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

6 months to
2 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,498 3,216 4,143
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.68% 10.39% 9.55%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.57% 11.43% 11.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,816 2,299 2,822
10th Percentile £381 £363 £400
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
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 117 18 124
10th Percentile £39.02 £33.58 £56.33
25th Percentile £61.87 £51.25 £61.51
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 £93.25 £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 43,739 28,136 37,017
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.86% 85.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,189 17,763 23,600
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.08% -3.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £621 £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 2,627 1,381 2,550
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.61 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +3.45%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +75.84% -34.42% +8.91%

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 2 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 2 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 2 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 +4 4,663 £525 - 1,631
UK excluding London +4 2,417 £500 - 1,165
London +4 2,394 £550 - 672
Work from Home 0 1,560 £525 - 937
North of England +7 867 £500 +1.46% 329
Yorkshire +2 465 £511 +2.25% 94
South East -7 454 £525 +5.00% 359
Midlands -1 428 £499 -0.25% 132
West Midlands -2 338 £500 -2.44% 78
North West +2 327 £510 +7.37% 192
South West +18 293 £523 -5.00% 148
Scotland +2 204 £483 +1.58% 52
East of England +29 141 £525 +5.00% 88
North East +11 93 £444 -15.07% 47
East Midlands -4 85 £488 +8.33% 54
Wales +2 52 £425 +39.13% 35
Northern Ireland +14 22 £475 +11.76% 45
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
1 322 (5.86%) Confluence
2 135 (2.46%) Apache Spark
3 128 (2.33%) SharePoint
4 105 (1.91%) Apache Airflow
5 97 (1.76%) Apache
6 81 (1.47%) SAS
7 49 (0.89%) CMS
8 32 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.56%) IIS
9 31 (0.56%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.56%) nginx
10 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.29%) Camunda
12 15 (0.27%) WebSphere
13 14 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
14 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
15 9 (0.16%) Mendix
15 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
16 8 (0.15%) Appian
17 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 71 (1.29%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.11%) Microsoft Project
3 43 (0.78%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 40 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
5 36 (0.65%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.073%) Notion
8 4 (0.073%) Spreadsheet
9 3 (0.055%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.055%) Trello
10 1 (0.018%) InDesign
10 1 (0.018%) Maya
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 71 (1.29%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.67%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle ERP
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.15%) Maximo
6 7 (0.13%) Magento
6 7 (0.13%) SAP MDG
7 6 (0.11%) Endur
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
8 5 (0.091%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.091%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.091%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 3 (0.055%) Findur
9 3 (0.055%) OpenText VIM for SAP
9 3 (0.055%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.055%) SAP BPC
9 3 (0.055%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 2,952 (53.69%) Azure
2 1,934 (35.18%) AWS
3 1,625 (29.56%) Azure DevOps
4 907 (16.50%) GitHub
5 690 (12.55%) GCP
6 542 (9.86%) GitHub Actions
7 480 (8.73%) Serverless
8 465 (8.46%) Power Platform
9 309 (5.62%) Amazon S3
10 271 (4.93%) AWS Lambda
11 251 (4.57%) AWS CloudFormation
12 247 (4.49%) Entra ID
13 223 (4.06%) Azure AKS
14 213 (3.87%) Amazon EKS
15 187 (3.40%) Azure Data Factory
16 186 (3.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 186 (3.38%) Amazon EC2
17 178 (3.24%) Azure Monitor
18 158 (2.87%) PaaS
19 155 (2.82%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 232 (4.22%) Firewall
2 138 (2.51%) DNS
3 118 (2.15%) Network Security
4 106 (1.93%) VPN
5 49 (0.89%) WAN
6 42 (0.76%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.65%) SD-WAN
7 36 (0.65%) SSL
8 34 (0.62%) BGP
9 27 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
10 26 (0.47%) Internet
11 24 (0.44%) DHCP
11 24 (0.44%) HTTP
11 24 (0.44%) OSPF
12 23 (0.42%) SAN
13 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
13 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
13 17 (0.31%) IPsec
13 17 (0.31%) LAN
13 17 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 302 (5.49%) Power BI
2 279 (5.07%) SQL Server
3 258 (4.69%) PostgreSQL
4 191 (3.47%) NoSQL
5 172 (3.13%) Relational Database
6 165 (3.00%) MongoDB
7 163 (2.96%) Data Warehouse
8 157 (2.86%) Data Lake
9 120 (2.18%) Amazon RDS
10 104 (1.89%) Azure SQL Database
11 101 (1.84%) Metadata
12 98 (1.78%) DynamoDB
13 87 (1.58%) Delta Lake
14 79 (1.44%) Oracle Database
15 71 (1.29%) Amazon Athena
15 71 (1.29%) Big Data
16 68 (1.24%) Amazon Redshift
17 64 (1.16%) Redis
18 62 (1.13%) Elasticsearch
19 53 (0.96%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 798 (14.51%) Jenkins
2 715 (13.00%) Git
3 671 (12.20%) JIRA
4 575 (10.46%) GitLab
5 126 (2.29%) Selenium
6 111 (2.02%) Postman
7 98 (1.78%) JUnit
8 91 (1.66%) SonarQube
9 79 (1.44%) REST Assured
10 75 (1.36%) Bitbucket
11 74 (1.35%) Maven
12 63 (1.15%) Cucumber
13 60 (1.09%) JMeter
14 53 (0.96%) Cypress.io
15 49 (0.89%) Gradle
16 44 (0.80%) Gatling
17 41 (0.75%) Mockito
18 39 (0.71%) Artifactory
19 36 (0.65%) Visual Studio
20 35 (0.64%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,361 (24.75%) Social Skills
2 1,010 (18.37%) Finance
3 766 (13.93%) Public Sector
4 441 (8.02%) Analytical Skills
5 361 (6.57%) Banking
6 131 (2.38%) Documentation Skills
7 114 (2.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 81 (1.47%) Retail
9 74 (1.35%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.22%) Legal
11 60 (1.09%) Organisational Skills
12 59 (1.07%) Marketing
13 45 (0.82%) Investment Banking
13 45 (0.82%) Military
14 44 (0.80%) Financial Institution
15 40 (0.73%) Law
16 36 (0.65%) Presentation Skills
17 34 (0.62%) Front Office
17 34 (0.62%) Telecoms
18 30 (0.55%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,102 (20.04%) DevOps Engineer
2 878 (15.97%) Developer
3 765 (13.91%) Senior
4 638 (11.60%) Architect
5 493 (8.97%) Lead
6 338 (6.15%) Azure Engineer
7 319 (5.80%) Data Engineer
8 308 (5.60%) Analyst
9 277 (5.04%) AWS Engineer
10 208 (3.78%) Cloud Engineer
10 208 (3.78%) Platform Engineer
11 203 (3.69%) AWS DevOps
12 194 (3.53%) Java Developer
13 189 (3.44%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 183 (3.33%) Solutions Architect
15 181 (3.29%) Senior DevOps
16 174 (3.16%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 165 (3.00%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 155 (2.82%) Business Analyst
19 152 (2.76%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 522 (9.49%) REST
2 486 (8.84%) .NET
3 322 (5.86%) Spring
4 311 (5.66%) RESTful
5 305 (5.55%) React
6 302 (5.49%) Spring Boot
7 296 (5.38%) Kafka
8 237 (4.31%) Node.js
9 170 (3.09%) AngularJS
10 165 (3.00%) PySpark
11 162 (2.95%) Playwright
12 158 (2.87%) OAuth
13 142 (2.58%) JSON
14 131 (2.38%) SOAP
15 130 (2.36%) .NET Framework
16 119 (2.16%) HTML
17 108 (1.96%) YAML
18 107 (1.95%) OAuth2
18 107 (1.95%) OpenID
19 106 (1.93%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 975 (17.73%) Cloud Native
2 372 (6.77%) Product Ownership
3 236 (4.29%) Distributed Systems
4 155 (2.82%) Onboarding
5 141 (2.56%) Enterprise Software
6 135 (2.46%) Legacy Systems
7 118 (2.15%) Hybrid Cloud
8 101 (1.84%) Public Cloud
9 82 (1.49%) Data Centre
10 81 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
11 73 (1.33%) Management Information System
12 70 (1.27%) Self-Motivation
13 66 (1.20%) Security Posture
14 60 (1.09%) Data Structures
15 56 (1.02%) Virtual Team
16 54 (0.98%) Mobile App
17 52 (0.95%) AI Agents
18 51 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
19 49 (0.89%) Replication
20 47 (0.85%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 475 (8.64%) Linux
2 288 (5.24%) Windows
3 102 (1.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 77 (1.40%) Unix
5 65 (1.18%) Windows Server
6 37 (0.67%) VMS
7 29 (0.53%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.27%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) CentOS
10 10 (0.18%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
12 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
13 5 (0.091%) Amazon Linux
13 5 (0.091%) Mac OS
13 5 (0.091%) Windows 10
13 5 (0.091%) zOS
14 4 (0.073%) Alpine Linux
14 4 (0.073%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,209 (58.37%) CI/CD
2 2,120 (38.56%) Agile
3 1,458 (26.52%) Infrastructure as Code
4 898 (16.33%) Containerisation
5 839 (15.26%) Problem-Solving
6 800 (14.55%) Continuous Improvement
6 800 (14.55%) Test Automation
7 796 (14.48%) Microservices
8 677 (12.31%) Migration
9 673 (12.24%) Stakeholder Management
10 651 (11.84%) AI
11 650 (11.82%) Scrum
12 646 (11.75%) Observability
13 608 (11.06%) Platform Engineering
14 604 (10.99%) Analytics
15 579 (10.53%) Software Engineering
16 487 (8.86%) Data Modelling
17 464 (8.44%) Technical Leadership
18 446 (8.11%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 437 (7.95%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,532 (27.86%) Python
2 1,015 (18.46%) SQL
3 755 (13.73%) Java
4 518 (9.42%) C#
5 414 (7.53%) JavaScript
6 404 (7.35%) Bash
7 385 (7.00%) PowerShell
8 288 (5.24%) TypeScript
9 197 (3.58%) Bicep
10 113 (2.06%) Go
11 69 (1.26%) Apex Code
12 65 (1.18%) Scala
13 64 (1.16%) Shell Script
14 60 (1.09%) T-SQL
15 57 (1.04%) PL/SQL
16 50 (0.91%) Groovy
17 32 (0.58%) C++
18 26 (0.47%) Kotlin
19 23 (0.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 22 (0.40%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,739 (31.63%) Security Cleared
2 1,466 (26.66%) SC Cleared
3 341 (6.20%) Degree
4 206 (3.75%) Azure Certification
5 185 (3.36%) BPSS Clearance
6 174 (3.16%) AWS Certification
7 173 (3.15%) DV Cleared
8 132 (2.40%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.51%) CISSP
10 73 (1.33%) Microsoft Certification
11 57 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 56 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.91%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.82%) PMI Certification
15 44 (0.80%) PMP
16 43 (0.78%) Master's Degree
17 41 (0.75%) CISM
18 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.47%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 469 (8.53%) QA
2 259 (4.71%) Data Quality
3 175 (3.18%) Accessibility
4 168 (3.06%) GDPR
5 117 (2.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 106 (1.93%) NIST
7 70 (1.27%) NCSC
8 68 (1.24%) WCAG
9 47 (0.85%) PCI DSS
10 41 (0.75%) SLA
11 33 (0.60%) PMO
12 31 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 27 (0.49%) GRC
14 19 (0.35%) 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 8 (0.15%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 1,056 (19.21%) Docker
2 175 (3.18%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.51%) Virtual Machines
4 76 (1.38%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.53%) vSphere
6 27 (0.49%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.33%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 9 (0.16%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) NFS
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.091%) Firmware
13 5 (0.091%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.091%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,579 (28.72%) Terraform
2 1,405 (25.55%) Kubernetes
3 519 (9.44%) Ansible
4 359 (6.53%) Grafana
5 311 (5.66%) Prometheus
6 89 (1.62%) Argo
7 74 (1.35%) Single Sign-On
8 65 (1.18%) Puppet
9 50 (0.91%) Istio
10 35 (0.64%) 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 (0.35%) Consul
16 16 (0.29%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 16 (0.29%) Kustomize
17 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
17 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 965 (17.55%) Microsoft
2 291 (5.29%) Oracle
3 276 (5.02%) Databricks
4 261 (4.75%) Google
5 199 (3.62%) ServiceNow
6 183 (3.33%) Salesforce
7 182 (3.31%) Splunk
8 126 (2.29%) SAP
9 121 (2.20%) Dynatrace
10 115 (2.09%) Red Hat
11 114 (2.07%) VMware
12 73 (1.33%) OpenAI
13 57 (1.04%) IBM
14 56 (1.02%) Informatica
15 54 (0.98%) Atlassian
16 49 (0.89%) CyberArk
17 43 (0.78%) Cisco
17 43 (0.78%) Foundry
18 41 (0.75%) MuleSoft
18 41 (0.75%) Okta