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

6 months to
31 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,625 3,602 3,845
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.47% 10.93% 9.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.37% 12.08% 11.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,910 2,536 2,623
10th Percentile £385 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £728
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 126 28 76
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.58 £56.75
25th Percentile £55.69 £52.19 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.60 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.90% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £94.06 £95.00 £85.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.11 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.65% -4.29% +7.69%

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 45,455 29,807 32,988
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.58% 90.45% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,783 18,569 20,737
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,905 1,767 1,609
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.75 £17.30 £18.89
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +3.56%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.31 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.56 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +92.49% -47.37% +14.67%

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 31 August 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 31 August 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 31 August 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 4,802 £525 - 2,174
London 0 2,539 £550 - 1,160
UK excluding London -1 2,407 £500 - 1,324
Work from Home +1 1,627 £525 +2.44% 1,028
North of England 0 797 £500 +5.26% 350
South East -7 462 £525 +5.00% 358
Midlands -1 445 £488 -2.50% 161
Yorkshire -1 392 £500 +2.04% 114
West Midlands -2 352 £492 -5.11% 92
South West +6 313 £546 +4.05% 214
North West -2 310 £510 +13.33% 177
Scotland -1 208 £494 +3.95% 95
East of England +15 142 £505 -3.81% 93
North East +17 112 £431 -17.07% 61
East Midlands +6 89 £459 +1.94% 68
Wales -4 49 £513 +36.67% 37
Northern Ireland +17 21 £450 +9.76% 31
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 339 (6.03%) Confluence
2 154 (2.74%) SharePoint
3 126 (2.24%) Apache Spark
4 124 (2.20%) Apache Airflow
5 113 (2.01%) Apache
6 62 (1.10%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
9 36 (0.64%) IIS
10 25 (0.44%) nginx
11 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.28%) Camunda
13 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
14 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
15 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
16 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
17 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
18 9 (0.16%) Appian
19 7 (0.12%) Mule
19 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
Applications
1 65 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.12%) Microsoft Project
3 43 (0.76%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
5 32 (0.57%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 6 (0.11%) Trello
9 5 (0.089%) Notion
9 5 (0.089%) Windchill
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 76 (1.35%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Magento
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 7 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 4 (0.071%) Maximo
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,090 (54.93%) Azure
2 2,003 (35.61%) AWS
3 1,786 (31.75%) Azure DevOps
4 975 (17.33%) GitHub
5 708 (12.59%) GCP
6 611 (10.86%) GitHub Actions
7 486 (8.64%) Power Platform
8 456 (8.11%) Serverless
9 291 (5.17%) Amazon S3
10 275 (4.89%) AWS Lambda
11 261 (4.64%) Entra ID
12 238 (4.23%) Amazon EKS
13 237 (4.21%) AWS CloudFormation
14 226 (4.02%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 221 (3.93%) Azure AKS
16 220 (3.91%) Azure Monitor
17 200 (3.56%) Azure Data Factory
18 182 (3.24%) Dynamics 365
19 180 (3.20%) Amazon EC2
20 164 (2.92%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 251 (4.46%) Firewall
2 174 (3.09%) DNS
3 124 (2.20%) VPN
4 112 (1.99%) Network Security
5 68 (1.21%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.92%) WAN
7 47 (0.84%) DHCP
7 47 (0.84%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 36 (0.64%) HTTP
10 33 (0.59%) BGP
11 32 (0.57%) Internet
12 29 (0.52%) SSH
12 29 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
13 24 (0.43%) OSPF
14 21 (0.37%) SAN
14 21 (0.37%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 323 (5.74%) Power BI
2 296 (5.26%) SQL Server
3 292 (5.19%) PostgreSQL
4 209 (3.72%) Data Warehouse
5 188 (3.34%) NoSQL
6 178 (3.16%) MongoDB
6 178 (3.16%) Relational Database
7 167 (2.97%) Data Lake
8 133 (2.36%) Amazon RDS
9 123 (2.19%) Metadata
10 111 (1.97%) Azure SQL Database
11 91 (1.62%) DynamoDB
12 88 (1.56%) Delta Lake
13 80 (1.42%) Oracle Database
13 80 (1.42%) Redis
14 76 (1.35%) MySQL
15 67 (1.19%) Amazon Redshift
16 60 (1.07%) Big Data
17 57 (1.01%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 53 (0.94%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 796 (14.15%) Jenkins
2 788 (14.01%) Git
3 677 (12.04%) JIRA
4 613 (10.90%) GitLab
5 141 (2.51%) Selenium
6 103 (1.83%) Postman
7 99 (1.76%) SonarQube
8 93 (1.65%) JUnit
9 90 (1.60%) Maven
10 80 (1.42%) Bitbucket
11 72 (1.28%) JMeter
11 72 (1.28%) REST Assured
12 71 (1.26%) Cypress.io
13 62 (1.10%) Gradle
14 56 (1.00%) Cucumber
15 50 (0.89%) Gatling
16 44 (0.78%) Claude Code
17 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
17 43 (0.76%) Mockito
18 41 (0.73%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,456 (25.88%) Social Skills
2 1,002 (17.81%) Finance
3 823 (14.63%) Public Sector
4 508 (9.03%) Analytical Skills
5 368 (6.54%) Banking
6 159 (2.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 103 (1.83%) Retail
8 94 (1.67%) Documentation Skills
9 74 (1.32%) Influencing Skills
10 66 (1.17%) Legal
11 65 (1.16%) Organisational Skills
12 55 (0.98%) Marketing
13 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
13 51 (0.91%) Investment Banking
14 50 (0.89%) Military
14 50 (0.89%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.82%) Law
16 42 (0.75%) Financial Institution
16 42 (0.75%) Front Office
17 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,122 (19.95%) DevOps Engineer
2 915 (16.27%) Developer
3 841 (14.95%) Senior
4 631 (11.22%) Architect
5 540 (9.60%) Lead
6 356 (6.33%) Azure Engineer
7 307 (5.46%) Data Engineer
8 279 (4.96%) Analyst
9 262 (4.66%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.16%) Platform Engineer
11 204 (3.63%) Azure DevOps Engineer
11 204 (3.63%) Cloud Engineer
12 199 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
13 190 (3.38%) Java Developer
14 184 (3.27%) Senior DevOps Engineer
15 183 (3.25%) AWS DevOps
16 172 (3.06%) Solutions Architect
17 170 (3.02%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 157 (2.79%) Senior Developer
19 147 (2.61%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,669 (29.67%) Terraform
2 588 (10.45%) REST
3 485 (8.62%) .NET
4 371 (6.60%) Kafka
5 345 (6.13%) RESTful
6 304 (5.40%) Spring
7 292 (5.19%) React
8 290 (5.16%) Spring Boot
9 211 (3.75%) Node.js
10 182 (3.24%) JSON
11 168 (2.99%) Playwright
12 165 (2.93%) OAuth
13 158 (2.81%) PySpark
14 137 (2.44%) HTML
15 136 (2.42%) .NET Framework
16 130 (2.31%) SOAP
17 127 (2.26%) CSS
18 126 (2.24%) AngularJS
19 118 (2.10%) OAuth2
20 116 (2.06%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,023 (18.19%) Cloud Native
2 421 (7.48%) Product Ownership
3 262 (4.66%) Distributed Systems
4 188 (3.34%) Enterprise Software
5 182 (3.24%) Onboarding
6 154 (2.74%) Legacy Systems
7 149 (2.65%) Hybrid Cloud
8 89 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
9 88 (1.56%) AI Agents
10 82 (1.46%) Self-Motivation
11 79 (1.40%) Management Information System
12 76 (1.35%) Public Cloud
13 74 (1.32%) Data Structures
14 69 (1.23%) Data Centre
15 68 (1.21%) Replication
16 66 (1.17%) Security Posture
17 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
18 56 (1.00%) Virtual Team
19 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
20 49 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 528 (9.39%) Linux
2 308 (5.48%) Windows
3 112 (1.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 102 (1.81%) Unix
5 92 (1.64%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.69%) VMS
7 33 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
12 8 (0.14%) CentOS
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,347 (59.50%) CI/CD
2 2,285 (40.62%) Agile
3 1,614 (28.69%) Infrastructure as Code
4 940 (16.71%) Continuous Improvement
5 932 (16.57%) Containerisation
6 876 (15.57%) Test Automation
7 873 (15.52%) Problem-Solving
7 873 (15.52%) Stakeholder Management
8 831 (14.77%) Microservices
9 802 (14.26%) AI
10 750 (13.33%) Observability
11 739 (13.14%) Platform Engineering
12 699 (12.43%) Software Engineering
13 679 (12.07%) Scrum
14 673 (11.96%) Migration
15 585 (10.40%) Analytics
16 582 (10.35%) Technical Leadership
17 530 (9.42%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 479 (8.52%) Roadmaps
19 470 (8.36%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,609 (28.60%) Python
2 1,014 (18.03%) SQL
3 808 (14.36%) Java
4 497 (8.84%) C#
5 489 (8.69%) PowerShell
6 480 (8.53%) Bash
7 456 (8.11%) JavaScript
8 310 (5.51%) TypeScript
9 253 (4.50%) Bicep
10 99 (1.76%) Go
11 78 (1.39%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
13 66 (1.17%) T-SQL
14 63 (1.12%) Groovy
14 63 (1.12%) Scala
15 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
16 35 (0.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 34 (0.60%) Perl
18 31 (0.55%) C++
19 25 (0.44%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,809 (32.16%) Security Cleared
2 1,528 (27.16%) SC Cleared
3 336 (5.97%) Degree
4 232 (4.12%) Azure Certification
5 226 (4.02%) BPSS Clearance
6 206 (3.66%) DV Cleared
7 188 (3.34%) AWS Certification
8 134 (2.38%) Computer Science Degree
9 101 (1.80%) Microsoft Certification
10 74 (1.32%) CISSP
11 63 (1.12%) ISTQB
12 56 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 51 (0.91%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 25 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
19 23 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 526 (9.35%) QA
2 279 (4.96%) Data Quality
3 203 (3.61%) Accessibility
4 134 (2.38%) GDPR
5 104 (1.85%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 82 (1.46%) NIST
6 82 (1.46%) WCAG
7 54 (0.96%) NCSC
8 53 (0.94%) PMO
9 39 (0.69%) SLA
10 34 (0.60%) PCI DSS
11 29 (0.52%) GRC
12 25 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.28%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
15 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) HL7
15 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,143 (20.32%) Docker
2 175 (3.11%) Active Directory
3 92 (1.64%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.50%) Hyper-V
6 26 (0.46%) vSphere
7 20 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.20%) IAG
10 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.16%) Postfix
12 7 (0.12%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 5 (0.089%) Firmware
14 5 (0.089%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,512 (26.88%) Kubernetes
2 537 (9.55%) Ansible
3 371 (6.60%) Grafana
4 315 (5.60%) Prometheus
5 84 (1.49%) Argo
6 61 (1.08%) Puppet
7 54 (0.96%) Single Sign-On
8 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Microsoft Intune
10 39 (0.69%) Istio
11 35 (0.62%) Packer
12 25 (0.44%) Kibana
13 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
14 20 (0.36%) SCCM
14 20 (0.36%) vCenter Server
15 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
16 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
17 14 (0.25%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,101 (19.57%) Microsoft
2 301 (5.35%) Oracle
3 289 (5.14%) Databricks
4 266 (4.73%) Google
5 200 (3.56%) ServiceNow
6 184 (3.27%) Salesforce
6 184 (3.27%) Splunk
7 145 (2.58%) Dynatrace
8 129 (2.29%) VMware
9 112 (1.99%) SAP
10 106 (1.88%) Red Hat
11 65 (1.16%) IBM
12 62 (1.10%) OpenAI
13 61 (1.08%) Informatica
13 61 (1.08%) MuleSoft
14 50 (0.89%) Cisco
15 47 (0.84%) Foundry
16 45 (0.80%) AppDynamics
17 44 (0.78%) Atlassian
18 36 (0.64%) CyberArk