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

6 months to
26 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,656 3,298 3,848
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.23% 10.75% 8.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.95% 11.95% 10.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,259 2,311 2,752
10th Percentile £375 £385 £411
25th Percentile £427 £456 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £711 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 67 23 97
10th Percentile - £36.30 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £58.45 £56.65
Median hourly rate £60.00 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.06% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £78.85 £80.75 £71.25
90th Percentile £93.00 £87.50 £84.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £70.36 £65.00
% change year-on-year -21.83% +8.25% -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 35,955 27,589 38,137
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.76% 89.91% 86.97%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,818 17,125 24,933
10th Percentile £313 £306 £300
25th Percentile £411 £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 £721 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -2.18% -1.45% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,143 864 2,185
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.99 £21.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £26.61 £32.66 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year -18.53% -1.24% -5.53%
75th Percentile £61.50 £63.75 £59.50
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.18 £71.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.76 £35.00
% change year-on-year -20.81% -9.26% -

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 26 February 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 26 February 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 26 February 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 3,970 £525 -7.89% 956
UK excluding London +7 2,086 £500 -4.76% 677
London -1 1,981 £540 -8.67% 354
Work from Home -3 1,314 £525 -2.28% 513
North of England +6 722 £500 -2.44% 249
South East +1 425 £525 -8.70% 167
Midlands +13 415 £503 +1.62% 94
Yorkshire +1 383 £500 -1.96% 74
West Midlands +10 330 £520 +4.00% 64
North West +2 289 £488 -2.50% 139
South West +12 258 £525 -12.50% 90
Scotland +6 187 £450 - 36
East of England +18 116 £575 +11.65% 32
East Midlands +3 84 £428 -10.00% 29
North East -4 53 £488 -7.14% 40
Wales +4 37 £418 +62.50% 13
Northern Ireland -6 9 £475 +26.67% 6

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
1 279 (5.99%) Confluence
2 105 (2.26%) Apache Spark
3 90 (1.93%) Apache
4 85 (1.83%) SharePoint
5 84 (1.80%) SAS
6 60 (1.29%) Apache Airflow
7 35 (0.75%) nginx
7 35 (0.75%) OpenStack
8 31 (0.67%) CMS
9 23 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
10 18 (0.39%) IIS
11 15 (0.32%) WebLogic
12 14 (0.30%) JBoss
12 14 (0.30%) Mendix
13 12 (0.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 12 (0.26%) Sitecore CMS
14 10 (0.21%) HCL Notes
15 9 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
16 8 (0.17%) Camunda
16 8 (0.17%) GeoServer
Applications
1 93 (2.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 42 (0.90%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.34%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 5 (0.11%) Trello
9 3 (0.064%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 2 (0.043%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.021%) Maya
11 1 (0.021%) Revit
11 1 (0.021%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 68 (1.46%) Dynamics CRM
2 13 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.26%) Oracle ERP
4 10 (0.21%) Endur
4 10 (0.21%) Maximo
5 8 (0.17%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.17%) NEC Housing
6 6 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
6 6 (0.13%) SAP ERP
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.086%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.086%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.064%) NetSuite
9 3 (0.064%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.064%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.064%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.064%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.064%) VisionPLUS
Cloud Services
1 2,412 (51.80%) Azure
2 1,682 (36.13%) AWS
3 1,294 (27.79%) Azure DevOps
4 866 (18.60%) GitHub
5 680 (14.60%) GCP
6 555 (11.92%) Serverless
7 483 (10.37%) GitHub Actions
8 386 (8.29%) Power Platform
9 292 (6.27%) AWS CloudFormation
10 272 (5.84%) AWS Lambda
11 265 (5.69%) Amazon S3
12 228 (4.90%) Azure Data Factory
13 218 (4.68%) Azure AKS
14 209 (4.49%) Amazon EKS
15 202 (4.34%) OpenShift
16 193 (4.15%) Entra ID
17 172 (3.69%) Amazon ECS
18 169 (3.63%) Dynamics 365
19 168 (3.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 168 (3.61%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 213 (4.57%) Firewall
2 113 (2.43%) DNS
3 96 (2.06%) Network Security
3 96 (2.06%) VPN
4 54 (1.16%) TCP/IP
5 39 (0.84%) SSL
6 32 (0.69%) HTTP
7 23 (0.49%) HTTPS
8 21 (0.45%) WAN
9 17 (0.37%) DHCP
10 16 (0.34%) SD-WAN
11 15 (0.32%) Kerberos
11 15 (0.32%) SAN
12 13 (0.28%) Reverse Proxy
13 12 (0.26%) MPLS
14 11 (0.24%) BGP
15 10 (0.21%) Internet
15 10 (0.21%) IPsec
16 9 (0.19%) 5G
16 9 (0.19%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 273 (5.86%) PostgreSQL
2 243 (5.22%) Power BI
3 193 (4.15%) SQL Server
4 177 (3.80%) NoSQL
5 152 (3.26%) Data Lake
6 132 (2.84%) Amazon RDS
7 126 (2.71%) Relational Database
8 119 (2.56%) Data Warehouse
9 109 (2.34%) MongoDB
10 100 (2.15%) Azure SQL Database
11 84 (1.80%) DynamoDB
12 81 (1.74%) Elasticsearch
13 78 (1.68%) Oracle Database
14 71 (1.52%) MySQL
15 67 (1.44%) Delta Lake
16 61 (1.31%) Metadata
17 58 (1.25%) Big Data
18 56 (1.20%) Redis
19 55 (1.18%) Amazon Athena
20 52 (1.12%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 815 (17.50%) Jenkins
2 636 (13.66%) Git
3 607 (13.04%) JIRA
4 590 (12.67%) GitLab
5 142 (3.05%) Selenium
6 105 (2.26%) JUnit
7 94 (2.02%) Postman
8 74 (1.59%) Bitbucket
9 67 (1.44%) SonarQube
10 65 (1.40%) Cucumber
11 61 (1.31%) Cypress.io
12 60 (1.29%) Sonatype Nexus
13 57 (1.22%) Maven
14 49 (1.05%) Artifactory
15 48 (1.03%) JMeter
16 47 (1.01%) REST Assured
17 41 (0.88%) Liquibase
18 38 (0.82%) Gradle
19 37 (0.79%) Oracle APEX
20 33 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,358 (29.17%) Social Skills
2 852 (18.30%) Finance
3 598 (12.84%) Public Sector
4 391 (8.40%) Analytical Skills
5 349 (7.50%) Banking
6 160 (3.44%) Documentation Skills
7 81 (1.74%) Influencing Skills
8 70 (1.50%) Financial Institution
9 66 (1.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 59 (1.27%) Marketing
11 56 (1.20%) Retail
12 47 (1.01%) Presentation Skills
13 45 (0.97%) Front Office
14 44 (0.95%) Investment Banking
15 42 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
16 40 (0.86%) Telecoms
17 36 (0.77%) Military
18 35 (0.75%) Legal
19 31 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
20 26 (0.56%) Law
Job Titles
1 895 (19.22%) DevOps Engineer
2 778 (16.71%) Developer
3 646 (13.87%) Senior
4 478 (10.27%) Architect
5 377 (8.10%) Lead
6 286 (6.14%) Azure Engineer
7 265 (5.69%) Data Engineer
8 261 (5.61%) AWS Engineer
9 256 (5.50%) Analyst
10 202 (4.34%) AWS DevOps
11 181 (3.89%) Cloud Engineer
12 179 (3.84%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 168 (3.61%) Software Engineer
14 160 (3.44%) Platform Engineer
15 145 (3.11%) Senior Developer
16 138 (2.96%) Solutions Architect
17 135 (2.90%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 131 (2.81%) Senior DevOps
19 127 (2.73%) Business Analyst
20 124 (2.66%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 522 (11.21%) REST
2 408 (8.76%) .NET
3 321 (6.89%) React
4 310 (6.66%) Node.js
5 270 (5.80%) RESTful
6 253 (5.43%) Kafka
6 253 (5.43%) Spring
7 234 (5.03%) Spring Boot
8 173 (3.72%) AngularJS
9 163 (3.50%) JSON
10 157 (3.37%) OAuth
11 143 (3.07%) Elastic Stack
12 140 (3.01%) HTML
13 131 (2.81%) PySpark
13 131 (2.81%) YAML
14 128 (2.75%) Playwright
15 122 (2.62%) SOAP
16 118 (2.53%) XML
17 116 (2.49%) CSS
18 105 (2.26%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 695 (14.93%) Cloud Native
2 252 (5.41%) Product Ownership
3 176 (3.78%) Distributed Systems
4 130 (2.79%) Public Cloud
5 120 (2.58%) Onboarding
6 96 (2.06%) Legacy Systems
7 91 (1.95%) Hybrid Cloud
8 76 (1.63%) Enterprise Software
9 59 (1.27%) Management Information System
10 56 (1.20%) Security Posture
11 54 (1.16%) Virtual Team
12 51 (1.10%) Data Protection Act
13 49 (1.05%) Data Centre
13 49 (1.05%) NHS
14 46 (0.99%) Private Cloud
15 39 (0.84%) Greenfield Project
16 37 (0.79%) AI Agents
16 37 (0.79%) Low-Code
16 37 (0.79%) Mobile App
16 37 (0.79%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 501 (10.76%) Linux
2 248 (5.33%) Windows
3 107 (2.30%) Unix
4 66 (1.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 45 (0.97%) Windows Server
6 42 (0.90%) VMS
7 26 (0.56%) Ubuntu
8 17 (0.37%) CentOS
9 14 (0.30%) Android
10 13 (0.28%) Apple iOS
11 12 (0.26%) Windows 10
12 11 (0.24%) Solaris
13 9 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
14 8 (0.17%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.086%) Mac OS
17 2 (0.043%) Debian
17 2 (0.043%) Windows Server 2008
17 2 (0.043%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,705 (58.10%) CI/CD
2 1,811 (38.90%) Agile
3 1,235 (26.52%) Infrastructure as Code
4 889 (19.09%) Containerisation
5 887 (19.05%) Problem-Solving
6 702 (15.08%) Test Automation
7 699 (15.01%) Microservices
8 587 (12.61%) Continuous Improvement
9 577 (12.39%) Analytics
10 531 (11.40%) Migration
11 523 (11.23%) Scrum
12 501 (10.76%) Observability
13 494 (10.61%) AI
14 452 (9.71%) Stakeholder Management
15 432 (9.28%) Software Engineering
16 409 (8.78%) Data Modelling
17 373 (8.01%) Mentoring
18 338 (7.26%) Data Pipeline
19 323 (6.94%) Platform Engineering
20 318 (6.83%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,447 (31.08%) Python
2 952 (20.45%) SQL
3 621 (13.34%) Java
4 470 (10.09%) C#
5 456 (9.79%) JavaScript
6 374 (8.03%) PowerShell
7 359 (7.71%) Bash
8 323 (6.94%) TypeScript
9 152 (3.26%) Bicep
10 149 (3.20%) Go
11 80 (1.72%) PL/SQL
12 66 (1.42%) Scala
13 58 (1.25%) Shell Script
14 48 (1.03%) C++
14 48 (1.03%) Ruby
15 46 (0.99%) T-SQL
16 43 (0.92%) Groovy
17 33 (0.71%) Perl
18 32 (0.69%) Rust
19 23 (0.49%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,434 (30.80%) Security Cleared
2 1,181 (25.37%) SC Cleared
3 392 (8.42%) Degree
4 207 (4.45%) Azure Certification
5 201 (4.32%) Computer Science Degree
6 158 (3.39%) AWS Certification
7 153 (3.29%) DV Cleared
8 125 (2.68%) BPSS Clearance
9 90 (1.93%) Master's Degree
10 84 (1.80%) CISSP
11 65 (1.40%) Microsoft Certification
12 63 (1.35%) CISM
13 56 (1.20%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 52 (1.12%) ISTQB
15 41 (0.88%) PMI Certification
16 33 (0.71%) Cisco Certification
16 33 (0.71%) PMP
17 32 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 25 (0.54%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 24 (0.52%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 397 (8.53%) QA
2 191 (4.10%) Data Quality
2 191 (4.10%) GDPR
3 145 (3.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 125 (2.68%) Accessibility
5 124 (2.66%) NIST
6 71 (1.52%) NCSC
7 37 (0.79%) PCI DSS
8 36 (0.77%) WCAG
9 29 (0.62%) PMO
10 26 (0.56%) HIPAA
10 26 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 23 (0.49%) SLA
12 18 (0.39%) SOC 2
13 15 (0.32%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.28%) PSD2
15 12 (0.26%) NIST 800
16 11 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.24%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 10 (0.21%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,122 (24.10%) Docker
2 175 (3.76%) Active Directory
3 76 (1.63%) Virtual Machines
4 72 (1.55%) VMware Infrastructure
5 41 (0.88%) vSphere
6 27 (0.58%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 12 (0.26%) Squid
10 11 (0.24%) Lustre
11 9 (0.19%) GPFS
11 9 (0.19%) Postfix
12 8 (0.17%) Hyper-V
12 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
12 8 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
13 7 (0.15%) DFS Replication
13 7 (0.15%) Firmware
14 6 (0.13%) HDFS
14 6 (0.13%) NFS
15 5 (0.11%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,444 (31.01%) Terraform
2 1,342 (28.82%) Kubernetes
3 508 (10.91%) Ansible
4 340 (7.30%) Grafana
5 286 (6.14%) Prometheus
6 96 (2.06%) Argo
7 79 (1.70%) Puppet
8 71 (1.52%) Single Sign-On
9 48 (1.03%) Istio
10 36 (0.77%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.73%) Kibana
12 30 (0.64%) Packer
13 23 (0.49%) Podman
13 23 (0.49%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
15 18 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 17 (0.37%) Consul
16 17 (0.37%) Rancher
17 16 (0.34%) FortiGate
18 15 (0.32%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 786 (16.88%) Microsoft
2 304 (6.53%) Oracle
3 284 (6.10%) Databricks
4 268 (5.76%) Google
5 217 (4.66%) Splunk
6 159 (3.41%) ServiceNow
7 142 (3.05%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.64%) VMware
9 122 (2.62%) Salesforce
10 106 (2.28%) SAP
11 81 (1.74%) OpenAI
12 65 (1.40%) Dynatrace
13 57 (1.22%) CyberArk
14 56 (1.20%) Atlassian
15 49 (1.05%) IBM
16 42 (0.90%) Talend
17 39 (0.84%) Cisco
18 38 (0.82%) Denodo
18 38 (0.82%) F5
19 34 (0.73%) Foundry