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 31 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,915 3,126 3,973
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.04% 10.75% 8.98%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.89% 11.89% 10.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,434 2,302 2,783
10th Percentile £381 £388 £404
25th Percentile £430 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.91% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £603 £650 £650
90th Percentile £709 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 91 25 90
10th Percentile £39.53 £29.65 £54.63
25th Percentile £45.46 £56.25 £61.25
Median hourly rate £63.73 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.97% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £75.88 £80.75 £69.50
90th Percentile £92.50 £87.50 £85.78
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.73 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -5.59% +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 38,122 26,294 38,266
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.61% 90.44% 86.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,155 17,082 24,859
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £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 £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.51% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,251 966 2,351
10th Percentile £14.96 £15.00 £12.84
25th Percentile £18.87 £20.24 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.50 £31.88 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +11.36% -1.91% -10.48%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.72 £70.66
UK excluding London median hourly rate £33.00 £31.50 £31.50
% change year-on-year +4.76% - -12.50%

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 31 March 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 31 March 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 31 March 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 4,215 £525 -4.55% 1,414
UK excluding London +8 2,179 £500 -2.44% 1,103
London -2 2,130 £550 -4.35% 512
Work from Home -2 1,351 £525 -0.38% 782
North of England +6 760 £500 -4.76% 306
South East 0 443 £525 -4.55% 307
Midlands +10 414 £492 -1.04% 142
Yorkshire 0 408 £500 -4.76% 86
West Midlands +6 323 £500 - 98
North West +6 298 £488 -7.13% 159
South West +13 285 £500 -16.67% 165
Scotland +5 170 £449 -0.22% 52
East of England +14 115 £568 +14.07% 92
East Midlands +5 89 £449 -5.58% 44
North East +5 58 £475 -9.52% 63
Wales +13 43 £425 +89.47% 43
Northern Ireland -7 10 £475 +13.77% 10
Channel Islands - 3 £450 - 1

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
1 304 (6.19%) Confluence
2 119 (2.42%) Apache Spark
3 100 (2.03%) SharePoint
4 94 (1.91%) SAS
5 89 (1.81%) Apache
6 69 (1.40%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.67%) nginx
8 32 (0.65%) CMS
8 32 (0.65%) OpenStack
9 28 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
10 25 (0.51%) IIS
11 15 (0.31%) Mendix
12 11 (0.22%) Adobe Experience Manager
12 11 (0.22%) HCL Notes
12 11 (0.22%) Sitecore CMS
13 10 (0.20%) Camunda
14 8 (0.16%) WebLogic
15 7 (0.14%) ArcGIS
15 7 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
15 7 (0.14%) WebSphere
Applications
1 88 (1.79%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 53 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 22 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 6 (0.12%) Weka
8 5 (0.10%) Trello
9 2 (0.041%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.041%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.041%) Spreadsheet
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
Business Applications
1 73 (1.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.26%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 9 (0.18%) Maximo
4 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
5 6 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
5 6 (0.12%) Endur
5 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
5 6 (0.12%) SAP ERP
6 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
7 4 (0.081%) Payment Gateway
7 4 (0.081%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 3 (0.061%) Findur
8 3 (0.061%) NetSuite
8 3 (0.061%) Salesforce CRM
8 3 (0.061%) SAP CO
8 3 (0.061%) SAP FI
8 3 (0.061%) SAP FI/CO
8 3 (0.061%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,647 (53.86%) Azure
2 1,706 (34.71%) AWS
3 1,465 (29.81%) Azure DevOps
4 918 (18.68%) GitHub
5 684 (13.92%) GCP
6 561 (11.41%) Serverless
7 508 (10.34%) GitHub Actions
8 412 (8.38%) Power Platform
9 298 (6.06%) AWS CloudFormation
10 272 (5.53%) AWS Lambda
11 268 (5.45%) Amazon S3
12 239 (4.86%) Azure Data Factory
13 220 (4.48%) Entra ID
14 216 (4.39%) Azure AKS
15 205 (4.17%) Amazon EKS
16 199 (4.05%) OpenShift
17 181 (3.68%) Azure Monitor
18 170 (3.46%) Dynamics 365
19 158 (3.21%) Amazon EC2
19 158 (3.21%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 214 (4.35%) Firewall
2 118 (2.40%) DNS
3 100 (2.03%) Network Security
4 91 (1.85%) VPN
5 43 (0.87%) TCP/IP
6 30 (0.61%) WAN
7 29 (0.59%) SD-WAN
8 28 (0.57%) HTTP
8 28 (0.57%) SSL
9 20 (0.41%) DHCP
10 19 (0.39%) SAN
11 18 (0.37%) BGP
12 16 (0.33%) MPLS
13 15 (0.31%) IPsec
14 13 (0.26%) Reverse Proxy
15 12 (0.24%) 5G
15 12 (0.24%) HTTPS
16 11 (0.22%) Internet
16 11 (0.22%) OpenVPN
17 10 (0.20%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 278 (5.66%) PostgreSQL
2 253 (5.15%) Power BI
3 230 (4.68%) SQL Server
4 196 (3.99%) NoSQL
5 170 (3.46%) Data Lake
6 148 (3.01%) Relational Database
7 130 (2.64%) Data Warehouse
8 118 (2.40%) Azure SQL Database
9 117 (2.38%) Amazon RDS
10 114 (2.32%) MongoDB
11 88 (1.79%) DynamoDB
12 86 (1.75%) Metadata
13 81 (1.65%) Delta Lake
14 74 (1.51%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.46%) Elasticsearch
16 66 (1.34%) Big Data
17 60 (1.22%) MySQL
18 56 (1.14%) Tableau
19 54 (1.10%) Amazon Athena
20 53 (1.08%) Redis
Development Applications
1 798 (16.24%) Jenkins
2 647 (13.16%) JIRA
3 646 (13.14%) Git
4 553 (11.25%) GitLab
5 138 (2.81%) Selenium
6 107 (2.18%) JUnit
7 95 (1.93%) Postman
8 82 (1.67%) Bitbucket
9 70 (1.42%) SonarQube
10 64 (1.30%) Cucumber
11 54 (1.10%) JMeter
12 53 (1.08%) Artifactory
12 53 (1.08%) Cypress.io
13 52 (1.06%) Maven
13 52 (1.06%) REST Assured
14 43 (0.87%) Sonatype Nexus
15 38 (0.77%) Visual Studio
16 37 (0.75%) Mockito
17 34 (0.69%) Oracle APEX
18 33 (0.67%) Liquibase
General
1 1,351 (27.49%) Social Skills
2 911 (18.54%) Finance
3 641 (13.04%) Public Sector
4 408 (8.30%) Analytical Skills
5 361 (7.34%) Banking
6 166 (3.38%) Documentation Skills
7 73 (1.49%) Influencing Skills
8 65 (1.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 64 (1.30%) Financial Institution
10 63 (1.28%) Retail
11 56 (1.14%) Marketing
12 52 (1.06%) Organisational Skills
13 50 (1.02%) Front Office
14 49 (1.00%) Legal
15 47 (0.96%) Investment Banking
16 44 (0.90%) Presentation Skills
17 42 (0.85%) Telecoms
18 29 (0.59%) Military
19 26 (0.53%) Pharmaceutical
20 25 (0.51%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 899 (18.29%) DevOps Engineer
2 781 (15.89%) Developer
3 682 (13.88%) Senior
4 541 (11.01%) Architect
5 414 (8.42%) Lead
6 311 (6.33%) Azure Engineer
7 295 (6.00%) Data Engineer
8 266 (5.41%) Analyst
9 247 (5.03%) AWS Engineer
10 190 (3.87%) AWS DevOps
11 181 (3.68%) Cloud Engineer
12 179 (3.64%) Platform Engineer
13 164 (3.34%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 156 (3.17%) Software Engineer
15 151 (3.07%) Solutions Architect
16 146 (2.97%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 145 (2.95%) Senior Developer
18 142 (2.89%) Senior DevOps
19 133 (2.71%) Senior DevOps Engineer
20 131 (2.67%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 535 (10.89%) REST
2 432 (8.79%) .NET
3 312 (6.35%) React
4 309 (6.29%) Node.js
5 283 (5.76%) Kafka
6 270 (5.49%) RESTful
7 269 (5.47%) Spring
8 253 (5.15%) Spring Boot
9 186 (3.78%) AngularJS
10 161 (3.28%) JSON
11 154 (3.13%) OAuth
12 146 (2.97%) YAML
13 144 (2.93%) PySpark
14 140 (2.85%) Playwright
15 130 (2.64%) HTML
16 125 (2.54%) Elastic Stack
17 121 (2.46%) SOAP
18 114 (2.32%) Middleware
19 108 (2.20%) CSS
20 105 (2.14%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 722 (14.69%) Cloud Native
2 296 (6.02%) Product Ownership
3 189 (3.85%) Distributed Systems
4 131 (2.67%) Public Cloud
5 124 (2.52%) Onboarding
6 102 (2.08%) Hybrid Cloud
7 99 (2.01%) Legacy Systems
8 88 (1.79%) Enterprise Software
9 71 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
10 64 (1.30%) Virtual Team
11 59 (1.20%) Management Information System
12 51 (1.04%) Data Centre
13 46 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
14 45 (0.92%) NHS
15 44 (0.90%) Private Cloud
16 43 (0.87%) Data Structures
16 43 (0.87%) Security Posture
17 42 (0.85%) AI Agents
18 38 (0.77%) Low-Code
19 36 (0.73%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 481 (9.79%) Linux
2 260 (5.29%) Windows
3 92 (1.87%) Unix
4 71 (1.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 47 (0.96%) VMS
6 46 (0.94%) Windows Server
7 23 (0.47%) Ubuntu
8 14 (0.28%) CentOS
9 10 (0.20%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.14%) Android
10 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
10 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
11 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 5 (0.10%) Solaris
12 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
13 3 (0.061%) Oracle Linux
13 3 (0.061%) Rocky
13 3 (0.061%) Windows Server 2008
13 3 (0.061%) zOS
14 2 (0.041%) Debian
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,801 (56.99%) CI/CD
2 1,889 (38.43%) Agile
3 1,255 (25.53%) Infrastructure as Code
4 883 (17.97%) Problem-Solving
5 873 (17.76%) Containerisation
6 746 (15.18%) Test Automation
7 739 (15.04%) Microservices
8 643 (13.08%) Continuous Improvement
9 615 (12.51%) Analytics
10 574 (11.68%) Migration
11 546 (11.11%) Observability
12 541 (11.01%) Scrum
13 524 (10.66%) AI
14 520 (10.58%) Stakeholder Management
15 448 (9.11%) Data Modelling
16 438 (8.91%) Software Engineering
17 389 (7.91%) Mentoring
18 387 (7.87%) Data Pipeline
19 371 (7.55%) Platform Engineering
20 352 (7.16%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 1,484 (30.19%) Python
2 1,034 (21.04%) SQL
3 636 (12.94%) Java
4 513 (10.44%) C#
5 433 (8.81%) JavaScript
6 379 (7.71%) PowerShell
7 351 (7.14%) Bash
8 305 (6.21%) TypeScript
9 160 (3.26%) Bicep
10 127 (2.58%) Go
11 83 (1.69%) PL/SQL
12 69 (1.40%) Scala
13 60 (1.22%) Shell Script
14 48 (0.98%) T-SQL
15 45 (0.92%) C++
15 45 (0.92%) Groovy
16 39 (0.79%) Ruby
17 33 (0.67%) Apex Code
18 28 (0.57%) Perl
19 25 (0.51%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,539 (31.31%) Security Cleared
2 1,262 (25.68%) SC Cleared
3 365 (7.43%) Degree
4 201 (4.09%) Azure Certification
5 179 (3.64%) Computer Science Degree
6 156 (3.17%) DV Cleared
7 143 (2.91%) AWS Certification
8 138 (2.81%) BPSS Clearance
9 88 (1.79%) CISSP
10 75 (1.53%) Master's Degree
11 64 (1.30%) CISM
12 63 (1.28%) ISTQB
13 57 (1.16%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 56 (1.14%) Microsoft Certification
15 48 (0.98%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.79%) PMP
17 36 (0.73%) Cisco Certification
18 31 (0.63%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 27 (0.55%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
20 24 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 430 (8.75%) QA
2 222 (4.52%) Data Quality
3 192 (3.91%) GDPR
4 160 (3.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 131 (2.67%) NIST
6 119 (2.42%) Accessibility
7 74 (1.51%) NCSC
8 41 (0.83%) PCI DSS
8 41 (0.83%) WCAG
9 39 (0.79%) PMO
10 31 (0.63%) SLA
11 29 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.45%) HIPAA
13 16 (0.33%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 15 (0.31%) ISO 20022
14 15 (0.31%) NIST 800
15 14 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.26%) PSD2
17 12 (0.24%) GRC
18 11 (0.22%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,090 (22.18%) Docker
2 181 (3.68%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.57%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.53%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.92%) vSphere
6 33 (0.67%) VMware NSX
7 16 (0.33%) Hyper-V
7 16 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
8 12 (0.24%) Squid
9 9 (0.18%) Lustre
9 9 (0.18%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 8 (0.16%) Firmware
10 8 (0.16%) Postfix
11 7 (0.14%) GPFS
11 7 (0.14%) Virtual Servers
11 7 (0.14%) VMware ESXi
12 6 (0.12%) Ceph
12 6 (0.12%) HDFS
12 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
13 5 (0.10%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,433 (29.16%) Terraform
2 1,339 (27.24%) Kubernetes
3 501 (10.19%) Ansible
4 342 (6.96%) Grafana
5 280 (5.70%) Prometheus
6 99 (2.01%) Argo
7 72 (1.46%) Puppet
7 72 (1.46%) Single Sign-On
8 60 (1.22%) Istio
9 33 (0.67%) Progress Chef
10 30 (0.61%) Packer
11 28 (0.57%) vCenter Server
12 25 (0.51%) Kibana
13 21 (0.43%) Active Directory Federation Services
13 21 (0.43%) HP ALM
14 19 (0.39%) Podman
14 19 (0.39%) Rancher
15 18 (0.37%) Microsoft Intune
16 17 (0.35%) FortiGate
17 16 (0.33%) Consul
Vendors
1 851 (17.31%) Microsoft
2 327 (6.65%) Oracle
3 292 (5.94%) Databricks
4 253 (5.15%) Google
5 201 (4.09%) Splunk
6 168 (3.42%) ServiceNow
7 144 (2.93%) Red Hat
8 131 (2.67%) Salesforce
9 129 (2.62%) VMware
10 109 (2.22%) SAP
11 84 (1.71%) OpenAI
12 74 (1.51%) Dynatrace
13 70 (1.42%) Atlassian
14 62 (1.26%) CyberArk
15 47 (0.96%) IBM
16 45 (0.92%) Talend
17 42 (0.85%) Cisco
18 38 (0.77%) Denodo
19 35 (0.71%) Foundry
20 34 (0.69%) Informatica