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 8 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
8 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,026 3,018 3,967
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.59% 10.37% 9.20%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.54% 11.40% 10.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,517 2,216 2,732
10th Percentile £381 £392 £400
25th Percentile £438 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £530 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.89% -3.64% -4.76%
75th Percentile £600 £650 £650
90th Percentile £701 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 108 19 105
10th Percentile £39.53 £34.05 £56.25
25th Percentile £55.94 £53.75 £61.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.82% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £78.55 £85.23 £77.50
90th Percentile £95.00 £88.50 £87.28
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -3.57% +7.69% -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 40,077 26,470 37,223
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.45% 90.96% 86.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,204 17,026 23,967
10th Percentile £321 £306 £300
25th Percentile £413 £411 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -0.95% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £638
90th Percentile £725 £745 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £488 £479 £500
% change year-on-year +1.77% -4.20% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,387 1,075 2,431
10th Percentile £14.96 £14.50 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.50 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.00 £28.75 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +46.09% -21.23% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.25 £60.38 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.00 £27.35 £37.50
% change year-on-year +60.88% -27.07% +7.14%

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 8 May 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 8 May 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 8 May 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 +3 4,295 £525 -4.55% 1,372
London +3 2,204 £540 -6.09% 553
UK excluding London +11 2,200 £500 - 994
Work from Home -3 1,351 £525 - 715
North of England +7 732 £500 -3.80% 285
South East +2 472 £505 -3.81% 309
Yorkshire +3 403 £500 -3.80% 74
Midlands +2 402 £488 -2.50% 109
West Midlands +6 307 £500 -4.03% 55
South West +16 287 £525 -7.08% 116
North West +1 272 £500 - 146
Scotland 0 175 £475 +0.42% 55
East of England +26 127 £525 +3.45% 88
East Midlands 0 92 £465 -0.80% 54
North East +7 68 £475 -13.64% 66
Wales +5 39 £425 +39.13% 33
Northern Ireland -2 10 £475 +13.77% 17
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
1 282 (5.61%) Confluence
2 131 (2.61%) Apache Spark
3 114 (2.27%) SharePoint
4 84 (1.67%) Apache
5 81 (1.61%) SAS
6 68 (1.35%) Apache Airflow
7 36 (0.72%) CMS
8 31 (0.62%) Microsoft Exchange
9 30 (0.60%) nginx
10 26 (0.52%) OpenStack
11 23 (0.46%) IIS
12 15 (0.30%) Mendix
13 10 (0.20%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 10 (0.20%) HCL Notes
13 10 (0.20%) WebSphere
14 9 (0.18%) Camunda
14 9 (0.18%) Jupyter
14 9 (0.18%) Sitecore CMS
15 8 (0.16%) ArcGIS
15 8 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 73 (1.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.23%) Microsoft Project
3 47 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 33 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 24 (0.48%) MS Visio
6 5 (0.099%) Chatbot
7 4 (0.080%) CPLEX
7 4 (0.080%) Trello
8 3 (0.060%) Weka
9 2 (0.040%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.040%) Spreadsheet
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
Business Applications
1 64 (1.27%) Dynamics CRM
2 25 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.28%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 9 (0.18%) Maximo
4 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
5 7 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 7 (0.14%) Remedy ITSM
6 6 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
7 5 (0.099%) Oracle EBS
7 5 (0.099%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.080%) Endur
8 4 (0.080%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.060%) Findur
9 3 (0.060%) Magento
9 3 (0.060%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.060%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.060%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.060%) SAP FI
9 3 (0.060%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,754 (54.80%) Azure
2 1,703 (33.88%) AWS
3 1,507 (29.98%) Azure DevOps
4 864 (17.19%) GitHub
5 653 (12.99%) GCP
6 507 (10.09%) GitHub Actions
7 504 (10.03%) Serverless
8 429 (8.54%) Power Platform
9 269 (5.35%) Amazon S3
10 267 (5.31%) AWS CloudFormation
11 253 (5.03%) AWS Lambda
12 232 (4.62%) Azure AKS
13 231 (4.60%) Entra ID
14 223 (4.44%) Azure Data Factory
15 199 (3.96%) Amazon EKS
16 175 (3.48%) OpenShift
17 174 (3.46%) Azure Monitor
18 165 (3.28%) PaaS
19 154 (3.06%) Dynamics 365
20 148 (2.94%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 211 (4.20%) Firewall
2 119 (2.37%) DNS
3 98 (1.95%) Network Security
4 90 (1.79%) VPN
5 39 (0.78%) TCP/IP
6 34 (0.68%) WAN
7 30 (0.60%) SD-WAN
8 29 (0.58%) HTTP
9 25 (0.50%) BGP
9 25 (0.50%) SSL
10 22 (0.44%) DHCP
11 21 (0.42%) SAN
12 19 (0.38%) IPsec
13 18 (0.36%) Wi-Fi
14 16 (0.32%) MPLS
14 16 (0.32%) OSPF
14 16 (0.32%) Reverse Proxy
15 14 (0.28%) LAN
16 11 (0.22%) Internet
16 11 (0.22%) OpenVPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 283 (5.63%) Power BI
2 251 (4.99%) SQL Server
3 245 (4.87%) PostgreSQL
4 180 (3.58%) NoSQL
5 172 (3.42%) Data Lake
6 151 (3.00%) Relational Database
7 138 (2.75%) Data Warehouse
8 118 (2.35%) Azure SQL Database
9 115 (2.29%) MongoDB
10 108 (2.15%) Amazon RDS
11 96 (1.91%) DynamoDB
12 93 (1.85%) Metadata
13 90 (1.79%) Delta Lake
14 75 (1.49%) Big Data
15 71 (1.41%) Oracle Database
16 70 (1.39%) Elasticsearch
17 62 (1.23%) Amazon Athena
18 55 (1.09%) Redis
19 51 (1.01%) BigQuery
20 49 (0.97%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 728 (14.48%) Jenkins
2 643 (12.79%) Git
3 608 (12.10%) JIRA
4 507 (10.09%) GitLab
5 101 (2.01%) Selenium
6 96 (1.91%) Postman
7 82 (1.63%) SonarQube
8 81 (1.61%) JUnit
9 72 (1.43%) Bitbucket
10 60 (1.19%) Maven
11 52 (1.03%) JMeter
12 50 (0.99%) Artifactory
12 50 (0.99%) REST Assured
13 49 (0.97%) Cucumber
14 48 (0.96%) Cypress.io
15 37 (0.74%) Gatling
16 36 (0.72%) Mockito
17 32 (0.64%) Sonatype Nexus
18 31 (0.62%) Gradle
19 28 (0.56%) NUnit
General
1 1,265 (25.17%) Social Skills
2 918 (18.27%) Finance
3 633 (12.59%) Public Sector
4 408 (8.12%) Analytical Skills
5 322 (6.41%) Banking
6 149 (2.96%) Documentation Skills
7 73 (1.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 67 (1.33%) Influencing Skills
9 61 (1.21%) Legal
10 60 (1.19%) Retail
11 54 (1.07%) Financial Institution
11 54 (1.07%) Marketing
12 50 (0.99%) Organisational Skills
13 44 (0.88%) Front Office
14 42 (0.84%) Presentation Skills
15 38 (0.76%) Investment Banking
16 35 (0.70%) Military
16 35 (0.70%) Telecoms
17 24 (0.48%) Law
17 24 (0.48%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,018 (20.25%) DevOps Engineer
2 753 (14.98%) Developer
3 709 (14.11%) Senior
4 576 (11.46%) Architect
5 408 (8.12%) Lead
6 343 (6.82%) Azure Engineer
7 311 (6.19%) Data Engineer
8 299 (5.95%) Analyst
9 236 (4.70%) AWS Engineer
10 180 (3.58%) Cloud Engineer
11 178 (3.54%) AWS DevOps
12 176 (3.50%) Platform Engineer
13 172 (3.42%) Solutions Architect
14 169 (3.36%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 163 (3.24%) AWS DevOps Engineer
16 158 (3.14%) Senior DevOps
17 150 (2.98%) Software Engineer
18 147 (2.92%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 146 (2.90%) Business Analyst
20 139 (2.77%) Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 455 (9.05%) REST
2 453 (9.01%) .NET
3 299 (5.95%) React
4 282 (5.61%) Kafka
5 280 (5.57%) Spring
6 276 (5.49%) Node.js
7 266 (5.29%) Spring Boot
8 254 (5.05%) RESTful
9 181 (3.60%) AngularJS
10 152 (3.02%) PySpark
11 150 (2.98%) OAuth
12 149 (2.96%) Playwright
13 140 (2.79%) JSON
14 133 (2.65%) YAML
15 118 (2.35%) Middleware
16 115 (2.29%) HTML
17 108 (2.15%) SOAP
18 102 (2.03%) .NET Framework
19 101 (2.01%) CSS
20 99 (1.97%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 812 (16.16%) Cloud Native
2 319 (6.35%) Product Ownership
3 191 (3.80%) Distributed Systems
4 135 (2.69%) Onboarding
5 108 (2.15%) Legacy Systems
6 105 (2.09%) Public Cloud
7 99 (1.97%) Enterprise Software
8 91 (1.81%) Hybrid Cloud
9 81 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
10 59 (1.17%) Data Centre
11 56 (1.11%) Management Information System
12 49 (0.97%) Self-Motivation
12 49 (0.97%) Virtual Team
13 48 (0.96%) Private Cloud
14 43 (0.86%) Data Structures
15 42 (0.84%) Replication
16 41 (0.82%) Greenfield Project
16 41 (0.82%) Low-Code
16 41 (0.82%) NHS
17 40 (0.80%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 444 (8.83%) Linux
2 255 (5.07%) Windows
3 79 (1.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 79 (1.57%) Unix
4 46 (0.92%) Windows Server
5 42 (0.84%) VMS
6 22 (0.44%) Ubuntu
7 16 (0.32%) Apple iOS
8 14 (0.28%) Android
9 11 (0.22%) CentOS
10 10 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
11 8 (0.16%) Windows 10
12 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.12%) Solaris
14 5 (0.099%) Windows Server 2012
15 4 (0.080%) Amazon Linux
15 4 (0.080%) Mac OS
15 4 (0.080%) Windows Server 2008
16 3 (0.060%) Oracle Linux
16 3 (0.060%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,869 (57.08%) CI/CD
2 1,856 (36.93%) Agile
3 1,278 (25.43%) Infrastructure as Code
4 848 (16.87%) Containerisation
5 799 (15.90%) Problem-Solving
6 734 (14.60%) Microservices
7 718 (14.29%) Test Automation
8 657 (13.07%) Continuous Improvement
9 607 (12.08%) Migration
10 589 (11.72%) Observability
11 584 (11.62%) Analytics
12 537 (10.68%) Stakeholder Management
13 530 (10.55%) Scrum
14 510 (10.15%) AI
15 475 (9.45%) Data Modelling
15 475 (9.45%) Software Engineering
16 435 (8.65%) Platform Engineering
17 391 (7.78%) Data Pipeline
18 388 (7.72%) Mentoring
19 387 (7.70%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,390 (27.66%) Python
2 1,011 (20.12%) SQL
3 658 (13.09%) Java
4 504 (10.03%) C#
5 384 (7.64%) JavaScript
6 352 (7.00%) PowerShell
7 333 (6.63%) Bash
8 289 (5.75%) TypeScript
9 170 (3.38%) Bicep
10 110 (2.19%) Go
11 70 (1.39%) Scala
12 64 (1.27%) PL/SQL
13 63 (1.25%) Shell Script
14 46 (0.92%) Groovy
15 45 (0.90%) T-SQL
16 42 (0.84%) Apex Code
17 39 (0.78%) C++
18 31 (0.62%) Ruby
19 26 (0.52%) Perl
20 25 (0.50%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,600 (31.83%) Security Cleared
2 1,337 (26.60%) SC Cleared
3 319 (6.35%) Degree
4 211 (4.20%) Azure Certification
5 154 (3.06%) BPSS Clearance
6 150 (2.98%) Computer Science Degree
7 149 (2.96%) DV Cleared
8 139 (2.77%) AWS Certification
9 76 (1.51%) CISSP
10 59 (1.17%) Microsoft Certification
11 54 (1.07%) ISTQB
11 54 (1.07%) Master's Degree
12 53 (1.05%) CISM
13 49 (0.97%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 45 (0.90%) PMI Certification
15 40 (0.80%) Cisco Certification
15 40 (0.80%) PMP
16 30 (0.60%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 27 (0.54%) TOGAF Certification
18 22 (0.44%) Oracle Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 448 (8.91%) QA
2 242 (4.81%) Data Quality
3 185 (3.68%) GDPR
4 135 (2.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 129 (2.57%) Accessibility
6 125 (2.49%) NIST
7 65 (1.29%) NCSC
8 46 (0.92%) WCAG
9 44 (0.88%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.70%) PMO
11 33 (0.66%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 33 (0.66%) SLA
12 19 (0.38%) GRC
13 17 (0.34%) HIPAA
14 15 (0.30%) ISO 20022
14 15 (0.30%) NIST 800
15 14 (0.28%) PSD2
16 12 (0.24%) SEPA
16 12 (0.24%) SOC 2
17 10 (0.20%) HL7
System Software
1 988 (19.66%) Docker
2 177 (3.52%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.55%) Virtual Machines
4 70 (1.39%) VMware Infrastructure
5 32 (0.64%) vSphere
6 27 (0.54%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.26%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.26%) Squid
9 12 (0.24%) Postfix
10 10 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
11 8 (0.16%) Firmware
11 8 (0.16%) HDFS
12 6 (0.12%) Corosync
12 6 (0.12%) Lustre
12 6 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.12%) Slurm Workload Manager
13 5 (0.099%) Ceph
13 5 (0.099%) NFS
13 5 (0.099%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,429 (28.43%) Terraform
2 1,318 (26.22%) Kubernetes
3 482 (9.59%) Ansible
4 343 (6.82%) Grafana
5 285 (5.67%) Prometheus
6 99 (1.97%) Argo
7 71 (1.41%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.37%) Puppet
9 63 (1.25%) Istio
10 28 (0.56%) Progress Chef
11 26 (0.52%) Microsoft Intune
11 26 (0.52%) Packer
12 24 (0.48%) Kibana
13 22 (0.44%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.42%) HP ALM
15 20 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 17 (0.34%) Rancher
17 14 (0.28%) Consul
17 14 (0.28%) FortiGate
17 14 (0.28%) SCCM
Vendors
1 880 (17.51%) Microsoft
2 294 (5.85%) Oracle
3 283 (5.63%) Databricks
4 236 (4.70%) Google
5 196 (3.90%) Splunk
6 175 (3.48%) ServiceNow
7 148 (2.94%) Salesforce
8 139 (2.77%) Red Hat
9 116 (2.31%) SAP
9 116 (2.31%) VMware
10 99 (1.97%) Dynatrace
11 72 (1.43%) OpenAI
12 60 (1.19%) CyberArk
13 50 (0.99%) Atlassian
14 43 (0.86%) IBM
14 43 (0.86%) Informatica
15 39 (0.78%) AppDynamics
15 39 (0.78%) Cisco
16 36 (0.72%) Denodo
16 36 (0.72%) Foundry