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

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,654 3,675 3,800
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.35% 11.16% 9.94%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.24% 12.33% 11.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,935 2,559 2,552
10th Percentile £381 £363 £381
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 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 124 25 71
10th Percentile £37.55 £38.00 £57.50
25th Percentile £56.25 £52.50 £65.00
Median hourly rate £68.48 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.21% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £91.15 £95.00 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +3.73% -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 46,183 29,816 32,769
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.50% 90.52% 85.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,080 18,531 20,147
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £404 £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 £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,092 1,799 1,460
10th Percentile £13.85 £14.25 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.42 £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 £44.68 £65.00
90th Percentile £79.00 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.71 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +84.31% -47.37% +5.81%

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 17 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 17 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 17 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 4,807 £525 - 4,848
London 0 2,540 £550 - 2,508
UK excluding London -4 2,416 £500 - 2,621
Work from Home +1 1,616 £525 +2.39% 2,180
North of England -2 784 £500 +5.26% 797
South East -12 454 £525 +5.00% 589
Midlands -5 442 £488 -4.88% 321
Yorkshire -2 396 £500 +3.09% 212
West Midlands -7 348 £500 -4.76% 182
South West +6 324 £550 +4.76% 316
North West -6 295 £525 +11.70% 456
Scotland -2 224 £475 - 225
East of England +6 149 £505 -3.35% 229
North East +16 108 £438 -15.87% 132
East Midlands +3 91 £463 +6.32% 139
Wales -7 46 £500 +33.33% 68
Northern Ireland +21 23 £450 -4.26% 84
Channel Islands - 5 £450 - 1

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 (5.96%) Confluence
2 161 (2.85%) SharePoint
3 129 (2.28%) Apache Airflow
4 126 (2.23%) Apache Spark
5 112 (1.98%) Apache
6 62 (1.10%) SAS
7 45 (0.80%) CMS
8 42 (0.74%) Jupyter
9 29 (0.51%) nginx
10 28 (0.50%) IIS
11 20 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
13 13 (0.23%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) WebSphere
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 9 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 69 (1.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 54 (0.96%) Microsoft Project
3 49 (0.87%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 12 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.14%) CPLEX
9 7 (0.12%) Trello
10 6 (0.11%) Windchill
11 5 (0.088%) Notion
12 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
12 2 (0.035%) Mingle
13 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
13 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
13 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
13 1 (0.018%) Sketch
13 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 82 (1.45%) Dynamics CRM
2 38 (0.67%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.18%) Magento
5 10 (0.18%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 7 (0.12%) Oracle EBS R12
8 6 (0.11%) Aladdin
8 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 4 (0.071%) Oracle ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Infor LN
11 3 (0.053%) Maximo
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,060 (54.12%) Azure
2 2,035 (35.99%) AWS
3 1,748 (30.92%) Azure DevOps
4 977 (17.28%) GitHub
5 737 (13.04%) GCP
6 620 (10.97%) GitHub Actions
7 489 (8.65%) Power Platform
8 463 (8.19%) Serverless
9 311 (5.50%) Amazon S3
10 291 (5.15%) AWS Lambda
11 254 (4.49%) Entra ID
12 247 (4.37%) Amazon EKS
13 243 (4.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 235 (4.16%) AWS CloudFormation
15 218 (3.86%) Azure AKS
16 206 (3.64%) Azure Monitor
17 199 (3.52%) Amazon EC2
18 194 (3.43%) Azure Data Factory
19 186 (3.29%) Dynamics 365
20 168 (2.97%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 243 (4.30%) Firewall
2 179 (3.17%) DNS
3 122 (2.16%) VPN
4 113 (2.00%) Network Security
5 72 (1.27%) TCP/IP
6 57 (1.01%) SSL
7 51 (0.90%) DHCP
8 47 (0.83%) WAN
9 37 (0.65%) HTTP
10 34 (0.60%) BGP
11 30 (0.53%) SD-WAN
12 29 (0.51%) SSH
13 28 (0.50%) Internet
14 25 (0.44%) OSPF
15 24 (0.42%) Wi-Fi
16 20 (0.35%) VLAN
17 19 (0.34%) SAN
18 18 (0.32%) LAN
19 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
19 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 320 (5.66%) Power BI
2 307 (5.43%) PostgreSQL
3 306 (5.41%) SQL Server
4 212 (3.75%) Data Warehouse
5 187 (3.31%) MongoDB
6 183 (3.24%) NoSQL
7 179 (3.17%) Relational Database
8 173 (3.06%) Data Lake
9 147 (2.60%) Amazon RDS
10 131 (2.32%) Metadata
11 98 (1.73%) Azure SQL Database
12 94 (1.66%) DynamoDB
13 90 (1.59%) Oracle Database
14 88 (1.56%) Delta Lake
14 88 (1.56%) MySQL
15 83 (1.47%) Redis
16 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
17 63 (1.11%) Big Data
18 62 (1.10%) SQL Server Integration Services
19 56 (0.99%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 834 (14.75%) Git
2 814 (14.40%) Jenkins
3 673 (11.90%) JIRA
4 647 (11.44%) GitLab
5 138 (2.44%) Selenium
6 103 (1.82%) SonarQube
7 99 (1.75%) Maven
8 94 (1.66%) Postman
9 93 (1.64%) JUnit
10 74 (1.31%) Bitbucket
11 71 (1.26%) REST Assured
12 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
13 67 (1.19%) Gradle
14 64 (1.13%) Cucumber
15 63 (1.11%) JMeter
16 52 (0.92%) Claude Code
17 46 (0.81%) Mockito
18 45 (0.80%) Gatling
19 43 (0.76%) Sonatype Nexus
20 38 (0.67%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,485 (26.26%) Social Skills
2 1,001 (17.70%) Finance
3 808 (14.29%) Public Sector
4 525 (9.29%) Analytical Skills
5 388 (6.86%) Banking
6 169 (2.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 107 (1.89%) Retail
8 85 (1.50%) Documentation Skills
9 84 (1.49%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.19%) Organisational Skills
11 65 (1.15%) Legal
12 56 (0.99%) Marketing
13 55 (0.97%) Aerospace
14 54 (0.96%) Military
15 52 (0.92%) Investment Banking
16 50 (0.88%) Telecoms
17 45 (0.80%) Law
18 44 (0.78%) Front Office
19 42 (0.74%) Manufacturing
20 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,151 (20.36%) DevOps Engineer
2 922 (16.31%) Developer
3 858 (15.18%) Senior
4 643 (11.37%) Architect
5 539 (9.53%) Lead
6 350 (6.19%) Azure Engineer
7 310 (5.48%) Data Engineer
8 268 (4.74%) Analyst
9 260 (4.60%) AWS Engineer
10 236 (4.17%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.71%) Azure DevOps Engineer
12 207 (3.66%) Cloud Engineer
13 202 (3.57%) Java Developer
14 201 (3.56%) Senior DevOps
15 188 (3.33%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 181 (3.20%) Solutions Architect
17 180 (3.18%) AWS DevOps
18 169 (2.99%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 160 (2.83%) Senior Developer
20 144 (2.55%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,684 (29.78%) Terraform
2 621 (10.98%) REST
3 477 (8.44%) .NET
4 384 (6.79%) Kafka
5 359 (6.35%) RESTful
6 311 (5.50%) Spring
7 306 (5.41%) Spring Boot
8 294 (5.20%) React
9 203 (3.59%) Node.js
10 185 (3.27%) JSON
11 178 (3.15%) OAuth
12 162 (2.87%) Playwright
13 161 (2.85%) PySpark
14 143 (2.53%) HTML
15 132 (2.33%) CSS
16 127 (2.25%) OAuth2
16 127 (2.25%) SOAP
17 125 (2.21%) .NET Framework
18 123 (2.18%) AngularJS
19 116 (2.05%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 1,032 (18.25%) Cloud Native
2 430 (7.61%) Product Ownership
3 271 (4.79%) Distributed Systems
4 209 (3.70%) Enterprise Software
5 200 (3.54%) Onboarding
6 153 (2.71%) Hybrid Cloud
7 145 (2.56%) Legacy Systems
8 99 (1.75%) AI Agents
9 94 (1.66%) Management Information System
10 83 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
11 80 (1.41%) Self-Motivation
12 77 (1.36%) Replication
13 76 (1.34%) Public Cloud
14 74 (1.31%) Data Structures
15 73 (1.29%) Security Posture
16 71 (1.26%) Data Centre
17 64 (1.13%) Virtual Team
18 59 (1.04%) Enterprise Cloud
19 57 (1.01%) PKI
20 53 (0.94%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 558 (9.87%) Linux
2 320 (5.66%) Windows
3 122 (2.16%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 113 (2.00%) Unix
5 96 (1.70%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) Ubuntu
7 34 (0.60%) VMS
8 32 (0.57%) Apple iOS
9 22 (0.39%) Android
10 13 (0.23%) CentOS
11 11 (0.19%) zOS
12 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
13 9 (0.16%) Solaris
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.12%) AIX
15 5 (0.088%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,436 (60.77%) CI/CD
2 2,311 (40.87%) Agile
3 1,669 (29.52%) Infrastructure as Code
4 964 (17.05%) Continuous Improvement
5 950 (16.80%) Containerisation
6 935 (16.54%) Stakeholder Management
7 903 (15.97%) Problem-Solving
8 894 (15.81%) Test Automation
9 855 (15.12%) AI
10 840 (14.86%) Microservices
11 769 (13.60%) Observability
12 768 (13.58%) Platform Engineering
13 735 (13.00%) Software Engineering
14 689 (12.19%) Scrum
15 684 (12.10%) Migration
16 616 (10.89%) Technical Leadership
17 586 (10.36%) Analytics
18 536 (9.48%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 500 (8.84%) Roadmaps
20 489 (8.65%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,638 (28.97%) Python
2 999 (17.67%) SQL
3 831 (14.70%) Java
4 503 (8.90%) Bash
5 500 (8.84%) PowerShell
6 492 (8.70%) C#
7 464 (8.21%) JavaScript
8 313 (5.54%) TypeScript
9 256 (4.53%) Bicep
10 114 (2.02%) Go
11 80 (1.41%) Shell Script
12 68 (1.20%) T-SQL
13 66 (1.17%) Apex Code
13 66 (1.17%) Scala
14 64 (1.13%) Groovy
15 62 (1.10%) PL/SQL
16 38 (0.67%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 35 (0.62%) Perl
18 33 (0.58%) C++
19 25 (0.44%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,823 (32.24%) Security Cleared
2 1,530 (27.06%) SC Cleared
3 357 (6.31%) Degree
4 250 (4.42%) Azure Certification
5 240 (4.24%) BPSS Clearance
6 232 (4.10%) DV Cleared
7 189 (3.34%) AWS Certification
8 143 (2.53%) Computer Science Degree
9 113 (2.00%) Microsoft Certification
10 76 (1.34%) CISSP
11 57 (1.01%) ISTQB
12 52 (0.92%) Cisco Certification
13 50 (0.88%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 41 (0.73%) Master's Degree
15 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
16 30 (0.53%) CISM
17 25 (0.44%) ITIL Certification
18 24 (0.42%) (ISC)2 CCSP
18 24 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 548 (9.69%) QA
2 292 (5.16%) Data Quality
3 212 (3.75%) Accessibility
4 130 (2.30%) GDPR
5 87 (1.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 87 (1.54%) WCAG
6 75 (1.33%) NIST
7 54 (0.96%) NCSC
8 48 (0.85%) PMO
9 37 (0.65%) SLA
10 30 (0.53%) PCI DSS
11 29 (0.51%) GRC
12 24 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 21 (0.37%) ISO 20022
14 14 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
15 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 13 (0.23%) SEPA
16 12 (0.21%) HIPAA
17 10 (0.18%) HL7
17 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,169 (20.68%) Docker
2 169 (2.99%) Active Directory
3 93 (1.64%) VMware Infrastructure
4 79 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.58%) vSphere
6 26 (0.46%) VMware ESXi
7 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
8 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
9 19 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
10 14 (0.25%) Squid
11 11 (0.19%) IAG
11 11 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
12 9 (0.16%) Postfix
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) KVM
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
15 5 (0.088%) RACF
Systems Management
1 1,554 (27.48%) Kubernetes
2 551 (9.75%) Ansible
3 378 (6.69%) Grafana
4 318 (5.62%) Prometheus
5 80 (1.41%) Argo
6 64 (1.13%) Puppet
7 52 (0.92%) Progress Chef
8 51 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
9 47 (0.83%) Microsoft Intune
10 36 (0.64%) Packer
11 30 (0.53%) Istio
12 29 (0.51%) Kibana
13 23 (0.41%) vCenter Server
14 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
15 20 (0.35%) Kubeflow
15 20 (0.35%) Oracle RMAN
16 19 (0.34%) SCCM
17 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
18 14 (0.25%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.23%) SCOM
Vendors
1 1,107 (19.58%) Microsoft
2 314 (5.55%) Oracle
3 301 (5.32%) Databricks
4 280 (4.95%) Google
5 212 (3.75%) ServiceNow
6 187 (3.31%) Splunk
7 182 (3.22%) Salesforce
8 146 (2.58%) Dynatrace
9 137 (2.42%) VMware
10 112 (1.98%) SAP
11 108 (1.91%) Red Hat
12 69 (1.22%) OpenAI
13 66 (1.17%) IBM
14 64 (1.13%) MuleSoft
15 54 (0.96%) Foundry
16 52 (0.92%) Informatica
17 50 (0.88%) Cisco
18 43 (0.76%) AppDynamics
19 40 (0.71%) Atlassian
20 37 (0.65%) Okta