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 27 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,631 3,573 3,831
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.49% 10.91% 9.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.40% 12.06% 11.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,904 2,522 2,612
10th Percentile £385 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £461
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.01% -5.50% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £713 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 123 27 80
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.10 £56.23
25th Percentile £55.25 £51.88 £64.15
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £85.23 £74.00
90th Percentile £93.50 £95.00 £85.03
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.22 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.81% -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 45,399 29,629 33,143
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.55% 90.46% 85.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,782 18,436 20,950
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% -3.67%
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 2,881 1,773 1,687
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £13.86
25th Percentile £17.87 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +6.25%

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 27 August 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 27 August 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 27 August 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 4,814 £525 - 3,661
London 0 2,538 £550 - 2,103
UK excluding London 0 2,418 £500 - 1,951
Work from Home +1 1,617 £525 +1.35% 1,644
North of England 0 804 £500 +5.26% 534
South East -10 463 £525 +5.00% 489
Midlands 0 451 £488 -2.50% 252
Yorkshire -1 395 £500 +2.04% 146
West Midlands -2 358 £490 -5.50% 150
North West -2 316 £521 +10.87% 290
South West +6 311 £543 +4.33% 286
Scotland -2 206 £498 +4.74% 139
East of England +11 141 £505 -3.81% 144
North East +17 110 £425 -18.27% 103
East Midlands +7 89 £459 +0.55% 102
Wales -4 51 £500 +33.33% 48
Northern Ireland +14 21 £450 +2.27% 72
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 (6.06%) Confluence
2 153 (2.72%) SharePoint
3 125 (2.22%) Apache Airflow
3 125 (2.22%) Apache Spark
4 112 (1.99%) Apache
5 64 (1.14%) SAS
6 42 (0.75%) CMS
7 38 (0.67%) IIS
7 38 (0.67%) Jupyter
8 25 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
8 25 (0.44%) nginx
9 17 (0.30%) Camunda
10 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
11 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
11 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
13 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
14 9 (0.16%) Appian
15 7 (0.12%) JBoss
15 7 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 63 (1.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.80%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Office
5 31 (0.55%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 6 (0.11%) Trello
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
9 4 (0.071%) Windchill
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 74 (1.31%) Dynamics CRM
2 38 (0.67%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
9 4 (0.071%) Maximo
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.053%) Shopify
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,100 (55.05%) Azure
2 1,996 (35.45%) AWS
3 1,794 (31.86%) Azure DevOps
4 975 (17.31%) GitHub
5 712 (12.64%) GCP
6 610 (10.83%) GitHub Actions
7 486 (8.63%) Power Platform
8 452 (8.03%) Serverless
9 288 (5.11%) Amazon S3
10 273 (4.85%) AWS Lambda
11 261 (4.64%) Entra ID
12 237 (4.21%) Amazon EKS
12 237 (4.21%) AWS CloudFormation
13 225 (4.00%) Azure AKS
14 221 (3.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 216 (3.84%) Azure Monitor
16 199 (3.53%) Azure Data Factory
17 180 (3.20%) Dynamics 365
18 177 (3.14%) Amazon EC2
19 166 (2.95%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 244 (4.33%) Firewall
2 170 (3.02%) DNS
3 121 (2.15%) VPN
4 112 (1.99%) Network Security
5 66 (1.17%) TCP/IP
6 53 (0.94%) WAN
7 47 (0.83%) SSL
8 45 (0.80%) DHCP
9 38 (0.67%) HTTP
9 38 (0.67%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.60%) BGP
11 32 (0.57%) Internet
12 29 (0.52%) SSH
12 29 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.44%) OSPF
14 22 (0.39%) SAN
15 21 (0.37%) VLAN
16 18 (0.32%) LAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 323 (5.74%) Power BI
2 301 (5.35%) SQL Server
3 297 (5.27%) PostgreSQL
4 207 (3.68%) Data Warehouse
5 191 (3.39%) NoSQL
6 181 (3.21%) MongoDB
7 179 (3.18%) Relational Database
8 163 (2.89%) Data Lake
9 131 (2.33%) Amazon RDS
10 124 (2.20%) Metadata
11 113 (2.01%) Azure SQL Database
12 90 (1.60%) DynamoDB
13 84 (1.49%) Delta Lake
14 83 (1.47%) Oracle Database
15 80 (1.42%) Redis
16 74 (1.31%) MySQL
17 68 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
18 59 (1.05%) Big Data
18 59 (1.05%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 52 (0.92%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 796 (14.14%) Jenkins
2 790 (14.03%) Git
3 683 (12.13%) JIRA
4 608 (10.80%) GitLab
5 141 (2.50%) Selenium
6 102 (1.81%) Postman
7 95 (1.69%) SonarQube
8 93 (1.65%) JUnit
9 89 (1.58%) Maven
10 83 (1.47%) Bitbucket
11 72 (1.28%) JMeter
11 72 (1.28%) REST Assured
12 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
13 62 (1.10%) Gradle
14 58 (1.03%) Cucumber
15 50 (0.89%) Gatling
16 44 (0.78%) Claude Code
16 44 (0.78%) LoadRunner
16 44 (0.78%) Mockito
17 40 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,456 (25.86%) Social Skills
2 1,000 (17.76%) Finance
3 823 (14.62%) Public Sector
4 511 (9.07%) Analytical Skills
5 367 (6.52%) Banking
6 157 (2.79%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 104 (1.85%) Retail
8 95 (1.69%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.30%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.19%) Legal
11 65 (1.15%) Organisational Skills
12 54 (0.96%) Marketing
13 50 (0.89%) Investment Banking
13 50 (0.89%) Telecoms
14 48 (0.85%) Aerospace
14 48 (0.85%) Military
15 46 (0.82%) Law
16 42 (0.75%) Front Office
17 41 (0.73%) Financial Institution
18 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,113 (19.77%) DevOps Engineer
2 926 (16.44%) Developer
3 839 (14.90%) Senior
4 634 (11.26%) Architect
5 538 (9.55%) Lead
6 354 (6.29%) Azure Engineer
7 309 (5.49%) Data Engineer
8 277 (4.92%) Analyst
9 258 (4.58%) AWS Engineer
10 233 (4.14%) Platform Engineer
11 203 (3.61%) Cloud Engineer
12 201 (3.57%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 200 (3.55%) Senior DevOps
14 190 (3.37%) Java Developer
15 185 (3.29%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 180 (3.20%) AWS DevOps
17 176 (3.13%) Solutions Architect
18 167 (2.97%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 156 (2.77%) Senior Developer
20 145 (2.58%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,654 (29.37%) Terraform
2 594 (10.55%) REST
3 488 (8.67%) .NET
4 372 (6.61%) Kafka
5 343 (6.09%) RESTful
6 304 (5.40%) Spring
7 293 (5.20%) React
8 290 (5.15%) Spring Boot
9 213 (3.78%) Node.js
10 185 (3.29%) JSON
11 171 (3.04%) OAuth
12 169 (3.00%) Playwright
13 157 (2.79%) PySpark
14 138 (2.45%) .NET Framework
15 136 (2.42%) SOAP
16 134 (2.38%) HTML
17 131 (2.33%) AngularJS
18 122 (2.17%) CSS
18 122 (2.17%) OAuth2
19 120 (2.13%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,018 (18.08%) Cloud Native
2 426 (7.57%) Product Ownership
3 264 (4.69%) Distributed Systems
4 190 (3.37%) Enterprise Software
5 184 (3.27%) Onboarding
6 155 (2.75%) Legacy Systems
7 148 (2.63%) Hybrid Cloud
8 94 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
9 86 (1.53%) AI Agents
10 84 (1.49%) Self-Motivation
11 77 (1.37%) Management Information System
12 75 (1.33%) Data Structures
13 74 (1.31%) Public Cloud
14 71 (1.26%) Data Centre
15 69 (1.23%) Replication
16 64 (1.14%) Security Posture
17 56 (0.99%) Enterprise Cloud
17 56 (0.99%) Virtual Team
18 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
19 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 519 (9.22%) Linux
2 305 (5.42%) Windows
3 110 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 97 (1.72%) Unix
5 89 (1.58%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) VMS
7 33 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) 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 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,347 (59.44%) CI/CD
2 2,280 (40.49%) Agile
3 1,597 (28.36%) Infrastructure as Code
4 941 (16.71%) Continuous Improvement
5 930 (16.52%) Containerisation
6 879 (15.61%) Test Automation
7 878 (15.59%) Problem-Solving
8 869 (15.43%) Stakeholder Management
9 830 (14.74%) Microservices
10 789 (14.01%) AI
11 743 (13.19%) Observability
12 731 (12.98%) Platform Engineering
13 694 (12.32%) Software Engineering
14 684 (12.15%) Migration
15 675 (11.99%) Scrum
16 588 (10.44%) Analytics
17 578 (10.26%) Technical Leadership
18 531 (9.43%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 478 (8.49%) Data Modelling
20 477 (8.47%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,595 (28.33%) Python
2 1,025 (18.20%) SQL
3 809 (14.37%) Java
4 500 (8.88%) C#
5 484 (8.60%) PowerShell
6 473 (8.40%) Bash
7 455 (8.08%) JavaScript
8 307 (5.45%) TypeScript
9 253 (4.49%) Bicep
10 100 (1.78%) Go
11 76 (1.35%) Shell Script
12 71 (1.26%) Apex Code
13 68 (1.21%) T-SQL
14 64 (1.14%) Scala
15 62 (1.10%) Groovy
16 61 (1.08%) PL/SQL
17 34 (0.60%) Perl
18 33 (0.59%) C++
19 32 (0.57%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 25 (0.44%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,806 (32.07%) Security Cleared
2 1,520 (26.99%) SC Cleared
3 334 (5.93%) Degree
4 230 (4.08%) Azure Certification
5 224 (3.98%) BPSS Clearance
6 205 (3.64%) DV Cleared
7 184 (3.27%) AWS Certification
8 131 (2.33%) Computer Science Degree
9 97 (1.72%) Microsoft Certification
10 72 (1.28%) CISSP
11 65 (1.15%) ISTQB
12 56 (0.99%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 52 (0.92%) Cisco Certification
14 43 (0.76%) PMP
15 42 (0.75%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.53%) CISM
18 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 25 (0.44%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
20 23 (0.41%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 528 (9.38%) QA
2 282 (5.01%) Data Quality
3 203 (3.61%) Accessibility
4 133 (2.36%) GDPR
5 99 (1.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 81 (1.44%) WCAG
7 79 (1.40%) NIST
8 53 (0.94%) PMO
9 51 (0.91%) NCSC
10 40 (0.71%) SLA
11 34 (0.60%) PCI DSS
12 30 (0.53%) GRC
13 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 16 (0.28%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
15 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
16 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
16 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
16 10 (0.18%) HL7
16 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,135 (20.16%) Docker
2 173 (3.07%) Active Directory
3 91 (1.62%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.48%) Hyper-V
5 27 (0.48%) vSphere
6 21 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 12 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
11 11 (0.20%) IAG
12 9 (0.16%) Postfix
13 8 (0.14%) KVM
14 7 (0.12%) zsh
15 6 (0.11%) Corosync
15 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
16 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
16 5 (0.089%) Ceph
16 5 (0.089%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,504 (26.71%) Kubernetes
2 531 (9.43%) Ansible
3 368 (6.54%) Grafana
4 312 (5.54%) Prometheus
5 85 (1.51%) Argo
6 61 (1.08%) Puppet
7 54 (0.96%) Single Sign-On
8 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Microsoft Intune
10 39 (0.69%) Istio
11 35 (0.62%) Packer
12 25 (0.44%) Kibana
13 20 (0.36%) Kustomize
13 20 (0.36%) SCCM
13 20 (0.36%) vCenter Server
14 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
14 16 (0.28%) Kubeflow
15 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
16 13 (0.23%) Control-M
16 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,101 (19.55%) Microsoft
2 305 (5.42%) Oracle
3 287 (5.10%) Databricks
4 266 (4.72%) Google
5 205 (3.64%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.30%) Salesforce
7 184 (3.27%) Splunk
8 145 (2.58%) Dynatrace
9 127 (2.26%) VMware
10 115 (2.04%) SAP
11 103 (1.83%) Red Hat
12 66 (1.17%) IBM
13 61 (1.08%) Informatica
13 61 (1.08%) MuleSoft
14 60 (1.07%) OpenAI
15 51 (0.91%) Cisco
16 47 (0.83%) Atlassian
17 46 (0.82%) AppDynamics
18 45 (0.80%) Foundry
19 36 (0.64%) CyberArk