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

6 months to
15 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,630 3,381 4,111
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.70% 10.42% 9.62%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.58% 11.52% 11.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,906 2,414 2,803
10th Percentile £385 £363 £388
25th Percentile £438 £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 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 113 23 120
10th Percentile £38.25 £36.50 £56.25
25th Percentile £61.87 £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 £74.58
90th Percentile £94.00 £88.50 £85.78
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 44,765 29,340 36,482
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.08% 90.42% 85.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,853 18,476 23,295
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
25th Percentile £418 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £624 £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 2,647 1,521 2,449
10th Percentile £14.94 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.61 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -4.70%
75th Percentile £68.50 £52.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.70 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.25 £24.64 £38.12
% change year-on-year +83.64% -35.36% -0.99%

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 15 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 15 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 15 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 4,766 £525 - 1,878
UK excluding London +5 2,462 £500 - 1,658
London +3 2,455 £550 - 593
Work from Home +2 1,629 £525 +2.34% 1,478
North of England +5 873 £500 +1.63% 437
Yorkshire +2 461 £500 - 135
South East -8 455 £525 +5.00% 404
Midlands 0 442 £492 -0.61% 211
West Midlands -2 351 £500 - 127
North West 0 334 £514 +8.19% 240
South West +16 304 £525 -4.55% 188
Scotland +1 214 £479 +0.79% 153
East of England +18 145 £525 +5.00% 162
North East +12 97 £425 -18.66% 63
East Midlands 0 86 £488 +5.41% 84
Wales -3 50 £425 +38.10% 70
Northern Ireland +15 22 £475 +11.76% 63
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
1 333 (5.91%) Confluence
2 137 (2.43%) Apache Spark
3 136 (2.42%) SharePoint
4 112 (1.99%) Apache Airflow
5 105 (1.87%) Apache
6 80 (1.42%) SAS
7 51 (0.91%) CMS
8 37 (0.66%) IIS
9 35 (0.62%) Jupyter
9 35 (0.62%) nginx
10 30 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
11 16 (0.28%) OpenStack
11 16 (0.28%) WebSphere
12 15 (0.27%) Camunda
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 70 (1.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 65 (1.15%) Microsoft Project
3 44 (0.78%) Microsoft Office
4 39 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 35 (0.62%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Chatbot
9 4 (0.071%) Notion
10 3 (0.053%) Trello
11 2 (0.036%) Adobe XD
12 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
12 1 (0.018%) InDesign
12 1 (0.018%) Maya
12 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%) Oracle ERP
3 10 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
4 9 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
5 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
5 8 (0.14%) Magento
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%) OpenText VIM for SAP
8 3 (0.053%) Salesforce CRM
8 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
8 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
8 3 (0.053%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 3,024 (53.71%) Azure
2 2,013 (35.75%) AWS
3 1,679 (29.82%) Azure DevOps
4 946 (16.80%) GitHub
5 714 (12.68%) GCP
6 577 (10.25%) GitHub Actions
7 479 (8.51%) Serverless
8 462 (8.21%) Power Platform
9 318 (5.65%) Amazon S3
10 282 (5.01%) AWS Lambda
11 259 (4.60%) AWS CloudFormation
12 243 (4.32%) Entra ID
13 225 (4.00%) Amazon EKS
14 218 (3.87%) Azure AKS
15 195 (3.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 194 (3.45%) Amazon EC2
17 184 (3.27%) Azure Monitor
18 176 (3.13%) Azure Data Factory
19 161 (2.86%) OpenShift
20 158 (2.81%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 235 (4.17%) Firewall
2 147 (2.61%) DNS
3 118 (2.10%) Network Security
4 111 (1.97%) VPN
5 50 (0.89%) WAN
6 49 (0.87%) TCP/IP
7 38 (0.67%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 34 (0.60%) BGP
10 29 (0.52%) Internet
11 27 (0.48%) DHCP
11 27 (0.48%) HTTP
11 27 (0.48%) Wi-Fi
12 24 (0.43%) OSPF
12 24 (0.43%) SAN
13 18 (0.32%) LAN
14 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
14 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 17 (0.30%) IPsec
14 17 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 300 (5.33%) Power BI
2 290 (5.15%) SQL Server
3 269 (4.78%) PostgreSQL
4 186 (3.30%) NoSQL
5 182 (3.23%) Relational Database
6 171 (3.04%) Data Warehouse
7 168 (2.98%) MongoDB
8 153 (2.72%) Data Lake
9 123 (2.18%) Amazon RDS
10 103 (1.83%) Metadata
11 102 (1.81%) DynamoDB
12 101 (1.79%) Azure SQL Database
13 87 (1.55%) Delta Lake
14 84 (1.49%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.28%) Big Data
16 68 (1.21%) Amazon Athena
17 67 (1.19%) Amazon Redshift
18 66 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
18 66 (1.17%) Redis
19 54 (0.96%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 827 (14.69%) Jenkins
2 756 (13.43%) Git
3 691 (12.27%) JIRA
4 580 (10.30%) GitLab
5 132 (2.34%) Selenium
6 112 (1.99%) Postman
7 99 (1.76%) JUnit
8 96 (1.71%) SonarQube
9 82 (1.46%) Maven
10 79 (1.40%) REST Assured
11 76 (1.35%) Bitbucket
12 62 (1.10%) Cucumber
13 59 (1.05%) Cypress.io
14 58 (1.03%) JMeter
15 54 (0.96%) Gradle
16 44 (0.78%) Gatling
17 41 (0.73%) Mockito
18 39 (0.69%) Visual Studio
19 37 (0.66%) Artifactory
20 35 (0.62%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,391 (24.71%) Social Skills
2 1,020 (18.12%) Finance
3 801 (14.23%) Public Sector
4 463 (8.22%) Analytical Skills
5 358 (6.36%) Banking
6 128 (2.27%) Documentation Skills
7 121 (2.15%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 87 (1.55%) Retail
9 74 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
10 68 (1.21%) Legal
11 62 (1.10%) Organisational Skills
12 56 (0.99%) Marketing
13 47 (0.83%) Military
14 43 (0.76%) Law
15 42 (0.75%) Investment Banking
16 41 (0.73%) Financial Institution
17 37 (0.66%) Manufacturing
18 36 (0.64%) Telecoms
19 33 (0.59%) Front Office
19 33 (0.59%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 1,141 (20.27%) DevOps Engineer
2 930 (16.52%) Developer
3 779 (13.84%) Senior
4 646 (11.47%) Architect
5 511 (9.08%) Lead
6 342 (6.07%) Azure Engineer
7 318 (5.65%) Data Engineer
8 301 (5.35%) Analyst
9 287 (5.10%) AWS Engineer
10 225 (4.00%) Platform Engineer
11 212 (3.77%) Cloud Engineer
12 209 (3.71%) AWS DevOps
13 206 (3.66%) Java Developer
14 195 (3.46%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 193 (3.43%) Senior DevOps
16 186 (3.30%) Solutions Architect
17 183 (3.25%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 177 (3.14%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 152 (2.70%) Business Analyst
20 149 (2.65%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 548 (9.73%) REST
2 499 (8.86%) .NET
3 333 (5.91%) Spring
4 323 (5.74%) RESTful
5 314 (5.58%) Kafka
6 312 (5.54%) Spring Boot
7 309 (5.49%) React
8 240 (4.26%) Node.js
9 168 (2.98%) AngularJS
10 166 (2.95%) OAuth
11 165 (2.93%) PySpark
12 164 (2.91%) Playwright
13 158 (2.81%) JSON
14 136 (2.42%) SOAP
15 135 (2.40%) .NET Framework
16 130 (2.31%) HTML
17 112 (1.99%) OAuth2
18 107 (1.90%) CSS
18 107 (1.90%) Middleware
19 104 (1.85%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,003 (17.82%) Cloud Native
2 379 (6.73%) Product Ownership
3 254 (4.51%) Distributed Systems
4 172 (3.06%) Onboarding
5 152 (2.70%) Enterprise Software
6 151 (2.68%) Legacy Systems
7 120 (2.13%) Hybrid Cloud
8 103 (1.83%) Public Cloud
9 88 (1.56%) Data Protection Act
10 81 (1.44%) Data Centre
11 77 (1.37%) Self-Motivation
12 67 (1.19%) Management Information System
12 67 (1.19%) Security Posture
13 64 (1.14%) Data Structures
14 60 (1.07%) Replication
14 60 (1.07%) Virtual Team
15 57 (1.01%) AI Agents
16 55 (0.98%) Mobile App
17 53 (0.94%) Enterprise Cloud
17 53 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 479 (8.51%) Linux
2 291 (5.17%) Windows
3 102 (1.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 79 (1.40%) Unix
5 66 (1.17%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) VMS
7 27 (0.48%) Ubuntu
8 25 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 16 (0.28%) 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 3,296 (58.54%) CI/CD
2 2,211 (39.27%) Agile
3 1,520 (27.00%) Infrastructure as Code
4 937 (16.64%) Containerisation
5 859 (15.26%) Problem-Solving
6 838 (14.88%) Test Automation
7 834 (14.81%) Continuous Improvement
8 820 (14.56%) Microservices
9 708 (12.58%) Stakeholder Management
10 690 (12.26%) AI
11 687 (12.20%) Migration
12 679 (12.06%) Observability
13 678 (12.04%) Scrum
14 638 (11.33%) Platform Engineering
15 618 (10.98%) Software Engineering
16 581 (10.32%) Analytics
17 485 (8.61%) Data Modelling
17 485 (8.61%) Technical Leadership
18 473 (8.40%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 449 (7.98%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,576 (27.99%) Python
2 1,020 (18.12%) SQL
3 791 (14.05%) Java
4 515 (9.15%) C#
5 432 (7.67%) JavaScript
6 429 (7.62%) Bash
7 401 (7.12%) PowerShell
8 301 (5.35%) TypeScript
9 192 (3.41%) Bicep
10 116 (2.06%) Go
11 70 (1.24%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.23%) PL/SQL
13 67 (1.19%) Shell Script
14 65 (1.15%) T-SQL
15 62 (1.10%) Scala
16 53 (0.94%) Groovy
17 28 (0.50%) Kotlin
18 27 (0.48%) C++
19 24 (0.43%) Data Analysis Expressions
20 21 (0.37%) Perl
Qualifications
1 1,790 (31.79%) Security Cleared
2 1,508 (26.79%) SC Cleared
3 336 (5.97%) Degree
4 216 (3.84%) Azure Certification
5 212 (3.77%) BPSS Clearance
6 192 (3.41%) AWS Certification
7 185 (3.29%) DV Cleared
8 128 (2.27%) Computer Science Degree
9 80 (1.42%) CISSP
10 74 (1.31%) Microsoft Certification
11 61 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 59 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 54 (0.96%) Cisco Certification
14 45 (0.80%) Master's Degree
15 43 (0.76%) PMP
16 42 (0.75%) PMI Certification
17 37 (0.66%) CISM
18 33 (0.59%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 488 (8.67%) QA
2 263 (4.67%) Data Quality
3 191 (3.39%) Accessibility
4 167 (2.97%) GDPR
5 106 (1.88%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 98 (1.74%) NIST
7 76 (1.35%) WCAG
8 66 (1.17%) NCSC
9 43 (0.76%) PCI DSS
10 38 (0.67%) PMO
11 37 (0.66%) SLA
12 27 (0.48%) GRC
12 27 (0.48%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 17 (0.30%) HIPAA
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
14 13 (0.23%) SOC 2
15 12 (0.21%) PSD2
16 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
16 11 (0.20%) SEPA
17 9 (0.16%) HL7
System Software
1 1,095 (19.45%) Docker
2 173 (3.07%) Active Directory
3 82 (1.46%) Virtual Machines
4 78 (1.39%) 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 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) IAG
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) NFS
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.089%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.089%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,624 (28.85%) Terraform
2 1,453 (25.81%) Kubernetes
3 521 (9.25%) Ansible
4 380 (6.75%) Grafana
5 327 (5.81%) Prometheus
6 94 (1.67%) Argo
7 75 (1.33%) Single Sign-On
8 63 (1.12%) Puppet
9 48 (0.85%) Istio
10 39 (0.69%) 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 20 (0.36%) Kibana
15 19 (0.34%) Consul
16 17 (0.30%) Kustomize
17 15 (0.27%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 15 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
18 14 (0.25%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 992 (17.62%) Microsoft
2 319 (5.67%) Oracle
3 270 (4.80%) Databricks
4 262 (4.65%) Google
5 197 (3.50%) ServiceNow
6 191 (3.39%) Splunk
7 185 (3.29%) Salesforce
8 132 (2.34%) SAP
9 127 (2.26%) Dynatrace
10 116 (2.06%) VMware
11 113 (2.01%) Red Hat
12 69 (1.23%) OpenAI
13 59 (1.05%) IBM
14 58 (1.03%) Informatica
15 55 (0.98%) Atlassian
16 48 (0.85%) Foundry
17 47 (0.83%) CyberArk
18 45 (0.80%) Cisco
19 44 (0.78%) MuleSoft
20 41 (0.73%) Okta