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

6 months to
10 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,655 3,597 3,828
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.60% 10.85% 9.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.49% 11.99% 11.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,912 2,563 2,616
10th Percentile £385 £360 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.32% -5.79% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £495 £550
% change year-on-year +1.01% -10.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 122 26 86
10th Percentile £37.24 £32.63 £58.75
25th Percentile £56.38 £51.56 £65.00
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 £74.33
90th Percentile £87.70 £93.75 £85.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.28%

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 45,268 29,990 33,185
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.86% 90.46% 85.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,853 18,764 21,291
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% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £729 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,826 1,696 1,837
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.05
25th Percentile £18.89 £17.30 £18.35
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -38.57% -3.67%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.63 £42.50
% change year-on-year +94.26% -46.75% +13.33%

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 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 10 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 10 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 4,846 £525 - 2,472
London +1 2,524 £550 - 1,325
UK excluding London 0 2,445 £500 +1.01% 1,373
Work from Home +1 1,619 £525 +2.44% 1,136
North of England 0 831 £500 +5.26% 394
South East -10 463 £525 +5.00% 373
Midlands 0 462 £488 -2.50% 194
Yorkshire +1 410 £500 +3.36% 116
West Midlands -2 380 £490 -4.85% 129
North West -3 327 £525 +10.53% 201
South West +9 319 £525 +0.48% 173
Scotland -2 192 £495 -0.60% 89
East of England +19 140 £505 +1.00% 79
North East +13 111 £425 -19.05% 79
East Midlands +1 77 £488 +7.26% 65
Wales -6 46 £500 +41.61% 42
Northern Ireland +20 22 £475 +7.95% 35
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
1 341 (6.03%) Confluence
2 136 (2.40%) SharePoint
3 133 (2.35%) Apache Spark
4 125 (2.21%) Apache Airflow
5 110 (1.95%) Apache
6 87 (1.54%) SAS
7 43 (0.76%) CMS
8 37 (0.65%) IIS
9 36 (0.64%) 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%) Mendix
17 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
Applications
1 63 (1.11%) Microsoft Project
2 57 (1.01%) 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 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Trello
9 5 (0.088%) Notion
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 70 (1.24%) 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%) Shopify
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,068 (54.25%) Azure
2 1,997 (35.31%) AWS
3 1,749 (30.93%) Azure DevOps
4 973 (17.21%) GitHub
5 722 (12.77%) GCP
6 599 (10.59%) GitHub Actions
7 465 (8.22%) Power Platform
8 443 (7.83%) Serverless
9 296 (5.23%) Amazon S3
10 266 (4.70%) AWS Lambda
11 265 (4.69%) Entra ID
12 247 (4.37%) AWS CloudFormation
13 236 (4.17%) Amazon EKS
14 228 (4.03%) Azure AKS
15 209 (3.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 201 (3.55%) Azure Monitor
17 192 (3.40%) Azure Data Factory
18 178 (3.15%) Amazon EC2
19 162 (2.86%) Dynamics 365
20 153 (2.71%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 247 (4.37%) Firewall
2 165 (2.92%) DNS
3 125 (2.21%) VPN
4 113 (2.00%) Network Security
5 64 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 44 (0.78%) SSL
8 43 (0.76%) 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
1 315 (5.57%) Power BI
2 293 (5.18%) SQL Server
3 274 (4.85%) PostgreSQL
4 201 (3.55%) Data Warehouse
5 189 (3.34%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.20%) Relational Database
7 173 (3.06%) MongoDB
8 164 (2.90%) Data Lake
9 117 (2.07%) Amazon RDS
10 115 (2.03%) Metadata
11 112 (1.98%) Azure SQL Database
12 92 (1.63%) DynamoDB
13 91 (1.61%) Delta Lake
14 82 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.26%) Amazon Redshift
16 70 (1.24%) Redis
17 68 (1.20%) Big Data
18 66 (1.17%) MySQL
19 58 (1.03%) Amazon Athena
20 55 (0.97%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 811 (14.34%) Jenkins
2 788 (13.93%) Git
3 690 (12.20%) JIRA
4 595 (10.52%) GitLab
5 132 (2.33%) Selenium
6 103 (1.82%) Postman
6 103 (1.82%) SonarQube
7 90 (1.59%) JUnit
8 85 (1.50%) Bitbucket
9 84 (1.49%) Maven
10 67 (1.18%) JMeter
10 67 (1.18%) REST Assured
11 66 (1.17%) Cypress.io
12 58 (1.03%) Cucumber
13 55 (0.97%) Gradle
14 50 (0.88%) Gatling
15 44 (0.78%) LoadRunner
15 44 (0.78%) Mockito
16 40 (0.71%) Claude Code
16 40 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,420 (25.11%) Social Skills
2 1,012 (17.90%) Finance
3 832 (14.71%) Public Sector
4 502 (8.88%) Analytical Skills
5 378 (6.68%) Banking
6 148 (2.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 102 (1.80%) Retail
8 97 (1.72%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.26%) Influencing Skills
10 68 (1.20%) Organisational Skills
11 67 (1.18%) Legal
12 54 (0.95%) Marketing
13 52 (0.92%) Investment Banking
14 48 (0.85%) Telecoms
15 47 (0.83%) Military
16 45 (0.80%) Aerospace
17 44 (0.78%) Front Office
18 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
18 43 (0.76%) Law
19 41 (0.73%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,089 (19.26%) DevOps Engineer
2 938 (16.59%) Developer
3 829 (14.66%) Senior
4 630 (11.14%) Architect
5 545 (9.64%) Lead
6 342 (6.05%) Azure Engineer
7 328 (5.80%) Data Engineer
8 283 (5.00%) Analyst
9 271 (4.79%) AWS Engineer
10 231 (4.08%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.71%) Cloud Engineer
12 204 (3.61%) Senior DevOps
13 193 (3.41%) Java Developer
14 189 (3.34%) AWS DevOps
15 188 (3.32%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 185 (3.27%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 180 (3.18%) Solutions Architect
18 176 (3.11%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 151 (2.67%) Senior Developer
20 150 (2.65%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 574 (10.15%) REST
2 494 (8.74%) .NET
3 342 (6.05%) Kafka
4 339 (5.99%) RESTful
5 299 (5.29%) Spring
6 289 (5.11%) React
7 279 (4.93%) Spring Boot
8 219 (3.87%) Node.js
9 176 (3.11%) JSON
10 168 (2.97%) OAuth
10 168 (2.97%) Playwright
11 167 (2.95%) PySpark
12 152 (2.69%) AngularJS
13 141 (2.49%) SOAP
14 140 (2.48%) .NET Framework
15 132 (2.33%) HTML
16 119 (2.10%) OAuth2
17 111 (1.96%) YAML
18 110 (1.95%) Middleware
19 109 (1.93%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,017 (17.98%) Cloud Native
2 405 (7.16%) Product Ownership
3 269 (4.76%) Distributed Systems
4 172 (3.04%) Enterprise Software
5 171 (3.02%) Onboarding
6 155 (2.74%) Legacy Systems
7 142 (2.51%) Hybrid Cloud
8 90 (1.59%) Data Protection Act
9 84 (1.49%) Self-Motivation
10 83 (1.47%) Public Cloud
11 77 (1.36%) Management Information System
12 72 (1.27%) Data Structures
13 71 (1.26%) AI Agents
13 71 (1.26%) Data Centre
14 68 (1.20%) Security Posture
15 62 (1.10%) Replication
16 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
17 54 (0.95%) Virtual Team
18 52 (0.92%) Mobile App
19 48 (0.85%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 505 (8.93%) Linux
2 307 (5.43%) Windows
3 108 (1.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 86 (1.52%) Unix
5 84 (1.49%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.60%) VMS
7 29 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 28 (0.50%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
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 3,336 (58.99%) CI/CD
2 2,273 (40.19%) Agile
3 1,557 (27.53%) Infrastructure as Code
4 933 (16.50%) Containerisation
5 924 (16.34%) Continuous Improvement
6 879 (15.54%) Test Automation
7 875 (15.47%) Problem-Solving
8 824 (14.57%) Microservices
9 788 (13.93%) AI
9 788 (13.93%) Stakeholder Management
10 716 (12.66%) Observability
11 707 (12.50%) Scrum
12 691 (12.22%) Platform Engineering
13 684 (12.10%) Software Engineering
14 676 (11.95%) Migration
15 614 (10.86%) Analytics
16 537 (9.50%) Technical Leadership
17 533 (9.43%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 507 (8.97%) Data Modelling
19 468 (8.28%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,607 (28.42%) Python
2 1,044 (18.46%) SQL
3 795 (14.06%) Java
4 518 (9.16%) C#
5 467 (8.26%) Bash
6 464 (8.21%) JavaScript
7 449 (7.94%) PowerShell
8 312 (5.52%) TypeScript
9 224 (3.96%) Bicep
10 102 (1.80%) Go
11 71 (1.26%) Shell Script
12 70 (1.24%) Apex Code
13 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
14 65 (1.15%) PL/SQL
15 62 (1.10%) Scala
16 55 (0.97%) Groovy
17 33 (0.58%) C++
18 31 (0.55%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 27 (0.48%) C
20 25 (0.44%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,806 (31.94%) Security Cleared
2 1,522 (26.91%) SC Cleared
3 330 (5.84%) Degree
4 225 (3.98%) Azure Certification
5 220 (3.89%) BPSS Clearance
6 192 (3.40%) AWS Certification
7 191 (3.38%) DV Cleared
8 127 (2.25%) Computer Science Degree
9 85 (1.50%) Microsoft Certification
10 82 (1.45%) CISSP
11 62 (1.10%) ISTQB
12 59 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 56 (0.99%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.81%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 38 (0.67%) 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
1 512 (9.05%) QA
2 289 (5.11%) Data Quality
3 197 (3.48%) Accessibility
4 153 (2.71%) GDPR
5 95 (1.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 79 (1.40%) WCAG
7 77 (1.36%) NIST
8 55 (0.97%) NCSC
9 46 (0.81%) PMO
10 38 (0.67%) PCI DSS
11 36 (0.64%) SLA
12 28 (0.50%) GRC
12 28 (0.50%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 12 (0.21%) ISO 20022
14 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
15 10 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
15 10 (0.18%) Disclosure Scotland
16 9 (0.16%) PSD2
16 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,128 (19.95%) Docker
2 184 (3.25%) Active Directory
3 85 (1.50%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
5 25 (0.44%) vSphere
6 19 (0.34%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
8 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 12 (0.21%) Postfix
12 8 (0.14%) IAG
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 5 (0.088%) Firmware
15 5 (0.088%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,634 (28.89%) Terraform
2 1,468 (25.96%) Kubernetes
3 530 (9.37%) Ansible
4 366 (6.47%) Grafana
5 313 (5.53%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.47%) Argo
7 64 (1.13%) Puppet
8 60 (1.06%) Single Sign-On
9 46 (0.81%) Progress Chef
10 45 (0.80%) Istio
11 35 (0.62%) Microsoft Intune
12 33 (0.58%) Packer
13 19 (0.34%) Kibana
13 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
14 18 (0.32%) Kustomize
14 18 (0.32%) SCCM
15 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
15 16 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
16 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
17 13 (0.23%) Consul
Vendors
1 1,042 (18.43%) Microsoft
2 312 (5.52%) Oracle
3 275 (4.86%) Databricks
4 270 (4.77%) Google
5 205 (3.63%) ServiceNow
6 189 (3.34%) Salesforce
7 175 (3.09%) Splunk
8 143 (2.53%) Dynatrace
9 125 (2.21%) SAP
10 117 (2.07%) VMware
11 107 (1.89%) Red Hat
12 65 (1.15%) IBM
13 61 (1.08%) Informatica
13 61 (1.08%) OpenAI
14 55 (0.97%) MuleSoft
15 54 (0.95%) Atlassian
16 49 (0.87%) Cisco
17 44 (0.78%) Foundry
18 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
18 43 (0.76%) Okta