.15%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 150 (2.65%) Senior Developer
19 150 (2.65%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 577 (10.21%) REST
2 486 (8.60%) .NET
3 340 (6.02%) RESTful
4 332 (5.88%) Kafka
5 304 (5.38%) Spring
6 288 (5.10%) React
7 284 (5.03%) Spring Boot
8 222 (3.93%) Node.js
9 174 (3.08%) JSON
10 170 (3.01%) PySpark
11 169 (2.99%) Playwright
12 168 (2.97%) OAuth
13 153 (2.71%) AngularJS
14 145 (2.57%) SOAP
15 139 (2.46%) .NET Framework
16 130 (2.30%) HTML
17 118 (2.09%) OAuth2
18 111 (1.96%) Middleware
19 110 (1.95%) YAML
20 108 (1.91%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,013 (17.93%) Cloud Native
2 403 (7.13%) Product Ownership
3 272 (4.81%) Distributed Systems
4 169 (2.99%) Onboarding
5 168 (2.97%) Enterprise Software
6 157 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
7 140 (2.48%) Hybrid Cloud
8 92 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
9 86 (1.52%) Public Cloud
10 83 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.36%) Management Information System
12 74 (1.31%) Data Structures
13 73 (1.29%) Data Centre
14 68 (1.20%) Security Posture
15 67 (1.19%) AI Agents
16 63 (1.12%) Replication
17 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
18 55 (0.97%) Mobile App
18 55 (0.97%) Virtual Team
19 47 (0.83%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 497 (8.80%) Linux
2 305 (5.40%) Windows
3 104 (1.84%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 85 (1.50%) Unix
5 80 (1.42%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.58%) VMS
7 29 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.50%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
12 8 (0.14%) zOS
13 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
13 7 (0.12%) CentOS
13 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,325 (58.85%) CI/CD
2 2,267 (40.12%) Agile
3 1,546 (27.36%) Infrastructure as Code
4 934 (16.53%) Containerisation
5 914 (16.18%) Continuous Improvement
6 874 (15.47%) Problem-Solving
7 866 (15.33%) Test Automation
8 818 (14.48%) Microservices
9 782 (13.84%) Stakeholder Management
10 776 (13.73%) AI
11 714 (12.64%) Observability
12 708 (12.53%) Scrum
13 684 (12.11%) Platform Engineering
14 676 (11.96%) Migration
15 671 (11.88%) Software Engineering
16 615 (10.88%) Analytics
17 529 (9.36%) Technical Leadership
18 524 (9.27%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 505 (8.94%) Data Modelling
20 466 (8.25%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,588 (28.11%) Python
2 1,037 (18.35%) SQL
3 789 (13.96%) Java
4 508 (8.99%) C#
5 462 (8.18%) Bash
6 453 (8.02%) JavaScript
7 439 (7.77%) PowerShell
8 315 (5.58%) TypeScript
9 227 (4.02%) Bicep
10 105 (1.86%) Go
11 71 (1.26%) Apex Code
12 70 (1.24%) Shell Script
12 70 (1.24%) T-SQL
13 65 (1.15%) PL/SQL
14 58 (1.03%) Scala
15 56 (0.99%) Groovy
16 33 (0.58%) C++
17 29 (0.51%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 27 (0.48%) C
18 27 (0.48%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,800 (31.86%) Security Cleared
2 1,517 (26.85%) SC Cleared
3 329 (5.82%) Degree
4 228 (4.04%) Azure Certification
5 219 (3.88%) BPSS Clearance
6 196 (3.47%) AWS Certification
7 195 (3.45%) DV Cleared
8 126 (2.23%) Computer Science Degree
9 84 (1.49%) Microsoft Certification
10 82 (1.45%) CISSP
11 61 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 60 (1.06%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 56 (0.99%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.81%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.65%) Master's Degree
17 33 (0.58%) CISM
18 31 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 513 (9.08%) QA
2 287 (5.08%) Data Quality
3 195 (3.45%) Accessibility
4 154 (2.73%) GDPR
5 95 (1.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.40%) WCAG
7 76 (1.35%) NIST
8 55 (0.97%) NCSC
9 47 (0.83%) PMO
10 39 (0.69%) PCI DSS
11 34 (0.60%) SLA
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
12 28 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
13 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
14 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
15 9 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
15 9 (0.16%) ISO 20022
15 9 (0.16%) PSD2
15 9 (0.16%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,118 (19.79%) Docker
2 182 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
4 81 (1.43%) VMware Infrastructure
5 26 (0.46%) vSphere
6 23 (0.41%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (0.27%) Squid
10 14 (0.25%) Oracle RAC
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
10 14 (0.25%) Virtual Desktop
11 8 (0.14%) IAG
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) NFS
12 6 (0.11%) zsh
13 5 (0.088%) Firmware
13 5 (0.088%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,627 (28.80%) Terraform
2 1,453 (25.72%) Kubernetes
3 533 (9.43%) Ansible
4 373 (6.60%) Grafana
5 314 (5.56%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.50%) Argo
7 63 (1.12%) Puppet
8 61 (1.08%) Single Sign-On
9 46 (0.81%) Progress Chef
10 44 (0.78%) Istio
11 35 (0.62%) Microsoft Intune
12 32 (0.57%) Packer
13 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
14 18 (0.32%) Kibana
14 18 (0.32%) SCCM
15 17 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
16 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
17 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
18 13 (0.23%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 1,031 (18.25%) Microsoft
2 311 (5.50%) Oracle
3 276 (4.88%) Databricks
4 274 (4.85%) Google
5 206 (3.65%) ServiceNow
6 189 (3.35%) Salesforce
7 177 (3.13%) Splunk
8 143 (2.53%) Dynatrace
9 126 (2.23%) SAP
10 115 (2.04%) VMware
11 107 (1.89%) Red Hat
12 62 (1.10%) IBM
13 61 (1.08%) Informatica
14 60 (1.06%) OpenAI
15 56 (0.99%) Atlassian
16 54 (0.96%) MuleSoft
17 49 (0.87%) Cisco
18 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
19 41 (0.73%) Foundry
19 41 (0.73%) Okta