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

6 months to
11 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,467 3,266 3,941
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.25% 10.61% 8.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.93% 11.86% 10.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,126 2,260 2,848
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £428 £463 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £551 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.63% +0.18% -6.78%
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 34,545 27,534 38,814
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.04% 89.45% 87.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,908 16,837 25,471
10th Percentile £306 £306 £300
25th Percentile £408 £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 £717 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.50% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,083 848 2,117
10th Percentile £14.51 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.78 £21.03 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -2.99% +2.48%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.38 £60.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.08 £35.00
% change year-on-year -19.08% -11.20% +8.53%

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 11 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 11 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 11 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 +2 3,808 £525 -8.70% 1,269
UK excluding London +7 2,005 £500 -4.76% 1,026
London -3 1,906 £540 -10.00% 486
Work from Home -3 1,272 £525 -4.55% 749
North of England +5 689 £500 -3.61% 298
South East +2 416 £525 -8.70% 331
Midlands +20 386 £513 +2.55% 118
Yorkshire +1 359 £500 -2.20% 94
West Midlands +20 309 £525 +3.75% 87
North West +4 282 £471 -9.95% 172
South West +10 245 £525 -12.50% 142
Scotland +6 197 £450 - 59
East of England +16 112 £573 +8.79% 56
East Midlands +11 77 £425 -10.53% 32
North East -3 51 £475 -9.52% 36
Wales +9 36 £425 +72.44% 28
Northern Ireland -6 9 £475 +26.67% 12

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
1 269 (6.02%) Confluence
2 92 (2.06%) Apache Spark
3 90 (2.01%) SharePoint
4 89 (1.99%) Apache
5 59 (1.32%) Apache Airflow
6 58 (1.30%) SAS
7 37 (0.83%) OpenStack
8 35 (0.78%) 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 (0.22%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.22%) Mendix
16 8 (0.18%) Camunda
16 8 (0.18%) CICS
16 8 (0.18%) GeoServer
Applications
1 100 (2.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 42 (0.94%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.74%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 6 (0.13%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.090%) Trello
10 2 (0.045%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.022%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.48%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.25%) Endur
3 10 (0.22%) Maximo
3 10 (0.22%) Oracle ERP
3 10 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
4 9 (0.20%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 6 (0.13%) 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 (0.067%) Oracle Assets
9 3 (0.067%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.067%) Oracle Payables
9 3 (0.067%) Oracle Receivables
9 3 (0.067%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.067%) SAP FI/CO
9 3 (0.067%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,331 (52.18%) Azure
2 1,613 (36.11%) AWS
3 1,261 (28.23%) Azure DevOps
4 839 (18.78%) GitHub
5 667 (14.93%) GCP
6 536 (12.00%) Serverless
7 479 (10.72%) GitHub Actions
8 370 (8.28%) Power Platform
9 287 (6.42%) AWS CloudFormation
10 262 (5.87%) AWS Lambda
11 245 (5.48%) Amazon S3
12 222 (4.97%) Azure Data Factory
13 212 (4.75%) Azure AKS
14 202 (4.52%) Amazon EKS
15 186 (4.16%) OpenShift
16 176 (3.94%) Entra ID
17 174 (3.90%) Amazon ECS
18 172 (3.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 172 (3.85%) Dynamics 365
19 166 (3.72%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 202 (4.52%) Firewall
2 110 (2.46%) DNS
3 93 (2.08%) VPN
4 92 (2.06%) Network Security
5 52 (1.16%) TCP/IP
6 47 (1.05%) SSL
7 34 (0.76%) HTTP
7 34 (0.76%) HTTPS
8 22 (0.49%) WAN
9 18 (0.40%) DHCP
10 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
11 14 (0.31%) BGP
11 14 (0.31%) SD-WAN
12 13 (0.29%) MPLS
12 13 (0.29%) SAN
13 11 (0.25%) FTP
13 11 (0.25%) LAN
13 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
14 10 (0.22%) Internet
14 10 (0.22%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 263 (5.89%) PostgreSQL
2 237 (5.31%) Power BI
3 178 (3.98%) SQL Server
4 172 (3.85%) NoSQL
5 143 (3.20%) Data Lake
6 137 (3.07%) Amazon RDS
7 122 (2.73%) Relational Database
8 109 (2.44%) MongoDB
9 108 (2.42%) Data Warehouse
10 97 (2.17%) Azure SQL Database
11 78 (1.75%) Oracle Database
12 76 (1.70%) Elasticsearch
13 75 (1.68%) DynamoDB
14 70 (1.57%) MySQL
15 58 (1.30%) Metadata
16 55 (1.23%) Delta Lake
17 54 (1.21%) Redis
18 52 (1.16%) Tableau
19 51 (1.14%) Big Data
20 48 (1.07%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 784 (17.55%) Jenkins
2 592 (13.25%) JIRA
3 591 (13.23%) Git
4 587 (13.14%) GitLab
5 134 (3.00%) Selenium
6 96 (2.15%) JUnit
7 91 (2.04%) Postman
8 67 (1.50%) SonarQube
9 65 (1.46%) Bitbucket
9 65 (1.46%) Sonatype Nexus
10 63 (1.41%) Cucumber
11 61 (1.37%) Cypress.io
12 50 (1.12%) Artifactory
13 49 (1.10%) JMeter
13 49 (1.10%) Maven
14 45 (1.01%) REST Assured
15 42 (0.94%) Gradle
16 38 (0.85%) Oracle APEX
17 37 (0.83%) Liquibase
18 33 (0.74%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,338 (29.95%) Social Skills
2 803 (17.98%) Finance
3 571 (12.78%) Public Sector
4 373 (8.35%) Analytical Skills
5 341 (7.63%) Banking
6 155 (3.47%) Documentation Skills
7 80 (1.79%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.50%) Financial Institution
8 67 (1.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 65 (1.46%) Marketing
10 52 (1.16%) Retail
11 47 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
12 46 (1.03%) Front Office
13 44 (0.99%) Investment Banking
14 43 (0.96%) Telecoms
15 35 (0.78%) Military
15 35 (0.78%) Organisational Skills
16 32 (0.72%) Legal
17 30 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
18 27 (0.60%) Law
Job Titles
1 891 (19.95%) DevOps Engineer
2 774 (17.33%) Developer
3 608 (13.61%) Senior
4 448 (10.03%) Architect
5 343 (7.68%) Lead
6 270 (6.04%) Azure Engineer
7 256 (5.73%) AWS Engineer
8 234 (5.24%) Analyst
9 231 (5.17%) Data Engineer
10 200 (4.48%) AWS DevOps
11 177 (3.96%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 162 (3.63%) Cloud Engineer
13 157 (3.51%) Software Engineer
14 150 (3.36%) Platform Engineer
15 145 (3.25%) Senior Developer
16 135 (3.02%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 132 (2.96%) Solutions Architect
18 122 (2.73%) Business Analyst
18 122 (2.73%) Senior DevOps
19 116 (2.60%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 522 (11.69%) REST
2 398 (8.91%) .NET
3 305 (6.83%) React
4 301 (6.74%) Node.js
5 255 (5.71%) RESTful
6 254 (5.69%) Kafka
7 244 (5.46%) Spring
8 226 (5.06%) Spring Boot
9 174 (3.90%) JSON
10 161 (3.60%) OAuth
11 151 (3.38%) AngularJS
12 144 (3.22%) Elastic Stack
13 136 (3.04%) SOAP
14 129 (2.89%) HTML
14 129 (2.89%) XML
15 127 (2.84%) YAML
16 116 (2.60%) Playwright
17 110 (2.46%) CSS
17 110 (2.46%) PySpark
18 100 (2.24%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 653 (14.62%) Cloud Native
2 246 (5.51%) Product Ownership
3 167 (3.74%) Distributed Systems
4 126 (2.82%) Onboarding
5 121 (2.71%) Public Cloud
6 92 (2.06%) Legacy Systems
7 83 (1.86%) Hybrid Cloud
8 73 (1.63%) Enterprise Software
9 55 (1.23%) Virtual Team
10 54 (1.21%) Management Information System
11 52 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
12 49 (1.10%) Data Centre
13 48 (1.07%) NHS
13 48 (1.07%) Private Cloud
13 48 (1.07%) Security Posture
14 43 (0.96%) Mobile App
14 43 (0.96%) Replication
15 41 (0.92%) CMDB
16 39 (0.87%) Self-Motivation
17 37 (0.83%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 492 (11.01%) Linux
2 247 (5.53%) Windows
3 108 (2.42%) Unix
4 55 (1.23%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 49 (1.10%) Windows Server
6 45 (1.01%) 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 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.090%) Mac OS
17 3 (0.067%) zOS
18 2 (0.045%) Debian
19 1 (0.022%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,577 (57.69%) CI/CD
2 1,735 (38.84%) Agile
3 1,187 (26.57%) Infrastructure as Code
4 868 (19.43%) Problem-Solving
5 865 (19.36%) Containerisation
6 671 (15.02%) Microservices
7 667 (14.93%) Test Automation
8 535 (11.98%) Continuous Improvement
9 528 (11.82%) Analytics
10 511 (11.44%) Migration
11 482 (10.79%) Observability
12 480 (10.75%) Scrum
13 444 (9.94%) AI
14 425 (9.51%) Stakeholder Management
15 398 (8.91%) Software Engineering
16 357 (7.99%) Data Modelling
17 354 (7.92%) Mentoring
18 301 (6.74%) Platform Engineering
19 299 (6.69%) Data Pipeline
20 297 (6.65%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,373 (30.74%) Python
2 886 (19.83%) SQL
3 592 (13.25%) Java
4 440 (9.85%) C#
5 435 (9.74%) JavaScript
6 381 (8.53%) PowerShell
7 349 (7.81%) Bash
8 316 (7.07%) TypeScript
9 152 (3.40%) Bicep
10 146 (3.27%) Go
11 78 (1.75%) PL/SQL
12 65 (1.46%) Scala
13 58 (1.30%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.10%) Ruby
15 48 (1.07%) Groovy
16 44 (0.99%) C++
17 43 (0.96%) T-SQL
18 34 (0.76%) Perl
19 28 (0.63%) Rust
20 23 (0.51%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,366 (30.58%) Security Cleared
2 1,130 (25.30%) SC Cleared
3 378 (8.46%) Degree
4 193 (4.32%) Azure Certification
5 191 (4.28%) Computer Science Degree
6 145 (3.25%) DV Cleared
7 141 (3.16%) AWS Certification
8 111 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
9 89 (1.99%) Master's Degree
10 75 (1.68%) CISSP
11 69 (1.54%) Microsoft Certification
12 59 (1.32%) CISM
13 50 (1.12%) ISTQB
14 49 (1.10%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 39 (0.87%) PMI Certification
16 31 (0.69%) PMP
17 29 (0.65%) Cisco Certification
18 28 (0.63%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 23 (0.51%) IIBA
20 22 (0.49%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 389 (8.71%) QA
2 180 (4.03%) GDPR
3 160 (3.58%) Data Quality
4 142 (3.18%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.78%) Accessibility
6 123 (2.75%) NIST
7 71 (1.59%) NCSC
8 36 (0.81%) PCI DSS
9 34 (0.76%) WCAG
10 30 (0.67%) HIPAA
11 28 (0.63%) PMO
12 27 (0.60%) SLA
13 24 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 19 (0.43%) SOC 2
15 18 (0.40%) PSD2
16 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
17 14 (0.31%) SEPA
18 11 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
18 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
18 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,086 (24.31%) Docker
2 172 (3.85%) Active Directory
3 74 (1.66%) Virtual Machines
4 70 (1.57%) VMware Infrastructure
5 39 (0.87%) vSphere
6 26 (0.58%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.34%) 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 (0.13%) KVM
14 6 (0.13%) NFS
14 6 (0.13%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 6 (0.13%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,409 (31.54%) Terraform
2 1,315 (29.44%) Kubernetes
3 497 (11.13%) Ansible
4 339 (7.59%) Grafana
5 293 (6.56%) Prometheus
6 95 (2.13%) Argo
7 73 (1.63%) Puppet
8 66 (1.48%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (0.99%) Istio
10 38 (0.85%) Kibana
11 32 (0.72%) Packer
11 32 (0.72%) Progress Chef
12 22 (0.49%) Podman
13 20 (0.45%) vCenter Server
14 19 (0.43%) SCCM
15 18 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
16 17 (0.38%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 17 (0.38%) Rancher
17 16 (0.36%) Consul
18 15 (0.34%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 771 (17.26%) Microsoft
2 290 (6.49%) Oracle
3 266 (5.95%) Databricks
4 263 (5.89%) Google
5 220 (4.93%) Splunk
6 163 (3.65%) ServiceNow
7 130 (2.91%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.71%) VMware
9 114 (2.55%) Salesforce
10 103 (2.31%) SAP
11 78 (1.75%) OpenAI
12 63 (1.41%) Dynatrace
13 53 (1.19%) CyberArk
14 48 (1.07%) Atlassian
15 47 (1.05%) IBM
16 41 (0.92%) F5
17 39 (0.87%) Cisco
18 33 (0.74%) Palo Alto
19 30 (0.67%) MuleSoft
20 29 (0.65%) Talend