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 23 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -7
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,154 3,687 4,418
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.63% 9.98% 9.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.99% 11.52% 10.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,904 2,468 3,216
10th Percentile £363 £381 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £560 £565
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -0.88% -5.83%
75th Percentile £615 £663 £669
90th Percentile £700 £743 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 44 40 97
10th Percentile - £40.98 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £58.92 £51.25
Median hourly rate £61.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.50% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £85.63 £74.11 £75.67
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £58.50 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -16.43% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and 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 31,979 31,998 41,164
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 89.50% 86.61% 88.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,013 19,257 27,677
10th Percentile £300 £310 £308
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £532
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.22% -3.36%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £743 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,115 1,171 1,588
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.10 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.12 £19.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £34.00 £43.85
Median % change year-on-year -26.03% -22.46% +25.29%
75th Percentile £45.46 £64.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.85 £32.50 £44.50
% change year-on-year -29.69% -26.97% +48.33%

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 23 November 2025.

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 23 November 2025.

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 23 November 2025. 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 3,519 £525 -8.70% 1,194
UK excluding London +4 1,886 £500 -9.09% 1,016
London 0 1,761 £550 -5.98% 465
Work from Home +1 1,333 £525 -4.55% 711
North of England +3 610 £492 -3.05% 202
South East +1 372 £500 -16.67% 396
Midlands +15 369 £515 -6.36% 119
Yorkshire -1 324 £500 - 63
West Midlands +13 299 £525 -8.70% 78
North West +6 258 £457 -14.27% 110
South West +1 222 £538 -10.42% 139
Scotland +7 218 £475 +5.56% 67
East of England +25 105 £520 -0.95% 68
East Midlands +23 70 £418 -12.11% 37
Wales +8 44 £450 +9.09% 38
North East -10 30 £550 -5.98% 30
Northern Ireland -3 6 - - 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
1 259 (6.23%) Confluence
2 97 (2.34%) Apache
3 70 (1.69%) Apache Airflow
3 70 (1.69%) SharePoint
4 64 (1.54%) SAS
5 57 (1.37%) Apache Spark
6 40 (0.96%) CMS
7 39 (0.94%) nginx
8 29 (0.70%) IIS
8 29 (0.70%) JBoss
9 28 (0.67%) OpenStack
10 27 (0.65%) WebLogic
11 25 (0.60%) CICS
12 21 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
13 18 (0.43%) WebSphere
14 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
14 15 (0.36%) Mule
15 14 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 12 (0.29%) WebSphere Application Server
17 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
Applications
1 73 (1.76%) Microsoft Excel
2 40 (0.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 35 (0.84%) Microsoft Office
4 31 (0.75%) Microsoft Project
5 19 (0.46%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.36%) Chatbot
7 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 8 (0.19%) Trello
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.024%) Moqups
9 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 65 (1.56%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.48%) Endur
3 19 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
4 18 (0.43%) Oracle BPM
5 17 (0.41%) Aladdin
6 16 (0.39%) VisionPLUS
7 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
8 10 (0.24%) Maximo
9 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
10 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 4 (0.096%) Fidessa
11 4 (0.096%) NEC Housing
11 4 (0.096%) SAP CO
11 4 (0.096%) SAP ERP
11 4 (0.096%) SAP FI
11 4 (0.096%) SAP FI/CO
11 4 (0.096%) Teamcenter
11 4 (0.096%) thinkFolio
11 4 (0.096%) Workday HCM
12 3 (0.072%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 2,025 (48.75%) Azure
2 1,568 (37.75%) AWS
3 1,115 (26.84%) Azure DevOps
4 716 (17.24%) GitHub
5 581 (13.99%) GCP
6 471 (11.34%) Serverless
7 410 (9.87%) GitHub Actions
8 281 (6.76%) Power Platform
9 266 (6.40%) Amazon S3
10 265 (6.38%) AWS CloudFormation
11 261 (6.28%) AWS Lambda
12 217 (5.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 202 (4.86%) Amazon EC2
14 180 (4.33%) Azure AKS
15 171 (4.12%) Amazon EKS
16 159 (3.83%) SaaS
17 157 (3.78%) Amazon ECS
18 155 (3.73%) Azure Data Factory
19 150 (3.61%) Dynamics 365
20 149 (3.59%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 205 (4.94%) Firewall
2 130 (3.13%) DNS
3 88 (2.12%) VPN
4 69 (1.66%) Network Security
5 68 (1.64%) TCP/IP
6 67 (1.61%) SSL
7 51 (1.23%) HTTP
8 36 (0.87%) HTTPS
9 34 (0.82%) SSH
10 30 (0.72%) SMTP
10 30 (0.72%) WAN
11 24 (0.58%) FTP
12 20 (0.48%) BGP
13 18 (0.43%) DHCP
13 18 (0.43%) Kerberos
14 16 (0.39%) LAN
14 16 (0.39%) OpenLDAP
15 15 (0.36%) MPLS
15 15 (0.36%) SD-WAN
16 12 (0.29%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 278 (6.69%) PostgreSQL
2 170 (4.09%) Amazon RDS
2 170 (4.09%) NoSQL
2 170 (4.09%) Power BI
3 158 (3.80%) SQL Server
4 119 (2.86%) MongoDB
5 102 (2.46%) Relational Database
6 100 (2.41%) Data Warehouse
7 91 (2.19%) Data Lake
7 91 (2.19%) Oracle Database
8 69 (1.66%) Azure SQL Database
9 68 (1.64%) DynamoDB
10 65 (1.56%) MySQL
11 61 (1.47%) Redis
12 55 (1.32%) Amazon Aurora
13 51 (1.23%) Elasticsearch
14 50 (1.20%) Metadata
15 41 (0.99%) Delta Lake
16 38 (0.91%) Big Data
17 36 (0.87%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 806 (19.40%) Jenkins
2 678 (16.32%) Git
3 611 (14.71%) JIRA
4 531 (12.78%) GitLab
5 143 (3.44%) Selenium
6 109 (2.62%) JUnit
7 102 (2.46%) SonarQube
8 96 (2.31%) Bitbucket
8 96 (2.31%) Sonatype Nexus
9 86 (2.07%) Postman
10 67 (1.61%) Cypress.io
11 62 (1.49%) Cucumber
11 62 (1.49%) Liquibase
12 60 (1.44%) Maven
13 50 (1.20%) Artifactory
13 50 (1.20%) Gradle
14 45 (1.08%) JMeter
14 45 (1.08%) Visual Studio
15 40 (0.96%) CircleCI
16 39 (0.94%) Oracle APEX
General
1 1,310 (31.54%) Social Skills
2 768 (18.49%) Finance
3 526 (12.66%) Public Sector
4 358 (8.62%) Banking
5 352 (8.47%) Analytical Skills
6 132 (3.18%) Documentation Skills
7 71 (1.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 71 (1.71%) Investment Banking
8 65 (1.56%) Marketing
9 63 (1.52%) Financial Institution
10 61 (1.47%) Telecoms
11 55 (1.32%) Retail
12 53 (1.28%) Influencing Skills
13 44 (1.06%) Presentation Skills
14 41 (0.99%) Front Office
15 35 (0.84%) Back Office
16 31 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
17 29 (0.70%) Manufacturing
17 29 (0.70%) Military
18 28 (0.67%) Law
Job Titles
1 822 (19.79%) Developer
2 764 (18.39%) DevOps Engineer
3 554 (13.34%) Senior
4 350 (8.43%) Architect
5 318 (7.66%) Lead
6 258 (6.21%) AWS Engineer
7 207 (4.98%) Azure Engineer
8 198 (4.77%) AWS DevOps
9 193 (4.65%) Analyst
10 187 (4.50%) Data Engineer
11 169 (4.07%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 165 (3.97%) Senior Developer
13 162 (3.90%) Software Engineer
14 150 (3.61%) Cloud Engineer
15 144 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
16 139 (3.35%) Java Developer
17 126 (3.03%) Consultant
18 110 (2.65%) Business Analyst
19 108 (2.60%) Senior DevOps
20 102 (2.46%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 473 (11.39%) REST
2 365 (8.79%) .NET
3 317 (7.63%) RESTful
4 254 (6.11%) React
5 249 (5.99%) Node.js
6 235 (5.66%) Kafka
7 208 (5.01%) JSON
8 187 (4.50%) Spring
9 183 (4.41%) Spring Boot
10 180 (4.33%) SOAP
11 163 (3.92%) HTML
12 155 (3.73%) OAuth
13 153 (3.68%) AngularJS
13 153 (3.68%) Elastic Stack
14 142 (3.42%) XML
15 114 (2.74%) CSS
16 110 (2.65%) YAML
17 87 (2.09%) .NET Core
18 85 (2.05%) Web Services
19 81 (1.95%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 541 (13.02%) Cloud Native
2 230 (5.54%) Product Ownership
3 172 (4.14%) Distributed Systems
4 126 (3.03%) Onboarding
5 109 (2.62%) Legacy Systems
6 103 (2.48%) Public Cloud
7 73 (1.76%) Hybrid Cloud
8 70 (1.69%) Data Protection Act
9 68 (1.64%) Mobile App
9 68 (1.64%) Virtual Team
10 63 (1.52%) Replication
11 54 (1.30%) Greenfield Project
12 53 (1.28%) Enterprise Software
13 52 (1.25%) Security Posture
14 50 (1.20%) Management Information System
15 43 (1.04%) Algorithms
15 43 (1.04%) Data Centre
16 41 (0.99%) Self-Motivation
17 40 (0.96%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
18 36 (0.87%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 516 (12.42%) Linux
2 251 (6.04%) Windows
3 116 (2.79%) Unix
4 64 (1.54%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 60 (1.44%) Windows Server
6 53 (1.28%) Android
7 47 (1.13%) VMS
8 46 (1.11%) Apple iOS
9 26 (0.63%) Amazon Linux
10 24 (0.58%) Ubuntu
11 20 (0.48%) CentOS
12 16 (0.39%) Solaris
12 16 (0.39%) Windows 10
13 11 (0.26%) Mac OS
13 11 (0.26%) zOS
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
15 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 3 (0.072%) AIX
16 3 (0.072%) Debian
16 3 (0.072%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,333 (56.16%) CI/CD
2 1,835 (44.17%) Agile
3 1,073 (25.83%) Infrastructure as Code
4 822 (19.79%) Problem-Solving
5 799 (19.23%) Containerisation
6 659 (15.86%) Test Automation
7 624 (15.02%) Microservices
8 524 (12.61%) Scrum
9 459 (11.05%) Migration
10 440 (10.59%) Continuous Improvement
11 422 (10.16%) Software Engineering
12 407 (9.80%) Analytics
13 371 (8.93%) AI
14 355 (8.55%) Observability
15 319 (7.68%) Stakeholder Management
16 314 (7.56%) Mentoring
17 302 (7.27%) SDLC
18 285 (6.86%) Infrastructure Automation
19 275 (6.62%) DevSecOps
20 269 (6.48%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,344 (32.35%) Python
2 788 (18.97%) SQL
3 619 (14.90%) Java
4 439 (10.57%) JavaScript
5 412 (9.92%) C#
6 393 (9.46%) Bash
7 376 (9.05%) PowerShell
8 289 (6.96%) TypeScript
9 177 (4.26%) Go
10 117 (2.82%) Bicep
11 80 (1.93%) PL/SQL
12 75 (1.81%) Shell Script
13 65 (1.56%) Groovy
14 57 (1.37%) Perl
15 54 (1.30%) C++
16 48 (1.16%) Scala
17 46 (1.11%) Ruby
18 35 (0.84%) T-SQL
19 34 (0.82%) Kotlin
20 28 (0.67%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,118 (26.91%) Security Cleared
2 928 (22.34%) SC Cleared
3 340 (8.18%) Degree
4 183 (4.41%) Computer Science Degree
5 156 (3.76%) AWS Certification
6 153 (3.68%) Azure Certification
7 131 (3.15%) DV Cleared
8 85 (2.05%) BPSS Clearance
9 79 (1.90%) Master's Degree
10 70 (1.69%) CISSP
11 63 (1.52%) Microsoft Certification
12 54 (1.30%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 46 (1.11%) CISM
14 40 (0.96%) ISTQB
15 35 (0.84%) Cisco Certification
16 32 (0.77%) PMI Certification
17 28 (0.67%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.63%) PMP
19 18 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
20 17 (0.41%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 381 (9.17%) QA
2 151 (3.64%) GDPR
3 139 (3.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 128 (3.08%) Accessibility
5 117 (2.82%) Data Quality
6 106 (2.55%) NIST
7 47 (1.13%) NCSC
8 36 (0.87%) PCI DSS
9 27 (0.65%) WCAG
10 26 (0.63%) HIPAA
11 20 (0.48%) PMO
11 20 (0.48%) SLA
12 19 (0.46%) SOC 2
13 16 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 14 (0.34%) MiFID
15 13 (0.31%) PSD2
16 12 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials
16 12 (0.29%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.29%) SEPA
17 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 1,047 (25.20%) Docker
2 187 (4.50%) Active Directory
3 80 (1.93%) VMware Infrastructure
4 58 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 29 (0.70%) vSphere
6 24 (0.58%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.36%) Postfix
7 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 13 (0.31%) Squid
9 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
9 12 (0.29%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
9 12 (0.29%) Virtual Desktop
10 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
11 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 10 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
12 8 (0.19%) GPFS
12 8 (0.19%) Lustre
12 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
13 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,317 (31.70%) Terraform
2 1,210 (29.13%) Kubernetes
3 534 (12.86%) Ansible
4 321 (7.73%) Grafana
5 309 (7.44%) Prometheus
6 86 (2.07%) Puppet
7 80 (1.93%) Argo
8 69 (1.66%) Single Sign-On
9 58 (1.40%) Progress Chef
10 45 (1.08%) Kibana
11 40 (0.96%) Packer
12 34 (0.82%) Istio
13 21 (0.51%) ITRS Geneos
13 21 (0.51%) Podman
14 20 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
14 20 (0.48%) SCCM
15 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
15 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.39%) Nessus
17 15 (0.36%) logstash
Vendors
1 708 (17.04%) Microsoft
2 303 (7.29%) Oracle
3 228 (5.49%) Google
4 200 (4.81%) Splunk
5 180 (4.33%) Databricks
6 174 (4.19%) ServiceNow
7 122 (2.94%) Salesforce
8 112 (2.70%) VMware
9 110 (2.65%) SAP
10 96 (2.31%) Red Hat
11 65 (1.56%) Dynatrace
12 59 (1.42%) MuleSoft
13 57 (1.37%) IBM
14 48 (1.16%) OpenAI
15 46 (1.11%) Cisco
15 46 (1.11%) F5
16 44 (1.06%) Atlassian
17 38 (0.91%) Palo Alto
18 36 (0.87%) CyberArk
18 36 (0.87%) Talend