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

6 months to
28 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -4
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,923 3,142 3,972
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.08% 10.81% 8.98%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.92% 11.95% 10.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,429 2,311 2,779
10th Percentile £378 £388 £404
25th Percentile £429 £450 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.91% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £605 £650 £650
90th Percentile £709 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -2.58% -2.24% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 91 25 90
10th Percentile £39.53 £29.65 £54.63
25th Percentile £45.46 £56.25 £61.25
Median hourly rate £63.73 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.97% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £75.88 £80.75 £69.50
90th Percentile £92.50 £87.50 £85.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.73 £67.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year -5.59% +3.85% -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 38,117 26,296 38,255
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.75% 90.49% 86.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,146 17,083 24,839
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £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 £725 £738 £748
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.51% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,236 956 2,346
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.12 £12.84
25th Percentile £18.87 £20.47 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.00 £32.50 £32.50
Median % change year-on-year +7.69% - -9.72%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.94 £57.50
90th Percentile £77.50 £77.35 £71.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.25 £31.64 £31.80
% change year-on-year -1.23% -0.50% -11.67%

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 28 March 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 28 March 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 28 March 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 +4 4,226 £525 -4.55% 1,414
UK excluding London +8 2,183 £500 -2.58% 1,103
London -2 2,134 £550 -4.35% 512
Work from Home -3 1,364 £525 -1.59% 782
North of England +6 768 £500 -4.76% 306
South East 0 441 £525 -6.25% 307
Midlands +9 414 £496 +0.25% 142
Yorkshire 0 407 £500 -4.76% 86
West Midlands +7 323 £500 +0.50% 98
North West +5 308 £488 -7.13% 159
South West +15 285 £500 -16.67% 165
Scotland +6 168 £443 -1.50% 52
East of England +19 119 £568 +14.07% 92
East Midlands +2 89 £447 -5.89% 44
North East +6 57 £475 -9.52% 63
Wales +9 42 £443 +108.11% 43
Northern Ireland -8 11 £475 +13.77% 10
Channel Islands - 3 £450 - 1

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
1 306 (6.22%) Confluence
2 119 (2.42%) Apache Spark
3 99 (2.01%) SharePoint
4 91 (1.85%) Apache
4 91 (1.85%) SAS
5 67 (1.36%) Apache Airflow
6 34 (0.69%) CMS
7 33 (0.67%) OpenStack
8 32 (0.65%) nginx
9 28 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
10 24 (0.49%) IIS
11 15 (0.30%) Mendix
12 12 (0.24%) Sitecore CMS
13 11 (0.22%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 11 (0.22%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.20%) Camunda
15 8 (0.16%) WebLogic
16 7 (0.14%) ArcGIS
16 7 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
16 7 (0.14%) WebSphere
Applications
1 88 (1.79%) Microsoft Excel
2 64 (1.30%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 54 (1.10%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 22 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 10 (0.20%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.16%) Weka
8 5 (0.10%) Trello
9 2 (0.041%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.041%) CPLEX
9 2 (0.041%) Spreadsheet
10 1 (0.020%) InDesign
10 1 (0.020%) Maya
Business Applications
1 74 (1.50%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.30%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.26%) Oracle ERP
4 10 (0.20%) Maximo
5 9 (0.18%) Aladdin
5 9 (0.18%) NEC Housing
6 7 (0.14%) Endur
7 6 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.12%) SAP ERP
8 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.081%) Payment Gateway
9 4 (0.081%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
10 3 (0.061%) Findur
10 3 (0.061%) NetSuite
10 3 (0.061%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.061%) SAP CO
10 3 (0.061%) SAP FI
10 3 (0.061%) SAP FI/CO
10 3 (0.061%) SAP Oil and Gas
Cloud Services
1 2,656 (53.95%) Azure
2 1,707 (34.67%) AWS
3 1,473 (29.92%) Azure DevOps
4 925 (18.79%) GitHub
5 692 (14.06%) GCP
6 569 (11.56%) Serverless
7 514 (10.44%) GitHub Actions
8 415 (8.43%) Power Platform
9 301 (6.11%) AWS CloudFormation
10 274 (5.57%) AWS Lambda
11 269 (5.46%) Amazon S3
12 239 (4.85%) Azure Data Factory
13 222 (4.51%) Entra ID
14 217 (4.41%) Azure AKS
15 209 (4.25%) Amazon EKS
16 198 (4.02%) OpenShift
17 185 (3.76%) Azure Monitor
18 172 (3.49%) Dynamics 365
19 162 (3.29%) Amazon EC2
20 160 (3.25%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 211 (4.29%) Firewall
2 117 (2.38%) DNS
3 100 (2.03%) Network Security
4 92 (1.87%) VPN
5 44 (0.89%) TCP/IP
6 31 (0.63%) WAN
7 29 (0.59%) SD-WAN
8 27 (0.55%) HTTP
8 27 (0.55%) SSL
9 20 (0.41%) DHCP
10 19 (0.39%) SAN
11 18 (0.37%) BGP
12 17 (0.35%) MPLS
13 15 (0.30%) IPsec
14 13 (0.26%) Reverse Proxy
15 12 (0.24%) 5G
15 12 (0.24%) HTTPS
16 11 (0.22%) Internet
16 11 (0.22%) LAN
16 11 (0.22%) OpenVPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 280 (5.69%) PostgreSQL
2 256 (5.20%) Power BI
3 230 (4.67%) SQL Server
4 199 (4.04%) NoSQL
5 170 (3.45%) Data Lake
6 147 (2.99%) Relational Database
7 126 (2.56%) Data Warehouse
8 120 (2.44%) Amazon RDS
9 118 (2.40%) Azure SQL Database
10 116 (2.36%) MongoDB
11 89 (1.81%) DynamoDB
12 81 (1.65%) Metadata
13 79 (1.60%) Delta Lake
14 73 (1.48%) Oracle Database
15 72 (1.46%) Elasticsearch
16 66 (1.34%) Big Data
17 63 (1.28%) MySQL
18 56 (1.14%) Tableau
19 55 (1.12%) Redis
20 54 (1.10%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 806 (16.37%) Jenkins
2 650 (13.20%) JIRA
3 644 (13.08%) Git
4 562 (11.42%) GitLab
5 138 (2.80%) Selenium
6 108 (2.19%) JUnit
7 93 (1.89%) Postman
8 83 (1.69%) Bitbucket
9 72 (1.46%) SonarQube
10 64 (1.30%) Cucumber
11 54 (1.10%) Artifactory
11 54 (1.10%) JMeter
12 53 (1.08%) Cypress.io
13 52 (1.06%) Maven
14 51 (1.04%) REST Assured
15 45 (0.91%) Sonatype Nexus
16 39 (0.79%) Visual Studio
17 37 (0.75%) Mockito
18 34 (0.69%) Liquibase
18 34 (0.69%) Oracle APEX
General
1 1,365 (27.73%) Social Skills
2 919 (18.67%) Finance
3 644 (13.08%) Public Sector
4 412 (8.37%) Analytical Skills
5 364 (7.39%) Banking
6 164 (3.33%) Documentation Skills
7 75 (1.52%) Influencing Skills
8 65 (1.32%) Financial Institution
8 65 (1.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 62 (1.26%) Retail
10 56 (1.14%) Marketing
11 51 (1.04%) Organisational Skills
12 50 (1.02%) Front Office
13 47 (0.95%) Investment Banking
14 45 (0.91%) Legal
14 45 (0.91%) Presentation Skills
15 42 (0.85%) Telecoms
16 30 (0.61%) Military
17 27 (0.55%) Pharmaceutical
18 25 (0.51%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 905 (18.38%) DevOps Engineer
2 785 (15.95%) Developer
3 684 (13.89%) Senior
4 540 (10.97%) Architect
5 416 (8.45%) Lead
6 308 (6.26%) Azure Engineer
7 295 (5.99%) Data Engineer
8 268 (5.44%) Analyst
9 249 (5.06%) AWS Engineer
10 190 (3.86%) AWS DevOps
11 181 (3.68%) Cloud Engineer
12 177 (3.60%) Platform Engineer
13 164 (3.33%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 157 (3.19%) Software Engineer
15 150 (3.05%) Solutions Architect
16 145 (2.95%) Azure DevOps Engineer
17 144 (2.93%) Senior Developer
18 143 (2.90%) Senior DevOps
19 133 (2.70%) Senior DevOps Engineer
20 131 (2.66%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 537 (10.91%) REST
2 440 (8.94%) .NET
3 313 (6.36%) React
4 304 (6.18%) Node.js
5 289 (5.87%) Kafka
6 270 (5.48%) RESTful
7 269 (5.46%) Spring
8 253 (5.14%) Spring Boot
9 188 (3.82%) AngularJS
10 165 (3.35%) JSON
11 152 (3.09%) OAuth
12 146 (2.97%) YAML
13 144 (2.93%) PySpark
14 141 (2.86%) Playwright
15 133 (2.70%) HTML
16 128 (2.60%) Elastic Stack
17 121 (2.46%) SOAP
18 112 (2.28%) Middleware
19 110 (2.23%) CSS
20 105 (2.13%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 718 (14.58%) Cloud Native
2 294 (5.97%) Product Ownership
3 188 (3.82%) Distributed Systems
4 131 (2.66%) Public Cloud
5 125 (2.54%) Onboarding
6 106 (2.15%) Hybrid Cloud
7 101 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
8 89 (1.81%) Enterprise Software
9 72 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
10 61 (1.24%) Virtual Team
11 59 (1.20%) Management Information System
12 51 (1.04%) Data Centre
13 46 (0.93%) Self-Motivation
14 44 (0.89%) Data Structures
14 44 (0.89%) Private Cloud
15 43 (0.87%) NHS
15 43 (0.87%) Security Posture
16 42 (0.85%) AI Agents
17 39 (0.79%) Low-Code
18 38 (0.77%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 485 (9.85%) Linux
2 260 (5.28%) Windows
3 92 (1.87%) Unix
4 70 (1.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 47 (0.95%) VMS
6 46 (0.93%) Windows Server
7 23 (0.47%) Ubuntu
8 14 (0.28%) CentOS
9 10 (0.20%) Windows 10
10 7 (0.14%) Android
10 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
10 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
11 6 (0.12%) Apple iOS
12 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
13 4 (0.081%) Solaris
14 3 (0.061%) Oracle Linux
14 3 (0.061%) Rocky
14 3 (0.061%) zOS
15 2 (0.041%) Debian
15 2 (0.041%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,816 (57.20%) CI/CD
2 1,892 (38.43%) Agile
3 1,263 (25.66%) Infrastructure as Code
4 890 (18.08%) Problem-Solving
5 887 (18.02%) Containerisation
6 745 (15.13%) Test Automation
7 742 (15.07%) Microservices
8 651 (13.22%) Continuous Improvement
9 613 (12.45%) Analytics
10 572 (11.62%) Migration
11 545 (11.07%) Scrum
12 543 (11.03%) Observability
13 523 (10.62%) AI
14 518 (10.52%) Stakeholder Management
15 447 (9.08%) Software Engineering
16 442 (8.98%) Data Modelling
17 391 (7.94%) Mentoring
18 384 (7.80%) Data Pipeline
19 369 (7.50%) Platform Engineering
20 348 (7.07%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 1,503 (30.53%) Python
2 1,038 (21.08%) SQL
3 640 (13.00%) Java
4 518 (10.52%) C#
5 440 (8.94%) JavaScript
6 383 (7.78%) PowerShell
7 365 (7.41%) Bash
8 306 (6.22%) TypeScript
9 160 (3.25%) Bicep
10 132 (2.68%) Go
11 81 (1.65%) PL/SQL
12 69 (1.40%) Scala
13 60 (1.22%) Shell Script
14 48 (0.98%) T-SQL
15 47 (0.95%) C++
16 45 (0.91%) Groovy
17 40 (0.81%) Ruby
18 33 (0.67%) Apex Code
19 30 (0.61%) Perl
20 28 (0.57%) Rust
Qualifications
1 1,528 (31.04%) Security Cleared
2 1,252 (25.43%) SC Cleared
3 370 (7.52%) Degree
4 205 (4.16%) Azure Certification
5 182 (3.70%) Computer Science Degree
6 152 (3.09%) DV Cleared
7 146 (2.97%) AWS Certification
8 138 (2.80%) BPSS Clearance
9 88 (1.79%) CISSP
10 76 (1.54%) Master's Degree
11 64 (1.30%) CISM
12 63 (1.28%) ISTQB
13 57 (1.16%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 57 (1.16%) Microsoft Certification
14 48 (0.98%) PMI Certification
15 39 (0.79%) PMP
16 36 (0.73%) Cisco Certification
17 34 (0.69%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 27 (0.55%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 24 (0.49%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 434 (8.82%) QA
2 220 (4.47%) Data Quality
3 189 (3.84%) GDPR
4 159 (3.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 131 (2.66%) NIST
6 121 (2.46%) Accessibility
7 73 (1.48%) NCSC
8 41 (0.83%) PCI DSS
8 41 (0.83%) WCAG
9 39 (0.79%) PMO
10 31 (0.63%) SLA
11 30 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 22 (0.45%) HIPAA
13 16 (0.33%) HMG Security Policy Framework
14 15 (0.30%) ISO 20022
14 15 (0.30%) NIST 800
15 14 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 13 (0.26%) PSD2
17 12 (0.24%) GRC
18 11 (0.22%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,102 (22.38%) Docker
2 182 (3.70%) Active Directory
3 75 (1.52%) VMware Infrastructure
4 74 (1.50%) Virtual Machines
5 45 (0.91%) vSphere
6 33 (0.67%) VMware NSX
7 16 (0.33%) Virtual Desktop
8 15 (0.30%) Hyper-V
9 12 (0.24%) Squid
10 11 (0.22%) Lustre
10 11 (0.22%) Slurm Workload Manager
11 9 (0.18%) GPFS
12 8 (0.16%) Firmware
12 8 (0.16%) Postfix
13 7 (0.14%) Virtual Servers
14 6 (0.12%) Ceph
14 6 (0.12%) HDFS
14 6 (0.12%) VMware ESXi
15 5 (0.10%) KVM
15 5 (0.10%) Oracle RAC
Systems Management
1 1,443 (29.31%) Terraform
2 1,351 (27.44%) Kubernetes
3 516 (10.48%) Ansible
4 346 (7.03%) Grafana
5 285 (5.79%) Prometheus
6 100 (2.03%) Argo
7 74 (1.50%) Puppet
8 71 (1.44%) Single Sign-On
9 60 (1.22%) Istio
10 33 (0.67%) Progress Chef
11 31 (0.63%) Packer
12 28 (0.57%) vCenter Server
13 25 (0.51%) Kibana
14 20 (0.41%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 20 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 20 (0.41%) Rancher
15 19 (0.39%) Podman
16 18 (0.37%) Microsoft Intune
17 17 (0.35%) Consul
17 17 (0.35%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 854 (17.35%) Microsoft
2 320 (6.50%) Oracle
3 293 (5.95%) Databricks
4 257 (5.22%) Google
5 202 (4.10%) Splunk
6 168 (3.41%) ServiceNow
7 144 (2.93%) Red Hat
8 130 (2.64%) Salesforce
9 127 (2.58%) VMware
10 107 (2.17%) SAP
11 84 (1.71%) OpenAI
12 76 (1.54%) Dynatrace
13 71 (1.44%) Atlassian
14 63 (1.28%) CyberArk
15 44 (0.89%) IBM
16 42 (0.85%) Talend
17 40 (0.81%) Cisco
18 37 (0.75%) Denodo
19 35 (0.71%) Foundry
20 32 (0.65%) Informatica