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

6 months to
15 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,471 3,291 3,965
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.19% 10.65% 8.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.88% 11.89% 10.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,131 2,288 2,854
10th Percentile £375 £388 £407
25th Percentile £427 £460 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -7.17%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £707 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 23 101
10th Percentile £44.27 £36.30 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £58.45 £56.65
Median hourly rate £52.50 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.30% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £80.75 £71.90
90th Percentile £93.75 £87.50 £81.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £70.36 £65.00
% change year-on-year -32.49% +8.25% -0.76%

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 34,716 27,671 39,074
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.89% 89.53% 87.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,993 16,979 25,588
10th Percentile £310 £306 £300
25th Percentile £409 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £721 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £495 £500
% change year-on-year -3.43% -1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,102 844 2,136
10th Percentile £14.55 £15.62 £13.25
25th Percentile £17.87 £21.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.28
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -2.35% -1.12%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.29
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.27
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £30.45 £35.00
% change year-on-year -17.41% -13.00% +7.69%

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 February 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 February 2026.

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 15 February 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 +1 3,809 £525 -8.70% 1,279
UK excluding London +7 1,998 £500 -4.76% 1,018
London -3 1,912 £535 -10.83% 432
Work from Home -3 1,264 £525 -2.78% 728
North of England +5 683 £500 -1.96% 291
South East +2 413 £525 -8.70% 331
Midlands +20 385 £509 +2.88% 134
Yorkshire +1 354 £500 - 94
West Midlands +17 306 £525 +5.00% 95
North West +3 281 £473 -6.71% 161
South West +12 247 £525 -12.50% 132
Scotland +4 194 £450 - 56
East of England +19 115 £575 +9.26% 54
East Midlands +9 79 £425 -10.53% 40
North East -3 51 £475 -9.52% 39
Wales +8 37 £425 +72.44% 27
Northern Ireland -6 9 £475 +26.67% 10

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
1 265 (5.93%) Confluence
2 93 (2.08%) Apache Spark
3 89 (1.99%) SharePoint
4 87 (1.95%) Apache
5 56 (1.25%) SAS
6 55 (1.23%) Apache Airflow
7 36 (0.81%) OpenStack
8 34 (0.76%) nginx
9 30 (0.67%) CMS
10 24 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
11 21 (0.47%) IIS
12 15 (0.34%) JBoss
13 14 (0.31%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.27%) Sitecore CMS
15 11 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
15 11 (0.25%) Mendix
16 10 (0.22%) HCL Notes
17 9 (0.20%) WebSphere
18 8 (0.18%) GeoServer
18 8 (0.18%) Smallworld
Applications
1 99 (2.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 42 (0.94%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.74%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 4 (0.089%) Mozilla Thunderbird
8 4 (0.089%) Trello
9 2 (0.045%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.022%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.022%) Maya
10 1 (0.022%) Revit
10 1 (0.022%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 68 (1.52%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.25%) Endur
2 11 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
3 10 (0.22%) Maximo
3 10 (0.22%) Oracle ERP
4 8 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
5 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
5 5 (0.11%) SAP ERP
5 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 4 (0.089%) Oracle EBS
6 4 (0.089%) Payment Gateway
7 3 (0.067%) NetSuite
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle Assets
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle General Ledger
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle Payables
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle Receivables
7 3 (0.067%) SAP FI
7 3 (0.067%) SAP FI/CO
7 3 (0.067%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,337 (52.27%) Azure
2 1,617 (36.17%) AWS
3 1,255 (28.07%) Azure DevOps
4 848 (18.97%) GitHub
5 671 (15.01%) GCP
6 537 (12.01%) Serverless
7 485 (10.85%) GitHub Actions
8 371 (8.30%) Power Platform
9 286 (6.40%) AWS CloudFormation
10 263 (5.88%) AWS Lambda
11 247 (5.52%) Amazon S3
12 222 (4.97%) Azure Data Factory
13 213 (4.76%) Azure AKS
14 204 (4.56%) Amazon EKS
15 188 (4.20%) OpenShift
16 176 (3.94%) Entra ID
17 173 (3.87%) Amazon ECS
18 172 (3.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 172 (3.85%) Dynamics 365
19 164 (3.67%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 199 (4.45%) Firewall
2 109 (2.44%) DNS
3 95 (2.12%) Network Security
4 92 (2.06%) VPN
5 54 (1.21%) TCP/IP
6 46 (1.03%) SSL
7 33 (0.74%) HTTP
7 33 (0.74%) HTTPS
8 21 (0.47%) WAN
9 16 (0.36%) DHCP
9 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
10 14 (0.31%) BGP
10 14 (0.31%) SD-WAN
11 13 (0.29%) SAN
12 12 (0.27%) MPLS
13 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
14 10 (0.22%) Internet
14 10 (0.22%) IPsec
14 10 (0.22%) LAN
15 9 (0.20%) FTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 262 (5.86%) PostgreSQL
2 238 (5.32%) Power BI
3 181 (4.05%) SQL Server
4 172 (3.85%) NoSQL
5 144 (3.22%) Data Lake
6 135 (3.02%) Amazon RDS
7 122 (2.73%) Relational Database
8 111 (2.48%) Data Warehouse
9 106 (2.37%) MongoDB
10 98 (2.19%) Azure SQL Database
11 78 (1.74%) Oracle Database
12 75 (1.68%) DynamoDB
13 74 (1.66%) Elasticsearch
14 69 (1.54%) MySQL
15 61 (1.36%) Delta Lake
16 58 (1.30%) Metadata
17 55 (1.23%) Redis
18 51 (1.14%) Tableau
19 50 (1.12%) Big Data
20 47 (1.05%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 779 (17.42%) Jenkins
2 598 (13.38%) Git
3 584 (13.06%) GitLab
4 577 (12.91%) JIRA
5 135 (3.02%) Selenium
6 98 (2.19%) JUnit
7 91 (2.04%) Postman
8 67 (1.50%) Bitbucket
9 64 (1.43%) SonarQube
10 63 (1.41%) Cucumber
10 63 (1.41%) Sonatype Nexus
11 62 (1.39%) Cypress.io
12 51 (1.14%) Maven
13 50 (1.12%) Artifactory
14 49 (1.10%) JMeter
15 47 (1.05%) REST Assured
16 40 (0.89%) Gradle
17 39 (0.87%) Liquibase
18 38 (0.85%) Oracle APEX
19 32 (0.72%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,327 (29.68%) Social Skills
2 797 (17.83%) Finance
3 578 (12.93%) Public Sector
4 370 (8.28%) Analytical Skills
5 336 (7.52%) Banking
6 156 (3.49%) Documentation Skills
7 80 (1.79%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 66 (1.48%) Financial Institution
10 63 (1.41%) Marketing
11 50 (1.12%) Retail
12 46 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
13 44 (0.98%) Front Office
14 42 (0.94%) Investment Banking
15 41 (0.92%) Telecoms
16 37 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
17 34 (0.76%) Military
18 32 (0.72%) Legal
19 30 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
20 25 (0.56%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 893 (19.97%) DevOps Engineer
2 761 (17.02%) Developer
3 618 (13.82%) Senior
4 461 (10.31%) Architect
5 347 (7.76%) Lead
6 276 (6.17%) Azure Engineer
7 249 (5.57%) AWS Engineer
8 237 (5.30%) Data Engineer
9 232 (5.19%) Analyst
10 196 (4.38%) AWS DevOps
11 174 (3.89%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 169 (3.78%) Cloud Engineer
13 156 (3.49%) Software Engineer
14 155 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
15 139 (3.11%) Senior Developer
16 138 (3.09%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 132 (2.95%) Solutions Architect
18 127 (2.84%) Senior DevOps
19 121 (2.71%) Business Analyst
19 121 (2.71%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 510 (11.41%) REST
2 398 (8.90%) .NET
3 305 (6.82%) React
4 299 (6.69%) Node.js
5 257 (5.75%) RESTful
6 251 (5.61%) Kafka
7 248 (5.55%) Spring
8 228 (5.10%) Spring Boot
9 168 (3.76%) JSON
10 161 (3.60%) OAuth
11 156 (3.49%) AngularJS
12 141 (3.15%) Elastic Stack
13 131 (2.93%) HTML
14 128 (2.86%) SOAP
14 128 (2.86%) YAML
15 124 (2.77%) XML
16 120 (2.68%) Playwright
17 117 (2.62%) PySpark
18 113 (2.53%) CSS
19 103 (2.30%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 652 (14.58%) Cloud Native
2 247 (5.52%) Product Ownership
3 166 (3.71%) Distributed Systems
4 123 (2.75%) Onboarding
5 122 (2.73%) Public Cloud
6 96 (2.15%) Legacy Systems
7 83 (1.86%) Hybrid Cloud
8 75 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
9 56 (1.25%) Management Information System
10 53 (1.19%) Virtual Team
11 52 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
12 49 (1.10%) Data Centre
13 48 (1.07%) NHS
13 48 (1.07%) Private Cloud
14 46 (1.03%) Security Posture
15 42 (0.94%) Mobile App
16 38 (0.85%) Replication
16 38 (0.85%) Self-Motivation
17 36 (0.81%) AI Agents
17 36 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 487 (10.89%) Linux
2 244 (5.46%) Windows
3 107 (2.39%) Unix
4 56 (1.25%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 47 (1.05%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.98%) VMS
7 27 (0.60%) Ubuntu
8 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
9 19 (0.42%) Android
10 18 (0.40%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.38%) CentOS
12 10 (0.22%) Solaris
13 8 (0.18%) Windows Server 2019
14 7 (0.16%) Amazon Linux
14 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.089%) Mac OS
17 2 (0.045%) Debian
17 2 (0.045%) zOS
18 1 (0.022%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,591 (57.95%) CI/CD
2 1,725 (38.58%) Agile
3 1,199 (26.82%) Infrastructure as Code
4 871 (19.48%) Containerisation
5 860 (19.24%) Problem-Solving
6 680 (15.21%) Microservices
7 675 (15.10%) Test Automation
8 542 (12.12%) Continuous Improvement
9 528 (11.81%) Analytics
10 512 (11.45%) Migration
11 491 (10.98%) Observability
12 474 (10.60%) Scrum
13 458 (10.24%) AI
14 427 (9.55%) Stakeholder Management
15 404 (9.04%) Software Engineering
16 359 (8.03%) Data Modelling
17 358 (8.01%) Mentoring
18 306 (6.84%) Data Pipeline
19 305 (6.82%) Platform Engineering
20 297 (6.64%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,380 (30.87%) Python
2 891 (19.93%) SQL
3 592 (13.24%) Java
4 449 (10.04%) C#
5 427 (9.55%) JavaScript
6 370 (8.28%) PowerShell
7 345 (7.72%) Bash
8 315 (7.05%) TypeScript
9 152 (3.40%) Bicep
10 148 (3.31%) Go
11 78 (1.74%) PL/SQL
12 64 (1.43%) Scala
13 60 (1.34%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.10%) Ruby
15 48 (1.07%) C++
16 45 (1.01%) Groovy
17 43 (0.96%) T-SQL
18 34 (0.76%) Perl
19 28 (0.63%) Rust
20 23 (0.51%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,363 (30.49%) Security Cleared
2 1,125 (25.16%) SC Cleared
3 383 (8.57%) Degree
4 197 (4.41%) Azure Certification
5 195 (4.36%) Computer Science Degree
6 145 (3.24%) DV Cleared
7 142 (3.18%) AWS Certification
8 115 (2.57%) BPSS Clearance
9 92 (2.06%) Master's Degree
10 74 (1.66%) CISSP
11 70 (1.57%) Microsoft Certification
12 59 (1.32%) CISM
13 50 (1.12%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 49 (1.10%) ISTQB
15 38 (0.85%) PMI Certification
16 31 (0.69%) Cisco Certification
16 31 (0.69%) PMP
17 29 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 23 (0.51%) IIBA
19 22 (0.49%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 390 (8.72%) QA
2 179 (4.00%) GDPR
3 167 (3.74%) Data Quality
4 142 (3.18%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.77%) Accessibility
6 122 (2.73%) NIST
7 71 (1.59%) NCSC
8 35 (0.78%) PCI DSS
9 34 (0.76%) WCAG
10 28 (0.63%) PMO
11 27 (0.60%) HIPAA
12 26 (0.58%) SLA
13 24 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 18 (0.40%) SOC 2
15 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
15 16 (0.36%) PSD2
16 14 (0.31%) SEPA
17 11 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,095 (24.49%) Docker
2 169 (3.78%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.72%) Virtual Machines
4 71 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
5 40 (0.89%) vSphere
6 27 (0.60%) VMware NSX
7 16 (0.36%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
8 13 (0.29%) Squid
9 11 (0.25%) Hyper-V
9 11 (0.25%) Lustre
9 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
10 9 (0.20%) DFS Replication
10 9 (0.20%) GPFS
11 7 (0.16%) Firmware
11 7 (0.16%) Postfix
11 7 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
12 6 (0.13%) KVM
12 6 (0.13%) NFS
12 6 (0.13%) Tivoli Directory Server
Systems Management
1 1,417 (31.69%) Terraform
2 1,317 (29.46%) Kubernetes
3 492 (11.00%) Ansible
4 336 (7.52%) Grafana
5 289 (6.46%) Prometheus
6 97 (2.17%) Argo
7 75 (1.68%) Puppet
8 68 (1.52%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (0.94%) Istio
10 34 (0.76%) Kibana
11 32 (0.72%) Progress Chef
12 29 (0.65%) Packer
13 23 (0.51%) Podman
14 21 (0.47%) vCenter Server
15 19 (0.42%) SCCM
16 18 (0.40%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 18 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
17 16 (0.36%) Consul
18 15 (0.34%) FortiGate
18 15 (0.34%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 768 (17.18%) Microsoft
2 289 (6.46%) Oracle
3 271 (6.06%) Databricks
4 262 (5.86%) Google
5 217 (4.85%) Splunk
6 152 (3.40%) ServiceNow
7 131 (2.93%) Red Hat
8 122 (2.73%) VMware
9 118 (2.64%) Salesforce
10 105 (2.35%) SAP
11 79 (1.77%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.39%) Dynatrace
13 54 (1.21%) CyberArk
14 50 (1.12%) IBM
15 49 (1.10%) Atlassian
16 40 (0.89%) F5
17 39 (0.87%) Cisco
18 33 (0.74%) Palo Alto
19 31 (0.69%) Foundry
20 30 (0.67%) MuleSoft