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

6 months to
22 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +3 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,392 3,343 3,870
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.62% 10.54% 8.98%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.26% 11.86% 10.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,092 2,292 2,810
10th Percentile £373 £400 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £561 £563
Median % change year-on-year -7.35% -0.22% -6.25%
75th Percentile £613 £672 £656
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £538
% change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 56 25 94
10th Percentile £42.50 £36.85 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £56.31
Median hourly rate £48.75 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.78% +3.85% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.25 £80.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £94.38 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.84%

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 33,128 28,199 37,720
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.64% 88.95% 87.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,004 17,123 24,892
10th Percentile £305 £306 £300
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £645
90th Percentile £720 £743 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,016 901 1,818
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £14.00
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £17.08
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -13.33% +17.19%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £69.65 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.00 £30.78 £40.00
% change year-on-year -22.03% -23.05% +53.85%

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 January 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 January 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 January 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 3,769 £525 -8.70% 1,968
UK excluding London +7 1,977 £500 -4.76% 1,801
London -1 1,887 £533 -11.25% 457
Work from Home -2 1,249 £525 -2.78% 1,065
North of England +5 683 £500 -2.20% 397
Midlands +23 401 £515 -1.67% 210
South East -2 391 £525 -10.64% 565
Yorkshire +1 354 £500 - 161
West Midlands +24 326 £525 - 102
North West +4 282 £463 -7.50% 182
South West +7 238 £525 -12.50% 232
Scotland +5 193 £475 +5.56% 96
East of England +17 108 £568 +11.82% 220
East Midlands +17 75 £425 -10.53% 104
North East -5 48 £475 -17.03% 55
Wales +2 33 £450 +66.67% 88
Northern Ireland -9 8 - - 35

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
1 258 (5.87%) Confluence
2 88 (2.00%) Apache
2 88 (2.00%) SharePoint
3 79 (1.80%) SAS
4 75 (1.71%) Apache Spark
5 63 (1.43%) Apache Airflow
6 36 (0.82%) CMS
6 36 (0.82%) nginx
6 36 (0.82%) OpenStack
7 25 (0.57%) IIS
8 21 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
9 19 (0.43%) JBoss
10 17 (0.39%) WebLogic
11 13 (0.30%) CICS
12 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
12 10 (0.23%) Mendix
12 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
13 9 (0.20%) iPlanet
13 9 (0.20%) WebSphere Application Server
14 8 (0.18%) Smallworld
Applications
1 94 (2.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 33 (0.75%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
5 17 (0.39%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.34%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.20%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.18%) Weka
9 5 (0.11%) Trello
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.023%) Moqups
10 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.39%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.27%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.25%) Endur
5 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.20%) Maximo
6 9 (0.20%) Oracle ERP
7 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
8 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
8 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.091%) NetSuite
9 4 (0.091%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.091%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.091%) Remedy ITSM
9 4 (0.091%) SAP ERP
9 4 (0.091%) Teamcenter
10 3 (0.068%) Oracle Assets
10 3 (0.068%) Oracle Payables
10 3 (0.068%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,228 (50.73%) Azure
2 1,596 (36.34%) AWS
3 1,198 (27.28%) Azure DevOps
4 802 (18.26%) GitHub
5 640 (14.57%) GCP
6 526 (11.98%) Serverless
7 461 (10.50%) GitHub Actions
8 357 (8.13%) Power Platform
9 284 (6.47%) AWS CloudFormation
10 256 (5.83%) AWS Lambda
11 246 (5.60%) Amazon S3
12 212 (4.83%) Azure Data Factory
13 202 (4.60%) Azure AKS
14 187 (4.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 179 (4.08%) Amazon EKS
16 177 (4.03%) OpenShift
17 172 (3.92%) Amazon ECS
17 172 (3.92%) Dynamics 365
18 169 (3.85%) Entra ID
19 161 (3.67%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 207 (4.71%) Firewall
2 111 (2.53%) DNS
3 88 (2.00%) VPN
4 84 (1.91%) Network Security
5 55 (1.25%) TCP/IP
6 54 (1.23%) SSL
7 43 (0.98%) HTTP
8 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
9 26 (0.59%) WAN
10 20 (0.46%) BGP
11 19 (0.43%) MPLS
12 18 (0.41%) SSH
13 17 (0.39%) DHCP
13 17 (0.39%) FTP
13 17 (0.39%) SD-WAN
13 17 (0.39%) SMTP
14 15 (0.34%) Kerberos
15 13 (0.30%) LAN
16 11 (0.25%) Internet
17 10 (0.23%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 257 (5.85%) PostgreSQL
2 230 (5.24%) Power BI
3 178 (4.05%) SQL Server
4 168 (3.83%) NoSQL
5 139 (3.16%) Amazon RDS
6 134 (3.05%) Data Lake
7 112 (2.55%) Relational Database
8 109 (2.48%) MongoDB
9 106 (2.41%) Data Warehouse
10 93 (2.12%) Azure SQL Database
11 84 (1.91%) Oracle Database
12 68 (1.55%) DynamoDB
13 64 (1.46%) MySQL
14 62 (1.41%) Elasticsearch
15 55 (1.25%) Tableau
16 52 (1.18%) Amazon Aurora
16 52 (1.18%) Redis
17 49 (1.12%) Delta Lake
18 47 (1.07%) Metadata
19 43 (0.98%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 798 (18.17%) Jenkins
2 622 (14.16%) Git
3 608 (13.84%) JIRA
4 577 (13.14%) GitLab
5 136 (3.10%) Selenium
6 101 (2.30%) JUnit
7 95 (2.16%) Postman
8 75 (1.71%) SonarQube
9 74 (1.68%) Sonatype Nexus
10 70 (1.59%) Cypress.io
11 68 (1.55%) Bitbucket
12 60 (1.37%) Cucumber
13 51 (1.16%) Artifactory
14 49 (1.12%) JMeter
15 47 (1.07%) Gradle
16 46 (1.05%) Maven
17 43 (0.98%) Liquibase
18 37 (0.84%) Oracle APEX
18 37 (0.84%) REST Assured
19 36 (0.82%) CircleCI
General
1 1,335 (30.40%) Social Skills
2 797 (18.15%) Finance
3 557 (12.68%) Public Sector
4 362 (8.24%) Analytical Skills
5 361 (8.22%) Banking
6 148 (3.37%) Documentation Skills
7 73 (1.66%) Influencing Skills
8 70 (1.59%) Financial Institution
9 67 (1.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 61 (1.39%) Marketing
11 50 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
12 49 (1.12%) Investment Banking
13 47 (1.07%) Front Office
14 45 (1.02%) Retail
15 44 (1.00%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.80%) Military
17 33 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
18 28 (0.64%) Organisational Skills
19 26 (0.59%) Back Office
20 25 (0.57%) Law
Job Titles
1 858 (19.54%) DevOps Engineer
2 768 (17.49%) Developer
3 598 (13.62%) Senior
4 398 (9.06%) Architect
5 333 (7.58%) Lead
6 253 (5.76%) AWS Engineer
6 253 (5.76%) Azure Engineer
7 229 (5.21%) Data Engineer
8 217 (4.94%) Analyst
9 197 (4.49%) AWS DevOps
10 173 (3.94%) AWS DevOps Engineer
11 164 (3.73%) Software Engineer
12 158 (3.60%) Cloud Engineer
13 149 (3.39%) Senior Developer
14 147 (3.35%) Platform Engineer
15 125 (2.85%) Consultant
16 124 (2.82%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 121 (2.76%) Senior DevOps
18 118 (2.69%) Solutions Architect
19 116 (2.64%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 508 (11.57%) REST
2 374 (8.52%) .NET
3 284 (6.47%) React
4 279 (6.35%) Node.js
5 266 (6.06%) RESTful
6 253 (5.76%) Kafka
7 227 (5.17%) Spring
8 205 (4.67%) Spring Boot
9 190 (4.33%) JSON
10 161 (3.67%) OAuth
11 153 (3.48%) AngularJS
12 142 (3.23%) Elastic Stack
13 140 (3.19%) SOAP
13 140 (3.19%) XML
14 136 (3.10%) HTML
15 131 (2.98%) YAML
16 109 (2.48%) Playwright
17 104 (2.37%) CSS
18 97 (2.21%) Middleware
18 97 (2.21%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 621 (14.14%) Cloud Native
2 239 (5.44%) Product Ownership
3 165 (3.76%) Distributed Systems
4 120 (2.73%) Onboarding
5 114 (2.60%) Public Cloud
6 90 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
7 82 (1.87%) Hybrid Cloud
8 73 (1.66%) Enterprise Software
9 58 (1.32%) Virtual Team
10 56 (1.28%) Data Protection Act
11 55 (1.25%) Data Centre
11 55 (1.25%) Management Information System
12 49 (1.12%) Replication
13 47 (1.07%) Private Cloud
14 45 (1.02%) Security Posture
15 44 (1.00%) Mobile App
15 44 (1.00%) NHS
16 41 (0.93%) CMDB
17 40 (0.91%) AI Agents
17 40 (0.91%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 497 (11.32%) Linux
2 254 (5.78%) Windows
3 110 (2.50%) Unix
4 57 (1.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 57 (1.30%) Windows Server
5 51 (1.16%) VMS
6 30 (0.68%) Ubuntu
7 27 (0.61%) Android
8 25 (0.57%) Apple iOS
9 20 (0.46%) Windows 10
10 18 (0.41%) CentOS
11 14 (0.32%) Amazon Linux
12 10 (0.23%) Solaris
13 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 5 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.11%) zOS
15 3 (0.068%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.046%) Debian
17 1 (0.023%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,509 (57.13%) CI/CD
2 1,766 (40.21%) Agile
3 1,160 (26.41%) Infrastructure as Code
4 856 (19.49%) Containerisation
5 849 (19.33%) Problem-Solving
6 678 (15.44%) Test Automation
7 673 (15.32%) Microservices
8 517 (11.77%) Continuous Improvement
9 499 (11.36%) Analytics
10 497 (11.32%) Migration
11 492 (11.20%) Scrum
12 457 (10.41%) Observability
13 424 (9.65%) AI
14 403 (9.18%) Software Engineering
15 385 (8.77%) Stakeholder Management
16 335 (7.63%) Data Modelling
16 335 (7.63%) Mentoring
17 301 (6.85%) Data Pipeline
18 295 (6.72%) Business Intelligence
19 293 (6.67%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,367 (31.12%) Python
2 874 (19.90%) SQL
3 601 (13.68%) Java
4 429 (9.77%) JavaScript
5 425 (9.68%) C#
6 380 (8.65%) PowerShell
7 351 (7.99%) Bash
8 308 (7.01%) TypeScript
9 149 (3.39%) Bicep
10 145 (3.30%) Go
11 78 (1.78%) PL/SQL
12 76 (1.73%) Shell Script
13 59 (1.34%) Scala
14 54 (1.23%) Groovy
15 51 (1.16%) Ruby
16 50 (1.14%) C++
17 43 (0.98%) Perl
17 43 (0.98%) T-SQL
18 24 (0.55%) Rust
19 22 (0.50%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,330 (30.28%) Security Cleared
2 1,104 (25.14%) SC Cleared
3 374 (8.52%) Degree
4 199 (4.53%) Computer Science Degree
5 185 (4.21%) Azure Certification
6 144 (3.28%) AWS Certification
7 142 (3.23%) DV Cleared
8 109 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
9 85 (1.94%) Master's Degree
10 73 (1.66%) CISSP
11 64 (1.46%) Microsoft Certification
12 56 (1.28%) CISM
13 48 (1.09%) ISTQB
14 45 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 38 (0.87%) PMI Certification
16 30 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
16 30 (0.68%) PMP
17 29 (0.66%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 21 (0.48%) IIBA
19 20 (0.46%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 384 (8.74%) QA
2 164 (3.73%) GDPR
3 156 (3.55%) Data Quality
4 141 (3.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 121 (2.76%) Accessibility
6 117 (2.66%) NIST
7 64 (1.46%) NCSC
8 36 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 31 (0.71%) WCAG
10 28 (0.64%) HIPAA
11 27 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 24 (0.55%) PMO
12 24 (0.55%) SLA
13 17 (0.39%) PSD2
13 17 (0.39%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.30%) SEPA
16 10 (0.23%) HL7
16 10 (0.23%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 10 (0.23%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,124 (25.59%) Docker
2 168 (3.83%) Active Directory
3 68 (1.55%) VMware Infrastructure
4 64 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.66%) vSphere
6 17 (0.39%) DFS Replication
6 17 (0.39%) VMware NSX
7 14 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.30%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.27%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.23%) Lustre
11 10 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.20%) Dovecot
12 9 (0.20%) Postfix
13 8 (0.18%) GPFS
13 8 (0.18%) NFS
13 8 (0.18%) Tivoli Directory Server
13 8 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,380 (31.42%) Terraform
2 1,289 (29.35%) Kubernetes
3 540 (12.30%) Ansible
4 325 (7.40%) Grafana
5 287 (6.53%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.91%) Argo
7 80 (1.82%) Puppet
8 53 (1.21%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (1.00%) Progress Chef
10 43 (0.98%) Istio
11 39 (0.89%) Kibana
12 33 (0.75%) Packer
13 23 (0.52%) Podman
14 19 (0.43%) SCCM
15 17 (0.39%) Rancher
16 16 (0.36%) Proxmox
17 15 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
18 14 (0.32%) Nessus
18 14 (0.32%) NetBackup
19 13 (0.30%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 753 (17.14%) Microsoft
2 315 (7.17%) Oracle
3 252 (5.74%) Google
4 241 (5.49%) Databricks
5 223 (5.08%) Splunk
6 164 (3.73%) ServiceNow
7 124 (2.82%) Red Hat
8 113 (2.57%) Salesforce
9 111 (2.53%) VMware
10 102 (2.32%) SAP
11 71 (1.62%) Dynatrace
12 67 (1.53%) OpenAI
13 50 (1.14%) F5
14 48 (1.09%) CyberArk
14 48 (1.09%) IBM
15 45 (1.02%) Cisco
16 42 (0.96%) Talend
17 41 (0.93%) Palo Alto
18 39 (0.89%) Atlassian
19 38 (0.87%) Denodo