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

6 months to
22 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +1 -4
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,902 3,173 3,948
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.16% 10.75% 8.91%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.98% 11.88% 10.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,428 2,311 2,775
10th Percentile £375 £385 £404
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.79% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £606 £653 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 26 94
10th Percentile £39.53 £29.75 £50.38
25th Percentile £45.46 £52.50 £60.31
Median hourly rate £63.73 £71.61 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.01% +10.17% -0.76%
75th Percentile £76.75 £80.75 £69.50
90th Percentile £93.25 £87.50 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.62 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -5.76% +3.85% -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 37,756 26,715 38,313
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.98% 90.47% 86.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,946 17,208 24,897
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £740 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -1.33% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,227 936 2,327
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.22 £12.86
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £30.50 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year -6.15% - -7.29%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.52 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.35 £71.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.50 £31.76 £31.50
% change year-on-year -10.26% +0.83% -12.01%

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 March 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 22 March 2026.

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 March 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 +4 4,196 £525 -4.55% 1,442
UK excluding London +8 2,184 £500 -2.44% 1,111
London -1 2,108 £550 -4.35% 536
Work from Home -3 1,363 £525 -0.19% 787
North of England +6 769 £500 -4.53% 319
South East 0 447 £525 -5.41% 323
Midlands +10 413 £496 -0.75% 145
Yorkshire +2 405 £500 -3.61% 103
West Midlands +7 328 £505 +1.00% 94
North West +7 313 £488 -7.14% 162
South West +12 278 £525 -12.50% 156
Scotland +6 179 £450 - 61
East of England +22 118 £575 +15.58% 89
East Midlands +1 83 £438 -7.89% 51
North East 0 55 £475 -9.52% 56
Wales +12 40 £443 +108.11% 32
Northern Ireland -5 11 £475 +15.15% 8

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
1 303 (6.18%) Confluence
2 116 (2.37%) Apache Spark
3 97 (1.98%) SharePoint
4 90 (1.84%) Apache
5 84 (1.71%) SAS
6 62 (1.26%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.67%) CMS
7 33 (0.67%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.65%) nginx
9 28 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.49%) IIS
11 15 (0.31%) Mendix
12 12 (0.24%) Sitecore CMS
13 11 (0.22%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 11 (0.22%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.20%) Camunda
14 10 (0.20%) Palantir Foundry
15 9 (0.18%) WebLogic
16 8 (0.16%) GeoServer
16 8 (0.16%) Smallworld
Applications
1 90 (1.84%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 51 (1.04%) Microsoft Project
4 34 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
5 22 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 11 (0.22%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 4 (0.082%) Trello
9 2 (0.041%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.041%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.041%) Spreadsheet
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
Business Applications
1 74 (1.51%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 11 (0.22%) Aladdin
5 10 (0.20%) Maximo
6 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
7 7 (0.14%) Endur
8 6 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
8 6 (0.12%) SAP ERP
9 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
10 4 (0.082%) Payment Gateway
10 4 (0.082%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 3 (0.061%) Findur
11 3 (0.061%) NetSuite
11 3 (0.061%) Salesforce CRM
11 3 (0.061%) SAP BPC
11 3 (0.061%) SAP CO
11 3 (0.061%) SAP FI/CO
11 3 (0.061%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,631 (53.67%) Azure
2 1,698 (34.64%) AWS
3 1,447 (29.52%) Azure DevOps
4 933 (19.03%) GitHub
5 685 (13.97%) GCP
6 568 (11.59%) Serverless
7 511 (10.42%) GitHub Actions
8 415 (8.47%) Power Platform
9 305 (6.22%) AWS CloudFormation
10 272 (5.55%) AWS Lambda
11 262 (5.34%) Amazon S3
12 242 (4.94%) Azure Data Factory
13 216 (4.41%) Amazon EKS
13 216 (4.41%) Azure AKS
14 213 (4.35%) Entra ID
15 204 (4.16%) OpenShift
16 185 (3.77%) Azure Monitor
17 176 (3.59%) Dynamics 365
18 160 (3.26%) Amazon ECS
18 160 (3.26%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 212 (4.32%) Firewall
2 115 (2.35%) DNS
3 96 (1.96%) Network Security
4 89 (1.82%) VPN
5 45 (0.92%) TCP/IP
6 28 (0.57%) WAN
7 27 (0.55%) HTTP
8 26 (0.53%) SD-WAN
9 24 (0.49%) SSL
10 20 (0.41%) DHCP
11 19 (0.39%) SAN
12 17 (0.35%) BGP
13 16 (0.33%) HTTPS
13 16 (0.33%) MPLS
14 14 (0.29%) IPsec
15 13 (0.27%) Internet
15 13 (0.27%) Reverse Proxy
16 11 (0.22%) LAN
16 11 (0.22%) OpenVPN
17 10 (0.20%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 288 (5.88%) PostgreSQL
2 258 (5.26%) Power BI
3 224 (4.57%) SQL Server
4 194 (3.96%) NoSQL
5 169 (3.45%) Data Lake
6 140 (2.86%) Relational Database
7 129 (2.63%) Data Warehouse
8 122 (2.49%) Amazon RDS
9 118 (2.41%) Azure SQL Database
10 114 (2.33%) MongoDB
11 84 (1.71%) DynamoDB
12 78 (1.59%) Delta Lake
13 74 (1.51%) Oracle Database
14 72 (1.47%) Metadata
15 71 (1.45%) Elasticsearch
16 64 (1.31%) Big Data
17 62 (1.26%) MySQL
18 58 (1.18%) Redis
19 57 (1.16%) Tableau
20 55 (1.12%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 803 (16.38%) Jenkins
2 652 (13.30%) JIRA
3 646 (13.18%) Git
4 560 (11.42%) GitLab
5 137 (2.79%) Selenium
6 107 (2.18%) JUnit
7 94 (1.92%) Postman
8 85 (1.73%) Bitbucket
9 66 (1.35%) Cucumber
10 65 (1.33%) SonarQube
11 55 (1.12%) Cypress.io
12 54 (1.10%) JMeter
13 53 (1.08%) Artifactory
14 51 (1.04%) REST Assured
15 50 (1.02%) Sonatype Nexus
16 49 (1.00%) Maven
17 39 (0.80%) Visual Studio
18 35 (0.71%) Mockito
18 35 (0.71%) Oracle APEX
19 33 (0.67%) Liquibase
General
1 1,377 (28.09%) Social Skills
2 913 (18.63%) Finance
3 647 (13.20%) Public Sector
4 413 (8.43%) Analytical Skills
5 360 (7.34%) Banking
6 165 (3.37%) Documentation Skills
7 76 (1.55%) Influencing Skills
8 64 (1.31%) Financial Institution
9 61 (1.24%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 61 (1.24%) Retail
10 54 (1.10%) Marketing
11 52 (1.06%) Front Office
12 49 (1.00%) Organisational Skills
13 48 (0.98%) Investment Banking
14 47 (0.96%) Presentation Skills
15 43 (0.88%) Legal
16 40 (0.82%) Telecoms
17 31 (0.63%) Military
18 28 (0.57%) Pharmaceutical
19 25 (0.51%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 892 (18.20%) DevOps Engineer
2 803 (16.38%) Developer
3 682 (13.91%) Senior
4 531 (10.83%) Architect
5 412 (8.40%) Lead
6 303 (6.18%) Azure Engineer
7 285 (5.81%) Data Engineer
8 272 (5.55%) Analyst
9 251 (5.12%) AWS Engineer
10 194 (3.96%) AWS DevOps
11 186 (3.79%) Cloud Engineer
12 176 (3.59%) Platform Engineer
13 168 (3.43%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 157 (3.20%) Software Engineer
15 148 (3.02%) Senior Developer
16 145 (2.96%) Solutions Architect
17 140 (2.86%) Senior DevOps
18 138 (2.82%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 135 (2.75%) Business Analyst
20 130 (2.65%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 533 (10.87%) REST
2 434 (8.85%) .NET
3 321 (6.55%) React
4 313 (6.39%) Node.js
5 275 (5.61%) Kafka
6 269 (5.49%) RESTful
6 269 (5.49%) Spring
7 245 (5.00%) Spring Boot
8 191 (3.90%) AngularJS
9 160 (3.26%) JSON
10 150 (3.06%) OAuth
11 144 (2.94%) PySpark
12 141 (2.88%) HTML
12 141 (2.88%) YAML
13 139 (2.84%) Playwright
14 130 (2.65%) Elastic Stack
15 126 (2.57%) SOAP
16 119 (2.43%) CSS
17 108 (2.20%) Middleware
17 108 (2.20%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 721 (14.71%) Cloud Native
2 289 (5.90%) Product Ownership
3 184 (3.75%) Distributed Systems
4 130 (2.65%) Public Cloud
5 123 (2.51%) Onboarding
6 112 (2.28%) Legacy Systems
7 105 (2.14%) Hybrid Cloud
8 84 (1.71%) Enterprise Software
9 68 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
10 58 (1.18%) Virtual Team
11 56 (1.14%) Management Information System
12 53 (1.08%) Data Centre
13 46 (0.94%) NHS
14 45 (0.92%) Private Cloud
14 45 (0.92%) Self-Motivation
15 44 (0.90%) Security Posture
16 43 (0.88%) Data Structures
17 42 (0.86%) AI Agents
18 39 (0.80%) Greenfield Project
19 38 (0.78%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 488 (9.96%) Linux
2 257 (5.24%) Windows
3 94 (1.92%) Unix
4 69 (1.41%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 47 (0.96%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.90%) VMS
7 23 (0.47%) Ubuntu
8 15 (0.31%) CentOS
9 11 (0.22%) Android
9 11 (0.22%) Windows 10
10 8 (0.16%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
11 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.12%) Solaris
13 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.082%) Mac OS
15 3 (0.061%) Rocky
15 3 (0.061%) zOS
16 2 (0.041%) Debian
16 2 (0.041%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,793 (56.98%) CI/CD
2 1,890 (38.56%) Agile
3 1,248 (25.46%) Infrastructure as Code
4 903 (18.42%) Problem-Solving
5 890 (18.16%) Containerisation
6 739 (15.08%) Microservices
7 737 (15.03%) Test Automation
8 637 (12.99%) Continuous Improvement
9 618 (12.61%) Analytics
10 583 (11.89%) Migration
11 549 (11.20%) Scrum
12 537 (10.95%) Observability
13 522 (10.65%) AI
14 516 (10.53%) Stakeholder Management
15 440 (8.98%) Data Modelling
16 431 (8.79%) Software Engineering
17 386 (7.87%) Mentoring
18 362 (7.38%) Data Pipeline
19 357 (7.28%) Platform Engineering
20 346 (7.06%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,509 (30.78%) Python
2 1,026 (20.93%) SQL
3 640 (13.06%) Java
4 508 (10.36%) C#
5 451 (9.20%) JavaScript
6 390 (7.96%) PowerShell
7 366 (7.47%) Bash
8 310 (6.32%) TypeScript
9 162 (3.30%) Bicep
10 134 (2.73%) Go
11 81 (1.65%) PL/SQL
12 67 (1.37%) Scala
13 58 (1.18%) Shell Script
14 50 (1.02%) C++
14 50 (1.02%) Ruby
15 49 (1.00%) T-SQL
16 38 (0.78%) Groovy
17 31 (0.63%) Perl
18 30 (0.61%) Rust
19 28 (0.57%) Apex Code
Qualifications
1 1,526 (31.13%) Security Cleared
2 1,246 (25.42%) SC Cleared
3 378 (7.71%) Degree
4 210 (4.28%) Azure Certification
5 187 (3.81%) Computer Science Degree
6 151 (3.08%) DV Cleared
7 149 (3.04%) AWS Certification
8 136 (2.77%) BPSS Clearance
9 85 (1.73%) CISSP
10 76 (1.55%) Master's Degree
11 63 (1.29%) CISM
11 63 (1.29%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.16%) Microsoft Certification
13 56 (1.14%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 48 (0.98%) PMI Certification
15 39 (0.80%) PMP
16 37 (0.75%) Cisco Certification
17 34 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 28 (0.57%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 23 (0.47%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 433 (8.83%) QA
2 214 (4.37%) Data Quality
3 189 (3.86%) GDPR
4 158 (3.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 127 (2.59%) Accessibility
6 126 (2.57%) NIST
7 71 (1.45%) NCSC
8 41 (0.84%) PCI DSS
9 40 (0.82%) WCAG
10 36 (0.73%) PMO
11 28 (0.57%) SLA
12 27 (0.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 23 (0.47%) HIPAA
14 16 (0.33%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 16 (0.33%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.31%) ISO 20022
16 13 (0.27%) PSD2
17 12 (0.24%) GRC
17 12 (0.24%) NIST 800
18 11 (0.22%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,105 (22.54%) Docker
2 175 (3.57%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.59%) Virtual Machines
4 77 (1.57%) VMware Infrastructure
5 45 (0.92%) vSphere
6 32 (0.65%) VMware NSX
7 16 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.31%) Hyper-V
9 13 (0.27%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.22%) Lustre
10 11 (0.22%) Squid
11 9 (0.18%) GPFS
12 8 (0.16%) Firmware
12 8 (0.16%) Virtual Servers
13 7 (0.14%) Postfix
14 6 (0.12%) HDFS
15 5 (0.10%) Ceph
15 5 (0.10%) KVM
15 5 (0.10%) Oracle RAC
15 5 (0.10%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,440 (29.38%) Terraform
2 1,352 (27.58%) Kubernetes
3 514 (10.49%) Ansible
4 348 (7.10%) Grafana
5 287 (5.85%) Prometheus
6 105 (2.14%) Argo
7 73 (1.49%) Puppet
8 64 (1.31%) Single Sign-On
9 61 (1.24%) Istio
10 32 (0.65%) Packer
11 31 (0.63%) Progress Chef
12 28 (0.57%) vCenter Server
13 25 (0.51%) Kibana
14 20 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 20 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
14 20 (0.41%) Rancher
15 19 (0.39%) Podman
16 18 (0.37%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 17 (0.35%) Consul
17 17 (0.35%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 850 (17.34%) Microsoft
2 317 (6.47%) Oracle
3 293 (5.98%) Databricks
4 266 (5.43%) Google
5 203 (4.14%) Splunk
6 162 (3.30%) ServiceNow
7 151 (3.08%) Red Hat
8 129 (2.63%) VMware
9 120 (2.45%) Salesforce
10 106 (2.16%) SAP
11 84 (1.71%) OpenAI
12 73 (1.49%) Dynatrace
13 68 (1.39%) Atlassian
14 60 (1.22%) CyberArk
15 44 (0.90%) IBM
16 39 (0.80%) Cisco
17 38 (0.78%) Talend
18 36 (0.73%) Foundry
19 34 (0.69%) Denodo
20 29 (0.59%) Pure Storage