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

6 months to
19 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,679 3,573 3,829
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.60% 10.89% 9.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.52% 12.03% 11.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,944 2,533 2,617
10th Percentile £385 £363 £382
25th Percentile £440 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £615 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £720 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 124 27 83
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.10 £56.25
25th Percentile £56.06 £51.88 £63.30
Median hourly rate £67.60 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.90% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.00
90th Percentile £88.00 £95.00 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%

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 45,377 29,691 33,202
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.71% 90.48% 85.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,881 18,495 21,183
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.58%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £727 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,839 1,731 1,775
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.38 £17.30 £18.15
Median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +65.23% -38.57% +0.61%
75th Percentile £68.00 £49.63 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.05 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.30 £42.50
% change year-on-year +88.67% -45.18% +18.88%

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 19 August 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 19 August 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 19 August 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 4,872 £525 - 2,343
London 0 2,539 £550 - 1,252
UK excluding London +1 2,465 £500 - 1,434
Work from Home +1 1,634 £525 +2.44% 1,189
North of England 0 821 £500 +3.90% 401
South East -7 478 £525 +5.00% 380
Midlands +1 468 £488 -2.50% 170
Yorkshire 0 404 £500 +1.44% 101
West Midlands 0 381 £490 -4.85% 111
South West +8 322 £525 +0.96% 184
North West -3 321 £525 +11.11% 220
Scotland -3 191 £500 +5.26% 119
East of England +11 139 £505 +1.00% 113
North East +14 113 £431 -17.86% 84
East Midlands +3 83 £488 +6.85% 58
Wales -4 50 £513 +36.67% 31
Northern Ireland +22 23 £475 +7.95% 45
Channel Islands - 5 £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
1 336 (5.92%) Confluence
2 146 (2.57%) SharePoint
3 129 (2.27%) Apache Spark
4 125 (2.20%) Apache Airflow
5 111 (1.95%) Apache
6 86 (1.51%) SAS
7 42 (0.74%) CMS
8 38 (0.67%) IIS
8 38 (0.67%) Jupyter
9 24 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
10 23 (0.41%) nginx
11 14 (0.25%) Camunda
12 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
12 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
13 12 (0.21%) OpenStack
14 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
14 11 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
15 9 (0.16%) Appian
16 8 (0.14%) Tomcat
16 8 (0.14%) WebLogic
Applications
1 62 (1.09%) Microsoft Excel
1 62 (1.09%) Microsoft Project
2 41 (0.72%) MS Visio
3 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
4 31 (0.55%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 10 (0.18%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
7 8 (0.14%) Spreadsheet
8 7 (0.12%) Trello
9 5 (0.088%) Notion
10 3 (0.053%) Windchill
11 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
11 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 69 (1.22%) Dynamics CRM
2 37 (0.65%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.19%) Aladdin
3 11 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
3 11 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
7 7 (0.12%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
9 5 (0.088%) Maximo
9 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.070%) Endur
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) SAP BPC
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,105 (54.68%) Azure
2 2,021 (35.59%) AWS
3 1,783 (31.40%) Azure DevOps
4 979 (17.24%) GitHub
5 729 (12.84%) GCP
6 611 (10.76%) GitHub Actions
7 472 (8.31%) Power Platform
8 447 (7.87%) Serverless
9 292 (5.14%) Amazon S3
10 267 (4.70%) AWS Lambda
11 264 (4.65%) Entra ID
12 246 (4.33%) AWS CloudFormation
13 235 (4.14%) Amazon EKS
14 225 (3.96%) Azure AKS
15 218 (3.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 207 (3.65%) Azure Monitor
17 200 (3.52%) Azure Data Factory
18 178 (3.13%) Amazon EC2
19 165 (2.91%) Dynamics 365
20 159 (2.80%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 250 (4.40%) Firewall
2 165 (2.91%) DNS
3 124 (2.18%) VPN
4 112 (1.97%) Network Security
5 62 (1.09%) TCP/IP
6 53 (0.93%) WAN
7 45 (0.79%) SSL
8 43 (0.76%) DHCP
9 39 (0.69%) SD-WAN
10 34 (0.60%) BGP
11 33 (0.58%) HTTP
12 32 (0.56%) Internet
13 29 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
14 26 (0.46%) OSPF
15 22 (0.39%) SAN
15 22 (0.39%) SSH
16 21 (0.37%) VLAN
17 18 (0.32%) LAN
17 18 (0.32%) VXLAN
18 17 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 314 (5.53%) Power BI
2 294 (5.18%) SQL Server
3 292 (5.14%) PostgreSQL
4 199 (3.50%) Data Warehouse
5 196 (3.45%) NoSQL
6 180 (3.17%) Relational Database
7 179 (3.15%) MongoDB
8 163 (2.87%) Data Lake
9 124 (2.18%) Amazon RDS
10 120 (2.11%) Metadata
11 111 (1.95%) Azure SQL Database
12 94 (1.66%) DynamoDB
13 87 (1.53%) Delta Lake
14 80 (1.41%) Oracle Database
15 75 (1.32%) Redis
16 70 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
17 67 (1.18%) MySQL
18 64 (1.13%) Big Data
19 56 (0.99%) SQL Server Integration Services
20 54 (0.95%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 829 (14.60%) Jenkins
2 801 (14.10%) Git
3 694 (12.22%) JIRA
4 612 (10.78%) GitLab
5 139 (2.45%) Selenium
6 102 (1.80%) Postman
7 101 (1.78%) SonarQube
8 94 (1.66%) JUnit
9 88 (1.55%) Bitbucket
10 87 (1.53%) Maven
11 71 (1.25%) Cypress.io
12 69 (1.22%) JMeter
13 67 (1.18%) REST Assured
14 58 (1.02%) Cucumber
15 57 (1.00%) Gradle
16 50 (0.88%) Gatling
17 44 (0.77%) LoadRunner
18 43 (0.76%) Mockito
19 42 (0.74%) Claude Code
20 40 (0.70%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,460 (25.71%) Social Skills
2 1,020 (17.96%) Finance
3 832 (14.65%) Public Sector
4 511 (9.00%) Analytical Skills
5 372 (6.55%) Banking
6 155 (2.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 107 (1.88%) Retail
8 101 (1.78%) Documentation Skills
9 71 (1.25%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.18%) Legal
10 67 (1.18%) Organisational Skills
11 53 (0.93%) Marketing
12 52 (0.92%) Investment Banking
13 47 (0.83%) Aerospace
13 47 (0.83%) Telecoms
14 46 (0.81%) Military
15 45 (0.79%) Front Office
15 45 (0.79%) Law
16 43 (0.76%) Financial Institution
17 42 (0.74%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,097 (19.32%) DevOps Engineer
2 932 (16.41%) Developer
3 836 (14.72%) Senior
4 621 (10.94%) Architect
5 549 (9.67%) Lead
6 352 (6.20%) Azure Engineer
7 325 (5.72%) Data Engineer
8 282 (4.97%) Analyst
9 266 (4.68%) AWS Engineer
10 229 (4.03%) Platform Engineer
11 213 (3.75%) Cloud Engineer
12 202 (3.56%) Senior DevOps
13 194 (3.42%) Java Developer
14 191 (3.36%) Azure DevOps Engineer
15 186 (3.28%) AWS DevOps
15 186 (3.28%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 174 (3.06%) Solutions Architect
17 173 (3.05%) AWS DevOps Engineer
18 159 (2.80%) Senior Developer
19 148 (2.61%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 598 (10.53%) REST
2 492 (8.66%) .NET
3 358 (6.30%) Kafka
4 345 (6.08%) RESTful
5 302 (5.32%) Spring
6 287 (5.05%) React
7 285 (5.02%) Spring Boot
8 214 (3.77%) Node.js
9 184 (3.24%) JSON
10 168 (2.96%) OAuth
10 168 (2.96%) Playwright
11 161 (2.84%) PySpark
12 148 (2.61%) AngularJS
13 137 (2.41%) SOAP
14 136 (2.39%) .NET Framework
15 135 (2.38%) HTML
16 122 (2.15%) OAuth2
17 117 (2.06%) YAML
18 113 (1.99%) CSS
19 109 (1.92%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 1,035 (18.23%) Cloud Native
2 410 (7.22%) Product Ownership
3 273 (4.81%) Distributed Systems
4 186 (3.28%) Enterprise Software
5 178 (3.13%) Onboarding
6 155 (2.73%) Legacy Systems
7 151 (2.66%) Hybrid Cloud
8 93 (1.64%) Data Protection Act
9 81 (1.43%) AI Agents
9 81 (1.43%) Self-Motivation
10 78 (1.37%) Management Information System
11 76 (1.34%) Public Cloud
12 72 (1.27%) Security Posture
13 69 (1.22%) Data Centre
13 69 (1.22%) Data Structures
14 65 (1.14%) Enterprise Cloud
15 63 (1.11%) Replication
16 57 (1.00%) Virtual Team
17 52 (0.92%) Mobile App
18 49 (0.86%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 522 (9.19%) Linux
2 315 (5.55%) Windows
3 115 (2.03%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 100 (1.76%) Unix
5 88 (1.55%) Windows Server
6 35 (0.62%) VMS
7 30 (0.53%) Apple iOS
7 30 (0.53%) Ubuntu
8 18 (0.32%) Android
9 10 (0.18%) Solaris
10 9 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
10 9 (0.16%) zOS
11 8 (0.14%) AIX
11 8 (0.14%) CentOS
11 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 7 (0.12%) Amazon Linux
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 4 (0.070%) Alpine Linux
14 4 (0.070%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,371 (59.36%) CI/CD
2 2,307 (40.62%) Agile
3 1,592 (28.03%) Infrastructure as Code
4 947 (16.68%) Continuous Improvement
5 945 (16.64%) Containerisation
6 893 (15.72%) Test Automation
7 892 (15.71%) Problem-Solving
8 846 (14.90%) Stakeholder Management
9 830 (14.62%) Microservices
10 788 (13.88%) AI
11 728 (12.82%) Observability
12 702 (12.36%) Platform Engineering
13 698 (12.29%) Scrum
14 683 (12.03%) Migration
15 682 (12.01%) Software Engineering
16 609 (10.72%) Analytics
17 566 (9.97%) Technical Leadership
18 540 (9.51%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 501 (8.82%) Data Modelling
20 468 (8.24%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,607 (28.30%) Python
2 1,051 (18.51%) SQL
3 806 (14.19%) Java
4 508 (8.95%) C#
5 481 (8.47%) PowerShell
6 477 (8.40%) Bash
7 463 (8.15%) JavaScript
8 309 (5.44%) TypeScript
9 238 (4.19%) Bicep
10 97 (1.71%) Go
11 76 (1.34%) Shell Script
12 71 (1.25%) Apex Code
13 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
14 66 (1.16%) PL/SQL
15 62 (1.09%) Scala
16 58 (1.02%) Groovy
17 32 (0.56%) Data Analysis Expressions
18 31 (0.55%) C++
19 29 (0.51%) Perl
20 24 (0.42%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,839 (32.38%) Security Cleared
2 1,557 (27.42%) SC Cleared
3 329 (5.79%) Degree
4 225 (3.96%) Azure Certification
4 225 (3.96%) BPSS Clearance
5 198 (3.49%) DV Cleared
6 191 (3.36%) AWS Certification
7 124 (2.18%) Computer Science Degree
8 88 (1.55%) Microsoft Certification
9 80 (1.41%) CISSP
10 67 (1.18%) ISTQB
11 56 (0.99%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 56 (0.99%) Cisco Certification
12 46 (0.81%) PMP
13 44 (0.77%) PMI Certification
14 37 (0.65%) Master's Degree
15 33 (0.58%) CISM
16 29 (0.51%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 28 (0.49%) ITIL Certification
18 24 (0.42%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 530 (9.33%) QA
2 288 (5.07%) Data Quality
3 202 (3.56%) Accessibility
4 146 (2.57%) GDPR
5 102 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 80 (1.41%) NIST
7 79 (1.39%) WCAG
8 55 (0.97%) NCSC
9 49 (0.86%) PMO
10 41 (0.72%) SLA
11 38 (0.67%) PCI DSS
12 31 (0.55%) GRC
13 29 (0.51%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 13 (0.23%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.21%) HIPAA
16 11 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
17 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
18 9 (0.16%) SEPA
18 9 (0.16%) SOC 2
System Software
1 1,138 (20.04%) Docker
2 180 (3.17%) Active Directory
3 89 (1.57%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.36%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.48%) vSphere
6 25 (0.44%) Hyper-V
7 20 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 16 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
9 13 (0.23%) Oracle RAC
9 13 (0.23%) Squid
10 11 (0.19%) Postfix
11 10 (0.18%) IAG
12 8 (0.14%) KVM
13 7 (0.12%) zsh
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 6 (0.11%) NFS
15 5 (0.088%) Firmware
15 5 (0.088%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,649 (29.04%) Terraform
2 1,512 (26.62%) Kubernetes
3 536 (9.44%) Ansible
4 373 (6.57%) Grafana
5 314 (5.53%) Prometheus
6 85 (1.50%) Argo
7 62 (1.09%) Puppet
8 58 (1.02%) Single Sign-On
9 51 (0.90%) Progress Chef
10 44 (0.77%) Istio
11 38 (0.67%) Microsoft Intune
12 34 (0.60%) Packer
13 21 (0.37%) Kibana
14 20 (0.35%) Kustomize
14 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
15 19 (0.33%) SCCM
16 18 (0.32%) HP ALM
17 16 (0.28%) Kubeflow
17 16 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,080 (19.02%) Microsoft
2 313 (5.51%) Oracle
3 280 (4.93%) Databricks
3 280 (4.93%) Google
4 213 (3.75%) ServiceNow
5 188 (3.31%) Salesforce
6 179 (3.15%) Splunk
7 147 (2.59%) Dynatrace
8 123 (2.17%) VMware
9 120 (2.11%) SAP
10 108 (1.90%) Red Hat
11 63 (1.11%) IBM
12 62 (1.09%) Informatica
13 58 (1.02%) OpenAI
14 57 (1.00%) MuleSoft
15 53 (0.93%) Atlassian
16 52 (0.92%) Cisco
17 46 (0.81%) Foundry
18 45 (0.79%) AppDynamics
19 42 (0.74%) Okta