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

6 months to
25 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,649 3,443 3,999
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.66% 10.52% 9.86%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.53% 11.64% 11.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,905 2,445 2,755
10th Percentile £385 £363 £385
25th Percentile £438 £425 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -5.50% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £495 £525
% change year-on-year +1.11% -5.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 26 97
10th Percentile £36.34 £32.63 £56.40
25th Percentile £61.00 £51.56 £65.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £86.37 £77.50
90th Percentile £93.25 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%

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 45,072 29,587 34,698
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.08% 90.43% 85.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,942 18,578 22,301
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,665 1,596 2,086
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £13.50
25th Percentile £20.02 £17.33 £17.31
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 £82.80 £68.75 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +83.17% -40.00% -1.45%

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 25 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 25 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 25 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 4,824 £525 - 1,572
UK excluding London +5 2,485 £500 +1.11% 1,016
London +2 2,472 £550 - 740
Work from Home 0 1,621 £525 +2.44% 751
North of England +4 872 £500 +3.09% 315
South East -9 464 £525 +5.00% 278
Midlands +2 460 £489 +2.89% 151
Yorkshire +2 445 £500 +0.70% 79
West Midlands -1 371 £499 -0.25% 107
North West -2 341 £525 +10.53% 170
South West +15 322 £518 -1.43% 124
Scotland -1 200 £483 -2.28% 53
East of England +19 139 £510 +2.00% 55
North East +12 105 £425 -18.66% 68
East Midlands +1 84 £488 +6.21% 44
Wales -7 46 £425 +32.57% 27
Northern Ireland +19 22 £475 +7.95% 29
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
1 345 (6.11%) Confluence
2 137 (2.43%) Apache Spark
3 134 (2.37%) SharePoint
4 112 (1.98%) Apache Airflow
5 107 (1.89%) Apache
6 81 (1.43%) SAS
7 45 (0.80%) CMS
8 37 (0.65%) 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
12 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 8 (0.14%) Anypoint
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 64 (1.13%) Microsoft Project
2 63 (1.12%) Microsoft Excel
3 40 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
4 34 (0.60%) MS Visio
5 33 (0.58%) 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 (0.035%) 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 68 (1.20%) 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
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
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 3,044 (53.89%) Azure
2 2,018 (35.72%) AWS
3 1,706 (30.20%) Azure DevOps
4 950 (16.82%) GitHub
5 724 (12.82%) GCP
6 581 (10.29%) GitHub Actions
7 456 (8.07%) Power Platform
7 456 (8.07%) Serverless
8 305 (5.40%) Amazon S3
9 274 (4.85%) AWS Lambda
10 255 (4.51%) Entra ID
11 254 (4.50%) AWS CloudFormation
12 230 (4.07%) Amazon EKS
12 230 (4.07%) Azure AKS
13 197 (3.49%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 195 (3.45%) Azure Monitor
15 181 (3.20%) Amazon EC2
16 178 (3.15%) Azure Data Factory
17 156 (2.76%) Dynamics 365
18 155 (2.74%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 238 (4.21%) Firewall
2 153 (2.71%) DNS
3 120 (2.12%) Network Security
4 119 (2.11%) VPN
5 55 (0.97%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 42 (0.74%) SSL
8 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.60%) DHCP
10 33 (0.58%) BGP
11 30 (0.53%) Internet
12 27 (0.48%) HTTP
12 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.44%) OSPF
14 21 (0.37%) SAN
15 18 (0.32%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.30%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 306 (5.42%) Power BI
2 290 (5.13%) SQL Server
3 279 (4.94%) PostgreSQL
4 194 (3.43%) NoSQL
5 188 (3.33%) Relational Database
6 179 (3.17%) MongoDB
7 178 (3.15%) Data Warehouse
8 157 (2.78%) Data Lake
9 119 (2.11%) Amazon RDS
10 109 (1.93%) Metadata
11 105 (1.86%) DynamoDB
12 103 (1.82%) Azure SQL Database
13 86 (1.52%) Oracle Database
14 85 (1.50%) Delta Lake
15 71 (1.26%) Big Data
16 69 (1.22%) Redis
17 68 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
18 66 (1.17%) Amazon Athena
18 66 (1.17%) MySQL
19 56 (0.99%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 814 (14.41%) Jenkins
2 760 (13.45%) Git
3 691 (12.23%) JIRA
4 575 (10.18%) GitLab
5 134 (2.37%) Selenium
6 106 (1.88%) Postman
7 99 (1.75%) JUnit
8 96 (1.70%) SonarQube
9 83 (1.47%) Maven
10 81 (1.43%) Bitbucket
11 75 (1.33%) REST Assured
12 61 (1.08%) Cucumber
13 60 (1.06%) Cypress.io
13 60 (1.06%) JMeter
14 54 (0.96%) Gradle
15 46 (0.81%) Gatling
15 46 (0.81%) Mockito
16 37 (0.65%) Visual Studio
17 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
17 36 (0.64%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,395 (24.69%) Social Skills
2 1,016 (17.99%) Finance
3 826 (14.62%) Public Sector
4 470 (8.32%) Analytical Skills
5 367 (6.50%) Banking
6 134 (2.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 108 (1.91%) Documentation Skills
8 95 (1.68%) Retail
9 69 (1.22%) Legal
10 68 (1.20%) Influencing Skills
10 68 (1.20%) Organisational Skills
11 58 (1.03%) Marketing
12 50 (0.89%) Military
13 45 (0.80%) Law
14 44 (0.78%) Investment Banking
14 44 (0.78%) Telecoms
15 42 (0.74%) Financial Institution
16 39 (0.69%) Front Office
16 39 (0.69%) Manufacturing
17 36 (0.64%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,126 (19.93%) DevOps Engineer
2 934 (16.53%) Developer
3 800 (14.16%) Senior
4 633 (11.21%) Architect
5 526 (9.31%) Lead
6 342 (6.05%) Azure Engineer
7 316 (5.59%) Data Engineer
8 299 (5.29%) Analyst
9 283 (5.01%) AWS Engineer
10 237 (4.20%) Platform Engineer
11 213 (3.77%) Cloud Engineer
12 204 (3.61%) Java Developer
13 199 (3.52%) Senior DevOps
14 197 (3.49%) AWS DevOps
15 188 (3.33%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 188 (3.33%) Solutions Architect
16 184 (3.26%) AWS DevOps Engineer
17 183 (3.24%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 149 (2.64%) Senior Developer
18 149 (2.64%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 566 (10.02%) REST
2 495 (8.76%) .NET
3 335 (5.93%) RESTful
4 328 (5.81%) Kafka
5 325 (5.75%) Spring
6 308 (5.45%) Spring Boot
7 300 (5.31%) React
8 226 (4.00%) Node.js
9 168 (2.97%) JSON
10 167 (2.96%) PySpark
11 165 (2.92%) OAuth
12 162 (2.87%) Playwright
13 160 (2.83%) AngularJS
14 144 (2.55%) SOAP
15 140 (2.48%) .NET Framework
16 130 (2.30%) HTML
17 113 (2.00%) OAuth2
18 110 (1.95%) Middleware
18 110 (1.95%) YAML
19 108 (1.91%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,005 (17.79%) Cloud Native
2 404 (7.15%) Product Ownership
3 271 (4.80%) Distributed Systems
4 168 (2.97%) Onboarding
5 161 (2.85%) Enterprise Software
6 152 (2.69%) Legacy Systems
7 131 (2.32%) Hybrid Cloud
8 94 (1.66%) Public Cloud
9 91 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
10 86 (1.52%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.36%) Data Centre
12 74 (1.31%) Management Information System
13 70 (1.24%) Data Structures
13 70 (1.24%) Security Posture
14 63 (1.12%) Replication
15 62 (1.10%) AI Agents
16 60 (1.06%) Virtual Team
17 56 (0.99%) Enterprise Cloud
18 50 (0.89%) Greenfield Project
18 50 (0.89%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 491 (8.69%) Linux
2 291 (5.15%) Windows
3 103 (1.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 81 (1.43%) Unix
5 73 (1.29%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.60%) VMS
7 28 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 25 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.28%) Android
10 11 (0.19%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 7 (0.12%) AIX
12 7 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
13 6 (0.11%) CentOS
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
14 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,322 (58.81%) CI/CD
2 2,252 (39.87%) Agile
3 1,531 (27.10%) Infrastructure as Code
4 949 (16.80%) Containerisation
5 877 (15.52%) Continuous Improvement
6 862 (15.26%) Problem-Solving
7 846 (14.98%) Test Automation
8 833 (14.75%) Microservices
9 750 (13.28%) Stakeholder Management
10 738 (13.06%) AI
11 706 (12.50%) Observability
12 700 (12.39%) Scrum
13 685 (12.13%) Migration
14 671 (11.88%) Platform Engineering
15 656 (11.61%) Software Engineering
16 607 (10.75%) Analytics
17 506 (8.96%) Technical Leadership
18 501 (8.87%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 493 (8.73%) Data Modelling
20 469 (8.30%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,577 (27.92%) Python
2 1,022 (18.09%) SQL
3 797 (14.11%) Java
4 513 (9.08%) C#
5 450 (7.97%) Bash
6 432 (7.65%) JavaScript
7 417 (7.38%) PowerShell
8 301 (5.33%) TypeScript
9 211 (3.74%) Bicep
10 113 (2.00%) Go
11 69 (1.22%) Apex Code
12 68 (1.20%) PL/SQL
13 66 (1.17%) Shell Script
13 66 (1.17%) T-SQL
14 55 (0.97%) Groovy
15 52 (0.92%) Scala
16 28 (0.50%) C++
16 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
17 24 (0.42%) C
17 24 (0.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,776 (31.44%) Security Cleared
2 1,489 (26.36%) SC Cleared
3 334 (5.91%) Degree
4 224 (3.97%) Azure Certification
5 210 (3.72%) BPSS Clearance
6 195 (3.45%) DV Cleared
7 189 (3.35%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.18%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.47%) Microsoft Certification
10 80 (1.42%) CISSP
11 59 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 55 (0.97%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) Master's Degree
15 43 (0.76%) PMP
16 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
17 35 (0.62%) CISM
18 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.42%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 500 (8.85%) QA
2 271 (4.80%) Data Quality
3 195 (3.45%) Accessibility
4 171 (3.03%) GDPR
5 93 (1.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 81 (1.43%) NIST
7 76 (1.35%) WCAG
8 52 (0.92%) NCSC
9 43 (0.76%) PMO
10 41 (0.73%) PCI DSS
11 35 (0.62%) SLA
12 30 (0.53%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 13 (0.23%) HIPAA
15 11 (0.19%) Disclosure Scotland
15 11 (0.19%) SOC 2
16 10 (0.18%) ISO 20022
16 10 (0.18%) PSD2
17 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
17 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,111 (19.67%) Docker
2 180 (3.19%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
4 80 (1.42%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.57%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) VMware NSX
7 17 (0.30%) Hyper-V
7 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
7 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
8 15 (0.27%) Squid
9 14 (0.25%) Postfix
10 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
11 8 (0.14%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) IAG
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) NFS
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,633 (28.91%) Terraform
2 1,458 (25.81%) Kubernetes
3 531 (9.40%) Ansible
4 375 (6.64%) Grafana
5 321 (5.68%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.66%) Argo
7 65 (1.15%) Single Sign-On
8 62 (1.10%) Puppet
9 44 (0.78%) Istio
10 42 (0.74%) Progress Chef
11 34 (0.60%) Microsoft Intune
12 31 (0.55%) Packer
13 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 20 (0.35%) HP ALM
15 17 (0.30%) Kibana
16 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 16 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
16 16 (0.28%) SCCM
17 13 (0.23%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 13 (0.23%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 1,012 (17.91%) Microsoft
2 322 (5.70%) Oracle
3 269 (4.76%) Databricks
4 268 (4.74%) Google
5 204 (3.61%) ServiceNow
6 184 (3.26%) Salesforce
6 184 (3.26%) Splunk
7 131 (2.32%) Dynatrace
7 131 (2.32%) SAP
8 119 (2.11%) VMware
9 108 (1.91%) Red Hat
10 70 (1.24%) OpenAI
11 64 (1.13%) IBM
12 58 (1.03%) Informatica
13 57 (1.01%) Atlassian
14 49 (0.87%) MuleSoft
15 47 (0.83%) Cisco
16 44 (0.78%) Foundry
17 42 (0.74%) Okta
18 37 (0.65%) CyberArk