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

6 months to
25 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,440 3,134 4,136
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.69% 10.41% 9.49%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.58% 11.43% 11.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,791 2,248 2,830
10th Percentile £381 £365 £400
25th Percentile £438 £431 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -5.66%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £740 £729
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 117 16 123
10th Percentile £39.53 £32.63 £56.30
25th Percentile £61.87 £49.06 £61.43
Median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -7.89% +8.57% +6.70%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.25 £90.63 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £76.00 £67.50
% change year-on-year -7.89% +12.59% +2.97%

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 43,238 27,425 37,092
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.97% 91.06% 85.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,959 17,371 23,647
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.78% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £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 2,600 1,291 2,584
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.65
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.70 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.88 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £71.25 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.04 £38.12
% change year-on-year +79.73% -34.32% +17.29%

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 25 June 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 25 June 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 25 June 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 4,608 £525 - 1,082
UK excluding London +5 2,402 £500 - 832
London +4 2,360 £550 - 431
Work from Home 0 1,535 £525 - 597
North of England +7 854 £500 - 249
Yorkshire +2 458 £513 +2.65% 69
South East -5 451 £513 +2.50% 265
Midlands 0 434 £492 -1.60% 103
West Midlands 0 343 £500 -2.44% 61
North West +2 323 £500 +2.09% 139
South West +12 289 £520 -5.45% 98
Scotland +2 211 £500 +3.20% 35
East of England +23 137 £525 +6.33% 66
North East +10 91 £450 -13.88% 45
East Midlands 0 87 £471 +4.72% 42
Wales +4 51 £425 +38.10% 27
Northern Ireland +13 21 £475 +11.76% 11
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
1 324 (5.96%) Confluence
2 139 (2.56%) Apache Spark
3 126 (2.32%) SharePoint
4 105 (1.93%) Apache Airflow
5 96 (1.76%) Apache
6 83 (1.53%) SAS
7 48 (0.88%) CMS
8 33 (0.61%) Microsoft Exchange
9 31 (0.57%) Jupyter
9 31 (0.57%) nginx
10 29 (0.53%) IIS
11 17 (0.31%) Camunda
11 17 (0.31%) OpenStack
12 14 (0.26%) Palantir Foundry
12 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
13 11 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
14 10 (0.18%) Mendix
15 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
16 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
16 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 76 (1.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 58 (1.07%) Microsoft Project
3 49 (0.90%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 39 (0.72%) Microsoft Office
5 31 (0.57%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.18%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.074%) Notion
9 3 (0.055%) Adobe XD
9 3 (0.055%) Trello
10 2 (0.037%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.018%) InDesign
11 1 (0.018%) Maya
11 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 70 (1.29%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.64%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Maximo
5 9 (0.17%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 7 (0.13%) SAP MDG
8 6 (0.11%) Magento
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS
9 5 (0.092%) Endur
9 5 (0.092%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.092%) Oracle BPM
9 5 (0.092%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 3 (0.055%) OpenText VIM for SAP
10 3 (0.055%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.055%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.055%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.055%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,923 (53.73%) Azure
2 1,919 (35.28%) AWS
3 1,611 (29.61%) Azure DevOps
4 897 (16.49%) GitHub
5 680 (12.50%) GCP
6 538 (9.89%) GitHub Actions
7 485 (8.92%) Serverless
8 462 (8.49%) Power Platform
9 308 (5.66%) Amazon S3
10 272 (5.00%) AWS Lambda
11 252 (4.63%) AWS CloudFormation
12 246 (4.52%) Entra ID
13 226 (4.15%) Azure AKS
14 214 (3.93%) Amazon EKS
15 192 (3.53%) Azure Data Factory
16 187 (3.44%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 180 (3.31%) Amazon EC2
18 171 (3.14%) Azure Monitor
19 160 (2.94%) OpenShift
20 159 (2.92%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 236 (4.34%) Firewall
2 136 (2.50%) DNS
3 117 (2.15%) Network Security
4 107 (1.97%) VPN
5 48 (0.88%) WAN
6 42 (0.77%) TCP/IP
7 36 (0.66%) SD-WAN
8 34 (0.63%) BGP
9 30 (0.55%) SSL
10 27 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 24 (0.44%) OSPF
12 23 (0.42%) DHCP
12 23 (0.42%) HTTP
12 23 (0.42%) Internet
13 22 (0.40%) SAN
14 17 (0.31%) BIG-IP
14 17 (0.31%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
14 17 (0.31%) IPsec
14 17 (0.31%) LAN
14 17 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 300 (5.51%) Power BI
2 263 (4.83%) SQL Server
3 260 (4.78%) PostgreSQL
4 192 (3.53%) NoSQL
5 172 (3.16%) Relational Database
6 163 (3.00%) Data Lake
7 161 (2.96%) MongoDB
8 156 (2.87%) Data Warehouse
9 122 (2.24%) Amazon RDS
10 107 (1.97%) Azure SQL Database
11 101 (1.86%) Metadata
12 100 (1.84%) DynamoDB
13 88 (1.62%) Delta Lake
14 77 (1.42%) Oracle Database
15 73 (1.34%) Big Data
16 72 (1.32%) Amazon Athena
17 69 (1.27%) Redis
18 68 (1.25%) Amazon Redshift
19 60 (1.10%) Elasticsearch
20 52 (0.96%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 789 (14.50%) Jenkins
2 694 (12.76%) Git
3 666 (12.24%) JIRA
4 577 (10.61%) GitLab
5 122 (2.24%) Selenium
6 108 (1.99%) Postman
7 95 (1.75%) JUnit
8 91 (1.67%) SonarQube
9 75 (1.38%) REST Assured
10 72 (1.32%) Bitbucket
11 71 (1.31%) Maven
12 64 (1.18%) Cucumber
13 59 (1.08%) JMeter
14 50 (0.92%) Cypress.io
15 48 (0.88%) Gradle
16 43 (0.79%) Gatling
17 42 (0.77%) Mockito
18 39 (0.72%) Artifactory
19 36 (0.66%) Visual Studio
20 32 (0.59%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,354 (24.89%) Social Skills
2 1,001 (18.40%) Finance
3 759 (13.95%) Public Sector
4 423 (7.78%) Analytical Skills
5 357 (6.56%) Banking
6 132 (2.43%) Documentation Skills
7 113 (2.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 76 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
8 76 (1.40%) Retail
9 68 (1.25%) Legal
10 59 (1.08%) Marketing
11 58 (1.07%) Organisational Skills
12 47 (0.86%) Military
13 46 (0.85%) Financial Institution
14 42 (0.77%) Investment Banking
15 39 (0.72%) Law
16 37 (0.68%) Presentation Skills
17 32 (0.59%) Telecoms
18 31 (0.57%) Front Office
19 28 (0.51%) Aerospace
Job Titles
1 1,094 (20.11%) DevOps Engineer
2 838 (15.40%) Developer
3 766 (14.08%) Senior
4 636 (11.69%) Architect
5 486 (8.93%) Lead
6 339 (6.23%) Azure Engineer
7 320 (5.88%) Data Engineer
8 317 (5.83%) Analyst
9 271 (4.98%) AWS Engineer
10 207 (3.81%) Cloud Engineer
11 199 (3.66%) AWS DevOps
12 197 (3.62%) Platform Engineer
13 185 (3.40%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 185 (3.40%) Java Developer
14 183 (3.36%) Senior DevOps
14 183 (3.36%) Solutions Architect
15 176 (3.24%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 167 (3.07%) Senior DevOps Engineer
17 157 (2.89%) Business Analyst
18 155 (2.85%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 508 (9.34%) REST
2 469 (8.62%) .NET
3 314 (5.77%) Spring
4 311 (5.72%) React
5 300 (5.51%) RESTful
6 299 (5.50%) Spring Boot
7 293 (5.39%) Kafka
8 231 (4.25%) Node.js
9 170 (3.13%) AngularJS
10 168 (3.09%) PySpark
11 161 (2.96%) OAuth
12 154 (2.83%) Playwright
13 139 (2.56%) JSON
14 126 (2.32%) SOAP
15 124 (2.28%) .NET Framework
16 115 (2.11%) HTML
17 112 (2.06%) YAML
18 110 (2.02%) OpenID
19 108 (1.99%) Middleware
20 107 (1.97%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 958 (17.61%) Cloud Native
2 368 (6.76%) Product Ownership
3 234 (4.30%) Distributed Systems
4 149 (2.74%) Onboarding
5 131 (2.41%) Legacy Systems
6 130 (2.39%) Enterprise Software
7 114 (2.10%) Hybrid Cloud
8 106 (1.95%) Public Cloud
9 84 (1.54%) Data Centre
10 80 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
11 74 (1.36%) Management Information System
12 66 (1.21%) Self-Motivation
13 64 (1.18%) Security Posture
14 57 (1.05%) Data Structures
14 57 (1.05%) Virtual Team
15 54 (0.99%) Mobile App
16 53 (0.97%) AI Agents
17 49 (0.90%) Greenfield Project
18 46 (0.85%) NHS
19 44 (0.81%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 468 (8.60%) Linux
2 275 (5.06%) Windows
3 106 (1.95%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 77 (1.42%) Unix
5 58 (1.07%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.66%) VMS
7 31 (0.57%) Ubuntu
8 24 (0.44%) Apple iOS
9 15 (0.28%) Android
10 13 (0.24%) CentOS
11 10 (0.18%) Solaris
12 9 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2016
14 5 (0.092%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.092%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.092%) Windows 10
15 4 (0.074%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.074%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.074%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,162 (58.13%) CI/CD
2 2,086 (38.35%) Agile
3 1,433 (26.34%) Infrastructure as Code
4 868 (15.96%) Containerisation
5 820 (15.07%) Problem-Solving
6 786 (14.45%) Microservices
7 784 (14.41%) Continuous Improvement
8 782 (14.38%) Test Automation
9 673 (12.37%) Migration
10 666 (12.24%) Stakeholder Management
11 642 (11.80%) AI
12 640 (11.76%) Observability
13 632 (11.62%) Scrum
14 619 (11.38%) Analytics
15 582 (10.70%) Platform Engineering
16 565 (10.39%) Software Engineering
17 495 (9.10%) Data Modelling
18 467 (8.58%) Technical Leadership
19 439 (8.07%) Mentoring
19 439 (8.07%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,522 (27.98%) Python
2 1,019 (18.73%) SQL
3 741 (13.62%) Java
4 511 (9.39%) C#
5 407 (7.48%) JavaScript
6 387 (7.11%) Bash
7 372 (6.84%) PowerShell
8 273 (5.02%) TypeScript
9 190 (3.49%) Bicep
10 113 (2.08%) Go
11 67 (1.23%) Apex Code
12 65 (1.19%) Shell Script
13 63 (1.16%) Scala
14 53 (0.97%) T-SQL
15 52 (0.96%) PL/SQL
16 48 (0.88%) Groovy
17 33 (0.61%) C++
18 26 (0.48%) Data Analysis Expressions
19 25 (0.46%) Kotlin
20 23 (0.42%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,723 (31.67%) Security Cleared
2 1,451 (26.67%) SC Cleared
3 335 (6.16%) Degree
4 208 (3.82%) Azure Certification
5 177 (3.25%) BPSS Clearance
6 175 (3.22%) AWS Certification
7 166 (3.05%) DV Cleared
8 132 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
9 83 (1.53%) CISSP
10 73 (1.34%) Microsoft Certification
11 59 (1.08%) ISTQB
12 55 (1.01%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 47 (0.86%) Cisco Certification
14 46 (0.85%) PMI Certification
15 45 (0.83%) PMP
16 44 (0.81%) CISM
17 42 (0.77%) Master's Degree
18 29 (0.53%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 27 (0.50%) ITIL Certification
20 24 (0.44%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 463 (8.51%) QA
2 262 (4.82%) Data Quality
3 172 (3.16%) GDPR
4 168 (3.09%) Accessibility
5 125 (2.30%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 114 (2.10%) NIST
7 73 (1.34%) NCSC
8 65 (1.19%) WCAG
9 50 (0.92%) PCI DSS
10 42 (0.77%) SLA
11 32 (0.59%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.53%) PMO
13 26 (0.48%) GRC
14 19 (0.35%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.22%) PSD2
17 11 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.20%) ISO 20022
17 11 (0.20%) NIST 800
17 11 (0.20%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,036 (19.04%) Docker
2 178 (3.27%) Active Directory
3 79 (1.45%) Virtual Machines
4 74 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
5 28 (0.51%) vSphere
6 26 (0.48%) VMware NSX
7 19 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
8 17 (0.31%) Squid
8 17 (0.31%) VMware ESXi
9 16 (0.29%) Hyper-V
10 14 (0.26%) Postfix
11 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
12 6 (0.11%) Corosync
12 6 (0.11%) Firmware
12 6 (0.11%) HDFS
12 6 (0.11%) KVM
12 6 (0.11%) RACF
13 5 (0.092%) Microsoft App-V
13 5 (0.092%) NFS
13 5 (0.092%) SRDF
Systems Management
1 1,556 (28.60%) Terraform
2 1,380 (25.37%) Kubernetes
3 515 (9.47%) Ansible
4 354 (6.51%) Grafana
5 307 (5.64%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.54%) Argo
7 75 (1.38%) Single Sign-On
8 67 (1.23%) Puppet
9 51 (0.94%) Istio
10 34 (0.63%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.57%) Packer
12 27 (0.50%) Microsoft Intune
13 26 (0.48%) vCenter Server
14 23 (0.42%) HP ALM
15 22 (0.40%) Kibana
16 18 (0.33%) Consul
17 17 (0.31%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
19 13 (0.24%) HAProxy
19 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 950 (17.46%) Microsoft
2 280 (5.15%) Databricks
3 279 (5.13%) Oracle
4 262 (4.82%) Google
5 193 (3.55%) ServiceNow
6 181 (3.33%) Salesforce
6 181 (3.33%) Splunk
7 126 (2.32%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.26%) SAP
9 118 (2.17%) Dynatrace
10 112 (2.06%) VMware
11 79 (1.45%) OpenAI
12 57 (1.05%) IBM
13 56 (1.03%) Atlassian
14 55 (1.01%) Informatica
15 48 (0.88%) CyberArk
16 41 (0.75%) Cisco
16 41 (0.75%) Foundry
16 41 (0.75%) Okta
17 40 (0.74%) MuleSoft