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

6 months to
3 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,489 3,261 4,148
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.65% 10.43% 9.54%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.53% 11.49% 11.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,808 2,334 2,827
10th Percentile £384 £363 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £728
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 18 124
10th Percentile £39.02 £33.58 £56.33
25th Percentile £61.87 £51.25 £61.51
Median hourly rate £70.00 £66.25 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +5.66% -5.36% +6.70%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.25 £89.88 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +6.87%

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 43,799 28,390 37,058
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.01% 90.78% 85.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,227 17,909 23,638
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.98% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,638 1,396 2,532
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.21 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.50 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +3.45%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.26% -35.31% +8.91%

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 3 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 3 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 3 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 +3 4,654 £525 - 1,580
UK excluding London +5 2,401 £500 - 1,128
London +3 2,397 £550 - 654
Work from Home 0 1,563 £525 - 917
North of England +6 863 £500 +1.63% 315
Yorkshire +1 463 £501 +0.20% 90
South East -5 447 £525 +5.00% 349
Midlands -2 427 £500 - 134
West Midlands -2 338 £500 -2.44% 80
North West 0 325 £510 +7.37% 183
South West +17 293 £525 -4.55% 138
Scotland +2 201 £479 +0.79% 51
East of England +26 139 £525 +5.00% 85
North East +9 93 £431 -17.46% 46
East Midlands -1 84 £488 +8.33% 54
Wales +1 52 £425 +39.13% 36
Northern Ireland +16 22 £475 +11.76% 42
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
1 318 (5.79%) Confluence
2 134 (2.44%) Apache Spark
3 125 (2.28%) SharePoint
4 105 (1.91%) Apache Airflow
5 97 (1.77%) Apache
6 81 (1.48%) SAS
7 49 (0.89%) CMS
8 32 (0.58%) IIS
8 32 (0.58%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.56%) nginx
10 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
11 15 (0.27%) Camunda
11 15 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.27%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
13 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
14 8 (0.15%) Appian
14 8 (0.15%) Mendix
15 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 69 (1.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.11%) Microsoft Project
3 41 (0.75%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 40 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
5 36 (0.66%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.073%) Notion
8 4 (0.073%) Spreadsheet
9 3 (0.055%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.055%) Trello
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 72 (1.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.71%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.15%) SAP MDG
6 7 (0.13%) Magento
7 6 (0.11%) Endur
7 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.091%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.091%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.091%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.055%) Findur
9 3 (0.055%) OpenText VIM for SAP
9 3 (0.055%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.055%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.055%) SAP MM
Cloud Services
1 2,947 (53.69%) Azure
2 1,942 (35.38%) AWS
3 1,620 (29.51%) Azure DevOps
4 907 (16.52%) GitHub
5 694 (12.64%) GCP
6 546 (9.95%) GitHub Actions
7 476 (8.67%) Serverless
8 461 (8.40%) Power Platform
9 309 (5.63%) Amazon S3
10 272 (4.96%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.61%) AWS CloudFormation
12 243 (4.43%) Entra ID
13 222 (4.04%) Azure AKS
14 217 (3.95%) Amazon EKS
15 187 (3.41%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 187 (3.41%) Azure Data Factory
16 186 (3.39%) Amazon EC2
17 175 (3.19%) Azure Monitor
18 156 (2.84%) PaaS
19 153 (2.79%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 230 (4.19%) Firewall
2 138 (2.51%) DNS
3 117 (2.13%) Network Security
4 104 (1.89%) VPN
5 49 (0.89%) WAN
6 42 (0.77%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.66%) SD-WAN
7 36 (0.66%) SSL
8 34 (0.62%) BGP
9 27 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
10 26 (0.47%) Internet
11 24 (0.44%) DHCP
11 24 (0.44%) HTTP
11 24 (0.44%) OSPF
12 23 (0.42%) SAN
13 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
13 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 17 (0.31%) IPsec
13 17 (0.31%) LAN
13 17 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 299 (5.45%) Power BI
2 279 (5.08%) SQL Server
3 259 (4.72%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.50%) NoSQL
5 170 (3.10%) Relational Database
6 165 (3.01%) MongoDB
7 164 (2.99%) Data Warehouse
8 154 (2.81%) Data Lake
9 118 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
10 103 (1.88%) Azure SQL Database
11 100 (1.82%) Metadata
12 98 (1.79%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.60%) Delta Lake
14 79 (1.44%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.29%) Amazon Athena
15 71 (1.29%) Big Data
16 68 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
17 65 (1.18%) Redis
18 62 (1.13%) Elasticsearch
19 52 (0.95%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 801 (14.59%) Jenkins
2 714 (13.01%) Git
3 669 (12.19%) JIRA
4 578 (10.53%) GitLab
5 126 (2.30%) Selenium
6 113 (2.06%) Postman
7 97 (1.77%) JUnit
8 91 (1.66%) SonarQube
9 79 (1.44%) REST Assured
10 75 (1.37%) Bitbucket
11 73 (1.33%) Maven
12 62 (1.13%) Cucumber
12 62 (1.13%) JMeter
13 52 (0.95%) Cypress.io
14 48 (0.87%) Gradle
15 46 (0.84%) Gatling
16 40 (0.73%) Mockito
17 39 (0.71%) Artifactory
18 36 (0.66%) LoadRunner
19 35 (0.64%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,362 (24.81%) Social Skills
2 1,005 (18.31%) Finance
3 768 (13.99%) Public Sector
4 444 (8.09%) Analytical Skills
5 360 (6.56%) Banking
6 128 (2.33%) Documentation Skills
7 114 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 83 (1.51%) Retail
9 74 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.22%) Legal
11 60 (1.09%) Organisational Skills
12 58 (1.06%) Marketing
13 45 (0.82%) Investment Banking
14 44 (0.80%) Military
15 42 (0.77%) Financial Institution
16 40 (0.73%) Law
17 36 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
18 34 (0.62%) Front Office
18 34 (0.62%) Telecoms
19 31 (0.56%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,103 (20.09%) DevOps Engineer
2 880 (16.03%) Developer
3 763 (13.90%) Senior
4 636 (11.59%) Architect
5 492 (8.96%) Lead
6 334 (6.08%) Azure Engineer
7 320 (5.83%) Data Engineer
8 303 (5.52%) Analyst
9 278 (5.06%) AWS Engineer
10 208 (3.79%) Platform Engineer
11 205 (3.73%) Cloud Engineer
12 204 (3.72%) AWS DevOps
13 195 (3.55%) Java Developer
14 190 (3.46%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 185 (3.37%) Solutions Architect
16 182 (3.32%) Senior DevOps
17 173 (3.15%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 166 (3.02%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 153 (2.79%) Business Analyst
20 150 (2.73%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 524 (9.55%) REST
2 483 (8.80%) .NET
3 322 (5.87%) Spring
4 310 (5.65%) RESTful
5 301 (5.48%) React
6 300 (5.47%) Spring Boot
7 296 (5.39%) Kafka
8 237 (4.32%) Node.js
9 168 (3.06%) AngularJS
10 165 (3.01%) PySpark
11 163 (2.97%) Playwright
12 159 (2.90%) OAuth
13 143 (2.61%) JSON
14 132 (2.40%) SOAP
15 131 (2.39%) .NET Framework
16 118 (2.15%) HTML
17 108 (1.97%) OAuth2
17 108 (1.97%) OpenID
18 105 (1.91%) Middleware
19 103 (1.88%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 976 (17.78%) Cloud Native
2 369 (6.72%) Product Ownership
3 235 (4.28%) Distributed Systems
4 157 (2.86%) Onboarding
5 138 (2.51%) Enterprise Software
6 136 (2.48%) Legacy Systems
7 116 (2.11%) Hybrid Cloud
8 100 (1.82%) Public Cloud
9 82 (1.49%) Data Centre
10 81 (1.48%) Data Protection Act
11 72 (1.31%) Management Information System
12 71 (1.29%) Self-Motivation
13 66 (1.20%) Security Posture
14 60 (1.09%) Data Structures
15 56 (1.02%) Virtual Team
16 54 (0.98%) Mobile App
17 51 (0.93%) AI Agents
17 51 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
18 49 (0.89%) Replication
19 48 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 472 (8.60%) Linux
2 289 (5.27%) Windows
3 100 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 77 (1.40%) Unix
5 66 (1.20%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.67%) VMS
7 27 (0.49%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.27%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.15%) CentOS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) zOS
14 5 (0.091%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.091%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.091%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.073%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.073%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,210 (58.48%) CI/CD
2 2,121 (38.64%) Agile
3 1,464 (26.67%) Infrastructure as Code
4 904 (16.47%) Containerisation
5 835 (15.21%) Problem-Solving
6 807 (14.70%) Test Automation
7 800 (14.57%) Continuous Improvement
8 796 (14.50%) Microservices
9 677 (12.33%) Migration
10 673 (12.26%) Stakeholder Management
11 651 (11.86%) Observability
12 650 (11.84%) AI
13 648 (11.81%) Scrum
14 610 (11.11%) Platform Engineering
15 596 (10.86%) Analytics
16 579 (10.55%) Software Engineering
17 487 (8.87%) Data Modelling
18 460 (8.38%) Technical Leadership
19 448 (8.16%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 437 (7.96%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,529 (27.86%) Python
2 1,011 (18.42%) SQL
3 759 (13.83%) Java
4 514 (9.36%) C#
5 415 (7.56%) JavaScript
6 405 (7.38%) Bash
7 382 (6.96%) PowerShell
8 292 (5.32%) TypeScript
9 194 (3.53%) Bicep
10 112 (2.04%) Go
11 69 (1.26%) Apex Code
12 66 (1.20%) Scala
13 65 (1.18%) Shell Script
14 61 (1.11%) T-SQL
15 57 (1.04%) PL/SQL
16 50 (0.91%) Groovy
17 31 (0.56%) C++
18 26 (0.47%) Kotlin
19 23 (0.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 20 (0.36%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,737 (31.65%) Security Cleared
2 1,465 (26.69%) SC Cleared
3 340 (6.19%) Degree
4 203 (3.70%) Azure Certification
5 186 (3.39%) BPSS Clearance
6 175 (3.19%) AWS Certification
7 172 (3.13%) DV Cleared
8 133 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
9 81 (1.48%) CISSP
10 71 (1.29%) Microsoft Certification
11 58 (1.06%) ISTQB
12 56 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.91%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.82%) PMI Certification
15 44 (0.80%) PMP
16 43 (0.78%) Master's Degree
17 39 (0.71%) CISM
18 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.47%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 471 (8.58%) QA
2 259 (4.72%) Data Quality
3 178 (3.24%) Accessibility
4 167 (3.04%) GDPR
5 115 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 103 (1.88%) NIST
7 71 (1.29%) WCAG
8 67 (1.22%) NCSC
9 47 (0.86%) PCI DSS
10 41 (0.75%) SLA
11 32 (0.58%) PMO
12 30 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 27 (0.49%) GRC
14 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.22%) PSD2
17 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
17 11 (0.20%) SEPA
18 8 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,058 (19.27%) Docker
2 174 (3.17%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.51%) Virtual Machines
4 76 (1.38%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.53%) vSphere
6 27 (0.49%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
10 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.26%) Postfix
12 9 (0.16%) Oracle RAC
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) NFS
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.091%) Firmware
14 5 (0.091%) IAG
14 5 (0.091%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,583 (28.84%) Terraform
2 1,405 (25.60%) Kubernetes
3 516 (9.40%) Ansible
4 362 (6.60%) Grafana
5 312 (5.68%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.62%) Argo
7 73 (1.33%) Single Sign-On
8 63 (1.15%) Puppet
9 49 (0.89%) Istio
10 35 (0.64%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.58%) Packer
12 27 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.49%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.42%) HP ALM
14 21 (0.38%) Kibana
15 19 (0.35%) Consul
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
18 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 961 (17.51%) Microsoft
2 291 (5.30%) Oracle
3 275 (5.01%) Databricks
4 263 (4.79%) Google
5 201 (3.66%) ServiceNow
6 184 (3.35%) Splunk
7 182 (3.32%) Salesforce
8 129 (2.35%) SAP
9 122 (2.22%) Dynatrace
10 114 (2.08%) VMware
11 108 (1.97%) Red Hat
12 70 (1.28%) OpenAI
13 57 (1.04%) Informatica
14 56 (1.02%) IBM
15 53 (0.97%) Atlassian
16 48 (0.87%) CyberArk
17 45 (0.82%) Foundry
18 42 (0.77%) Cisco
18 42 (0.77%) MuleSoft
18 42 (0.77%) Okta