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

6 months to
13 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 15 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 -1 -3
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,319 3,059 4,160
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.63% 10.37% 9.53%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.54% 11.39% 11.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,710 2,198 2,862
10th Percentile £385 £375 £400
25th Percentile £437 £438 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year - -4.55% -6.14%
75th Percentile £613 £630 £650
90th Percentile £700 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £525
% change year-on-year - -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 115 17 122
10th Percentile £39.53 £33.10 £56.50
25th Percentile £61.38 £51.25 £61.60
Median hourly rate £70.00 £70.00 £67.50
Median % change year-on-year - +3.70% +3.05%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.44
90th Percentile £93.63 £90.25 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.75 £68.75 £66.50
% change year-on-year - +3.38% +1.53%

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 42,415 26,864 37,189
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.78% 91.03% 85.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,461 17,061 23,740
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £508 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.99% -3.33% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £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 2,543 1,206 2,581
10th Percentile £14.71 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.13 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +62.06% -25.68% +1.67%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.00 £61.25
90th Percentile £81.25 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% +9.23%

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 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 13 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 13 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 4,523 £525 - 1,264
UK excluding London +6 2,343 £500 - 937
London +4 2,323 £550 - 501
Work from Home -1 1,462 £525 - 768
North of England +7 830 £500 - 280
South East -3 461 £513 +2.50% 269
Yorkshire +2 449 £502 +0.40% 84
Midlands +3 419 £488 -2.50% 115
West Midlands 0 330 £500 -2.44% 74
North West +1 310 £500 - 163
South West +16 281 £525 -4.55% 122
Scotland +2 198 £500 +3.20% 51
East of England +23 131 £525 +6.33% 74
North East +10 89 £450 -16.28% 38
East Midlands +1 85 £465 +0.54% 41
Wales +5 51 £425 +37.10% 26
Northern Ireland +9 20 £475 +15.85% 21
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
1 310 (5.83%) Confluence
2 137 (2.58%) Apache Spark
3 121 (2.27%) SharePoint
4 99 (1.86%) Apache Airflow
5 93 (1.75%) Apache
6 86 (1.62%) SAS
7 46 (0.86%) CMS
8 31 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
8 31 (0.58%) nginx
9 29 (0.55%) Jupyter
10 27 (0.51%) IIS
11 18 (0.34%) OpenStack
12 15 (0.28%) Camunda
13 14 (0.26%) WebSphere
14 12 (0.23%) Palantir Foundry
15 10 (0.19%) Mendix
16 9 (0.17%) Sitecore CMS
17 8 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
18 7 (0.13%) ArcGIS
18 7 (0.13%) Tomcat
Applications
1 77 (1.45%) Microsoft Excel
2 57 (1.07%) Microsoft Project
3 50 (0.94%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 37 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
5 28 (0.53%) MS Visio
6 8 (0.15%) CPLEX
7 7 (0.13%) Chatbot
8 4 (0.075%) Notion
9 3 (0.056%) Trello
10 2 (0.038%) Adobe XD
10 2 (0.038%) Spreadsheet
11 1 (0.019%) InDesign
11 1 (0.019%) Maya
11 1 (0.019%) Weka
Business Applications
1 66 (1.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 33 (0.62%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.19%) Maximo
4 10 (0.19%) Oracle ERP
5 9 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
6 8 (0.15%) Aladdin
6 8 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Endur
7 6 (0.11%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.094%) Magento
8 5 (0.094%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.075%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 3 (0.056%) NEC Housing
10 3 (0.056%) Oracle BPM
10 3 (0.056%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.056%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.056%) SAP MM
10 3 (0.056%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,867 (53.90%) Azure
2 1,852 (34.82%) AWS
3 1,570 (29.52%) Azure DevOps
4 893 (16.79%) GitHub
5 681 (12.80%) GCP
6 536 (10.08%) GitHub Actions
7 481 (9.04%) Serverless
8 453 (8.52%) Power Platform
9 289 (5.43%) Amazon S3
10 264 (4.96%) AWS Lambda
11 255 (4.79%) AWS CloudFormation
12 235 (4.42%) Entra ID
13 220 (4.14%) Azure AKS
14 213 (4.00%) Amazon EKS
15 196 (3.68%) Azure Data Factory
16 177 (3.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 169 (3.18%) Amazon EC2
18 161 (3.03%) PaaS
19 159 (2.99%) Azure Monitor
20 156 (2.93%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 241 (4.53%) Firewall
2 140 (2.63%) DNS
3 114 (2.14%) Network Security
4 103 (1.94%) VPN
5 47 (0.88%) TCP/IP
6 46 (0.86%) WAN
7 36 (0.68%) SD-WAN
8 33 (0.62%) BGP
9 30 (0.56%) SSL
10 27 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
11 26 (0.49%) DHCP
12 25 (0.47%) SAN
13 24 (0.45%) OSPF
14 22 (0.41%) HTTP
14 22 (0.41%) Internet
15 18 (0.34%) IPsec
16 17 (0.32%) VXLAN
17 16 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 16 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 16 (0.30%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 291 (5.47%) Power BI
2 258 (4.85%) SQL Server
3 254 (4.78%) PostgreSQL
4 185 (3.48%) NoSQL
5 170 (3.20%) Data Lake
6 161 (3.03%) Relational Database
7 149 (2.80%) Data Warehouse
8 147 (2.76%) MongoDB
9 114 (2.14%) Amazon RDS
10 105 (1.97%) Azure SQL Database
11 99 (1.86%) Metadata
12 97 (1.82%) DynamoDB
13 89 (1.67%) Delta Lake
14 73 (1.37%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.35%) Big Data
16 69 (1.30%) Amazon Athena
17 68 (1.28%) Redis
18 62 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
19 58 (1.09%) Amazon Redshift
20 54 (1.02%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 757 (14.23%) Jenkins
2 674 (12.67%) Git
3 638 (11.99%) JIRA
4 563 (10.58%) GitLab
5 112 (2.11%) Selenium
6 99 (1.86%) Postman
7 89 (1.67%) SonarQube
8 88 (1.65%) JUnit
9 71 (1.33%) Bitbucket
10 69 (1.30%) REST Assured
11 67 (1.26%) Maven
12 59 (1.11%) Cucumber
13 56 (1.05%) JMeter
14 47 (0.88%) Cypress.io
15 45 (0.85%) Artifactory
15 45 (0.85%) Gradle
16 43 (0.81%) Gatling
17 38 (0.71%) Mockito
18 35 (0.66%) Visual Studio
19 33 (0.62%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 1,324 (24.89%) Social Skills
2 965 (18.14%) Finance
3 710 (13.35%) Public Sector
4 416 (7.82%) Analytical Skills
5 341 (6.41%) Banking
6 142 (2.67%) Documentation Skills
7 103 (1.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 76 (1.43%) Influencing Skills
9 75 (1.41%) Retail
10 69 (1.30%) Legal
11 57 (1.07%) Marketing
12 54 (1.02%) Organisational Skills
13 49 (0.92%) Financial Institution
14 45 (0.85%) Military
15 40 (0.75%) Law
15 40 (0.75%) Presentation Skills
16 36 (0.68%) Investment Banking
17 31 (0.58%) Telecoms
18 30 (0.56%) Front Office
19 27 (0.51%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 1,096 (20.61%) DevOps Engineer
2 800 (15.04%) Developer
3 752 (14.14%) Senior
4 624 (11.73%) Architect
5 478 (8.99%) Lead
6 342 (6.43%) Azure Engineer
7 322 (6.05%) Analyst
8 312 (5.87%) Data Engineer
9 263 (4.94%) AWS Engineer
10 201 (3.78%) Cloud Engineer
11 196 (3.68%) Platform Engineer
12 193 (3.63%) AWS DevOps
13 182 (3.42%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 182 (3.42%) Solutions Architect
14 178 (3.35%) Senior DevOps
15 177 (3.33%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 176 (3.31%) Java Developer
17 164 (3.08%) Business Analyst
18 162 (3.05%) Senior DevOps Engineer
19 145 (2.73%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 484 (9.10%) REST
2 456 (8.57%) .NET
3 310 (5.83%) React
4 306 (5.75%) Spring
5 293 (5.51%) Spring Boot
6 290 (5.45%) Kafka
7 280 (5.26%) RESTful
8 241 (4.53%) Node.js
9 173 (3.25%) AngularJS
10 162 (3.05%) PySpark
11 156 (2.93%) OAuth
12 150 (2.82%) Playwright
13 133 (2.50%) JSON
14 124 (2.33%) YAML
15 118 (2.22%) SOAP
16 112 (2.11%) .NET Framework
17 109 (2.05%) Middleware
18 107 (2.01%) HTML
19 105 (1.97%) OpenID
20 103 (1.94%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 907 (17.05%) Cloud Native
2 338 (6.35%) Product Ownership
3 220 (4.14%) Distributed Systems
4 140 (2.63%) Onboarding
5 126 (2.37%) Legacy Systems
6 119 (2.24%) Enterprise Software
7 112 (2.11%) Hybrid Cloud
8 108 (2.03%) Public Cloud
9 83 (1.56%) Data Centre
10 81 (1.52%) Data Protection Act
11 66 (1.24%) Management Information System
12 61 (1.15%) Self-Motivation
13 55 (1.03%) Mobile App
14 53 (1.00%) Security Posture
15 51 (0.96%) AI Agents
16 49 (0.92%) Data Structures
16 49 (0.92%) Greenfield Project
16 49 (0.92%) Virtual Team
17 44 (0.83%) Private Cloud
18 43 (0.81%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 455 (8.55%) Linux
2 263 (4.94%) Windows
3 101 (1.90%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 81 (1.52%) Unix
5 56 (1.05%) Windows Server
6 36 (0.68%) VMS
7 30 (0.56%) Ubuntu
8 23 (0.43%) Apple iOS
9 17 (0.32%) Android
10 14 (0.26%) CentOS
11 10 (0.19%) Solaris
11 10 (0.19%) Windows Server 2019
12 7 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
13 6 (0.11%) Windows 10
13 6 (0.11%) Windows Server 2008
14 5 (0.094%) Amazon Linux
14 5 (0.094%) Mac OS
15 4 (0.075%) Alpine Linux
15 4 (0.075%) Data ONTAP
15 4 (0.075%) Windows Server 2012
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,082 (57.94%) CI/CD
2 1,970 (37.04%) Agile
3 1,423 (26.75%) Infrastructure as Code
4 853 (16.04%) Containerisation
5 789 (14.83%) Problem-Solving
6 767 (14.42%) Microservices
7 750 (14.10%) Test Automation
8 739 (13.89%) Continuous Improvement
9 649 (12.20%) Migration
10 645 (12.13%) Observability
11 627 (11.79%) Stakeholder Management
12 613 (11.52%) AI
13 605 (11.37%) Analytics
14 596 (11.21%) Scrum
15 548 (10.30%) Platform Engineering
16 537 (10.10%) Software Engineering
17 487 (9.16%) Data Modelling
18 444 (8.35%) Technical Leadership
19 434 (8.16%) Mentoring
20 427 (8.03%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,491 (28.03%) Python
2 1,001 (18.82%) SQL
3 730 (13.72%) Java
4 492 (9.25%) C#
5 385 (7.24%) JavaScript
6 382 (7.18%) Bash
7 377 (7.09%) PowerShell
8 264 (4.96%) TypeScript
9 181 (3.40%) Bicep
10 111 (2.09%) Go
11 66 (1.24%) Shell Script
12 64 (1.20%) Apex Code
12 64 (1.20%) Scala
13 51 (0.96%) T-SQL
14 49 (0.92%) PL/SQL
15 45 (0.85%) Groovy
16 31 (0.58%) C++
17 26 (0.49%) Kotlin
17 26 (0.49%) Ruby
18 25 (0.47%) Data Analysis Expressions
Qualifications
1 1,679 (31.57%) Security Cleared
2 1,410 (26.51%) SC Cleared
3 320 (6.02%) Degree
4 211 (3.97%) Azure Certification
5 176 (3.31%) BPSS Clearance
6 167 (3.14%) AWS Certification
7 158 (2.97%) DV Cleared
8 129 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
9 82 (1.54%) CISSP
10 69 (1.30%) Microsoft Certification
11 55 (1.03%) ISTQB
12 51 (0.96%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 48 (0.90%) CISM
14 46 (0.86%) Cisco Certification
15 44 (0.83%) PMI Certification
16 42 (0.79%) Master's Degree
17 41 (0.77%) PMP
18 29 (0.55%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 26 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
20 24 (0.45%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 437 (8.22%) QA
2 255 (4.79%) Data Quality
3 174 (3.27%) GDPR
4 153 (2.88%) Accessibility
5 125 (2.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 116 (2.18%) NIST
7 72 (1.35%) NCSC
8 63 (1.18%) WCAG
9 50 (0.94%) PCI DSS
10 45 (0.85%) SLA
11 32 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 29 (0.55%) PMO
13 26 (0.49%) GRC
14 19 (0.36%) HIPAA
15 15 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 12 (0.23%) ISO 20022
16 12 (0.23%) PSD2
17 11 (0.21%) NIST 800
18 10 (0.19%) SEPA
19 9 (0.17%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,014 (19.06%) Docker
2 176 (3.31%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.47%) VMware Infrastructure
4 75 (1.41%) Virtual Machines
5 33 (0.62%) vSphere
6 27 (0.51%) VMware NSX
7 20 (0.38%) Virtual Desktop
8 18 (0.34%) Squid
9 16 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
10 15 (0.28%) Hyper-V
11 14 (0.26%) Postfix
12 9 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
13 7 (0.13%) RACF
14 6 (0.11%) Corosync
14 6 (0.11%) Firmware
14 6 (0.11%) HDFS
15 5 (0.094%) KVM
15 5 (0.094%) NFS
15 5 (0.094%) SRDF
16 4 (0.075%) Microsoft App-V
Systems Management
1 1,532 (28.80%) Terraform
2 1,344 (25.27%) Kubernetes
3 511 (9.61%) Ansible
4 366 (6.88%) Grafana
5 314 (5.90%) Prometheus
6 93 (1.75%) Argo
7 77 (1.45%) Single Sign-On
8 68 (1.28%) Puppet
9 63 (1.18%) Istio
10 31 (0.58%) Progress Chef
11 30 (0.56%) Microsoft Intune
11 30 (0.56%) Packer
12 25 (0.47%) vCenter Server
13 22 (0.41%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 20 (0.38%) HP ALM
15 18 (0.34%) Consul
15 18 (0.34%) Kibana
16 15 (0.28%) Kustomize
16 15 (0.28%) SCCM
17 13 (0.24%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 924 (17.37%) Microsoft
2 279 (5.25%) Databricks
3 275 (5.17%) Oracle
4 253 (4.76%) Google
5 191 (3.59%) Splunk
6 183 (3.44%) ServiceNow
7 171 (3.21%) Salesforce
8 135 (2.54%) Red Hat
9 121 (2.27%) VMware
10 120 (2.26%) SAP
11 116 (2.18%) Dynatrace
12 75 (1.41%) OpenAI
13 53 (1.00%) IBM
14 51 (0.96%) Informatica
15 50 (0.94%) Atlassian
16 47 (0.88%) CyberArk
17 41 (0.77%) Cisco
18 39 (0.73%) Foundry
18 39 (0.73%) Okta
19 38 (0.71%) AppDynamics