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

6 months to
10 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 15 13 14
Rank change year-on-year -2 +1 0
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,632 3,786 3,770
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.32% 11.43% 9.94%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.19% 12.63% 11.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,924 2,634 2,505
10th Percentile £381 £363 £380
25th Percentile £435 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £623 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 23 66
10th Percentile £37.55 £44.25 £49.34
25th Percentile £57.44 £54.88 £65.31
Median hourly rate £68.88 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.80% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £88.13 £74.00
90th Percentile £92.03 £95.00 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +7.69%

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 46,195 29,974 32,629
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.49% 86.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,749 18,609 19,667
10th Percentile £325 £294 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,350 1,884 1,294
10th Percentile £13.54 £14.35 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.00 £17.30 £20.03
Median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.16
Median % change year-on-year +49.11% -37.38% -8.38%
75th Percentile £65.00 £43.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £73.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £22.27 £41.50
% change year-on-year +68.43% -46.35% -2.35%

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 10 October 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 10 October 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 10 October 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 4,782 £525 - 4,758
London -1 2,549 £550 - 2,486
UK excluding London -3 2,369 £500 - 2,485
Work from Home -2 1,617 £525 +0.96% 2,174
North of England -3 786 £500 +4.17% 745
South East -10 450 £540 +7.95% 562
Midlands -8 408 £488 -5.34% 288
Yorkshire -3 371 £500 - 233
West Midlands -10 331 £500 -4.76% 177
South West +7 327 £550 - 270
North West -4 320 £521 +15.80% 394
Scotland -7 221 £475 -4.90% 211
East of England +1 147 £505 -7.13% 248
North East +10 109 £450 -18.18% 122
East Midlands -10 75 £449 +7.75% 111
Wales -7 42 £375 - 84
Northern Ireland +25 23 £600 - 88
Channel Islands - 2 £500 -

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
1 339 (6.02%) Confluence
2 160 (2.84%) SharePoint
3 135 (2.40%) Apache Spark
4 126 (2.24%) Apache
4 126 (2.24%) Apache Airflow
5 49 (0.87%) SAS
6 44 (0.78%) Jupyter
7 41 (0.73%) CMS
8 34 (0.60%) nginx
9 31 (0.55%) IIS
10 21 (0.37%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.28%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
13 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 11 (0.20%) WebSphere
15 10 (0.18%) Tomcat
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 74 (1.31%) Microsoft Excel
2 52 (0.92%) Microsoft Project
2 52 (0.92%) MS Visio
3 41 (0.73%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 14 (0.25%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
7 8 (0.14%) Windchill
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
8 5 (0.089%) Trello
9 3 (0.053%) Gliffy
9 3 (0.053%) Mingle
10 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.018%) Sketch
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 81 (1.44%) Dynamics CRM
2 46 (0.82%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.21%) SAP MDG
5 11 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
6 10 (0.18%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 9 (0.16%) Magento
8 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
9 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
10 5 (0.089%) Aladdin
10 5 (0.089%) Dynamics AX
10 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
10 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
10 5 (0.089%) Temenos T24
11 4 (0.071%) Maximo
11 4 (0.071%) Oracle Payroll
11 4 (0.071%) Teamcenter
11 4 (0.071%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.053%) Endur
12 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 3,065 (54.42%) Azure
2 2,018 (35.83%) AWS
3 1,751 (31.09%) Azure DevOps
4 1,008 (17.90%) GitHub
5 775 (13.76%) GCP
6 637 (11.31%) GitHub Actions
7 501 (8.90%) Power Platform
8 478 (8.49%) Serverless
9 313 (5.56%) Amazon S3
10 288 (5.11%) AWS Lambda
11 272 (4.83%) Entra ID
12 267 (4.74%) Amazon EKS
13 259 (4.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 234 (4.15%) AWS CloudFormation
15 224 (3.98%) Azure AKS
15 224 (3.98%) Azure Monitor
16 203 (3.60%) Amazon EC2
17 197 (3.50%) Azure Data Factory
18 196 (3.48%) Dynamics 365
19 184 (3.27%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 240 (4.26%) Firewall
2 185 (3.28%) DNS
3 121 (2.15%) VPN
4 120 (2.13%) Network Security
5 82 (1.46%) TCP/IP
6 56 (0.99%) DHCP
7 54 (0.96%) SSL
8 45 (0.80%) WAN
9 38 (0.67%) BGP
9 38 (0.67%) HTTP
10 30 (0.53%) Internet
10 30 (0.53%) SSH
11 28 (0.50%) OSPF
12 27 (0.48%) SD-WAN
13 21 (0.37%) LAN
13 21 (0.37%) VLAN
14 18 (0.32%) BIG-IP
14 18 (0.32%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 18 (0.32%) Wi-Fi
15 16 (0.28%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 319 (5.66%) Power BI
2 307 (5.45%) PostgreSQL
3 303 (5.38%) SQL Server
4 208 (3.69%) Data Warehouse
5 194 (3.44%) MongoDB
6 183 (3.25%) NoSQL
7 180 (3.20%) Data Lake
8 167 (2.97%) Relational Database
9 157 (2.79%) Amazon RDS
10 127 (2.25%) Metadata
11 109 (1.94%) Azure SQL Database
12 91 (1.62%) MySQL
13 90 (1.60%) DynamoDB
14 89 (1.58%) Oracle Database
15 85 (1.51%) Redis
16 84 (1.49%) Delta Lake
17 65 (1.15%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 64 (1.14%) Amazon Redshift
18 64 (1.14%) Big Data
19 57 (1.01%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 867 (15.39%) Git
2 833 (14.79%) Jenkins
3 669 (11.88%) GitLab
4 655 (11.63%) JIRA
5 148 (2.63%) Selenium
6 102 (1.81%) JUnit
7 97 (1.72%) Maven
7 97 (1.72%) Postman
8 92 (1.63%) SonarQube
9 82 (1.46%) Cucumber
10 74 (1.31%) Bitbucket
10 74 (1.31%) Cypress.io
10 74 (1.31%) REST Assured
11 68 (1.21%) Gradle
12 64 (1.14%) JMeter
13 56 (0.99%) Claude Code
14 51 (0.91%) Mockito
15 45 (0.80%) Sonatype Nexus
16 44 (0.78%) Visual Studio
17 40 (0.71%) Gatling
General
1 1,504 (26.70%) Social Skills
2 1,039 (18.45%) Finance
3 818 (14.52%) Public Sector
4 552 (9.80%) Analytical Skills
5 418 (7.42%) Banking
6 169 (3.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 113 (2.01%) Retail
8 93 (1.65%) Influencing Skills
9 80 (1.42%) Documentation Skills
10 61 (1.08%) Aerospace
11 59 (1.05%) Investment Banking
11 59 (1.05%) Legal
11 59 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (0.99%) Marketing
12 56 (0.99%) Military
13 51 (0.91%) Telecoms
14 49 (0.87%) Manufacturing
15 47 (0.83%) Financial Institution
16 46 (0.82%) Law
16 46 (0.82%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 1,127 (20.01%) DevOps Engineer
2 929 (16.50%) Developer
3 859 (15.25%) Senior
4 636 (11.29%) Architect
5 547 (9.71%) Lead
6 344 (6.11%) Azure Engineer
7 313 (5.56%) Data Engineer
8 263 (4.67%) AWS Engineer
9 252 (4.47%) Analyst
10 225 (4.00%) Platform Engineer
11 208 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
12 202 (3.59%) Senior DevOps
13 195 (3.46%) Azure DevOps Engineer
14 194 (3.44%) Java Developer
15 187 (3.32%) AWS DevOps
16 184 (3.27%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 176 (3.13%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 175 (3.11%) Solutions Architect
19 152 (2.70%) Senior Developer
20 143 (2.54%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,728 (30.68%) Terraform
2 694 (12.32%) REST
3 502 (8.91%) .NET
4 405 (7.19%) Kafka
5 366 (6.50%) RESTful
6 303 (5.38%) Spring
7 298 (5.29%) React
7 298 (5.29%) Spring Boot
8 206 (3.66%) OAuth
9 191 (3.39%) Node.js
10 186 (3.30%) JSON
11 160 (2.84%) Playwright
12 154 (2.73%) PySpark
13 148 (2.63%) HTML
14 141 (2.50%) OAuth2
15 138 (2.45%) .NET Framework
16 134 (2.38%) CSS
17 133 (2.36%) Middleware
17 133 (2.36%) SOAP
18 126 (2.24%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 1,058 (18.79%) Cloud Native
2 420 (7.46%) Product Ownership
3 276 (4.90%) Distributed Systems
4 232 (4.12%) Enterprise Software
5 218 (3.87%) Onboarding
6 161 (2.86%) Hybrid Cloud
7 147 (2.61%) Legacy Systems
8 116 (2.06%) AI Agents
9 106 (1.88%) Management Information System
10 86 (1.53%) Self-Motivation
11 79 (1.40%) Public Cloud
12 78 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
12 78 (1.38%) Security Posture
13 75 (1.33%) Data Structures
14 74 (1.31%) Data Centre
15 72 (1.28%) Replication
16 68 (1.21%) PKI
17 64 (1.14%) Enterprise Cloud
18 55 (0.98%) Virtual Team
19 52 (0.92%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 591 (10.49%) Linux
2 335 (5.95%) Windows
3 124 (2.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 116 (2.06%) Unix
5 105 (1.86%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) Ubuntu
7 35 (0.62%) VMS
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 18 (0.32%) Android
9 18 (0.32%) CentOS
10 12 (0.21%) zOS
11 11 (0.20%) Amazon Linux
12 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
12 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.12%) AIX
13 7 (0.12%) Solaris
14 5 (0.089%) Mac OS
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Windows Server 2008
16 3 (0.053%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,513 (62.38%) CI/CD
2 2,295 (40.75%) Agile
3 1,714 (30.43%) Infrastructure as Code
4 1,004 (17.83%) Stakeholder Management
5 982 (17.44%) Continuous Improvement
6 954 (16.94%) Containerisation
6 954 (16.94%) Test Automation
7 927 (16.46%) AI
8 906 (16.09%) Problem-Solving
9 844 (14.99%) Microservices
10 810 (14.38%) Observability
11 797 (14.15%) Platform Engineering
12 761 (13.51%) Software Engineering
13 691 (12.27%) Migration
14 685 (12.16%) Scrum
15 634 (11.26%) Technical Leadership
16 577 (10.25%) Analytics
17 523 (9.29%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 504 (8.95%) Event-Driven
18 504 (8.95%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,676 (29.76%) Python
2 983 (17.45%) SQL
3 828 (14.70%) Java
4 532 (9.45%) Bash
5 525 (9.32%) PowerShell
6 518 (9.20%) C#
7 472 (8.38%) JavaScript
8 335 (5.95%) TypeScript
9 276 (4.90%) Bicep
10 129 (2.29%) Go
11 83 (1.47%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.23%) Scala
13 68 (1.21%) T-SQL
14 66 (1.17%) Groovy
15 57 (1.01%) Apex Code
15 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
16 38 (0.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 36 (0.64%) Perl
18 34 (0.60%) C++
19 32 (0.57%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,817 (32.26%) Security Cleared
2 1,519 (26.97%) SC Cleared
3 374 (6.64%) Degree
4 254 (4.51%) Azure Certification
5 253 (4.49%) DV Cleared
6 249 (4.42%) BPSS Clearance
7 206 (3.66%) AWS Certification
8 149 (2.65%) Computer Science Degree
9 108 (1.92%) Microsoft Certification
10 80 (1.42%) CISSP
11 67 (1.19%) ISTQB
12 56 (0.99%) PMP
13 55 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 53 (0.94%) PMI Certification
15 49 (0.87%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 42 (0.75%) Master's Degree
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 28 (0.50%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.44%) (ISC)2 CCSP
20 24 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 560 (9.94%) QA
2 284 (5.04%) Data Quality
3 222 (3.94%) Accessibility
4 123 (2.18%) GDPR
5 95 (1.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.47%) WCAG
7 65 (1.15%) NIST
8 56 (0.99%) NCSC
9 47 (0.83%) PMO
10 35 (0.62%) SLA
11 32 (0.57%) PCI DSS
12 26 (0.46%) GRC
13 23 (0.41%) ISO 20022
14 18 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 15 (0.27%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.27%) SEPA
15 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 14 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
16 14 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
17 13 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,181 (20.97%) Docker
2 174 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 84 (1.49%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 32 (0.57%) vSphere
6 24 (0.43%) Virtual Desktop
6 24 (0.43%) VMware ESXi
7 21 (0.37%) Hyper-V
8 14 (0.25%) VMware NSX
9 11 (0.20%) Squid
10 10 (0.18%) IAG
10 10 (0.18%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.14%) zsh
12 7 (0.12%) Virtual Servers
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) Postfix
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.089%) KVM
15 4 (0.071%) Corosync
Systems Management
1 1,568 (27.84%) Kubernetes
2 551 (9.78%) Ansible
3 380 (6.75%) Grafana
4 319 (5.66%) Prometheus
5 73 (1.30%) Argo
6 57 (1.01%) Puppet
7 51 (0.91%) Microsoft Intune
8 49 (0.87%) Progress Chef
9 43 (0.76%) Kibana
10 41 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
11 37 (0.66%) Packer
12 32 (0.57%) Istio
13 24 (0.43%) Kubeflow
14 23 (0.41%) Kustomize
15 21 (0.37%) SCCM
16 17 (0.30%) vCenter Server
17 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
18 14 (0.25%) HP ALM
19 13 (0.23%) Karpenter
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,154 (20.49%) Microsoft
2 324 (5.75%) Google
3 314 (5.58%) Databricks
4 303 (5.38%) Oracle
5 197 (3.50%) ServiceNow
6 188 (3.34%) Splunk
7 161 (2.86%) Salesforce
8 159 (2.82%) Dynatrace
9 124 (2.20%) VMware
10 118 (2.10%) SAP
11 96 (1.70%) Red Hat
12 76 (1.35%) OpenAI
13 71 (1.26%) IBM
14 70 (1.24%) MuleSoft
15 63 (1.12%) Foundry
16 46 (0.82%) Informatica
17 44 (0.78%) Cisco
18 39 (0.69%) AppDynamics
18 39 (0.69%) Atlassian
18 39 (0.69%) Okta