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 31 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,617 3,478 3,927
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.58% 10.60% 9.88%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.45% 11.72% 11.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,906 2,487 2,690
10th Percentile £385 £360 £382
25th Percentile £438 £425 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -6.36% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £725 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £488 £535
% change year-on-year +2.56% -8.88% -2.73%
Number of hourly rates quoted 114 25 94
10th Percentile £35.00 £32.15 £56.33
25th Percentile £56.38 £51.25 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £82.96 £74.86
90th Percentile £88.00 £91.00 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -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 45,107 29,668 33,959
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.95% 90.46% 85.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,893 18,635 21,816
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £736 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,744 1,629 1,969
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £13.69
25th Percentile £19.66 £17.35 £17.72
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.00 £40.33
% change year-on-year +83.17% -40.48% +0.81%

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 31 July 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 31 July 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 31 July 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 +3 4,801 £525 - 1,713
London +2 2,488 £550 - 870
UK excluding London +4 2,445 £500 +2.56% 1,047
Work from Home 0 1,596 £525 +2.44% 882
North of England +2 846 £500 +5.26% 313
Midlands +2 458 £491 +3.37% 154
South East -11 456 £525 +5.00% 290
Yorkshire +2 429 £500 +3.36% 94
West Midlands -1 373 £495 -1.04% 115
North West -3 332 £523 +10.11% 161
South West +13 317 £525 - 133
Scotland 0 200 £485 -1.77% 55
East of England +15 137 £509 +1.70% 59
North East +12 103 £425 -18.66% 60
East Midlands 0 80 £488 +7.26% 39
Wales -7 45 £480 +49.73% 32
Northern Ireland +16 22 £475 +7.95% 23
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
1 341 (6.07%) Confluence
2 137 (2.44%) SharePoint
3 132 (2.35%) Apache Spark
4 117 (2.08%) Apache Airflow
5 107 (1.90%) Apache
6 83 (1.48%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
11 25 (0.45%) nginx
12 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
13 15 (0.27%) Camunda
14 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
14 13 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) OpenStack
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
18 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
18 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
2 58 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
3 38 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
4 35 (0.62%) MS Visio
5 26 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 8 (0.14%) Chatbot
9 6 (0.11%) Trello
10 4 (0.071%) Notion
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 67 (1.19%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.69%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
3 10 (0.18%) Remedy ITSM
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle ERP
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.11%) Maximo
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.071%) Endur
8 4 (0.071%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.053%) Findur
9 3 (0.053%) Shopify
9 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
9 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,031 (53.96%) Azure
2 2,003 (35.66%) AWS
3 1,711 (30.46%) Azure DevOps
4 954 (16.98%) GitHub
5 724 (12.89%) GCP
6 587 (10.45%) GitHub Actions
7 456 (8.12%) Power Platform
8 447 (7.96%) Serverless
9 302 (5.38%) Amazon S3
10 266 (4.74%) AWS Lambda
11 256 (4.56%) Entra ID
12 250 (4.45%) AWS CloudFormation
13 232 (4.13%) Amazon EKS
14 229 (4.08%) Azure AKS
15 201 (3.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 195 (3.47%) Azure Monitor
17 187 (3.33%) Azure Data Factory
18 179 (3.19%) Amazon EC2
19 158 (2.81%) Dynamics 365
20 154 (2.74%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 244 (4.34%) Firewall
2 157 (2.80%) DNS
3 124 (2.21%) VPN
4 115 (2.05%) Network Security
5 56 (1.00%) TCP/IP
6 49 (0.87%) WAN
7 43 (0.77%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) DHCP
9 36 (0.64%) SD-WAN
10 33 (0.59%) BGP
11 31 (0.55%) Internet
12 28 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
13 27 (0.48%) HTTP
14 25 (0.45%) OSPF
15 21 (0.37%) SAN
16 20 (0.36%) VLAN
17 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
18 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
18 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
18 17 (0.30%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 310 (5.52%) Power BI
2 294 (5.23%) SQL Server
3 281 (5.00%) PostgreSQL
4 194 (3.45%) NoSQL
5 189 (3.36%) Data Warehouse
6 181 (3.22%) Relational Database
7 178 (3.17%) MongoDB
8 155 (2.76%) Data Lake
9 112 (1.99%) Amazon RDS
10 106 (1.89%) Metadata
11 105 (1.87%) Azure SQL Database
12 102 (1.82%) DynamoDB
13 85 (1.51%) Delta Lake
14 81 (1.44%) Oracle Database
15 69 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
15 69 (1.23%) Redis
16 68 (1.21%) MySQL
17 67 (1.19%) Big Data
18 64 (1.14%) Amazon Athena
19 53 (0.94%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 818 (14.56%) Jenkins
2 755 (13.44%) Git
3 680 (12.11%) JIRA
4 580 (10.33%) GitLab
5 130 (2.31%) Selenium
6 104 (1.85%) Postman
7 100 (1.78%) JUnit
7 100 (1.78%) SonarQube
8 84 (1.50%) Bitbucket
9 82 (1.46%) Maven
10 72 (1.28%) REST Assured
11 66 (1.18%) JMeter
12 63 (1.12%) Cypress.io
13 60 (1.07%) Cucumber
14 51 (0.91%) Gradle
15 49 (0.87%) Mockito
16 46 (0.82%) Gatling
17 41 (0.73%) LoadRunner
18 39 (0.69%) Visual Studio
19 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
General
1 1,383 (24.62%) Social Skills
2 1,001 (17.82%) Finance
3 821 (14.62%) Public Sector
4 476 (8.47%) Analytical Skills
5 363 (6.46%) Banking
6 132 (2.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 101 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
8 100 (1.78%) Retail
9 68 (1.21%) Organisational Skills
10 66 (1.18%) Influencing Skills
10 66 (1.18%) Legal
11 56 (1.00%) Marketing
12 48 (0.85%) Investment Banking
12 48 (0.85%) Military
13 45 (0.80%) Law
14 44 (0.78%) Telecoms
15 43 (0.77%) Financial Institution
16 40 (0.71%) Front Office
16 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
17 37 (0.66%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,098 (19.55%) DevOps Engineer
2 942 (16.77%) Developer
3 803 (14.30%) Senior
4 623 (11.09%) Architect
5 534 (9.51%) Lead
6 337 (6.00%) Azure Engineer
7 318 (5.66%) Data Engineer
8 287 (5.11%) Analyst
9 275 (4.90%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.17%) Platform Engineer
11 211 (3.76%) Cloud Engineer
12 205 (3.65%) Java Developer
13 198 (3.53%) Senior DevOps
14 191 (3.40%) AWS DevOps
15 182 (3.24%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 182 (3.24%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 181 (3.22%) Solutions Architect
17 177 (3.15%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 150 (2.67%) Senior Developer
19 149 (2.65%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 568 (10.11%) REST
2 490 (8.72%) .NET
3 336 (5.98%) RESTful
4 324 (5.77%) Kafka
5 317 (5.64%) Spring
6 297 (5.29%) Spring Boot
7 295 (5.25%) React
8 221 (3.93%) Node.js
9 170 (3.03%) JSON
9 170 (3.03%) OAuth
10 169 (3.01%) PySpark
11 165 (2.94%) Playwright
12 158 (2.81%) AngularJS
13 148 (2.63%) SOAP
14 140 (2.49%) .NET Framework
15 127 (2.26%) HTML
16 119 (2.12%) OAuth2
17 111 (1.98%) Middleware
18 107 (1.90%) YAML
19 105 (1.87%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 1,006 (17.91%) Cloud Native
2 396 (7.05%) Product Ownership
3 272 (4.84%) Distributed Systems
4 165 (2.94%) Onboarding
5 163 (2.90%) Enterprise Software
6 156 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
7 133 (2.37%) Hybrid Cloud
8 89 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
9 88 (1.57%) Public Cloud
10 85 (1.51%) Self-Motivation
11 76 (1.35%) Data Centre
12 74 (1.32%) Management Information System
13 72 (1.28%) Data Structures
14 66 (1.18%) AI Agents
14 66 (1.18%) Security Posture
15 61 (1.09%) Replication
16 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
16 57 (1.01%) Virtual Team
17 50 (0.89%) Mobile App
18 47 (0.84%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 487 (8.67%) Linux
2 298 (5.31%) Windows
3 103 (1.83%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 84 (1.50%) Unix
5 77 (1.37%) Windows Server
6 33 (0.59%) VMS
7 29 (0.52%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
13 7 (0.12%) AIX
13 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
14 6 (0.11%) CentOS
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,309 (58.91%) CI/CD
2 2,254 (40.13%) Agile
3 1,530 (27.24%) Infrastructure as Code
4 931 (16.57%) Containerisation
5 890 (15.84%) Continuous Improvement
6 859 (15.29%) Problem-Solving
7 855 (15.22%) Test Automation
8 826 (14.71%) Microservices
9 757 (13.48%) Stakeholder Management
10 743 (13.23%) AI
11 711 (12.66%) Observability
12 703 (12.52%) Scrum
13 673 (11.98%) Platform Engineering
14 668 (11.89%) Migration
15 659 (11.73%) Software Engineering
16 600 (10.68%) Analytics
17 514 (9.15%) Technical Leadership
18 503 (8.95%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 498 (8.87%) Data Modelling
20 463 (8.24%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,583 (28.18%) Python
2 1,029 (18.32%) SQL
3 800 (14.24%) Java
4 506 (9.01%) C#
5 455 (8.10%) Bash
6 447 (7.96%) JavaScript
7 423 (7.53%) PowerShell
8 310 (5.52%) TypeScript
9 213 (3.79%) Bicep
10 110 (1.96%) Go
11 69 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 68 (1.21%) T-SQL
13 67 (1.19%) PL/SQL
14 64 (1.14%) Shell Script
15 55 (0.98%) Groovy
16 53 (0.94%) Scala
17 32 (0.57%) C++
18 29 (0.52%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
20 26 (0.46%) C
Qualifications
1 1,772 (31.55%) Security Cleared
2 1,490 (26.53%) SC Cleared
3 323 (5.75%) Degree
4 222 (3.95%) Azure Certification
5 213 (3.79%) BPSS Clearance
6 195 (3.47%) DV Cleared
7 192 (3.42%) AWS Certification
8 123 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
9 81 (1.44%) Microsoft Certification
10 78 (1.39%) CISSP
11 61 (1.09%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 58 (1.03%) ISTQB
13 54 (0.96%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 41 (0.73%) PMI Certification
16 38 (0.68%) Master's Degree
17 32 (0.57%) CISM
18 30 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 25 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
20 23 (0.41%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 508 (9.04%) QA
2 273 (4.86%) Data Quality
3 192 (3.42%) Accessibility
4 153 (2.72%) GDPR
5 90 (1.60%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 76 (1.35%) NIST
6 76 (1.35%) WCAG
7 52 (0.93%) NCSC
8 45 (0.80%) PMO
9 40 (0.71%) PCI DSS
10 35 (0.62%) SLA
11 28 (0.50%) GRC
12 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
14 11 (0.20%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) SOC 2
16 9 (0.16%) Cyber Essentials
16 9 (0.16%) PSD2
17 8 (0.14%) Actionable Recommendations
17 8 (0.14%) HL7
System Software
1 1,103 (19.64%) Docker
2 181 (3.22%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
4 80 (1.42%) VMware Infrastructure
5 31 (0.55%) vSphere
6 24 (0.43%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Hyper-V
8 17 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (0.27%) Squid
9 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) IAG
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.089%) RACF
15 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,617 (28.79%) Terraform
2 1,448 (25.78%) Kubernetes
3 525 (9.35%) Ansible
4 371 (6.60%) Grafana
5 312 (5.55%) Prometheus
6 91 (1.62%) Argo
7 62 (1.10%) Puppet
8 61 (1.09%) Single Sign-On
9 43 (0.77%) Istio
9 43 (0.77%) Progress Chef
10 35 (0.62%) Microsoft Intune
11 31 (0.55%) Packer
12 25 (0.45%) vCenter Server
13 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
13 18 (0.32%) Kibana
13 18 (0.32%) SCCM
14 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
14 16 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
15 13 (0.23%) HAProxy
15 13 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 1,019 (18.14%) Microsoft
2 314 (5.59%) Oracle
3 272 (4.84%) Google
4 270 (4.81%) Databricks
5 206 (3.67%) ServiceNow
6 191 (3.40%) Salesforce
7 178 (3.17%) Splunk
8 140 (2.49%) Dynatrace
9 127 (2.26%) SAP
10 116 (2.07%) VMware
11 108 (1.92%) Red Hat
12 64 (1.14%) IBM
13 61 (1.09%) OpenAI
14 60 (1.07%) Informatica
15 58 (1.03%) Atlassian
16 53 (0.94%) MuleSoft
17 48 (0.85%) Cisco
18 42 (0.75%) AppDynamics
18 42 (0.75%) Okta
19 40 (0.71%) Foundry