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

6 months to
29 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,573 3,479 3,932
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.61% 10.60% 9.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.49% 11.72% 11.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,873 2,485 2,696
10th Percentile £385 £360 £385
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 £623 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £538
% change year-on-year +2.56% -9.30% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 26 94
10th Percentile £35.00 £32.63 £56.33
25th Percentile £56.50 £51.56 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.28%
75th Percentile £77.50 £86.37 £74.86
90th Percentile £88.00 £90.63 £85.65
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 44,620 29,684 34,056
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.91% 90.46% 85.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,627 18,648 21,888
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £734 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,682 1,621 1,980
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £13.69
25th Percentile £19.73 £17.33 £17.74
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.35 £68.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.57 £40.33
% change year-on-year +86.55% -41.56% -

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 +4 4,767 £525 - 1,696
London +2 2,454 £550 - 816
UK excluding London +5 2,442 £500 +2.56% 1,078
Work from Home 0 1,580 £525 +2.44% 844
North of England +3 848 £500 +4.17% 332
Midlands +2 457 £491 +3.37% 157
South East -10 456 £525 +5.00% 286
Yorkshire +2 428 £500 +2.04% 87
West Midlands -1 372 £495 -1.04% 114
North West -2 333 £521 +9.70% 172
South West +14 319 £525 - 140
Scotland +1 194 £493 -0.71% 53
East of England +15 137 £509 +1.70% 65
North East +8 104 £425 -18.66% 75
East Midlands +2 80 £488 +7.26% 43
Wales -5 45 £480 +49.73% 28
Northern Ireland +16 22 £475 +7.95% 28
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 (6.12%) Confluence
2 137 (2.46%) SharePoint
3 129 (2.31%) Apache Spark
4 111 (1.99%) Apache Airflow
5 103 (1.85%) Apache
6 83 (1.49%) SAS
7 44 (0.79%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.63%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 27 (0.48%) nginx
11 16 (0.29%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.25%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 12 (0.22%) Anypoint
15 11 (0.20%) OpenStack
15 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
17 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.11%) Microsoft Project
2 58 (1.04%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
4 35 (0.63%) MS Visio
5 26 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
10 4 (0.072%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 65 (1.17%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.70%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.090%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.090%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.090%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.072%) Endur
8 4 (0.072%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.054%) Findur
9 3 (0.054%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.054%) Shopify
9 3 (0.054%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,001 (53.85%) Azure
2 1,982 (35.56%) AWS
3 1,692 (30.36%) Azure DevOps
4 933 (16.74%) GitHub
5 715 (12.83%) GCP
6 577 (10.35%) GitHub Actions
7 452 (8.11%) Power Platform
8 443 (7.95%) Serverless
9 297 (5.33%) Amazon S3
10 265 (4.76%) AWS Lambda
11 252 (4.52%) Entra ID
12 249 (4.47%) AWS CloudFormation
13 228 (4.09%) Amazon EKS
14 226 (4.06%) Azure AKS
15 196 (3.52%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 194 (3.48%) Azure Monitor
17 178 (3.19%) Azure Data Factory
18 177 (3.18%) Amazon EC2
19 156 (2.80%) Dynamics 365
20 149 (2.67%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 239 (4.29%) Firewall
2 151 (2.71%) DNS
3 121 (2.17%) VPN
4 113 (2.03%) Network Security
5 56 (1.00%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.88%) WAN
7 42 (0.75%) SSL
8 36 (0.65%) SD-WAN
9 35 (0.63%) DHCP
10 33 (0.59%) BGP
11 31 (0.56%) Internet
12 27 (0.48%) HTTP
12 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.45%) OSPF
14 20 (0.36%) SAN
15 18 (0.32%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
16 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.31%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 306 (5.49%) Power BI
2 290 (5.20%) SQL Server
3 277 (4.97%) PostgreSQL
4 189 (3.39%) NoSQL
5 180 (3.23%) Relational Database
6 178 (3.19%) Data Warehouse
7 174 (3.12%) MongoDB
8 154 (2.76%) Data Lake
9 112 (2.01%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.88%) Metadata
11 103 (1.85%) Azure SQL Database
12 100 (1.79%) DynamoDB
13 84 (1.51%) Delta Lake
14 81 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 67 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
15 67 (1.20%) Redis
16 66 (1.18%) MySQL
17 65 (1.17%) Big Data
18 64 (1.15%) Amazon Athena
19 54 (0.97%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 802 (14.39%) Jenkins
2 746 (13.39%) Git
3 681 (12.22%) JIRA
4 569 (10.21%) GitLab
5 129 (2.31%) Selenium
6 103 (1.85%) Postman
7 98 (1.76%) JUnit
8 97 (1.74%) SonarQube
9 83 (1.49%) Bitbucket
10 81 (1.45%) Maven
11 70 (1.26%) REST Assured
12 64 (1.15%) JMeter
13 61 (1.09%) Cypress.io
14 60 (1.08%) Cucumber
15 51 (0.92%) Gradle
16 48 (0.86%) Mockito
17 46 (0.83%) Gatling
18 39 (0.70%) LoadRunner
19 38 (0.68%) Visual Studio
20 36 (0.65%) Artifactory
General
1 1,368 (24.55%) Social Skills
2 991 (17.78%) Finance
3 809 (14.52%) Public Sector
4 465 (8.34%) Analytical Skills
5 357 (6.41%) Banking
6 133 (2.39%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 101 (1.81%) Documentation Skills
8 97 (1.74%) Retail
9 67 (1.20%) Influencing Skills
10 66 (1.18%) Legal
10 66 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
11 53 (0.95%) Marketing
12 48 (0.86%) Military
13 45 (0.81%) Investment Banking
13 45 (0.81%) Law
14 44 (0.79%) Telecoms
15 40 (0.72%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.70%) Front Office
16 39 (0.70%) Manufacturing
17 37 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,096 (19.67%) DevOps Engineer
2 928 (16.65%) Developer
3 795 (14.27%) Senior
4 617 (11.07%) Architect
5 530 (9.51%) Lead
6 333 (5.98%) Azure Engineer
7 317 (5.69%) Data Engineer
8 289 (5.19%) Analyst
9 274 (4.92%) AWS Engineer
10 236 (4.23%) Platform Engineer
11 208 (3.73%) Cloud Engineer
12 201 (3.61%) Java Developer
13 197 (3.53%) Senior DevOps
14 190 (3.41%) AWS DevOps
15 181 (3.25%) Senior DevOps Engineer
15 181 (3.25%) Solutions Architect
16 180 (3.23%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 177 (3.18%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 150 (2.69%) Senior Developer
19 149 (2.67%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 556 (9.98%) REST
2 487 (8.74%) .NET
3 329 (5.90%) RESTful
4 319 (5.72%) Kafka
5 307 (5.51%) Spring
6 291 (5.22%) React
7 287 (5.15%) Spring Boot
8 216 (3.88%) Node.js
9 167 (3.00%) JSON
9 167 (3.00%) PySpark
10 165 (2.96%) OAuth
11 157 (2.82%) Playwright
12 156 (2.80%) AngularJS
13 146 (2.62%) SOAP
14 139 (2.49%) .NET Framework
15 126 (2.26%) HTML
16 115 (2.06%) OAuth2
17 109 (1.96%) Middleware
18 106 (1.90%) YAML
19 104 (1.87%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 991 (17.78%) Cloud Native
2 395 (7.09%) Product Ownership
3 271 (4.86%) Distributed Systems
4 165 (2.96%) Onboarding
5 160 (2.87%) Enterprise Software
6 151 (2.71%) Legacy Systems
7 132 (2.37%) Hybrid Cloud
8 89 (1.60%) Public Cloud
9 88 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
10 86 (1.54%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.36%) Data Centre
12 73 (1.31%) Management Information System
13 71 (1.27%) Data Structures
14 67 (1.20%) Security Posture
15 62 (1.11%) AI Agents
16 61 (1.09%) Replication
17 57 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
17 57 (1.02%) Virtual Team
18 50 (0.90%) Mobile App
19 47 (0.84%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 485 (8.70%) Linux
2 295 (5.29%) Windows
3 103 (1.85%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 81 (1.45%) Unix
5 76 (1.36%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.61%) VMS
7 28 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 25 (0.45%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.29%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 9 (0.16%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 7 (0.13%) AIX
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) CentOS
15 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.072%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.072%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,269 (58.66%) CI/CD
2 2,232 (40.05%) Agile
3 1,513 (27.15%) Infrastructure as Code
4 926 (16.62%) Containerisation
5 877 (15.74%) Continuous Improvement
6 845 (15.16%) Problem-Solving
7 839 (15.05%) Test Automation
8 810 (14.53%) Microservices
9 742 (13.31%) Stakeholder Management
10 731 (13.12%) AI
11 699 (12.54%) Observability
12 696 (12.49%) Scrum
13 668 (11.99%) Platform Engineering
14 663 (11.90%) Migration
15 655 (11.75%) Software Engineering
16 596 (10.69%) Analytics
17 504 (9.04%) Technical Leadership
18 496 (8.90%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 488 (8.76%) Data Modelling
20 459 (8.24%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,569 (28.15%) Python
2 1,013 (18.18%) SQL
3 786 (14.10%) Java
4 502 (9.01%) C#
5 449 (8.06%) Bash
6 438 (7.86%) JavaScript
7 416 (7.46%) PowerShell
8 302 (5.42%) TypeScript
9 210 (3.77%) Bicep
10 112 (2.01%) Go
11 69 (1.24%) Apex Code
12 67 (1.20%) PL/SQL
13 66 (1.18%) T-SQL
14 65 (1.17%) Shell Script
15 55 (0.99%) Groovy
16 52 (0.93%) Scala
17 31 (0.56%) C++
18 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
19 26 (0.47%) C
19 26 (0.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,763 (31.63%) Security Cleared
2 1,483 (26.61%) SC Cleared
3 323 (5.80%) Degree
4 222 (3.98%) Azure Certification
5 210 (3.77%) BPSS Clearance
6 196 (3.52%) DV Cleared
7 190 (3.41%) AWS Certification
8 121 (2.17%) Computer Science Degree
9 80 (1.44%) Microsoft Certification
10 78 (1.40%) CISSP
11 60 (1.08%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 59 (1.06%) ISTQB
13 53 (0.95%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.79%) PMP
15 41 (0.74%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.70%) Master's Degree
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 30 (0.54%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
20 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 500 (8.97%) QA
2 267 (4.79%) Data Quality
3 192 (3.45%) Accessibility
4 155 (2.78%) GDPR
5 89 (1.60%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 76 (1.36%) NIST
6 76 (1.36%) WCAG
7 51 (0.92%) NCSC
8 44 (0.79%) PMO
9 40 (0.72%) PCI DSS
10 34 (0.61%) SLA
11 28 (0.50%) GRC
12 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
13 11 (0.20%) HIPAA
14 10 (0.18%) PSD2
14 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
15 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
15 9 (0.16%) SEPA
16 8 (0.14%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 1,091 (19.58%) Docker
2 177 (3.18%) Active Directory
3 85 (1.53%) Virtual Machines
4 80 (1.44%) VMware Infrastructure
5 31 (0.56%) vSphere
6 24 (0.43%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.34%) Hyper-V
8 17 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 15 (0.27%) Squid
11 14 (0.25%) Postfix
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.13%) IAG
15 6 (0.11%) Corosync
15 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 6 (0.11%) NFS
16 5 (0.090%) Microsoft App-V
16 5 (0.090%) RACF
16 5 (0.090%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,605 (28.80%) Terraform
2 1,433 (25.71%) Kubernetes
3 521 (9.35%) Ansible
4 367 (6.59%) Grafana
5 311 (5.58%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.65%) Argo
7 62 (1.11%) Puppet
8 61 (1.09%) Single Sign-On
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
9 43 (0.77%) Progress Chef
10 34 (0.61%) Microsoft Intune
11 31 (0.56%) Packer
12 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
13 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
14 17 (0.31%) SCCM
15 16 (0.29%) Kibana
15 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
15 16 (0.29%) Oracle RMAN
16 13 (0.23%) HAProxy
16 13 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 1,008 (18.09%) Microsoft
2 312 (5.60%) Oracle
3 268 (4.81%) Google
4 264 (4.74%) Databricks
5 204 (3.66%) ServiceNow
6 191 (3.43%) Salesforce
7 178 (3.19%) Splunk
8 136 (2.44%) Dynatrace
9 129 (2.31%) SAP
10 115 (2.06%) VMware
11 107 (1.92%) Red Hat
12 64 (1.15%) IBM
13 62 (1.11%) OpenAI
14 58 (1.04%) Atlassian
14 58 (1.04%) Informatica
15 52 (0.93%) MuleSoft
16 47 (0.84%) Cisco
17 42 (0.75%) Okta
18 41 (0.74%) Foundry
19 39 (0.70%) AppDynamics