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

6 months to
30 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,615 3,479 3,932
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.60% 10.60% 9.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.48% 11.72% 11.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,904 2,485 2,696
10th Percentile £385 £360 £385
25th Percentile £438 £425 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £623 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £538
% change year-on-year +2.56% -9.30% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 26 94
10th Percentile £35.00 £32.63 £56.33
25th Percentile £56.50 £51.56 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.28%
75th Percentile £77.50 £86.37 £74.86
90th Percentile £88.00 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -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 45,002 29,684 34,056
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.96% 90.46% 85.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,855 18,648 21,888
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £734 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,714 1,621 1,980
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £13.69
25th Percentile £19.89 £17.33 £17.74
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.57 £40.33
% change year-on-year +86.55% -41.56% -

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 30 July 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 30 July 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 30 July 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 +4 4,800 £525 - 1,786
London +2 2,474 £550 - 857
UK excluding London +5 2,456 £500 +2.56% 1,141
Work from Home 0 1,594 £525 +2.44% 902
North of England +3 852 £500 +4.17% 345
Midlands +1 459 £491 +3.37% 161
South East -10 459 £525 +5.00% 302
Yorkshire +2 429 £500 +2.04% 90
West Midlands -2 374 £495 -1.04% 116
North West -2 336 £521 +9.70% 181
South West +14 320 £525 - 161
Scotland +1 198 £488 -1.71% 55
East of England +14 137 £509 +1.70% 68
North East +8 104 £425 -18.66% 76
East Midlands +3 80 £488 +7.26% 45
Wales -5 45 £480 +49.73% 29
Northern Ireland +15 22 £475 +7.95% 31
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
1 343 (6.11%) Confluence
2 139 (2.48%) SharePoint
3 132 (2.35%) Apache Spark
4 113 (2.01%) Apache Airflow
5 104 (1.85%) Apache
6 83 (1.48%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
10 27 (0.48%) nginx
11 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
12 14 (0.25%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) OpenStack
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
2 58 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
4 35 (0.62%) MS Visio
5 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
10 4 (0.071%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 65 (1.16%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.071%) Endur
8 4 (0.071%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.053%) Findur
9 3 (0.053%) Shopify
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,026 (53.89%) Azure
2 2,000 (35.62%) AWS
3 1,707 (30.40%) Azure DevOps
4 943 (16.79%) GitHub
5 721 (12.84%) GCP
6 581 (10.35%) GitHub Actions
7 456 (8.12%) Power Platform
8 446 (7.94%) Serverless
9 301 (5.36%) Amazon S3
10 267 (4.76%) AWS Lambda
11 254 (4.52%) Entra ID
12 250 (4.45%) AWS CloudFormation
13 232 (4.13%) Amazon EKS
14 229 (4.08%) Azure AKS
15 198 (3.53%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 194 (3.46%) Azure Monitor
17 183 (3.26%) Azure Data Factory
18 178 (3.17%) Amazon EC2
19 156 (2.78%) Dynamics 365
20 153 (2.72%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 242 (4.31%) Firewall
2 155 (2.76%) DNS
3 123 (2.19%) VPN
4 113 (2.01%) Network Security
5 56 (1.00%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 42 (0.75%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.59%) BGP
11 31 (0.55%) Internet
12 28 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
13 27 (0.48%) HTTP
14 25 (0.45%) OSPF
15 21 (0.37%) SAN
16 19 (0.34%) VLAN
17 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
18 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
18 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 17 (0.30%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 310 (5.52%) Power BI
2 294 (5.24%) SQL Server
3 283 (5.04%) PostgreSQL
4 191 (3.40%) NoSQL
5 186 (3.31%) Data Warehouse
6 182 (3.24%) Relational Database
7 176 (3.13%) MongoDB
8 154 (2.74%) Data Lake
9 112 (1.99%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.87%) Azure SQL Database
10 105 (1.87%) Metadata
11 101 (1.80%) DynamoDB
12 85 (1.51%) Delta Lake
13 81 (1.44%) Oracle Database
14 68 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
15 67 (1.19%) Big Data
15 67 (1.19%) MySQL
15 67 (1.19%) Redis
16 64 (1.14%) Amazon Athena
17 54 (0.96%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 812 (14.46%) Jenkins
2 752 (13.39%) Git
3 684 (12.18%) JIRA
4 581 (10.35%) GitLab
5 129 (2.30%) Selenium
6 104 (1.85%) Postman
7 100 (1.78%) JUnit
8 99 (1.76%) SonarQube
9 83 (1.48%) Bitbucket
10 81 (1.44%) Maven
11 71 (1.26%) REST Assured
12 65 (1.16%) JMeter
13 61 (1.09%) Cucumber
13 61 (1.09%) Cypress.io
14 51 (0.91%) Gradle
15 49 (0.87%) Mockito
16 46 (0.82%) Gatling
17 40 (0.71%) LoadRunner
18 38 (0.68%) Visual Studio
19 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
General
1 1,383 (24.63%) Social Skills
2 1,001 (17.83%) Finance
3 820 (14.60%) Public Sector
4 471 (8.39%) Analytical Skills
5 362 (6.45%) Banking
6 133 (2.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 101 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
7 101 (1.80%) Retail
8 68 (1.21%) Organisational Skills
9 67 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
9 67 (1.19%) Legal
10 55 (0.98%) Marketing
11 48 (0.85%) Military
12 46 (0.82%) Investment Banking
13 45 (0.80%) Law
14 44 (0.78%) Telecoms
15 42 (0.75%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.69%) Front Office
16 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
17 37 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,101 (19.61%) DevOps Engineer
2 939 (16.72%) Developer
3 803 (14.30%) Senior
4 621 (11.06%) Architect
5 534 (9.51%) Lead
6 338 (6.02%) Azure Engineer
7 318 (5.66%) Data Engineer
8 290 (5.16%) Analyst
9 275 (4.90%) AWS Engineer
10 236 (4.20%) Platform Engineer
11 209 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.62%) Java Developer
13 199 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
14 190 (3.38%) AWS DevOps
15 183 (3.26%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 183 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 181 (3.22%) Solutions Architect
17 177 (3.15%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 151 (2.69%) Senior Developer
19 150 (2.67%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 565 (10.06%) REST
2 489 (8.71%) .NET
3 333 (5.93%) RESTful
4 321 (5.72%) Kafka
5 315 (5.61%) Spring
6 295 (5.25%) Spring Boot
7 294 (5.24%) React
8 220 (3.92%) Node.js
9 169 (3.01%) JSON
10 168 (2.99%) OAuth
10 168 (2.99%) PySpark
11 163 (2.90%) Playwright
12 157 (2.80%) AngularJS
13 147 (2.62%) SOAP
14 139 (2.48%) .NET Framework
15 126 (2.24%) HTML
16 118 (2.10%) OAuth2
17 110 (1.96%) Middleware
18 106 (1.89%) YAML
19 104 (1.85%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,005 (17.90%) Cloud Native
2 397 (7.07%) Product Ownership
3 273 (4.86%) Distributed Systems
4 167 (2.97%) Onboarding
5 162 (2.89%) Enterprise Software
6 154 (2.74%) Legacy Systems
7 132 (2.35%) Hybrid Cloud
8 89 (1.59%) Public Cloud
9 88 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
10 86 (1.53%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.35%) Data Centre
12 73 (1.30%) Management Information System
13 71 (1.26%) Data Structures
14 67 (1.19%) Security Posture
15 63 (1.12%) AI Agents
16 61 (1.09%) Replication
17 58 (1.03%) Virtual Team
18 57 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
19 50 (0.89%) Mobile App
20 49 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 486 (8.66%) Linux
2 298 (5.31%) Windows
3 103 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 81 (1.44%) Unix
5 78 (1.39%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.61%) VMS
7 28 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 10 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
12 9 (0.16%) zOS
13 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 7 (0.12%) AIX
15 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
15 6 (0.11%) CentOS
15 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
15 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,301 (58.79%) CI/CD
2 2,249 (40.05%) Agile
3 1,524 (27.14%) Infrastructure as Code
4 934 (16.63%) Containerisation
5 888 (15.81%) Continuous Improvement
6 860 (15.32%) Problem-Solving
7 849 (15.12%) Test Automation
8 821 (14.62%) Microservices
9 753 (13.41%) Stakeholder Management
10 739 (13.16%) AI
11 708 (12.61%) Observability
12 700 (12.47%) Scrum
13 672 (11.97%) Platform Engineering
14 667 (11.88%) Migration
15 660 (11.75%) Software Engineering
16 600 (10.69%) Analytics
17 509 (9.07%) Technical Leadership
18 502 (8.94%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 495 (8.82%) Data Modelling
20 462 (8.23%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,579 (28.12%) Python
2 1,024 (18.24%) SQL
3 800 (14.25%) Java
4 506 (9.01%) C#
5 451 (8.03%) Bash
6 444 (7.91%) JavaScript
7 420 (7.48%) PowerShell
8 308 (5.49%) TypeScript
9 211 (3.76%) Bicep
10 112 (1.99%) Go
11 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 68 (1.21%) T-SQL
13 67 (1.19%) PL/SQL
14 65 (1.16%) Shell Script
15 55 (0.98%) Groovy
16 54 (0.96%) Scala
17 31 (0.55%) C++
18 29 (0.52%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
20 26 (0.46%) C
Qualifications
1 1,770 (31.52%) Security Cleared
2 1,488 (26.50%) SC Cleared
3 325 (5.79%) Degree
4 224 (3.99%) Azure Certification
5 214 (3.81%) BPSS Clearance
6 197 (3.51%) DV Cleared
7 191 (3.40%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
9 80 (1.42%) Microsoft Certification
10 78 (1.39%) CISSP
11 61 (1.09%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 59 (1.05%) ISTQB
13 53 (0.94%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.69%) Master's Degree
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
20 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 508 (9.05%) QA
2 270 (4.81%) Data Quality
3 193 (3.44%) Accessibility
4 155 (2.76%) GDPR
5 90 (1.60%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 76 (1.35%) NIST
6 76 (1.35%) WCAG
7 52 (0.93%) NCSC
8 44 (0.78%) PMO
9 40 (0.71%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.62%) SLA
11 28 (0.50%) GRC
12 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.20%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) PSD2
15 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
16 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.16%) SEPA
17 8 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,099 (19.57%) Docker
2 180 (3.21%) Active Directory
3 85 (1.51%) Virtual Machines
4 81 (1.44%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.57%) vSphere
6 24 (0.43%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Hyper-V
8 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
10 15 (0.27%) Squid
11 14 (0.25%) Postfix
12 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.12%) IAG
15 6 (0.11%) Corosync
15 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 6 (0.11%) NFS
16 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
16 5 (0.089%) RACF
16 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,619 (28.83%) Terraform
2 1,445 (25.73%) Kubernetes
3 524 (9.33%) Ansible
4 370 (6.59%) Grafana
5 311 (5.54%) Prometheus
6 92 (1.64%) Argo
7 62 (1.10%) Puppet
8 61 (1.09%) Single Sign-On
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
9 43 (0.77%) Progress Chef
10 36 (0.64%) Microsoft Intune
11 31 (0.55%) Packer
12 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
13 19 (0.34%) Kibana
13 19 (0.34%) SCCM
14 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
15 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
15 16 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
16 13 (0.23%) HAProxy
16 13 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 1,016 (18.09%) Microsoft
2 314 (5.59%) Oracle
3 271 (4.83%) Databricks
4 270 (4.81%) Google
5 205 (3.65%) ServiceNow
6 191 (3.40%) Salesforce
7 178 (3.17%) Splunk
8 139 (2.48%) Dynatrace
9 129 (2.30%) SAP
10 117 (2.08%) VMware
11 107 (1.91%) Red Hat
12 64 (1.14%) IBM
13 62 (1.10%) OpenAI
14 58 (1.03%) Atlassian
14 58 (1.03%) Informatica
15 53 (0.94%) MuleSoft
16 47 (0.84%) Cisco
17 42 (0.75%) Okta
18 41 (0.73%) AppDynamics
18 41 (0.73%) Foundry