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 19 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,379 3,095 4,160
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.64% 10.38% 9.48%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.54% 11.40% 11.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,757 2,222 2,848
10th Percentile £381 £367 £400
25th Percentile £438 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.94%
75th Percentile £613 £627 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £731
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 113 16 125
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.35
25th Percentile £61.87 £51.25 £61.60
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +12.59% +2.89%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £94.00 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £66.50
% change year-on-year - +5.26% +1.53%

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 42,883 27,154 37,300
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.85% 91.05% 85.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,719 17,238 23,736
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.49% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,572 1,254 2,607
10th Percentile £14.70 £14.20 £12.70
25th Percentile £20.07 £17.79 £16.04
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.40 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +73.07% -32.27% +7.05%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.19 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.08 £38.12
% change year-on-year +79.46% -34.22% +17.29%

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 19 June 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 19 June 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 19 June 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 4,564 £525 - 1,120
UK excluding London +7 2,375 £500 - 888
London +4 2,335 £550 - 436
Work from Home -1 1,487 £525 - 646
North of England +7 844 £500 - 268
Yorkshire +2 457 £511 +2.25% 76
South East -5 457 £513 +2.50% 280
Midlands +1 428 £488 -2.50% 98
West Midlands -1 338 £500 -3.24% 61
North West +2 314 £500 +1.63% 156
South West +16 287 £515 -6.36% 111
Scotland +2 202 £500 +1.21% 43
East of England +25 136 £525 +6.33% 62
North East +8 91 £450 -14.29% 42
East Midlands 0 86 £468 +2.86% 37
Wales +4 50 £425 +38.10% 28
Northern Ireland +10 20 £475 +11.76% 21
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
1 326 (6.06%) Confluence
2 136 (2.53%) Apache Spark
3 122 (2.27%) SharePoint
4 102 (1.90%) Apache Airflow
5 94 (1.75%) Apache
6 86 (1.60%) SAS
7 48 (0.89%) CMS
8 33 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.58%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.58%) nginx
10 28 (0.52%) IIS
11 19 (0.35%) OpenStack
12 16 (0.30%) Camunda
13 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.22%) Palantir Foundry
15 10 (0.19%) Mendix
16 9 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
16 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
17 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
17 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 77 (1.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.06%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.93%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 38 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
5 29 (0.54%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.19%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.074%) Notion
9 3 (0.056%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.056%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 66 (1.23%) Dynamics CRM
2 34 (0.63%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.19%) Maximo
5 9 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.093%) Endur
8 5 (0.093%) Magento
8 5 (0.093%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.093%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.074%) OpenText MBPM
9 4 (0.074%) Oracle BPM
10 3 (0.056%) Findur
10 3 (0.056%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.056%) SAP MM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,891 (53.75%) Azure
2 1,882 (34.99%) AWS
3 1,589 (29.54%) Azure DevOps
4 880 (16.36%) GitHub
5 677 (12.59%) GCP
6 525 (9.76%) GitHub Actions
7 483 (8.98%) Serverless
8 451 (8.38%) Power Platform
9 295 (5.48%) Amazon S3
10 268 (4.98%) AWS Lambda
11 248 (4.61%) Entra ID
12 246 (4.57%) AWS CloudFormation
13 222 (4.13%) Azure AKS
14 214 (3.98%) Amazon EKS
15 190 (3.53%) Azure Data Factory
16 182 (3.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 175 (3.25%) Amazon EC2
18 165 (3.07%) Azure Monitor
19 164 (3.05%) PaaS
20 151 (2.81%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 239 (4.44%) Firewall
2 138 (2.57%) DNS
3 118 (2.19%) Network Security
4 106 (1.97%) VPN
5 48 (0.89%) WAN
6 44 (0.82%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.67%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.63%) BGP
9 30 (0.56%) SSL
10 27 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 25 (0.46%) DHCP
11 25 (0.46%) SAN
12 24 (0.45%) OSPF
13 23 (0.43%) HTTP
13 23 (0.43%) Internet
14 18 (0.33%) IPsec
15 17 (0.32%) BIG-IP
15 17 (0.32%) LAN
15 17 (0.32%) MPLS
15 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 291 (5.41%) Power BI
2 260 (4.83%) SQL Server
3 247 (4.59%) PostgreSQL
4 191 (3.55%) NoSQL
5 168 (3.12%) Relational Database
6 163 (3.03%) Data Lake
7 153 (2.84%) Data Warehouse
8 152 (2.83%) MongoDB
9 116 (2.16%) Amazon RDS
10 106 (1.97%) Azure SQL Database
11 98 (1.82%) DynamoDB
11 98 (1.82%) Metadata
12 85 (1.58%) Delta Lake
13 73 (1.36%) Oracle Database
14 71 (1.32%) Amazon Athena
14 71 (1.32%) Big Data
15 65 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
16 64 (1.19%) Redis
17 60 (1.12%) Elasticsearch
18 49 (0.91%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 763 (14.18%) Jenkins
2 681 (12.66%) Git
3 656 (12.20%) JIRA
4 577 (10.73%) GitLab
5 115 (2.14%) Selenium
6 102 (1.90%) Postman
7 91 (1.69%) SonarQube
8 90 (1.67%) JUnit
9 71 (1.32%) Bitbucket
10 70 (1.30%) REST Assured
11 68 (1.26%) Maven
12 60 (1.12%) Cucumber
13 58 (1.08%) JMeter
14 49 (0.91%) Cypress.io
15 46 (0.86%) Gradle
16 43 (0.80%) Gatling
17 41 (0.76%) Artifactory
18 39 (0.73%) Mockito
19 38 (0.71%) Visual Studio
20 32 (0.59%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,336 (24.84%) Social Skills
2 976 (18.14%) Finance
3 741 (13.78%) Public Sector
4 416 (7.73%) Analytical Skills
5 346 (6.43%) Banking
6 138 (2.57%) Documentation Skills
7 112 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 75 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
9 73 (1.36%) Retail
10 69 (1.28%) Legal
11 58 (1.08%) Marketing
12 56 (1.04%) Organisational Skills
13 48 (0.89%) Military
14 46 (0.86%) Financial Institution
15 38 (0.71%) Investment Banking
15 38 (0.71%) Presentation Skills
16 37 (0.69%) Law
17 33 (0.61%) Telecoms
18 31 (0.58%) Front Office
19 28 (0.52%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,099 (20.43%) DevOps Engineer
2 828 (15.39%) Developer
3 758 (14.09%) Senior
4 631 (11.73%) Architect
5 477 (8.87%) Lead
6 344 (6.40%) Azure Engineer
7 321 (5.97%) Analyst
8 315 (5.86%) Data Engineer
9 266 (4.95%) AWS Engineer
10 200 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
11 196 (3.64%) AWS DevOps
12 195 (3.63%) Platform Engineer
13 183 (3.40%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 182 (3.38%) Solutions Architect
15 180 (3.35%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 180 (3.35%) Java Developer
16 179 (3.33%) Senior DevOps
17 163 (3.03%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 159 (2.96%) Business Analyst
19 147 (2.73%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 491 (9.13%) REST
2 461 (8.57%) .NET
3 309 (5.74%) React
3 309 (5.74%) Spring
4 295 (5.48%) Spring Boot
5 293 (5.45%) RESTful
6 287 (5.34%) Kafka
7 229 (4.26%) Node.js
8 171 (3.18%) AngularJS
9 163 (3.03%) PySpark
10 156 (2.90%) OAuth
11 148 (2.75%) Playwright
12 135 (2.51%) JSON
13 121 (2.25%) .NET Framework
14 120 (2.23%) SOAP
14 120 (2.23%) YAML
15 114 (2.12%) HTML
16 111 (2.06%) Middleware
17 108 (2.01%) OpenID
18 106 (1.97%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 934 (17.36%) Cloud Native
2 353 (6.56%) Product Ownership
3 230 (4.28%) Distributed Systems
4 149 (2.77%) Onboarding
5 128 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
6 127 (2.36%) Enterprise Software
7 113 (2.10%) Hybrid Cloud
8 105 (1.95%) Public Cloud
9 86 (1.60%) Data Centre
10 80 (1.49%) Data Protection Act
11 70 (1.30%) Management Information System
12 63 (1.17%) Self-Motivation
13 57 (1.06%) Security Posture
14 55 (1.02%) Data Structures
15 53 (0.99%) Mobile App
16 52 (0.97%) AI Agents
17 50 (0.93%) Virtual Team
18 49 (0.91%) Greenfield Project
19 42 (0.78%) Private Cloud
19 42 (0.78%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 454 (8.44%) Linux
2 276 (5.13%) Windows
3 101 (1.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 80 (1.49%) Unix
5 57 (1.06%) Windows Server
6 39 (0.73%) VMS
7 29 (0.54%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.45%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.28%) Android
10 14 (0.26%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.093%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.093%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.074%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.074%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.074%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,109 (57.80%) CI/CD
2 2,037 (37.87%) Agile
3 1,426 (26.51%) Infrastructure as Code
4 850 (15.80%) Containerisation
5 802 (14.91%) Problem-Solving
6 778 (14.46%) Microservices
7 763 (14.18%) Test Automation
8 760 (14.13%) Continuous Improvement
9 653 (12.14%) Migration
10 649 (12.07%) Stakeholder Management
11 627 (11.66%) Observability
12 617 (11.47%) AI
13 611 (11.36%) Scrum
14 610 (11.34%) Analytics
15 559 (10.39%) Platform Engineering
16 546 (10.15%) Software Engineering
17 489 (9.09%) Data Modelling
18 453 (8.42%) Technical Leadership
19 434 (8.07%) Roadmaps
20 426 (7.92%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 1,501 (27.90%) Python
2 1,008 (18.74%) SQL
3 733 (13.63%) Java
4 503 (9.35%) C#
5 400 (7.44%) JavaScript
6 378 (7.03%) Bash
7 371 (6.90%) PowerShell
8 268 (4.98%) TypeScript
9 186 (3.46%) Bicep
10 110 (2.04%) Go
11 67 (1.25%) Apex Code
12 63 (1.17%) Scala
13 62 (1.15%) Shell Script
14 52 (0.97%) T-SQL
15 49 (0.91%) PL/SQL
16 45 (0.84%) Groovy
17 32 (0.59%) C++
18 26 (0.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 25 (0.46%) Ruby
20 24 (0.45%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,703 (31.66%) Security Cleared
2 1,431 (26.60%) SC Cleared
3 326 (6.06%) Degree
4 213 (3.96%) Azure Certification
5 171 (3.18%) AWS Certification
6 169 (3.14%) BPSS Clearance
7 164 (3.05%) DV Cleared
8 127 (2.36%) Computer Science Degree
9 85 (1.58%) CISSP
10 71 (1.32%) Microsoft Certification
11 58 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 47 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
13 47 (0.87%) CISM
14 45 (0.84%) PMI Certification
15 44 (0.82%) Master's Degree
16 43 (0.80%) PMP
17 28 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 454 (8.44%) QA
2 258 (4.80%) Data Quality
3 175 (3.25%) GDPR
4 162 (3.01%) Accessibility
5 126 (2.34%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 115 (2.14%) NIST
7 72 (1.34%) NCSC
8 65 (1.21%) WCAG
9 49 (0.91%) PCI DSS
10 44 (0.82%) SLA
11 32 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.54%) PMO
13 25 (0.46%) GRC
14 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.20%) NIST 800
16 11 (0.20%) PSD2
17 10 (0.19%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,012 (18.81%) Docker
2 185 (3.44%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.43%) VMware Infrastructure
4 76 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 32 (0.59%) vSphere
6 27 (0.50%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (0.32%) Squid
8 17 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.30%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.26%) Postfix
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 7 (0.13%) RACF
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) Firmware
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
14 5 (0.093%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.093%) NFS
14 5 (0.093%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,538 (28.59%) Terraform
2 1,341 (24.93%) Kubernetes
3 513 (9.54%) Ansible
4 355 (6.60%) Grafana
5 307 (5.71%) Prometheus
6 83 (1.54%) Argo
7 76 (1.41%) Single Sign-On
8 69 (1.28%) Puppet
9 53 (0.99%) Istio
10 32 (0.59%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.58%) Packer
12 29 (0.54%) Microsoft Intune
13 26 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 21 (0.39%) HP ALM
15 18 (0.33%) Consul
15 18 (0.33%) Kibana
16 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
17 13 (0.24%) FortiGate
17 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 936 (17.40%) Microsoft
2 274 (5.09%) Databricks
3 270 (5.02%) Oracle
4 254 (4.72%) Google
5 187 (3.48%) ServiceNow
6 181 (3.36%) Splunk
7 179 (3.33%) Salesforce
8 130 (2.42%) Red Hat
9 121 (2.25%) SAP
10 115 (2.14%) VMware
11 111 (2.06%) Dynatrace
12 77 (1.43%) OpenAI
13 58 (1.08%) Atlassian
14 54 (1.00%) IBM
15 53 (0.99%) Informatica
16 47 (0.87%) CyberArk
17 41 (0.76%) Cisco
18 40 (0.74%) Okta
19 39 (0.73%) MuleSoft
20 38 (0.71%) Foundry