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 22 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -7
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,187 3,676 4,429
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.65% 10.01% 9.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.01% 11.57% 10.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,928 2,459 3,228
10th Percentile £363 £381 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £558 £568
Median % change year-on-year -5.83% -1.76% -5.42%
75th Percentile £615 £663 £670
90th Percentile £700 £743 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 42 99
10th Percentile - £41.74 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £60.79 £51.63
Median hourly rate £61.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £85.63 £74.00 £76.53
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -16.43% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and 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 32,181 31,778 41,284
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.57% 86.49% 88.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,153 19,119 27,753
10th Percentile £300 £310 £308
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £740 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,131 1,159 1,593
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.10 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.12 £19.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £33.93 £44.00
Median % change year-on-year -25.88% -22.89% +25.71%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.85 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -29.71% -26.97% +44.76%

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 22 November 2025.

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 22 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Top 17 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 22 November 2025. 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 3,550 £525 -8.70% 2,645
UK excluding London +5 1,900 £500 -9.09% 1,604
London -1 1,775 £550 -5.98% 1,323
Work from Home 0 1,342 £525 -4.55% 1,482
North of England +3 613 £492 -3.77% 445
South East +2 378 £500 -16.67% 502
Midlands +11 369 £515 -6.36% 187
Yorkshire -1 324 £500 - 122
West Midlands +11 299 £525 -8.70% 121
North West +4 261 £457 -16.24% 274
South West +1 225 £538 -10.42% 206
Scotland +8 218 £475 +5.56% 111
East of England +27 107 £525 - 108
East Midlands +23 70 £418 -12.11% 62
Wales +6 44 £450 +9.09% 50
North East -10 30 £550 -5.98% 50
Northern Ireland -3 6 - - 26

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
1 260 (6.21%) Confluence
2 103 (2.46%) Apache
3 71 (1.70%) SharePoint
4 70 (1.67%) Apache Airflow
5 64 (1.53%) SAS
6 57 (1.36%) Apache Spark
7 40 (0.96%) CMS
8 39 (0.93%) nginx
9 33 (0.79%) IIS
10 29 (0.69%) JBoss
11 28 (0.67%) OpenStack
12 27 (0.64%) WebLogic
13 25 (0.60%) CICS
14 22 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
15 21 (0.50%) WebSphere
16 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
16 15 (0.36%) Mule
17 14 (0.33%) Oracle SOA Suite
18 12 (0.29%) WebSphere Application Server
19 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
Applications
1 74 (1.77%) Microsoft Excel
2 40 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 35 (0.84%) Microsoft Office
4 32 (0.76%) Microsoft Project
5 19 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.36%) Chatbot
7 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Trello
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.024%) Moqups
9 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 67 (1.60%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.48%) Endur
3 19 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
4 18 (0.43%) Oracle BPM
5 17 (0.41%) Aladdin
6 16 (0.38%) VisionPLUS
7 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
8 13 (0.31%) Maximo
9 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
10 5 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
10 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 4 (0.096%) Fidessa
11 4 (0.096%) NEC Housing
11 4 (0.096%) SAP ERP
11 4 (0.096%) Teamcenter
11 4 (0.096%) thinkFolio
11 4 (0.096%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.072%) Oracle EBS
12 3 (0.072%) SAP CO
12 3 (0.072%) SAP FI
Cloud Services
1 2,039 (48.70%) Azure
2 1,581 (37.76%) AWS
3 1,122 (26.80%) Azure DevOps
4 719 (17.17%) GitHub
5 582 (13.90%) GCP
6 475 (11.34%) Serverless
7 410 (9.79%) GitHub Actions
8 284 (6.78%) Power Platform
9 272 (6.50%) Amazon S3
10 267 (6.38%) AWS CloudFormation
11 265 (6.33%) AWS Lambda
12 218 (5.21%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 205 (4.90%) Amazon EC2
14 182 (4.35%) Azure AKS
15 171 (4.08%) Amazon EKS
16 159 (3.80%) Amazon ECS
16 159 (3.80%) SaaS
17 156 (3.73%) Azure Data Factory
18 152 (3.63%) Dynamics 365
19 149 (3.56%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 204 (4.87%) Firewall
2 132 (3.15%) DNS
3 88 (2.10%) VPN
4 69 (1.65%) Network Security
5 68 (1.62%) TCP/IP
6 67 (1.60%) SSL
7 51 (1.22%) HTTP
8 36 (0.86%) HTTPS
9 34 (0.81%) SSH
10 31 (0.74%) SMTP
11 30 (0.72%) WAN
12 24 (0.57%) FTP
13 20 (0.48%) BGP
14 18 (0.43%) DHCP
14 18 (0.43%) Kerberos
15 16 (0.38%) LAN
15 16 (0.38%) OpenLDAP
16 15 (0.36%) MPLS
16 15 (0.36%) SD-WAN
17 12 (0.29%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 281 (6.71%) PostgreSQL
2 174 (4.16%) Amazon RDS
2 174 (4.16%) NoSQL
3 170 (4.06%) Power BI
4 163 (3.89%) SQL Server
5 120 (2.87%) MongoDB
6 102 (2.44%) Data Warehouse
6 102 (2.44%) Relational Database
7 92 (2.20%) Oracle Database
8 91 (2.17%) Data Lake
9 70 (1.67%) Azure SQL Database
10 69 (1.65%) DynamoDB
11 66 (1.58%) MySQL
12 62 (1.48%) Redis
13 56 (1.34%) Amazon Aurora
14 51 (1.22%) Elasticsearch
15 50 (1.19%) Metadata
16 41 (0.98%) Delta Lake
17 38 (0.91%) Big Data
18 36 (0.86%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 814 (19.44%) Jenkins
2 683 (16.31%) Git
3 614 (14.66%) JIRA
4 532 (12.71%) GitLab
5 145 (3.46%) Selenium
6 112 (2.67%) JUnit
7 103 (2.46%) SonarQube
8 99 (2.36%) Sonatype Nexus
9 97 (2.32%) Bitbucket
10 86 (2.05%) Postman
11 67 (1.60%) Cypress.io
12 62 (1.48%) Cucumber
12 62 (1.48%) Liquibase
13 61 (1.46%) Maven
14 50 (1.19%) Artifactory
14 50 (1.19%) Gradle
15 45 (1.07%) JMeter
15 45 (1.07%) Visual Studio
16 40 (0.96%) CircleCI
17 39 (0.93%) Oracle APEX
General
1 1,320 (31.53%) Social Skills
2 771 (18.41%) Finance
3 532 (12.71%) Public Sector
4 362 (8.65%) Banking
5 359 (8.57%) Analytical Skills
6 134 (3.20%) Documentation Skills
7 72 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 72 (1.72%) Investment Banking
8 65 (1.55%) Marketing
9 63 (1.50%) Financial Institution
10 61 (1.46%) Telecoms
11 55 (1.31%) Retail
12 53 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
13 46 (1.10%) Presentation Skills
14 41 (0.98%) Front Office
15 35 (0.84%) Back Office
16 31 (0.74%) Pharmaceutical
17 29 (0.69%) Manufacturing
17 29 (0.69%) Military
18 28 (0.67%) Law
Job Titles
1 830 (19.82%) Developer
2 766 (18.29%) DevOps Engineer
3 558 (13.33%) Senior
4 352 (8.41%) Architect
5 320 (7.64%) Lead
6 259 (6.19%) AWS Engineer
7 209 (4.99%) Azure Engineer
8 199 (4.75%) AWS DevOps
9 195 (4.66%) Analyst
10 190 (4.54%) Data Engineer
11 169 (4.04%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 166 (3.96%) Senior Developer
13 163 (3.89%) Software Engineer
14 152 (3.63%) Cloud Engineer
15 146 (3.49%) Platform Engineer
16 141 (3.37%) Java Developer
17 130 (3.10%) Consultant
18 110 (2.63%) Business Analyst
19 108 (2.58%) Senior DevOps
20 103 (2.46%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 477 (11.39%) REST
2 371 (8.86%) .NET
3 319 (7.62%) RESTful
4 254 (6.07%) React
5 250 (5.97%) Node.js
6 238 (5.68%) Kafka
7 211 (5.04%) JSON
8 188 (4.49%) Spring
9 186 (4.44%) SOAP
10 185 (4.42%) Spring Boot
11 163 (3.89%) HTML
12 156 (3.73%) OAuth
13 154 (3.68%) AngularJS
14 153 (3.65%) Elastic Stack
15 147 (3.51%) XML
16 114 (2.72%) CSS
17 112 (2.67%) YAML
18 91 (2.17%) Web Services
19 88 (2.10%) .NET Core
20 82 (1.96%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 544 (12.99%) Cloud Native
2 236 (5.64%) Product Ownership
3 173 (4.13%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (3.06%) Onboarding
5 110 (2.63%) Legacy Systems
6 103 (2.46%) Public Cloud
7 73 (1.74%) Hybrid Cloud
8 70 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
9 69 (1.65%) Virtual Team
10 68 (1.62%) Mobile App
11 63 (1.50%) Replication
12 54 (1.29%) Greenfield Project
13 53 (1.27%) Enterprise Software
14 52 (1.24%) Security Posture
15 50 (1.19%) Management Information System
16 45 (1.07%) Algorithms
17 43 (1.03%) Data Centre
18 41 (0.98%) Self-Motivation
19 40 (0.96%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
20 36 (0.86%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 521 (12.44%) Linux
2 256 (6.11%) Windows
3 116 (2.77%) Unix
4 66 (1.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.53%) Windows Server
6 53 (1.27%) Android
7 47 (1.12%) VMS
8 46 (1.10%) Apple iOS
9 26 (0.62%) Amazon Linux
10 24 (0.57%) Ubuntu
11 22 (0.53%) CentOS
12 16 (0.38%) Solaris
12 16 (0.38%) Windows 10
13 11 (0.26%) Mac OS
13 11 (0.26%) zOS
14 7 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 3 (0.072%) AIX
16 3 (0.072%) Debian
16 3 (0.072%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,349 (56.10%) CI/CD
2 1,849 (44.16%) Agile
3 1,076 (25.70%) Infrastructure as Code
4 832 (19.87%) Problem-Solving
5 802 (19.15%) Containerisation
6 666 (15.91%) Test Automation
7 626 (14.95%) Microservices
8 527 (12.59%) Scrum
9 459 (10.96%) Migration
10 444 (10.60%) Continuous Improvement
11 424 (10.13%) Software Engineering
12 409 (9.77%) Analytics
13 372 (8.88%) AI
14 357 (8.53%) Observability
15 320 (7.64%) Stakeholder Management
16 318 (7.59%) Mentoring
17 303 (7.24%) SDLC
18 286 (6.83%) Infrastructure Automation
19 275 (6.57%) DevSecOps
20 269 (6.42%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,358 (32.43%) Python
2 796 (19.01%) SQL
3 627 (14.97%) Java
4 445 (10.63%) JavaScript
5 414 (9.89%) C#
6 394 (9.41%) Bash
7 380 (9.08%) PowerShell
8 289 (6.90%) TypeScript
9 177 (4.23%) Go
10 117 (2.79%) Bicep
11 80 (1.91%) PL/SQL
12 77 (1.84%) Shell Script
13 66 (1.58%) Groovy
14 57 (1.36%) Perl
15 54 (1.29%) C++
16 51 (1.22%) Scala
17 46 (1.10%) Ruby
18 35 (0.84%) T-SQL
19 34 (0.81%) Kotlin
20 30 (0.72%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,131 (27.01%) Security Cleared
2 937 (22.38%) SC Cleared
3 344 (8.22%) Degree
4 185 (4.42%) Computer Science Degree
5 160 (3.82%) AWS Certification
6 153 (3.65%) Azure Certification
7 135 (3.22%) DV Cleared
8 86 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
9 79 (1.89%) Master's Degree
10 70 (1.67%) CISSP
11 63 (1.50%) Microsoft Certification
12 56 (1.34%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 46 (1.10%) CISM
14 42 (1.00%) ISTQB
15 35 (0.84%) Cisco Certification
16 33 (0.79%) PMI Certification
17 28 (0.67%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 27 (0.64%) PMP
19 18 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
20 17 (0.41%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 389 (9.29%) QA
2 151 (3.61%) GDPR
3 139 (3.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 130 (3.10%) Accessibility
5 120 (2.87%) Data Quality
6 106 (2.53%) NIST
7 47 (1.12%) NCSC
8 36 (0.86%) PCI DSS
9 27 (0.64%) WCAG
10 26 (0.62%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.48%) PMO
11 20 (0.48%) SLA
12 19 (0.45%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.38%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.33%) MiFID
15 13 (0.31%) PSD2
15 13 (0.31%) SEPA
16 12 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials
16 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
17 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 1,054 (25.17%) Docker
2 190 (4.54%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.96%) VMware Infrastructure
4 58 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.69%) vSphere
6 24 (0.57%) DFS Replication
7 16 (0.38%) Postfix
8 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.31%) Squid
10 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
10 12 (0.29%) Hyper-V
10 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
10 12 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
11 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
12 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
13 8 (0.19%) GPFS
13 8 (0.19%) Lustre
13 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,321 (31.55%) Terraform
2 1,217 (29.07%) Kubernetes
3 537 (12.83%) Ansible
4 323 (7.71%) Grafana
5 311 (7.43%) Prometheus
6 86 (2.05%) Puppet
7 81 (1.93%) Argo
8 70 (1.67%) Single Sign-On
9 58 (1.39%) Progress Chef
10 45 (1.07%) Kibana
11 40 (0.96%) Packer
12 34 (0.81%) Istio
13 21 (0.50%) ITRS Geneos
13 21 (0.50%) Podman
14 20 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
14 20 (0.48%) SCCM
15 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
15 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.38%) Nessus
17 15 (0.36%) logstash
Vendors
1 717 (17.12%) Microsoft
2 304 (7.26%) Oracle
3 228 (5.45%) Google
4 200 (4.78%) Splunk
5 180 (4.30%) Databricks
6 174 (4.16%) ServiceNow
7 122 (2.91%) Salesforce
8 114 (2.72%) VMware
9 109 (2.60%) SAP
10 96 (2.29%) Red Hat
11 65 (1.55%) Dynatrace
12 61 (1.46%) IBM
13 59 (1.41%) MuleSoft
14 48 (1.15%) OpenAI
15 46 (1.10%) Atlassian
15 46 (1.10%) Cisco
15 46 (1.10%) F5
16 38 (0.91%) Palo Alto
17 37 (0.88%) Talend
18 36 (0.86%) CyberArk