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

6 months to
8 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,568 3,331 4,156
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.67% 10.43% 9.64%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.54% 11.50% 11.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,856 2,384 2,830
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 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 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 £93.25 £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 44,398 28,953 36,844
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.10% 90.63% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,615 18,257 23,517
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 2,640 1,439 2,494
10th Percentile £14.80 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.70 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% +1.65%

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 4,717 £525 - 1,406
UK excluding London +4 2,440 £500 - 1,108
London +3 2,426 £550 - 521
Work from Home -1 1,584 £525 - 947
North of England +5 871 £500 - 323
Yorkshire +2 470 £500 - 87
South East -7 456 £525 +5.00% 297
Midlands 0 435 £500 - 133
West Midlands -3 345 £500 -2.34% 76
North West 0 323 £510 +7.37% 186
South West +16 297 £520 -5.45% 131
Scotland 0 206 £475 -1.96% 59
East of England +25 144 £525 +5.00% 96
North East +10 97 £425 -18.66% 52
East Midlands -1 85 £488 +8.33% 56
Wales +1 53 £425 +39.13% 42
Northern Ireland +17 22 £475 +11.76% 50
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
1 325 (5.84%) Confluence
2 137 (2.46%) Apache Spark
3 128 (2.30%) SharePoint
4 108 (1.94%) Apache Airflow
5 101 (1.81%) Apache
6 81 (1.45%) SAS
7 50 (0.90%) CMS
8 33 (0.59%) IIS
9 32 (0.57%) Jupyter
10 31 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
10 31 (0.56%) nginx
11 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
12 15 (0.27%) Palantir Foundry
12 15 (0.27%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
14 9 (0.16%) Appian
14 9 (0.16%) Sitecore CMS
15 8 (0.14%) Mendix
16 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 70 (1.26%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.13%) Microsoft Project
3 41 (0.74%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 39 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
5 36 (0.65%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 6 (0.11%) Spreadsheet
9 4 (0.072%) Notion
10 3 (0.054%) Adobe XD
10 3 (0.054%) Trello
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 72 (1.29%) 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%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 2,993 (53.75%) Azure
2 1,973 (35.43%) AWS
3 1,650 (29.63%) Azure DevOps
4 923 (16.58%) GitHub
5 704 (12.64%) GCP
6 556 (9.99%) GitHub Actions
7 481 (8.64%) Serverless
8 469 (8.42%) Power Platform
9 313 (5.62%) Amazon S3
10 276 (4.96%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.58%) AWS CloudFormation
12 249 (4.47%) Entra ID
13 224 (4.02%) Azure AKS
14 220 (3.95%) Amazon EKS
15 188 (3.38%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 188 (3.38%) Amazon EC2
16 182 (3.27%) Azure Monitor
17 180 (3.23%) Azure Data Factory
18 160 (2.87%) OpenShift
18 160 (2.87%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 233 (4.18%) Firewall
2 143 (2.57%) DNS
3 117 (2.10%) Network Security
4 110 (1.98%) VPN
5 50 (0.90%) WAN
6 43 (0.77%) TCP/IP
7 38 (0.68%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.61%) BGP
10 28 (0.50%) Internet
11 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
12 26 (0.47%) HTTP
13 25 (0.45%) DHCP
14 24 (0.43%) OSPF
15 23 (0.41%) SAN
16 18 (0.32%) LAN
17 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 17 (0.31%) IPsec
17 17 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 307 (5.51%) Power BI
2 283 (5.08%) SQL Server
3 265 (4.76%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.45%) NoSQL
5 178 (3.20%) Relational Database
6 166 (2.98%) MongoDB
7 165 (2.96%) Data Warehouse
8 155 (2.78%) Data Lake
9 122 (2.19%) Amazon RDS
10 103 (1.85%) Azure SQL Database
11 101 (1.81%) Metadata
12 98 (1.76%) DynamoDB
13 90 (1.62%) Delta Lake
14 80 (1.44%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.29%) Big Data
16 71 (1.28%) Amazon Athena
17 68 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
18 66 (1.19%) Redis
19 61 (1.10%) Elasticsearch
20 53 (0.95%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 811 (14.57%) Jenkins
2 727 (13.06%) Git
3 681 (12.23%) JIRA
4 581 (10.43%) GitLab
5 127 (2.28%) Selenium
6 114 (2.05%) Postman
7 97 (1.74%) JUnit
8 91 (1.63%) SonarQube
9 80 (1.44%) REST Assured
10 76 (1.36%) Bitbucket
11 73 (1.31%) Maven
12 62 (1.11%) Cucumber
13 61 (1.10%) JMeter
14 55 (0.99%) Cypress.io
15 48 (0.86%) Gradle
16 46 (0.83%) Gatling
17 40 (0.72%) Mockito
18 38 (0.68%) Artifactory
19 36 (0.65%) LoadRunner
19 36 (0.65%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,389 (24.95%) Social Skills
2 1,023 (18.37%) Finance
3 779 (13.99%) Public Sector
4 455 (8.17%) Analytical Skills
5 366 (6.57%) Banking
6 133 (2.39%) Documentation Skills
7 116 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 83 (1.49%) Retail
9 74 (1.33%) Influencing Skills
10 69 (1.24%) Legal
11 59 (1.06%) Organisational Skills
12 58 (1.04%) Marketing
13 46 (0.83%) Military
14 45 (0.81%) Investment Banking
15 42 (0.75%) Financial Institution
16 41 (0.74%) Law
17 36 (0.65%) Front Office
18 35 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
18 35 (0.63%) Telecoms
19 34 (0.61%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,113 (19.99%) DevOps Engineer
2 905 (16.25%) Developer
3 772 (13.86%) Senior
4 650 (11.67%) Architect
5 493 (8.85%) Lead
6 339 (6.09%) Azure Engineer
7 324 (5.82%) Data Engineer
8 303 (5.44%) Analyst
9 277 (4.97%) AWS Engineer
10 214 (3.84%) Platform Engineer
11 207 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
12 203 (3.65%) AWS DevOps
13 197 (3.54%) Java Developer
14 189 (3.39%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 187 (3.36%) Solutions Architect
16 185 (3.32%) Senior DevOps
17 178 (3.20%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 169 (3.04%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 155 (2.78%) Software Engineer
20 153 (2.75%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 535 (9.61%) REST
2 492 (8.84%) .NET
3 325 (5.84%) Spring
4 319 (5.73%) RESTful
5 307 (5.51%) React
6 303 (5.44%) Spring Boot
7 302 (5.42%) Kafka
8 239 (4.29%) Node.js
9 170 (3.05%) AngularJS
10 167 (3.00%) Playwright
11 166 (2.98%) OAuth
12 165 (2.96%) PySpark
13 149 (2.68%) JSON
14 134 (2.41%) SOAP
15 133 (2.39%) .NET Framework
16 124 (2.23%) HTML
17 113 (2.03%) OAuth2
18 111 (1.99%) OpenID
19 107 (1.92%) Middleware
20 106 (1.90%) CSS
Miscellaneous
1 989 (17.76%) Cloud Native
2 374 (6.72%) Product Ownership
3 242 (4.35%) Distributed Systems
4 164 (2.95%) Onboarding
5 144 (2.59%) Enterprise Software
6 139 (2.50%) Legacy Systems
7 118 (2.12%) Hybrid Cloud
8 99 (1.78%) Public Cloud
9 86 (1.54%) Data Protection Act
10 80 (1.44%) Data Centre
11 75 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
12 73 (1.31%) Management Information System
13 66 (1.19%) Security Posture
14 60 (1.08%) Data Structures
15 57 (1.02%) Virtual Team
16 56 (1.01%) AI Agents
17 54 (0.97%) Mobile App
18 52 (0.93%) Replication
19 51 (0.92%) Enterprise Cloud
19 51 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 480 (8.62%) Linux
2 293 (5.26%) Windows
3 101 (1.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.42%) Unix
5 66 (1.19%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.63%) VMS
7 27 (0.48%) 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%) Amazon Linux
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%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.072%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.072%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,265 (58.64%) CI/CD
2 2,157 (38.74%) Agile
3 1,487 (26.71%) Infrastructure as Code
4 928 (16.67%) Containerisation
5 855 (15.36%) Problem-Solving
6 825 (14.82%) Test Automation
7 803 (14.42%) Continuous Improvement
7 803 (14.42%) Microservices
8 683 (12.27%) Stakeholder Management
9 675 (12.12%) Migration
10 667 (11.98%) AI
10 667 (11.98%) Observability
11 659 (11.84%) Scrum
12 625 (11.22%) Platform Engineering
13 597 (10.72%) Analytics
14 596 (10.70%) Software Engineering
15 490 (8.80%) Data Modelling
16 470 (8.44%) Technical Leadership
17 466 (8.37%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 444 (7.97%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,550 (27.84%) Python
2 1,024 (18.39%) SQL
3 771 (13.85%) Java
4 520 (9.34%) C#
5 424 (7.61%) JavaScript
6 412 (7.40%) Bash
7 391 (7.02%) PowerShell
8 297 (5.33%) TypeScript
9 198 (3.56%) Bicep
10 115 (2.07%) Go
11 70 (1.26%) Apex Code
12 68 (1.22%) Scala
12 68 (1.22%) Shell Script
13 60 (1.08%) PL/SQL
13 60 (1.08%) T-SQL
14 53 (0.95%) Groovy
15 33 (0.59%) C++
16 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
17 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 22 (0.40%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,769 (31.77%) Security Cleared
2 1,487 (26.71%) SC Cleared
3 339 (6.09%) Degree
4 208 (3.74%) Azure Certification
5 192 (3.45%) BPSS Clearance
6 177 (3.18%) AWS Certification
7 176 (3.16%) DV Cleared
8 132 (2.37%) Computer Science Degree
9 81 (1.45%) CISSP
10 73 (1.31%) Microsoft Certification
11 58 (1.04%) ISTQB
12 57 (1.02%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (0.90%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.81%) Master's Degree
15 44 (0.79%) PMI Certification
15 44 (0.79%) PMP
16 39 (0.70%) CISM
17 29 (0.52%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 26 (0.47%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 474 (8.51%) QA
2 260 (4.67%) Data Quality
3 182 (3.27%) Accessibility
4 170 (3.05%) GDPR
5 116 (2.08%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 103 (1.85%) NIST
7 73 (1.31%) WCAG
8 66 (1.19%) NCSC
9 47 (0.84%) PCI DSS
10 40 (0.72%) SLA
11 36 (0.65%) PMO
12 30 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 27 (0.48%) GRC
14 19 (0.34%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.27%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
17 12 (0.22%) PSD2
18 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
18 11 (0.20%) SEPA
19 9 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 1,082 (19.43%) Docker
2 178 (3.20%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
4 76 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
5 29 (0.52%) vSphere
6 27 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.36%) Squid
8 18 (0.32%) 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 1,602 (28.77%) Terraform
2 1,435 (25.77%) Kubernetes
3 518 (9.30%) Ansible
4 372 (6.68%) Grafana
5 322 (5.78%) Prometheus
6 90 (1.62%) Argo
7 74 (1.33%) Single Sign-On
8 65 (1.17%) Puppet
9 49 (0.88%) Istio
10 37 (0.66%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.59%) Packer
12 27 (0.48%) Microsoft Intune
12 27 (0.48%) vCenter Server
13 23 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 21 (0.38%) Kibana
15 19 (0.34%) Consul
16 17 (0.31%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 13 (0.23%) HAProxy
18 13 (0.23%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 977 (17.55%) Microsoft
2 300 (5.39%) Oracle
3 274 (4.92%) Databricks
4 263 (4.72%) Google
5 202 (3.63%) ServiceNow
6 190 (3.41%) Splunk
7 182 (3.27%) Salesforce
8 129 (2.32%) SAP
9 124 (2.23%) Dynatrace
10 114 (2.05%) VMware
11 109 (1.96%) Red Hat
12 72 (1.29%) OpenAI
13 57 (1.02%) Informatica
14 56 (1.01%) IBM
15 53 (0.95%) Atlassian
16 49 (0.88%) CyberArk
17 47 (0.84%) Foundry
18 42 (0.75%) Cisco
18 42 (0.75%) MuleSoft
18 42 (0.75%) Okta