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

6 months to
2 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,592 3,564 3,845
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.44% 10.96% 9.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.34% 12.12% 11.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,889 2,504 2,621
10th Percentile £385 £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 126 28 76
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.58 £56.75
25th Percentile £56.25 £52.19 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.60 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.90% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £94.06 £95.00 £85.13
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.11 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.65% -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 45,329 29,411 32,997
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.42% 85.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,714 18,306 20,733
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% -3.54%
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 2,913 1,754 1,602
10th Percentile £14.07 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.75 £17.30 £18.79
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.89 £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 2 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 2 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 2 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 +1 4,774 £525 - 3,714
London 0 2,518 £550 - 2,157
UK excluding London -1 2,406 £500 - 1,995
Work from Home +1 1,615 £525 +2.44% 1,706
North of England +1 796 £500 +5.26% 551
South East -9 458 £525 +5.00% 460
Midlands -3 446 £488 -2.50% 223
Yorkshire -1 390 £500 +2.04% 155
West Midlands -3 351 £490 -5.50% 130
North West -3 312 £524 +16.44% 293
South West +7 310 £543 +4.33% 287
Scotland -3 210 £493 +3.68% 178
East of England +15 146 £505 -3.81% 175
North East +13 109 £425 -18.27% 106
East Midlands +5 91 £464 +3.06% 93
Wales -4 49 £513 +36.67% 49
Northern Ireland +18 21 £450 +2.27% 87
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
1 341 (6.10%) Confluence
2 147 (2.63%) SharePoint
3 126 (2.25%) Apache Airflow
3 126 (2.25%) Apache Spark
4 113 (2.02%) Apache
5 61 (1.09%) SAS
6 43 (0.77%) CMS
7 39 (0.70%) Jupyter
8 34 (0.61%) IIS
9 25 (0.45%) nginx
10 17 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.29%) Camunda
12 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
15 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
18 7 (0.13%) JBoss
18 7 (0.13%) Mule
Applications
1 66 (1.18%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.13%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.80%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 34 (0.61%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 7 (0.13%) Trello
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
8 5 (0.089%) Windchill
9 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
9 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
9 1 (0.018%) Mingle
9 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 74 (1.32%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.63%) 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 (0.13%) 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 (0.072%) Endur
11 3 (0.054%) Findur
11 3 (0.054%) Maximo
11 3 (0.054%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.054%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.054%) Shopify
11 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,073 (54.95%) Azure
2 1,994 (35.66%) AWS
3 1,773 (31.71%) Azure DevOps
4 968 (17.31%) GitHub
5 714 (12.77%) GCP
6 602 (10.77%) GitHub Actions
7 487 (8.71%) Power Platform
8 452 (8.08%) Serverless
9 293 (5.24%) Amazon S3
10 277 (4.95%) AWS Lambda
11 250 (4.47%) Entra ID
12 239 (4.27%) Amazon EKS
13 232 (4.15%) AWS CloudFormation
14 230 (4.11%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 215 (3.84%) Azure AKS
16 210 (3.76%) Azure Monitor
17 201 (3.59%) Azure Data Factory
18 181 (3.24%) Amazon EC2
19 179 (3.20%) Dynamics 365
20 161 (2.88%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 252 (4.51%) Firewall
2 173 (3.09%) DNS
3 123 (2.20%) VPN
4 114 (2.04%) Network Security
5 68 (1.22%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.93%) SSL
7 51 (0.91%) WAN
8 47 (0.84%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) HTTP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 32 (0.57%) BGP
11 31 (0.55%) Internet
12 29 (0.52%) SSH
12 29 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
13 23 (0.41%) OSPF
14 21 (0.38%) SAN
14 21 (0.38%) VLAN
15 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 327 (5.85%) Power BI
2 299 (5.35%) SQL Server
3 292 (5.22%) PostgreSQL
4 209 (3.74%) Data Warehouse
5 186 (3.33%) NoSQL
6 177 (3.17%) Relational Database
7 174 (3.11%) MongoDB
8 169 (3.02%) Data Lake
9 134 (2.40%) Amazon RDS
10 125 (2.24%) Metadata
11 109 (1.95%) Azure SQL Database
12 92 (1.65%) DynamoDB
13 91 (1.63%) Delta Lake
14 83 (1.48%) Oracle Database
15 81 (1.45%) MySQL
15 81 (1.45%) Redis
16 68 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
17 62 (1.11%) SQL Server Integration Services
18 61 (1.09%) Big Data
19 53 (0.95%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 790 (14.13%) Jenkins
2 782 (13.98%) Git
3 678 (12.12%) JIRA
4 612 (10.94%) GitLab
5 140 (2.50%) Selenium
6 100 (1.79%) Postman
7 97 (1.73%) SonarQube
8 92 (1.65%) JUnit
9 91 (1.63%) Maven
10 79 (1.41%) Bitbucket
11 72 (1.29%) JMeter
11 72 (1.29%) REST Assured
12 71 (1.27%) Cypress.io
13 63 (1.13%) Gradle
14 57 (1.02%) Cucumber
15 50 (0.89%) Gatling
16 46 (0.82%) Claude Code
17 44 (0.79%) Mockito
18 43 (0.77%) LoadRunner
19 41 (0.73%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,454 (26.00%) Social Skills
2 996 (17.81%) Finance
3 809 (14.47%) Public Sector
4 511 (9.14%) Analytical Skills
5 367 (6.56%) Banking
6 158 (2.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 103 (1.84%) Retail
8 94 (1.68%) Documentation Skills
9 78 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
10 65 (1.16%) Organisational Skills
11 64 (1.14%) Legal
12 55 (0.98%) Marketing
13 52 (0.93%) Investment Banking
13 52 (0.93%) Military
14 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
15 49 (0.88%) 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 1,114 (19.92%) DevOps Engineer
2 904 (16.17%) Developer
3 839 (15.00%) Senior
4 627 (11.21%) Architect
5 535 (9.57%) Lead
6 350 (6.26%) Azure Engineer
7 310 (5.54%) Data Engineer
8 278 (4.97%) Analyst
9 260 (4.65%) AWS Engineer
10 233 (4.17%) Platform Engineer
11 207 (3.70%) Cloud Engineer
12 201 (3.59%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 196 (3.51%) Senior DevOps
14 190 (3.40%) Java Developer
15 182 (3.25%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 179 (3.20%) AWS DevOps
17 172 (3.08%) Solutions Architect
18 168 (3.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 156 (2.79%) Senior Developer
20 143 (2.56%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,657 (29.63%) Terraform
2 586 (10.48%) REST
3 476 (8.51%) .NET
4 371 (6.63%) Kafka
5 344 (6.15%) RESTful
6 302 (5.40%) Spring
7 294 (5.26%) React
8 289 (5.17%) Spring Boot
9 208 (3.72%) Node.js
10 182 (3.25%) JSON
11 167 (2.99%) Playwright
12 165 (2.95%) OAuth
13 159 (2.84%) PySpark
14 138 (2.47%) HTML
15 129 (2.31%) CSS
16 127 (2.27%) .NET Framework
17 126 (2.25%) AngularJS
18 122 (2.18%) SOAP
19 118 (2.11%) OAuth2
20 113 (2.02%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,019 (18.22%) Cloud Native
2 422 (7.55%) Product Ownership
3 263 (4.70%) Distributed Systems
4 192 (3.43%) Enterprise Software
5 181 (3.24%) Onboarding
6 151 (2.70%) Legacy Systems
7 149 (2.66%) Hybrid Cloud
8 93 (1.66%) AI Agents
9 86 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
10 82 (1.47%) Management Information System
10 82 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.36%) Public Cloud
12 74 (1.32%) Replication
13 73 (1.31%) Data Structures
14 68 (1.22%) Security Posture
15 67 (1.20%) Data Centre
16 57 (1.02%) Virtual Team
17 56 (1.00%) Enterprise Cloud
18 51 (0.91%) Mobile App
19 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 529 (9.46%) Linux
2 310 (5.54%) Windows
3 115 (2.06%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 104 (1.86%) Unix
5 96 (1.72%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.72%) VMS
7 33 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.38%) 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%) CentOS
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.072%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.072%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,347 (59.85%) CI/CD
2 2,283 (40.83%) Agile
3 1,604 (28.68%) Infrastructure as Code
4 936 (16.74%) Continuous Improvement
5 921 (16.47%) Containerisation
6 878 (15.70%) Stakeholder Management
7 873 (15.61%) Problem-Solving
8 872 (15.59%) Test Automation
9 821 (14.68%) Microservices
10 816 (14.59%) AI
11 739 (13.22%) Observability
12 736 (13.16%) Platform Engineering
13 706 (12.63%) Software Engineering
14 679 (12.14%) Scrum
15 668 (11.95%) Migration
16 584 (10.44%) Technical Leadership
17 578 (10.34%) Analytics
18 531 (9.50%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 484 (8.66%) Roadmaps
20 478 (8.55%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,610 (28.79%) Python
2 1,019 (18.22%) SQL
3 807 (14.43%) Java
4 487 (8.71%) C#
5 482 (8.62%) Bash
5 482 (8.62%) PowerShell
6 459 (8.21%) JavaScript
7 310 (5.54%) TypeScript
8 251 (4.49%) Bicep
9 99 (1.77%) Go
10 79 (1.41%) Shell Script
11 70 (1.25%) T-SQL
12 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
13 66 (1.18%) Scala
14 61 (1.09%) Groovy
15 56 (1.00%) PL/SQL
16 35 (0.63%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 34 (0.61%) Perl
18 30 (0.54%) C++
19 22 (0.39%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,784 (31.90%) Security Cleared
2 1,507 (26.95%) SC Cleared
3 344 (6.15%) Degree
4 234 (4.18%) Azure Certification
5 230 (4.11%) BPSS Clearance
6 207 (3.70%) DV Cleared
7 188 (3.36%) AWS Certification
8 136 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
9 103 (1.84%) Microsoft Certification
10 76 (1.36%) CISSP
11 62 (1.11%) ISTQB
12 54 (0.97%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.89%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.79%) PMP
15 42 (0.75%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 24 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
19 23 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 530 (9.48%) QA
2 284 (5.08%) Data Quality
3 199 (3.56%) Accessibility
4 131 (2.34%) GDPR
5 102 (1.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 81 (1.45%) NIST
6 81 (1.45%) WCAG
7 52 (0.93%) NCSC
7 52 (0.93%) PMO
8 39 (0.70%) SLA
9 32 (0.57%) PCI DSS
10 30 (0.54%) GRC
11 25 (0.45%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 16 (0.29%) ISO 20022
13 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
13 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
14 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
14 10 (0.18%) HL7
14 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,140 (20.39%) Docker
2 170 (3.04%) Active Directory
3 91 (1.63%) VMware Infrastructure
4 81 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.50%) Hyper-V
6 27 (0.48%) vSphere
7 21 (0.38%) 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 (0.13%) KVM
13 7 (0.13%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
15 5 (0.089%) Ceph
15 5 (0.089%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,507 (26.95%) Kubernetes
2 533 (9.53%) Ansible
3 368 (6.58%) Grafana
4 311 (5.56%) Prometheus
5 84 (1.50%) Argo
6 61 (1.09%) Puppet
7 54 (0.97%) Single Sign-On
8 49 (0.88%) Progress Chef
9 42 (0.75%) Microsoft Intune
10 37 (0.66%) Istio
11 34 (0.61%) Packer
12 26 (0.46%) 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%) SCOM
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,090 (19.49%) Microsoft
2 306 (5.47%) Oracle
3 296 (5.29%) Databricks
4 272 (4.86%) Google
5 200 (3.58%) ServiceNow
6 185 (3.31%) Splunk
7 184 (3.29%) Salesforce
8 144 (2.58%) Dynatrace
9 130 (2.32%) VMware
10 112 (2.00%) SAP
11 109 (1.95%) Red Hat
12 66 (1.18%) OpenAI
13 64 (1.14%) IBM
14 62 (1.11%) Informatica
15 61 (1.09%) MuleSoft
16 50 (0.89%) Foundry
17 49 (0.88%) Cisco
18 46 (0.82%) AppDynamics
19 42 (0.75%) Atlassian
20 36 (0.64%) CyberArk