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

6 months to
10 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,429 3,260 3,973
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.25% 10.62% 8.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.93% 11.88% 10.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,102 2,247 2,872
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £429 £463 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -7.37%
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 59 24 101
10th Percentile £44.27 £36.58 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £57.19 £56.65
Median hourly rate £52.50 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.30% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £79.75 £80.75 £71.90
90th Percentile £94.00 £87.50 £81.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £70.36 £65.00
% change year-on-year -32.49% +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 34,251 27,445 39,124
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.02% 89.42% 87.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,718 16,700 25,680
10th Percentile £306 £306 £300
25th Percentile £406 £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 £716 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.50% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,071 843 2,128
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.05 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -1.71% +1.74%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.12
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.08 £35.00
% change year-on-year -19.08% -11.20% +10.55%

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 10 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 10 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 10 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 3,776 £525 -8.70% 1,230
UK excluding London +7 1,994 £500 -4.76% 1,002
London -3 1,887 £540 -10.00% 466
Work from Home -3 1,265 £525 -4.55% 767
North of England +4 685 £500 -3.61% 295
South East 0 413 £525 -8.70% 340
Midlands +22 385 £513 +2.55% 110
Yorkshire +1 357 £500 -2.20% 94
West Midlands +19 308 £525 +5.00% 82
North West +3 280 £468 -10.53% 172
South West +12 243 £525 -12.50% 125
Scotland +5 196 £450 - 61
East of England +19 112 £573 +8.79% 56
East Midlands +7 77 £425 -10.53% 29
North East -3 51 £475 -9.52% 32
Wales +3 36 £425 +72.44% 25
Northern Ireland -6 9 £475 +26.67% 9

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
1 263 (5.94%) Confluence
2 90 (2.03%) SharePoint
3 89 (2.01%) Apache Spark
4 88 (1.99%) Apache
5 59 (1.33%) Apache Airflow
6 58 (1.31%) SAS
7 37 (0.84%) OpenStack
8 34 (0.77%) nginx
9 32 (0.72%) CMS
10 24 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
11 21 (0.47%) IIS
12 15 (0.34%) JBoss
13 13 (0.29%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 11 (0.25%) Sitecore CMS
15 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.23%) Mendix
16 8 (0.18%) Camunda
16 8 (0.18%) CICS
16 8 (0.18%) Smallworld
Applications
1 100 (2.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 41 (0.93%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.75%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 6 (0.14%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.090%) Trello
10 2 (0.045%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.023%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.25%) Endur
3 10 (0.23%) Maximo
3 10 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
3 10 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
4 9 (0.20%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 6 (0.14%) VisionPLUS
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.090%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.090%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.090%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.068%) NetSuite
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Assets
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Payables
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Receivables
9 3 (0.068%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.068%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,313 (52.22%) Azure
2 1,597 (36.06%) AWS
3 1,248 (28.18%) Azure DevOps
4 834 (18.83%) GitHub
5 660 (14.90%) GCP
6 534 (12.06%) Serverless
7 476 (10.75%) GitHub Actions
8 370 (8.35%) Power Platform
9 285 (6.43%) AWS CloudFormation
10 259 (5.85%) AWS Lambda
11 242 (5.46%) Amazon S3
12 222 (5.01%) Azure Data Factory
13 211 (4.76%) Azure AKS
14 199 (4.49%) Amazon EKS
15 185 (4.18%) OpenShift
16 174 (3.93%) Entra ID
17 172 (3.88%) Amazon ECS
18 171 (3.86%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 171 (3.86%) Dynamics 365
19 164 (3.70%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 200 (4.52%) Firewall
2 108 (2.44%) DNS
3 91 (2.05%) VPN
4 90 (2.03%) Network Security
5 50 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 47 (1.06%) SSL
7 34 (0.77%) HTTP
7 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
8 22 (0.50%) WAN
9 18 (0.41%) DHCP
10 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
11 14 (0.32%) BGP
11 14 (0.32%) SD-WAN
12 13 (0.29%) MPLS
13 12 (0.27%) SAN
14 11 (0.25%) FTP
14 11 (0.25%) LAN
14 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
15 10 (0.23%) Internet
15 10 (0.23%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 260 (5.87%) PostgreSQL
2 237 (5.35%) Power BI
3 176 (3.97%) SQL Server
4 170 (3.84%) NoSQL
5 142 (3.21%) Data Lake
6 136 (3.07%) Amazon RDS
7 118 (2.66%) Relational Database
8 108 (2.44%) Data Warehouse
9 107 (2.42%) MongoDB
10 95 (2.14%) Azure SQL Database
11 78 (1.76%) Oracle Database
12 75 (1.69%) DynamoDB
12 75 (1.69%) Elasticsearch
13 70 (1.58%) MySQL
14 57 (1.29%) Metadata
15 54 (1.22%) Delta Lake
16 53 (1.20%) Redis
17 52 (1.17%) Tableau
18 49 (1.11%) Big Data
19 48 (1.08%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 779 (17.59%) Jenkins
2 585 (13.21%) JIRA
3 583 (13.16%) Git
4 580 (13.10%) GitLab
5 134 (3.03%) Selenium
6 96 (2.17%) JUnit
7 92 (2.08%) Postman
8 66 (1.49%) SonarQube
9 65 (1.47%) Sonatype Nexus
10 64 (1.45%) Bitbucket
11 63 (1.42%) Cucumber
12 61 (1.38%) Cypress.io
13 50 (1.13%) Artifactory
14 49 (1.11%) Maven
15 48 (1.08%) JMeter
16 45 (1.02%) REST Assured
17 42 (0.95%) Gradle
18 38 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
19 37 (0.84%) Liquibase
20 33 (0.75%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,327 (29.96%) Social Skills
2 797 (18.00%) Finance
3 566 (12.78%) Public Sector
4 371 (8.38%) Analytical Skills
5 335 (7.56%) Banking
6 153 (3.45%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.78%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.51%) Financial Institution
8 67 (1.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 65 (1.47%) Marketing
10 52 (1.17%) Retail
11 47 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
12 45 (1.02%) Front Office
13 43 (0.97%) Investment Banking
13 43 (0.97%) Telecoms
14 35 (0.79%) Military
14 35 (0.79%) Organisational Skills
15 32 (0.72%) Legal
16 30 (0.68%) Pharmaceutical
17 27 (0.61%) Law
Job Titles
1 882 (19.91%) DevOps Engineer
2 764 (17.25%) Developer
3 600 (13.55%) Senior
4 443 (10.00%) Architect
5 342 (7.72%) Lead
6 268 (6.05%) Azure Engineer
7 255 (5.76%) AWS Engineer
8 231 (5.22%) Analyst
9 230 (5.19%) Data Engineer
10 199 (4.49%) AWS DevOps
11 176 (3.97%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 161 (3.64%) Cloud Engineer
13 157 (3.54%) Software Engineer
14 150 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
15 144 (3.25%) Senior Developer
16 133 (3.00%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 131 (2.96%) Solutions Architect
18 119 (2.69%) Business Analyst
18 119 (2.69%) Senior DevOps
19 113 (2.55%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 515 (11.63%) REST
2 393 (8.87%) .NET
3 304 (6.86%) React
4 300 (6.77%) Node.js
5 252 (5.69%) RESTful
6 251 (5.67%) Kafka
7 242 (5.46%) Spring
8 224 (5.06%) Spring Boot
9 172 (3.88%) JSON
10 157 (3.54%) OAuth
11 151 (3.41%) AngularJS
12 144 (3.25%) Elastic Stack
13 135 (3.05%) SOAP
14 129 (2.91%) XML
15 128 (2.89%) HTML
16 127 (2.87%) YAML
17 114 (2.57%) Playwright
18 110 (2.48%) PySpark
19 109 (2.46%) CSS
20 99 (2.24%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 647 (14.61%) Cloud Native
2 244 (5.51%) Product Ownership
3 163 (3.68%) Distributed Systems
4 125 (2.82%) Onboarding
5 119 (2.69%) Public Cloud
6 91 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
7 82 (1.85%) Hybrid Cloud
8 73 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
9 54 (1.22%) Management Information System
9 54 (1.22%) Virtual Team
10 50 (1.13%) Data Protection Act
11 48 (1.08%) Data Centre
11 48 (1.08%) NHS
11 48 (1.08%) Security Posture
12 47 (1.06%) Private Cloud
13 43 (0.97%) Replication
14 42 (0.95%) Mobile App
15 41 (0.93%) CMDB
16 39 (0.88%) Self-Motivation
17 37 (0.84%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 488 (11.02%) Linux
2 244 (5.51%) Windows
3 107 (2.42%) Unix
4 55 (1.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (1.08%) Windows Server
6 45 (1.02%) VMS
7 29 (0.65%) Ubuntu
8 20 (0.45%) Android
8 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
9 19 (0.43%) Apple iOS
10 17 (0.38%) CentOS
11 9 (0.20%) Solaris
12 8 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
13 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.090%) Mac OS
17 3 (0.068%) zOS
18 2 (0.045%) Debian
19 1 (0.023%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,554 (57.67%) CI/CD
2 1,723 (38.90%) Agile
3 1,177 (26.57%) Infrastructure as Code
4 858 (19.37%) Problem-Solving
5 855 (19.30%) Containerisation
6 667 (15.06%) Microservices
7 661 (14.92%) Test Automation
8 528 (11.92%) Continuous Improvement
9 523 (11.81%) Analytics
10 507 (11.45%) Migration
11 474 (10.70%) Scrum
12 473 (10.68%) Observability
13 439 (9.91%) AI
14 421 (9.51%) Stakeholder Management
15 392 (8.85%) Software Engineering
16 352 (7.95%) Mentoring
17 350 (7.90%) Data Modelling
18 297 (6.71%) Business Intelligence
19 296 (6.68%) Platform Engineering
20 293 (6.62%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 1,357 (30.64%) Python
2 878 (19.82%) SQL
3 587 (13.25%) Java
4 435 (9.82%) C#
5 433 (9.78%) JavaScript
6 380 (8.58%) PowerShell
7 347 (7.83%) Bash
8 315 (7.11%) TypeScript
9 150 (3.39%) Bicep
10 143 (3.23%) Go
11 78 (1.76%) PL/SQL
12 64 (1.45%) Scala
13 58 (1.31%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.11%) Ruby
15 48 (1.08%) Groovy
16 44 (0.99%) C++
17 43 (0.97%) T-SQL
18 34 (0.77%) Perl
19 28 (0.63%) Rust
20 23 (0.52%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,358 (30.66%) Security Cleared
2 1,124 (25.38%) SC Cleared
3 375 (8.47%) Degree
4 192 (4.34%) Azure Certification
5 190 (4.29%) Computer Science Degree
6 144 (3.25%) DV Cleared
7 141 (3.18%) AWS Certification
8 109 (2.46%) BPSS Clearance
9 88 (1.99%) Master's Degree
10 74 (1.67%) CISSP
11 69 (1.56%) Microsoft Certification
12 59 (1.33%) CISM
13 49 (1.11%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 49 (1.11%) ISTQB
14 39 (0.88%) PMI Certification
15 31 (0.70%) PMP
16 28 (0.63%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 28 (0.63%) Cisco Certification
17 23 (0.52%) IIBA
18 22 (0.50%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 386 (8.72%) QA
2 179 (4.04%) GDPR
3 157 (3.54%) Data Quality
4 142 (3.21%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.80%) Accessibility
6 123 (2.78%) NIST
7 71 (1.60%) NCSC
8 36 (0.81%) PCI DSS
9 34 (0.77%) WCAG
10 30 (0.68%) HIPAA
11 28 (0.63%) PMO
12 27 (0.61%) SLA
13 24 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 19 (0.43%) SOC 2
15 18 (0.41%) PSD2
16 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
17 14 (0.32%) SEPA
18 11 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
18 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
18 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,073 (24.23%) Docker
2 170 (3.84%) Active Directory
3 72 (1.63%) Virtual Machines
4 70 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
5 39 (0.88%) vSphere
6 26 (0.59%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.41%) Virtual Desktop
8 14 (0.32%) Squid
9 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.25%) DFS Replication
10 11 (0.25%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.25%) Lustre
10 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
11 9 (0.20%) GPFS
12 8 (0.18%) Postfix
13 7 (0.16%) Firmware
14 6 (0.14%) Dovecot
14 6 (0.14%) KVM
14 6 (0.14%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 6 (0.14%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,396 (31.52%) Terraform
2 1,305 (29.46%) Kubernetes
3 493 (11.13%) Ansible
4 334 (7.54%) Grafana
5 289 (6.53%) Prometheus
6 94 (2.12%) Argo
7 72 (1.63%) Puppet
8 65 (1.47%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (0.99%) Istio
10 37 (0.84%) Kibana
11 32 (0.72%) Progress Chef
12 31 (0.70%) Packer
13 21 (0.47%) Podman
14 20 (0.45%) vCenter Server
15 19 (0.43%) SCCM
16 18 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
17 17 (0.38%) Rancher
18 16 (0.36%) Active Directory Federation Services
19 15 (0.34%) Consul
19 15 (0.34%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 766 (17.30%) Microsoft
2 289 (6.53%) Oracle
3 263 (5.94%) Databricks
4 261 (5.89%) Google
5 219 (4.94%) Splunk
6 163 (3.68%) ServiceNow
7 128 (2.89%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.73%) VMware
9 112 (2.53%) Salesforce
10 103 (2.33%) SAP
11 76 (1.72%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.40%) Dynatrace
13 53 (1.20%) CyberArk
14 47 (1.06%) Atlassian
14 47 (1.06%) IBM
15 41 (0.93%) F5
16 39 (0.88%) Cisco
17 33 (0.75%) Palo Alto
18 30 (0.68%) MuleSoft
19 29 (0.65%) Talend