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

6 months to
14 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 13 13
Rank change year-on-year -2 0 +1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,738 3,811 3,724
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.38% 11.49% 9.94%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.25% 12.69% 11.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,004 2,654 2,487
10th Percentile £381 £363 £375
25th Percentile £434 £425 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £734
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 23 59
10th Percentile £37.55 £44.25 £46.18
25th Percentile £57.44 £54.88 £65.00
Median hourly rate £69.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.73% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £88.13 £73.50
90th Percentile £92.03 £95.00 £79.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -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 46,826 30,024 32,246
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.73% 90.50% 86.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,144 18,679 19,408
10th Percentile £325 £294 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.42%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £737 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,407 1,886 1,245
10th Percentile £13.64 £14.38 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.00 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +49.11% -37.13% -10.11%
75th Percentile £65.00 £42.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.72 £65.07 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £22.27 £40.33
% change year-on-year +68.43% -44.79% -8.14%

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 14 October 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 14 October 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 14 October 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 -1 4,872 £525 - 4,037
London -1 2,603 £550 - 2,065
UK excluding London -3 2,403 £500 - 2,150
Work from Home -2 1,640 £525 - 1,867
North of England -4 802 £500 +4.17% 645
South East -10 456 £543 +8.50% 503
Midlands -8 422 £486 -5.58% 237
Yorkshire -4 382 £500 - 218
West Midlands -7 344 £490 -6.67% 140
South West +5 326 £550 - 233
North West -4 322 £521 +15.80% 324
Scotland -7 222 £475 -5.00% 170
East of England -2 146 £505 -4.94% 202
North East +11 112 £450 -18.18% 108
East Midlands -11 76 £425 +1.19% 97
Wales -10 41 £375 -8.54% 84
Northern Ireland +25 23 £600 - 87
Channel Islands - 2 £500 -

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
1 348 (6.06%) Confluence
2 162 (2.82%) SharePoint
3 137 (2.39%) Apache Spark
4 126 (2.20%) Apache
5 125 (2.18%) Apache Airflow
6 58 (1.01%) SAS
7 46 (0.80%) Jupyter
8 42 (0.73%) CMS
9 35 (0.61%) nginx
10 31 (0.54%) IIS
11 20 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.28%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.21%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.19%) Tomcat
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 75 (1.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 56 (0.98%) Microsoft Project
2 56 (0.98%) MS Visio
3 43 (0.75%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 39 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
5 14 (0.24%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
7 8 (0.14%) Windchill
8 5 (0.087%) Notion
8 5 (0.087%) Trello
9 3 (0.052%) Gliffy
9 3 (0.052%) Mingle
10 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.017%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.017%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.017%) Sketch
11 1 (0.017%) Weka
Business Applications
1 82 (1.43%) Dynamics CRM
2 46 (0.80%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.26%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.21%) SAP MDG
5 11 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
6 10 (0.17%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 9 (0.16%) Magento
8 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
9 6 (0.10%) Aladdin
9 6 (0.10%) Remedy ITSM
10 5 (0.087%) Dynamics AX
10 5 (0.087%) OpenText MBPM
10 5 (0.087%) Oracle BPM
10 5 (0.087%) Teamcenter
10 5 (0.087%) Temenos T24
11 4 (0.070%) Maximo
11 4 (0.070%) Oracle Payroll
11 4 (0.070%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.052%) FLEXCUBE
12 3 (0.052%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 3,120 (54.37%) Azure
2 2,056 (35.83%) AWS
3 1,790 (31.20%) Azure DevOps
4 1,031 (17.97%) GitHub
5 788 (13.73%) GCP
6 650 (11.33%) GitHub Actions
7 507 (8.84%) Power Platform
8 489 (8.52%) Serverless
9 317 (5.52%) Amazon S3
10 293 (5.11%) AWS Lambda
11 278 (4.84%) Entra ID
12 274 (4.78%) Amazon EKS
13 265 (4.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 241 (4.20%) AWS CloudFormation
15 228 (3.97%) Azure Monitor
16 226 (3.94%) Azure AKS
17 208 (3.62%) Amazon EC2
18 201 (3.50%) Azure Data Factory
19 199 (3.47%) Dynamics 365
20 190 (3.31%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.22%) Firewall
2 191 (3.33%) DNS
3 125 (2.18%) Network Security
4 124 (2.16%) VPN
5 84 (1.46%) TCP/IP
6 56 (0.98%) DHCP
7 55 (0.96%) SSL
8 46 (0.80%) WAN
9 39 (0.68%) BGP
9 39 (0.68%) HTTP
10 32 (0.56%) Internet
11 30 (0.52%) SSH
12 28 (0.49%) OSPF
12 28 (0.49%) SD-WAN
13 21 (0.37%) LAN
13 21 (0.37%) VLAN
14 19 (0.33%) BIG-IP
14 19 (0.33%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 18 (0.31%) Wi-Fi
16 16 (0.28%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 321 (5.59%) Power BI
2 314 (5.47%) PostgreSQL
3 305 (5.32%) SQL Server
4 208 (3.62%) Data Warehouse
5 197 (3.43%) MongoDB
6 187 (3.26%) NoSQL
7 183 (3.19%) Data Lake
8 168 (2.93%) Relational Database
9 161 (2.81%) Amazon RDS
10 128 (2.23%) Metadata
11 111 (1.93%) Azure SQL Database
12 92 (1.60%) DynamoDB
13 91 (1.59%) MySQL
14 90 (1.57%) Oracle Database
15 86 (1.50%) Delta Lake
16 85 (1.48%) Redis
17 65 (1.13%) Big Data
17 65 (1.13%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 63 (1.10%) Amazon Redshift
19 58 (1.01%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 897 (15.63%) Git
2 856 (14.92%) Jenkins
3 678 (11.82%) GitLab
4 675 (11.76%) JIRA
5 152 (2.65%) Selenium
6 105 (1.83%) JUnit
7 99 (1.73%) Postman
8 98 (1.71%) Maven
9 92 (1.60%) SonarQube
10 85 (1.48%) Cucumber
11 77 (1.34%) Cypress.io
11 77 (1.34%) REST Assured
12 75 (1.31%) Bitbucket
13 69 (1.20%) Gradle
14 63 (1.10%) JMeter
15 59 (1.03%) Claude Code
16 52 (0.91%) Mockito
17 46 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
18 45 (0.78%) Visual Studio
19 39 (0.68%) Gatling
General
1 1,546 (26.94%) Social Skills
2 1,073 (18.70%) Finance
3 839 (14.62%) Public Sector
4 565 (9.85%) Analytical Skills
5 436 (7.60%) Banking
6 172 (3.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 116 (2.02%) Retail
8 93 (1.62%) Influencing Skills
9 80 (1.39%) Documentation Skills
10 62 (1.08%) Aerospace
10 62 (1.08%) Legal
11 60 (1.05%) Investment Banking
11 60 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
12 57 (0.99%) Marketing
13 56 (0.98%) Military
14 53 (0.92%) Telecoms
15 50 (0.87%) Manufacturing
16 49 (0.85%) Financial Institution
17 46 (0.80%) Law
17 46 (0.80%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,137 (19.82%) DevOps Engineer
2 947 (16.50%) Developer
3 875 (15.25%) Senior
4 649 (11.31%) Architect
5 554 (9.65%) Lead
6 355 (6.19%) Azure Engineer
7 324 (5.65%) Data Engineer
8 266 (4.64%) AWS Engineer
9 258 (4.50%) Analyst
10 234 (4.08%) Platform Engineer
11 212 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
13 200 (3.49%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 197 (3.43%) Java Developer
15 189 (3.29%) AWS DevOps
16 185 (3.22%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 178 (3.10%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 175 (3.05%) Solutions Architect
19 156 (2.72%) Senior Developer
20 146 (2.54%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,766 (30.78%) Terraform
2 712 (12.41%) REST
3 514 (8.96%) .NET
4 409 (7.13%) Kafka
5 372 (6.48%) RESTful
6 314 (5.47%) Spring
7 309 (5.39%) Spring Boot
8 304 (5.30%) React
9 208 (3.62%) OAuth
10 196 (3.42%) Node.js
11 187 (3.26%) JSON
12 162 (2.82%) Playwright
13 157 (2.74%) PySpark
14 148 (2.58%) HTML
15 142 (2.47%) OAuth2
16 137 (2.39%) .NET Framework
17 136 (2.37%) SOAP
18 135 (2.35%) Middleware
19 134 (2.34%) CSS
20 128 (2.23%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,088 (18.96%) Cloud Native
2 435 (7.58%) Product Ownership
3 282 (4.91%) Distributed Systems
4 240 (4.18%) Enterprise Software
5 223 (3.89%) Onboarding
6 162 (2.82%) Hybrid Cloud
7 152 (2.65%) Legacy Systems
8 118 (2.06%) AI Agents
9 107 (1.86%) Management Information System
10 86 (1.50%) Self-Motivation
11 83 (1.45%) Public Cloud
12 80 (1.39%) Security Posture
13 79 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
14 77 (1.34%) Data Centre
15 76 (1.32%) Data Structures
16 72 (1.25%) Replication
17 68 (1.19%) PKI
18 66 (1.15%) Enterprise Cloud
19 56 (0.98%) Virtual Team
20 52 (0.91%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 598 (10.42%) Linux
2 342 (5.96%) Windows
3 126 (2.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 118 (2.06%) Unix
5 106 (1.85%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.68%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.61%) VMS
8 26 (0.45%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.31%) Android
9 18 (0.31%) CentOS
10 12 (0.21%) zOS
11 11 (0.19%) Amazon Linux
12 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
12 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
13 8 (0.14%) AIX
13 8 (0.14%) macOS
14 7 (0.12%) Solaris
15 5 (0.087%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.070%) Windows Server 2008
17 3 (0.052%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,581 (62.41%) CI/CD
2 2,353 (41.01%) Agile
3 1,749 (30.48%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,028 (17.92%) Stakeholder Management
5 1,009 (17.58%) Continuous Improvement
6 975 (16.99%) Containerisation
6 975 (16.99%) Test Automation
7 944 (16.45%) AI
8 927 (16.16%) Problem-Solving
9 858 (14.95%) Microservices
10 826 (14.40%) Observability
11 814 (14.19%) Platform Engineering
12 784 (13.66%) Software Engineering
13 720 (12.55%) Migration
14 702 (12.23%) Scrum
15 645 (11.24%) Technical Leadership
16 583 (10.16%) Analytics
17 536 (9.34%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 520 (9.06%) Roadmaps
19 510 (8.89%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 1,713 (29.85%) Python
2 1,001 (17.45%) SQL
3 847 (14.76%) Java
4 542 (9.45%) Bash
5 534 (9.31%) PowerShell
6 531 (9.25%) C#
7 481 (8.38%) JavaScript
8 346 (6.03%) TypeScript
9 284 (4.95%) Bicep
10 133 (2.32%) Go
11 86 (1.50%) Shell Script
12 73 (1.27%) Scala
13 68 (1.19%) Groovy
13 68 (1.19%) T-SQL
14 60 (1.05%) Apex Code
15 57 (0.99%) PL/SQL
16 39 (0.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 37 (0.64%) Perl
18 36 (0.63%) C++
19 33 (0.58%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,840 (32.07%) Security Cleared
2 1,536 (26.77%) SC Cleared
3 378 (6.59%) Degree
4 258 (4.50%) Azure Certification
4 258 (4.50%) DV Cleared
5 255 (4.44%) BPSS Clearance
6 220 (3.83%) AWS Certification
7 149 (2.60%) Computer Science Degree
8 110 (1.92%) Microsoft Certification
9 83 (1.45%) CISSP
10 68 (1.19%) ISTQB
11 61 (1.06%) PMP
12 58 (1.01%) PMI Certification
13 56 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 49 (0.85%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 42 (0.73%) Master's Degree
16 33 (0.58%) CISM
17 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.45%) (ISC)2 CCSP
19 24 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 568 (9.90%) QA
2 294 (5.12%) Data Quality
3 223 (3.89%) Accessibility
4 132 (2.30%) GDPR
5 100 (1.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.45%) WCAG
7 66 (1.15%) NIST
8 57 (0.99%) NCSC
9 48 (0.84%) PMO
10 35 (0.61%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.61%) SLA
11 26 (0.45%) GRC
12 23 (0.40%) ISO 20022
13 18 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 16 (0.28%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials
15 15 (0.26%) SEPA
16 14 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
17 13 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,212 (21.12%) Docker
2 175 (3.05%) Active Directory
3 84 (1.46%) VMware Infrastructure
4 80 (1.39%) Virtual Machines
5 32 (0.56%) vSphere
6 24 (0.42%) Virtual Desktop
6 24 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
7 22 (0.38%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.24%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.19%) Squid
10 10 (0.17%) IAG
10 10 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.14%) zsh
12 7 (0.12%) Virtual Servers
13 6 (0.10%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.10%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.10%) Postfix
13 6 (0.10%) RACF
14 5 (0.087%) KVM
15 4 (0.070%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,601 (27.90%) Kubernetes
2 557 (9.71%) Ansible
3 387 (6.74%) Grafana
4 324 (5.65%) Prometheus
5 73 (1.27%) Argo
6 56 (0.98%) Puppet
7 51 (0.89%) Microsoft Intune
8 49 (0.85%) Progress Chef
9 44 (0.77%) Kibana
10 42 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
11 38 (0.66%) Packer
12 32 (0.56%) Istio
13 25 (0.44%) Kubeflow
14 23 (0.40%) Kustomize
15 21 (0.37%) SCCM
16 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
18 14 (0.24%) HP ALM
19 13 (0.23%) Karpenter
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,169 (20.37%) Microsoft
2 332 (5.79%) Google
3 325 (5.66%) Databricks
4 307 (5.35%) Oracle
5 198 (3.45%) ServiceNow
6 192 (3.35%) Splunk
7 168 (2.93%) Salesforce
8 158 (2.75%) Dynatrace
9 125 (2.18%) VMware
10 117 (2.04%) SAP
11 99 (1.73%) Red Hat
12 77 (1.34%) OpenAI
13 71 (1.24%) IBM
14 70 (1.22%) MuleSoft
15 64 (1.12%) Foundry
16 46 (0.80%) Informatica
17 44 (0.77%) Cisco
18 41 (0.71%) Atlassian
19 40 (0.70%) Okta
20 38 (0.66%) AppDynamics