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

6 months to
27 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -4
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,177 2,977 4,024
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.62% 10.42% 9.43%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.57% 11.45% 10.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,609 2,162 2,794
10th Percentile £385 £380 £400
25th Percentile £438 £443 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -6.38%
75th Percentile £610 £638 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 17 112
10th Percentile £39.53 £33.10 £56.28
25th Percentile £56.75 £51.25 £61.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £73.23 £65.25
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% +12.22% -0.38%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £77.50
90th Percentile £92.50 £89.50 £86.86
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £73.23 £65.25
% change year-on-year -7.82% +12.22% -0.38%

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 41,181 26,010 36,599
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.50% 91.03% 85.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,765 16,696 23,578
10th Percentile £325 £303 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.14% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £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 2,462 1,066 2,486
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.73 £17.92 £16.00
Median hourly rate £41.94 £27.45 £36.02
Median % change year-on-year +52.79% -23.80% -2.64%
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.05 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.69 £25.15 £37.75
% change year-on-year +69.72% -33.38% +7.86%

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 27 May 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 27 May 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 27 May 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 +3 4,412 £525 -1.58% 1,378
UK excluding London +8 2,287 £500 - 969
London +4 2,251 £550 -2.22% 586
Work from Home -3 1,392 £525 - 752
North of England +7 786 £500 - 310
South East +3 484 £513 +2.65% 254
Yorkshire +2 445 £500 - 85
Midlands +5 405 £488 -2.50% 113
West Midlands +1 316 £500 -4.58% 79
South West +16 288 £525 -4.55% 126
North West +1 285 £500 - 178
Scotland +1 184 £475 - 52
East of England +20 128 £525 +3.45% 68
East Midlands +1 85 £465 +0.54% 34
North East +3 72 £450 -16.28% 50
Wales +4 49 £425 +39.13% 33
Northern Ireland 0 14 £531 +27.25% 26
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
1 288 (5.56%) Confluence
2 134 (2.59%) Apache Spark
3 117 (2.26%) SharePoint
4 90 (1.74%) Apache
5 79 (1.53%) Apache Airflow
6 78 (1.51%) SAS
7 42 (0.81%) CMS
8 30 (0.58%) nginx
9 27 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
10 26 (0.50%) IIS
11 21 (0.41%) OpenStack
12 16 (0.31%) Jupyter
13 14 (0.27%) Camunda
13 14 (0.27%) Mendix
14 13 (0.25%) WebSphere
15 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
16 10 (0.19%) HCL Notes
17 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
18 8 (0.15%) Adobe Experience Manager
19 7 (0.14%) ArcGIS
Applications
1 73 (1.41%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.12%) Microsoft Project
3 47 (0.91%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 34 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 26 (0.50%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.077%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.077%) CPLEX
6 4 (0.077%) Trello
7 3 (0.058%) Notion
8 2 (0.039%) Adobe XD
8 2 (0.039%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.019%) InDesign
9 1 (0.019%) Maya
9 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 60 (1.16%) Dynamics CRM
2 30 (0.58%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 11 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
5 9 (0.17%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.17%) Maximo
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.12%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.097%) Endur
8 5 (0.097%) Magento
8 5 (0.097%) NEC Housing
8 5 (0.097%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.077%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.058%) Findur
10 3 (0.058%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.058%) SAP MM
10 3 (0.058%) SAP Oil and Gas
11 2 (0.039%) OpenText MBPM
11 2 (0.039%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 2,815 (54.38%) Azure
2 1,753 (33.86%) AWS
3 1,525 (29.46%) Azure DevOps
4 868 (16.77%) GitHub
5 668 (12.90%) GCP
6 509 (9.83%) GitHub Actions
7 470 (9.08%) Serverless
8 440 (8.50%) Power Platform
9 271 (5.23%) Amazon S3
10 255 (4.93%) AWS CloudFormation
11 240 (4.64%) AWS Lambda
12 231 (4.46%) Entra ID
13 223 (4.31%) Azure AKS
14 220 (4.25%) Azure Data Factory
15 194 (3.75%) Amazon EKS
16 180 (3.48%) OpenShift
17 166 (3.21%) Azure Monitor
18 162 (3.13%) PaaS
19 155 (2.99%) Amazon EC2
20 149 (2.88%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 220 (4.25%) Firewall
2 127 (2.45%) DNS
3 102 (1.97%) Network Security
4 96 (1.85%) VPN
5 45 (0.87%) TCP/IP
6 39 (0.75%) WAN
7 34 (0.66%) SD-WAN
8 31 (0.60%) BGP
9 28 (0.54%) SSL
10 25 (0.48%) HTTP
11 24 (0.46%) SAN
11 24 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
12 23 (0.44%) DHCP
13 21 (0.41%) OSPF
14 19 (0.37%) IPsec
15 17 (0.33%) MPLS
16 16 (0.31%) Internet
16 16 (0.31%) Reverse Proxy
16 16 (0.31%) VXLAN
17 15 (0.29%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 285 (5.51%) Power BI
2 263 (5.08%) SQL Server
3 249 (4.81%) PostgreSQL
4 182 (3.52%) NoSQL
5 181 (3.50%) Data Lake
6 156 (3.01%) Relational Database
7 141 (2.72%) Data Warehouse
8 133 (2.57%) MongoDB
9 115 (2.22%) Azure SQL Database
10 104 (2.01%) Amazon RDS
11 96 (1.85%) Delta Lake
12 95 (1.84%) DynamoDB
12 95 (1.84%) Metadata
13 74 (1.43%) Big Data
14 73 (1.41%) Oracle Database
15 66 (1.27%) Elasticsearch
16 61 (1.18%) Amazon Athena
17 56 (1.08%) Redis
18 54 (1.04%) BigQuery
19 50 (0.97%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 733 (14.16%) Jenkins
2 647 (12.50%) Git
3 611 (11.80%) JIRA
4 533 (10.30%) GitLab
5 111 (2.14%) Selenium
6 107 (2.07%) Postman
7 86 (1.66%) SonarQube
8 82 (1.58%) JUnit
9 67 (1.29%) REST Assured
10 62 (1.20%) Bitbucket
11 61 (1.18%) Maven
12 59 (1.14%) Cucumber
13 56 (1.08%) JMeter
14 49 (0.95%) Artifactory
14 49 (0.95%) Cypress.io
15 43 (0.83%) Gatling
16 38 (0.73%) Mockito
17 37 (0.71%) Gradle
18 33 (0.64%) Visual Studio
19 32 (0.62%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,272 (24.57%) Social Skills
2 925 (17.87%) Finance
3 655 (12.65%) Public Sector
4 400 (7.73%) Analytical Skills
5 334 (6.45%) Banking
6 141 (2.72%) Documentation Skills
7 80 (1.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 75 (1.45%) Influencing Skills
9 71 (1.37%) Legal
10 67 (1.29%) Retail
11 55 (1.06%) Financial Institution
12 52 (1.00%) Marketing
12 52 (1.00%) Organisational Skills
13 41 (0.79%) Military
14 38 (0.73%) Front Office
14 38 (0.73%) Investment Banking
14 38 (0.73%) Presentation Skills
15 30 (0.58%) Law
16 28 (0.54%) Telecoms
17 24 (0.46%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,069 (20.65%) DevOps Engineer
2 758 (14.64%) Developer
3 718 (13.87%) Senior
4 594 (11.47%) Architect
5 450 (8.69%) Lead
6 349 (6.74%) Azure Engineer
7 314 (6.07%) Data Engineer
8 306 (5.91%) Analyst
9 249 (4.81%) AWS Engineer
10 188 (3.63%) Cloud Engineer
11 182 (3.52%) Platform Engineer
12 178 (3.44%) AWS DevOps
13 174 (3.36%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 174 (3.36%) Solutions Architect
14 172 (3.32%) Senior DevOps
15 166 (3.21%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 157 (3.03%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 155 (2.99%) Business Analyst
18 152 (2.94%) Java Developer
19 150 (2.90%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 469 (9.06%) REST
2 464 (8.96%) .NET
3 312 (6.03%) React
4 285 (5.51%) Kafka
5 279 (5.39%) Spring
6 270 (5.22%) Spring Boot
7 261 (5.04%) RESTful
8 250 (4.83%) Node.js
9 169 (3.26%) AngularJS
10 162 (3.13%) PySpark
11 156 (3.01%) Playwright
12 153 (2.96%) OAuth
13 138 (2.67%) JSON
14 132 (2.55%) YAML
15 117 (2.26%) SOAP
16 111 (2.14%) Middleware
17 109 (2.11%) HTML
18 105 (2.03%) .NET Framework
19 102 (1.97%) OpenID
20 97 (1.87%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 833 (16.09%) Cloud Native
2 328 (6.34%) Product Ownership
3 201 (3.88%) Distributed Systems
4 135 (2.61%) Onboarding
5 116 (2.24%) Legacy Systems
6 107 (2.07%) Public Cloud
7 105 (2.03%) Enterprise Software
8 102 (1.97%) Hybrid Cloud
9 84 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
10 72 (1.39%) Data Centre
11 58 (1.12%) Management Information System
12 55 (1.06%) Self-Motivation
13 48 (0.93%) Virtual Team
14 47 (0.91%) AI Agents
14 47 (0.91%) Private Cloud
15 45 (0.87%) Data Structures
15 45 (0.87%) Mobile App
16 44 (0.85%) Greenfield Project
17 43 (0.83%) Low-Code
17 43 (0.83%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 451 (8.71%) Linux
2 258 (4.98%) Windows
3 81 (1.56%) Unix
4 80 (1.55%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (0.97%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.81%) VMS
7 24 (0.46%) Ubuntu
8 18 (0.35%) Apple iOS
9 14 (0.27%) Android
10 12 (0.23%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.15%) Windows 10
13 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.12%) Solaris
15 5 (0.097%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.097%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.097%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.077%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.077%) zOS
17 3 (0.058%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,979 (57.54%) CI/CD
2 1,875 (36.22%) Agile
3 1,337 (25.83%) Infrastructure as Code
4 813 (15.70%) Containerisation
5 769 (14.85%) Problem-Solving
6 739 (14.27%) Microservices
7 734 (14.18%) Test Automation
8 693 (13.39%) Continuous Improvement
9 629 (12.15%) Migration
10 621 (12.00%) Observability
11 594 (11.47%) Analytics
12 570 (11.01%) AI
13 565 (10.91%) Stakeholder Management
14 556 (10.74%) Scrum
15 503 (9.72%) Software Engineering
16 490 (9.46%) Data Modelling
16 490 (9.46%) Platform Engineering
17 417 (8.05%) Technical Leadership
18 414 (8.00%) Mentoring
19 406 (7.84%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,417 (27.37%) Python
2 1,016 (19.63%) SQL
3 683 (13.19%) Java
4 494 (9.54%) C#
5 382 (7.38%) JavaScript
6 355 (6.86%) Bash
6 355 (6.86%) PowerShell
7 272 (5.25%) TypeScript
8 179 (3.46%) Bicep
9 109 (2.11%) Go
10 70 (1.35%) Scala
11 64 (1.24%) Shell Script
12 59 (1.14%) Apex Code
13 52 (1.00%) PL/SQL
14 46 (0.89%) Groovy
14 46 (0.89%) T-SQL
15 36 (0.70%) C++
16 27 (0.52%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 27 (0.52%) Ruby
17 25 (0.48%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,616 (31.21%) Security Cleared
2 1,342 (25.92%) SC Cleared
3 318 (6.14%) Degree
4 209 (4.04%) Azure Certification
5 161 (3.11%) BPSS Clearance
6 156 (3.01%) DV Cleared
7 137 (2.65%) Computer Science Degree
8 136 (2.63%) AWS Certification
9 74 (1.43%) CISSP
10 60 (1.16%) Microsoft Certification
11 55 (1.06%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.99%) CISM
13 46 (0.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 46 (0.89%) Master's Degree
14 45 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
15 42 (0.81%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.75%) PMP
17 27 (0.52%) TOGAF Certification
18 25 (0.48%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 21 (0.41%) IIBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 434 (8.38%) QA
2 250 (4.83%) Data Quality
3 181 (3.50%) GDPR
4 140 (2.70%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 117 (2.26%) NIST
7 66 (1.27%) NCSC
8 56 (1.08%) WCAG
9 48 (0.93%) PCI DSS
10 41 (0.79%) SLA
11 34 (0.66%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 33 (0.64%) PMO
13 22 (0.42%) GRC
14 16 (0.31%) HIPAA
15 13 (0.25%) NIST 800
16 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.23%) SOC 2
17 11 (0.21%) PSD2
18 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
18 9 (0.17%) SEPA
System Software
1 972 (18.78%) Docker
2 170 (3.28%) Active Directory
3 74 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
4 70 (1.35%) VMware Infrastructure
5 33 (0.64%) vSphere
6 26 (0.50%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.35%) Squid
9 14 (0.27%) Postfix
10 12 (0.23%) Hyper-V
11 10 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
12 8 (0.15%) Firmware
13 7 (0.14%) HDFS
13 7 (0.14%) Oracle RAC
14 6 (0.12%) Corosync
14 6 (0.12%) RACF
15 5 (0.097%) Ceph
15 5 (0.097%) NFS
16 4 (0.077%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
16 4 (0.077%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 1,466 (28.32%) Terraform
2 1,317 (25.44%) Kubernetes
3 504 (9.74%) Ansible
4 359 (6.93%) Grafana
5 301 (5.81%) Prometheus
6 93 (1.80%) Argo
7 74 (1.43%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.33%) Puppet
9 61 (1.18%) Istio
10 29 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
10 29 (0.56%) Packer
10 29 (0.56%) Progress Chef
11 23 (0.44%) Kibana
12 22 (0.42%) HP ALM
13 21 (0.41%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 21 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 18 (0.35%) Consul
15 15 (0.29%) SCCM
16 14 (0.27%) FortiGate
16 14 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
Vendors
1 904 (17.46%) Microsoft
2 299 (5.78%) Databricks
3 283 (5.47%) Oracle
4 237 (4.58%) Google
5 197 (3.81%) Splunk
6 183 (3.53%) ServiceNow
7 165 (3.19%) Salesforce
8 138 (2.67%) Red Hat
9 117 (2.26%) SAP
10 115 (2.22%) VMware
11 105 (2.03%) Dynatrace
12 75 (1.45%) OpenAI
13 50 (0.97%) Atlassian
14 47 (0.91%) CyberArk
14 47 (0.91%) IBM
15 44 (0.85%) Informatica
16 42 (0.81%) Cisco
17 39 (0.75%) Foundry
18 38 (0.73%) AppDynamics
19 33 (0.64%) Okta