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

6 months to
13 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,486 3,288 3,947
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.21% 10.62% 8.86%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.89% 11.86% 10.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,138 2,284 2,848
10th Percentile £375 £400 £408
25th Percentile £429 £463 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.78%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £705 £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 £79.75 £80.75 £71.90
90th Percentile £94.00 £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 34,804 27,718 38,790
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.01% 89.51% 87.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,033 16,994 25,434
10th Percentile £308 £306 £300
25th Percentile £408 £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 £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £496 £500
% change year-on-year -3.25% -0.77% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,100 850 2,118
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.27
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.53
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -3.06% +3.15%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £30.78 £35.00
% change year-on-year -18.29% -12.06% +9.38%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 +2 3,823 £525 -8.70% 1,254
UK excluding London +7 2,008 £500 -4.76% 1,017
London -3 1,917 £538 -10.42% 472
Work from Home -3 1,271 £525 -3.14% 738
North of England +5 685 £500 -2.44% 286
South East +1 420 £525 -8.70% 329
Midlands +19 388 £513 +3.02% 133
Yorkshire +1 358 £500 -0.99% 94
West Midlands +19 311 £525 +5.00% 97
North West +2 279 £471 -9.12% 163
South West +11 246 £525 -12.50% 135
Scotland +6 195 £450 - 57
East of England +17 113 £575 +9.26% 56
East Midlands +6 77 £425 -10.53% 37
North East -4 51 £475 -9.52% 32
Wales +5 37 £425 +72.44% 28
Northern Ireland -7 9 £475 +26.67% 11

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
1 268 (5.97%) Confluence
2 93 (2.07%) Apache Spark
3 90 (2.01%) SharePoint
4 89 (1.98%) Apache
5 57 (1.27%) Apache Airflow
6 56 (1.25%) SAS
7 38 (0.85%) OpenStack
8 35 (0.78%) nginx
9 31 (0.69%) CMS
10 24 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
11 21 (0.47%) IIS
12 15 (0.33%) JBoss
13 13 (0.29%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.27%) Sitecore CMS
15 11 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
16 10 (0.22%) HCL Notes
16 10 (0.22%) Mendix
17 8 (0.18%) Camunda
17 8 (0.18%) GeoServer
17 8 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 101 (2.25%) Microsoft Excel
2 68 (1.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 42 (0.94%) Microsoft Project
4 35 (0.78%) Microsoft Office
5 21 (0.47%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 6 (0.13%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.089%) Trello
10 2 (0.045%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.022%) Maya
11 1 (0.022%) Revit
11 1 (0.022%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 68 (1.52%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.25%) Endur
3 10 (0.22%) Maximo
3 10 (0.22%) Oracle ERP
3 10 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
4 8 (0.18%) Aladdin
4 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
5 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
5 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 4 (0.089%) Oracle EBS
6 4 (0.089%) Payment Gateway
6 4 (0.089%) SAP ERP
6 4 (0.089%) VisionPLUS
7 3 (0.067%) NetSuite
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle Assets
7 3 (0.067%) Oracle General Ledger
7 3 (0.067%) SAP CO
7 3 (0.067%) SAP FI
7 3 (0.067%) SAP FI/CO
7 3 (0.067%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,343 (52.23%) Azure
2 1,619 (36.09%) AWS
3 1,263 (28.15%) Azure DevOps
4 850 (18.95%) GitHub
5 668 (14.89%) GCP
6 544 (12.13%) Serverless
7 485 (10.81%) GitHub Actions
8 374 (8.34%) Power Platform
9 288 (6.42%) AWS CloudFormation
10 263 (5.86%) AWS Lambda
11 250 (5.57%) Amazon S3
12 222 (4.95%) Azure Data Factory
13 218 (4.86%) Azure AKS
14 203 (4.53%) Amazon EKS
15 188 (4.19%) OpenShift
16 177 (3.95%) Amazon ECS
16 177 (3.95%) Entra ID
17 176 (3.92%) Dynamics 365
18 175 (3.90%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 167 (3.72%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 201 (4.48%) Firewall
2 110 (2.45%) DNS
3 94 (2.10%) Network Security
3 94 (2.10%) VPN
4 54 (1.20%) TCP/IP
5 46 (1.03%) SSL
6 34 (0.76%) HTTP
6 34 (0.76%) HTTPS
7 22 (0.49%) WAN
8 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
9 15 (0.33%) BGP
9 15 (0.33%) DHCP
10 14 (0.31%) SD-WAN
11 13 (0.29%) MPLS
11 13 (0.29%) SAN
12 11 (0.25%) FTP
12 11 (0.25%) LAN
12 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
13 10 (0.22%) Internet
13 10 (0.22%) IPsec
Database & Business Intelligence
1 266 (5.93%) PostgreSQL
2 241 (5.37%) Power BI
3 181 (4.03%) SQL Server
4 178 (3.97%) NoSQL
5 143 (3.19%) Data Lake
6 138 (3.08%) Amazon RDS
7 122 (2.72%) Relational Database
8 110 (2.45%) MongoDB
9 109 (2.43%) Data Warehouse
10 99 (2.21%) Azure SQL Database
11 77 (1.72%) DynamoDB
11 77 (1.72%) Elasticsearch
11 77 (1.72%) Oracle Database
12 69 (1.54%) MySQL
13 59 (1.32%) Delta Lake
14 58 (1.29%) Metadata
15 55 (1.23%) Redis
16 52 (1.16%) Big Data
17 51 (1.14%) Tableau
18 50 (1.11%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 786 (17.52%) Jenkins
2 604 (13.46%) Git
3 590 (13.15%) GitLab
4 581 (12.95%) JIRA
5 134 (2.99%) Selenium
6 98 (2.18%) JUnit
7 91 (2.03%) Postman
8 67 (1.49%) Bitbucket
8 67 (1.49%) SonarQube
9 63 (1.40%) Cucumber
9 63 (1.40%) Sonatype Nexus
10 61 (1.36%) Cypress.io
11 51 (1.14%) Maven
12 50 (1.11%) Artifactory
13 49 (1.09%) JMeter
14 46 (1.03%) REST Assured
15 41 (0.91%) Gradle
16 38 (0.85%) Oracle APEX
17 37 (0.82%) Liquibase
18 32 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,337 (29.80%) Social Skills
2 807 (17.99%) Finance
3 576 (12.84%) Public Sector
4 373 (8.31%) Analytical Skills
5 338 (7.53%) Banking
6 156 (3.48%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.76%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.49%) Financial Institution
8 67 (1.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 65 (1.45%) Marketing
10 54 (1.20%) Retail
11 48 (1.07%) Presentation Skills
12 44 (0.98%) Front Office
12 44 (0.98%) Telecoms
13 42 (0.94%) Investment Banking
14 37 (0.82%) Organisational Skills
15 34 (0.76%) Military
16 32 (0.71%) Legal
17 30 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
18 27 (0.60%) Law
Job Titles
1 893 (19.91%) DevOps Engineer
2 771 (17.19%) Developer
3 620 (13.82%) Senior
4 456 (10.16%) Architect
5 349 (7.78%) Lead
6 274 (6.11%) Azure Engineer
7 255 (5.68%) AWS Engineer
8 236 (5.26%) Data Engineer
9 233 (5.19%) Analyst
10 200 (4.46%) AWS DevOps
11 177 (3.95%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 169 (3.77%) Cloud Engineer
13 158 (3.52%) Software Engineer
14 152 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
15 145 (3.23%) Senior Developer
16 135 (3.01%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 134 (2.99%) Solutions Architect
18 126 (2.81%) Senior DevOps
19 122 (2.72%) Business Analyst
20 120 (2.67%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 514 (11.46%) REST
2 405 (9.03%) .NET
3 309 (6.89%) React
4 307 (6.84%) Node.js
5 261 (5.82%) RESTful
6 254 (5.66%) Kafka
7 249 (5.55%) Spring
8 229 (5.10%) Spring Boot
9 172 (3.83%) JSON
10 162 (3.61%) OAuth
11 157 (3.50%) AngularJS
12 144 (3.21%) Elastic Stack
13 131 (2.92%) HTML
14 128 (2.85%) XML
14 128 (2.85%) YAML
15 127 (2.83%) SOAP
16 118 (2.63%) Playwright
17 115 (2.56%) PySpark
18 112 (2.50%) CSS
19 102 (2.27%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 662 (14.76%) Cloud Native
2 246 (5.48%) Product Ownership
3 171 (3.81%) Distributed Systems
4 123 (2.74%) Onboarding
5 121 (2.70%) Public Cloud
6 94 (2.10%) Legacy Systems
7 83 (1.85%) Hybrid Cloud
8 74 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
9 54 (1.20%) Management Information System
10 53 (1.18%) Virtual Team
11 51 (1.14%) Data Protection Act
12 48 (1.07%) Data Centre
12 48 (1.07%) Private Cloud
12 48 (1.07%) Security Posture
13 47 (1.05%) NHS
14 43 (0.96%) Replication
15 42 (0.94%) Mobile App
15 42 (0.94%) Self-Motivation
16 36 (0.80%) AI Agents
16 36 (0.80%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 492 (10.97%) Linux
2 244 (5.44%) Windows
3 107 (2.39%) Unix
4 55 (1.23%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 46 (1.03%) Windows Server
6 45 (1.00%) VMS
7 29 (0.65%) Ubuntu
8 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
9 19 (0.42%) Android
10 18 (0.40%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.38%) CentOS
12 9 (0.20%) Amazon Linux
12 9 (0.20%) Solaris
13 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.13%) 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 2,598 (57.91%) CI/CD
2 1,737 (38.72%) Agile
3 1,203 (26.82%) Infrastructure as Code
4 876 (19.53%) Containerisation
5 866 (19.30%) Problem-Solving
6 685 (15.27%) Microservices
7 677 (15.09%) Test Automation
8 536 (11.95%) Continuous Improvement
9 527 (11.75%) Analytics
10 512 (11.41%) Migration
11 492 (10.97%) Observability
12 472 (10.52%) Scrum
13 455 (10.14%) AI
14 426 (9.50%) Stakeholder Management
15 406 (9.05%) Software Engineering
16 361 (8.05%) Data Modelling
17 357 (7.96%) Mentoring
18 307 (6.84%) Data Pipeline
19 304 (6.78%) Platform Engineering
20 301 (6.71%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,386 (30.90%) Python
2 903 (20.13%) SQL
3 596 (13.29%) Java
4 450 (10.03%) C#
5 427 (9.52%) JavaScript
6 376 (8.38%) PowerShell
7 348 (7.76%) Bash
8 319 (7.11%) TypeScript
9 153 (3.41%) Bicep
10 148 (3.30%) Go
11 77 (1.72%) PL/SQL
12 64 (1.43%) Scala
13 60 (1.34%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.09%) Ruby
15 48 (1.07%) Groovy
16 46 (1.03%) C++
17 43 (0.96%) T-SQL
18 34 (0.76%) Perl
19 28 (0.62%) Rust
20 23 (0.51%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,368 (30.49%) Security Cleared
2 1,131 (25.21%) SC Cleared
3 386 (8.60%) Degree
4 197 (4.39%) Azure Certification
5 196 (4.37%) Computer Science Degree
6 145 (3.23%) DV Cleared
7 143 (3.19%) AWS Certification
8 113 (2.52%) BPSS Clearance
9 92 (2.05%) Master's Degree
10 76 (1.69%) CISSP
11 70 (1.56%) Microsoft Certification
12 60 (1.34%) CISM
13 50 (1.11%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 49 (1.09%) ISTQB
15 39 (0.87%) 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
1 389 (8.67%) QA
2 180 (4.01%) GDPR
3 164 (3.66%) Data Quality
4 143 (3.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.76%) NIST
6 123 (2.74%) Accessibility
7 72 (1.60%) NCSC
8 35 (0.78%) PCI DSS
9 34 (0.76%) WCAG
10 28 (0.62%) HIPAA
10 28 (0.62%) PMO
11 27 (0.60%) SLA
12 24 (0.53%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 18 (0.40%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
14 16 (0.36%) PSD2
15 14 (0.31%) SEPA
16 11 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,102 (24.57%) Docker
2 171 (3.81%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.72%) Virtual Machines
4 71 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
5 40 (0.89%) vSphere
6 27 (0.60%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.33%) Squid
9 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.25%) DFS Replication
10 11 (0.25%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.25%) Lustre
10 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
11 9 (0.20%) GPFS
11 9 (0.20%) Postfix
12 7 (0.16%) Firmware
13 6 (0.13%) Dovecot
13 6 (0.13%) NFS
13 6 (0.13%) Tivoli Directory Server
13 6 (0.13%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,414 (31.52%) Terraform
2 1,323 (29.49%) Kubernetes
3 496 (11.06%) Ansible
4 340 (7.58%) Grafana
5 292 (6.51%) Prometheus
6 97 (2.16%) Argo
7 74 (1.65%) Puppet
8 67 (1.49%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (0.94%) Istio
10 38 (0.85%) Kibana
11 33 (0.74%) 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%) Microsoft Intune
17 17 (0.38%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 16 (0.36%) Consul
19 15 (0.33%) HP ALM
19 15 (0.33%) Rancher
Vendors
1 775 (17.28%) Microsoft
2 288 (6.42%) Oracle
3 269 (6.00%) Databricks
4 262 (5.84%) Google
5 218 (4.86%) Splunk
6 154 (3.43%) ServiceNow
7 130 (2.90%) Red Hat
8 122 (2.72%) VMware
9 116 (2.59%) Salesforce
10 106 (2.36%) SAP
11 78 (1.74%) OpenAI
12 63 (1.40%) Dynatrace
13 53 (1.18%) CyberArk
14 49 (1.09%) Atlassian
15 47 (1.05%) IBM
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