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

6 months to
7 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,974 3,143 3,947
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.91% 10.74% 8.99%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.77% 11.86% 10.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,484 2,316 2,752
10th Percentile £381 £393 £401
25th Percentile £432 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.22%
75th Percentile £604 £650 £650
90th Percentile £708 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 99 23 89
10th Percentile £39.53 £29.45 £54.25
25th Percentile £45.46 £57.82 £61.25
Median hourly rate £63.73 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.97% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £75.88 £81.86 £70.00
90th Percentile £92.50 £87.50 £87.09
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.73 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -5.59% +3.85% -0.76%

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 38,955 26,496 37,900
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.44% 90.55% 86.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,674 17,197 24,574
10th Percentile £314 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £487 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.10% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,314 992 2,359
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.00 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.02 £19.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £36.00 £31.51 £33.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.25% -4.52% -11.53%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.48 £70.39
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.87 £30.00 £32.50
% change year-on-year +19.55% -7.69% -11.69%

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 7 April 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 7 April 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 7 April 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 4,268 £525 -4.55% 1,414
UK excluding London +9 2,215 £500 -2.44% 1,103
London 0 2,155 £545 -5.22% 512
Work from Home -4 1,360 £525 -1.59% 782
North of England +5 752 £500 -4.76% 306
South East 0 452 £525 -4.55% 307
Midlands +5 426 £492 -1.60% 142
Yorkshire 0 401 £500 -4.76% 86
West Midlands +7 334 £500 - 98
North West +2 295 £490 -6.67% 159
South West +12 289 £520 -9.17% 165
Scotland +5 177 £450 - 52
East of England +23 122 £550 +6.80% 92
East Midlands +6 89 £450 -5.26% 44
North East +3 61 £475 -9.52% 63
Wales +12 46 £468 +108.41% 43
Northern Ireland -10 10 £475 +13.77% 10
Channel Islands - 3 £450 - 1

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
1 301 (6.05%) Confluence
2 118 (2.37%) Apache Spark
3 104 (2.09%) SharePoint
4 101 (2.03%) SAS
5 90 (1.81%) Apache
6 71 (1.43%) Apache Airflow
7 34 (0.68%) CMS
7 34 (0.68%) nginx
8 31 (0.62%) OpenStack
9 28 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
10 23 (0.46%) IIS
11 15 (0.30%) Mendix
12 11 (0.22%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 11 (0.22%) HCL Notes
12 11 (0.22%) Sitecore CMS
13 9 (0.18%) WebLogic
14 8 (0.16%) ArcGIS
14 8 (0.16%) Camunda
15 7 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
15 7 (0.14%) WebSphere
Applications
1 87 (1.75%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.23%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 54 (1.09%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
5 25 (0.50%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 6 (0.12%) Weka
8 5 (0.10%) Trello
9 2 (0.040%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.040%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.040%) Spreadsheet
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
Business Applications
1 74 (1.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.26%) Oracle ERP
4 10 (0.20%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.18%) Maximo
5 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 6 (0.12%) Endur
6 6 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
6 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
7 5 (0.10%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
7 5 (0.10%) SAP ERP
7 5 (0.10%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.080%) SAP BPC
8 4 (0.080%) SAP CO
8 4 (0.080%) SAP FI
8 4 (0.080%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.060%) Findur
9 3 (0.060%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.060%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,677 (53.82%) Azure
2 1,708 (34.34%) AWS
3 1,487 (29.90%) Azure DevOps
4 907 (18.23%) GitHub
5 663 (13.33%) GCP
6 570 (11.46%) Serverless
7 506 (10.17%) GitHub Actions
8 419 (8.42%) Power Platform
9 303 (6.09%) AWS CloudFormation
10 283 (5.69%) AWS Lambda
11 276 (5.55%) Amazon S3
12 240 (4.83%) Azure Data Factory
13 226 (4.54%) Entra ID
14 225 (4.52%) Azure AKS
15 209 (4.20%) Amazon EKS
16 199 (4.00%) OpenShift
17 185 (3.72%) Azure Monitor
18 170 (3.42%) Dynamics 365
19 167 (3.36%) PaaS
20 158 (3.18%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 216 (4.34%) Firewall
2 115 (2.31%) DNS
3 102 (2.05%) Network Security
4 88 (1.77%) VPN
5 40 (0.80%) TCP/IP
6 27 (0.54%) HTTP
6 27 (0.54%) SSL
7 25 (0.50%) WAN
8 24 (0.48%) SD-WAN
9 22 (0.44%) DHCP
10 20 (0.40%) SAN
11 18 (0.36%) BGP
12 17 (0.34%) IPsec
13 16 (0.32%) MPLS
14 14 (0.28%) Reverse Proxy
15 13 (0.26%) Internet
16 12 (0.24%) 5G
16 12 (0.24%) LAN
17 11 (0.22%) OpenVPN
18 10 (0.20%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 275 (5.53%) PostgreSQL
2 257 (5.17%) Power BI
3 233 (4.68%) SQL Server
4 195 (3.92%) NoSQL
5 172 (3.46%) Data Lake
6 147 (2.96%) Relational Database
7 131 (2.63%) Data Warehouse
8 120 (2.41%) Amazon RDS
9 119 (2.39%) Azure SQL Database
10 113 (2.27%) MongoDB
11 97 (1.95%) DynamoDB
12 90 (1.81%) Metadata
13 80 (1.61%) Delta Lake
14 78 (1.57%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.45%) Elasticsearch
16 67 (1.35%) Big Data
17 60 (1.21%) MySQL
18 58 (1.17%) Amazon Athena
19 57 (1.15%) Tableau
20 52 (1.05%) Redis
Development Applications
1 774 (15.56%) Jenkins
2 646 (12.99%) Git
3 645 (12.97%) JIRA
4 535 (10.76%) GitLab
5 140 (2.81%) Selenium
6 109 (2.19%) JUnit
7 95 (1.91%) Postman
8 79 (1.59%) Bitbucket
9 74 (1.49%) SonarQube
10 63 (1.27%) Cucumber
11 56 (1.13%) JMeter
12 54 (1.09%) REST Assured
13 53 (1.07%) Maven
14 51 (1.03%) Artifactory
14 51 (1.03%) Cypress.io
15 41 (0.82%) Sonatype Nexus
16 39 (0.78%) Mockito
17 36 (0.72%) Visual Studio
18 34 (0.68%) Oracle APEX
19 30 (0.60%) Gatling
General
1 1,344 (27.02%) Social Skills
2 921 (18.52%) Finance
3 655 (13.17%) Public Sector
4 406 (8.16%) Analytical Skills
5 360 (7.24%) Banking
6 167 (3.36%) Documentation Skills
7 72 (1.45%) Influencing Skills
8 65 (1.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 62 (1.25%) Retail
10 59 (1.19%) Marketing
11 58 (1.17%) Financial Institution
12 53 (1.07%) Legal
13 52 (1.05%) Front Office
13 52 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
14 48 (0.97%) Investment Banking
15 44 (0.88%) Presentation Skills
16 40 (0.80%) Telecoms
17 31 (0.62%) Military
18 24 (0.48%) Law
18 24 (0.48%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 924 (18.58%) DevOps Engineer
2 787 (15.82%) Developer
3 689 (13.85%) Senior
4 553 (11.12%) Architect
5 425 (8.54%) Lead
6 322 (6.47%) Azure Engineer
7 295 (5.93%) Data Engineer
8 274 (5.51%) Analyst
9 250 (5.03%) AWS Engineer
10 194 (3.90%) AWS DevOps
11 185 (3.72%) Platform Engineer
12 181 (3.64%) Cloud Engineer
13 169 (3.40%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 156 (3.14%) Solutions Architect
15 155 (3.12%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 153 (3.08%) Software Engineer
17 148 (2.98%) Senior Developer
18 145 (2.92%) Senior DevOps
19 137 (2.75%) Senior DevOps Engineer
20 136 (2.73%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 520 (10.45%) REST
2 432 (8.69%) .NET
3 311 (6.25%) Node.js
4 309 (6.21%) React
5 285 (5.73%) Kafka
6 276 (5.55%) Spring
7 273 (5.49%) RESTful
8 258 (5.19%) Spring Boot
9 180 (3.62%) AngularJS
10 152 (3.06%) JSON
10 152 (3.06%) OAuth
11 145 (2.92%) YAML
12 143 (2.87%) PySpark
13 140 (2.81%) Playwright
14 129 (2.59%) HTML
15 122 (2.45%) SOAP
16 115 (2.31%) Middleware
17 112 (2.25%) Elastic Stack
18 109 (2.19%) CSS
19 98 (1.97%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 737 (14.82%) Cloud Native
2 314 (6.31%) Product Ownership
3 188 (3.78%) Distributed Systems
4 125 (2.51%) Onboarding
5 124 (2.49%) Public Cloud
6 102 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
7 99 (1.99%) Hybrid Cloud
8 90 (1.81%) Enterprise Software
9 73 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
10 64 (1.29%) Virtual Team
11 57 (1.15%) Management Information System
12 52 (1.05%) Data Centre
13 49 (0.99%) NHS
14 48 (0.97%) Self-Motivation
15 44 (0.88%) Private Cloud
16 42 (0.84%) AI Agents
16 42 (0.84%) Data Structures
17 40 (0.80%) Security Posture
18 38 (0.76%) Greenfield Project
19 37 (0.74%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 471 (9.47%) Linux
2 255 (5.13%) Windows
3 89 (1.79%) Unix
4 71 (1.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (0.97%) VMS
6 44 (0.88%) Windows Server
7 24 (0.48%) Ubuntu
8 14 (0.28%) CentOS
9 10 (0.20%) Windows 10
10 9 (0.18%) Android
11 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
12 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 5 (0.10%) Solaris
13 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.080%) Mac OS
14 4 (0.080%) Windows Server 2016
15 3 (0.060%) Oracle Linux
15 3 (0.060%) Rocky
15 3 (0.060%) Windows Server 2008
15 3 (0.060%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,814 (56.57%) CI/CD
2 1,918 (38.56%) Agile
3 1,257 (25.27%) Infrastructure as Code
4 874 (17.57%) Problem-Solving
5 872 (17.53%) Containerisation
6 746 (15.00%) Microservices
7 735 (14.78%) Test Automation
8 663 (13.33%) Continuous Improvement
9 625 (12.57%) Analytics
10 594 (11.94%) Migration
11 554 (11.14%) Observability
12 553 (11.12%) Scrum
13 530 (10.66%) Stakeholder Management
14 523 (10.51%) AI
15 461 (9.27%) Data Modelling
16 440 (8.85%) Software Engineering
17 401 (8.06%) Mentoring
18 388 (7.80%) Platform Engineering
19 387 (7.78%) Data Pipeline
20 359 (7.22%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,466 (29.47%) Python
2 1,043 (20.97%) SQL
3 648 (13.03%) Java
4 518 (10.41%) C#
5 434 (8.73%) JavaScript
6 376 (7.56%) PowerShell
7 346 (6.96%) Bash
8 297 (5.97%) TypeScript
9 168 (3.38%) Bicep
10 127 (2.55%) Go
11 85 (1.71%) PL/SQL
12 69 (1.39%) Scala
13 60 (1.21%) Shell Script
14 48 (0.97%) T-SQL
15 45 (0.90%) Groovy
16 42 (0.84%) C++
17 41 (0.82%) Ruby
18 35 (0.70%) Apex Code
19 28 (0.56%) Perl
20 23 (0.46%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,564 (31.44%) Security Cleared
2 1,290 (25.93%) SC Cleared
3 354 (7.12%) Degree
4 208 (4.18%) Azure Certification
5 172 (3.46%) Computer Science Degree
6 156 (3.14%) DV Cleared
7 144 (2.90%) AWS Certification
8 140 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
9 84 (1.69%) CISSP
10 69 (1.39%) Master's Degree
11 64 (1.29%) ISTQB
12 62 (1.25%) CISM
13 57 (1.15%) Microsoft Certification
14 56 (1.13%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 49 (0.99%) PMI Certification
16 42 (0.84%) PMP
17 36 (0.72%) Cisco Certification
18 31 (0.62%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.52%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
20 25 (0.50%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 440 (8.85%) QA
2 225 (4.52%) Data Quality
3 192 (3.86%) GDPR
4 163 (3.28%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 132 (2.65%) NIST
6 123 (2.47%) Accessibility
7 77 (1.55%) NCSC
8 43 (0.86%) WCAG
9 42 (0.84%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.76%) PMO
11 31 (0.62%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 31 (0.62%) SLA
12 21 (0.42%) HIPAA
13 16 (0.32%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 16 (0.32%) ISO 20022
14 15 (0.30%) NIST 800
15 14 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.26%) GRC
16 13 (0.26%) PSD2
17 11 (0.22%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,079 (21.69%) Docker
2 184 (3.70%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.61%) VMware Infrastructure
4 72 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.90%) vSphere
6 34 (0.68%) VMware NSX
7 16 (0.32%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (0.24%) Squid
10 10 (0.20%) Postfix
11 9 (0.18%) Lustre
11 9 (0.18%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 9 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
12 8 (0.16%) Firmware
13 7 (0.14%) GPFS
13 7 (0.14%) HDFS
13 7 (0.14%) Virtual Servers
14 6 (0.12%) Ceph
14 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
15 5 (0.10%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,434 (28.83%) Terraform
2 1,347 (27.08%) Kubernetes
3 486 (9.77%) Ansible
4 335 (6.74%) Grafana
5 274 (5.51%) Prometheus
6 103 (2.07%) Argo
7 74 (1.49%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.39%) Puppet
9 64 (1.29%) Istio
10 31 (0.62%) Progress Chef
11 29 (0.58%) Packer
11 29 (0.58%) vCenter Server
12 24 (0.48%) Kibana
13 21 (0.42%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 21 (0.42%) HP ALM
14 20 (0.40%) Rancher
15 19 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
16 18 (0.36%) FortiGate
17 17 (0.34%) Podman
18 16 (0.32%) Consul
Vendors
1 862 (17.33%) Microsoft
2 338 (6.80%) Oracle
3 294 (5.91%) Databricks
4 248 (4.99%) Google
5 203 (4.08%) Splunk
6 162 (3.26%) ServiceNow
7 142 (2.85%) Red Hat
8 140 (2.81%) Salesforce
9 132 (2.65%) VMware
10 108 (2.17%) SAP
11 84 (1.69%) OpenAI
12 76 (1.53%) Dynatrace
13 66 (1.33%) Atlassian
14 62 (1.25%) CyberArk
15 47 (0.94%) IBM
16 46 (0.92%) Talend
17 45 (0.90%) Cisco
18 39 (0.78%) Denodo
19 35 (0.70%) Foundry
20 34 (0.68%) Informatica