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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,614 3,585 3,845
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.46% 10.95% 9.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.37% 12.10% 11.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,898 2,524 2,621
10th Percentile £384 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £728
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 127 28 76
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.58 £56.75
25th Percentile £55.88 £52.19 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £94.00 £95.00 £85.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.49% -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 45,369 29,617 32,996
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.56% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,730 18,446 20,728
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,902 1,758 1,607
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.78 £17.30 £18.82
Median hourly rate £41.09 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.39% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.88 £47.09 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.56 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +92.49% -47.37% +14.67%

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 1 September 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 1 September 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 1 September 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 +2 4,796 £525 - 3,622
London 0 2,533 £550 - 2,070
UK excluding London 0 2,410 £500 - 2,003
Work from Home +1 1,619 £525 +2.44% 1,669
North of England 0 799 £500 +5.26% 555
South East -7 462 £525 +5.00% 452
Midlands -2 446 £488 -2.50% 226
Yorkshire -1 392 £500 +2.04% 162
West Midlands -4 351 £490 -5.50% 132
North West -2 312 £519 +15.37% 297
South West +6 311 £543 +3.83% 291
Scotland -3 209 £493 +3.68% 181
East of England +14 143 £506 -3.62% 166
North East +13 112 £431 -17.07% 100
East Midlands +6 91 £464 +3.06% 94
Wales -3 49 £513 +36.67% 49
Northern Ireland +18 21 £450 +9.76% 97
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 340 (6.06%) Confluence
2 148 (2.64%) SharePoint
3 125 (2.23%) Apache Airflow
4 124 (2.21%) Apache Spark
5 112 (2.00%) Apache
6 61 (1.09%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
9 36 (0.64%) IIS
10 25 (0.45%) nginx
11 17 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.29%) Camunda
13 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
14 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
15 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
16 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
17 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
18 9 (0.16%) Appian
19 7 (0.12%) Mule
19 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
Applications
1 65 (1.16%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.12%) Microsoft Project
3 43 (0.77%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 6 (0.11%) Trello
9 5 (0.089%) Notion
9 5 (0.089%) Windchill
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) Mingle
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 77 (1.37%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Magento
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 7 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
9 5 (0.089%) Oracle ERP
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) Maximo
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,085 (54.95%) Azure
2 2,002 (35.66%) AWS
3 1,780 (31.71%) Azure DevOps
4 972 (17.31%) GitHub
5 711 (12.66%) GCP
6 606 (10.79%) GitHub Actions
7 488 (8.69%) Power Platform
8 456 (8.12%) Serverless
9 293 (5.22%) Amazon S3
10 276 (4.92%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.51%) Entra ID
12 238 (4.24%) Amazon EKS
13 235 (4.19%) AWS CloudFormation
14 228 (4.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 217 (3.87%) Azure AKS
16 213 (3.79%) Azure Monitor
17 200 (3.56%) Azure Data Factory
18 184 (3.28%) Dynamics 365
19 181 (3.22%) Amazon EC2
20 165 (2.94%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 254 (4.52%) Firewall
2 174 (3.10%) DNS
3 124 (2.21%) VPN
4 112 (2.00%) Network Security
5 68 (1.21%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.93%) WAN
7 50 (0.89%) SSL
8 47 (0.84%) DHCP
9 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
10 36 (0.64%) HTTP
11 33 (0.59%) BGP
12 32 (0.57%) Internet
13 29 (0.52%) SSH
13 29 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
14 24 (0.43%) OSPF
15 21 (0.37%) SAN
15 21 (0.37%) VLAN
16 18 (0.32%) LAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 325 (5.79%) Power BI
2 300 (5.34%) SQL Server
3 293 (5.22%) PostgreSQL
4 208 (3.71%) Data Warehouse
5 189 (3.37%) NoSQL
6 178 (3.17%) Relational Database
7 177 (3.15%) MongoDB
8 167 (2.97%) Data Lake
9 135 (2.40%) Amazon RDS
10 125 (2.23%) Metadata
11 110 (1.96%) Azure SQL Database
12 93 (1.66%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.59%) Delta Lake
14 82 (1.46%) Oracle Database
15 81 (1.44%) Redis
16 80 (1.43%) MySQL
17 68 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
18 61 (1.09%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 60 (1.07%) Big Data
20 52 (0.93%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 797 (14.20%) Jenkins
2 786 (14.00%) Git
3 677 (12.06%) JIRA
4 611 (10.88%) GitLab
5 141 (2.51%) Selenium
6 102 (1.82%) Postman
7 100 (1.78%) SonarQube
8 92 (1.64%) JUnit
9 91 (1.62%) Maven
10 79 (1.41%) Bitbucket
11 72 (1.28%) JMeter
11 72 (1.28%) REST Assured
12 71 (1.26%) Cypress.io
13 62 (1.10%) Gradle
14 57 (1.02%) Cucumber
15 50 (0.89%) Gatling
16 46 (0.82%) Claude Code
17 43 (0.77%) LoadRunner
17 43 (0.77%) Mockito
18 42 (0.75%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,456 (25.94%) Social Skills
2 1,001 (17.83%) Finance
3 818 (14.57%) Public Sector
4 508 (9.05%) Analytical Skills
5 368 (6.56%) Banking
6 158 (2.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 104 (1.85%) Retail
8 94 (1.67%) Documentation Skills
9 76 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
10 66 (1.18%) Legal
11 65 (1.16%) Organisational Skills
12 55 (0.98%) Marketing
13 52 (0.93%) Military
14 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
14 51 (0.91%) Investment Banking
15 49 (0.87%) Telecoms
16 46 (0.82%) Law
17 42 (0.75%) Financial Institution
17 42 (0.75%) Front Office
17 42 (0.75%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,121 (19.97%) DevOps Engineer
2 907 (16.16%) Developer
3 840 (14.96%) Senior
4 630 (11.22%) Architect
5 536 (9.55%) Lead
6 353 (6.29%) Azure Engineer
7 306 (5.45%) Data Engineer
8 277 (4.93%) Analyst
9 260 (4.63%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.17%) Platform Engineer
11 206 (3.67%) Cloud Engineer
12 202 (3.60%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 197 (3.51%) Senior DevOps
14 190 (3.38%) Java Developer
15 182 (3.24%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 181 (3.22%) AWS DevOps
17 172 (3.06%) Solutions Architect
18 168 (2.99%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 156 (2.78%) Senior Developer
20 146 (2.60%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,669 (29.73%) Terraform
2 582 (10.37%) REST
3 478 (8.51%) .NET
4 372 (6.63%) Kafka
5 345 (6.15%) RESTful
6 303 (5.40%) Spring
7 294 (5.24%) React
8 289 (5.15%) Spring Boot
9 210 (3.74%) Node.js
10 183 (3.26%) JSON
11 167 (2.97%) Playwright
12 165 (2.94%) OAuth
13 157 (2.80%) PySpark
14 138 (2.46%) HTML
15 129 (2.30%) CSS
16 127 (2.26%) .NET Framework
17 126 (2.24%) AngularJS
18 121 (2.16%) SOAP
19 118 (2.10%) OAuth2
20 115 (2.05%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,019 (18.15%) Cloud Native
2 421 (7.50%) Product Ownership
3 261 (4.65%) Distributed Systems
4 191 (3.40%) Enterprise Software
5 182 (3.24%) Onboarding
6 152 (2.71%) Legacy Systems
7 150 (2.67%) Hybrid Cloud
8 92 (1.64%) AI Agents
9 88 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
10 82 (1.46%) Self-Motivation
11 80 (1.43%) Management Information System
12 77 (1.37%) Public Cloud
13 72 (1.28%) Data Structures
13 72 (1.28%) Replication
14 69 (1.23%) Data Centre
15 66 (1.18%) Security Posture
16 57 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
17 56 (1.00%) Virtual Team
18 51 (0.91%) Mobile App
19 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 528 (9.41%) Linux
2 307 (5.47%) Windows
3 112 (2.00%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 104 (1.85%) Unix
5 95 (1.69%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.71%) VMS
7 33 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.12%) CentOS
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,351 (59.69%) CI/CD
2 2,286 (40.72%) Agile
3 1,616 (28.79%) Infrastructure as Code
4 940 (16.74%) Continuous Improvement
5 930 (16.57%) Containerisation
6 873 (15.55%) Stakeholder Management
7 871 (15.51%) Problem-Solving
7 871 (15.51%) Test Automation
8 827 (14.73%) Microservices
9 810 (14.43%) AI
10 740 (13.18%) Observability
11 737 (13.13%) Platform Engineering
12 706 (12.58%) Software Engineering
13 679 (12.09%) Scrum
14 672 (11.97%) Migration
15 582 (10.37%) Technical Leadership
16 577 (10.28%) Analytics
17 529 (9.42%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 485 (8.64%) Roadmaps
19 473 (8.43%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,612 (28.71%) Python
2 1,019 (18.15%) SQL
3 807 (14.37%) Java
4 489 (8.71%) C#
5 482 (8.59%) Bash
6 480 (8.55%) PowerShell
7 459 (8.18%) JavaScript
8 310 (5.52%) TypeScript
9 252 (4.49%) Bicep
10 98 (1.75%) Go
11 81 (1.44%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.23%) T-SQL
13 64 (1.14%) Groovy
13 64 (1.14%) Scala
14 57 (1.02%) PL/SQL
15 35 (0.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
16 34 (0.61%) Perl
17 30 (0.53%) C++
18 21 (0.37%) C
Qualifications
1 1,794 (31.96%) Security Cleared
2 1,515 (26.99%) SC Cleared
3 338 (6.02%) Degree
4 234 (4.17%) Azure Certification
5 229 (4.08%) BPSS Clearance
6 205 (3.65%) DV Cleared
7 188 (3.35%) AWS Certification
8 134 (2.39%) Computer Science Degree
9 103 (1.83%) Microsoft Certification
10 74 (1.32%) CISSP
11 62 (1.10%) ISTQB
12 56 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 51 (0.91%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 42 (0.75%) PMI Certification
16 36 (0.64%) Master's Degree
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 25 (0.45%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 24 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
20 23 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 529 (9.42%) QA
2 280 (4.99%) Data Quality
3 203 (3.62%) Accessibility
4 132 (2.35%) GDPR
5 103 (1.83%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 82 (1.46%) NIST
6 82 (1.46%) WCAG
7 53 (0.94%) NCSC
8 52 (0.93%) PMO
9 39 (0.69%) SLA
10 33 (0.59%) PCI DSS
11 28 (0.50%) GRC
12 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.29%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
15 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) HL7
15 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,142 (20.34%) Docker
2 172 (3.06%) Active Directory
3 91 (1.62%) VMware Infrastructure
4 82 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.50%) Hyper-V
6 27 (0.48%) vSphere
7 21 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
8 20 (0.36%) VMware NSX
9 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.20%) IAG
11 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.16%) Postfix
13 7 (0.12%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 5 (0.089%) Firmware
15 5 (0.089%) NFS
Systems Management
1 1,513 (26.95%) Kubernetes
2 538 (9.58%) Ansible
3 370 (6.59%) Grafana
4 312 (5.56%) Prometheus
5 84 (1.50%) Argo
6 61 (1.09%) Puppet
7 54 (0.96%) Single Sign-On
8 48 (0.86%) Progress Chef
9 41 (0.73%) Microsoft Intune
10 37 (0.66%) Istio
11 34 (0.61%) Packer
12 25 (0.45%) Kibana
13 20 (0.36%) Kustomize
13 20 (0.36%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.34%) SCCM
15 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
16 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
17 14 (0.25%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,095 (19.50%) Microsoft
2 303 (5.40%) Oracle
3 292 (5.20%) Databricks
4 269 (4.79%) Google
5 201 (3.58%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.31%) Splunk
7 185 (3.30%) Salesforce
8 145 (2.58%) Dynatrace
9 130 (2.32%) VMware
10 112 (2.00%) SAP
11 107 (1.91%) Red Hat
12 64 (1.14%) IBM
12 64 (1.14%) OpenAI
13 62 (1.10%) Informatica
14 61 (1.09%) MuleSoft
15 50 (0.89%) Cisco
16 49 (0.87%) Foundry
17 46 (0.82%) AppDynamics
18 44 (0.78%) Atlassian
19 36 (0.64%) CyberArk