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

6 months to
1 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -5
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,675 3,262 3,902
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.26% 10.72% 8.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.01% 11.91% 10.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,274 2,302 2,772
10th Percentile £375 £388 £411
25th Percentile £427 £456 £472
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.45% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £613 £663 £650
90th Percentile £712 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 69 23 100
10th Percentile - £36.30 £46.18
25th Percentile £45.46 £62.82 £56.65
Median hourly rate £65.00 £74.44 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -12.68% +14.52% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.50 £80.75 £72.53
90th Percentile £92.75 £87.50 £84.52
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £73.23 £65.00
% change year-on-year -24.89% +12.65% -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 35,946 27,398 38,816
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.59% 90.01% 86.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,812 17,104 25,306
10th Percentile £313 £305 £300
25th Percentile £412 £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 £723 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £492 £500
% change year-on-year -1.93% -1.70% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,146 887 2,267
10th Percentile £14.66 £15.62 £13.25
25th Percentile £18.25 £21.24 £16.25
Median hourly rate £27.50 £32.50 £33.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% -1.52% -5.71%
75th Percentile £63.48 £64.50 £59.44
90th Percentile £73.46 £75.35 £72.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.76 £34.21
% change year-on-year -20.81% -7.16% -2.26%

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 1 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 1 March 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 1 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 +2 3,986 £525 -8.30% 1,947
UK excluding London +7 2,088 £500 -4.76% 1,650
London -3 1,997 £540 -9.24% 575
Work from Home -3 1,313 £525 -2.23% 1,051
North of England +6 728 £500 -4.76% 425
South East +1 423 £525 -8.70% 518
Midlands +15 412 £500 +1.52% 199
Yorkshire +1 382 £500 -3.61% 144
West Midlands +12 328 £515 +3.00% 115
North West +3 296 £492 -6.29% 223
South West +10 258 £525 -12.50% 223
Scotland +6 184 £450 - 80
East of England +16 115 £575 +13.30% 156
East Midlands +5 83 £430 -9.47% 81
North East -3 53 £488 -7.14% 63
Wales +9 39 £425 +80.08% 48
Northern Ireland -4 11 £475 +11.76% 25

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
1 281 (6.01%) Confluence
2 105 (2.25%) Apache Spark
3 90 (1.93%) Apache
4 88 (1.88%) SharePoint
5 84 (1.80%) SAS
6 62 (1.33%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.71%) nginx
7 33 (0.71%) OpenStack
8 31 (0.66%) CMS
9 24 (0.51%) Microsoft Exchange
10 20 (0.43%) IIS
11 15 (0.32%) WebLogic
12 14 (0.30%) Mendix
13 13 (0.28%) JBoss
14 12 (0.26%) Adobe Experience Manager
14 12 (0.26%) Sitecore CMS
15 10 (0.21%) HCL Notes
16 9 (0.19%) Camunda
16 9 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
17 8 (0.17%) GeoServer
Applications
1 92 (1.97%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 43 (0.92%) Microsoft Project
4 31 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 21 (0.45%) MS Visio
6 15 (0.32%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 5 (0.11%) Trello
9 2 (0.043%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.021%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.021%) InDesign
10 1 (0.021%) Maya
10 1 (0.021%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.021%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 69 (1.48%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.32%) SAP S/4HANA
3 11 (0.24%) Oracle ERP
4 10 (0.21%) Endur
4 10 (0.21%) Maximo
5 8 (0.17%) Aladdin
5 8 (0.17%) NEC Housing
6 7 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.13%) Remedy ITSM
7 6 (0.13%) SAP ERP
8 5 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
9 4 (0.086%) Oracle EBS
9 4 (0.086%) Payment Gateway
10 3 (0.064%) NetSuite
10 3 (0.064%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.064%) SAP BPC
10 3 (0.064%) SAP CO
10 3 (0.064%) SAP FI/CO
10 3 (0.064%) VisionPLUS
10 3 (0.064%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,434 (52.06%) Azure
2 1,680 (35.94%) AWS
3 1,312 (28.06%) Azure DevOps
4 868 (18.57%) GitHub
5 687 (14.70%) GCP
6 553 (11.83%) Serverless
7 487 (10.42%) GitHub Actions
8 391 (8.36%) Power Platform
9 293 (6.27%) AWS CloudFormation
10 267 (5.71%) AWS Lambda
11 262 (5.60%) Amazon S3
12 231 (4.94%) Azure Data Factory
13 215 (4.60%) Azure AKS
14 212 (4.53%) Amazon EKS
15 202 (4.32%) OpenShift
16 194 (4.15%) Entra ID
17 171 (3.66%) Dynamics 365
18 167 (3.57%) Amazon ECS
18 167 (3.57%) Azure Monitor
19 164 (3.51%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 210 (4.49%) Firewall
2 112 (2.40%) DNS
3 95 (2.03%) VPN
4 94 (2.01%) Network Security
5 53 (1.13%) TCP/IP
6 36 (0.77%) SSL
7 31 (0.66%) HTTP
8 21 (0.45%) WAN
9 20 (0.43%) HTTPS
10 17 (0.36%) DHCP
10 17 (0.36%) SD-WAN
11 16 (0.34%) SAN
12 15 (0.32%) Kerberos
13 13 (0.28%) Reverse Proxy
14 12 (0.26%) BGP
14 12 (0.26%) MPLS
15 10 (0.21%) IPsec
16 9 (0.19%) Internet
17 8 (0.17%) LAN
17 8 (0.17%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 275 (5.88%) PostgreSQL
2 246 (5.26%) Power BI
3 197 (4.21%) SQL Server
4 178 (3.81%) NoSQL
5 152 (3.25%) Data Lake
6 130 (2.78%) Relational Database
7 128 (2.74%) Amazon RDS
8 122 (2.61%) Data Warehouse
9 115 (2.46%) MongoDB
10 102 (2.18%) Azure SQL Database
11 85 (1.82%) DynamoDB
12 80 (1.71%) Elasticsearch
13 77 (1.65%) Oracle Database
14 71 (1.52%) MySQL
15 68 (1.45%) Delta Lake
16 61 (1.30%) Metadata
17 58 (1.24%) Big Data
18 55 (1.18%) Amazon Athena
18 55 (1.18%) Redis
19 52 (1.11%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 814 (17.41%) Jenkins
2 639 (13.67%) Git
3 617 (13.20%) JIRA
4 595 (12.73%) GitLab
5 140 (2.99%) Selenium
6 104 (2.22%) JUnit
7 91 (1.95%) Postman
8 78 (1.67%) Bitbucket
9 70 (1.50%) SonarQube
10 67 (1.43%) Cucumber
11 60 (1.28%) Cypress.io
12 57 (1.22%) Sonatype Nexus
13 55 (1.18%) Maven
14 48 (1.03%) Artifactory
14 48 (1.03%) JMeter
15 47 (1.01%) REST Assured
16 36 (0.77%) Liquibase
16 36 (0.77%) Oracle APEX
17 35 (0.75%) Gradle
18 33 (0.71%) Visual Studio
General
1 1,348 (28.83%) Social Skills
2 859 (18.37%) Finance
3 605 (12.94%) Public Sector
4 396 (8.47%) Analytical Skills
5 349 (7.47%) Banking
6 160 (3.42%) Documentation Skills
7 79 (1.69%) Influencing Skills
8 67 (1.43%) Financial Institution
9 64 (1.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 57 (1.22%) Marketing
10 57 (1.22%) Retail
11 46 (0.98%) Front Office
11 46 (0.98%) Presentation Skills
12 43 (0.92%) Investment Banking
13 42 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
14 39 (0.83%) Telecoms
15 35 (0.75%) Legal
15 35 (0.75%) Military
16 33 (0.71%) Pharmaceutical
17 27 (0.58%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 894 (19.12%) DevOps Engineer
2 784 (16.77%) Developer
3 647 (13.84%) Senior
4 479 (10.25%) Architect
5 382 (8.17%) Lead
6 284 (6.07%) Azure Engineer
7 269 (5.75%) Data Engineer
8 255 (5.45%) AWS Engineer
9 254 (5.43%) Analyst
10 201 (4.30%) AWS DevOps
11 181 (3.87%) Cloud Engineer
12 178 (3.81%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 162 (3.47%) Software Engineer
14 160 (3.42%) Platform Engineer
15 142 (3.04%) Senior Developer
16 139 (2.97%) Solutions Architect
17 136 (2.91%) Senior DevOps
18 134 (2.87%) Azure DevOps Engineer
19 128 (2.74%) Business Analyst
19 128 (2.74%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 514 (10.99%) REST
2 416 (8.90%) .NET
3 318 (6.80%) React
4 315 (6.74%) Node.js
5 266 (5.69%) RESTful
6 253 (5.41%) Kafka
7 249 (5.33%) Spring
8 230 (4.92%) Spring Boot
9 179 (3.83%) AngularJS
10 163 (3.49%) JSON
11 157 (3.36%) OAuth
12 144 (3.08%) HTML
13 139 (2.97%) Elastic Stack
14 132 (2.82%) PySpark
15 131 (2.80%) Playwright
15 131 (2.80%) YAML
16 121 (2.59%) SOAP
17 120 (2.57%) XML
18 114 (2.44%) CSS
19 105 (2.25%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 695 (14.87%) Cloud Native
2 260 (5.56%) Product Ownership
3 171 (3.66%) Distributed Systems
4 126 (2.70%) Public Cloud
5 123 (2.63%) Onboarding
6 96 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
7 90 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
8 77 (1.65%) Enterprise Software
9 58 (1.24%) Management Information System
10 55 (1.18%) Data Protection Act
10 55 (1.18%) Virtual Team
11 52 (1.11%) Security Posture
12 50 (1.07%) Data Centre
13 46 (0.98%) NHS
14 45 (0.96%) Private Cloud
15 38 (0.81%) Low-Code
15 38 (0.81%) Self-Motivation
16 37 (0.79%) AI Agents
16 37 (0.79%) Data Structures
16 37 (0.79%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 486 (10.40%) Linux
2 245 (5.24%) Windows
3 105 (2.25%) Unix
4 65 (1.39%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 43 (0.92%) Windows Server
6 40 (0.86%) VMS
7 24 (0.51%) Ubuntu
8 17 (0.36%) CentOS
9 13 (0.28%) Android
9 13 (0.28%) Apple iOS
10 12 (0.26%) Windows 10
11 10 (0.21%) Solaris
12 7 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
12 7 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
13 5 (0.11%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.086%) Mac OS
15 3 (0.064%) Amazon Linux
16 2 (0.043%) Debian
16 2 (0.043%) Windows Server 2008
16 2 (0.043%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,717 (58.12%) CI/CD
2 1,811 (38.74%) Agile
3 1,233 (26.37%) Infrastructure as Code
4 887 (18.97%) Problem-Solving
5 882 (18.87%) Containerisation
6 707 (15.12%) Test Automation
7 695 (14.87%) Microservices
8 594 (12.71%) Continuous Improvement
9 586 (12.53%) Analytics
10 539 (11.53%) Migration
11 521 (11.14%) Scrum
12 509 (10.89%) Observability
13 493 (10.55%) AI
14 463 (9.90%) Stakeholder Management
15 427 (9.13%) Software Engineering
16 418 (8.94%) Data Modelling
17 381 (8.15%) Mentoring
18 340 (7.27%) Data Pipeline
19 328 (7.02%) Platform Engineering
20 321 (6.87%) Business Intelligence
Programming Languages
1 1,446 (30.93%) Python
2 964 (20.62%) SQL
3 615 (13.16%) Java
4 481 (10.29%) C#
5 459 (9.82%) JavaScript
6 374 (8.00%) PowerShell
7 361 (7.72%) Bash
8 325 (6.95%) TypeScript
9 149 (3.19%) Bicep
10 143 (3.06%) Go
11 82 (1.75%) PL/SQL
12 66 (1.41%) Scala
13 59 (1.26%) Shell Script
14 49 (1.05%) T-SQL
15 48 (1.03%) C++
15 48 (1.03%) Ruby
16 41 (0.88%) Groovy
17 32 (0.68%) Perl
18 31 (0.66%) Rust
19 23 (0.49%) PHP
Qualifications
1 1,447 (30.95%) Security Cleared
2 1,188 (25.41%) SC Cleared
3 379 (8.11%) Degree
4 208 (4.45%) Azure Certification
5 192 (4.11%) Computer Science Degree
6 156 (3.34%) AWS Certification
7 151 (3.23%) DV Cleared
8 124 (2.65%) BPSS Clearance
9 86 (1.84%) Master's Degree
10 83 (1.78%) CISSP
11 64 (1.37%) Microsoft Certification
12 62 (1.33%) CISM
13 56 (1.20%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 52 (1.11%) ISTQB
15 41 (0.88%) PMI Certification
16 36 (0.77%) Cisco Certification
17 33 (0.71%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 33 (0.71%) PMP
18 25 (0.53%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 24 (0.51%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 407 (8.71%) QA
2 193 (4.13%) Data Quality
3 184 (3.94%) GDPR
4 142 (3.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 124 (2.65%) Accessibility
6 123 (2.63%) NIST
7 72 (1.54%) NCSC
8 37 (0.79%) PCI DSS
9 36 (0.77%) WCAG
10 29 (0.62%) PMO
11 26 (0.56%) HIPAA
11 26 (0.56%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 25 (0.53%) SLA
13 18 (0.39%) SOC 2
14 15 (0.32%) ISO 20022
15 13 (0.28%) PSD2
16 12 (0.26%) NIST 800
17 11 (0.24%) Disclosure Scotland
17 11 (0.24%) HMG Security Policy Framework
18 10 (0.21%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,110 (23.74%) Docker
2 175 (3.74%) Active Directory
3 77 (1.65%) Virtual Machines
4 72 (1.54%) VMware Infrastructure
5 42 (0.90%) vSphere
6 27 (0.58%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.32%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.28%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 11 (0.24%) Lustre
10 10 (0.21%) Squid
11 9 (0.19%) GPFS
11 9 (0.19%) Hyper-V
12 8 (0.17%) Postfix
12 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
12 8 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
13 7 (0.15%) Firmware
14 6 (0.13%) HDFS
14 6 (0.13%) NFS
15 5 (0.11%) RACF
15 5 (0.11%) Tivoli Directory Server
Systems Management
1 1,429 (30.57%) Terraform
2 1,329 (28.43%) Kubernetes
3 504 (10.78%) Ansible
4 339 (7.25%) Grafana
5 283 (6.05%) Prometheus
6 98 (2.10%) Argo
7 76 (1.63%) Puppet
8 66 (1.41%) Single Sign-On
9 51 (1.09%) Istio
10 34 (0.73%) Progress Chef
11 33 (0.71%) Kibana
12 30 (0.64%) Packer
13 23 (0.49%) vCenter Server
14 22 (0.47%) Podman
15 20 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
16 18 (0.39%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 18 (0.39%) HP ALM
17 17 (0.36%) Consul
17 17 (0.36%) Rancher
18 16 (0.34%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 793 (16.96%) Microsoft
2 307 (6.57%) Oracle
3 287 (6.14%) Databricks
4 268 (5.73%) Google
5 214 (4.58%) Splunk
6 163 (3.49%) ServiceNow
7 141 (3.02%) Red Hat
8 123 (2.63%) VMware
9 117 (2.50%) Salesforce
10 108 (2.31%) SAP
11 80 (1.71%) OpenAI
12 65 (1.39%) Dynatrace
13 60 (1.28%) Atlassian
14 56 (1.20%) CyberArk
15 47 (1.01%) IBM
16 42 (0.90%) Talend
17 38 (0.81%) Cisco
17 38 (0.81%) Denodo
18 37 (0.79%) F5
19 34 (0.73%) Foundry