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

6 months to
2 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,665 3,733 3,774
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.32% 11.27% 9.91%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.21% 12.44% 11.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,933 2,602 2,508
10th Percentile £381 £363 £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 £625 £619 £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 120 23 65
10th Percentile £38.15 £44.25 £54.50
25th Percentile £61.56 £54.88 £65.00
Median hourly rate £69.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.73% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £78.06 £88.13 £74.00
90th Percentile £92.63 £95.00 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -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 46,382 30,011 32,696
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.49% 90.62% 85.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,976 18,637 19,780
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £630 £625 £638
90th Percentile £734 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,269 1,869 1,352
10th Percentile £13.69 £14.32 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.17 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £38.72 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +53.96% -40.82% -
75th Percentile £65.60 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £39.02 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +74.86% -48.10% +1.18%

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 2 October 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 2 October 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 2 October 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 4,809 £525 - 4,905
London 0 2,536 £550 - 2,512
UK excluding London -4 2,418 £500 - 2,682
Work from Home -1 1,599 £525 +1.45% 2,231
North of England -2 803 £500 +5.26% 777
South East -13 451 £525 +5.00% 634
Midlands -7 424 £488 -5.11% 324
Yorkshire -2 392 £500 +2.04% 230
West Midlands -8 338 £500 -4.76% 203
South West +6 330 £550 - 343
North West -3 317 £525 +15.89% 439
Scotland -2 227 £475 -5.00% 211
East of England +3 156 £504 -4.00% 243
North East +13 110 £450 -18.18% 113
East Midlands -2 84 £459 +9.23% 121
Wales -8 44 £425 +13.33% 81
Northern Ireland +25 23 £450 - 82
Channel Islands - 2 £500 -

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
1 349 (6.16%) Confluence
2 160 (2.82%) SharePoint
3 136 (2.40%) Apache Spark
4 124 (2.19%) Apache Airflow
5 121 (2.14%) Apache
6 50 (0.88%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) Jupyter
8 43 (0.76%) CMS
9 30 (0.53%) IIS
10 26 (0.46%) nginx
11 20 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.28%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.19%) WebSphere
16 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 9 (0.16%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 69 (1.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (0.95%) Microsoft Project
3 53 (0.94%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 35 (0.62%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 14 (0.25%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
7 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.14%) Windchill
8 5 (0.088%) Notion
8 5 (0.088%) Trello
9 3 (0.053%) Mingle
10 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.035%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.018%) Sketch
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 83 (1.47%) Dynamics CRM
2 47 (0.83%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
4 12 (0.21%) SAP MDG
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
5 9 (0.16%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
7 6 (0.11%) Aladdin
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.088%) Temenos T24
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Oracle Payroll
9 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
9 4 (0.071%) Workday HCM
10 3 (0.053%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 3,068 (54.16%) Azure
2 2,037 (35.96%) AWS
3 1,760 (31.07%) Azure DevOps
4 985 (17.39%) GitHub
5 761 (13.43%) GCP
6 622 (10.98%) GitHub Actions
7 497 (8.77%) Power Platform
8 472 (8.33%) Serverless
9 316 (5.58%) Amazon S3
10 291 (5.14%) AWS Lambda
11 271 (4.78%) Amazon EKS
12 261 (4.61%) Entra ID
13 258 (4.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 239 (4.22%) AWS CloudFormation
15 219 (3.87%) Azure AKS
16 212 (3.74%) Azure Monitor
17 204 (3.60%) Amazon EC2
18 197 (3.48%) Azure Data Factory
19 193 (3.41%) Dynamics 365
20 178 (3.14%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 238 (4.20%) Firewall
2 171 (3.02%) DNS
3 121 (2.14%) VPN
4 113 (1.99%) Network Security
5 75 (1.32%) TCP/IP
6 55 (0.97%) SSL
7 51 (0.90%) DHCP
8 45 (0.79%) WAN
9 37 (0.65%) HTTP
10 36 (0.64%) BGP
11 28 (0.49%) Internet
11 28 (0.49%) SSH
12 27 (0.48%) OSPF
12 27 (0.48%) SD-WAN
13 21 (0.37%) LAN
13 21 (0.37%) VLAN
13 21 (0.37%) Wi-Fi
14 18 (0.32%) BIG-IP
14 18 (0.32%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 18 (0.32%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 323 (5.70%) Power BI
2 304 (5.37%) PostgreSQL
3 297 (5.24%) SQL Server
4 214 (3.78%) Data Warehouse
5 188 (3.32%) MongoDB
6 184 (3.25%) NoSQL
7 182 (3.21%) Data Lake
8 164 (2.89%) Relational Database
9 155 (2.74%) Amazon RDS
10 128 (2.26%) Metadata
11 102 (1.80%) Azure SQL Database
12 92 (1.62%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.55%) Delta Lake
13 88 (1.55%) MySQL
14 87 (1.54%) Oracle Database
15 84 (1.48%) Redis
16 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
17 65 (1.15%) Big Data
18 64 (1.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 58 (1.02%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 862 (15.22%) Git
2 809 (14.28%) Jenkins
3 677 (11.95%) JIRA
4 665 (11.74%) GitLab
5 145 (2.56%) Selenium
6 103 (1.82%) JUnit
7 100 (1.77%) Maven
8 98 (1.73%) SonarQube
9 95 (1.68%) Postman
10 80 (1.41%) Cucumber
11 77 (1.36%) REST Assured
12 71 (1.25%) Bitbucket
13 69 (1.22%) Cypress.io
13 69 (1.22%) Gradle
14 66 (1.17%) JMeter
15 54 (0.95%) Claude Code
16 50 (0.88%) Mockito
17 43 (0.76%) Sonatype Nexus
18 42 (0.74%) Gatling
18 42 (0.74%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,484 (26.20%) Social Skills
2 1,030 (18.18%) Finance
3 815 (14.39%) Public Sector
4 543 (9.59%) Analytical Skills
5 408 (7.20%) Banking
6 171 (3.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 112 (1.98%) Retail
8 91 (1.61%) Influencing Skills
9 80 (1.41%) Documentation Skills
10 59 (1.04%) Legal
11 58 (1.02%) Aerospace
11 58 (1.02%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (0.99%) Military
13 55 (0.97%) Investment Banking
13 55 (0.97%) Marketing
14 52 (0.92%) Telecoms
15 51 (0.90%) Manufacturing
16 44 (0.78%) Financial Institution
17 43 (0.76%) Law
18 42 (0.74%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,139 (20.11%) DevOps Engineer
2 929 (16.40%) Developer
3 863 (15.23%) Senior
4 644 (11.37%) Architect
5 539 (9.51%) Lead
6 347 (6.13%) Azure Engineer
7 312 (5.51%) Data Engineer
8 275 (4.85%) Analyst
9 259 (4.57%) AWS Engineer
10 228 (4.02%) Platform Engineer
11 206 (3.64%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.58%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 202 (3.57%) Senior DevOps
14 200 (3.53%) Java Developer
15 185 (3.27%) AWS DevOps
16 184 (3.25%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 176 (3.11%) Solutions Architect
18 174 (3.07%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 151 (2.67%) Senior Developer
20 145 (2.56%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,718 (30.33%) Terraform
2 661 (11.67%) REST
3 485 (8.56%) .NET
4 401 (7.08%) Kafka
5 368 (6.50%) RESTful
6 309 (5.45%) Spring
7 304 (5.37%) Spring Boot
8 296 (5.23%) React
9 197 (3.48%) Node.js
10 194 (3.42%) OAuth
11 187 (3.30%) JSON
12 158 (2.79%) Playwright
13 153 (2.70%) PySpark
14 148 (2.61%) HTML
15 134 (2.37%) .NET Framework
15 134 (2.37%) CSS
16 133 (2.35%) OAuth2
17 132 (2.33%) SOAP
18 125 (2.21%) Middleware
19 123 (2.17%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,063 (18.76%) Cloud Native
2 428 (7.56%) Product Ownership
3 266 (4.70%) Distributed Systems
4 221 (3.90%) Enterprise Software
5 210 (3.71%) Onboarding
6 152 (2.68%) Hybrid Cloud
7 148 (2.61%) Legacy Systems
8 113 (1.99%) AI Agents
9 96 (1.69%) Management Information System
10 87 (1.54%) Self-Motivation
11 78 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
11 78 (1.38%) Public Cloud
12 76 (1.34%) Replication
13 74 (1.31%) Data Structures
13 74 (1.31%) Security Posture
14 73 (1.29%) Data Centre
15 62 (1.09%) PKI
16 61 (1.08%) Enterprise Cloud
17 58 (1.02%) Virtual Team
18 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 572 (10.10%) Linux
2 318 (5.61%) Windows
3 125 (2.21%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 113 (1.99%) Unix
5 98 (1.73%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 30 (0.53%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 17 (0.30%) CentOS
11 12 (0.21%) zOS
12 11 (0.19%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) AIX
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
16 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,495 (61.69%) CI/CD
2 2,331 (41.15%) Agile
3 1,697 (29.96%) Infrastructure as Code
4 976 (17.23%) Continuous Improvement
5 973 (17.18%) Stakeholder Management
6 962 (16.98%) Containerisation
7 928 (16.38%) Test Automation
8 912 (16.10%) AI
9 901 (15.90%) Problem-Solving
10 842 (14.86%) Microservices
11 794 (14.02%) Observability
12 786 (13.87%) Platform Engineering
13 753 (13.29%) Software Engineering
14 705 (12.44%) Scrum
15 690 (12.18%) Migration
16 634 (11.19%) Technical Leadership
17 581 (10.26%) Analytics
18 532 (9.39%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 495 (8.74%) Roadmaps
20 487 (8.60%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 1,657 (29.25%) Python
2 998 (17.62%) SQL
3 835 (14.74%) Java
4 512 (9.04%) Bash
5 505 (8.91%) C#
6 500 (8.83%) PowerShell
7 468 (8.26%) JavaScript
8 316 (5.58%) TypeScript
9 268 (4.73%) Bicep
10 131 (2.31%) Go
11 83 (1.47%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
13 68 (1.20%) Scala
14 60 (1.06%) PL/SQL
15 59 (1.04%) Apex Code
15 59 (1.04%) Groovy
16 39 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 34 (0.60%) C++
17 34 (0.60%) Perl
18 27 (0.48%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,819 (32.11%) Security Cleared
2 1,518 (26.80%) SC Cleared
3 372 (6.57%) Degree
4 252 (4.45%) Azure Certification
5 245 (4.32%) BPSS Clearance
6 241 (4.25%) DV Cleared
7 198 (3.50%) AWS Certification
8 148 (2.61%) Computer Science Degree
9 112 (1.98%) Microsoft Certification
10 74 (1.31%) CISSP
11 60 (1.06%) ISTQB
12 56 (0.99%) PMP
13 52 (0.92%) Cisco Certification
14 51 (0.90%) PMI Certification
15 47 (0.83%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 42 (0.74%) Master's Degree
17 28 (0.49%) CISM
18 25 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 23 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 23 (0.41%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 558 (9.85%) QA
2 284 (5.01%) Data Quality
3 221 (3.90%) Accessibility
4 120 (2.12%) GDPR
5 88 (1.55%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.47%) WCAG
7 68 (1.20%) NIST
8 54 (0.95%) NCSC
9 45 (0.79%) PMO
10 35 (0.62%) SLA
11 31 (0.55%) PCI DSS
12 28 (0.49%) GRC
13 23 (0.41%) ISO 20022
14 20 (0.35%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 15 (0.26%) HIPAA
16 14 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
16 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
16 14 (0.25%) SEPA
16 14 (0.25%) SOC 2
17 13 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,172 (20.69%) Docker
2 164 (2.89%) Active Directory
3 86 (1.52%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 32 (0.56%) vSphere
6 24 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
7 22 (0.39%) Hyper-V
8 21 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) VMware NSX
10 11 (0.19%) Squid
11 10 (0.18%) IAG
11 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
12 8 (0.14%) zsh
13 7 (0.12%) Postfix
14 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) KVM
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) RACF
15 5 (0.088%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,575 (27.80%) Kubernetes
2 549 (9.69%) Ansible
3 380 (6.71%) Grafana
4 326 (5.75%) Prometheus
5 77 (1.36%) Argo
6 59 (1.04%) Puppet
7 48 (0.85%) Microsoft Intune
8 47 (0.83%) Progress Chef
9 42 (0.74%) Single Sign-On
10 39 (0.69%) Packer
11 34 (0.60%) Kibana
12 32 (0.56%) Istio
13 23 (0.41%) Kubeflow
14 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.34%) vCenter Server
16 17 (0.30%) Oracle RMAN
17 16 (0.28%) SCCM
18 14 (0.25%) HP ALM
19 13 (0.23%) Consul
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,126 (19.88%) Microsoft
2 315 (5.56%) Databricks
3 306 (5.40%) Google
4 299 (5.28%) Oracle
5 202 (3.57%) ServiceNow
6 193 (3.41%) Splunk
7 172 (3.04%) Salesforce
8 147 (2.59%) Dynatrace
9 127 (2.24%) VMware
10 117 (2.07%) SAP
11 97 (1.71%) Red Hat
12 75 (1.32%) OpenAI
13 69 (1.22%) IBM
14 66 (1.17%) MuleSoft
15 59 (1.04%) Foundry
16 46 (0.81%) Informatica
17 44 (0.78%) Cisco
18 42 (0.74%) AppDynamics
19 41 (0.72%) Okta
20 39 (0.69%) Atlassian