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 10 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,256 3,062 4,151
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.62% 10.42% 9.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.54% 11.45% 11.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,659 2,198 2,859
10th Percentile £385 £375 £400
25th Percentile £438 £438 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -6.14%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £650
90th Percentile £700 £747 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 118 17 120
10th Percentile £39.53 £33.10 £56.48
25th Percentile £61.00 £51.25 £61.51
Median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £66.50
Median % change year-on-year - +5.26% +1.53%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.58
90th Percentile £93.06 £90.25 £85.78
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.75 £68.75 £65.50
% change year-on-year - +4.96% -

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 41,920 26,731 37,187
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.71% 91.01% 85.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,154 16,984 23,772
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £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 2,513 1,182 2,587
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.28 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +61.14% -25.26% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.84 £56.00 £61.16
90th Percentile £81.24 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% +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 10 June 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 10 June 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 10 June 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 +2 4,465 £525 - 1,218
UK excluding London +6 2,324 £500 - 929
London +4 2,283 £550 - 453
Work from Home -1 1,441 £525 - 821
North of England +7 820 £500 - 270
South East -1 466 £513 +2.50% 281
Yorkshire +2 448 £501 +0.20% 80
Midlands +4 416 £488 -2.50% 109
West Midlands +3 328 £500 -4.58% 70
North West +1 306 £500 +1.27% 155
South West +14 275 £520 -5.45% 114
Scotland +1 196 £525 +6.28% 51
East of England +22 128 £525 +6.33% 76
North East +10 84 £450 -16.28% 40
East Midlands -3 84 £465 +0.54% 39
Wales +7 51 £425 +28.33% 25
Northern Ireland +9 19 £475 +15.85% 20
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
1 304 (5.78%) Confluence
2 136 (2.59%) Apache Spark
3 120 (2.28%) SharePoint
4 97 (1.85%) Apache Airflow
5 92 (1.75%) Apache
6 86 (1.64%) SAS
7 47 (0.89%) CMS
8 31 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
8 31 (0.59%) nginx
9 27 (0.51%) IIS
10 26 (0.49%) Jupyter
11 19 (0.36%) OpenStack
12 15 (0.29%) Camunda
13 14 (0.27%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 10 (0.19%) Mendix
16 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
17 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
18 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
18 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 77 (1.46%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.95%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 36 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
5 27 (0.51%) MS Visio
6 7 (0.13%) CPLEX
7 5 (0.095%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.076%) Notion
9 3 (0.057%) Trello
10 2 (0.038%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.038%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 65 (1.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 32 (0.61%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.25%) Oracle ERP
4 12 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.19%) Maximo
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 7 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
8 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.095%) Endur
9 5 (0.095%) Magento
9 5 (0.095%) Oracle EBS
10 4 (0.076%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 3 (0.057%) Findur
11 3 (0.057%) NEC Housing
11 3 (0.057%) OpenText MBPM
11 3 (0.057%) Oracle BPM
11 3 (0.057%) SAP BPC
11 3 (0.057%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.057%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,839 (54.01%) Azure
2 1,826 (34.74%) AWS
3 1,545 (29.39%) Azure DevOps
4 876 (16.67%) GitHub
5 677 (12.88%) GCP
6 524 (9.97%) GitHub Actions
7 475 (9.04%) Serverless
8 445 (8.47%) Power Platform
9 284 (5.40%) Amazon S3
10 258 (4.91%) AWS Lambda
11 254 (4.83%) AWS CloudFormation
12 237 (4.51%) Entra ID
13 218 (4.15%) Azure AKS
14 212 (4.03%) Amazon EKS
15 196 (3.73%) Azure Data Factory
16 170 (3.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 167 (3.18%) PaaS
18 164 (3.12%) Amazon EC2
19 158 (3.01%) Azure Monitor
20 154 (2.93%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 241 (4.59%) Firewall
2 138 (2.63%) DNS
3 111 (2.11%) Network Security
4 103 (1.96%) VPN
5 47 (0.89%) TCP/IP
6 45 (0.86%) WAN
7 37 (0.70%) SD-WAN
8 33 (0.63%) BGP
9 29 (0.55%) SSL
10 27 (0.51%) DHCP
10 27 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
11 25 (0.48%) SAN
12 24 (0.46%) OSPF
13 22 (0.42%) HTTP
13 22 (0.42%) Internet
14 19 (0.36%) IPsec
15 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
16 16 (0.30%) LAN
16 16 (0.30%) MPLS
17 15 (0.29%) BIG-IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 288 (5.48%) Power BI
2 262 (4.98%) SQL Server
3 240 (4.57%) PostgreSQL
4 181 (3.44%) NoSQL
5 171 (3.25%) Data Lake
6 156 (2.97%) Relational Database
7 145 (2.76%) Data Warehouse
8 137 (2.61%) MongoDB
9 112 (2.13%) Amazon RDS
10 108 (2.05%) Azure SQL Database
11 98 (1.86%) Metadata
12 96 (1.83%) DynamoDB
13 90 (1.71%) Delta Lake
14 72 (1.37%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.35%) Big Data
16 66 (1.26%) Amazon Athena
17 62 (1.18%) Elasticsearch
18 60 (1.14%) Redis
19 55 (1.05%) BigQuery
20 54 (1.03%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 745 (14.17%) Jenkins
2 654 (12.44%) Git
3 622 (11.83%) JIRA
4 552 (10.50%) GitLab
5 116 (2.21%) Selenium
6 109 (2.07%) Postman
7 87 (1.66%) SonarQube
8 80 (1.52%) JUnit
9 72 (1.37%) REST Assured
10 68 (1.29%) Bitbucket
11 62 (1.18%) Maven
12 61 (1.16%) Cucumber
13 56 (1.07%) JMeter
14 47 (0.89%) Cypress.io
15 46 (0.88%) Artifactory
16 42 (0.80%) Gatling
17 40 (0.76%) Gradle
18 37 (0.70%) Mockito
19 35 (0.67%) Visual Studio
20 31 (0.59%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,308 (24.89%) Social Skills
2 936 (17.81%) Finance
3 694 (13.20%) Public Sector
4 405 (7.71%) Analytical Skills
5 329 (6.26%) Banking
6 144 (2.74%) Documentation Skills
7 97 (1.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 77 (1.46%) Influencing Skills
9 69 (1.31%) Legal
9 69 (1.31%) Retail
10 56 (1.07%) Marketing
11 53 (1.01%) Organisational Skills
12 49 (0.93%) Financial Institution
13 46 (0.88%) Military
14 37 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
15 36 (0.68%) Investment Banking
16 35 (0.67%) Law
17 31 (0.59%) Front Office
18 30 (0.57%) Telecoms
19 26 (0.49%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,086 (20.66%) DevOps Engineer
2 770 (14.65%) Developer
3 746 (14.19%) Senior
4 616 (11.72%) Architect
5 474 (9.02%) Lead
6 342 (6.51%) Azure Engineer
7 316 (6.01%) Analyst
8 308 (5.86%) Data Engineer
9 260 (4.95%) AWS Engineer
10 199 (3.79%) Cloud Engineer
11 195 (3.71%) Platform Engineer
12 190 (3.61%) AWS DevOps
13 181 (3.44%) Solutions Architect
14 179 (3.41%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 176 (3.35%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 176 (3.35%) Senior DevOps
16 166 (3.16%) Java Developer
17 161 (3.06%) Business Analyst
18 160 (3.04%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 147 (2.80%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 477 (9.08%) REST
2 458 (8.71%) .NET
3 304 (5.78%) React
4 291 (5.54%) Spring
5 281 (5.35%) Spring Boot
6 280 (5.33%) Kafka
7 268 (5.10%) RESTful
8 236 (4.49%) Node.js
9 174 (3.31%) AngularJS
10 160 (3.04%) PySpark
11 157 (2.99%) OAuth
12 150 (2.85%) Playwright
13 135 (2.57%) JSON
14 122 (2.32%) YAML
15 118 (2.25%) SOAP
16 113 (2.15%) .NET Framework
17 110 (2.09%) OpenID
18 107 (2.04%) HTML
19 102 (1.94%) Middleware
19 102 (1.94%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 891 (16.95%) Cloud Native
2 329 (6.26%) Product Ownership
3 213 (4.05%) Distributed Systems
4 137 (2.61%) Onboarding
5 124 (2.36%) Legacy Systems
6 112 (2.13%) Public Cloud
7 111 (2.11%) Enterprise Software
8 107 (2.04%) Hybrid Cloud
9 83 (1.58%) Data Centre
10 80 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
11 65 (1.24%) Management Information System
12 60 (1.14%) Self-Motivation
13 52 (0.99%) Mobile App
14 51 (0.97%) Security Posture
14 51 (0.97%) Virtual Team
15 50 (0.95%) AI Agents
16 49 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
17 46 (0.88%) Private Cloud
18 43 (0.82%) Data Structures
19 42 (0.80%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 449 (8.54%) Linux
2 265 (5.04%) Windows
3 96 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 78 (1.48%) Unix
5 57 (1.08%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.76%) VMS
7 27 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 22 (0.42%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.30%) Android
10 13 (0.25%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Solaris
11 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) Windows 10
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 5 (0.095%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.095%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.095%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.076%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.076%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,035 (57.74%) CI/CD
2 1,929 (36.70%) Agile
3 1,404 (26.71%) Infrastructure as Code
4 833 (15.85%) Containerisation
5 770 (14.65%) Problem-Solving
6 750 (14.27%) Microservices
7 741 (14.10%) Test Automation
8 721 (13.72%) Continuous Improvement
9 641 (12.20%) Observability
10 640 (12.18%) Migration
11 607 (11.55%) Stakeholder Management
12 597 (11.36%) Analytics
13 594 (11.30%) AI
14 582 (11.07%) Scrum
15 535 (10.18%) Platform Engineering
16 525 (9.99%) Software Engineering
17 485 (9.23%) Data Modelling
18 442 (8.41%) Technical Leadership
19 428 (8.14%) Mentoring
20 417 (7.93%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,467 (27.91%) Python
2 1,001 (19.04%) SQL
3 714 (13.58%) Java
4 495 (9.42%) C#
5 384 (7.31%) JavaScript
6 377 (7.17%) PowerShell
7 375 (7.13%) Bash
8 264 (5.02%) TypeScript
9 181 (3.44%) Bicep
10 109 (2.07%) Go
11 64 (1.22%) Scala
12 63 (1.20%) Shell Script
13 59 (1.12%) Apex Code
14 49 (0.93%) T-SQL
15 48 (0.91%) PL/SQL
16 44 (0.84%) Groovy
17 33 (0.63%) C++
18 27 (0.51%) Kotlin
19 26 (0.49%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 26 (0.49%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,665 (31.68%) Security Cleared
2 1,396 (26.56%) SC Cleared
3 318 (6.05%) Degree
4 213 (4.05%) Azure Certification
5 175 (3.33%) BPSS Clearance
6 162 (3.08%) AWS Certification
7 156 (2.97%) DV Cleared
8 129 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.58%) CISSP
10 63 (1.20%) Microsoft Certification
11 56 (1.07%) ISTQB
12 50 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 49 (0.93%) CISM
14 46 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
15 44 (0.84%) PMI Certification
16 42 (0.80%) Master's Degree
17 41 (0.78%) PMP
18 29 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
20 23 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 439 (8.35%) QA
2 249 (4.74%) Data Quality
3 177 (3.37%) GDPR
4 146 (2.78%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 118 (2.25%) NIST
7 74 (1.41%) NCSC
8 59 (1.12%) WCAG
9 47 (0.89%) PCI DSS
10 45 (0.86%) SLA
11 32 (0.61%) PMO
12 31 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 25 (0.48%) GRC
14 18 (0.34%) HIPAA
15 14 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.23%) NIST 800
16 12 (0.23%) PSD2
17 10 (0.19%) SEPA
18 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 994 (18.91%) Docker
2 177 (3.37%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.50%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 35 (0.67%) vSphere
6 28 (0.53%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.34%) Squid
9 16 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 15 (0.29%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.27%) Postfix
12 8 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
13 7 (0.13%) Firmware
13 7 (0.13%) RACF
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 5 (0.095%) NFS
15 5 (0.095%) SRDF
16 4 (0.076%) Ceph
16 4 (0.076%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,514 (28.81%) Terraform
2 1,326 (25.23%) Kubernetes
3 502 (9.55%) Ansible
4 360 (6.85%) Grafana
5 307 (5.84%) Prometheus
6 93 (1.77%) Argo
7 77 (1.46%) Single Sign-On
8 66 (1.26%) Puppet
9 62 (1.18%) Istio
10 31 (0.59%) Progress Chef
11 30 (0.57%) Microsoft Intune
12 29 (0.55%) Packer
13 25 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 23 (0.44%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 20 (0.38%) HP ALM
16 18 (0.34%) Consul
16 18 (0.34%) Kibana
17 15 (0.29%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.29%) SCCM
18 13 (0.25%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 909 (17.29%) Microsoft
2 281 (5.35%) Databricks
3 278 (5.29%) Oracle
4 249 (4.74%) Google
5 188 (3.58%) Splunk
6 180 (3.42%) ServiceNow
7 162 (3.08%) Salesforce
8 136 (2.59%) Red Hat
9 121 (2.30%) VMware
10 120 (2.28%) SAP
11 109 (2.07%) Dynatrace
12 72 (1.37%) OpenAI
13 52 (0.99%) IBM
14 50 (0.95%) Atlassian
15 48 (0.91%) CyberArk
15 48 (0.91%) Informatica
16 42 (0.80%) Cisco
17 38 (0.72%) AppDynamics
17 38 (0.72%) Foundry
17 38 (0.72%) Okta