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

6 months to
13 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 13 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +2 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,631 3,655 3,841
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.36% 11.10% 9.97%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.26% 12.27% 11.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,925 2,551 2,591
10th Percentile £381 £361 £381
25th Percentile £437 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 118 26 71
10th Percentile £37.25 £38.75 £56.00
25th Percentile £55.69 £52.63 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.22
90th Percentile £92.88 £95.00 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.11 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.65% -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 45,937 29,792 32,994
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.50% 90.51% 85.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,939 18,514 20,418
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
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 3,060 1,790 1,498
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.44 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.50 £43.94 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.10 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.13 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +78.36% -47.67% +7.50%

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 13 September 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 13 September 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 13 September 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 4,794 £525 - 3,021
London 0 2,532 £550 - 1,669
UK excluding London -4 2,411 £500 - 1,616
Work from Home 0 1,609 £525 +2.14% 2,771
North of England -2 791 £500 +5.26% 468
South East -12 454 £525 +5.00% 400
Midlands -5 443 £488 -4.88% 191
Yorkshire -2 391 £500 +3.09% 135
West Midlands -7 347 £500 -4.76% 113
South West +8 317 £550 +4.76% 225
North West -4 309 £524 +14.47% 249
Scotland -7 222 £475 - 134
East of England +8 144 £505 -3.35% 135
North East +16 106 £425 -18.27% 87
East Midlands 0 93 £463 +10.12% 77
Wales -7 46 £500 +33.33% 40
Northern Ireland +21 23 £450 -4.26% 39
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 342 (6.07%) Confluence
2 158 (2.81%) SharePoint
3 128 (2.27%) Apache Airflow
4 123 (2.18%) Apache Spark
5 109 (1.94%) Apache
6 61 (1.08%) SAS
7 42 (0.75%) CMS
8 40 (0.71%) Jupyter
9 29 (0.52%) IIS
10 28 (0.50%) nginx
11 19 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
13 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
13 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
14 11 (0.20%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
15 9 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 67 (1.19%) Microsoft Excel
2 60 (1.07%) Microsoft Project
3 47 (0.83%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Trello
9 5 (0.089%) Notion
9 5 (0.089%) Windchill
10 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.036%) Mingle
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.018%) Sketch
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 78 (1.39%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.18%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS R12
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.089%) Aladdin
8 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Infor LN
10 3 (0.053%) Maximo
10 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,063 (54.40%) Azure
2 2,022 (35.91%) AWS
3 1,754 (31.15%) Azure DevOps
4 986 (17.51%) GitHub
5 738 (13.11%) GCP
6 627 (11.13%) GitHub Actions
7 487 (8.65%) Power Platform
8 467 (8.29%) Serverless
9 309 (5.49%) Amazon S3
10 291 (5.17%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.49%) Entra ID
12 246 (4.37%) Amazon EKS
13 242 (4.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 241 (4.28%) AWS CloudFormation
15 217 (3.85%) Azure AKS
16 205 (3.64%) Azure Monitor
17 197 (3.50%) Azure Data Factory
18 195 (3.46%) Amazon EC2
19 181 (3.21%) Dynamics 365
20 165 (2.93%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.30%) Firewall
2 172 (3.05%) DNS
3 118 (2.10%) VPN
4 112 (1.99%) Network Security
5 67 (1.19%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.92%) SSL
7 49 (0.87%) DHCP
8 47 (0.83%) WAN
9 34 (0.60%) HTTP
10 31 (0.55%) SD-WAN
11 30 (0.53%) BGP
12 28 (0.50%) Internet
12 28 (0.50%) SSH
13 25 (0.44%) Wi-Fi
14 21 (0.37%) OSPF
15 19 (0.34%) SAN
15 19 (0.34%) VLAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 319 (5.67%) Power BI
2 305 (5.42%) PostgreSQL
3 300 (5.33%) SQL Server
4 213 (3.78%) Data Warehouse
5 187 (3.32%) MongoDB
6 185 (3.29%) NoSQL
7 181 (3.21%) Relational Database
8 174 (3.09%) Data Lake
9 144 (2.56%) Amazon RDS
10 124 (2.20%) Metadata
11 105 (1.86%) Azure SQL Database
12 93 (1.65%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.58%) Delta Lake
14 87 (1.55%) MySQL
14 87 (1.55%) Oracle Database
15 80 (1.42%) Redis
16 69 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
17 61 (1.08%) Big Data
17 61 (1.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 54 (0.96%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 817 (14.51%) Git
2 811 (14.40%) Jenkins
3 676 (12.00%) JIRA
4 640 (11.37%) GitLab
5 135 (2.40%) Selenium
6 104 (1.85%) SonarQube
7 97 (1.72%) JUnit
7 97 (1.72%) Maven
8 95 (1.69%) Postman
9 76 (1.35%) Bitbucket
10 74 (1.31%) REST Assured
11 71 (1.26%) Cypress.io
12 68 (1.21%) Gradle
13 65 (1.15%) JMeter
14 62 (1.10%) Cucumber
15 50 (0.89%) Claude Code
16 47 (0.83%) Mockito
17 45 (0.80%) Gatling
18 44 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
19 38 (0.67%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,469 (26.09%) Social Skills
2 1,003 (17.81%) Finance
3 807 (14.33%) Public Sector
4 521 (9.25%) Analytical Skills
5 383 (6.80%) Banking
6 168 (2.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 107 (1.90%) Retail
8 88 (1.56%) Documentation Skills
9 81 (1.44%) Influencing Skills
10 64 (1.14%) Legal
10 64 (1.14%) Organisational Skills
11 54 (0.96%) Marketing
12 53 (0.94%) Military
13 52 (0.92%) Investment Banking
14 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
15 48 (0.85%) Telecoms
16 45 (0.80%) Front Office
16 45 (0.80%) Law
17 43 (0.76%) Manufacturing
18 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,134 (20.14%) DevOps Engineer
2 921 (16.36%) Developer
3 857 (15.22%) Senior
4 633 (11.24%) Architect
5 541 (9.61%) Lead
6 350 (6.22%) Azure Engineer
7 311 (5.52%) Data Engineer
8 270 (4.79%) Analyst
9 259 (4.60%) AWS Engineer
10 236 (4.19%) Platform Engineer
11 211 (3.75%) Cloud Engineer
12 208 (3.69%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 200 (3.55%) Java Developer
14 199 (3.53%) Senior DevOps
15 186 (3.30%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 179 (3.18%) Solutions Architect
17 178 (3.16%) AWS DevOps
18 166 (2.95%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 163 (2.89%) Senior Developer
20 143 (2.54%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,680 (29.83%) Terraform
2 610 (10.83%) REST
3 474 (8.42%) .NET
4 388 (6.89%) Kafka
5 356 (6.32%) RESTful
6 308 (5.47%) Spring
7 301 (5.35%) Spring Boot
8 291 (5.17%) React
9 200 (3.55%) Node.js
10 185 (3.29%) JSON
11 172 (3.05%) OAuth
12 166 (2.95%) Playwright
13 158 (2.81%) PySpark
14 142 (2.52%) HTML
15 130 (2.31%) CSS
16 125 (2.22%) .NET Framework
16 125 (2.22%) SOAP
17 121 (2.15%) AngularJS
17 121 (2.15%) OAuth2
18 112 (1.99%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,025 (18.20%) Cloud Native
2 438 (7.78%) Product Ownership
3 269 (4.78%) Distributed Systems
4 205 (3.64%) Enterprise Software
5 188 (3.34%) Onboarding
6 151 (2.68%) Hybrid Cloud
7 142 (2.52%) Legacy Systems
8 96 (1.70%) AI Agents
9 88 (1.56%) Management Information System
10 86 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
11 78 (1.39%) Public Cloud
12 77 (1.37%) Replication
12 77 (1.37%) Self-Motivation
13 73 (1.30%) Data Structures
14 71 (1.26%) Security Posture
15 70 (1.24%) Data Centre
16 63 (1.12%) Virtual Team
17 58 (1.03%) Enterprise Cloud
18 55 (0.98%) PKI
19 53 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 548 (9.73%) Linux
2 310 (5.51%) Windows
3 118 (2.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 111 (1.97%) Unix
5 93 (1.65%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) VMS
7 34 (0.60%) Ubuntu
8 32 (0.57%) Apple iOS
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
11 10 (0.18%) zOS
12 9 (0.16%) Solaris
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) AIX
15 5 (0.089%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,407 (60.50%) CI/CD
2 2,297 (40.79%) Agile
3 1,657 (29.43%) Infrastructure as Code
4 963 (17.10%) Continuous Improvement
5 950 (16.87%) Containerisation
6 921 (16.36%) Stakeholder Management
7 897 (15.93%) Problem-Solving
8 891 (15.82%) Test Automation
9 837 (14.86%) AI
10 834 (14.81%) Microservices
11 758 (13.46%) Observability
11 758 (13.46%) Platform Engineering
12 730 (12.96%) Software Engineering
13 687 (12.20%) Scrum
14 666 (11.83%) Migration
15 603 (10.71%) Technical Leadership
16 580 (10.30%) Analytics
17 532 (9.45%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 490 (8.70%) Roadmaps
19 482 (8.56%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,619 (28.75%) Python
2 1,006 (17.87%) SQL
3 827 (14.69%) Java
4 499 (8.86%) Bash
5 498 (8.84%) PowerShell
6 486 (8.63%) C#
7 459 (8.15%) JavaScript
8 309 (5.49%) TypeScript
9 256 (4.55%) Bicep
10 110 (1.95%) Go
11 78 (1.39%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.23%) T-SQL
13 67 (1.19%) Apex Code
14 65 (1.15%) Scala
15 64 (1.14%) Groovy
16 60 (1.07%) PL/SQL
17 38 (0.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 35 (0.62%) Perl
19 30 (0.53%) C++
20 24 (0.43%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,813 (32.20%) Security Cleared
2 1,518 (26.96%) SC Cleared
3 346 (6.14%) Degree
4 241 (4.28%) Azure Certification
5 238 (4.23%) BPSS Clearance
6 224 (3.98%) DV Cleared
7 186 (3.30%) AWS Certification
8 138 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
9 110 (1.95%) Microsoft Certification
10 78 (1.39%) CISSP
11 57 (1.01%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.91%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.89%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 40 (0.71%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.69%) Master's Degree
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 24 (0.43%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 24 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 551 (9.79%) QA
2 289 (5.13%) Data Quality
3 211 (3.75%) Accessibility
4 132 (2.34%) GDPR
5 93 (1.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 86 (1.53%) WCAG
7 81 (1.44%) NIST
8 54 (0.96%) NCSC
9 49 (0.87%) PMO
10 37 (0.66%) SLA
11 30 (0.53%) PCI DSS
12 29 (0.52%) GRC
13 24 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 19 (0.34%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
16 12 (0.21%) SEPA
17 11 (0.20%) HIPAA
18 10 (0.18%) HL7
19 9 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,166 (20.71%) Docker
2 171 (3.04%) Active Directory
3 89 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.42%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.52%) vSphere
6 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
6 25 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
7 19 (0.34%) VMware NSX
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.20%) IAG
10 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.16%) Postfix
12 7 (0.12%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
14 5 (0.089%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 1,543 (27.40%) Kubernetes
2 542 (9.63%) Ansible
3 376 (6.68%) Grafana
4 318 (5.65%) Prometheus
5 81 (1.44%) Argo
6 64 (1.14%) Puppet
7 53 (0.94%) Single Sign-On
8 52 (0.92%) Progress Chef
9 46 (0.82%) Microsoft Intune
10 36 (0.64%) Packer
11 32 (0.57%) Istio
12 26 (0.46%) Kibana
13 22 (0.39%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.34%) Oracle RMAN
15 19 (0.34%) SCCM
16 18 (0.32%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,101 (19.55%) Microsoft
2 310 (5.51%) Oracle
3 300 (5.33%) Databricks
4 281 (4.99%) Google
5 208 (3.69%) ServiceNow
6 183 (3.25%) Salesforce
6 183 (3.25%) Splunk
7 147 (2.61%) Dynatrace
8 132 (2.34%) VMware
9 112 (1.99%) SAP
10 108 (1.92%) Red Hat
11 66 (1.17%) IBM
12 65 (1.15%) OpenAI
13 62 (1.10%) MuleSoft
14 58 (1.03%) Informatica
15 52 (0.92%) Foundry
16 46 (0.82%) Cisco
17 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
18 41 (0.73%) Atlassian
19 36 (0.64%) Okta