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

6 months to
11 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,210 3,337 3,956
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.57% 10.50% 9.21%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.17% 11.84% 10.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,950 2,289 2,892
10th Percentile £369 £393 £408
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £565 £563
Median % change year-on-year -7.08% +0.44% -6.25%
75th Percentile £615 £675 £655
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £538 £548
% change year-on-year -6.98% -1.83% -0.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 52 26 81
10th Percentile - £37.13 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £50.00
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.76%
75th Percentile £83.50 £79.62 £70.00
90th Percentile £94.88 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +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 31,966 28,176 37,671
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.84% 88.65% 87.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,158 17,120 25,014
10th Percentile £304 £306 £305
25th Percentile £406 £413 £416
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £615 £638 £650
90th Percentile £723 £744 £743
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,974 895 1,590
10th Percentile £14.61 £15.62 £14.18
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.50 £18.35
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -19.75% +16.41%
75th Percentile £55.00 £62.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.59 £75.00 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £23.83 £30.41 £43.90
% change year-on-year -21.64% -30.74% +59.64%

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 11 January 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 11 January 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 11 January 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 3,613 £525 -8.70% 1,606
UK excluding London +6 1,889 £500 -6.98% 1,379
London -1 1,803 £548 -8.75% 423
Work from Home 0 1,215 £525 -2.78% 811
North of England +5 641 £487 -4.91% 339
South East +3 384 £525 -12.50% 422
Midlands +21 383 £515 -1.90% 178
Yorkshire +1 331 £500 -2.44% 145
West Midlands +20 309 £525 -1.52% 90
North West +7 267 £458 -8.50% 147
South West +7 233 £538 -10.42% 180
Scotland +5 184 £475 +5.56% 53
East of England +13 96 £550 +8.37% 152
East Midlands +19 74 £430 -9.47% 85
North East -7 45 £475 -17.21% 48
Wales +6 32 £495 +83.33% 57
Northern Ireland -7 8 - - 24

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
1 257 (6.10%) Confluence
2 84 (2.00%) SharePoint
3 80 (1.90%) Apache
4 75 (1.78%) SAS
5 65 (1.54%) Apache Airflow
6 63 (1.50%) Apache Spark
7 32 (0.76%) CMS
7 32 (0.76%) nginx
7 32 (0.76%) OpenStack
8 24 (0.57%) IIS
9 21 (0.50%) WebLogic
10 20 (0.48%) JBoss
11 19 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.38%) CICS
13 10 (0.24%) HCL Notes
13 10 (0.24%) Mendix
13 10 (0.24%) Mule
13 10 (0.24%) Oracle SOA Suite
13 10 (0.24%) WebSphere
14 9 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 84 (2.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 53 (1.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 31 (0.74%) Microsoft Project
4 27 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
5 15 (0.36%) Chatbot
5 15 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 9 (0.21%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.19%) Weka
8 5 (0.12%) Trello
9 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.024%) Moqups
9 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 61 (1.45%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.33%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.26%) Aladdin
4 11 (0.26%) Endur
5 9 (0.21%) Maximo
5 9 (0.21%) Oracle BPM
5 9 (0.21%) Remedy ITSM
6 7 (0.17%) NEC Housing
6 7 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
7 5 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.095%) NetSuite
8 4 (0.095%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.095%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.095%) SAP ERP
8 4 (0.095%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.071%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.071%) Oracle Payables
9 3 (0.071%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,122 (50.40%) Azure
2 1,533 (36.41%) AWS
3 1,134 (26.94%) Azure DevOps
4 780 (18.53%) GitHub
5 602 (14.30%) GCP
6 507 (12.04%) Serverless
7 459 (10.90%) GitHub Actions
8 327 (7.77%) Power Platform
9 262 (6.22%) AWS CloudFormation
10 256 (6.08%) AWS Lambda
11 240 (5.70%) Amazon S3
12 199 (4.73%) Azure AKS
12 199 (4.73%) Azure Data Factory
13 193 (4.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 175 (4.16%) Amazon EKS
15 171 (4.06%) OpenShift
16 165 (3.92%) Amazon EC2
17 163 (3.87%) Dynamics 365
18 160 (3.80%) Amazon ECS
19 155 (3.68%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 203 (4.82%) Firewall
2 117 (2.78%) DNS
3 88 (2.09%) VPN
4 75 (1.78%) Network Security
5 59 (1.40%) SSL
6 57 (1.35%) TCP/IP
7 44 (1.05%) HTTP
8 34 (0.81%) HTTPS
9 22 (0.52%) WAN
10 21 (0.50%) SSH
11 19 (0.45%) BGP
12 18 (0.43%) FTP
12 18 (0.43%) SMTP
13 17 (0.40%) DHCP
13 17 (0.40%) MPLS
14 15 (0.36%) Kerberos
14 15 (0.36%) SD-WAN
15 13 (0.31%) Internet
15 13 (0.31%) OpenLDAP
16 10 (0.24%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 259 (6.15%) PostgreSQL
2 214 (5.08%) Power BI
3 163 (3.87%) SQL Server
4 161 (3.82%) NoSQL
5 142 (3.37%) Amazon RDS
6 125 (2.97%) Data Lake
7 110 (2.61%) MongoDB
8 107 (2.54%) Relational Database
9 102 (2.42%) Data Warehouse
10 89 (2.11%) Oracle Database
11 88 (2.09%) Azure SQL Database
12 68 (1.62%) MySQL
13 66 (1.57%) DynamoDB
14 57 (1.35%) Elasticsearch
15 56 (1.33%) Redis
16 55 (1.31%) Amazon Aurora
17 51 (1.21%) Tableau
18 46 (1.09%) Metadata
19 40 (0.95%) Delta Lake
20 39 (0.93%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 772 (18.34%) Jenkins
2 619 (14.70%) Git
3 589 (13.99%) JIRA
4 553 (13.14%) GitLab
5 131 (3.11%) Selenium
6 97 (2.30%) JUnit
7 83 (1.97%) Postman
8 80 (1.90%) SonarQube
9 72 (1.71%) Sonatype Nexus
10 71 (1.69%) Bitbucket
10 71 (1.69%) Cypress.io
11 60 (1.43%) Cucumber
12 50 (1.19%) Artifactory
13 49 (1.16%) Liquibase
14 46 (1.09%) CircleCI
15 44 (1.05%) Gradle
15 44 (1.05%) JMeter
16 39 (0.93%) Maven
17 38 (0.90%) Oracle APEX
18 32 (0.76%) REST Assured
General
1 1,275 (30.29%) Social Skills
2 748 (17.77%) Finance
3 547 (12.99%) Public Sector
4 351 (8.34%) Banking
5 333 (7.91%) Analytical Skills
6 137 (3.25%) Documentation Skills
7 69 (1.64%) Financial Institution
8 67 (1.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 64 (1.52%) Influencing Skills
10 58 (1.38%) Marketing
11 50 (1.19%) Investment Banking
12 46 (1.09%) Front Office
13 45 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
13 45 (1.07%) Retail
13 45 (1.07%) Telecoms
14 34 (0.81%) Pharmaceutical
15 33 (0.78%) Military
16 30 (0.71%) Organisational Skills
17 27 (0.64%) Back Office
18 24 (0.57%) Law
Job Titles
1 825 (19.60%) DevOps Engineer
2 744 (17.67%) Developer
3 592 (14.06%) Senior
4 363 (8.62%) Architect
5 324 (7.70%) Lead
6 244 (5.80%) Azure Engineer
7 241 (5.72%) AWS Engineer
8 208 (4.94%) Data Engineer
9 201 (4.77%) Analyst
10 189 (4.49%) AWS DevOps
11 166 (3.94%) Software Engineer
12 162 (3.85%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 155 (3.68%) Senior Developer
14 154 (3.66%) Cloud Engineer
15 143 (3.40%) Platform Engineer
16 123 (2.92%) Consultant
16 123 (2.92%) Senior DevOps
17 120 (2.85%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 113 (2.68%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 111 (2.64%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 491 (11.66%) REST
2 362 (8.60%) .NET
3 269 (6.39%) React
4 266 (6.32%) RESTful
5 265 (6.29%) Node.js
6 252 (5.99%) Kafka
7 204 (4.85%) Spring
8 201 (4.77%) JSON
9 189 (4.49%) Spring Boot
10 154 (3.66%) OAuth
11 150 (3.56%) SOAP
12 147 (3.49%) AngularJS
13 143 (3.40%) Elastic Stack
14 141 (3.35%) XML
15 132 (3.14%) HTML
16 128 (3.04%) YAML
17 98 (2.33%) Playwright
18 91 (2.16%) CSS
19 90 (2.14%) Middleware
20 85 (2.02%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 579 (13.75%) Cloud Native
2 225 (5.34%) Product Ownership
3 164 (3.90%) Distributed Systems
4 116 (2.76%) Onboarding
5 107 (2.54%) Public Cloud
6 91 (2.16%) Legacy Systems
7 77 (1.83%) Hybrid Cloud
8 68 (1.62%) Enterprise Software
9 57 (1.35%) Virtual Team
10 54 (1.28%) Data Protection Act
11 50 (1.19%) Management Information System
11 50 (1.19%) Replication
12 49 (1.16%) Data Centre
13 47 (1.12%) Mobile App
14 44 (1.05%) Security Posture
15 42 (1.00%) CMDB
15 42 (1.00%) NHS
15 42 (1.00%) Self-Motivation
16 41 (0.97%) Private Cloud
17 38 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 487 (11.57%) Linux
2 237 (5.63%) Windows
3 109 (2.59%) Unix
4 54 (1.28%) Windows Server
5 53 (1.26%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 52 (1.24%) VMS
7 32 (0.76%) Android
8 28 (0.67%) Ubuntu
9 26 (0.62%) Apple iOS
10 19 (0.45%) Windows 10
11 16 (0.38%) CentOS
12 15 (0.36%) Amazon Linux
13 10 (0.24%) Solaris
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.14%) zOS
15 5 (0.12%) Mac OS
16 2 (0.048%) Debian
16 2 (0.048%) Windows Server 2012
17 1 (0.024%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,385 (56.65%) CI/CD
2 1,726 (41.00%) Agile
3 1,095 (26.01%) Infrastructure as Code
4 825 (19.60%) Containerisation
5 802 (19.05%) Problem-Solving
6 646 (15.34%) Microservices
7 635 (15.08%) Test Automation
8 477 (11.33%) Migration
9 476 (11.31%) Scrum
10 475 (11.28%) Continuous Improvement
11 457 (10.86%) Analytics
12 432 (10.26%) Observability
13 410 (9.74%) Software Engineering
14 402 (9.55%) AI
15 352 (8.36%) Stakeholder Management
16 317 (7.53%) Mentoring
17 307 (7.29%) Data Modelling
18 283 (6.72%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 281 (6.67%) Data Pipeline
20 273 (6.48%) DevSecOps
Programming Languages
1 1,314 (31.21%) Python
2 829 (19.69%) SQL
3 581 (13.80%) Java
4 416 (9.88%) JavaScript
5 402 (9.55%) C#
6 371 (8.81%) PowerShell
7 354 (8.41%) Bash
8 296 (7.03%) TypeScript
9 155 (3.68%) Go
10 138 (3.28%) Bicep
11 86 (2.04%) PL/SQL
12 75 (1.78%) Shell Script
13 52 (1.24%) Groovy
14 51 (1.21%) Ruby
15 46 (1.09%) Scala
16 45 (1.07%) C++
17 44 (1.05%) Perl
18 41 (0.97%) T-SQL
19 26 (0.62%) Kotlin
19 26 (0.62%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,250 (29.69%) Security Cleared
2 1,038 (24.66%) SC Cleared
3 356 (8.46%) Degree
4 194 (4.61%) Computer Science Degree
5 176 (4.18%) Azure Certification
6 137 (3.25%) DV Cleared
7 136 (3.23%) AWS Certification
8 100 (2.38%) BPSS Clearance
9 85 (2.02%) Master's Degree
10 71 (1.69%) CISSP
11 62 (1.47%) Microsoft Certification
12 53 (1.26%) CISM
13 45 (1.07%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 41 (0.97%) ISTQB
15 36 (0.86%) PMI Certification
16 29 (0.69%) Cisco Certification
16 29 (0.69%) PMP
17 27 (0.64%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 18 (0.43%) Oracle Certification
19 17 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 386 (9.17%) QA
2 156 (3.71%) GDPR
3 142 (3.37%) Data Quality
4 136 (3.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 120 (2.85%) Accessibility
6 112 (2.66%) NIST
7 55 (1.31%) NCSC
8 35 (0.83%) WCAG
9 31 (0.74%) PCI DSS
10 25 (0.59%) PMO
10 25 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 22 (0.52%) HIPAA
11 22 (0.52%) SLA
12 15 (0.36%) PSD2
13 14 (0.33%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.31%) SOC 2
15 11 (0.26%) SEPA
16 9 (0.21%) HL7
16 9 (0.21%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 9 (0.21%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,091 (25.91%) Docker
2 168 (3.99%) Active Directory
3 64 (1.52%) VMware Infrastructure
4 58 (1.38%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.69%) vSphere
6 18 (0.43%) DFS Replication
7 16 (0.38%) VMware NSX
8 14 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
9 12 (0.29%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
9 12 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.26%) Squid
10 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.24%) Lustre
12 9 (0.21%) Dovecot
12 9 (0.21%) Postfix
13 8 (0.19%) GPFS
13 8 (0.19%) NFS
13 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,328 (31.54%) Terraform
2 1,243 (29.52%) Kubernetes
3 527 (12.52%) Ansible
4 330 (7.84%) Grafana
5 299 (7.10%) Prometheus
6 82 (1.95%) Argo
7 76 (1.81%) Puppet
8 54 (1.28%) Single Sign-On
9 47 (1.12%) Progress Chef
10 40 (0.95%) Istio
10 40 (0.95%) Kibana
11 32 (0.76%) Packer
12 25 (0.59%) Podman
13 19 (0.45%) SCCM
14 16 (0.38%) Proxmox
14 16 (0.38%) Rancher
15 15 (0.36%) Data Guard
15 15 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
16 14 (0.33%) Nessus
16 14 (0.33%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 714 (16.96%) Microsoft
2 321 (7.62%) Oracle
3 230 (5.46%) Google
4 218 (5.18%) Databricks
5 214 (5.08%) Splunk
6 165 (3.92%) ServiceNow
7 126 (2.99%) Red Hat
8 109 (2.59%) Salesforce
9 108 (2.57%) VMware
10 101 (2.40%) SAP
11 76 (1.81%) Dynatrace
12 59 (1.40%) OpenAI
13 48 (1.14%) IBM
14 47 (1.12%) F5
15 43 (1.02%) Atlassian
15 43 (1.02%) Cisco
16 40 (0.95%) Palo Alto
17 39 (0.93%) CyberArk
18 38 (0.90%) MuleSoft
18 38 (0.90%) Talend