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

6 months to
24 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 11 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,408 3,327 3,945
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.60% 10.52% 8.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.25% 11.83% 10.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,101 2,283 2,855
10th Percentile £375 £394 £408
25th Percentile £425 £463 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £560 £563
Median % change year-on-year -7.14% -0.44% -6.25%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £656
90th Percentile £700 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £538
% change year-on-year -4.76% -2.33% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 25 99
10th Percentile £41.90 £36.85 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £46.18 £55.63
Median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.76%
75th Percentile £82.00 £80.00 £67.88
90th Percentile £93.75 £80.75 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -29.63% +3.85% -0.84%

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 33,264 28,130 38,528
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.54% 88.98% 87.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,071 17,089 25,387
10th Percentile £305 £306 £300
25th Percentile £408 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £644
90th Percentile £725 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,016 886 1,898
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.91
25th Percentile £17.50 £20.96 £17.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £36.42
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -10.76% +16.69%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £69.82 £74.93 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.00 £30.41 £37.50
% change year-on-year -21.08% -18.91% +44.23%

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 24 January 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 24 January 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 24 January 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 3,774 £525 -8.70% 2,213
UK excluding London +7 1,978 £500 -4.76% 2,085
London -1 1,896 £536 -10.67% 462
Work from Home 0 1,259 £525 -2.78% 1,258
North of England +4 679 £500 -2.44% 436
Midlands +24 400 £515 -1.20% 239
South East 0 389 £525 -10.26% 638
Yorkshire +1 349 £500 -1.72% 170
West Midlands +20 326 £525 - 114
North West +2 283 £468 -7.79% 202
South West +6 239 £525 -12.50% 275
Scotland +6 198 £475 +5.56% 116
East of England +21 110 £568 +10.19% 281
East Midlands +17 74 £425 -10.53% 122
North East -7 48 £475 -17.03% 65
Wales +2 33 £430 +59.26% 103
Northern Ireland -9 8 - - 47

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
1 264 (5.99%) Confluence
2 90 (2.04%) SharePoint
3 87 (1.97%) Apache
4 79 (1.79%) SAS
5 74 (1.68%) Apache Spark
6 62 (1.41%) Apache Airflow
7 40 (0.91%) nginx
8 37 (0.84%) CMS
9 36 (0.82%) OpenStack
10 25 (0.57%) IIS
11 21 (0.48%) Microsoft Exchange
12 19 (0.43%) JBoss
13 16 (0.36%) WebLogic
14 13 (0.29%) CICS
15 10 (0.23%) HCL Notes
15 10 (0.23%) Mendix
15 10 (0.23%) WebSphere
16 9 (0.20%) iPlanet
16 9 (0.20%) Sitecore CMS
16 9 (0.20%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 94 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 63 (1.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 34 (0.77%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.34%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Mozilla Thunderbird
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 4 (0.091%) Trello
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.023%) Adobe XD
9 1 (0.023%) Moqups
9 1 (0.023%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.39%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.27%) VisionPLUS
4 11 (0.25%) Endur
5 10 (0.23%) Aladdin
6 9 (0.20%) Maximo
6 9 (0.20%) Oracle ERP
7 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
8 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
8 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.091%) NetSuite
9 4 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.091%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.091%) Remedy ITSM
9 4 (0.091%) SAP ERP
10 3 (0.068%) Oracle Assets
10 3 (0.068%) Oracle General Ledger
10 3 (0.068%) SAP FI
10 3 (0.068%) SAP FI/CO
10 3 (0.068%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 2,239 (50.79%) Azure
2 1,594 (36.16%) AWS
3 1,208 (27.40%) Azure DevOps
4 804 (18.24%) GitHub
5 636 (14.43%) GCP
6 530 (12.02%) Serverless
7 462 (10.48%) GitHub Actions
8 362 (8.21%) Power Platform
9 282 (6.40%) AWS CloudFormation
10 261 (5.92%) AWS Lambda
11 247 (5.60%) Amazon S3
12 216 (4.90%) Azure Data Factory
13 202 (4.58%) Azure AKS
14 183 (4.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 183 (4.15%) Amazon EKS
15 181 (4.11%) OpenShift
16 173 (3.92%) Dynamics 365
17 171 (3.88%) Entra ID
18 165 (3.74%) Amazon ECS
19 164 (3.72%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 211 (4.79%) Firewall
2 112 (2.54%) DNS
3 93 (2.11%) VPN
4 87 (1.97%) Network Security
5 60 (1.36%) TCP/IP
6 54 (1.23%) SSL
7 40 (0.91%) HTTP
8 34 (0.77%) HTTPS
9 24 (0.54%) WAN
10 18 (0.41%) BGP
11 17 (0.39%) DHCP
11 17 (0.39%) MPLS
12 16 (0.36%) SD-WAN
12 16 (0.36%) SSH
13 15 (0.34%) FTP
13 15 (0.34%) Kerberos
13 15 (0.34%) SMTP
14 13 (0.29%) LAN
15 11 (0.25%) SAN
16 10 (0.23%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 251 (5.69%) PostgreSQL
2 231 (5.24%) Power BI
3 178 (4.04%) SQL Server
4 161 (3.65%) NoSQL
5 136 (3.09%) Amazon RDS
6 134 (3.04%) Data Lake
7 112 (2.54%) Relational Database
8 108 (2.45%) Data Warehouse
9 100 (2.27%) MongoDB
10 95 (2.16%) Azure SQL Database
11 81 (1.84%) Oracle Database
12 67 (1.52%) Elasticsearch
13 65 (1.47%) DynamoDB
14 63 (1.43%) MySQL
15 55 (1.25%) Tableau
16 51 (1.16%) Redis
17 50 (1.13%) Amazon Aurora
17 50 (1.13%) Metadata
18 49 (1.11%) Delta Lake
19 43 (0.98%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 794 (18.01%) Jenkins
2 614 (13.93%) Git
3 613 (13.91%) JIRA
4 578 (13.11%) GitLab
5 136 (3.09%) Selenium
6 101 (2.29%) JUnit
7 95 (2.16%) Postman
8 76 (1.72%) SonarQube
9 73 (1.66%) Bitbucket
9 73 (1.66%) Sonatype Nexus
10 70 (1.59%) Cypress.io
11 60 (1.36%) Cucumber
12 51 (1.16%) Artifactory
13 48 (1.09%) JMeter
14 47 (1.07%) Gradle
15 45 (1.02%) Maven
16 42 (0.95%) Liquibase
17 37 (0.84%) CircleCI
17 37 (0.84%) Oracle APEX
18 36 (0.82%) REST Assured
General
1 1,335 (30.29%) Social Skills
2 802 (18.19%) Finance
3 554 (12.57%) Public Sector
4 365 (8.28%) Analytical Skills
5 357 (8.10%) Banking
6 157 (3.56%) Documentation Skills
7 78 (1.77%) Influencing Skills
8 69 (1.57%) Financial Institution
9 68 (1.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 61 (1.38%) Marketing
11 49 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
12 48 (1.09%) Investment Banking
13 47 (1.07%) Front Office
14 46 (1.04%) Retail
15 44 (1.00%) Telecoms
16 35 (0.79%) Military
17 32 (0.73%) Pharmaceutical
18 28 (0.64%) Organisational Skills
19 27 (0.61%) Legal
20 26 (0.59%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 857 (19.44%) DevOps Engineer
2 773 (17.54%) Developer
3 593 (13.45%) Senior
4 408 (9.26%) Architect
5 331 (7.51%) Lead
6 254 (5.76%) Azure Engineer
7 251 (5.69%) AWS Engineer
8 226 (5.13%) Data Engineer
9 219 (4.97%) Analyst
10 197 (4.47%) AWS DevOps
11 172 (3.90%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 161 (3.65%) Software Engineer
13 157 (3.56%) Cloud Engineer
14 150 (3.40%) Senior Developer
15 146 (3.31%) Platform Engineer
16 125 (2.84%) Consultant
17 123 (2.79%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 120 (2.72%) Solutions Architect
19 119 (2.70%) Senior DevOps
20 115 (2.61%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 504 (11.43%) REST
2 380 (8.62%) .NET
3 286 (6.49%) React
4 281 (6.37%) Node.js
5 264 (5.99%) RESTful
6 244 (5.54%) Kafka
7 226 (5.13%) Spring
8 204 (4.63%) Spring Boot
9 185 (4.20%) JSON
10 160 (3.63%) OAuth
11 153 (3.47%) AngularJS
12 141 (3.20%) Elastic Stack
13 138 (3.13%) XML
14 135 (3.06%) HTML
14 135 (3.06%) SOAP
15 128 (2.90%) YAML
16 110 (2.50%) Playwright
17 104 (2.36%) CSS
18 97 (2.20%) Middleware
18 97 (2.20%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 622 (14.11%) Cloud Native
2 235 (5.33%) Product Ownership
3 162 (3.68%) Distributed Systems
4 123 (2.79%) Onboarding
5 117 (2.65%) Public Cloud
6 90 (2.04%) Legacy Systems
7 81 (1.84%) Hybrid Cloud
8 74 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
9 56 (1.27%) Data Protection Act
9 56 (1.27%) Virtual Team
10 54 (1.23%) Data Centre
10 54 (1.23%) Management Information System
11 48 (1.09%) Private Cloud
11 48 (1.09%) Replication
12 46 (1.04%) Mobile App
13 45 (1.02%) Security Posture
14 42 (0.95%) NHS
15 41 (0.93%) AI Agents
15 41 (0.93%) CMDB
15 41 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 496 (11.25%) Linux
2 257 (5.83%) Windows
3 112 (2.54%) Unix
4 58 (1.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 58 (1.32%) Windows Server
5 49 (1.11%) VMS
6 30 (0.68%) Ubuntu
7 28 (0.64%) Android
8 25 (0.57%) Apple iOS
9 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
10 18 (0.41%) CentOS
11 12 (0.27%) Amazon Linux
12 10 (0.23%) Solaris
13 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
14 6 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
15 5 (0.11%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.11%) zOS
16 4 (0.091%) Windows Server 2012
17 2 (0.045%) Debian
18 1 (0.023%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,511 (56.96%) CI/CD
2 1,760 (39.93%) Agile
3 1,155 (26.20%) Infrastructure as Code
4 852 (19.33%) Problem-Solving
5 849 (19.26%) Containerisation
6 677 (15.36%) Test Automation
7 665 (15.09%) Microservices
8 524 (11.89%) Continuous Improvement
9 503 (11.41%) Analytics
10 499 (11.32%) Migration
11 490 (11.12%) Scrum
12 456 (10.34%) Observability
13 423 (9.60%) AI
14 397 (9.01%) Software Engineering
15 392 (8.89%) Stakeholder Management
16 337 (7.65%) Data Modelling
17 334 (7.58%) Mentoring
18 299 (6.78%) Business Intelligence
18 299 (6.78%) Data Pipeline
19 293 (6.65%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,361 (30.88%) Python
2 878 (19.92%) SQL
3 595 (13.50%) Java
4 431 (9.78%) JavaScript
5 428 (9.71%) C#
6 383 (8.69%) PowerShell
7 355 (8.05%) Bash
8 309 (7.01%) TypeScript
9 149 (3.38%) Bicep
10 144 (3.27%) Go
11 77 (1.75%) PL/SQL
12 72 (1.63%) Shell Script
13 59 (1.34%) Scala
14 52 (1.18%) Groovy
15 50 (1.13%) C++
15 50 (1.13%) Ruby
16 44 (1.00%) T-SQL
17 42 (0.95%) Perl
18 24 (0.54%) Rust
19 23 (0.52%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,339 (30.38%) Security Cleared
2 1,113 (25.25%) SC Cleared
3 369 (8.37%) Degree
4 194 (4.40%) Computer Science Degree
5 185 (4.20%) Azure Certification
6 143 (3.24%) AWS Certification
7 141 (3.20%) DV Cleared
8 108 (2.45%) BPSS Clearance
9 82 (1.86%) Master's Degree
10 74 (1.68%) CISSP
11 64 (1.45%) Microsoft Certification
12 57 (1.29%) CISM
13 48 (1.09%) ISTQB
14 44 (1.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 39 (0.88%) PMI Certification
16 31 (0.70%) PMP
17 30 (0.68%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 30 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
18 21 (0.48%) IIBA
19 20 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 383 (8.69%) QA
2 161 (3.65%) GDPR
3 156 (3.54%) Data Quality
4 145 (3.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.81%) Accessibility
6 123 (2.79%) NIST
7 69 (1.57%) NCSC
8 36 (0.82%) PCI DSS
9 34 (0.77%) WCAG
10 28 (0.64%) HIPAA
11 27 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 26 (0.59%) PMO
13 24 (0.54%) SLA
14 17 (0.39%) PSD2
14 17 (0.39%) SOC 2
15 15 (0.34%) ISO 20022
16 13 (0.29%) SEPA
17 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
17 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
18 9 (0.20%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,113 (25.25%) Docker
2 172 (3.90%) Active Directory
3 70 (1.59%) VMware Infrastructure
4 65 (1.47%) Virtual Machines
5 30 (0.68%) vSphere
6 18 (0.41%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.34%) DFS Replication
7 15 (0.34%) Squid
7 15 (0.34%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.29%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 11 (0.25%) Lustre
9 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
10 9 (0.20%) GPFS
11 8 (0.18%) Dovecot
11 8 (0.18%) NFS
11 8 (0.18%) Postfix
11 8 (0.18%) Tivoli Directory Server
11 8 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
12 7 (0.16%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 1,378 (31.26%) Terraform
2 1,294 (29.36%) Kubernetes
3 529 (12.00%) Ansible
4 329 (7.46%) Grafana
5 292 (6.62%) Prometheus
6 84 (1.91%) Argo
7 77 (1.75%) Puppet
8 59 (1.34%) Single Sign-On
9 44 (1.00%) Istio
10 41 (0.93%) Progress Chef
11 39 (0.88%) Kibana
12 32 (0.73%) Packer
13 23 (0.52%) Podman
14 20 (0.45%) SCCM
15 17 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
15 17 (0.39%) Rancher
16 15 (0.34%) Consul
16 15 (0.34%) Proxmox
17 14 (0.32%) NetBackup
18 13 (0.29%) Nessus
Vendors
1 757 (17.17%) Microsoft
2 311 (7.06%) Oracle
3 253 (5.74%) Google
4 242 (5.49%) Databricks
5 224 (5.08%) Splunk
6 161 (3.65%) ServiceNow
7 128 (2.90%) Red Hat
8 116 (2.63%) Salesforce
9 115 (2.61%) VMware
10 104 (2.36%) SAP
11 74 (1.68%) Dynatrace
12 66 (1.50%) OpenAI
13 52 (1.18%) CyberArk
14 50 (1.13%) F5
15 48 (1.09%) IBM
16 45 (1.02%) Atlassian
17 43 (0.98%) Cisco
18 42 (0.95%) Talend
19 41 (0.93%) Palo Alto
20 38 (0.86%) Denodo