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 16 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,085 3,020 3,981
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.59% 10.37% 9.36%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.55% 11.39% 10.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,545 2,199 2,742
10th Percentile £381 £387 £400
25th Percentile £438 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% -5.66%
75th Percentile £606 £640 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 20 109
10th Percentile £39.53 £34.53 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.38 £55.00 £61.25
Median hourly rate £68.00 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.14% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £77.50
90th Percentile £95.00 £92.75 £87.09
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £71.61 £65.00
% change year-on-year -5.74% +10.17% -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 40,526 26,506 36,695
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.38% 90.99% 86.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,448 17,044 23,613
10th Percentile £325 £305 £300
25th Percentile £413 £410 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.94% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £626 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.58% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,394 1,081 2,430
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.30 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.20 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.41 £36.02
Median % change year-on-year +49.60% -21.13% +0.06%
75th Percentile £67.49 £60.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.43 £37.50
% change year-on-year +76.96% -32.19% +7.14%

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 16 May 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 16 May 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 16 May 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 4,339 £525 -3.67% 1,381
UK excluding London +9 2,241 £500 - 966
London +3 2,218 £550 -3.51% 557
Work from Home -3 1,371 £525 - 1,172
North of England +7 759 £500 -2.44% 285
South East +1 478 £513 +2.40% 301
Yorkshire +2 412 £500 -2.44% 77
Midlands +4 397 £488 -2.50% 105
West Midlands +3 308 £500 -4.58% 63
South West +16 289 £525 -4.55% 121
North West +2 286 £500 - 152
Scotland +2 181 £475 - 51
East of England +31 128 £525 +3.45% 76
East Midlands +1 86 £465 -0.80% 42
North East +8 73 £450 -14.29% 58
Wales +6 45 £425 +39.13% 26
Northern Ireland 0 13 £525 +25.75% 14
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
1 287 (5.64%) Confluence
2 131 (2.58%) Apache Spark
3 117 (2.30%) SharePoint
4 86 (1.69%) Apache
5 81 (1.59%) SAS
6 67 (1.32%) Apache Airflow
7 39 (0.77%) CMS
8 31 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
9 30 (0.59%) nginx
10 24 (0.47%) IIS
10 24 (0.47%) OpenStack
11 14 (0.28%) Mendix
12 12 (0.24%) Jupyter
12 12 (0.24%) WebSphere
13 10 (0.20%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 10 (0.20%) Camunda
13 10 (0.20%) HCL Notes
14 9 (0.18%) Sitecore CMS
15 8 (0.16%) ArcGIS
15 8 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 73 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 59 (1.16%) Microsoft Project
3 48 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 33 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 24 (0.47%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.079%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.079%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.079%) Trello
7 2 (0.039%) Adobe XD
7 2 (0.039%) Spreadsheet
8 1 (0.020%) InDesign
8 1 (0.020%) Maya
8 1 (0.020%) Weka
Business Applications
1 62 (1.22%) Dynamics CRM
2 29 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.28%) Oracle ERP
4 12 (0.24%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.20%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.18%) Maximo
6 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
7 8 (0.16%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.098%) Oracle EBS
9 5 (0.098%) SAP MDG
10 4 (0.079%) Endur
10 4 (0.079%) Magento
10 4 (0.079%) SAP BPC
11 3 (0.059%) Findur
11 3 (0.059%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.059%) SAP Oil and Gas
12 2 (0.039%) SAP CO
12 2 (0.039%) SAP FI/CO
12 2 (0.039%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 2,757 (54.22%) Azure
2 1,722 (33.86%) AWS
3 1,496 (29.42%) Azure DevOps
4 864 (16.99%) GitHub
5 669 (13.16%) GCP
6 509 (10.01%) GitHub Actions
7 490 (9.64%) Serverless
8 433 (8.52%) Power Platform
9 272 (5.35%) Amazon S3
10 263 (5.17%) AWS CloudFormation
11 249 (4.90%) AWS Lambda
12 228 (4.48%) Entra ID
13 226 (4.44%) Azure AKS
14 219 (4.31%) Azure Data Factory
15 203 (3.99%) Amazon EKS
16 174 (3.42%) OpenShift
17 167 (3.28%) Azure Monitor
17 167 (3.28%) PaaS
18 154 (3.03%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 154 (3.03%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 215 (4.23%) Firewall
2 122 (2.40%) DNS
3 99 (1.95%) Network Security
4 94 (1.85%) VPN
5 43 (0.85%) TCP/IP
6 35 (0.69%) WAN
7 31 (0.61%) SD-WAN
8 27 (0.53%) BGP
8 27 (0.53%) HTTP
9 26 (0.51%) SSL
10 23 (0.45%) SAN
11 22 (0.43%) DHCP
12 20 (0.39%) Wi-Fi
13 19 (0.37%) IPsec
14 18 (0.35%) OSPF
15 16 (0.31%) MPLS
15 16 (0.31%) Reverse Proxy
16 14 (0.28%) LAN
17 13 (0.26%) Internet
17 13 (0.26%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 283 (5.57%) Power BI
2 249 (4.90%) SQL Server
3 242 (4.76%) PostgreSQL
4 179 (3.52%) NoSQL
5 174 (3.42%) Data Lake
6 161 (3.17%) Relational Database
7 137 (2.69%) Data Warehouse
8 125 (2.46%) MongoDB
9 113 (2.22%) Azure SQL Database
10 104 (2.05%) Amazon RDS
11 93 (1.83%) DynamoDB
12 92 (1.81%) Metadata
13 90 (1.77%) Delta Lake
14 74 (1.46%) Big Data
15 71 (1.40%) Oracle Database
16 68 (1.34%) Elasticsearch
17 61 (1.20%) Amazon Athena
18 55 (1.08%) Redis
19 52 (1.02%) BigQuery
20 49 (0.96%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 739 (14.53%) Jenkins
2 645 (12.68%) Git
3 613 (12.06%) JIRA
4 519 (10.21%) GitLab
5 106 (2.08%) Postman
5 106 (2.08%) Selenium
6 82 (1.61%) SonarQube
7 79 (1.55%) JUnit
8 65 (1.28%) Bitbucket
9 62 (1.22%) REST Assured
10 59 (1.16%) Maven
11 57 (1.12%) Cucumber
12 56 (1.10%) JMeter
13 52 (1.02%) Artifactory
14 47 (0.92%) Cypress.io
15 44 (0.87%) Gatling
16 35 (0.69%) Gradle
17 32 (0.63%) Mockito
18 30 (0.59%) Sonatype Nexus
19 29 (0.57%) NUnit
General
1 1,249 (24.56%) Social Skills
2 910 (17.90%) Finance
3 640 (12.59%) Public Sector
4 405 (7.96%) Analytical Skills
5 318 (6.25%) Banking
6 146 (2.87%) Documentation Skills
7 73 (1.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 69 (1.36%) Influencing Skills
9 64 (1.26%) Legal
10 62 (1.22%) Retail
11 54 (1.06%) Marketing
12 53 (1.04%) Financial Institution
13 50 (0.98%) Organisational Skills
14 42 (0.83%) Front Office
15 41 (0.81%) Presentation Skills
16 40 (0.79%) Military
17 37 (0.73%) Investment Banking
18 35 (0.69%) Telecoms
19 24 (0.47%) Aerospace
19 24 (0.47%) Law
Job Titles
1 1,038 (20.41%) DevOps Engineer
2 747 (14.69%) Developer
3 710 (13.96%) Senior
4 586 (11.52%) Architect
5 422 (8.30%) Lead
6 342 (6.73%) Azure Engineer
7 311 (6.12%) Data Engineer
8 307 (6.04%) Analyst
9 237 (4.66%) AWS Engineer
10 185 (3.64%) Cloud Engineer
11 179 (3.52%) Platform Engineer
12 173 (3.40%) AWS DevOps
12 173 (3.40%) Solutions Architect
13 167 (3.28%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 166 (3.26%) Senior DevOps
15 159 (3.13%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 153 (3.01%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 153 (3.01%) Software Engineer
17 151 (2.97%) Business Analyst
18 139 (2.73%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 461 (9.07%) REST
2 450 (8.85%) .NET
3 302 (5.94%) React
4 287 (5.64%) Kafka
5 282 (5.55%) Spring
6 267 (5.25%) Spring Boot
7 263 (5.17%) Node.js
8 258 (5.07%) RESTful
9 169 (3.32%) AngularJS
10 159 (3.13%) Playwright
11 153 (3.01%) PySpark
12 149 (2.93%) OAuth
13 144 (2.83%) JSON
14 129 (2.54%) YAML
15 114 (2.24%) Middleware
16 113 (2.22%) SOAP
17 112 (2.20%) HTML
18 99 (1.95%) .NET Framework
18 99 (1.95%) OpenID
19 96 (1.89%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 805 (15.83%) Cloud Native
2 323 (6.35%) Product Ownership
3 195 (3.83%) Distributed Systems
4 132 (2.60%) Onboarding
5 108 (2.12%) Legacy Systems
5 108 (2.12%) Public Cloud
6 97 (1.91%) Enterprise Software
7 94 (1.85%) Hybrid Cloud
8 84 (1.65%) Data Protection Act
9 65 (1.28%) Data Centre
10 56 (1.10%) Management Information System
11 51 (1.00%) Self-Motivation
12 49 (0.96%) Virtual Team
13 45 (0.88%) Private Cloud
14 44 (0.87%) Low-Code
15 43 (0.85%) AI Agents
15 43 (0.85%) Data Structures
15 43 (0.85%) Greenfield Project
15 43 (0.85%) Replication
16 42 (0.83%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 447 (8.79%) Linux
2 254 (5.00%) Windows
3 83 (1.63%) Unix
4 79 (1.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (0.94%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.83%) VMS
7 24 (0.47%) Ubuntu
8 19 (0.37%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.31%) Android
10 11 (0.22%) CentOS
11 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.16%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.12%) Solaris
15 5 (0.098%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.098%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.098%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.079%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.079%) zOS
17 3 (0.059%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,909 (57.21%) CI/CD
2 1,860 (36.58%) Agile
3 1,296 (25.49%) Infrastructure as Code
4 831 (16.34%) Containerisation
5 790 (15.54%) Problem-Solving
6 733 (14.41%) Microservices
7 718 (14.12%) Test Automation
8 667 (13.12%) Continuous Improvement
9 610 (12.00%) Migration
10 607 (11.94%) Observability
11 582 (11.45%) Analytics
12 540 (10.62%) Scrum
13 538 (10.58%) Stakeholder Management
14 521 (10.25%) AI
15 484 (9.52%) Data Modelling
16 477 (9.38%) Software Engineering
17 451 (8.87%) Platform Engineering
18 400 (7.87%) Mentoring
19 393 (7.73%) Data Pipeline
20 392 (7.71%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 1,395 (27.43%) Python
2 998 (19.63%) SQL
3 669 (13.16%) Java
4 496 (9.75%) C#
5 383 (7.53%) JavaScript
6 349 (6.86%) PowerShell
7 347 (6.82%) Bash
8 281 (5.53%) TypeScript
9 173 (3.40%) Bicep
10 110 (2.16%) Go
11 69 (1.36%) Scala
12 64 (1.26%) Shell Script
13 55 (1.08%) PL/SQL
14 53 (1.04%) Apex Code
15 48 (0.94%) Groovy
16 44 (0.87%) T-SQL
17 38 (0.75%) C++
18 27 (0.53%) Ruby
19 25 (0.49%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 24 (0.47%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,609 (31.64%) Security Cleared
2 1,337 (26.29%) SC Cleared
3 321 (6.31%) Degree
4 208 (4.09%) Azure Certification
5 157 (3.09%) BPSS Clearance
6 152 (2.99%) DV Cleared
7 145 (2.85%) Computer Science Degree
8 138 (2.71%) AWS Certification
9 78 (1.53%) CISSP
10 58 (1.14%) Microsoft Certification
11 56 (1.10%) ISTQB
12 54 (1.06%) CISM
13 53 (1.04%) Master's Degree
14 50 (0.98%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 46 (0.90%) PMI Certification
16 44 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
17 41 (0.81%) PMP
18 28 (0.55%) TOGAF Certification
19 27 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
20 21 (0.41%) IIBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 446 (8.77%) QA
2 244 (4.80%) Data Quality
3 182 (3.58%) GDPR
4 137 (2.69%) Accessibility
5 133 (2.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 124 (2.44%) NIST
7 67 (1.32%) NCSC
8 53 (1.04%) WCAG
9 47 (0.92%) PCI DSS
10 36 (0.71%) PMO
11 34 (0.67%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 34 (0.67%) SLA
12 21 (0.41%) GRC
13 18 (0.35%) HIPAA
14 15 (0.29%) ISO 20022
15 14 (0.28%) NIST 800
15 14 (0.28%) PSD2
16 12 (0.24%) SEPA
16 12 (0.24%) SOC 2
17 10 (0.20%) HL7
System Software
1 984 (19.35%) Docker
2 174 (3.42%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.57%) Virtual Machines
4 70 (1.38%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.65%) vSphere
6 26 (0.51%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.35%) Squid
7 18 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.26%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.24%) Postfix
10 10 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
11 8 (0.16%) Firmware
11 8 (0.16%) HDFS
12 6 (0.12%) Corosync
12 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.12%) RACF
13 5 (0.098%) Ceph
13 5 (0.098%) NFS
14 4 (0.079%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
14 4 (0.079%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 1,436 (28.24%) Terraform
2 1,304 (25.64%) Kubernetes
3 488 (9.60%) Ansible
4 352 (6.92%) Grafana
5 288 (5.66%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.85%) Argo
7 70 (1.38%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.36%) Puppet
9 65 (1.28%) Istio
10 28 (0.55%) Progress Chef
11 26 (0.51%) Microsoft Intune
11 26 (0.51%) Packer
12 23 (0.45%) HP ALM
12 23 (0.45%) Kibana
13 21 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 16 (0.31%) Rancher
16 15 (0.29%) SCCM
17 14 (0.28%) Consul
17 14 (0.28%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 880 (17.31%) Microsoft
2 288 (5.66%) Databricks
3 286 (5.62%) Oracle
4 239 (4.70%) Google
5 199 (3.91%) Splunk
6 181 (3.56%) ServiceNow
7 160 (3.15%) Salesforce
8 138 (2.71%) Red Hat
9 120 (2.36%) SAP
10 115 (2.26%) VMware
11 105 (2.06%) Dynatrace
12 72 (1.42%) OpenAI
13 53 (1.04%) CyberArk
14 48 (0.94%) Atlassian
15 44 (0.87%) IBM
16 43 (0.85%) Informatica
17 42 (0.83%) Cisco
18 38 (0.75%) AppDynamics
18 38 (0.75%) Foundry
19 36 (0.71%) Denodo