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

6 months to
2 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,654 3,242 3,914
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.24% 10.74% 8.77%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.00% 11.93% 10.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,257 2,287 2,776
10th Percentile £375 £390 £410
25th Percentile £427 £456 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.78%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £713 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 68 23 99
10th Percentile - £36.30 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £62.82 £58.33
Median hourly rate £63.50 £74.44 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -14.70% +14.52% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £80.75 £73.17
90th Percentile £92.50 £87.50 £84.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £73.23 £65.00
% change year-on-year -24.89% +12.65% -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 35,800 27,183 38,766
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.50% 90.06% 86.86%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,707 16,972 25,287
10th Percentile £313 £305 £300
25th Percentile £412 £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 £723 £740 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -2.13% -1.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,144 882 2,256
10th Percentile £14.65 £15.62 £13.25
25th Percentile £18.24 £21.25 £16.25
Median hourly rate £27.61 £32.50 £33.03
Median % change year-on-year -15.06% -1.61% -5.62%
75th Percentile £63.75 £64.50 £59.44
90th Percentile £73.46 £75.48 £72.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £32.00 £34.36
% change year-on-year -21.41% -6.85% -1.84%

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 2 March 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 2 March 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 2 March 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 3,974 £525 -8.30% 1,820
UK excluding London +8 2,080 £500 -4.76% 1,520
London -3 1,990 £540 -9.24% 565
Work from Home -3 1,304 £525 -2.23% 1,012
North of England +5 725 £500 -4.76% 407
South East +1 424 £525 -8.70% 461
Midlands +12 409 £500 +1.01% 177
Yorkshire +1 380 £500 -3.61% 137
West Midlands +13 326 £515 +3.00% 100
North West +3 295 £492 -6.29% 218
South West +10 258 £525 -12.50% 205
Scotland +5 180 £450 - 85
East of England +18 115 £575 +15.00% 141
East Midlands +2 82 £434 -8.68% 72
North East -2 53 £488 -7.14% 57
Wales +13 39 £425 +80.08% 42
Northern Ireland -4 11 £475 +11.76% 19

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
1 281 (6.04%) Confluence
2 105 (2.26%) Apache Spark
3 90 (1.93%) Apache
4 88 (1.89%) SharePoint
5 84 (1.80%) SAS
6 61 (1.31%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.71%) nginx
7 33 (0.71%) OpenStack
8 31 (0.67%) CMS
9 24 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
10 20 (0.43%) IIS
11 15 (0.32%) WebLogic
12 14 (0.30%) Mendix
13 13 (0.28%) JBoss
14 12 (0.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 12 (0.26%) Sitecore CMS
15 10 (0.21%) HCL Notes
16 9 (0.19%) Camunda
16 9 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
17 8 (0.17%) GeoServer
Applications
1 92 (1.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 43 (0.92%) Microsoft Project
4 31 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 21 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.30%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 5 (0.11%) Trello
9 2 (0.043%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.021%) InDesign
10 1 (0.021%) Maya
10 1 (0.021%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.021%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 69 (1.48%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.24%) Oracle ERP
4 10 (0.21%) Endur
4 10 (0.21%) Maximo
5 8 (0.17%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.17%) NEC Housing
6 7 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.13%) SAP ERP
8 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.086%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.086%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.064%) NetSuite
10 3 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.064%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.064%) SAP CO
10 3 (0.064%) SAP FI/CO
10 3 (0.064%) VisionPLUS
10 3 (0.064%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,422 (52.04%) Azure
2 1,674 (35.97%) AWS
3 1,308 (28.10%) Azure DevOps
4 864 (18.56%) GitHub
5 684 (14.70%) GCP
6 548 (11.77%) Serverless
7 485 (10.42%) GitHub Actions
8 391 (8.40%) Power Platform
9 292 (6.27%) AWS CloudFormation
10 266 (5.72%) AWS Lambda
11 261 (5.61%) Amazon S3
12 230 (4.94%) Azure Data Factory
13 215 (4.62%) Azure AKS
14 211 (4.53%) Amazon EKS
15 202 (4.34%) OpenShift
16 193 (4.15%) Entra ID
17 171 (3.67%) Dynamics 365
18 167 (3.59%) Amazon ECS
19 165 (3.55%) Azure Monitor
20 163 (3.50%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 210 (4.51%) Firewall
2 112 (2.41%) DNS
3 94 (2.02%) Network Security
3 94 (2.02%) VPN
4 53 (1.14%) TCP/IP
5 35 (0.75%) SSL
6 31 (0.67%) HTTP
7 20 (0.43%) WAN
8 18 (0.39%) HTTPS
9 17 (0.37%) DHCP
9 17 (0.37%) SD-WAN
10 16 (0.34%) SAN
11 15 (0.32%) Kerberos
12 13 (0.28%) Reverse Proxy
13 12 (0.26%) BGP
13 12 (0.26%) MPLS
14 10 (0.21%) IPsec
15 9 (0.19%) Internet
16 8 (0.17%) LAN
16 8 (0.17%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 274 (5.89%) PostgreSQL
2 246 (5.29%) Power BI
3 197 (4.23%) SQL Server
4 177 (3.80%) NoSQL
5 152 (3.27%) Data Lake
6 130 (2.79%) Relational Database
7 127 (2.73%) Amazon RDS
8 122 (2.62%) Data Warehouse
9 115 (2.47%) MongoDB
10 102 (2.19%) Azure SQL Database
11 84 (1.80%) DynamoDB
12 80 (1.72%) Elasticsearch
13 76 (1.63%) Oracle Database
14 71 (1.53%) MySQL
15 67 (1.44%) Delta Lake
16 61 (1.31%) Metadata
17 58 (1.25%) Big Data
18 55 (1.18%) Amazon Athena
19 54 (1.16%) Redis
20 52 (1.12%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 808 (17.36%) Jenkins
2 638 (13.71%) Git
3 615 (13.21%) JIRA
4 592 (12.72%) GitLab
5 140 (3.01%) Selenium
6 104 (2.23%) JUnit
7 91 (1.96%) Postman
8 78 (1.68%) Bitbucket
9 70 (1.50%) SonarQube
10 67 (1.44%) Cucumber
11 60 (1.29%) Cypress.io
12 57 (1.22%) Sonatype Nexus
13 55 (1.18%) Maven
14 48 (1.03%) Artifactory
14 48 (1.03%) JMeter
15 47 (1.01%) REST Assured
16 36 (0.77%) Oracle APEX
17 35 (0.75%) Gradle
17 35 (0.75%) Liquibase
18 33 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,339 (28.77%) Social Skills
2 855 (18.37%) Finance
3 602 (12.94%) Public Sector
4 395 (8.49%) Analytical Skills
5 347 (7.46%) Banking
6 160 (3.44%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.70%) Influencing Skills
8 66 (1.42%) Financial Institution
9 63 (1.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 57 (1.22%) Marketing
10 57 (1.22%) Retail
11 46 (0.99%) Front Office
12 45 (0.97%) Presentation Skills
13 43 (0.92%) Investment Banking
14 42 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
15 38 (0.82%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.75%) Legal
16 35 (0.75%) Military
17 33 (0.71%) Pharmaceutical
18 27 (0.58%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 894 (19.21%) DevOps Engineer
2 777 (16.70%) Developer
3 643 (13.82%) Senior
4 479 (10.29%) Architect
5 381 (8.19%) Lead
6 283 (6.08%) Azure Engineer
7 267 (5.74%) Data Engineer
8 254 (5.46%) AWS Engineer
9 253 (5.44%) Analyst
10 201 (4.32%) AWS DevOps
11 180 (3.87%) Cloud Engineer
12 178 (3.82%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 161 (3.46%) Software Engineer
14 159 (3.42%) Platform Engineer
15 142 (3.05%) Senior Developer
16 139 (2.99%) Solutions Architect
17 135 (2.90%) Senior DevOps
18 133 (2.86%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 127 (2.73%) Business Analyst
19 127 (2.73%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 509 (10.94%) REST
2 415 (8.92%) .NET
3 317 (6.81%) React
4 314 (6.75%) Node.js
5 264 (5.67%) RESTful
6 252 (5.41%) Kafka
7 249 (5.35%) Spring
8 230 (4.94%) Spring Boot
9 178 (3.82%) AngularJS
10 160 (3.44%) JSON
11 155 (3.33%) OAuth
12 144 (3.09%) HTML
13 138 (2.97%) Elastic Stack
14 131 (2.81%) PySpark
15 130 (2.79%) Playwright
16 129 (2.77%) YAML
17 118 (2.54%) SOAP
18 117 (2.51%) XML
19 114 (2.45%) CSS
20 105 (2.26%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 689 (14.80%) Cloud Native
2 259 (5.57%) Product Ownership
3 170 (3.65%) Distributed Systems
4 125 (2.69%) Public Cloud
5 123 (2.64%) Onboarding
6 95 (2.04%) Legacy Systems
7 90 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
8 77 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
9 58 (1.25%) Management Information System
10 55 (1.18%) Data Protection Act
10 55 (1.18%) Virtual Team
11 52 (1.12%) Security Posture
12 50 (1.07%) Data Centre
13 46 (0.99%) NHS
14 45 (0.97%) Private Cloud
15 38 (0.82%) Low-Code
15 38 (0.82%) Self-Motivation
16 37 (0.80%) AI Agents
16 37 (0.80%) Data Structures
16 37 (0.80%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 484 (10.40%) Linux
2 245 (5.26%) Windows
3 105 (2.26%) Unix
4 65 (1.40%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 43 (0.92%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.84%) VMS
7 24 (0.52%) Ubuntu
8 17 (0.37%) CentOS
9 13 (0.28%) Android
9 13 (0.28%) Apple iOS
10 12 (0.26%) Windows 10
11 10 (0.21%) Solaris
12 7 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
12 7 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
13 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.086%) Mac OS
15 3 (0.064%) Amazon Linux
16 2 (0.043%) Debian
16 2 (0.043%) Windows Server 2008
16 2 (0.043%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,704 (58.10%) CI/CD
2 1,803 (38.74%) Agile
3 1,228 (26.39%) Infrastructure as Code
4 885 (19.02%) Problem-Solving
5 879 (18.89%) Containerisation
6 703 (15.11%) Test Automation
7 692 (14.87%) Microservices
8 594 (12.76%) Continuous Improvement
9 585 (12.57%) Analytics
10 538 (11.56%) Migration
11 519 (11.15%) Scrum
12 507 (10.89%) Observability
13 491 (10.55%) AI
14 462 (9.93%) Stakeholder Management
15 423 (9.09%) Software Engineering
16 417 (8.96%) Data Modelling
17 380 (8.17%) Mentoring
18 340 (7.31%) Data Pipeline
19 327 (7.03%) Platform Engineering
20 321 (6.90%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,439 (30.92%) Python
2 957 (20.56%) SQL
3 614 (13.19%) Java
4 479 (10.29%) C#
5 458 (9.84%) JavaScript
6 373 (8.01%) PowerShell
7 361 (7.76%) Bash
8 323 (6.94%) TypeScript
9 147 (3.16%) Bicep
10 141 (3.03%) Go
11 81 (1.74%) PL/SQL
12 66 (1.42%) Scala
13 58 (1.25%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.05%) T-SQL
15 48 (1.03%) C++
15 48 (1.03%) Ruby
16 41 (0.88%) Groovy
17 32 (0.69%) Perl
18 31 (0.67%) Rust
19 23 (0.49%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,444 (31.03%) Security Cleared
2 1,186 (25.48%) SC Cleared
3 378 (8.12%) Degree
4 207 (4.45%) Azure Certification
5 191 (4.10%) Computer Science Degree
6 156 (3.35%) AWS Certification
7 150 (3.22%) DV Cleared
8 123 (2.64%) BPSS Clearance
9 85 (1.83%) Master's Degree
10 83 (1.78%) CISSP
11 64 (1.38%) Microsoft Certification
12 62 (1.33%) CISM
13 56 (1.20%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 52 (1.12%) ISTQB
15 41 (0.88%) PMI Certification
16 36 (0.77%) Cisco Certification
17 33 (0.71%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 33 (0.71%) PMP
18 25 (0.54%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 24 (0.52%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 406 (8.72%) QA
2 192 (4.13%) Data Quality
3 183 (3.93%) GDPR
4 142 (3.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.66%) Accessibility
6 123 (2.64%) NIST
7 72 (1.55%) NCSC
8 37 (0.80%) PCI DSS
9 36 (0.77%) WCAG
10 29 (0.62%) PMO
11 26 (0.56%) HIPAA
11 26 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 25 (0.54%) SLA
13 18 (0.39%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.32%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.28%) PSD2
16 12 (0.26%) NIST 800
17 11 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.24%) HMG Security Policy Framework
18 10 (0.21%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,105 (23.74%) Docker
2 175 (3.76%) Active Directory
3 76 (1.63%) Virtual Machines
4 72 (1.55%) VMware Infrastructure
5 42 (0.90%) vSphere
6 27 (0.58%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 11 (0.24%) Lustre
10 10 (0.21%) Squid
11 9 (0.19%) GPFS
11 9 (0.19%) Hyper-V
12 8 (0.17%) Postfix
12 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
12 8 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
13 7 (0.15%) Firmware
14 6 (0.13%) HDFS
14 6 (0.13%) NFS
15 5 (0.11%) RACF
15 5 (0.11%) Tivoli Directory Server
Systems Management
1 1,422 (30.55%) Terraform
2 1,325 (28.47%) Kubernetes
3 502 (10.79%) Ansible
4 335 (7.20%) Grafana
5 280 (6.02%) Prometheus
6 98 (2.11%) Argo
7 76 (1.63%) Puppet
8 65 (1.40%) Single Sign-On
9 51 (1.10%) Istio
10 34 (0.73%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.71%) Kibana
12 30 (0.64%) Packer
13 23 (0.49%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.47%) Podman
15 20 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
16 18 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 18 (0.39%) HP ALM
17 17 (0.37%) Consul
17 17 (0.37%) Rancher
18 16 (0.34%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 791 (17.00%) Microsoft
2 306 (6.57%) Oracle
3 282 (6.06%) Databricks
4 265 (5.69%) Google
5 213 (4.58%) Splunk
6 163 (3.50%) ServiceNow
7 141 (3.03%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.64%) VMware
9 115 (2.47%) Salesforce
10 107 (2.30%) SAP
11 79 (1.70%) OpenAI
12 65 (1.40%) Dynatrace
13 60 (1.29%) Atlassian
14 56 (1.20%) CyberArk
15 47 (1.01%) IBM
16 42 (0.90%) Talend
17 38 (0.82%) Cisco
17 38 (0.82%) Denodo
18 37 (0.80%) F5
19 34 (0.73%) Foundry