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

6 months to
6 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 17
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,423 3,280 3,943
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.29% 10.53% 8.81%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.96% 11.79% 10.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,092 2,272 2,855
10th Percentile £375 £400 £406
25th Percentile £429 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £560 £550
Median % change year-on-year -7.14% +1.82% -7.56%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £704 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £530
% change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -3.64%
Number of hourly rates quoted 58 23 105
10th Percentile - £36.30 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £56.88 £56.65
Median hourly rate £53.75 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.60% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.00 £80.75 £76.53
90th Percentile £94.13 £86.15 £83.88
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 34,126 27,826 38,980
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.15% 89.30% 87.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,616 16,956 25,656
10th Percentile £306 £306 £300
25th Percentile £406 £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 £719 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £497 £500
% change year-on-year -3.47% -0.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,067 860 2,108
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.45
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -7.14% +9.38%
75th Percentile £58.75 £62.55 £61.31
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.00 £30.88 £35.50
% change year-on-year -19.03% -13.03% +18.89%

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 6 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 6 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 6 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 3,777 £525 -8.70% 1,382
UK excluding London +7 1,983 £500 -4.76% 1,076
London -3 1,890 £536 -10.67% 540
Work from Home -1 1,266 £525 -4.55% 818
North of England +4 683 £500 -4.31% 314
South East +1 405 £525 -8.70% 348
Midlands +20 388 £513 +2.60% 114
Yorkshire +1 356 £500 -1.96% 104
West Midlands +25 311 £525 +3.75% 80
North West +4 279 £471 -10.38% 180
South West +9 243 £525 -12.50% 148
Scotland +5 190 £465 +3.33% 65
East of England +16 114 £575 +9.26% 68
East Midlands +9 77 £425 -10.53% 34
North East -2 51 £475 -12.84% 32
Wales +5 35 £425 +57.41% 26
Northern Ireland -9 9 £475 +26.67% 9

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
1 261 (5.90%) Confluence
2 90 (2.03%) SharePoint
3 87 (1.97%) Apache
3 87 (1.97%) Apache Spark
4 63 (1.42%) SAS
5 60 (1.36%) Apache Airflow
6 38 (0.86%) OpenStack
7 34 (0.77%) nginx
8 33 (0.75%) CMS
9 24 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
10 21 (0.47%) IIS
11 15 (0.34%) JBoss
12 13 (0.29%) WebLogic
13 11 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 11 (0.25%) Sitecore CMS
14 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.23%) Mendix
15 9 (0.20%) CICS
16 8 (0.18%) Camunda
16 8 (0.18%) Smallworld
Applications
1 99 (2.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 40 (0.90%) Microsoft Project
4 34 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 7 (0.16%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.090%) Trello
10 2 (0.045%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 68 (1.54%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.25%) Endur
3 10 (0.23%) Maximo
3 10 (0.23%) Oracle ERP
3 10 (0.23%) SAP S/4HANA
4 9 (0.20%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 7 (0.16%) VisionPLUS
7 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.090%) Oracle EBS
8 4 (0.090%) Payment Gateway
8 4 (0.090%) SAP ERP
9 3 (0.068%) NetSuite
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Assets
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle General Ledger
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Payables
9 3 (0.068%) Oracle Receivables
9 3 (0.068%) SAP CO
9 3 (0.068%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,305 (52.11%) Azure
2 1,591 (35.97%) AWS
3 1,241 (28.06%) Azure DevOps
4 829 (18.74%) GitHub
5 651 (14.72%) GCP
6 530 (11.98%) Serverless
7 475 (10.74%) GitHub Actions
8 371 (8.39%) Power Platform
9 282 (6.38%) AWS CloudFormation
10 255 (5.77%) AWS Lambda
11 237 (5.36%) Amazon S3
12 218 (4.93%) Azure Data Factory
13 210 (4.75%) Azure AKS
14 198 (4.48%) Amazon EKS
15 185 (4.18%) OpenShift
16 174 (3.93%) Entra ID
17 173 (3.91%) Dynamics 365
18 171 (3.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 170 (3.84%) Amazon ECS
20 161 (3.64%) SaaS
Communications & Networking
1 200 (4.52%) Firewall
2 108 (2.44%) DNS
3 90 (2.03%) Network Security
3 90 (2.03%) VPN
4 50 (1.13%) TCP/IP
5 47 (1.06%) SSL
6 37 (0.84%) HTTP
7 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
8 23 (0.52%) WAN
9 18 (0.41%) DHCP
10 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
11 15 (0.34%) BGP
12 14 (0.32%) MPLS
12 14 (0.32%) SD-WAN
12 14 (0.32%) SSH
13 13 (0.29%) FTP
14 12 (0.27%) LAN
14 12 (0.27%) SAN
14 12 (0.27%) SMTP
15 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
Database & Business Intelligence
1 253 (5.72%) PostgreSQL
2 237 (5.36%) Power BI
3 178 (4.02%) SQL Server
4 167 (3.78%) NoSQL
5 140 (3.17%) Data Lake
6 134 (3.03%) Amazon RDS
7 118 (2.67%) Relational Database
8 108 (2.44%) Data Warehouse
9 104 (2.35%) MongoDB
10 93 (2.10%) Azure SQL Database
11 78 (1.76%) Oracle Database
12 73 (1.65%) Elasticsearch
13 66 (1.49%) DynamoDB
13 66 (1.49%) MySQL
14 57 (1.29%) Metadata
15 53 (1.20%) Delta Lake
15 53 (1.20%) Tableau
16 52 (1.18%) Redis
17 50 (1.13%) Big Data
18 47 (1.06%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 782 (17.68%) Jenkins
2 590 (13.34%) JIRA
3 585 (13.23%) Git
4 584 (13.20%) GitLab
5 135 (3.05%) Selenium
6 94 (2.13%) JUnit
7 93 (2.10%) Postman
8 65 (1.47%) SonarQube
8 65 (1.47%) Sonatype Nexus
9 64 (1.45%) Bitbucket
10 63 (1.42%) Cucumber
10 63 (1.42%) Cypress.io
11 49 (1.11%) Artifactory
11 49 (1.11%) JMeter
12 46 (1.04%) Maven
13 45 (1.02%) REST Assured
14 42 (0.95%) Gradle
15 38 (0.86%) Oracle APEX
16 36 (0.81%) Liquibase
17 33 (0.75%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,330 (30.07%) Social Skills
2 804 (18.18%) Finance
3 564 (12.75%) Public Sector
4 369 (8.34%) Analytical Skills
5 338 (7.64%) Banking
6 156 (3.53%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.79%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.51%) Financial Institution
9 66 (1.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 65 (1.47%) Marketing
11 49 (1.11%) Retail
12 48 (1.09%) Presentation Skills
13 45 (1.02%) Front Office
13 45 (1.02%) Investment Banking
14 43 (0.97%) Telecoms
15 37 (0.84%) Military
16 33 (0.75%) Organisational Skills
17 32 (0.72%) Pharmaceutical
18 31 (0.70%) Legal
19 26 (0.59%) Law
Job Titles
1 873 (19.74%) DevOps Engineer
2 767 (17.34%) Developer
3 604 (13.66%) Senior
4 441 (9.97%) Architect
5 343 (7.75%) Lead
6 264 (5.97%) Azure Engineer
7 252 (5.70%) AWS Engineer
8 229 (5.18%) Analyst
9 227 (5.13%) Data Engineer
10 197 (4.45%) AWS DevOps
11 174 (3.93%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 161 (3.64%) Cloud Engineer
13 155 (3.50%) Software Engineer
14 150 (3.39%) Platform Engineer
15 148 (3.35%) Senior Developer
16 130 (2.94%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 130 (2.94%) Solutions Architect
17 120 (2.71%) Business Analyst
18 118 (2.67%) Senior DevOps
19 113 (2.55%) Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 507 (11.46%) REST
2 397 (8.98%) .NET
3 302 (6.83%) React
4 294 (6.65%) Node.js
5 252 (5.70%) RESTful
6 251 (5.67%) Kafka
7 241 (5.45%) Spring
8 223 (5.04%) Spring Boot
9 171 (3.87%) JSON
10 154 (3.48%) AngularJS
10 154 (3.48%) OAuth
11 143 (3.23%) Elastic Stack
12 131 (2.96%) SOAP
12 131 (2.96%) XML
13 128 (2.89%) HTML
13 128 (2.89%) YAML
14 113 (2.55%) Playwright
15 109 (2.46%) CSS
16 102 (2.31%) PySpark
17 98 (2.22%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 640 (14.47%) Cloud Native
2 240 (5.43%) Product Ownership
3 162 (3.66%) Distributed Systems
4 125 (2.83%) Onboarding
5 118 (2.67%) Public Cloud
6 89 (2.01%) Legacy Systems
7 82 (1.85%) Hybrid Cloud
8 73 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
9 55 (1.24%) Virtual Team
10 54 (1.22%) Management Information System
11 49 (1.11%) Data Centre
11 49 (1.11%) Data Protection Act
11 49 (1.11%) Security Posture
12 48 (1.09%) NHS
13 46 (1.04%) Private Cloud
14 45 (1.02%) Replication
15 41 (0.93%) CMDB
15 41 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
16 38 (0.86%) AI Agents
16 38 (0.86%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 486 (10.99%) Linux
2 245 (5.54%) Windows
3 106 (2.40%) Unix
4 56 (1.27%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 50 (1.13%) Windows Server
6 46 (1.04%) VMS
7 30 (0.68%) Ubuntu
8 20 (0.45%) Android
8 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
9 19 (0.43%) Apple iOS
10 18 (0.41%) CentOS
11 10 (0.23%) Amazon Linux
12 9 (0.20%) Solaris
13 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
16 4 (0.090%) Mac OS
16 4 (0.090%) zOS
17 2 (0.045%) Debian
18 1 (0.023%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,551 (57.68%) CI/CD
2 1,727 (39.05%) Agile
3 1,178 (26.63%) Infrastructure as Code
4 856 (19.35%) Containerisation
5 853 (19.29%) Problem-Solving
6 669 (15.13%) Test Automation
7 667 (15.08%) Microservices
8 527 (11.91%) Continuous Improvement
9 521 (11.78%) Analytics
10 508 (11.49%) Migration
11 478 (10.81%) Scrum
12 467 (10.56%) Observability
13 443 (10.02%) AI
14 416 (9.41%) Stakeholder Management
15 388 (8.77%) Software Engineering
16 345 (7.80%) Data Modelling
16 345 (7.80%) Mentoring
17 297 (6.71%) Business Intelligence
18 295 (6.67%) Platform Engineering
18 295 (6.67%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,354 (30.61%) Python
2 877 (19.83%) SQL
3 587 (13.27%) Java
4 442 (9.99%) C#
5 425 (9.61%) JavaScript
6 382 (8.64%) PowerShell
7 347 (7.85%) Bash
8 305 (6.90%) TypeScript
9 148 (3.35%) Bicep
10 142 (3.21%) Go
11 78 (1.76%) PL/SQL
12 63 (1.42%) Scala
13 58 (1.31%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.11%) Groovy
14 49 (1.11%) Ruby
15 45 (1.02%) C++
16 42 (0.95%) T-SQL
17 36 (0.81%) Perl
18 26 (0.59%) Rust
19 23 (0.52%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,347 (30.45%) Security Cleared
2 1,117 (25.25%) SC Cleared
3 377 (8.52%) Degree
4 192 (4.34%) Azure Certification
5 190 (4.30%) Computer Science Degree
6 142 (3.21%) DV Cleared
7 138 (3.12%) AWS Certification
8 108 (2.44%) BPSS Clearance
9 89 (2.01%) Master's Degree
10 75 (1.70%) CISSP
11 69 (1.56%) Microsoft Certification
12 59 (1.33%) CISM
13 48 (1.09%) ISTQB
14 46 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 39 (0.88%) PMI Certification
16 31 (0.70%) PMP
17 30 (0.68%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 29 (0.66%) Cisco Certification
19 23 (0.52%) IIBA
20 22 (0.50%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 382 (8.64%) QA
2 180 (4.07%) GDPR
3 158 (3.57%) Data Quality
4 145 (3.28%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 127 (2.87%) Accessibility
5 127 (2.87%) NIST
6 73 (1.65%) NCSC
7 37 (0.84%) PCI DSS
8 35 (0.79%) WCAG
9 30 (0.68%) HIPAA
10 27 (0.61%) PMO
10 27 (0.61%) SLA
11 25 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 19 (0.43%) SOC 2
13 18 (0.41%) PSD2
14 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
15 14 (0.32%) SEPA
16 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
17 10 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,085 (24.53%) Docker
2 171 (3.87%) Active Directory
3 71 (1.61%) VMware Infrastructure
4 68 (1.54%) Virtual Machines
5 38 (0.86%) vSphere
6 25 (0.57%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.41%) Virtual Desktop
8 14 (0.32%) Squid
9 13 (0.29%) DFS Replication
9 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.25%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.25%) Lustre
10 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
11 9 (0.20%) GPFS
12 7 (0.16%) Dovecot
12 7 (0.16%) Firmware
12 7 (0.16%) NFS
12 7 (0.16%) Postfix
12 7 (0.16%) VMware ESXi
13 6 (0.14%) Tivoli Directory Server
Systems Management
1 1,392 (31.47%) Terraform
2 1,309 (29.60%) Kubernetes
3 501 (11.33%) Ansible
4 327 (7.39%) Grafana
5 290 (6.56%) Prometheus
6 93 (2.10%) Argo
7 73 (1.65%) Puppet
8 64 (1.45%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (0.99%) Istio
10 39 (0.88%) Kibana
11 35 (0.79%) Progress Chef
12 31 (0.70%) Packer
13 21 (0.47%) Podman
14 19 (0.43%) SCCM
14 19 (0.43%) vCenter Server
15 18 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
16 17 (0.38%) Rancher
17 16 (0.36%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 15 (0.34%) Consul
18 15 (0.34%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 766 (17.32%) Microsoft
2 293 (6.62%) Oracle
3 255 (5.77%) Databricks
4 253 (5.72%) Google
5 217 (4.91%) Splunk
6 163 (3.69%) ServiceNow
7 130 (2.94%) Red Hat
8 120 (2.71%) VMware
9 115 (2.60%) Salesforce
10 102 (2.31%) SAP
11 77 (1.74%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.40%) Dynatrace
13 55 (1.24%) CyberArk
14 48 (1.09%) IBM
15 45 (1.02%) Atlassian
16 41 (0.93%) F5
17 39 (0.88%) Cisco
18 33 (0.75%) Palo Alto
19 32 (0.72%) Talend
20 30 (0.68%) MuleSoft