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 12 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -8
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,125 3,615 4,485
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.72% 9.98% 9.63%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.03% 11.58% 10.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,886 2,407 3,273
10th Percentile £363 £381 £407
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £615 £651 £675
90th Percentile £700 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £540 £550
% change year-on-year -7.41% -1.82% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 41 42 99
10th Percentile - £41.74 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £60.79 £50.63
Median hourly rate £58.50 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -16.43% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £74.26 £73.88 £76.53
90th Percentile £95.00 £79.75 £78.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.23 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -28.24% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and 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 31,669 31,225 41,270
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.01% 86.16% 88.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,839 18,782 27,829
10th Percentile £297 £310 £308
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £533
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -1.43% -3.16%
75th Percentile £623 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,054 1,104 1,592
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.10 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.46 £20.12 £18.95
Median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £43.17
Median % change year-on-year -28.14% -18.92% +23.33%
75th Percentile £43.75 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £67.00 £73.50 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.53 £33.00 £43.83
% change year-on-year -31.73% -24.70% +51.64%

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 12 November 2025.

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 12 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for DevOps in the UK

DevOps
Top 17 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 12 November 2025. 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 +2 3,479 £525 -8.70% 2,757
UK excluding London +5 1,880 £500 -7.41% 1,585
London 0 1,734 £550 -4.35% 1,401
Work from Home +1 1,331 £525 -3.49% 1,604
North of England +4 616 £492 -1.60% 448
South East +4 372 £513 -12.77% 467
Midlands +12 358 £515 -6.36% 208
Yorkshire -1 330 £500 - 110
West Midlands +13 288 £525 -8.70% 147
North West +3 258 £453 -13.71% 297
Scotland +8 227 £499 +10.89% 103
South West +2 206 £538 -10.42% 180
East of England +29 110 £531 +6.25% 118
East Midlands +17 70 £418 -6.18% 60
Wales +6 45 £430 +4.24% 53
North East -11 30 £550 -5.98% 42
Northern Ireland -12 5 - - 33

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
1 254 (6.16%) Confluence
2 101 (2.45%) Apache
3 72 (1.75%) Apache Airflow
4 62 (1.50%) SharePoint
5 59 (1.43%) SAS
6 56 (1.36%) Apache Spark
7 40 (0.97%) CMS
8 39 (0.95%) nginx
9 32 (0.78%) IIS
10 31 (0.75%) JBoss
11 27 (0.65%) WebLogic
12 26 (0.63%) CICS
12 26 (0.63%) OpenStack
13 21 (0.51%) WebSphere
14 17 (0.41%) Microsoft Exchange
15 16 (0.39%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 15 (0.36%) Anypoint
16 15 (0.36%) Mule
17 12 (0.29%) Oracle Service Bus
17 12 (0.29%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 69 (1.67%) Microsoft Excel
2 37 (0.90%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 34 (0.82%) Microsoft Office
4 30 (0.73%) Microsoft Project
5 18 (0.44%) Chatbot
5 18 (0.44%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.29%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 9 (0.22%) Trello
8 8 (0.19%) Weka
9 1 (0.024%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.024%) Moqups
9 1 (0.024%) Revit
Business Applications
1 64 (1.55%) Dynamics CRM
2 23 (0.56%) Endur
3 22 (0.53%) Oracle BPM
4 19 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
5 17 (0.41%) VisionPLUS
6 16 (0.39%) Aladdin
7 14 (0.34%) Remedy ITSM
8 13 (0.32%) Maximo
9 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
9 7 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
10 6 (0.15%) Oracle EBS
11 5 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
11 5 (0.12%) SAP ERP
11 5 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 4 (0.097%) Fidessa
12 4 (0.097%) NetSuite
12 4 (0.097%) Teamcenter
12 4 (0.097%) thinkFolio
12 4 (0.097%) Workday HCM
13 3 (0.073%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 2,001 (48.51%) Azure
2 1,552 (37.62%) AWS
3 1,105 (26.79%) Azure DevOps
4 684 (16.58%) GitHub
5 559 (13.55%) GCP
6 453 (10.98%) Serverless
7 386 (9.36%) GitHub Actions
8 275 (6.67%) Power Platform
9 263 (6.38%) Amazon S3
10 258 (6.25%) AWS CloudFormation
11 252 (6.11%) AWS Lambda
12 218 (5.28%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 201 (4.87%) Amazon EC2
14 167 (4.05%) Azure AKS
15 156 (3.78%) Amazon EKS
16 152 (3.68%) Amazon ECS
16 152 (3.68%) SaaS
17 151 (3.66%) Azure Data Factory
18 148 (3.59%) Virtual Private Cloud
19 143 (3.47%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 204 (4.95%) Firewall
2 136 (3.30%) DNS
3 89 (2.16%) VPN
4 75 (1.82%) SSL
5 72 (1.75%) TCP/IP
6 71 (1.72%) Network Security
7 52 (1.26%) HTTP
8 39 (0.95%) HTTPS
9 34 (0.82%) SSH
10 31 (0.75%) SMTP
11 30 (0.73%) WAN
12 23 (0.56%) FTP
13 22 (0.53%) BGP
14 18 (0.44%) DHCP
14 18 (0.44%) Kerberos
14 18 (0.44%) MPLS
15 16 (0.39%) LAN
15 16 (0.39%) OpenLDAP
16 15 (0.36%) SD-WAN
17 12 (0.29%) IMAP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 284 (6.88%) PostgreSQL
2 170 (4.12%) Amazon RDS
3 169 (4.10%) NoSQL
4 167 (4.05%) SQL Server
5 165 (4.00%) Power BI
6 121 (2.93%) MongoDB
7 100 (2.42%) Data Warehouse
7 100 (2.42%) Relational Database
8 89 (2.16%) Data Lake
8 89 (2.16%) Oracle Database
9 70 (1.70%) Azure SQL Database
10 69 (1.67%) DynamoDB
11 68 (1.65%) MySQL
12 64 (1.55%) Redis
13 58 (1.41%) Amazon Aurora
14 48 (1.16%) Elasticsearch
15 46 (1.12%) Metadata
16 38 (0.92%) Delta Lake
17 37 (0.90%) Big Data
18 34 (0.82%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 792 (19.20%) Jenkins
2 670 (16.24%) Git
3 593 (14.38%) JIRA
4 511 (12.39%) GitLab
5 147 (3.56%) Selenium
6 110 (2.67%) JUnit
7 104 (2.52%) SonarQube
8 97 (2.35%) Sonatype Nexus
9 93 (2.25%) Bitbucket
10 88 (2.13%) Postman
11 71 (1.72%) Cypress.io
12 62 (1.50%) Maven
13 61 (1.48%) Cucumber
13 61 (1.48%) Liquibase
14 50 (1.21%) Gradle
15 47 (1.14%) Artifactory
15 47 (1.14%) Visual Studio
16 46 (1.12%) JMeter
17 40 (0.97%) Oracle APEX
18 39 (0.95%) CircleCI
General
1 1,288 (31.22%) Social Skills
2 756 (18.33%) Finance
3 516 (12.51%) Public Sector
4 360 (8.73%) Banking
5 346 (8.39%) Analytical Skills
6 125 (3.03%) Documentation Skills
7 73 (1.77%) Investment Banking
8 64 (1.55%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 63 (1.53%) Telecoms
10 62 (1.50%) Marketing
11 61 (1.48%) Financial Institution
12 59 (1.43%) Retail
13 49 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
14 47 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
15 38 (0.92%) Front Office
16 37 (0.90%) Military
17 33 (0.80%) Back Office
18 32 (0.78%) Manufacturing
19 31 (0.75%) Pharmaceutical
20 28 (0.68%) Law
Job Titles
1 826 (20.02%) Developer
2 751 (18.21%) DevOps Engineer
3 538 (13.04%) Senior
4 361 (8.75%) Architect
5 322 (7.81%) Lead
6 254 (6.16%) AWS Engineer
7 206 (4.99%) Azure Engineer
8 196 (4.75%) AWS DevOps
9 189 (4.58%) Analyst
10 178 (4.32%) Data Engineer
11 166 (4.02%) Senior Developer
12 164 (3.98%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 160 (3.88%) Software Engineer
14 147 (3.56%) Cloud Engineer
15 140 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
16 136 (3.30%) Java Developer
17 128 (3.10%) Consultant
18 105 (2.55%) Business Analyst
18 105 (2.55%) Senior DevOps
19 103 (2.50%) Azure DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 464 (11.25%) REST
2 364 (8.82%) .NET
3 310 (7.52%) RESTful
4 247 (5.99%) React
5 246 (5.96%) Node.js
6 222 (5.38%) Kafka
7 209 (5.07%) JSON
8 186 (4.51%) SOAP
9 176 (4.27%) Spring
10 170 (4.12%) Spring Boot
11 163 (3.95%) HTML
12 148 (3.59%) XML
13 147 (3.56%) Elastic Stack
13 147 (3.56%) OAuth
14 146 (3.54%) AngularJS
15 114 (2.76%) CSS
16 106 (2.57%) YAML
17 93 (2.25%) Web Services
18 88 (2.13%) .NET Core
19 83 (2.01%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 522 (12.65%) Cloud Native
2 223 (5.41%) Product Ownership
3 166 (4.02%) Distributed Systems
4 123 (2.98%) Onboarding
5 112 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
6 100 (2.42%) Public Cloud
7 71 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
8 70 (1.70%) Virtual Team
9 67 (1.62%) Data Protection Act
9 67 (1.62%) Mobile App
10 60 (1.45%) Replication
11 54 (1.31%) Greenfield Project
12 52 (1.26%) Security Posture
13 50 (1.21%) Management Information System
14 48 (1.16%) Algorithms
15 46 (1.12%) Enterprise Software
16 44 (1.07%) Data Centre
17 40 (0.97%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 40 (0.97%) Self-Motivation
18 38 (0.92%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 513 (12.44%) Linux
2 251 (6.08%) Windows
3 118 (2.86%) Unix
4 65 (1.58%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 63 (1.53%) Windows Server
6 55 (1.33%) Android
7 49 (1.19%) Apple iOS
8 48 (1.16%) VMS
9 26 (0.63%) Amazon Linux
10 23 (0.56%) Ubuntu
11 22 (0.53%) CentOS
12 16 (0.39%) Solaris
12 16 (0.39%) Windows 10
13 12 (0.29%) Mac OS
14 11 (0.27%) zOS
15 7 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
16 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
17 3 (0.073%) AIX
17 3 (0.073%) Debian
17 3 (0.073%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,286 (55.42%) CI/CD
2 1,819 (44.10%) Agile
3 1,042 (25.26%) Infrastructure as Code
4 793 (19.22%) Problem-Solving
5 764 (18.52%) Containerisation
6 646 (15.66%) Test Automation
7 603 (14.62%) Microservices
8 527 (12.78%) Scrum
9 454 (11.01%) Migration
10 431 (10.45%) Continuous Improvement
11 412 (9.99%) Software Engineering
12 398 (9.65%) Analytics
13 373 (9.04%) AI
14 350 (8.48%) Observability
15 319 (7.73%) Mentoring
16 309 (7.49%) Stakeholder Management
17 291 (7.05%) SDLC
18 285 (6.91%) Infrastructure Automation
19 263 (6.38%) DevSecOps
19 263 (6.38%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 1,323 (32.07%) Python
2 785 (19.03%) SQL
3 617 (14.96%) Java
4 433 (10.50%) JavaScript
5 403 (9.77%) C#
6 394 (9.55%) Bash
7 374 (9.07%) PowerShell
8 277 (6.72%) TypeScript
9 167 (4.05%) Go
10 118 (2.86%) Bicep
11 81 (1.96%) PL/SQL
11 81 (1.96%) Shell Script
12 66 (1.60%) Groovy
13 57 (1.38%) Perl
14 51 (1.24%) C++
14 51 (1.24%) Scala
15 42 (1.02%) Ruby
16 36 (0.87%) T-SQL
17 34 (0.82%) Kotlin
18 27 (0.65%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,079 (26.16%) Security Cleared
2 893 (21.65%) SC Cleared
3 338 (8.19%) Degree
4 178 (4.32%) Computer Science Degree
5 152 (3.68%) AWS Certification
6 144 (3.49%) Azure Certification
7 127 (3.08%) DV Cleared
8 79 (1.92%) BPSS Clearance
9 77 (1.87%) Master's Degree
10 64 (1.55%) CISSP
11 63 (1.53%) Microsoft Certification
12 52 (1.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 42 (1.02%) CISM
14 40 (0.97%) ISTQB
15 36 (0.87%) Cisco Certification
16 29 (0.70%) PMI Certification
17 25 (0.61%) PMP
18 24 (0.58%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 17 (0.41%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 17 (0.41%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 367 (8.90%) QA
2 148 (3.59%) GDPR
3 137 (3.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 128 (3.10%) Accessibility
5 115 (2.79%) Data Quality
6 105 (2.55%) NIST
7 46 (1.12%) NCSC
8 37 (0.90%) PCI DSS
9 27 (0.65%) HIPAA
10 26 (0.63%) WCAG
11 25 (0.61%) SOC 2
12 20 (0.48%) SLA
13 17 (0.41%) PMO
14 16 (0.39%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 13 (0.32%) MiFID
15 13 (0.32%) SEPA
16 12 (0.29%) Cyber Essentials
17 11 (0.27%) EU AI Act
17 11 (0.27%) PSD2
18 10 (0.24%) GRC
System Software
1 1,014 (24.58%) Docker
2 182 (4.41%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.89%) VMware Infrastructure
4 50 (1.21%) Virtual Machines
5 30 (0.73%) vSphere
6 24 (0.58%) DFS Replication
7 16 (0.39%) Postfix
8 15 (0.36%) VMware NSX
9 13 (0.32%) Squid
9 13 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
10 12 (0.29%) Dovecot
10 12 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
11 11 (0.27%) Hyper-V
11 11 (0.27%) Virtual Servers
12 10 (0.24%) Slurm Workload Manager
12 10 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
13 8 (0.19%) GPFS
13 8 (0.19%) Lustre
13 8 (0.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.17%) KVM
Systems Management
1 1,283 (31.10%) Terraform
2 1,175 (28.48%) Kubernetes
3 537 (13.02%) Ansible
4 320 (7.76%) Grafana
5 312 (7.56%) Prometheus
6 89 (2.16%) Puppet
7 73 (1.77%) Argo
8 69 (1.67%) Single Sign-On
9 59 (1.43%) Progress Chef
10 44 (1.07%) Kibana
11 39 (0.95%) Packer
12 31 (0.75%) Istio
13 22 (0.53%) Microsoft Intune
14 21 (0.51%) Podman
15 20 (0.48%) ITRS Geneos
15 20 (0.48%) SCCM
16 17 (0.41%) CA Endevor
16 17 (0.41%) Proxmox
17 15 (0.36%) Nessus
18 14 (0.34%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 702 (17.02%) Microsoft
2 294 (7.13%) Oracle
3 223 (5.41%) Google
4 209 (5.07%) Splunk
5 174 (4.22%) Databricks
6 168 (4.07%) ServiceNow
7 118 (2.86%) Salesforce
8 109 (2.64%) SAP
9 108 (2.62%) VMware
10 96 (2.33%) Red Hat
11 61 (1.48%) Dynatrace
11 61 (1.48%) IBM
12 56 (1.36%) MuleSoft
13 46 (1.12%) Cisco
13 46 (1.12%) F5
14 45 (1.09%) Atlassian
14 45 (1.09%) OpenAI
15 38 (0.92%) Palo Alto
16 31 (0.75%) Talend
17 30 (0.73%) Denodo