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 6 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 +1 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,206 3,635 4,316
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.54% 10.10% 9.54%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.97% 11.55% 10.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,947 2,456 3,155
10th Percentile £363 £379 £406
25th Percentile £425 £463 £473
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £551 £563
Median % change year-on-year -5.09% -2.13% -6.25%
75th Percentile £615 £663 £663
90th Percentile £700 £746 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £550 £550
% change year-on-year -9.09% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 46 37 88
10th Percentile - £40.15 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £56.25 £49.05
Median hourly rate £59.25 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.36% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £82.50 £74.44 £70.47
90th Percentile £95.00 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £56.75 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -18.93% +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 32,432 31,463 40,054
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 88.97% 87.43% 88.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,408 19,089 26,807
10th Percentile £300 £309 £312
25th Percentile £405 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.50% -3.09%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,095 1,098 1,556
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.24 £14.36
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.20 £18.93
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.75 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.21% -22.94% +21.43%
75th Percentile £45.46 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.50 £74.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.63 £32.50 £42.50
% change year-on-year -30.37% -23.53% +30.77%

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 6 December 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 6 December 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 6 December 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 3,569 £525 -8.70% 1,699
UK excluding London +5 1,894 £500 -9.09% 1,518
London -1 1,792 £550 -5.98% 527
Work from Home 0 1,304 £525 -2.78% 1,199
North of England +2 623 £486 -7.43% 361
Midlands +14 373 £515 -1.90% 197
South East +1 367 £513 -14.58% 516
Yorkshire -1 326 £500 - 143
West Midlands +15 303 £525 - 123
North West +5 262 £453 -14.93% 172
South West +4 224 £538 -10.42% 190
Scotland +9 210 £475 +5.56% 83
East of England +27 110 £523 -9.13% 142
East Midlands +21 70 £419 -11.84% 67
Wales +3 44 £410 +9.33% 50
North East -8 37 £518 -10.00% 48
Northern Ireland -3 7 - - 16

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
1 260 (6.18%) Confluence
2 89 (2.12%) Apache
3 75 (1.78%) SharePoint
4 72 (1.71%) Apache Airflow
5 64 (1.52%) SAS
6 62 (1.47%) Apache Spark
7 36 (0.86%) CMS
8 34 (0.81%) nginx
9 30 (0.71%) IIS
10 29 (0.69%) OpenStack
10 29 (0.69%) WebLogic
11 26 (0.62%) JBoss
12 22 (0.52%) CICS
13 21 (0.50%) Microsoft Exchange
14 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
14 15 (0.36%) Mule
14 15 (0.36%) WebSphere
15 14 (0.33%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 10 (0.24%) Oracle Service Bus
16 10 (0.24%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 71 (1.69%) Microsoft Excel
2 41 (0.97%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 35 (0.83%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.78%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 16 (0.38%) Chatbot
7 11 (0.26%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 9 (0.21%) Trello
9 8 (0.19%) Weka
10 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
10 1 (0.024%) Moqups
10 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 60 (1.43%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
3 17 (0.40%) Aladdin
3 17 (0.40%) Endur
3 17 (0.40%) Oracle BPM
4 15 (0.36%) Remedy ITSM
5 14 (0.33%) VisionPLUS
6 9 (0.21%) Maximo
7 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.14%) NEC Housing
9 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 4 (0.095%) Fidessa
10 4 (0.095%) NetSuite
10 4 (0.095%) SAP CO
10 4 (0.095%) SAP ERP
10 4 (0.095%) SAP FI
10 4 (0.095%) SAP FI/CO
10 4 (0.095%) Teamcenter
10 4 (0.095%) thinkFolio
10 4 (0.095%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,053 (48.81%) Azure
2 1,584 (37.66%) AWS
3 1,116 (26.53%) Azure DevOps
4 735 (17.48%) GitHub
5 594 (14.12%) GCP
6 494 (11.75%) Serverless
7 434 (10.32%) GitHub Actions
8 288 (6.85%) Power Platform
9 279 (6.63%) AWS CloudFormation
10 272 (6.47%) AWS Lambda
11 270 (6.42%) Amazon S3
12 216 (5.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 196 (4.66%) Amazon EC2
14 189 (4.49%) Azure AKS
15 187 (4.45%) Amazon EKS
16 170 (4.04%) Amazon ECS
16 170 (4.04%) Azure Data Factory
17 160 (3.80%) OpenShift
18 159 (3.78%) SaaS
19 152 (3.61%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 196 (4.66%) Firewall
2 129 (3.07%) DNS
3 89 (2.12%) VPN
4 70 (1.66%) Network Security
5 67 (1.59%) SSL
6 60 (1.43%) TCP/IP
7 52 (1.24%) HTTP
8 35 (0.83%) HTTPS
9 29 (0.69%) SSH
10 27 (0.64%) WAN
11 26 (0.62%) SMTP
12 22 (0.52%) FTP
13 20 (0.48%) BGP
14 17 (0.40%) DHCP
14 17 (0.40%) Kerberos
14 17 (0.40%) MPLS
15 15 (0.36%) OpenLDAP
16 14 (0.33%) LAN
16 14 (0.33%) SD-WAN
17 12 (0.29%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 275 (6.54%) PostgreSQL
2 180 (4.28%) Power BI
3 172 (4.09%) NoSQL
4 163 (3.88%) Amazon RDS
5 154 (3.66%) SQL Server
6 122 (2.90%) MongoDB
7 104 (2.47%) Relational Database
8 102 (2.43%) Data Warehouse
9 92 (2.19%) Data Lake
10 87 (2.07%) Oracle Database
11 72 (1.71%) Azure SQL Database
12 67 (1.59%) DynamoDB
13 64 (1.52%) MySQL
14 58 (1.38%) Redis
15 54 (1.28%) Amazon Aurora
15 54 (1.28%) Elasticsearch
16 49 (1.17%) Metadata
17 43 (1.02%) Big Data
17 43 (1.02%) Delta Lake
18 40 (0.95%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 813 (19.33%) Jenkins
2 674 (16.02%) Git
3 614 (14.60%) JIRA
4 553 (13.15%) GitLab
5 145 (3.45%) Selenium
6 105 (2.50%) JUnit
7 99 (2.35%) SonarQube
8 91 (2.16%) Bitbucket
8 91 (2.16%) Sonatype Nexus
9 82 (1.95%) Postman
10 68 (1.62%) Cypress.io
11 64 (1.52%) Cucumber
12 59 (1.40%) Liquibase
13 49 (1.17%) Maven
14 46 (1.09%) Gradle
14 46 (1.09%) JMeter
15 44 (1.05%) Artifactory
16 41 (0.97%) CircleCI
17 39 (0.93%) Oracle APEX
18 38 (0.90%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,310 (31.15%) Social Skills
2 775 (18.43%) Finance
3 540 (12.84%) Public Sector
4 358 (8.51%) Banking
5 337 (8.01%) Analytical Skills
6 125 (2.97%) Documentation Skills
7 72 (1.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 68 (1.62%) Financial Institution
9 65 (1.55%) Investment Banking
10 63 (1.50%) Marketing
11 55 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
12 54 (1.28%) Telecoms
13 51 (1.21%) Retail
14 47 (1.12%) Front Office
15 44 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
16 34 (0.81%) Back Office
17 31 (0.74%) Pharmaceutical
18 30 (0.71%) Military
19 28 (0.67%) Manufacturing
20 26 (0.62%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 805 (19.14%) Developer
2 788 (18.74%) DevOps Engineer
3 573 (13.62%) Senior
4 359 (8.54%) Architect
5 311 (7.39%) Lead
6 262 (6.23%) AWS Engineer
7 213 (5.06%) Azure Engineer
8 200 (4.76%) Data Engineer
9 198 (4.71%) AWS DevOps
10 192 (4.56%) Analyst
11 169 (4.02%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 162 (3.85%) Senior Developer
13 158 (3.76%) Software Engineer
14 151 (3.59%) Cloud Engineer
15 147 (3.50%) Platform Engineer
16 133 (3.16%) Java Developer
17 123 (2.92%) Consultant
18 113 (2.69%) Senior DevOps
19 105 (2.50%) Solutions Architect
20 102 (2.43%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 473 (11.25%) REST
2 367 (8.73%) .NET
3 310 (7.37%) RESTful
4 259 (6.16%) React
5 258 (6.13%) Node.js
6 247 (5.87%) Kafka
7 218 (5.18%) JSON
8 202 (4.80%) Spring
9 190 (4.52%) Spring Boot
10 180 (4.28%) SOAP
11 161 (3.83%) HTML
12 160 (3.80%) OAuth
13 158 (3.76%) Elastic Stack
14 154 (3.66%) AngularJS
15 149 (3.54%) XML
16 112 (2.66%) CSS
17 111 (2.64%) YAML
18 90 (2.14%) Playwright
19 89 (2.12%) .NET Core
20 83 (1.97%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 571 (13.58%) Cloud Native
2 238 (5.66%) Product Ownership
3 177 (4.21%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (3.04%) Onboarding
5 105 (2.50%) Legacy Systems
6 102 (2.43%) Public Cloud
7 79 (1.88%) Hybrid Cloud
8 71 (1.69%) Data Protection Act
9 69 (1.64%) Virtual Team
10 62 (1.47%) Mobile App
11 60 (1.43%) Replication
12 55 (1.31%) Enterprise Software
13 53 (1.26%) Greenfield Project
13 53 (1.26%) Security Posture
14 46 (1.09%) Data Centre
14 46 (1.09%) Management Information System
15 42 (1.00%) Self-Motivation
16 41 (0.97%) CMDB
17 40 (0.95%) NHS
18 38 (0.90%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 511 (12.15%) Linux
2 246 (5.85%) Windows
3 116 (2.76%) Unix
4 59 (1.40%) Windows Server
5 56 (1.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 48 (1.14%) VMS
7 47 (1.12%) Android
8 41 (0.97%) Apple iOS
9 27 (0.64%) Ubuntu
10 21 (0.50%) Amazon Linux
11 19 (0.45%) CentOS
12 16 (0.38%) Windows 10
13 12 (0.29%) Solaris
14 11 (0.26%) zOS
15 9 (0.21%) Mac OS
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
17 3 (0.071%) Debian
18 2 (0.048%) SUSE
19 1 (0.024%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,410 (57.30%) CI/CD
2 1,826 (43.41%) Agile
3 1,085 (25.80%) Infrastructure as Code
4 848 (20.16%) Containerisation
5 826 (19.64%) Problem-Solving
6 660 (15.69%) Test Automation
7 648 (15.41%) Microservices
8 529 (12.58%) Scrum
9 463 (11.01%) Migration
10 447 (10.63%) Continuous Improvement
11 416 (9.89%) Software Engineering
12 411 (9.77%) Analytics
13 387 (9.20%) AI
14 374 (8.89%) Observability
15 332 (7.89%) Stakeholder Management
16 308 (7.32%) Mentoring
17 296 (7.04%) SDLC
18 280 (6.66%) Infrastructure Automation
19 274 (6.51%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 271 (6.44%) DevSecOps
Programming Languages
1 1,350 (32.10%) Python
2 788 (18.74%) SQL
3 635 (15.10%) Java
4 435 (10.34%) JavaScript
5 417 (9.91%) C#
6 388 (9.22%) Bash
7 369 (8.77%) PowerShell
8 299 (7.11%) TypeScript
9 178 (4.23%) Go
10 116 (2.76%) Bicep
11 85 (2.02%) PL/SQL
12 73 (1.74%) Shell Script
13 62 (1.47%) Groovy
14 54 (1.28%) C++
15 53 (1.26%) Perl
16 51 (1.21%) Scala
17 47 (1.12%) Ruby
18 37 (0.88%) T-SQL
19 29 (0.69%) Kotlin
20 28 (0.67%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,156 (27.48%) Security Cleared
2 959 (22.80%) SC Cleared
3 358 (8.51%) Degree
4 195 (4.64%) Computer Science Degree
5 158 (3.76%) Azure Certification
6 154 (3.66%) AWS Certification
7 131 (3.11%) DV Cleared
8 88 (2.09%) BPSS Clearance
9 85 (2.02%) Master's Degree
10 67 (1.59%) CISSP
11 64 (1.52%) Microsoft Certification
12 55 (1.31%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 44 (1.05%) CISM
14 41 (0.97%) ISTQB
15 38 (0.90%) Cisco Certification
16 34 (0.81%) PMI Certification
17 29 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 28 (0.67%) PMP
19 17 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
20 15 (0.36%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 396 (9.42%) QA
2 157 (3.73%) GDPR
3 139 (3.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 124 (2.95%) Accessibility
5 122 (2.90%) Data Quality
6 105 (2.50%) NIST
7 47 (1.12%) NCSC
8 38 (0.90%) PCI DSS
9 29 (0.69%) HIPAA
10 28 (0.67%) WCAG
11 21 (0.50%) PMO
12 20 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 20 (0.48%) SLA
13 18 (0.43%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.36%) MiFID
15 14 (0.33%) PSD2
16 13 (0.31%) ISO 20022
16 13 (0.31%) SEPA
17 11 (0.26%) EU AI Act
17 11 (0.26%) GRC
System Software
1 1,085 (25.80%) Docker
2 178 (4.23%) Active Directory
3 68 (1.62%) VMware Infrastructure
4 59 (1.40%) Virtual Machines
5 25 (0.59%) vSphere
6 22 (0.52%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
8 12 (0.29%) Squid
9 11 (0.26%) Dovecot
9 11 (0.26%) Hyper-V
9 11 (0.26%) Postfix
9 11 (0.26%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 11 (0.26%) Virtual Desktop
9 11 (0.26%) Virtual Servers
10 9 (0.21%) Lustre
11 8 (0.19%) GPFS
11 8 (0.19%) NFS
11 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.19%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,336 (31.76%) Terraform
2 1,253 (29.79%) Kubernetes
3 539 (12.82%) Ansible
4 329 (7.82%) Grafana
5 309 (7.35%) Prometheus
6 81 (1.93%) Argo
7 80 (1.90%) Puppet
8 67 (1.59%) Single Sign-On
9 63 (1.50%) Progress Chef
10 44 (1.05%) Kibana
11 38 (0.90%) Packer
12 31 (0.74%) Istio
13 22 (0.52%) Podman
14 18 (0.43%) ITRS Geneos
15 17 (0.40%) CA Endevor
15 17 (0.40%) Nessus
15 17 (0.40%) Proxmox
16 16 (0.38%) logstash
16 16 (0.38%) Rancher
16 16 (0.38%) SCCM
Vendors
1 698 (16.60%) Microsoft
2 312 (7.42%) Oracle
3 228 (5.42%) Google
4 207 (4.92%) Splunk
5 202 (4.80%) Databricks
6 179 (4.26%) ServiceNow
7 121 (2.88%) Salesforce
8 112 (2.66%) SAP
9 104 (2.47%) VMware
10 93 (2.21%) Red Hat
11 63 (1.50%) Dynatrace
12 54 (1.28%) IBM
13 53 (1.26%) OpenAI
14 48 (1.14%) F5
14 48 (1.14%) MuleSoft
15 44 (1.05%) Cisco
16 39 (0.93%) Palo Alto
17 38 (0.90%) Atlassian
18 37 (0.88%) Talend
19 35 (0.83%) CyberArk