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

6 months to
16 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,620 3,387 4,096
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.68% 10.43% 9.61%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.55% 11.53% 11.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,893 2,416 2,798
10th Percentile £385 £363 £388
25th Percentile £440 £425 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £738 £726
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 23 118
10th Percentile £37.65 £36.50 £56.25
25th Percentile £61.81 £51.88 £61.25
Median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £85.23 £74.86
90th Percentile £93.63 £88.50 £86.05
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +4.48% -4.29% +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 44,779 29,366 36,386
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.09% 90.39% 85.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,858 18,449 23,259
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
25th Percentile £419 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,648 1,547 2,431
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.22 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.21 £17.45 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -5.29%
75th Percentile £68.50 £52.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.65 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.34 £38.12
% change year-on-year +84.88% -36.15% -3.74%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 4,765 £525 - 1,193
UK excluding London +5 2,460 £500 - 916
London +3 2,452 £550 - 459
Work from Home 0 1,624 £525 +1.16% 635
North of England +5 866 £500 +2.04% 250
Yorkshire +2 458 £500 - 51
South East -8 458 £525 +5.00% 257
Midlands +1 446 £492 -0.61% 133
West Midlands -2 356 £500 - 95
North West -2 331 £519 +9.27% 153
South West +16 307 £518 -5.69% 133
Scotland -1 210 £475 -4.04% 39
East of England +19 146 £525 +5.00% 58
North East +13 96 £425 -18.66% 47
East Midlands -4 85 £488 +5.41% 38
Wales -3 48 £425 +38.10% 28
Northern Ireland +16 22 £475 +11.76% 37
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
1 332 (5.91%) Confluence
2 136 (2.42%) Apache Spark
3 135 (2.40%) SharePoint
4 110 (1.96%) Apache Airflow
5 103 (1.83%) Apache
6 79 (1.41%) SAS
7 50 (0.89%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
9 35 (0.62%) nginx
10 29 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.28%) Camunda
11 16 (0.28%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
12 15 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
14 9 (0.16%) Appian
14 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
15 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 7 (0.12%) WebLogic
Applications
1 71 (1.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.16%) Microsoft Project
3 46 (0.82%) Microsoft Office
4 40 (0.71%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 36 (0.64%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 4 (0.071%) Notion
9 4 (0.071%) Trello
10 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 71 (1.26%) Dynamics CRM
2 40 (0.71%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.18%) Aladdin
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Magento
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
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%) Endur
7 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
7 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
7 5 (0.089%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 3 (0.053%) Infor LN
8 3 (0.053%) Salesforce CRM
8 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
8 3 (0.053%) SAP Oil and Gas
8 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,028 (53.88%) Azure
2 2,006 (35.69%) AWS
3 1,681 (29.91%) Azure DevOps
4 943 (16.78%) GitHub
5 711 (12.65%) GCP
6 576 (10.25%) GitHub Actions
7 473 (8.42%) Serverless
8 461 (8.20%) Power Platform
9 316 (5.62%) Amazon S3
10 279 (4.96%) AWS Lambda
11 257 (4.57%) AWS CloudFormation
12 242 (4.31%) Entra ID
13 224 (3.99%) Amazon EKS
14 218 (3.88%) Azure AKS
15 195 (3.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 191 (3.40%) Amazon EC2
17 184 (3.27%) Azure Monitor
18 178 (3.17%) Azure Data Factory
19 159 (2.83%) Dynamics 365
19 159 (2.83%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.20%) Firewall
2 148 (2.63%) DNS
3 116 (2.06%) Network Security
4 113 (2.01%) VPN
5 51 (0.91%) TCP/IP
6 50 (0.89%) WAN
7 39 (0.69%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.60%) BGP
10 29 (0.52%) Internet
11 28 (0.50%) DHCP
12 27 (0.48%) HTTP
12 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
13 25 (0.44%) SAN
14 24 (0.43%) OSPF
15 18 (0.32%) LAN
16 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
16 17 (0.30%) IPsec
16 17 (0.30%) MPLS
16 17 (0.30%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 302 (5.37%) Power BI
2 287 (5.11%) SQL Server
3 267 (4.75%) PostgreSQL
4 185 (3.29%) NoSQL
5 181 (3.22%) Relational Database
6 173 (3.08%) Data Warehouse
7 167 (2.97%) MongoDB
8 155 (2.76%) Data Lake
9 120 (2.14%) Amazon RDS
10 104 (1.85%) Metadata
11 101 (1.80%) Azure SQL Database
11 101 (1.80%) DynamoDB
12 86 (1.53%) Delta Lake
13 84 (1.49%) Oracle Database
14 71 (1.26%) Big Data
15 68 (1.21%) Amazon Athena
16 67 (1.19%) Amazon Redshift
17 66 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
18 65 (1.16%) Redis
19 56 (1.00%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 818 (14.56%) Jenkins
2 756 (13.45%) Git
3 687 (12.22%) JIRA
4 576 (10.25%) GitLab
5 136 (2.42%) Selenium
6 109 (1.94%) Postman
7 100 (1.78%) JUnit
8 97 (1.73%) SonarQube
9 82 (1.46%) Maven
10 80 (1.42%) REST Assured
11 75 (1.33%) Bitbucket
12 63 (1.12%) Cucumber
13 61 (1.09%) Cypress.io
14 58 (1.03%) JMeter
15 55 (0.98%) Gradle
16 44 (0.78%) Gatling
17 42 (0.75%) Mockito
18 39 (0.69%) Visual Studio
19 36 (0.64%) Artifactory
20 33 (0.59%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,392 (24.77%) Social Skills
2 1,018 (18.11%) Finance
3 802 (14.27%) Public Sector
4 468 (8.33%) Analytical Skills
5 357 (6.35%) Banking
6 128 (2.28%) Documentation Skills
7 120 (2.14%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 89 (1.58%) Retail
9 74 (1.32%) Influencing Skills
10 68 (1.21%) Legal
11 64 (1.14%) Organisational Skills
12 57 (1.01%) Marketing
13 46 (0.82%) Military
14 43 (0.77%) Law
15 42 (0.75%) Investment Banking
15 42 (0.75%) Telecoms
16 40 (0.71%) Financial Institution
17 37 (0.66%) Manufacturing
18 33 (0.59%) Front Office
18 33 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,135 (20.20%) DevOps Engineer
2 924 (16.44%) Developer
3 776 (13.81%) Senior
4 640 (11.39%) Architect
5 513 (9.13%) Lead
6 345 (6.14%) Azure Engineer
7 320 (5.69%) Data Engineer
8 304 (5.41%) Analyst
9 285 (5.07%) AWS Engineer
10 226 (4.02%) Platform Engineer
11 211 (3.75%) Cloud Engineer
12 207 (3.68%) AWS DevOps
13 203 (3.61%) Java Developer
14 193 (3.43%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 193 (3.43%) Senior DevOps
15 185 (3.29%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 184 (3.27%) Solutions Architect
17 177 (3.15%) Senior DevOps Engineer
18 154 (2.74%) Business Analyst
19 148 (2.63%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 548 (9.75%) REST
2 493 (8.77%) .NET
3 328 (5.84%) Spring
4 321 (5.71%) RESTful
5 312 (5.55%) Kafka
5 312 (5.55%) React
6 307 (5.46%) Spring Boot
7 239 (4.25%) Node.js
8 168 (2.99%) AngularJS
9 165 (2.94%) Playwright
9 165 (2.94%) PySpark
10 163 (2.90%) OAuth
11 157 (2.79%) JSON
12 135 (2.40%) SOAP
13 133 (2.37%) .NET Framework
14 130 (2.31%) HTML
15 113 (2.01%) OAuth2
16 107 (1.90%) CSS
16 107 (1.90%) Middleware
17 104 (1.85%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 990 (17.62%) Cloud Native
2 382 (6.80%) Product Ownership
3 255 (4.54%) Distributed Systems
4 173 (3.08%) Onboarding
5 152 (2.70%) Legacy Systems
6 151 (2.69%) Enterprise Software
7 120 (2.14%) Hybrid Cloud
8 100 (1.78%) Public Cloud
9 88 (1.57%) Data Protection Act
10 80 (1.42%) Self-Motivation
11 79 (1.41%) Data Centre
12 67 (1.19%) Security Posture
13 66 (1.17%) Data Structures
13 66 (1.17%) Management Information System
14 60 (1.07%) Replication
15 58 (1.03%) AI Agents
15 58 (1.03%) Virtual Team
16 55 (0.98%) Mobile App
17 53 (0.94%) Enterprise Cloud
17 53 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 478 (8.51%) Linux
2 292 (5.20%) Windows
3 102 (1.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.41%) Unix
5 66 (1.17%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) VMS
7 28 (0.50%) Ubuntu
8 26 (0.46%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.30%) Android
10 11 (0.20%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
12 7 (0.12%) CentOS
12 7 (0.12%) zOS
13 6 (0.11%) Amazon Linux
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.089%) AIX
14 5 (0.089%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,288 (58.51%) CI/CD
2 2,214 (39.40%) Agile
3 1,515 (26.96%) Infrastructure as Code
4 927 (16.49%) Containerisation
5 856 (15.23%) Problem-Solving
6 837 (14.89%) Test Automation
7 836 (14.88%) Continuous Improvement
8 817 (14.54%) Microservices
9 714 (12.70%) Stakeholder Management
10 701 (12.47%) AI
11 683 (12.15%) Migration
12 681 (12.12%) Observability
13 677 (12.05%) Scrum
14 638 (11.35%) Platform Engineering
15 620 (11.03%) Software Engineering
16 580 (10.32%) Analytics
17 487 (8.67%) Data Modelling
18 485 (8.63%) Technical Leadership
19 478 (8.51%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 449 (7.99%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,571 (27.95%) Python
2 1,023 (18.20%) SQL
3 784 (13.95%) Java
4 511 (9.09%) C#
5 432 (7.69%) Bash
5 432 (7.69%) JavaScript
6 402 (7.15%) PowerShell
7 302 (5.37%) TypeScript
8 191 (3.40%) Bicep
9 116 (2.06%) Go
10 70 (1.25%) Apex Code
11 69 (1.23%) PL/SQL
12 67 (1.19%) T-SQL
13 66 (1.17%) Shell Script
14 61 (1.09%) Scala
15 54 (0.96%) Groovy
16 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
17 27 (0.48%) C++
18 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 22 (0.39%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,782 (31.71%) Security Cleared
2 1,502 (26.73%) SC Cleared
3 335 (5.96%) Degree
4 216 (3.84%) Azure Certification
5 208 (3.70%) BPSS Clearance
6 190 (3.38%) AWS Certification
7 183 (3.26%) DV Cleared
8 129 (2.30%) Computer Science Degree
9 78 (1.39%) CISSP
10 74 (1.32%) Microsoft Certification
11 62 (1.10%) ISTQB
12 58 (1.03%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 55 (0.98%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.80%) Master's Degree
15 43 (0.77%) PMP
16 42 (0.75%) PMI Certification
17 35 (0.62%) CISM
18 33 (0.59%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 27 (0.48%) ITIL Certification
20 22 (0.39%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 493 (8.77%) QA
2 261 (4.64%) Data Quality
3 191 (3.40%) Accessibility
4 167 (2.97%) GDPR
5 105 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 95 (1.69%) NIST
7 75 (1.33%) WCAG
8 66 (1.17%) NCSC
9 41 (0.73%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.68%) PMO
11 37 (0.66%) SLA
12 27 (0.48%) GRC
12 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.28%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.21%) SOC 2
16 10 (0.18%) PSD2
17 9 (0.16%) HL7
17 9 (0.16%) ISO 20022
17 9 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,091 (19.41%) Docker
2 173 (3.08%) Active Directory
3 83 (1.48%) Virtual Machines
4 80 (1.42%) VMware Infrastructure
5 30 (0.53%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.32%) VMware ESXi
9 15 (0.27%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.25%) Postfix
11 12 (0.21%) 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
14 6 (0.11%) RACF
15 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
15 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,617 (28.77%) Terraform
2 1,437 (25.57%) Kubernetes
3 521 (9.27%) Ansible
4 378 (6.73%) Grafana
5 325 (5.78%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.67%) Argo
7 74 (1.32%) Single Sign-On
8 63 (1.12%) Puppet
9 47 (0.84%) Istio
10 39 (0.69%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.59%) Packer
12 28 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
13 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 23 (0.41%) HP ALM
15 20 (0.36%) Kibana
16 19 (0.34%) Consul
17 16 (0.28%) Kustomize
18 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
19 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 999 (17.78%) Microsoft
2 315 (5.60%) Oracle
3 269 (4.79%) Databricks
4 256 (4.56%) Google
5 197 (3.51%) ServiceNow
6 189 (3.36%) Splunk
7 185 (3.29%) Salesforce
8 132 (2.35%) SAP
9 128 (2.28%) Dynatrace
10 118 (2.10%) VMware
11 112 (1.99%) Red Hat
12 68 (1.21%) OpenAI
13 60 (1.07%) IBM
14 58 (1.03%) Informatica
15 54 (0.96%) Atlassian
16 47 (0.84%) CyberArk
16 47 (0.84%) Foundry
17 46 (0.82%) Cisco
18 44 (0.78%) MuleSoft
19 41 (0.73%) Okta