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 29 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 12 14 14
Rank change year-on-year +2 0 -6
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,002 3,683 4,654
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.71% 10.01% 9.91%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.95% 11.62% 11.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,776 2,463 3,395
10th Percentile £363 £380 £408
25th Percentile £425 £462 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £615 £650 £675
90th Percentile £700 £738 £752
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 26 49 102
10th Percentile £45.46 £45.19 £46.18
25th Percentile £57.56 £65.00 £47.14
Median hourly rate £67.00 £70.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.29% +7.69% -0.92%
75th Percentile £88.44 £73.50 £77.26
90th Percentile £95.00 £75.50 £82.92
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.00 £70.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -4.29% +7.69% -0.92%

All Process and 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 30,904 31,684 41,636
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.40% 86.12% 88.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 19,274 19,074 28,148
10th Percentile £300 £310 £313
25th Percentile £404 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -2.27%
75th Percentile £620 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £738 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,970 1,136 1,597
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.00 £14.25
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.12 £18.93
Median hourly rate £25.15 £37.00 £43.86
Median % change year-on-year -32.03% -15.64% +25.31%
75th Percentile £42.78 £65.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £66.55 £73.75 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £22.27 £36.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year -38.15% -15.29% +53.26%

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 29 October 2025.

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 29 October 2025.

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 29 October 2025. 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 +2 3,344 £525 -6.67% 2,229
UK excluding London +5 1,801 £500 -4.76% 1,747
London +1 1,682 £550 -4.35% 1,025
Work from Home +1 1,304 £525 -2.42% 1,157
North of England +4 578 £483 -3.50% 314
South East +6 370 £513 -12.39% 856
Midlands +15 357 £515 -6.36% 179
Yorkshire 0 312 £500 - 73
West Midlands +12 291 £525 -8.70% 125
North West +3 239 £450 -14.29% 196
Scotland +9 225 £487 +8.22% 79
South West -2 177 £550 -6.78% 170
East of England +28 103 £538 +2.38% 117
East Midlands +11 66 £413 -5.17% 52
Wales +6 46 £430 +1.18% 59
North East -7 29 £550 -4.97% 45
Northern Ireland -18 4 - - 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
1 245 (6.12%) Confluence
2 101 (2.52%) Apache
3 67 (1.67%) Apache Airflow
4 60 (1.50%) SharePoint
5 59 (1.47%) SAS
6 54 (1.35%) Apache Spark
7 40 (1.00%) CMS
8 30 (0.75%) IIS
8 30 (0.75%) JBoss
9 28 (0.70%) CICS
9 28 (0.70%) nginx
10 27 (0.67%) WebLogic
11 26 (0.65%) OpenStack
12 22 (0.55%) WebSphere
13 17 (0.42%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 16 (0.40%) Microsoft Exchange
15 15 (0.37%) Mule
16 14 (0.35%) Anypoint
17 13 (0.32%) Oracle Service Bus
18 12 (0.30%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 64 (1.60%) Microsoft Excel
2 33 (0.82%) Microsoft Office
2 33 (0.82%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 30 (0.75%) Microsoft Project
4 20 (0.50%) MS Visio
5 16 (0.40%) Chatbot
6 12 (0.30%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 10 (0.25%) Trello
8 5 (0.12%) Weka
9 1 (0.025%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.025%) Moqups
9 1 (0.025%) Notion
9 1 (0.025%) Revit
Business Applications
1 57 (1.42%) Dynamics CRM
2 29 (0.72%) Endur
3 25 (0.62%) Oracle BPM
4 20 (0.50%) SAP S/4HANA
5 17 (0.42%) VisionPLUS
6 16 (0.40%) Aladdin
7 14 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
8 13 (0.32%) Maximo
9 9 (0.22%) FLEXCUBE
10 7 (0.17%) Dynamics AX
11 6 (0.15%) Oracle EBS
11 6 (0.15%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
12 5 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
12 5 (0.12%) Teamcenter
13 4 (0.100%) Fidessa
13 4 (0.100%) NetSuite
13 4 (0.100%) SAP ERP
13 4 (0.100%) SAP PM
13 4 (0.100%) thinkFolio
13 4 (0.100%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 1,927 (48.15%) Azure
2 1,498 (37.43%) AWS
3 1,063 (26.56%) Azure DevOps
4 639 (15.97%) GitHub
5 532 (13.29%) GCP
6 433 (10.82%) Serverless
7 363 (9.07%) GitHub Actions
8 268 (6.70%) Power Platform
9 255 (6.37%) Amazon S3
10 244 (6.10%) AWS Lambda
11 237 (5.92%) AWS CloudFormation
12 208 (5.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 192 (4.80%) Amazon EC2
14 153 (3.82%) Azure AKS
15 150 (3.75%) SaaS
16 146 (3.65%) Amazon EKS
17 144 (3.60%) Virtual Private Cloud
18 142 (3.55%) Entra ID
19 139 (3.47%) Azure Data Factory
20 136 (3.40%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 201 (5.02%) Firewall
2 135 (3.37%) DNS
3 83 (2.07%) VPN
4 78 (1.95%) SSL
5 72 (1.80%) Network Security
5 72 (1.80%) TCP/IP
6 51 (1.27%) HTTP
7 38 (0.95%) HTTPS
8 34 (0.85%) SSH
9 31 (0.77%) SMTP
9 31 (0.77%) WAN
10 25 (0.62%) BGP
11 23 (0.57%) FTP
12 19 (0.47%) MPLS
13 18 (0.45%) DHCP
14 17 (0.42%) Kerberos
14 17 (0.42%) LAN
15 16 (0.40%) OpenLDAP
16 15 (0.37%) SD-WAN
17 13 (0.32%) OSPF
Database & Business Intelligence
1 272 (6.80%) PostgreSQL
2 172 (4.30%) NoSQL
3 170 (4.25%) SQL Server
4 169 (4.22%) Amazon RDS
5 167 (4.17%) Power BI
6 128 (3.20%) MongoDB
7 105 (2.62%) Relational Database
8 95 (2.37%) Data Warehouse
9 90 (2.25%) Oracle Database
10 83 (2.07%) Data Lake
11 72 (1.80%) Azure SQL Database
12 67 (1.67%) Redis
13 65 (1.62%) MySQL
14 64 (1.60%) DynamoDB
15 60 (1.50%) Amazon Aurora
16 51 (1.27%) Elasticsearch
17 44 (1.10%) Delta Lake
17 44 (1.10%) Metadata
18 37 (0.92%) Big Data
19 32 (0.80%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 791 (19.77%) Jenkins
2 657 (16.42%) Git
3 575 (14.37%) JIRA
4 491 (12.27%) GitLab
5 142 (3.55%) Selenium
6 105 (2.62%) JUnit
6 105 (2.62%) SonarQube
7 93 (2.32%) Sonatype Nexus
8 84 (2.10%) Bitbucket
9 83 (2.07%) Postman
10 77 (1.92%) Cypress.io
11 66 (1.65%) Maven
12 58 (1.45%) Liquibase
13 56 (1.40%) Cucumber
14 52 (1.30%) Gradle
15 48 (1.20%) Visual Studio
16 46 (1.15%) Artifactory
17 45 (1.12%) JMeter
18 38 (0.95%) CircleCI
18 38 (0.95%) TeamCity
General
1 1,214 (30.33%) Social Skills
2 734 (18.34%) Finance
3 486 (12.14%) Public Sector
4 351 (8.77%) Banking
5 339 (8.47%) Analytical Skills
6 109 (2.72%) Documentation Skills
7 72 (1.80%) Investment Banking
8 61 (1.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 61 (1.52%) Telecoms
9 58 (1.45%) Marketing
9 58 (1.45%) Retail
10 56 (1.40%) Financial Institution
11 46 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
12 45 (1.12%) Influencing Skills
13 42 (1.05%) Front Office
14 39 (0.97%) Military
15 37 (0.92%) Back Office
16 29 (0.72%) Manufacturing
17 28 (0.70%) Pharmaceutical
18 25 (0.62%) Law
Job Titles
1 811 (20.26%) Developer
2 728 (18.19%) DevOps Engineer
3 519 (12.97%) Senior
4 361 (9.02%) Architect
5 302 (7.55%) Lead
6 234 (5.85%) AWS Engineer
7 200 (5.00%) Azure Engineer
8 187 (4.67%) Analyst
9 176 (4.40%) AWS DevOps
10 164 (4.10%) Data Engineer
11 163 (4.07%) Software Engineer
12 150 (3.75%) Cloud Engineer
13 149 (3.72%) Senior Developer
14 148 (3.70%) AWS DevOps Engineer
15 139 (3.47%) Java Developer
16 131 (3.27%) Platform Engineer
17 130 (3.25%) Consultant
18 109 (2.72%) Senior DevOps
19 102 (2.55%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 102 (2.55%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 448 (11.19%) REST
2 357 (8.92%) .NET
3 312 (7.80%) RESTful
4 257 (6.42%) React
5 227 (5.67%) Kafka
6 224 (5.60%) Node.js
7 203 (5.07%) JSON
8 183 (4.57%) SOAP
9 170 (4.25%) HTML
10 168 (4.20%) Spring
11 165 (4.12%) Spring Boot
12 147 (3.67%) Elastic Stack
13 145 (3.62%) XML
14 144 (3.60%) AngularJS
15 143 (3.57%) OAuth
16 121 (3.02%) CSS
17 101 (2.52%) YAML
18 95 (2.37%) Web Services
19 88 (2.20%) .NET Core
20 87 (2.17%) ARM Templates
Miscellaneous
1 521 (13.02%) Cloud Native
2 201 (5.02%) Product Ownership
3 169 (4.22%) Distributed Systems
4 119 (2.97%) Onboarding
5 107 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
6 101 (2.52%) Public Cloud
7 73 (1.82%) Mobile App
8 71 (1.77%) Data Protection Act
9 70 (1.75%) Hybrid Cloud
10 59 (1.47%) Replication
11 58 (1.45%) Virtual Team
12 55 (1.37%) Greenfield Project
13 48 (1.20%) Algorithms
13 48 (1.20%) Management Information System
14 47 (1.17%) Security Posture
15 46 (1.15%) Data Centre
16 44 (1.10%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
17 42 (1.05%) Enterprise Software
18 41 (1.02%) Self-Motivation
19 37 (0.92%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 499 (12.47%) Linux
2 249 (6.22%) Windows
3 114 (2.85%) Unix
4 65 (1.62%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 64 (1.60%) Windows Server
6 60 (1.50%) Android
7 53 (1.32%) Apple iOS
8 44 (1.10%) VMS
9 26 (0.65%) Amazon Linux
10 22 (0.55%) CentOS
10 22 (0.55%) Ubuntu
11 16 (0.40%) Solaris
11 16 (0.40%) Windows 10
12 12 (0.30%) Mac OS
13 11 (0.27%) zOS
14 7 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
15 5 (0.12%) Windows Server 2016
16 3 (0.075%) Debian
16 3 (0.075%) SUSE
16 3 (0.075%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,223 (55.55%) CI/CD
2 1,730 (43.23%) Agile
3 1,008 (25.19%) Infrastructure as Code
4 763 (19.07%) Problem-Solving
5 747 (18.67%) Containerisation
6 630 (15.74%) Test Automation
7 588 (14.69%) Microservices
8 502 (12.54%) Scrum
9 440 (10.99%) Migration
10 404 (10.09%) Software Engineering
11 399 (9.97%) Continuous Improvement
12 379 (9.47%) Analytics
13 356 (8.90%) AI
14 334 (8.35%) Observability
15 306 (7.65%) Mentoring
16 297 (7.42%) Stakeholder Management
17 289 (7.22%) SDLC
18 272 (6.80%) Infrastructure Automation
19 258 (6.45%) Machine Learning
20 249 (6.22%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 1,272 (31.78%) Python
2 752 (18.79%) SQL
3 618 (15.44%) Java
4 410 (10.24%) JavaScript
5 398 (9.95%) C#
6 381 (9.52%) Bash
7 362 (9.05%) PowerShell
8 272 (6.80%) TypeScript
9 173 (4.32%) Go
10 120 (3.00%) Bicep
11 82 (2.05%) Shell Script
12 67 (1.67%) Groovy
13 61 (1.52%) PL/SQL
14 53 (1.32%) Perl
15 52 (1.30%) C++
15 52 (1.30%) Scala
16 37 (0.92%) Ruby
17 36 (0.90%) Kotlin
18 32 (0.80%) T-SQL
19 30 (0.75%) PHP
Qualifications
1 987 (24.66%) Security Cleared
2 803 (20.06%) SC Cleared
3 331 (8.27%) Degree
4 180 (4.50%) Computer Science Degree
5 156 (3.90%) AWS Certification
6 144 (3.60%) Azure Certification
7 122 (3.05%) DV Cleared
8 79 (1.97%) Master's Degree
9 71 (1.77%) BPSS Clearance
10 62 (1.55%) Microsoft Certification
11 54 (1.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 52 (1.30%) CISSP
13 37 (0.92%) ISTQB
14 36 (0.90%) Cisco Certification
15 30 (0.75%) CISM
16 25 (0.62%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 25 (0.62%) PMI Certification
17 22 (0.55%) PMP
18 17 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
19 16 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 346 (8.65%) QA
2 143 (3.57%) GDPR
3 126 (3.15%) Accessibility
4 118 (2.95%) Data Quality
4 118 (2.95%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 91 (2.27%) NIST
6 42 (1.05%) NCSC
7 34 (0.85%) PCI DSS
8 27 (0.67%) WCAG
9 24 (0.60%) HIPAA
9 24 (0.60%) SLA
9 24 (0.60%) SOC 2
10 13 (0.32%) MiFID
10 13 (0.32%) PMO
10 13 (0.32%) SEPA
11 12 (0.30%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 11 (0.27%) Cyber Essentials
12 11 (0.27%) EU AI Act
12 11 (0.27%) PSD2
13 10 (0.25%) GRC
System Software
1 979 (24.46%) Docker
2 176 (4.40%) Active Directory
3 72 (1.80%) VMware Infrastructure
4 53 (1.32%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.67%) vSphere
6 24 (0.60%) DFS Replication
7 16 (0.40%) Postfix
8 14 (0.35%) Oracle RAC
8 14 (0.35%) Virtual Desktop
9 13 (0.32%) Squid
10 12 (0.30%) Dovecot
11 11 (0.27%) VMware NSX
12 9 (0.22%) VMware ESXi
13 8 (0.20%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 7 (0.17%) Hyper-V
14 7 (0.17%) KVM
14 7 (0.17%) NFS
14 7 (0.17%) Slurm Workload Manager
14 7 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
15 6 (0.15%) Time Sharing Option
Systems Management
1 1,237 (30.91%) Terraform
2 1,143 (28.56%) Kubernetes
3 534 (13.34%) Ansible
4 304 (7.60%) Grafana
5 302 (7.55%) Prometheus
6 90 (2.25%) Puppet
7 70 (1.75%) Single Sign-On
8 68 (1.70%) Argo
9 64 (1.60%) Progress Chef
10 48 (1.20%) Kibana
11 32 (0.80%) Packer
12 30 (0.75%) Istio
13 25 (0.62%) ITRS Geneos
14 23 (0.57%) Microsoft Intune
15 20 (0.50%) Podman
15 20 (0.50%) SCCM
16 18 (0.45%) HP ALM
16 18 (0.45%) logstash
17 17 (0.42%) CA Endevor
18 16 (0.40%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 681 (17.02%) Microsoft
2 274 (6.85%) Oracle
3 222 (5.55%) Google
4 198 (4.95%) Splunk
5 181 (4.52%) Databricks
6 162 (4.05%) ServiceNow
7 112 (2.80%) Salesforce
8 107 (2.67%) SAP
9 94 (2.35%) Red Hat
10 93 (2.32%) VMware
11 63 (1.57%) Dynatrace
12 58 (1.45%) IBM
13 55 (1.37%) MuleSoft
14 47 (1.17%) F5
15 44 (1.10%) Cisco
16 38 (0.95%) Atlassian
16 38 (0.95%) Palo Alto
17 36 (0.90%) OpenAI
18 33 (0.82%) HP
19 31 (0.77%) Talend