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

6 months to
19 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,553 3,289 3,871
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.18% 10.68% 8.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.87% 11.90% 10.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,181 2,289 2,775
10th Percentile £375 £388 £408
25th Percentile £425 £459 £468
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -7.17%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 63 23 102
10th Percentile - £36.30 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £58.45 £56.65
Median hourly rate £58.50 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.11% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £78.85 £80.75 £76.53
90th Percentile £93.50 £87.50 £84.27
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £70.36 £65.00
% change year-on-year -25.39% +8.25% -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 35,377 27,631 38,379
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.89% 89.70% 87.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,416 17,028 25,083
10th Percentile £311 £306 £300
25th Percentile £410 £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 £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,136 844 2,147
10th Percentile £14.58 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.87 £21.05 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.50 £32.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -21.54% -7.14% -
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.32
90th Percentile £70.36 £75.00 £73.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £30.62 £35.00
% change year-on-year -17.85% -12.53% +5.26%

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 19 February 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 19 February 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 19 February 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 3,871 £525 -8.70% 1,624
UK excluding London +7 2,025 £500 -4.76% 1,211
London -2 1,946 £530 -11.67% 670
Work from Home -3 1,293 £525 -2.78% 858
North of England +4 694 £500 - 366
South East +1 417 £525 -8.70% 402
Midlands +13 392 £513 +2.50% 146
Yorkshire +1 365 £500 - 112
West Midlands +14 311 £525 +3.75% 105
North West +2 281 £475 -5.00% 208
South West +12 250 £525 -12.50% 141
Scotland +5 194 £450 - 69
East of England +17 117 £575 +13.30% 65
East Midlands +9 80 £425 -10.53% 41
North East -4 51 £475 -9.52% 49
Wales +5 37 £425 +65.41% 26
Northern Ireland -5 9 £475 +26.67% 13

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
1 271 (5.95%) Confluence
2 98 (2.15%) Apache Spark
3 89 (1.95%) Apache
4 88 (1.93%) SharePoint
5 59 (1.30%) SAS
6 56 (1.23%) Apache Airflow
7 36 (0.79%) OpenStack
8 35 (0.77%) nginx
9 31 (0.68%) CMS
10 24 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
11 20 (0.44%) IIS
12 14 (0.31%) JBoss
12 14 (0.31%) WebLogic
13 12 (0.26%) Sitecore CMS
14 11 (0.24%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 11 (0.24%) Mendix
15 10 (0.22%) HCL Notes
16 8 (0.18%) Camunda
16 8 (0.18%) Smallworld
16 8 (0.18%) WebSphere
Applications
1 97 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.45%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 41 (0.90%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.72%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.44%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.33%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 4 (0.088%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 4 (0.088%) Trello
9 2 (0.044%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.022%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.022%) Maya
10 1 (0.022%) Revit
10 1 (0.022%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 69 (1.52%) Dynamics CRM
2 12 (0.26%) Oracle ERP
2 12 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.24%) Endur
4 10 (0.22%) Maximo
5 8 (0.18%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 6 (0.13%) SAP ERP
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.088%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.088%) Payment Gateway
9 3 (0.066%) NetSuite
9 3 (0.066%) Oracle Assets
9 3 (0.066%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.066%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.066%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.066%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.066%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.066%) VisionPLUS
Cloud Services
1 2,375 (52.16%) Azure
2 1,633 (35.87%) AWS
3 1,277 (28.05%) Azure DevOps
4 856 (18.80%) GitHub
5 680 (14.94%) GCP
6 545 (11.97%) Serverless
7 482 (10.59%) GitHub Actions
8 377 (8.28%) Power Platform
9 288 (6.33%) AWS CloudFormation
10 267 (5.86%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (5.60%) Amazon S3
12 227 (4.99%) Azure Data Factory
13 216 (4.74%) Azure AKS
14 206 (4.52%) Amazon EKS
15 188 (4.13%) OpenShift
16 178 (3.91%) Entra ID
17 172 (3.78%) Amazon ECS
17 172 (3.78%) Dynamics 365
18 170 (3.73%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 165 (3.62%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 203 (4.46%) Firewall
2 110 (2.42%) DNS
3 97 (2.13%) Network Security
4 92 (2.02%) VPN
5 54 (1.19%) TCP/IP
6 44 (0.97%) SSL
7 33 (0.72%) HTTP
7 33 (0.72%) HTTPS
8 21 (0.46%) WAN
9 17 (0.37%) DHCP
10 15 (0.33%) Kerberos
11 14 (0.31%) BGP
11 14 (0.31%) SD-WAN
12 13 (0.29%) SAN
13 12 (0.26%) MPLS
13 12 (0.26%) Reverse Proxy
14 10 (0.22%) Internet
14 10 (0.22%) IPsec
14 10 (0.22%) LAN
15 9 (0.20%) FTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 264 (5.80%) PostgreSQL
2 240 (5.27%) Power BI
3 187 (4.11%) SQL Server
4 172 (3.78%) NoSQL
5 147 (3.23%) Data Lake
6 134 (2.94%) Amazon RDS
7 124 (2.72%) Relational Database
8 117 (2.57%) Data Warehouse
9 109 (2.39%) MongoDB
10 99 (2.17%) Azure SQL Database
11 78 (1.71%) Elasticsearch
11 78 (1.71%) Oracle Database
12 75 (1.65%) DynamoDB
13 69 (1.52%) MySQL
14 63 (1.38%) Delta Lake
15 60 (1.32%) Metadata
16 55 (1.21%) Redis
17 53 (1.16%) Tableau
18 52 (1.14%) Big Data
19 51 (1.12%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 784 (17.22%) Jenkins
2 600 (13.18%) Git
3 584 (12.83%) GitLab
4 583 (12.80%) JIRA
5 137 (3.01%) Selenium
6 98 (2.15%) JUnit
7 95 (2.09%) Postman
8 69 (1.52%) Bitbucket
9 64 (1.41%) Cucumber
9 64 (1.41%) SonarQube
10 62 (1.36%) Cypress.io
10 62 (1.36%) Sonatype Nexus
11 51 (1.12%) Maven
12 49 (1.08%) Artifactory
12 49 (1.08%) JMeter
13 48 (1.05%) REST Assured
14 41 (0.90%) Gradle
15 40 (0.88%) Liquibase
16 38 (0.83%) Oracle APEX
17 32 (0.70%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,341 (29.45%) Social Skills
2 814 (17.88%) Finance
3 585 (12.85%) Public Sector
4 381 (8.37%) Analytical Skills
5 338 (7.42%) Banking
6 157 (3.45%) Documentation Skills
7 82 (1.80%) Influencing Skills
8 68 (1.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 66 (1.45%) Financial Institution
10 63 (1.38%) Marketing
11 51 (1.12%) Retail
12 47 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
13 44 (0.97%) Investment Banking
14 43 (0.94%) Front Office
15 41 (0.90%) Telecoms
16 38 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
17 34 (0.75%) Military
18 33 (0.72%) Legal
19 30 (0.66%) Pharmaceutical
20 26 (0.57%) Law
Job Titles
1 900 (19.77%) DevOps Engineer
2 775 (17.02%) Developer
3 625 (13.73%) Senior
4 473 (10.39%) Architect
5 355 (7.80%) Lead
6 280 (6.15%) Azure Engineer
7 252 (5.53%) AWS Engineer
8 243 (5.34%) Analyst
8 243 (5.34%) Data Engineer
9 195 (4.28%) AWS DevOps
10 173 (3.80%) AWS DevOps Engineer
11 172 (3.78%) Cloud Engineer
12 161 (3.54%) Software Engineer
13 159 (3.49%) Platform Engineer
14 140 (3.07%) Senior Developer
15 139 (3.05%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 138 (3.03%) Solutions Architect
17 127 (2.79%) Senior DevOps
18 126 (2.77%) Business Analyst
19 120 (2.64%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 514 (11.29%) REST
2 404 (8.87%) .NET
3 312 (6.85%) React
4 306 (6.72%) Node.js
5 262 (5.75%) RESTful
6 254 (5.58%) Kafka
7 249 (5.47%) Spring
8 229 (5.03%) Spring Boot
9 169 (3.71%) JSON
10 162 (3.56%) OAuth
11 160 (3.51%) AngularJS
12 140 (3.07%) Elastic Stack
13 134 (2.94%) HTML
14 131 (2.88%) YAML
15 128 (2.81%) SOAP
16 126 (2.77%) XML
17 122 (2.68%) Playwright
17 122 (2.68%) PySpark
18 117 (2.57%) CSS
19 107 (2.35%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 662 (14.54%) Cloud Native
2 254 (5.58%) Product Ownership
3 168 (3.69%) Distributed Systems
4 126 (2.77%) Public Cloud
5 123 (2.70%) Onboarding
6 95 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
7 84 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
8 75 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
9 56 (1.23%) Management Information System
10 54 (1.19%) Virtual Team
11 52 (1.14%) Data Protection Act
12 51 (1.12%) Data Centre
13 48 (1.05%) NHS
14 47 (1.03%) Security Posture
15 46 (1.01%) Private Cloud
16 42 (0.92%) Mobile App
17 39 (0.86%) Replication
18 38 (0.83%) Greenfield Project
18 38 (0.83%) Self-Motivation
19 37 (0.81%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 489 (10.74%) Linux
2 247 (5.42%) Windows
3 105 (2.31%) Unix
4 57 (1.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 46 (1.01%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.97%) VMS
7 27 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 20 (0.44%) Windows 10
9 18 (0.40%) Android
10 17 (0.37%) Apple iOS
10 17 (0.37%) CentOS
11 10 (0.22%) Solaris
12 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.15%) Amazon Linux
13 7 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.088%) Mac OS
16 2 (0.044%) Debian
16 2 (0.044%) zOS
17 1 (0.022%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,635 (57.87%) CI/CD
2 1,754 (38.52%) Agile
3 1,215 (26.69%) Infrastructure as Code
4 871 (19.13%) Containerisation
5 869 (19.09%) Problem-Solving
6 688 (15.11%) Microservices
7 686 (15.07%) Test Automation
8 559 (12.28%) Continuous Improvement
9 537 (11.79%) Analytics
10 519 (11.40%) Migration
11 490 (10.76%) Observability
12 485 (10.65%) Scrum
13 474 (10.41%) AI
14 431 (9.47%) Stakeholder Management
15 420 (9.22%) Software Engineering
16 372 (8.17%) Data Modelling
17 364 (7.99%) Mentoring
18 314 (6.90%) Data Pipeline
19 313 (6.87%) Platform Engineering
20 304 (6.68%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,405 (30.86%) Python
2 903 (19.83%) SQL
3 605 (13.29%) Java
4 456 (10.02%) C#
5 440 (9.66%) JavaScript
6 371 (8.15%) PowerShell
7 343 (7.53%) Bash
8 324 (7.12%) TypeScript
9 153 (3.36%) Bicep
10 147 (3.23%) Go
11 77 (1.69%) PL/SQL
12 67 (1.47%) Scala
13 59 (1.30%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.08%) Ruby
15 48 (1.05%) C++
16 45 (0.99%) Groovy
16 45 (0.99%) T-SQL
17 34 (0.75%) Perl
18 30 (0.66%) Rust
19 23 (0.51%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,388 (30.49%) Security Cleared
2 1,138 (24.99%) SC Cleared
3 387 (8.50%) Degree
4 202 (4.44%) Azure Certification
5 198 (4.35%) Computer Science Degree
6 151 (3.32%) DV Cleared
7 144 (3.16%) AWS Certification
8 117 (2.57%) BPSS Clearance
9 91 (2.00%) Master's Degree
10 75 (1.65%) CISSP
11 70 (1.54%) Microsoft Certification
12 59 (1.30%) CISM
13 53 (1.16%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 50 (1.10%) ISTQB
15 37 (0.81%) PMI Certification
16 31 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
17 30 (0.66%) PMP
18 29 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 24 (0.53%) TOGAF Certification
20 23 (0.51%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 391 (8.59%) QA
2 183 (4.02%) GDPR
3 173 (3.80%) Data Quality
4 140 (3.07%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 126 (2.77%) Accessibility
6 121 (2.66%) NIST
7 71 (1.56%) NCSC
8 35 (0.77%) PCI DSS
9 34 (0.75%) WCAG
10 29 (0.64%) PMO
11 26 (0.57%) HIPAA
11 26 (0.57%) SLA
12 24 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 18 (0.40%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.33%) ISO 20022
14 15 (0.33%) PSD2
15 11 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.24%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 11 (0.24%) NIST 800
15 11 (0.24%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,102 (24.20%) Docker
2 170 (3.73%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.71%) Virtual Machines
4 72 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
5 41 (0.90%) vSphere
6 28 (0.61%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.37%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 13 (0.29%) Squid
9 11 (0.24%) Hyper-V
9 11 (0.24%) Lustre
9 11 (0.24%) Virtual Servers
10 9 (0.20%) DFS Replication
10 9 (0.20%) GPFS
11 7 (0.15%) Firmware
11 7 (0.15%) Postfix
11 7 (0.15%) VMware ESXi
12 6 (0.13%) KVM
12 6 (0.13%) NFS
13 5 (0.11%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,437 (31.56%) Terraform
2 1,326 (29.12%) Kubernetes
3 498 (10.94%) Ansible
4 333 (7.31%) Grafana
5 285 (6.26%) Prometheus
6 95 (2.09%) Argo
7 76 (1.67%) Puppet
8 70 (1.54%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (0.97%) Istio
10 34 (0.75%) Kibana
11 31 (0.68%) Progress Chef
12 29 (0.64%) Packer
13 23 (0.51%) Podman
14 22 (0.48%) vCenter Server
15 20 (0.44%) Microsoft Intune
16 19 (0.42%) SCCM
17 18 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 16 (0.35%) Consul
19 15 (0.33%) FortiGate
19 15 (0.33%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 777 (17.07%) Microsoft
2 292 (6.41%) Oracle
3 275 (6.04%) Databricks
4 266 (5.84%) Google
5 217 (4.77%) Splunk
6 149 (3.27%) ServiceNow
7 134 (2.94%) Red Hat
8 122 (2.68%) VMware
9 120 (2.64%) Salesforce
10 107 (2.35%) SAP
11 81 (1.78%) OpenAI
12 63 (1.38%) Dynatrace
13 54 (1.19%) CyberArk
14 50 (1.10%) Atlassian
14 50 (1.10%) IBM
15 39 (0.86%) Cisco
16 38 (0.83%) F5
17 31 (0.68%) Foundry
17 31 (0.68%) Palo Alto
18 30 (0.66%) Talend