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

6 months to
18 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +3 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,291 3,343 3,942
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.56% 10.53% 9.11%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.18% 11.84% 10.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,010 2,292 2,865
10th Percentile £370 £400 £410
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £564 £563
Median % change year-on-year -7.80% +0.27% -6.25%
75th Percentile £614 £675 £660
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £543
% change year-on-year -4.76% -3.31% -1.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 26 88
10th Percentile £41.90 £37.13 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £51.81
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.50 £79.62 £66.81
90th Percentile £94.50 £80.75 £77.65
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 32,565 28,230 37,893
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.70% 88.92% 87.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,598 17,153 25,051
10th Percentile £304 £308 £304
25th Percentile £406 £413 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £743 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,982 906 1,726
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £14.15
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.80 £17.54
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -18.75% +17.96%
75th Percentile £56.69 £62.50 £63.75
90th Percentile £68.75 £74.81 £75.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.00 £30.78 £40.28
% change year-on-year -22.03% -23.58% +46.45%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 3,683 £525 -8.70% 1,998
UK excluding London +7 1,930 £500 -4.76% 1,811
London -1 1,842 £540 -10.00% 448
Work from Home 0 1,221 £525 -2.78% 1,008
North of England +6 663 £492 -3.53% 400
Midlands +23 389 £515 -1.44% 216
South East 0 385 £525 -12.50% 556
Yorkshire +1 346 £500 -0.74% 168
West Midlands +25 318 £525 - 94
North West +5 272 £455 -9.00% 179
South West +8 236 £525 -11.76% 241
Scotland +6 188 £487 +8.22% 77
East of England +17 100 £558 +9.85% 238
East Midlands +17 71 £425 -10.53% 117
North East -7 46 £475 -17.03% 55
Wales +7 35 £485 +79.63% 91
Northern Ireland -8 8 - - 36

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
1 257 (5.99%) Confluence
2 86 (2.00%) SharePoint
3 82 (1.91%) Apache
4 79 (1.84%) SAS
5 67 (1.56%) Apache Spark
6 62 (1.44%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.77%) CMS
7 33 (0.77%) nginx
7 33 (0.77%) OpenStack
8 24 (0.56%) IIS
9 21 (0.49%) Microsoft Exchange
10 19 (0.44%) JBoss
11 18 (0.42%) WebLogic
12 15 (0.35%) CICS
13 11 (0.26%) HCL Notes
13 11 (0.26%) Mendix
14 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.21%) iPlanet
15 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
16 8 (0.19%) Smallworld
Applications
1 90 (2.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 32 (0.75%) Microsoft Project
4 26 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
5 16 (0.37%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.35%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.21%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 5 (0.12%) 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 63 (1.47%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.33%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.26%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.26%) Endur
5 9 (0.21%) Maximo
5 9 (0.21%) Oracle ERP
6 7 (0.16%) NEC Housing
7 5 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.12%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.093%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.093%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.093%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.093%) Remedy ITSM
8 4 (0.093%) SAP ERP
8 4 (0.093%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.070%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.070%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.070%) SAP FI/CO
Cloud Services
1 2,169 (50.55%) Azure
2 1,565 (36.47%) AWS
3 1,163 (27.10%) Azure DevOps
4 791 (18.43%) GitHub
5 627 (14.61%) GCP
6 517 (12.05%) Serverless
7 460 (10.72%) GitHub Actions
8 342 (7.97%) Power Platform
9 272 (6.34%) AWS CloudFormation
10 255 (5.94%) AWS Lambda
11 242 (5.64%) Amazon S3
12 208 (4.85%) Azure Data Factory
13 201 (4.68%) Azure AKS
14 188 (4.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 176 (4.10%) Amazon EKS
16 170 (3.96%) OpenShift
17 166 (3.87%) Amazon ECS
18 165 (3.85%) Dynamics 365
18 165 (3.85%) Entra ID
19 162 (3.78%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 205 (4.78%) Firewall
2 110 (2.56%) DNS
3 88 (2.05%) VPN
4 82 (1.91%) Network Security
5 54 (1.26%) SSL
5 54 (1.26%) TCP/IP
6 42 (0.98%) HTTP
7 34 (0.79%) HTTPS
8 23 (0.54%) WAN
9 18 (0.42%) BGP
9 18 (0.42%) SSH
10 17 (0.40%) FTP
10 17 (0.40%) MPLS
10 17 (0.40%) SD-WAN
10 17 (0.40%) SMTP
11 16 (0.37%) DHCP
12 15 (0.35%) Kerberos
13 13 (0.30%) OpenLDAP
14 11 (0.26%) Internet
15 10 (0.23%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 255 (5.94%) PostgreSQL
2 224 (5.22%) Power BI
3 171 (3.99%) SQL Server
4 162 (3.78%) NoSQL
5 135 (3.15%) Amazon RDS
6 128 (2.98%) Data Lake
7 111 (2.59%) Relational Database
8 108 (2.52%) MongoDB
9 105 (2.45%) Data Warehouse
10 90 (2.10%) Azure SQL Database
11 85 (1.98%) Oracle Database
12 68 (1.58%) DynamoDB
13 64 (1.49%) MySQL
14 59 (1.37%) Elasticsearch
15 54 (1.26%) Tableau
16 53 (1.24%) Amazon Aurora
17 51 (1.19%) Redis
18 46 (1.07%) Delta Lake
18 46 (1.07%) Metadata
19 41 (0.96%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 779 (18.15%) Jenkins
2 615 (14.33%) Git
3 599 (13.96%) JIRA
4 570 (13.28%) GitLab
5 131 (3.05%) Selenium
6 100 (2.33%) JUnit
7 88 (2.05%) Postman
8 74 (1.72%) SonarQube
9 73 (1.70%) Sonatype Nexus
10 70 (1.63%) Cypress.io
11 67 (1.56%) Bitbucket
12 59 (1.37%) Cucumber
13 50 (1.17%) Artifactory
14 47 (1.10%) Gradle
15 46 (1.07%) JMeter
16 44 (1.03%) Liquibase
17 43 (1.00%) Maven
18 39 (0.91%) CircleCI
19 37 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
20 32 (0.75%) REST Assured
General
1 1,298 (30.25%) Social Skills
2 772 (17.99%) Finance
3 545 (12.70%) Public Sector
4 360 (8.39%) Banking
5 341 (7.95%) Analytical Skills
6 141 (3.29%) Documentation Skills
7 70 (1.63%) Financial Institution
8 68 (1.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 67 (1.56%) Influencing Skills
10 60 (1.40%) Marketing
11 49 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
12 48 (1.12%) Investment Banking
13 47 (1.10%) Front Office
14 46 (1.07%) Retail
15 44 (1.03%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.82%) Military
17 34 (0.79%) Pharmaceutical
18 30 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
19 27 (0.63%) Back Office
20 24 (0.56%) Law
Job Titles
1 842 (19.62%) DevOps Engineer
2 749 (17.46%) Developer
3 590 (13.75%) Senior
4 378 (8.81%) Architect
5 328 (7.64%) Lead
6 244 (5.69%) AWS Engineer
7 243 (5.66%) Azure Engineer
8 222 (5.17%) Data Engineer
9 212 (4.94%) Analyst
10 189 (4.40%) AWS DevOps
11 165 (3.85%) AWS DevOps Engineer
11 165 (3.85%) Software Engineer
12 155 (3.61%) Cloud Engineer
13 148 (3.45%) Senior Developer
14 140 (3.26%) Platform Engineer
15 127 (2.96%) Consultant
16 120 (2.80%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 120 (2.80%) Senior DevOps
17 116 (2.70%) Solutions Architect
18 112 (2.61%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 493 (11.49%) REST
2 367 (8.55%) .NET
3 269 (6.27%) React
4 267 (6.22%) Node.js
5 264 (6.15%) RESTful
6 250 (5.83%) Kafka
7 220 (5.13%) Spring
8 200 (4.66%) Spring Boot
9 192 (4.47%) JSON
10 154 (3.59%) OAuth
11 143 (3.33%) AngularJS
12 141 (3.29%) SOAP
13 139 (3.24%) Elastic Stack
13 139 (3.24%) XML
14 128 (2.98%) HTML
15 127 (2.96%) YAML
16 104 (2.42%) Playwright
17 97 (2.26%) CSS
18 93 (2.17%) PySpark
19 91 (2.12%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 605 (14.10%) Cloud Native
2 233 (5.43%) Product Ownership
3 164 (3.82%) Distributed Systems
4 119 (2.77%) Onboarding
5 112 (2.61%) Public Cloud
6 85 (1.98%) Legacy Systems
7 79 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
8 70 (1.63%) Enterprise Software
9 57 (1.33%) Virtual Team
10 56 (1.31%) Data Protection Act
11 55 (1.28%) Management Information System
12 53 (1.24%) Data Centre
13 49 (1.14%) Replication
14 45 (1.05%) Mobile App
14 45 (1.05%) Security Posture
15 44 (1.03%) NHS
16 43 (1.00%) Private Cloud
17 41 (0.96%) CMDB
17 41 (0.96%) Self-Motivation
18 37 (0.86%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 487 (11.35%) Linux
2 245 (5.71%) Windows
3 110 (2.56%) Unix
4 54 (1.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 54 (1.26%) Windows Server
5 50 (1.17%) VMS
6 30 (0.70%) Android
7 29 (0.68%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.61%) Apple iOS
9 19 (0.44%) Windows 10
10 17 (0.40%) CentOS
11 14 (0.33%) Amazon Linux
12 10 (0.23%) Solaris
13 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 5 (0.12%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.12%) zOS
15 3 (0.070%) Windows Server 2012
16 2 (0.047%) Debian
17 1 (0.023%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,446 (57.00%) CI/CD
2 1,723 (40.15%) Agile
3 1,125 (26.22%) Infrastructure as Code
4 839 (19.55%) Containerisation
5 821 (19.13%) Problem-Solving
6 658 (15.33%) Test Automation
7 650 (15.15%) Microservices
8 500 (11.65%) Continuous Improvement
9 486 (11.33%) Analytics
10 479 (11.16%) Migration
11 476 (11.09%) Scrum
12 441 (10.28%) Observability
13 409 (9.53%) AI
13 409 (9.53%) Software Engineering
14 365 (8.51%) Stakeholder Management
15 325 (7.57%) Mentoring
16 322 (7.50%) Data Modelling
17 295 (6.87%) Data Pipeline
18 288 (6.71%) Business Intelligence
18 288 (6.71%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,335 (31.11%) Python
2 852 (19.86%) SQL
3 594 (13.84%) Java
4 421 (9.81%) JavaScript
5 408 (9.51%) C#
6 373 (8.69%) PowerShell
7 348 (8.11%) Bash
8 301 (7.01%) TypeScript
9 148 (3.45%) Go
10 145 (3.38%) Bicep
11 78 (1.82%) PL/SQL
12 76 (1.77%) Shell Script
13 52 (1.21%) Ruby
14 50 (1.17%) Groovy
14 50 (1.17%) Scala
15 49 (1.14%) C++
16 41 (0.96%) Perl
16 41 (0.96%) T-SQL
17 24 (0.56%) Rust
18 22 (0.51%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,287 (29.99%) Security Cleared
2 1,070 (24.94%) SC Cleared
3 364 (8.48%) Degree
4 193 (4.50%) Computer Science Degree
5 181 (4.22%) Azure Certification
6 140 (3.26%) DV Cleared
7 138 (3.22%) AWS Certification
8 104 (2.42%) BPSS Clearance
9 82 (1.91%) Master's Degree
10 73 (1.70%) CISSP
11 63 (1.47%) Microsoft Certification
12 57 (1.33%) CISM
13 44 (1.03%) ISTQB
14 43 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 36 (0.84%) PMI Certification
16 29 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
16 29 (0.68%) PMP
17 26 (0.61%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 18 (0.42%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 17 (0.40%) IIBA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 385 (8.97%) QA
2 160 (3.73%) GDPR
3 152 (3.54%) Data Quality
4 138 (3.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 118 (2.75%) Accessibility
6 114 (2.66%) NIST
7 58 (1.35%) NCSC
8 35 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 33 (0.77%) WCAG
10 27 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 25 (0.58%) HIPAA
12 24 (0.56%) PMO
13 23 (0.54%) SLA
14 17 (0.40%) PSD2
15 16 (0.37%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.37%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.30%) SEPA
17 10 (0.23%) HL7
17 10 (0.23%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 10 (0.23%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,102 (25.68%) Docker
2 170 (3.96%) Active Directory
3 65 (1.51%) VMware Infrastructure
4 63 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.68%) vSphere
6 17 (0.40%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
9 13 (0.30%) Hyper-V
10 12 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 11 (0.26%) Squid
11 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
12 10 (0.23%) Lustre
12 10 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 9 (0.21%) Dovecot
13 9 (0.21%) Postfix
14 8 (0.19%) GPFS
14 8 (0.19%) NFS
14 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
15 7 (0.16%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,352 (31.51%) Terraform
2 1,269 (29.57%) Kubernetes
3 528 (12.30%) Ansible
4 315 (7.34%) Grafana
5 283 (6.60%) Prometheus
6 82 (1.91%) Argo
7 79 (1.84%) Puppet
8 50 (1.17%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (1.03%) Progress Chef
10 43 (1.00%) Istio
11 37 (0.86%) Kibana
12 31 (0.72%) Packer
13 23 (0.54%) Podman
14 18 (0.42%) SCCM
15 17 (0.40%) Rancher
16 16 (0.37%) Proxmox
17 15 (0.35%) Microsoft Intune
18 14 (0.33%) Nessus
18 14 (0.33%) NetBackup
19 13 (0.30%) Data Guard
Vendors
1 730 (17.01%) Microsoft
2 316 (7.36%) Oracle
3 246 (5.73%) Google
4 233 (5.43%) Databricks
5 213 (4.96%) Splunk
6 164 (3.82%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.82%) Red Hat
8 108 (2.52%) VMware
9 106 (2.47%) Salesforce
10 102 (2.38%) SAP
11 72 (1.68%) Dynatrace
12 63 (1.47%) OpenAI
13 47 (1.10%) F5
13 47 (1.10%) IBM
14 43 (1.00%) Atlassian
15 42 (0.98%) Cisco
15 42 (0.98%) CyberArk
15 42 (0.98%) Talend
16 40 (0.93%) Palo Alto
17 38 (0.89%) Denodo