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

6 months to
26 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +4 +1 -4
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,883 3,136 3,953
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.10% 10.79% 8.93%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.94% 11.92% 10.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,405 2,304 2,768
10th Percentile £376 £385 £405
25th Percentile £425 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.36% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £702 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £515 £525
% change year-on-year -2.82% -2.00% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 88 25 95
10th Percentile £39.53 £29.65 £51.25
25th Percentile £45.46 £56.25 £60.63
Median hourly rate £63.73 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.97% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £75.44 £80.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £92.88 £87.50 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.73 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -5.59% +3.85% -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 37,733 26,318 38,291
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.81% 90.56% 86.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,910 17,091 24,889
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £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 £725 £738 £746
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.89% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,221 949 2,344
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.19 £12.85
25th Percentile £18.50 £20.45 £16.00
Median hourly rate £34.50 £32.00 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.81% -1.54% -9.72%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £58.69
90th Percentile £76.00 £76.25 £71.89
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £31.52 £31.80
% change year-on-year -4.82% -0.88% -12.28%

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 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 26 March 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 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 +4 4,189 £525 -4.55% 1,414
UK excluding London +8 2,166 £500 -2.82% 1,103
London -2 2,112 £550 -4.35% 512
Work from Home -3 1,350 £525 - 782
North of England +7 763 £500 -4.76% 306
South East 0 443 £525 -5.41% 307
Midlands +10 408 £498 - 142
Yorkshire +2 402 £500 -4.76% 86
West Midlands +8 318 £503 +1.11% 98
North West +5 308 £488 -7.13% 159
South West +15 279 £500 -16.67% 165
Scotland +5 170 £449 -0.22% 52
East of England +20 118 £570 +15.15% 92
East Midlands +3 88 £447 -8.31% 44
North East +4 57 £475 -9.52% 63
Wales +8 41 £425 +99.88% 43
Northern Ireland -8 11 £475 +15.85% 10
Channel Islands - 1 £500 - 1

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
1 304 (6.23%) Confluence
2 117 (2.40%) Apache Spark
3 99 (2.03%) SharePoint
4 89 (1.82%) Apache
5 84 (1.72%) SAS
6 64 (1.31%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.68%) CMS
7 33 (0.68%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.66%) nginx
9 28 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.49%) IIS
11 15 (0.31%) Mendix
12 12 (0.25%) Sitecore CMS
13 11 (0.23%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 11 (0.23%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.20%) Camunda
15 8 (0.16%) GeoServer
15 8 (0.16%) Smallworld
15 8 (0.16%) WebLogic
16 7 (0.14%) ArcGIS
Applications
1 89 (1.82%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 54 (1.11%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 22 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 5 (0.10%) Trello
9 2 (0.041%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.041%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.041%) Spreadsheet
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
Business Applications
1 75 (1.54%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.33%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 11 (0.23%) Aladdin
5 10 (0.20%) Maximo
6 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
7 7 (0.14%) Endur
8 6 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
8 6 (0.12%) SAP ERP
9 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
10 4 (0.082%) Payment Gateway
10 4 (0.082%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 3 (0.061%) Findur
11 3 (0.061%) NetSuite
11 3 (0.061%) Salesforce CRM
11 3 (0.061%) SAP BPC
11 3 (0.061%) SAP CO
11 3 (0.061%) SAP Oil and Gas
11 3 (0.061%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,632 (53.90%) Azure
2 1,688 (34.57%) AWS
3 1,457 (29.84%) Azure DevOps
4 917 (18.78%) GitHub
5 683 (13.99%) GCP
6 565 (11.57%) Serverless
7 508 (10.40%) GitHub Actions
8 415 (8.50%) Power Platform
9 300 (6.14%) AWS CloudFormation
10 272 (5.57%) AWS Lambda
11 267 (5.47%) Amazon S3
12 235 (4.81%) Azure Data Factory
13 215 (4.40%) Azure AKS
13 215 (4.40%) Entra ID
14 210 (4.30%) Amazon EKS
15 197 (4.03%) OpenShift
16 183 (3.75%) Azure Monitor
17 174 (3.56%) Dynamics 365
18 161 (3.30%) Amazon EC2
19 160 (3.28%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 210 (4.30%) Firewall
2 115 (2.36%) DNS
3 99 (2.03%) Network Security
4 91 (1.86%) VPN
5 44 (0.90%) TCP/IP
6 30 (0.61%) WAN
7 28 (0.57%) SD-WAN
8 27 (0.55%) HTTP
9 23 (0.47%) SSL
10 19 (0.39%) DHCP
10 19 (0.39%) SAN
11 17 (0.35%) BGP
12 16 (0.33%) MPLS
13 15 (0.31%) IPsec
14 13 (0.27%) Reverse Proxy
15 12 (0.25%) 5G
15 12 (0.25%) HTTPS
16 11 (0.23%) Internet
16 11 (0.23%) LAN
16 11 (0.23%) OpenVPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 279 (5.71%) PostgreSQL
2 256 (5.24%) Power BI
3 226 (4.63%) SQL Server
4 196 (4.01%) NoSQL
5 169 (3.46%) Data Lake
6 141 (2.89%) Relational Database
7 124 (2.54%) Data Warehouse
8 121 (2.48%) Amazon RDS
9 118 (2.42%) Azure SQL Database
10 115 (2.36%) MongoDB
11 86 (1.76%) DynamoDB
12 78 (1.60%) Delta Lake
13 77 (1.58%) Metadata
14 71 (1.45%) Elasticsearch
14 71 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 65 (1.33%) Big Data
16 62 (1.27%) MySQL
17 58 (1.19%) Tableau
18 54 (1.11%) Redis
19 52 (1.06%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 802 (16.42%) Jenkins
2 647 (13.25%) JIRA
3 632 (12.94%) Git
4 560 (11.47%) GitLab
5 138 (2.83%) Selenium
6 110 (2.25%) JUnit
7 93 (1.90%) Postman
8 82 (1.68%) Bitbucket
9 71 (1.45%) SonarQube
10 65 (1.33%) Cucumber
11 54 (1.11%) Cypress.io
12 53 (1.09%) Artifactory
12 53 (1.09%) JMeter
13 52 (1.06%) Maven
14 51 (1.04%) REST Assured
15 46 (0.94%) Sonatype Nexus
16 39 (0.80%) Visual Studio
17 37 (0.76%) Mockito
18 34 (0.70%) Liquibase
18 34 (0.70%) Oracle APEX
General
1 1,363 (27.91%) Social Skills
2 915 (18.74%) Finance
3 644 (13.19%) Public Sector
4 411 (8.42%) Analytical Skills
5 362 (7.41%) Banking
6 162 (3.32%) Documentation Skills
7 75 (1.54%) Influencing Skills
8 65 (1.33%) Financial Institution
9 64 (1.31%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 62 (1.27%) Retail
11 56 (1.15%) Marketing
12 52 (1.06%) Front Office
13 50 (1.02%) Organisational Skills
14 48 (0.98%) Investment Banking
15 45 (0.92%) Presentation Skills
16 44 (0.90%) Legal
17 42 (0.86%) Telecoms
18 30 (0.61%) Military
19 28 (0.57%) Pharmaceutical
20 25 (0.51%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 895 (18.33%) DevOps Engineer
2 778 (15.93%) Developer
3 677 (13.86%) Senior
4 536 (10.98%) Architect
5 413 (8.46%) Lead
6 302 (6.18%) Azure Engineer
7 288 (5.90%) Data Engineer
8 273 (5.59%) Analyst
9 247 (5.06%) AWS Engineer
10 190 (3.89%) AWS DevOps
11 180 (3.69%) Cloud Engineer
12 175 (3.58%) Platform Engineer
13 164 (3.36%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 155 (3.17%) Software Engineer
15 146 (2.99%) Solutions Architect
16 145 (2.97%) Senior Developer
17 141 (2.89%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 138 (2.83%) Senior DevOps
19 133 (2.72%) Business Analyst
20 128 (2.62%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 534 (10.94%) REST
2 434 (8.89%) .NET
3 309 (6.33%) React
4 303 (6.21%) Node.js
5 283 (5.80%) Kafka
6 266 (5.45%) RESTful
6 266 (5.45%) Spring
7 250 (5.12%) Spring Boot
8 187 (3.83%) AngularJS
9 163 (3.34%) JSON
10 147 (3.01%) OAuth
11 143 (2.93%) YAML
12 140 (2.87%) PySpark
13 139 (2.85%) Playwright
14 132 (2.70%) HTML
15 129 (2.64%) Elastic Stack
16 122 (2.50%) SOAP
17 111 (2.27%) Middleware
18 109 (2.23%) CSS
19 105 (2.15%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 712 (14.58%) Cloud Native
2 291 (5.96%) Product Ownership
3 187 (3.83%) Distributed Systems
4 132 (2.70%) Public Cloud
5 123 (2.52%) Onboarding
6 108 (2.21%) Legacy Systems
7 105 (2.15%) Hybrid Cloud
8 88 (1.80%) Enterprise Software
9 71 (1.45%) Data Protection Act
10 61 (1.25%) Virtual Team
11 57 (1.17%) Management Information System
12 54 (1.11%) Data Centre
13 46 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
14 45 (0.92%) Private Cloud
15 43 (0.88%) Data Structures
15 43 (0.88%) Security Posture
16 42 (0.86%) AI Agents
16 42 (0.86%) NHS
17 38 (0.78%) Greenfield Project
17 38 (0.78%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 485 (9.93%) Linux
2 259 (5.30%) Windows
3 93 (1.90%) Unix
4 70 (1.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 45 (0.92%) VMS
5 45 (0.92%) Windows Server
6 23 (0.47%) Ubuntu
7 14 (0.29%) CentOS
8 11 (0.23%) Windows 10
9 7 (0.14%) Android
9 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
9 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
10 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
11 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
12 4 (0.082%) Solaris
13 3 (0.061%) Oracle Linux
13 3 (0.061%) Rocky
13 3 (0.061%) zOS
14 2 (0.041%) Mac OS
14 2 (0.041%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,784 (57.01%) CI/CD
2 1,885 (38.60%) Agile
3 1,249 (25.58%) Infrastructure as Code
4 883 (18.08%) Problem-Solving
5 882 (18.06%) Containerisation
6 740 (15.15%) Test Automation
7 732 (14.99%) Microservices
8 642 (13.15%) Continuous Improvement
9 606 (12.41%) Analytics
10 572 (11.71%) Migration
11 542 (11.10%) Scrum
12 533 (10.92%) Observability
13 525 (10.75%) AI
14 521 (10.67%) Stakeholder Management
15 437 (8.95%) Data Modelling
15 437 (8.95%) Software Engineering
16 384 (7.86%) Mentoring
17 371 (7.60%) Data Pipeline
18 363 (7.43%) Platform Engineering
19 340 (6.96%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,489 (30.49%) Python
2 1,026 (21.01%) SQL
3 632 (12.94%) Java
4 511 (10.46%) C#
5 437 (8.95%) JavaScript
6 379 (7.76%) PowerShell
7 363 (7.43%) Bash
8 301 (6.16%) TypeScript
9 160 (3.28%) Bicep
10 132 (2.70%) Go
11 80 (1.64%) PL/SQL
12 69 (1.41%) Scala
13 59 (1.21%) Shell Script
14 48 (0.98%) C++
14 48 (0.98%) T-SQL
15 43 (0.88%) Groovy
16 39 (0.80%) Ruby
17 31 (0.63%) Apex Code
18 30 (0.61%) Perl
19 28 (0.57%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,512 (30.96%) Security Cleared
2 1,234 (25.27%) SC Cleared
3 370 (7.58%) Degree
4 205 (4.20%) Azure Certification
5 182 (3.73%) Computer Science Degree
6 151 (3.09%) DV Cleared
7 142 (2.91%) AWS Certification
8 137 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
9 84 (1.72%) CISSP
10 78 (1.60%) Master's Degree
11 62 (1.27%) ISTQB
12 61 (1.25%) CISM
13 56 (1.15%) Microsoft Certification
14 54 (1.11%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 48 (0.98%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.80%) PMP
17 35 (0.72%) Cisco Certification
18 34 (0.70%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 28 (0.57%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
20 23 (0.47%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 438 (8.97%) QA
2 220 (4.51%) Data Quality
3 186 (3.81%) GDPR
4 157 (3.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 129 (2.64%) NIST
6 124 (2.54%) Accessibility
7 71 (1.45%) NCSC
8 41 (0.84%) PCI DSS
8 41 (0.84%) WCAG
9 39 (0.80%) PMO
10 30 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 30 (0.61%) SLA
11 23 (0.47%) HIPAA
12 16 (0.33%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 15 (0.31%) ISO 20022
13 15 (0.31%) NIST 800
14 14 (0.29%) SOC 2
15 13 (0.27%) PSD2
16 12 (0.25%) GRC
17 11 (0.23%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,093 (22.38%) Docker
2 177 (3.62%) Active Directory
3 76 (1.56%) Virtual Machines
4 75 (1.54%) VMware Infrastructure
5 45 (0.92%) vSphere
6 33 (0.68%) VMware NSX
7 16 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.31%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.25%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.23%) Lustre
10 11 (0.23%) Squid
11 9 (0.18%) GPFS
12 8 (0.16%) Firmware
12 8 (0.16%) Postfix
13 7 (0.14%) Virtual Servers
14 6 (0.12%) Ceph
14 6 (0.12%) HDFS
14 6 (0.12%) VMware ESXi
15 5 (0.10%) Oracle RAC
15 5 (0.10%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,436 (29.41%) Terraform
2 1,339 (27.42%) Kubernetes
3 516 (10.57%) Ansible
4 346 (7.09%) Grafana
5 285 (5.84%) Prometheus
6 99 (2.03%) Argo
7 74 (1.52%) Puppet
8 67 (1.37%) Single Sign-On
9 60 (1.23%) Istio
10 33 (0.68%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.63%) Packer
12 28 (0.57%) vCenter Server
13 25 (0.51%) Kibana
14 20 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 20 (0.41%) Rancher
15 19 (0.39%) Podman
16 17 (0.35%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 17 (0.35%) Consul
16 17 (0.35%) FortiGate
16 17 (0.35%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 841 (17.22%) Microsoft
2 313 (6.41%) Oracle
3 289 (5.92%) Databricks
4 257 (5.26%) Google
5 199 (4.08%) Splunk
6 165 (3.38%) ServiceNow
7 144 (2.95%) Red Hat
8 128 (2.62%) Salesforce
9 127 (2.60%) VMware
10 108 (2.21%) SAP
11 84 (1.72%) OpenAI
12 73 (1.49%) Dynatrace
13 70 (1.43%) Atlassian
14 63 (1.29%) CyberArk
15 44 (0.90%) IBM
16 39 (0.80%) Cisco
16 39 (0.80%) Talend
17 34 (0.70%) Denodo
17 34 (0.70%) Foundry
18 33 (0.68%) Informatica