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

6 months to
12 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,464 3,288 3,914
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.21% 10.61% 8.83%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.88% 11.86% 10.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,119 2,280 2,824
10th Percentile £375 £400 £407
25th Percentile £429 £463 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.78%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £711 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 59 24 101
10th Percentile £44.27 £36.58 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £57.19 £56.65
Median hourly rate £52.50 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -28.30% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £79.75 £80.75 £71.90
90th Percentile £94.00 £87.50 £81.25
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 34,652 27,713 38,573
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.01% 89.46% 87.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,939 16,970 25,283
10th Percentile £306 £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 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £498 £500
% change year-on-year -4.06% -0.35% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,087 853 2,111
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.28
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.05 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -1.71% +1.74%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £72.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.51 £35.00
% change year-on-year -20.18% -9.97% +9.38%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 3,805 £525 -8.70% 1,271
UK excluding London +7 1,999 £500 -4.76% 1,028
London -3 1,909 £540 -9.62% 476
Work from Home -3 1,267 £525 -4.55% 735
North of England +5 683 £500 -2.91% 294
South East +2 417 £525 -8.70% 335
Midlands +20 384 £513 +2.55% 128
Yorkshire +1 355 £500 -1.96% 98
West Midlands +18 307 £525 +5.00% 95
North West +3 280 £473 -9.47% 165
South West +11 246 £525 -12.50% 138
Scotland +6 195 £450 - 57
East of England +16 113 £575 +9.26% 56
East Midlands +10 77 £425 -10.53% 34
North East -5 51 £475 -9.52% 34
Wales +10 37 £425 +72.44% 28
Northern Ireland -7 9 £475 +26.67% 10

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
1 266 (5.96%) Confluence
2 93 (2.08%) Apache Spark
3 90 (2.02%) SharePoint
4 89 (1.99%) Apache
5 57 (1.28%) SAS
6 56 (1.25%) Apache Airflow
7 37 (0.83%) OpenStack
8 35 (0.78%) nginx
9 32 (0.72%) CMS
10 24 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
11 21 (0.47%) IIS
12 15 (0.34%) JBoss
13 13 (0.29%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.27%) Sitecore CMS
15 11 (0.25%) Adobe Experience Manager
16 10 (0.22%) HCL Notes
16 10 (0.22%) Mendix
17 8 (0.18%) Camunda
17 8 (0.18%) GeoServer
17 8 (0.18%) Smallworld
Applications
1 99 (2.22%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 42 (0.94%) Microsoft Project
4 33 (0.74%) Microsoft Office
5 19 (0.43%) MS Visio
6 14 (0.31%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.18%) Weka
8 6 (0.13%) Mozilla Thunderbird
9 4 (0.090%) Trello
10 2 (0.045%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.022%) CPLEX
11 1 (0.022%) Revit
Business Applications
1 66 (1.48%) Dynamics CRM
2 11 (0.25%) Endur
3 10 (0.22%) Maximo
3 10 (0.22%) Oracle ERP
3 10 (0.22%) SAP S/4HANA
4 9 (0.20%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 5 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
6 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
6 5 (0.11%) VisionPLUS
7 4 (0.090%) Oracle EBS
7 4 (0.090%) Payment Gateway
7 4 (0.090%) SAP ERP
8 3 (0.067%) NetSuite
8 3 (0.067%) Oracle Assets
8 3 (0.067%) Oracle General Ledger
8 3 (0.067%) SAP CO
8 3 (0.067%) SAP FI
8 3 (0.067%) SAP FI/CO
8 3 (0.067%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,330 (52.20%) Azure
2 1,612 (36.11%) AWS
3 1,256 (28.14%) Azure DevOps
4 837 (18.75%) GitHub
5 670 (15.01%) GCP
6 538 (12.05%) Serverless
7 479 (10.73%) GitHub Actions
8 369 (8.27%) Power Platform
9 286 (6.41%) AWS CloudFormation
10 261 (5.85%) AWS Lambda
11 245 (5.49%) Amazon S3
12 221 (4.95%) Azure Data Factory
13 214 (4.79%) Azure AKS
14 202 (4.53%) Amazon EKS
15 186 (4.17%) OpenShift
16 174 (3.90%) Amazon ECS
17 173 (3.88%) Entra ID
18 172 (3.85%) Dynamics 365
19 171 (3.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
20 164 (3.67%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 202 (4.53%) Firewall
2 109 (2.44%) DNS
3 94 (2.11%) Network Security
3 94 (2.11%) VPN
4 54 (1.21%) TCP/IP
5 46 (1.03%) SSL
6 34 (0.76%) HTTP
6 34 (0.76%) HTTPS
7 22 (0.49%) WAN
8 16 (0.36%) Kerberos
9 15 (0.34%) BGP
9 15 (0.34%) DHCP
10 14 (0.31%) SD-WAN
11 13 (0.29%) MPLS
11 13 (0.29%) SAN
12 11 (0.25%) FTP
12 11 (0.25%) LAN
12 11 (0.25%) Reverse Proxy
13 10 (0.22%) Internet
13 10 (0.22%) IPsec
Database & Business Intelligence
1 263 (5.89%) PostgreSQL
2 237 (5.31%) Power BI
3 180 (4.03%) SQL Server
4 175 (3.92%) NoSQL
5 142 (3.18%) Data Lake
6 136 (3.05%) Amazon RDS
7 123 (2.76%) Relational Database
8 110 (2.46%) MongoDB
9 108 (2.42%) Data Warehouse
10 98 (2.20%) Azure SQL Database
11 78 (1.75%) Oracle Database
12 76 (1.70%) Elasticsearch
13 74 (1.66%) DynamoDB
14 70 (1.57%) MySQL
15 58 (1.30%) Metadata
16 57 (1.28%) Delta Lake
17 54 (1.21%) Redis
18 51 (1.14%) Big Data
18 51 (1.14%) Tableau
19 48 (1.08%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 781 (17.50%) Jenkins
2 593 (13.28%) Git
3 585 (13.10%) GitLab
4 583 (13.06%) JIRA
5 134 (3.00%) Selenium
6 96 (2.15%) JUnit
7 91 (2.04%) Postman
8 67 (1.50%) SonarQube
9 65 (1.46%) Bitbucket
9 65 (1.46%) Sonatype Nexus
10 63 (1.41%) Cucumber
11 61 (1.37%) Cypress.io
12 50 (1.12%) Artifactory
13 49 (1.10%) JMeter
13 49 (1.10%) Maven
14 46 (1.03%) REST Assured
15 41 (0.92%) Gradle
16 38 (0.85%) Oracle APEX
17 37 (0.83%) Liquibase
18 32 (0.72%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,338 (29.97%) Social Skills
2 805 (18.03%) Finance
3 569 (12.75%) Public Sector
4 373 (8.36%) Analytical Skills
5 340 (7.62%) Banking
6 155 (3.47%) Documentation Skills
7 80 (1.79%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.50%) Financial Institution
8 67 (1.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 65 (1.46%) Marketing
10 52 (1.16%) Retail
11 47 (1.05%) Presentation Skills
12 45 (1.01%) Front Office
13 44 (0.99%) Telecoms
14 42 (0.94%) Investment Banking
15 36 (0.81%) Organisational Skills
16 34 (0.76%) Military
17 31 (0.69%) Legal
18 30 (0.67%) Pharmaceutical
19 27 (0.60%) Law
Job Titles
1 890 (19.94%) DevOps Engineer
2 766 (17.16%) Developer
3 613 (13.73%) Senior
4 453 (10.15%) Architect
5 343 (7.68%) Lead
6 272 (6.09%) Azure Engineer
7 254 (5.69%) AWS Engineer
8 233 (5.22%) Analyst
9 232 (5.20%) Data Engineer
10 199 (4.46%) AWS DevOps
11 176 (3.94%) AWS DevOps Engineer
12 166 (3.72%) Cloud Engineer
13 157 (3.52%) Software Engineer
14 151 (3.38%) Platform Engineer
15 145 (3.25%) Senior Developer
16 135 (3.02%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 133 (2.98%) Solutions Architect
18 123 (2.76%) Senior DevOps
19 121 (2.71%) Business Analyst
20 117 (2.62%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 515 (11.54%) REST
2 401 (8.98%) .NET
3 307 (6.88%) React
4 301 (6.74%) Node.js
5 258 (5.78%) RESTful
6 253 (5.67%) Kafka
7 245 (5.49%) Spring
8 227 (5.09%) Spring Boot
9 174 (3.90%) JSON
10 161 (3.61%) OAuth
11 153 (3.43%) AngularJS
12 144 (3.23%) Elastic Stack
13 130 (2.91%) HTML
14 129 (2.89%) SOAP
14 129 (2.89%) XML
15 124 (2.78%) YAML
16 116 (2.60%) Playwright
17 112 (2.51%) CSS
18 111 (2.49%) PySpark
19 101 (2.26%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 655 (14.67%) Cloud Native
2 244 (5.47%) Product Ownership
3 167 (3.74%) Distributed Systems
4 125 (2.80%) Onboarding
5 121 (2.71%) Public Cloud
6 94 (2.11%) Legacy Systems
7 83 (1.86%) Hybrid Cloud
8 75 (1.68%) Enterprise Software
9 55 (1.23%) Management Information System
10 54 (1.21%) Virtual Team
11 53 (1.19%) Data Protection Act
12 49 (1.10%) Data Centre
12 49 (1.10%) Security Posture
13 48 (1.08%) Private Cloud
14 47 (1.05%) NHS
15 43 (0.96%) Replication
16 42 (0.94%) Mobile App
17 39 (0.87%) Self-Motivation
18 37 (0.83%) AI Agents
19 36 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 487 (10.91%) Linux
2 243 (5.44%) Windows
3 107 (2.40%) Unix
4 55 (1.23%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 46 (1.03%) Windows Server
6 45 (1.01%) VMS
7 29 (0.65%) Ubuntu
8 20 (0.45%) Windows 10
9 19 (0.43%) Android
10 18 (0.40%) Apple iOS
11 17 (0.38%) CentOS
12 9 (0.20%) Solaris
13 8 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
14 7 (0.16%) Windows Server 2019
15 6 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
16 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
17 4 (0.090%) Mac OS
18 3 (0.067%) zOS
19 2 (0.045%) Debian
20 1 (0.022%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,577 (57.73%) CI/CD
2 1,727 (38.69%) Agile
3 1,191 (26.68%) Infrastructure as Code
4 869 (19.47%) Problem-Solving
5 865 (19.38%) Containerisation
6 678 (15.19%) Microservices
7 673 (15.08%) Test Automation
8 534 (11.96%) Continuous Improvement
9 524 (11.74%) Analytics
10 510 (11.42%) Migration
11 488 (10.93%) Observability
12 472 (10.57%) Scrum
13 450 (10.08%) AI
14 426 (9.54%) Stakeholder Management
15 401 (8.98%) Software Engineering
16 358 (8.02%) Data Modelling
17 355 (7.95%) Mentoring
18 303 (6.79%) Data Pipeline
19 301 (6.74%) Platform Engineering
20 297 (6.65%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,372 (30.73%) Python
2 890 (19.94%) SQL
3 592 (13.26%) Java
4 443 (9.92%) C#
5 428 (9.59%) JavaScript
6 376 (8.42%) PowerShell
7 346 (7.75%) Bash
8 315 (7.06%) TypeScript
9 150 (3.36%) Bicep
10 146 (3.27%) Go
11 78 (1.75%) PL/SQL
12 64 (1.43%) Scala
13 57 (1.28%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.10%) Ruby
15 48 (1.08%) Groovy
16 44 (0.99%) C++
17 43 (0.96%) T-SQL
18 34 (0.76%) Perl
19 28 (0.63%) Rust
20 23 (0.52%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,363 (30.53%) Security Cleared
2 1,126 (25.22%) SC Cleared
3 382 (8.56%) Degree
4 196 (4.39%) Azure Certification
5 195 (4.37%) Computer Science Degree
6 145 (3.25%) DV Cleared
7 143 (3.20%) AWS Certification
8 112 (2.51%) BPSS Clearance
9 90 (2.02%) Master's Degree
10 77 (1.72%) CISSP
11 69 (1.55%) Microsoft Certification
12 60 (1.34%) CISM
13 50 (1.12%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 50 (1.12%) ISTQB
14 39 (0.87%) PMI Certification
15 31 (0.69%) Cisco Certification
15 31 (0.69%) PMP
16 29 (0.65%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 23 (0.52%) IIBA
18 22 (0.49%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 388 (8.69%) QA
2 180 (4.03%) GDPR
3 161 (3.61%) Data Quality
4 143 (3.20%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.78%) NIST
6 122 (2.73%) Accessibility
7 72 (1.61%) NCSC
8 35 (0.78%) PCI DSS
9 33 (0.74%) WCAG
10 28 (0.63%) HIPAA
10 28 (0.63%) PMO
11 27 (0.60%) SLA
12 24 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 18 (0.40%) PSD2
13 18 (0.40%) SOC 2
14 16 (0.36%) ISO 20022
15 14 (0.31%) SEPA
16 11 (0.25%) Disclosure Scotland
16 11 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 11 (0.25%) NIST 800
System Software
1 1,090 (24.42%) Docker
2 169 (3.79%) Active Directory
3 75 (1.68%) Virtual Machines
4 70 (1.57%) VMware Infrastructure
5 39 (0.87%) vSphere
6 26 (0.58%) VMware NSX
7 18 (0.40%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.34%) Squid
9 13 (0.29%) Slurm Workload Manager
10 11 (0.25%) DFS Replication
10 11 (0.25%) Hyper-V
10 11 (0.25%) Lustre
10 11 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
11 9 (0.20%) GPFS
12 8 (0.18%) Postfix
13 7 (0.16%) Firmware
14 6 (0.13%) Dovecot
14 6 (0.13%) NFS
14 6 (0.13%) Tivoli Directory Server
14 6 (0.13%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,406 (31.50%) Terraform
2 1,314 (29.44%) Kubernetes
3 495 (11.09%) Ansible
4 335 (7.50%) Grafana
5 291 (6.52%) Prometheus
6 95 (2.13%) Argo
7 73 (1.64%) Puppet
8 66 (1.48%) Single Sign-On
9 42 (0.94%) Istio
10 38 (0.85%) Kibana
11 32 (0.72%) Progress Chef
12 29 (0.65%) Packer
13 22 (0.49%) Podman
14 20 (0.45%) vCenter Server
15 19 (0.43%) SCCM
16 18 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
17 17 (0.38%) Active Directory Federation Services
18 16 (0.36%) Consul
19 15 (0.34%) HP ALM
19 15 (0.34%) Rancher
Vendors
1 766 (17.16%) Microsoft
2 290 (6.50%) Oracle
3 267 (5.98%) Databricks
4 263 (5.89%) Google
5 217 (4.86%) Splunk
6 156 (3.49%) ServiceNow
7 129 (2.89%) Red Hat
8 121 (2.71%) VMware
9 114 (2.55%) Salesforce
10 105 (2.35%) SAP
11 78 (1.75%) OpenAI
12 62 (1.39%) Dynatrace
13 53 (1.19%) CyberArk
14 48 (1.08%) Atlassian
15 47 (1.05%) IBM
16 41 (0.92%) F5
17 39 (0.87%) Cisco
18 33 (0.74%) Palo Alto
19 30 (0.67%) Foundry
19 30 (0.67%) MuleSoft