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

6 months to
26 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,431 3,144 4,135
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.67% 10.39% 9.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.56% 11.41% 11.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,782 2,252 2,820
10th Percentile £381 £365 £400
25th Percentile £438 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.66%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £744 £729
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 16 124
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.33
25th Percentile £61.87 £49.06 £61.51
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +6.70%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.25 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year -7.89% +12.59% +2.89%

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 43,249 27,546 37,029
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 91.07% 85.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,953 17,432 23,598
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.54% -4.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £621 £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 2,594 1,315 2,564
10th Percentile £14.81 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.44 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.71 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +82.48% -35.31% +17.65%

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 June 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 June 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 26 June 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 4,601 £525 - 1,223
UK excluding London +5 2,384 £500 - 933
London +3 2,365 £550 - 490
Work from Home +1 1,537 £525 - 665
North of England +6 851 £500 - 257
Yorkshire +2 456 £510 +2.00% 69
South East -4 443 £513 +2.50% 296
Midlands +1 433 £492 -1.60% 107
West Midlands -1 344 £500 -2.44% 65
North West +2 320 £500 +3.09% 143
South West +16 285 £520 -5.45% 134
Scotland +1 207 £493 +1.65% 38
East of England +26 137 £525 +5.00% 76
North East +11 93 £450 -13.88% 49
East Midlands +2 85 £481 +6.94% 42
Wales +4 51 £425 +38.10% 34
Northern Ireland +15 21 £475 +11.76% 14
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
1 323 (5.95%) Confluence
2 138 (2.54%) Apache Spark
3 125 (2.30%) SharePoint
4 105 (1.93%) Apache Airflow
5 97 (1.79%) Apache
6 83 (1.53%) SAS
7 48 (0.88%) CMS
8 32 (0.59%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.57%) IIS
9 31 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.57%) nginx
10 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.29%) Camunda
12 14 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
14 9 (0.17%) Mendix
14 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
15 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
16 6 (0.11%) Appian
Applications
1 75 (1.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.07%) Microsoft Project
3 46 (0.85%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 39 (0.72%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.61%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.074%) Notion
9 3 (0.055%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.055%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 71 (1.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.15%) Maximo
6 7 (0.13%) SAP MDG
7 6 (0.11%) Magento
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.092%) Endur
8 5 (0.092%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.092%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.092%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.055%) Findur
9 3 (0.055%) OpenText VIM for SAP
9 3 (0.055%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.055%) SAP MM
9 3 (0.055%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,919 (53.75%) Azure
2 1,921 (35.37%) AWS
3 1,608 (29.61%) Azure DevOps
4 897 (16.52%) GitHub
5 682 (12.56%) GCP
6 538 (9.91%) GitHub Actions
7 486 (8.95%) Serverless
8 456 (8.40%) Power Platform
9 306 (5.63%) Amazon S3
10 272 (5.01%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.66%) AWS CloudFormation
12 243 (4.47%) Entra ID
13 224 (4.12%) Azure AKS
14 214 (3.94%) Amazon EKS
15 193 (3.55%) Azure Data Factory
16 188 (3.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 180 (3.31%) Amazon EC2
18 167 (3.07%) Azure Monitor
19 156 (2.87%) OpenShift
19 156 (2.87%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 234 (4.31%) Firewall
2 137 (2.52%) DNS
3 118 (2.17%) Network Security
4 104 (1.91%) VPN
5 48 (0.88%) WAN
6 42 (0.77%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.66%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.63%) BGP
9 31 (0.57%) SSL
10 27 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 24 (0.44%) DHCP
11 24 (0.44%) Internet
11 24 (0.44%) OSPF
12 23 (0.42%) HTTP
12 23 (0.42%) SAN
13 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
13 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 17 (0.31%) IPsec
13 17 (0.31%) LAN
13 17 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 295 (5.43%) Power BI
2 269 (4.95%) SQL Server
3 261 (4.81%) PostgreSQL
4 193 (3.55%) NoSQL
5 171 (3.15%) Relational Database
6 164 (3.02%) MongoDB
7 159 (2.93%) Data Lake
8 158 (2.91%) Data Warehouse
9 119 (2.19%) Amazon RDS
10 106 (1.95%) Azure SQL Database
11 100 (1.84%) DynamoDB
12 99 (1.82%) Metadata
13 87 (1.60%) Delta Lake
14 74 (1.36%) Oracle Database
15 73 (1.34%) Big Data
16 72 (1.33%) Amazon Athena
17 69 (1.27%) Redis
18 68 (1.25%) Amazon Redshift
19 60 (1.10%) Elasticsearch
20 51 (0.94%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 792 (14.58%) Jenkins
2 702 (12.93%) Git
3 667 (12.28%) JIRA
4 579 (10.66%) GitLab
5 125 (2.30%) Selenium
6 109 (2.01%) Postman
7 95 (1.75%) JUnit
8 91 (1.68%) SonarQube
9 78 (1.44%) REST Assured
10 73 (1.34%) Bitbucket
11 71 (1.31%) Maven
12 62 (1.14%) Cucumber
13 60 (1.10%) JMeter
14 51 (0.94%) Cypress.io
15 48 (0.88%) Gradle
16 44 (0.81%) Gatling
17 41 (0.75%) Mockito
18 40 (0.74%) Artifactory
19 38 (0.70%) Visual Studio
20 34 (0.63%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,352 (24.89%) Social Skills
2 999 (18.39%) Finance
3 759 (13.98%) Public Sector
4 428 (7.88%) Analytical Skills
5 358 (6.59%) Banking
6 130 (2.39%) Documentation Skills
7 113 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 78 (1.44%) Influencing Skills
9 77 (1.42%) Retail
10 67 (1.23%) Legal
11 58 (1.07%) Marketing
11 58 (1.07%) Organisational Skills
12 46 (0.85%) Military
13 44 (0.81%) Financial Institution
14 43 (0.79%) Investment Banking
15 39 (0.72%) Law
16 37 (0.68%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.59%) Telecoms
18 31 (0.57%) Front Office
19 28 (0.52%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,094 (20.14%) DevOps Engineer
2 850 (15.65%) Developer
3 761 (14.01%) Senior
4 625 (11.51%) Architect
5 486 (8.95%) Lead
6 334 (6.15%) Azure Engineer
7 319 (5.87%) Analyst
7 319 (5.87%) Data Engineer
8 273 (5.03%) AWS Engineer
9 202 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
10 201 (3.70%) AWS DevOps
11 197 (3.63%) Platform Engineer
12 187 (3.44%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 186 (3.42%) Java Developer
14 183 (3.37%) Senior DevOps
14 183 (3.37%) Solutions Architect
15 174 (3.20%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 167 (3.07%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 159 (2.93%) Business Analyst
18 154 (2.84%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 511 (9.41%) REST
2 475 (8.75%) .NET
3 314 (5.78%) Spring
4 306 (5.63%) React
5 303 (5.58%) RESTful
6 296 (5.45%) Spring Boot
7 293 (5.39%) Kafka
8 232 (4.27%) Node.js
9 169 (3.11%) AngularJS
10 166 (3.06%) PySpark
11 164 (3.02%) OAuth
12 158 (2.91%) Playwright
13 142 (2.61%) JSON
14 129 (2.38%) SOAP
15 126 (2.32%) .NET Framework
16 116 (2.14%) HTML
17 111 (2.04%) OpenID
18 110 (2.03%) OAuth2
19 107 (1.97%) Middleware
19 107 (1.97%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 962 (17.71%) Cloud Native
2 368 (6.78%) Product Ownership
3 233 (4.29%) Distributed Systems
4 148 (2.73%) Onboarding
5 134 (2.47%) Legacy Systems
6 129 (2.38%) Enterprise Software
7 112 (2.06%) Hybrid Cloud
8 105 (1.93%) Public Cloud
9 85 (1.57%) Data Centre
10 80 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
11 73 (1.34%) Management Information System
12 68 (1.25%) Self-Motivation
13 65 (1.20%) Security Posture
14 59 (1.09%) Data Structures
15 57 (1.05%) Virtual Team
16 54 (0.99%) Mobile App
17 52 (0.96%) AI Agents
18 49 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
19 47 (0.87%) NHS
20 44 (0.81%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 467 (8.60%) Linux
2 277 (5.10%) Windows
3 104 (1.91%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 78 (1.44%) Unix
5 60 (1.10%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.66%) VMS
7 30 (0.55%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.28%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.092%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.092%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.074%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.074%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.074%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,157 (58.13%) CI/CD
2 2,099 (38.65%) Agile
3 1,437 (26.46%) Infrastructure as Code
4 876 (16.13%) Containerisation
5 822 (15.14%) Problem-Solving
6 791 (14.56%) Test Automation
7 789 (14.53%) Continuous Improvement
7 789 (14.53%) Microservices
8 674 (12.41%) Migration
9 664 (12.23%) Stakeholder Management
10 643 (11.84%) AI
11 641 (11.80%) Observability
12 638 (11.75%) Scrum
13 610 (11.23%) Analytics
14 582 (10.72%) Platform Engineering
15 564 (10.38%) Software Engineering
16 493 (9.08%) Data Modelling
17 460 (8.47%) Technical Leadership
18 437 (8.05%) Roadmaps
19 431 (7.94%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,520 (27.99%) Python
2 1,016 (18.71%) SQL
3 741 (13.64%) Java
4 513 (9.45%) C#
5 409 (7.53%) JavaScript
6 388 (7.14%) Bash
7 373 (6.87%) PowerShell
8 278 (5.12%) TypeScript
9 187 (3.44%) Bicep
10 112 (2.06%) Go
11 67 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 66 (1.22%) Shell Script
13 64 (1.18%) Scala
14 55 (1.01%) T-SQL
15 52 (0.96%) PL/SQL
16 49 (0.90%) Groovy
17 33 (0.61%) C++
18 25 (0.46%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 25 (0.46%) Kotlin
19 21 (0.39%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,718 (31.63%) Security Cleared
2 1,448 (26.66%) SC Cleared
3 336 (6.19%) Degree
4 205 (3.77%) Azure Certification
5 176 (3.24%) AWS Certification
5 176 (3.24%) BPSS Clearance
6 164 (3.02%) DV Cleared
7 133 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
8 80 (1.47%) CISSP
9 69 (1.27%) Microsoft Certification
10 59 (1.09%) ISTQB
11 56 (1.03%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 48 (0.88%) Cisco Certification
13 46 (0.85%) PMI Certification
14 45 (0.83%) PMP
15 42 (0.77%) Master's Degree
16 41 (0.75%) CISM
17 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 27 (0.50%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 467 (8.60%) QA
2 260 (4.79%) Data Quality
3 170 (3.13%) Accessibility
3 170 (3.13%) GDPR
4 121 (2.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 110 (2.03%) NIST
6 70 (1.29%) NCSC
7 65 (1.20%) WCAG
8 50 (0.92%) PCI DSS
9 42 (0.77%) SLA
10 31 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 28 (0.52%) PMO
12 26 (0.48%) GRC
13 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
14 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.22%) PSD2
16 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.20%) SEPA
17 8 (0.15%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,039 (19.13%) Docker
2 176 (3.24%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
4 75 (1.38%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.53%) vSphere
6 26 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (0.31%) Squid
8 17 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.26%) Postfix
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) Firmware
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.092%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.092%) NFS
13 5 (0.092%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,556 (28.65%) Terraform
2 1,382 (25.45%) Kubernetes
3 514 (9.46%) Ansible
4 358 (6.59%) Grafana
5 309 (5.69%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.57%) Argo
7 75 (1.38%) Single Sign-On
8 66 (1.22%) Puppet
9 50 (0.92%) Istio
10 35 (0.64%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.57%) Packer
12 27 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
13 26 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 24 (0.44%) HP ALM
15 22 (0.41%) Kibana
16 18 (0.33%) Consul
17 16 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
19 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 949 (17.47%) Microsoft
2 279 (5.14%) Oracle
3 277 (5.10%) Databricks
4 262 (4.82%) Google
5 193 (3.55%) ServiceNow
6 182 (3.35%) Splunk
7 181 (3.33%) Salesforce
8 123 (2.26%) SAP
9 118 (2.17%) Dynatrace
9 118 (2.17%) Red Hat
10 113 (2.08%) VMware
11 75 (1.38%) OpenAI
12 55 (1.01%) Atlassian
12 55 (1.01%) IBM
12 55 (1.01%) Informatica
13 47 (0.87%) CyberArk
14 42 (0.77%) Cisco
15 41 (0.75%) MuleSoft
15 41 (0.75%) Okta
16 40 (0.74%) Foundry