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

6 months to
7 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,533 3,313 4,157
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.63% 10.41% 9.61%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.50% 11.48% 11.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,831 2,372 2,832
10th Percentile £385 £363 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £737
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 118 18 123
10th Percentile £38.25 £33.58 £56.30
25th Percentile £61.87 £51.25 £61.43
Median hourly rate £70.00 £66.25 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +5.66% -5.36% +6.70%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.06 £89.88 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +6.87%

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 44,261 28,859 36,923
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.01% 90.68% 85.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,507 18,191 23,560
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £517 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.28% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,650 1,433 2,509
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £17.50 £16.12
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -3.85%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.32 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.83 £38.12
% change year-on-year +77.04% -34.86% +8.82%

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 7 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 7 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 7 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 4,689 £525 - 1,684
UK excluding London +5 2,423 £500 - 1,413
London +3 2,412 £550 - 591
Work from Home -1 1,577 £525 +0.17% 1,547
North of England +5 869 £500 +1.54% 369
Yorkshire +2 468 £501 +0.20% 103
South East -6 450 £525 +5.00% 374
Midlands 0 433 £500 - 182
West Midlands -2 343 £500 -2.34% 100
North West +1 324 £510 +7.37% 205
South West +17 295 £515 -6.36% 160
Scotland 0 202 £475 - 91
East of England +23 143 £525 +5.00% 126
North East +10 96 £431 -17.46% 65
East Midlands -1 85 £488 +8.33% 81
Wales +1 52 £425 +39.13% 67
Northern Ireland +17 22 £475 +11.76% 70
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
1 320 (5.78%) Confluence
2 136 (2.46%) Apache Spark
3 125 (2.26%) SharePoint
4 107 (1.93%) Apache Airflow
5 99 (1.79%) Apache
6 81 (1.46%) SAS
7 49 (0.89%) CMS
8 32 (0.58%) IIS
8 32 (0.58%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.56%) nginx
10 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
11 15 (0.27%) Camunda
11 15 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
11 15 (0.27%) WebSphere
12 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
13 9 (0.16%) Appian
13 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
14 8 (0.14%) Mendix
15 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 67 (1.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
3 39 (0.70%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 38 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
5 35 (0.63%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.072%) Notion
8 4 (0.072%) Spreadsheet
9 3 (0.054%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.054%) Trello
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 72 (1.30%) Dynamics CRM
2 39 (0.70%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Oracle EBS
5 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 7 (0.13%) Magento
7 6 (0.11%) Endur
7 6 (0.11%) Maximo
8 5 (0.090%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.090%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.090%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.054%) Findur
9 3 (0.054%) OpenText VIM for SAP
9 3 (0.054%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.054%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.054%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,973 (53.73%) Azure
2 1,961 (35.44%) AWS
3 1,636 (29.57%) Azure DevOps
4 921 (16.65%) GitHub
5 699 (12.63%) GCP
6 556 (10.05%) GitHub Actions
7 480 (8.68%) Serverless
8 463 (8.37%) Power Platform
9 312 (5.64%) Amazon S3
10 275 (4.97%) AWS Lambda
11 253 (4.57%) AWS CloudFormation
12 248 (4.48%) Entra ID
13 225 (4.07%) Azure AKS
14 220 (3.98%) Amazon EKS
15 187 (3.38%) Amazon EC2
16 186 (3.36%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 182 (3.29%) Azure Data Factory
18 180 (3.25%) Azure Monitor
19 160 (2.89%) PaaS
20 159 (2.87%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 231 (4.17%) Firewall
2 140 (2.53%) DNS
3 115 (2.08%) Network Security
4 109 (1.97%) VPN
5 50 (0.90%) WAN
6 43 (0.78%) TCP/IP
7 38 (0.69%) SSL
8 37 (0.67%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.61%) BGP
10 27 (0.49%) Internet
10 27 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
11 25 (0.45%) DHCP
12 24 (0.43%) HTTP
12 24 (0.43%) OSPF
13 23 (0.42%) SAN
14 18 (0.33%) LAN
15 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
15 17 (0.31%) IPsec
15 17 (0.31%) MPLS
15 17 (0.31%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 301 (5.44%) Power BI
2 282 (5.10%) SQL Server
3 261 (4.72%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.47%) NoSQL
5 174 (3.14%) Relational Database
6 166 (3.00%) Data Warehouse
7 165 (2.98%) MongoDB
8 155 (2.80%) Data Lake
9 121 (2.19%) Amazon RDS
10 102 (1.84%) Azure SQL Database
11 100 (1.81%) Metadata
12 98 (1.77%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.61%) Delta Lake
14 80 (1.45%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.28%) Amazon Athena
15 71 (1.28%) Big Data
16 68 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
17 64 (1.16%) Redis
18 62 (1.12%) Elasticsearch
19 52 (0.94%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 807 (14.59%) Jenkins
2 718 (12.98%) Git
3 671 (12.13%) JIRA
4 579 (10.46%) GitLab
5 127 (2.30%) Selenium
6 113 (2.04%) Postman
7 97 (1.75%) JUnit
8 91 (1.64%) SonarQube
9 80 (1.45%) REST Assured
10 76 (1.37%) Bitbucket
11 73 (1.32%) Maven
12 62 (1.12%) Cucumber
13 61 (1.10%) JMeter
14 54 (0.98%) Cypress.io
15 48 (0.87%) Gradle
16 46 (0.83%) Gatling
17 40 (0.72%) Mockito
18 38 (0.69%) Artifactory
19 36 (0.65%) LoadRunner
20 34 (0.61%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,373 (24.81%) Social Skills
2 1,020 (18.43%) Finance
3 775 (14.01%) Public Sector
4 450 (8.13%) Analytical Skills
5 365 (6.60%) Banking
6 128 (2.31%) Documentation Skills
7 115 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 83 (1.50%) Retail
9 73 (1.32%) Influencing Skills
10 69 (1.25%) Legal
11 59 (1.07%) Organisational Skills
12 58 (1.05%) Marketing
13 45 (0.81%) Investment Banking
13 45 (0.81%) Military
14 42 (0.76%) Financial Institution
15 41 (0.74%) Law
16 36 (0.65%) Front Office
17 35 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
17 35 (0.63%) Telecoms
18 34 (0.61%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,108 (20.03%) DevOps Engineer
2 893 (16.14%) Developer
3 768 (13.88%) Senior
4 649 (11.73%) Architect
5 491 (8.87%) Lead
6 337 (6.09%) Azure Engineer
7 324 (5.86%) Data Engineer
8 299 (5.40%) Analyst
9 276 (4.99%) AWS Engineer
10 212 (3.83%) Platform Engineer
11 206 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
12 202 (3.65%) AWS DevOps
13 197 (3.56%) Java Developer
14 188 (3.40%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 188 (3.40%) Solutions Architect
15 185 (3.34%) Senior DevOps
16 176 (3.18%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 169 (3.05%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 154 (2.78%) Software Engineer
19 150 (2.71%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 532 (9.62%) REST
2 488 (8.82%) .NET
3 324 (5.86%) Spring
4 313 (5.66%) RESTful
5 304 (5.49%) React
6 302 (5.46%) Spring Boot
7 297 (5.37%) Kafka
8 238 (4.30%) Node.js
9 169 (3.05%) AngularJS
10 166 (3.00%) Playwright
11 164 (2.96%) PySpark
12 163 (2.95%) OAuth
13 145 (2.62%) JSON
14 134 (2.42%) SOAP
15 133 (2.40%) .NET Framework
16 121 (2.19%) HTML
17 111 (2.01%) OAuth2
18 110 (1.99%) OpenID
19 109 (1.97%) Middleware
20 104 (1.88%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 982 (17.75%) Cloud Native
2 372 (6.72%) Product Ownership
3 239 (4.32%) Distributed Systems
4 157 (2.84%) Onboarding
5 143 (2.58%) Enterprise Software
6 137 (2.48%) Legacy Systems
7 118 (2.13%) Hybrid Cloud
8 98 (1.77%) Public Cloud
9 83 (1.50%) Data Protection Act
10 80 (1.45%) Data Centre
11 74 (1.34%) Self-Motivation
12 72 (1.30%) Management Information System
13 66 (1.19%) Security Posture
14 61 (1.10%) Data Structures
15 57 (1.03%) Virtual Team
16 54 (0.98%) Mobile App
17 53 (0.96%) AI Agents
18 51 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
19 50 (0.90%) Replication
20 49 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 477 (8.62%) Linux
2 291 (5.26%) Windows
3 100 (1.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 77 (1.39%) Unix
5 66 (1.19%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.63%) VMS
7 27 (0.49%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.43%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.27%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 8 (0.14%) CentOS
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) zOS
14 5 (0.090%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.090%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.072%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.072%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,241 (58.58%) CI/CD
2 2,143 (38.73%) Agile
3 1,470 (26.57%) Infrastructure as Code
4 918 (16.59%) Containerisation
5 850 (15.36%) Problem-Solving
6 816 (14.75%) Test Automation
7 803 (14.51%) Microservices
8 801 (14.48%) Continuous Improvement
9 676 (12.22%) Stakeholder Management
10 674 (12.18%) Migration
11 660 (11.93%) AI
11 660 (11.93%) Observability
12 656 (11.86%) Scrum
13 617 (11.15%) Platform Engineering
14 596 (10.77%) Analytics
15 588 (10.63%) Software Engineering
16 489 (8.84%) Data Modelling
17 467 (8.44%) Technical Leadership
18 461 (8.33%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 443 (8.01%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,538 (27.80%) Python
2 1,017 (18.38%) SQL
3 764 (13.81%) Java
4 519 (9.38%) C#
5 420 (7.59%) JavaScript
6 409 (7.39%) Bash
7 386 (6.98%) PowerShell
8 295 (5.33%) TypeScript
9 197 (3.56%) Bicep
10 114 (2.06%) Go
11 70 (1.27%) Apex Code
12 68 (1.23%) Scala
13 67 (1.21%) Shell Script
14 59 (1.07%) T-SQL
15 58 (1.05%) PL/SQL
16 52 (0.94%) Groovy
17 33 (0.60%) C++
18 26 (0.47%) Kotlin
19 21 (0.38%) C
19 21 (0.38%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,756 (31.74%) Security Cleared
2 1,475 (26.66%) SC Cleared
3 338 (6.11%) Degree
4 206 (3.72%) Azure Certification
5 188 (3.40%) BPSS Clearance
6 176 (3.18%) AWS Certification
6 176 (3.18%) DV Cleared
7 132 (2.39%) Computer Science Degree
8 81 (1.46%) CISSP
9 72 (1.30%) Microsoft Certification
10 57 (1.03%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 57 (1.03%) ISTQB
11 50 (0.90%) Cisco Certification
12 44 (0.80%) Master's Degree
12 44 (0.80%) PMI Certification
12 44 (0.80%) PMP
13 39 (0.70%) CISM
14 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 25 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
16 24 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 471 (8.51%) QA
2 258 (4.66%) Data Quality
3 181 (3.27%) Accessibility
4 168 (3.04%) GDPR
5 116 (2.10%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 103 (1.86%) NIST
7 73 (1.32%) WCAG
8 66 (1.19%) NCSC
9 47 (0.85%) PCI DSS
10 40 (0.72%) SLA
11 34 (0.61%) PMO
12 30 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 27 (0.49%) GRC
14 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.22%) PSD2
17 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
17 11 (0.20%) SEPA
18 9 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 1,074 (19.41%) Docker
2 176 (3.18%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.48%) Virtual Machines
4 76 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.52%) vSphere
6 27 (0.49%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
9 17 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
10 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.25%) Postfix
12 9 (0.16%) Oracle RAC
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) HDFS
13 6 (0.11%) KVM
13 6 (0.11%) NFS
13 6 (0.11%) RACF
14 5 (0.090%) IAG
14 5 (0.090%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.090%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,590 (28.74%) Terraform
2 1,424 (25.74%) Kubernetes
3 515 (9.31%) Ansible
4 368 (6.65%) Grafana
5 318 (5.75%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.61%) Argo
7 74 (1.34%) Single Sign-On
8 65 (1.17%) Puppet
9 49 (0.89%) Istio
10 37 (0.67%) Progress Chef
11 32 (0.58%) Packer
12 27 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.49%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.42%) HP ALM
14 21 (0.38%) Kibana
15 19 (0.34%) Consul
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 13 (0.23%) HAProxy
18 13 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 966 (17.46%) Microsoft
2 298 (5.39%) Oracle
3 275 (4.97%) Databricks
4 260 (4.70%) Google
5 201 (3.63%) ServiceNow
6 190 (3.43%) Splunk
7 182 (3.29%) Salesforce
8 129 (2.33%) SAP
9 123 (2.22%) Dynatrace
10 114 (2.06%) VMware
11 108 (1.95%) Red Hat
12 72 (1.30%) OpenAI
13 57 (1.03%) Informatica
14 55 (0.99%) IBM
15 53 (0.96%) Atlassian
16 48 (0.87%) CyberArk
17 46 (0.83%) Foundry
18 42 (0.76%) Cisco
18 42 (0.76%) MuleSoft
18 42 (0.76%) Okta