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 14 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 15
Rank change year-on-year 0 +1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,589 3,633 3,825
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.33% 11.11% 9.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.23% 12.28% 11.63%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,896 2,534 2,577
10th Percentile £381 £363 £384
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £619 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £735
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 118 25 71
10th Percentile £37.25 £38.00 £57.50
25th Percentile £55.69 £52.50 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £92.88 £95.00 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.11 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.65% -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 45,698 29,594 32,877
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.42% 90.53% 85.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,784 18,388 20,318
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £726 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,048 1,782 1,485
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.23 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.44 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £67.50 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £66.95 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.00 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +82.22% -47.67% +7.50%

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 14 September 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 14 September 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 14 September 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 0 4,756 £525 - 4,835
London 0 2,517 £550 - 2,602
UK excluding London -4 2,388 £500 - 2,610
Work from Home 0 1,603 £525 +1.45% 3,562
North of England -2 780 £500 +5.26% 774
South East -12 451 £525 +5.00% 577
Midlands -5 440 £488 -4.88% 299
Yorkshire -2 390 £500 +3.09% 207
West Midlands -7 346 £500 -4.76% 184
South West +6 315 £550 +4.76% 329
North West -6 299 £525 +13.51% 443
Scotland -4 220 £479 +0.79% 254
East of England +2 142 £505 -3.35% 234
North East +16 106 £425 -18.27% 130
East Midlands 0 91 £463 +10.12% 115
Wales -6 46 £500 +33.33% 66
Northern Ireland +22 23 £450 -4.26% 88
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
1 337 (6.03%) Confluence
2 158 (2.83%) SharePoint
3 128 (2.29%) Apache Airflow
4 122 (2.18%) Apache Spark
5 108 (1.93%) Apache
6 61 (1.09%) SAS
7 42 (0.75%) CMS
8 40 (0.72%) Jupyter
9 29 (0.52%) IIS
10 28 (0.50%) nginx
11 19 (0.34%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
13 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
13 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
13 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 10 (0.18%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 9 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 67 (1.20%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.02%) Microsoft Project
3 47 (0.84%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.13%) Trello
9 5 (0.089%) Notion
9 5 (0.089%) Windchill
10 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.036%) Mingle
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
11 1 (0.018%) Sketch
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 78 (1.40%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.18%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS R12
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.089%) Aladdin
8 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
9 4 (0.072%) Endur
9 4 (0.072%) Oracle ERP
10 3 (0.054%) Infor LN
10 3 (0.054%) Maximo
10 3 (0.054%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.054%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.054%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,034 (54.29%) Azure
2 2,007 (35.91%) AWS
3 1,739 (31.11%) Azure DevOps
4 975 (17.44%) GitHub
5 728 (13.03%) GCP
6 619 (11.08%) GitHub Actions
7 485 (8.68%) Power Platform
8 461 (8.25%) Serverless
9 306 (5.48%) Amazon S3
10 289 (5.17%) AWS Lambda
11 249 (4.46%) Entra ID
12 244 (4.37%) Amazon EKS
13 240 (4.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 237 (4.24%) AWS CloudFormation
15 216 (3.86%) Azure AKS
16 204 (3.65%) Azure Monitor
17 194 (3.47%) Azure Data Factory
18 193 (3.45%) Amazon EC2
19 181 (3.24%) Dynamics 365
20 165 (2.95%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 239 (4.28%) Firewall
2 172 (3.08%) DNS
3 118 (2.11%) VPN
4 111 (1.99%) Network Security
5 67 (1.20%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.93%) SSL
7 49 (0.88%) DHCP
8 47 (0.84%) WAN
9 34 (0.61%) HTTP
10 31 (0.55%) SD-WAN
11 30 (0.54%) BGP
12 28 (0.50%) Internet
12 28 (0.50%) SSH
13 25 (0.45%) Wi-Fi
14 21 (0.38%) OSPF
15 19 (0.34%) SAN
15 19 (0.34%) VLAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
16 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 319 (5.71%) Power BI
2 301 (5.39%) PostgreSQL
3 299 (5.35%) SQL Server
4 212 (3.79%) Data Warehouse
5 185 (3.31%) MongoDB
6 184 (3.29%) NoSQL
7 180 (3.22%) Relational Database
8 172 (3.08%) Data Lake
9 141 (2.52%) Amazon RDS
10 124 (2.22%) Metadata
11 103 (1.84%) Azure SQL Database
12 93 (1.66%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.57%) Delta Lake
14 87 (1.56%) Oracle Database
15 86 (1.54%) MySQL
16 80 (1.43%) Redis
17 69 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
18 61 (1.09%) Big Data
18 61 (1.09%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 54 (0.97%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 809 (14.47%) Git
2 803 (14.37%) Jenkins
3 668 (11.95%) JIRA
4 636 (11.38%) GitLab
5 133 (2.38%) Selenium
6 101 (1.81%) SonarQube
7 97 (1.74%) Maven
8 94 (1.68%) JUnit
9 92 (1.65%) Postman
10 76 (1.36%) Bitbucket
11 71 (1.27%) REST Assured
12 69 (1.23%) Cypress.io
13 68 (1.22%) Gradle
14 63 (1.13%) JMeter
15 61 (1.09%) Cucumber
16 50 (0.89%) Claude Code
17 47 (0.84%) Mockito
18 45 (0.81%) Gatling
19 43 (0.77%) Sonatype Nexus
20 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
General
1 1,459 (26.10%) Social Skills
2 992 (17.75%) Finance
3 804 (14.39%) Public Sector
4 518 (9.27%) Analytical Skills
5 378 (6.76%) Banking
6 167 (2.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 106 (1.90%) Retail
8 86 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
9 81 (1.45%) Influencing Skills
10 64 (1.15%) Legal
10 64 (1.15%) Organisational Skills
11 54 (0.97%) Marketing
12 53 (0.95%) Military
13 51 (0.91%) Aerospace
13 51 (0.91%) Investment Banking
14 48 (0.86%) Telecoms
15 45 (0.81%) Law
16 44 (0.79%) Front Office
17 42 (0.75%) Manufacturing
18 39 (0.70%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,130 (20.22%) DevOps Engineer
2 917 (16.41%) Developer
3 851 (15.23%) Senior
4 631 (11.29%) Architect
5 531 (9.50%) Lead
6 348 (6.23%) Azure Engineer
7 309 (5.53%) Data Engineer
8 269 (4.81%) Analyst
9 257 (4.60%) AWS Engineer
10 233 (4.17%) Platform Engineer
11 208 (3.72%) Azure DevOps Engineer
12 207 (3.70%) Cloud Engineer
13 198 (3.54%) Java Developer
14 197 (3.52%) Senior DevOps
15 184 (3.29%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 178 (3.18%) AWS DevOps
17 177 (3.17%) Solutions Architect
18 166 (2.97%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 161 (2.88%) Senior Developer
20 140 (2.50%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,663 (29.75%) Terraform
2 602 (10.77%) REST
3 472 (8.45%) .NET
4 387 (6.92%) Kafka
5 355 (6.35%) RESTful
6 304 (5.44%) Spring
7 298 (5.33%) Spring Boot
8 290 (5.19%) React
9 197 (3.52%) Node.js
10 184 (3.29%) JSON
11 170 (3.04%) OAuth
12 164 (2.93%) Playwright
13 157 (2.81%) PySpark
14 142 (2.54%) HTML
15 130 (2.33%) CSS
16 125 (2.24%) .NET Framework
17 124 (2.22%) SOAP
18 121 (2.16%) OAuth2
19 120 (2.15%) AngularJS
20 112 (2.00%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,019 (18.23%) Cloud Native
2 434 (7.77%) Product Ownership
3 270 (4.83%) Distributed Systems
4 203 (3.63%) Enterprise Software
5 188 (3.36%) Onboarding
6 150 (2.68%) Hybrid Cloud
7 142 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
8 96 (1.72%) AI Agents
9 88 (1.57%) Management Information System
10 84 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
11 77 (1.38%) Public Cloud
12 76 (1.36%) Replication
13 75 (1.34%) Self-Motivation
14 73 (1.31%) Data Structures
15 71 (1.27%) Security Posture
16 69 (1.23%) Data Centre
17 62 (1.11%) Virtual Team
18 57 (1.02%) Enterprise Cloud
19 55 (0.98%) PKI
20 53 (0.95%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 544 (9.73%) Linux
2 308 (5.51%) Windows
3 116 (2.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 111 (1.99%) Unix
5 93 (1.66%) Windows Server
6 34 (0.61%) Ubuntu
6 34 (0.61%) VMS
7 32 (0.57%) Apple iOS
8 22 (0.39%) Android
9 11 (0.20%) CentOS
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
10 10 (0.18%) zOS
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.13%) AIX
14 5 (0.089%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.072%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.072%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,375 (60.39%) CI/CD
2 2,282 (40.83%) Agile
3 1,640 (29.34%) Infrastructure as Code
4 956 (17.11%) Continuous Improvement
5 944 (16.89%) Containerisation
6 915 (16.37%) Stakeholder Management
7 891 (15.94%) Problem-Solving
8 881 (15.76%) Test Automation
9 832 (14.89%) AI
10 828 (14.81%) Microservices
11 755 (13.51%) Platform Engineering
12 753 (13.47%) Observability
13 726 (12.99%) Software Engineering
14 681 (12.18%) Scrum
15 663 (11.86%) Migration
16 599 (10.72%) Technical Leadership
17 576 (10.31%) Analytics
18 532 (9.52%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 486 (8.70%) Roadmaps
20 481 (8.61%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,604 (28.70%) Python
2 997 (17.84%) SQL
3 818 (14.64%) Java
4 495 (8.86%) Bash
5 493 (8.82%) PowerShell
6 484 (8.66%) C#
7 457 (8.18%) JavaScript
8 309 (5.53%) TypeScript
9 253 (4.53%) Bicep
10 110 (1.97%) Go
11 78 (1.40%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.23%) T-SQL
13 66 (1.18%) Apex Code
14 64 (1.15%) Scala
15 63 (1.13%) Groovy
16 60 (1.07%) PL/SQL
17 38 (0.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 35 (0.63%) Perl
19 30 (0.54%) C++
20 24 (0.43%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,806 (32.31%) Security Cleared
2 1,514 (27.09%) SC Cleared
3 344 (6.15%) Degree
4 241 (4.31%) Azure Certification
5 238 (4.26%) BPSS Clearance
6 222 (3.97%) DV Cleared
7 185 (3.31%) AWS Certification
8 137 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
9 110 (1.97%) Microsoft Certification
10 77 (1.38%) CISSP
11 57 (1.02%) ISTQB
12 50 (0.89%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 50 (0.89%) Cisco Certification
13 44 (0.79%) PMP
14 40 (0.72%) PMI Certification
15 39 (0.70%) Master's Degree
16 31 (0.55%) CISM
17 24 (0.43%) (ISC)2 CCSP
17 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 24 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 548 (9.80%) QA
2 287 (5.14%) Data Quality
3 210 (3.76%) Accessibility
4 131 (2.34%) GDPR
5 88 (1.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 85 (1.52%) WCAG
7 77 (1.38%) NIST
8 53 (0.95%) NCSC
9 49 (0.88%) PMO
10 37 (0.66%) SLA
11 30 (0.54%) PCI DSS
12 29 (0.52%) GRC
13 24 (0.43%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 19 (0.34%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.23%) Cyber Essentials
15 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
16 12 (0.21%) SEPA
17 11 (0.20%) HIPAA
18 10 (0.18%) HL7
19 9 (0.16%) Actionable Recommendations
System Software
1 1,155 (20.67%) Docker
2 168 (3.01%) Active Directory
3 89 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 78 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.52%) vSphere
6 25 (0.45%) Hyper-V
6 25 (0.45%) VMware ESXi
7 19 (0.34%) VMware NSX
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.20%) IAG
10 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.16%) Postfix
12 7 (0.13%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
14 5 (0.089%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 1,531 (27.39%) Kubernetes
2 537 (9.61%) Ansible
3 373 (6.67%) Grafana
4 315 (5.64%) Prometheus
5 80 (1.43%) Argo
6 64 (1.15%) Puppet
7 52 (0.93%) Progress Chef
8 50 (0.89%) Single Sign-On
9 46 (0.82%) Microsoft Intune
10 36 (0.64%) Packer
11 30 (0.54%) Istio
12 26 (0.47%) Kibana
13 22 (0.39%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.38%) Kustomize
15 19 (0.34%) Oracle RMAN
15 19 (0.34%) SCCM
16 18 (0.32%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.27%) HP ALM
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,095 (19.59%) Microsoft
2 308 (5.51%) Oracle
3 299 (5.35%) Databricks
4 277 (4.96%) Google
5 206 (3.69%) ServiceNow
6 182 (3.26%) Splunk
7 181 (3.24%) Salesforce
8 146 (2.61%) Dynatrace
9 132 (2.36%) VMware
10 112 (2.00%) SAP
11 105 (1.88%) Red Hat
12 65 (1.16%) IBM
12 65 (1.16%) OpenAI
13 62 (1.11%) MuleSoft
14 58 (1.04%) Informatica
15 52 (0.93%) Foundry
16 46 (0.82%) Cisco
17 43 (0.77%) AppDynamics
18 41 (0.73%) Atlassian
19 36 (0.64%) Okta