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

6 months to
28 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 15 15
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 -2
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,624 3,570 3,839
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.46% 10.91% 9.90%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.37% 12.07% 11.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,908 2,516 2,623
10th Percentile £385 £363 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £462
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.40% -5.86% -4.35%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 27 79
10th Percentile £37.24 £33.10 £56.20
25th Percentile £55.50 £51.88 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +6.87%
75th Percentile £77.50 £85.23 £74.00
90th Percentile £93.25 £95.00 £85.05
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.00 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.49% -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 45,469 29,582 33,102
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.43% 85.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,813 18,412 20,921
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% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,891 1,754 1,674
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.20 £13.86
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £67.89 £47.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £22.92 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.80% -46.07% +6.25%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 +1 4,803 £525 - 3,517
London 0 2,536 £550 - 2,051
UK excluding London -1 2,410 £500 - 1,873
Work from Home 0 1,620 £525 +1.69% 1,595
North of England -1 797 £500 +5.26% 510
South East -8 463 £525 +5.00% 455
Midlands 0 447 £488 -2.50% 241
Yorkshire -1 392 £500 +2.04% 142
West Midlands -3 355 £490 -5.50% 142
South West +9 314 £550 +5.77% 280
North West -3 311 £510 +9.38% 274
Scotland -2 208 £494 +3.95% 139
East of England +12 142 £505 -3.81% 138
North East +16 111 £425 -18.27% 98
East Midlands +6 88 £459 +1.94% 99
Wales -4 49 £513 +36.67% 48
Northern Ireland +16 21 £450 +2.27% 75
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
1 338 (6.01%) Confluence
2 152 (2.70%) SharePoint
3 126 (2.24%) Apache Airflow
4 125 (2.22%) Apache Spark
5 113 (2.01%) Apache
6 64 (1.14%) SAS
7 43 (0.76%) CMS
8 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
9 36 (0.64%) IIS
10 25 (0.44%) nginx
11 24 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.28%) Camunda
13 14 (0.25%) OpenStack
14 13 (0.23%) Anypoint
14 13 (0.23%) WebSphere
15 10 (0.18%) Oracle Workflow
15 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
16 9 (0.16%) Appian
17 7 (0.12%) Mule
17 7 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 64 (1.14%) Microsoft Excel
2 61 (1.08%) Microsoft Project
3 44 (0.78%) MS Visio
4 38 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
5 31 (0.55%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 6 (0.11%) Trello
8 5 (0.089%) Notion
9 4 (0.071%) Windchill
10 1 (0.018%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 74 (1.32%) Dynamics CRM
2 35 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.18%) Magento
4 10 (0.18%) Oracle EBS
5 9 (0.16%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 7 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
8 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
9 5 (0.089%) OpenText MBPM
9 5 (0.089%) Oracle BPM
10 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 4 (0.071%) Maximo
11 3 (0.053%) Findur
11 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
11 3 (0.053%) SAP ERP
11 3 (0.053%) Shopify
11 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,089 (54.93%) Azure
2 2,003 (35.62%) AWS
3 1,783 (31.70%) Azure DevOps
4 977 (17.37%) GitHub
5 710 (12.62%) GCP
6 611 (10.86%) GitHub Actions
7 485 (8.62%) Power Platform
8 453 (8.05%) Serverless
9 290 (5.16%) Amazon S3
10 275 (4.89%) AWS Lambda
11 259 (4.61%) Entra ID
12 237 (4.21%) AWS CloudFormation
13 235 (4.18%) Amazon EKS
14 223 (3.97%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 223 (3.97%) Azure AKS
15 217 (3.86%) Azure Monitor
16 201 (3.57%) Azure Data Factory
17 179 (3.18%) Dynamics 365
18 177 (3.15%) Amazon EC2
19 164 (2.92%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 248 (4.41%) Firewall
2 173 (3.08%) DNS
3 124 (2.20%) VPN
4 113 (2.01%) Network Security
5 68 (1.21%) TCP/IP
6 52 (0.92%) WAN
7 47 (0.84%) DHCP
7 47 (0.84%) SSL
8 37 (0.66%) HTTP
8 37 (0.66%) SD-WAN
9 33 (0.59%) BGP
10 32 (0.57%) Internet
11 29 (0.52%) SSH
11 29 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
12 24 (0.43%) OSPF
13 21 (0.37%) SAN
13 21 (0.37%) VLAN
14 18 (0.32%) LAN
15 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
15 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 324 (5.76%) Power BI
2 297 (5.28%) SQL Server
3 295 (5.25%) PostgreSQL
4 208 (3.70%) Data Warehouse
5 190 (3.38%) NoSQL
6 179 (3.18%) MongoDB
7 178 (3.17%) Relational Database
8 166 (2.95%) Data Lake
9 133 (2.36%) Amazon RDS
10 124 (2.20%) Metadata
11 112 (1.99%) Azure SQL Database
12 91 (1.62%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.58%) Delta Lake
14 82 (1.46%) Oracle Database
15 81 (1.44%) Redis
16 74 (1.32%) MySQL
17 67 (1.19%) Amazon Redshift
18 59 (1.05%) Big Data
19 57 (1.01%) SQL Server Integration Services
20 53 (0.94%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 799 (14.21%) Jenkins
2 791 (14.06%) Git
3 675 (12.00%) JIRA
4 610 (10.85%) GitLab
5 142 (2.52%) Selenium
6 102 (1.81%) Postman
7 97 (1.72%) SonarQube
8 94 (1.67%) JUnit
9 89 (1.58%) Maven
10 81 (1.44%) Bitbucket
11 72 (1.28%) REST Assured
12 71 (1.26%) JMeter
13 70 (1.24%) Cypress.io
14 62 (1.10%) Gradle
15 58 (1.03%) Cucumber
16 50 (0.89%) Gatling
17 44 (0.78%) Claude Code
17 44 (0.78%) Mockito
18 43 (0.76%) LoadRunner
19 40 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,455 (25.87%) Social Skills
2 1,000 (17.78%) Finance
3 821 (14.60%) Public Sector
4 509 (9.05%) Analytical Skills
5 367 (6.53%) Banking
6 158 (2.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 103 (1.83%) Retail
8 94 (1.67%) Documentation Skills
9 73 (1.30%) Influencing Skills
10 67 (1.19%) Legal
11 65 (1.16%) Organisational Skills
12 55 (0.98%) Marketing
13 50 (0.89%) Aerospace
13 50 (0.89%) Investment Banking
13 50 (0.89%) Telecoms
14 49 (0.87%) Military
15 46 (0.82%) Law
16 42 (0.75%) Front Office
17 41 (0.73%) Financial Institution
18 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 1,119 (19.90%) DevOps Engineer
2 918 (16.32%) Developer
3 841 (14.95%) Senior
4 630 (11.20%) Architect
5 540 (9.60%) Lead
6 355 (6.31%) Azure Engineer
7 310 (5.51%) Data Engineer
8 277 (4.93%) Analyst
9 262 (4.66%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.16%) Platform Engineer
11 205 (3.65%) Cloud Engineer
12 202 (3.59%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 199 (3.54%) Senior DevOps
14 190 (3.38%) Java Developer
15 184 (3.27%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 182 (3.24%) AWS DevOps
17 172 (3.06%) Solutions Architect
18 169 (3.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 156 (2.77%) Senior Developer
20 148 (2.63%) Infrastructure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,669 (29.68%) Terraform
2 587 (10.44%) REST
3 484 (8.61%) .NET
4 373 (6.63%) Kafka
5 344 (6.12%) RESTful
6 304 (5.41%) Spring
7 292 (5.19%) React
8 290 (5.16%) Spring Boot
9 211 (3.75%) Node.js
10 183 (3.25%) JSON
11 167 (2.97%) Playwright
12 166 (2.95%) OAuth
13 160 (2.84%) PySpark
14 136 (2.42%) .NET Framework
15 135 (2.40%) HTML
16 131 (2.33%) SOAP
17 128 (2.28%) AngularJS
18 124 (2.20%) CSS
19 119 (2.12%) OAuth2
20 117 (2.08%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,020 (18.14%) Cloud Native
2 418 (7.43%) Product Ownership
3 263 (4.68%) Distributed Systems
4 188 (3.34%) Enterprise Software
5 181 (3.22%) Onboarding
6 156 (2.77%) Legacy Systems
7 149 (2.65%) Hybrid Cloud
8 90 (1.60%) Data Protection Act
9 87 (1.55%) AI Agents
10 82 (1.46%) Self-Motivation
11 79 (1.40%) Management Information System
12 75 (1.33%) Public Cloud
13 74 (1.32%) Data Structures
14 69 (1.23%) Data Centre
15 67 (1.19%) Replication
16 66 (1.17%) Security Posture
17 57 (1.01%) Enterprise Cloud
18 56 (1.00%) Virtual Team
19 53 (0.94%) Mobile App
20 50 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 523 (9.30%) Linux
2 307 (5.46%) Windows
3 112 (1.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 98 (1.74%) Unix
5 91 (1.62%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.68%) VMS
7 33 (0.59%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
11 9 (0.16%) zOS
12 8 (0.14%) AIX
12 8 (0.14%) CentOS
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.089%) Windows Server 2008
15 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,346 (59.50%) CI/CD
2 2,278 (40.50%) Agile
3 1,611 (28.65%) Infrastructure as Code
4 941 (16.73%) Continuous Improvement
5 932 (16.57%) Containerisation
6 877 (15.59%) Problem-Solving
6 877 (15.59%) Test Automation
7 871 (15.49%) Stakeholder Management
8 830 (14.76%) Microservices
9 798 (14.19%) AI
10 744 (13.23%) Observability
11 738 (13.12%) Platform Engineering
12 699 (12.43%) Software Engineering
13 676 (12.02%) Migration
14 673 (11.97%) Scrum
15 586 (10.42%) Analytics
16 580 (10.31%) Technical Leadership
17 532 (9.46%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 483 (8.59%) Roadmaps
19 473 (8.41%) Data Modelling
Programming Languages
1 1,606 (28.56%) Python
2 1,020 (18.14%) SQL
3 807 (14.35%) Java
4 495 (8.80%) C#
5 488 (8.68%) PowerShell
6 479 (8.52%) Bash
7 452 (8.04%) JavaScript
8 306 (5.44%) TypeScript
9 254 (4.52%) Bicep
10 100 (1.78%) Go
11 77 (1.37%) Shell Script
12 70 (1.24%) Apex Code
13 65 (1.16%) T-SQL
14 64 (1.14%) Scala
15 62 (1.10%) Groovy
16 57 (1.01%) PL/SQL
17 35 (0.62%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 35 (0.62%) Perl
18 32 (0.57%) C++
19 23 (0.41%) C
Qualifications
1 1,807 (32.13%) Security Cleared
2 1,526 (27.13%) SC Cleared
3 336 (5.97%) Degree
4 231 (4.11%) Azure Certification
5 226 (4.02%) BPSS Clearance
6 206 (3.66%) DV Cleared
7 186 (3.31%) AWS Certification
8 132 (2.35%) Computer Science Degree
9 101 (1.80%) Microsoft Certification
10 74 (1.32%) CISSP
11 65 (1.16%) ISTQB
12 56 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 52 (0.92%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 43 (0.76%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.66%) Master's Degree
17 31 (0.55%) CISM
18 26 (0.46%) ITIL Certification
19 24 (0.43%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
20 23 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 525 (9.33%) QA
2 282 (5.01%) Data Quality
3 202 (3.59%) Accessibility
4 133 (2.36%) GDPR
5 101 (1.80%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 81 (1.44%) NIST
6 81 (1.44%) WCAG
7 54 (0.96%) NCSC
8 53 (0.94%) PMO
9 39 (0.69%) SLA
10 35 (0.62%) PCI DSS
11 29 (0.52%) GRC
12 25 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 16 (0.28%) ISO 20022
14 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
14 12 (0.21%) Disclosure Scotland
15 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
15 10 (0.18%) HIPAA
15 10 (0.18%) HL7
15 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,142 (20.31%) Docker
2 174 (3.09%) Active Directory
3 92 (1.64%) VMware Infrastructure
4 77 (1.37%) Virtual Machines
5 28 (0.50%) Hyper-V
6 26 (0.46%) vSphere
7 20 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.36%) VMware NSX
8 15 (0.27%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.20%) IAG
10 11 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.16%) Postfix
12 7 (0.12%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
14 5 (0.089%) Apache ZooKeeper
14 5 (0.089%) Ceph
14 5 (0.089%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 1,513 (26.90%) Kubernetes
2 537 (9.55%) Ansible
3 368 (6.54%) Grafana
4 313 (5.57%) Prometheus
5 85 (1.51%) Argo
6 61 (1.08%) Puppet
7 54 (0.96%) Single Sign-On
8 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
9 40 (0.71%) Microsoft Intune
10 39 (0.69%) Istio
11 36 (0.64%) Packer
12 25 (0.44%) Kibana
13 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
14 20 (0.36%) SCCM
14 20 (0.36%) vCenter Server
15 17 (0.30%) Kubeflow
16 16 (0.28%) HP ALM
17 14 (0.25%) Oracle RMAN
18 13 (0.23%) Control-M
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,100 (19.56%) Microsoft
2 301 (5.35%) Oracle
3 289 (5.14%) Databricks
4 267 (4.75%) Google
5 199 (3.54%) ServiceNow
6 185 (3.29%) Salesforce
6 185 (3.29%) Splunk
7 145 (2.58%) Dynatrace
8 128 (2.28%) VMware
9 112 (1.99%) SAP
10 106 (1.88%) Red Hat
11 65 (1.16%) IBM
12 62 (1.10%) MuleSoft
13 61 (1.08%) Informatica
13 61 (1.08%) OpenAI
14 50 (0.89%) Cisco
15 45 (0.80%) AppDynamics
15 45 (0.80%) Foundry
16 44 (0.78%) Atlassian
17 36 (0.64%) CyberArk