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

6 months to
19 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 14 16
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 -4
Contract jobs citing DevOps 4,843 3,177 3,928
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 11.17% 10.85% 8.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.00% 12.00% 10.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,389 2,308 2,772
10th Percentile £375 £393 £405
25th Percentile £429 £452 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £519 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.72% - -6.38%
75th Percentile £606 £656 £650
90th Percentile £701 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £515 £525
% change year-on-year -2.91% -1.90% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 82 26 95
10th Percentile £39.53 £29.75 £48.05
25th Percentile £45.46 £57.04 £58.33
Median hourly rate £66.25 £73.23 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -9.53% +12.65% -0.76%
75th Percentile £77.31 £80.75 £66.88
90th Percentile £93.63 £87.50 £85.15
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.50 £68.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year -7.64% +5.77% -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 37,265 26,485 38,452
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.97% 90.43% 86.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,631 17,037 25,025
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 £610 £638 £638
90th Percentile £723 £744 £745
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -2.04% -2.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,203 922 2,327
10th Percentile £14.97 £15.25 £13.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £21.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £30.00 £32.50 £32.12
Median % change year-on-year -7.69% +1.20% -8.24%
75th Percentile £65.00 £64.52 £57.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.50 £70.20
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £31.76 £30.91
% change year-on-year -13.41% +2.74% -11.68%

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 19 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 19 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 19 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 4,146 £525 -4.55% 1,368
UK excluding London +8 2,156 £500 -2.91% 1,084
London -1 2,083 £550 -5.17% 503
Work from Home -3 1,350 £525 -1.59% 790
North of England +7 765 £500 -4.76% 324
South East 0 441 £525 -6.96% 315
Midlands +8 402 £496 -0.75% 133
Yorkshire +2 399 £500 -4.76% 95
West Midlands +11 323 £502 +0.30% 91
North West +4 310 £489 -6.89% 172
South West +14 275 £525 -12.50% 142
Scotland +3 175 £450 - 67
East of England +17 117 £575 +15.00% 78
East Midlands +1 77 £434 -8.68% 42
North East +4 61 £475 -9.52% 60
Wales +10 42 £443 +108.11% 34
Northern Ireland -7 10 £475 +18.75% 8

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
1 296 (6.11%) Confluence
2 117 (2.42%) Apache Spark
3 95 (1.96%) SharePoint
4 90 (1.86%) Apache
5 84 (1.73%) SAS
6 63 (1.30%) Apache Airflow
7 33 (0.68%) CMS
7 33 (0.68%) OpenStack
8 31 (0.64%) nginx
9 28 (0.58%) Microsoft Exchange
10 23 (0.47%) IIS
11 15 (0.31%) Mendix
12 12 (0.25%) Sitecore CMS
13 11 (0.23%) Adobe Experience Manager
13 11 (0.23%) HCL Notes
14 10 (0.21%) Camunda
14 10 (0.21%) Palantir Foundry
15 9 (0.19%) WebLogic
16 8 (0.17%) GeoServer
16 8 (0.17%) Smallworld
Applications
1 87 (1.80%) Microsoft Excel
2 66 (1.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 48 (0.99%) Microsoft Project
4 32 (0.66%) Microsoft Office
5 20 (0.41%) MS Visio
6 12 (0.25%) Chatbot
7 8 (0.17%) Weka
8 4 (0.083%) Trello
9 2 (0.041%) Adobe XD
9 2 (0.041%) CPLEX
10 1 (0.021%) InDesign
10 1 (0.021%) Maya
10 1 (0.021%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 75 (1.55%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.31%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.27%) Oracle ERP
4 11 (0.23%) Aladdin
5 10 (0.21%) Maximo
6 9 (0.19%) NEC Housing
7 7 (0.14%) Endur
8 6 (0.12%) Dynamics AX
8 6 (0.12%) Remedy ITSM
8 6 (0.12%) SAP ERP
9 5 (0.10%) Oracle EBS
10 4 (0.083%) Payment Gateway
10 4 (0.083%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
11 3 (0.062%) Findur
11 3 (0.062%) NetSuite
11 3 (0.062%) Salesforce CRM
11 3 (0.062%) SAP BPC
11 3 (0.062%) SAP FI
11 3 (0.062%) SAP FI/CO
11 3 (0.062%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 2,581 (53.29%) Azure
2 1,681 (34.71%) AWS
3 1,415 (29.22%) Azure DevOps
4 919 (18.98%) GitHub
5 676 (13.96%) GCP
6 563 (11.63%) Serverless
7 502 (10.37%) GitHub Actions
8 410 (8.47%) Power Platform
9 304 (6.28%) AWS CloudFormation
10 272 (5.62%) AWS Lambda
11 259 (5.35%) Amazon S3
12 239 (4.93%) Azure Data Factory
13 215 (4.44%) Amazon EKS
14 211 (4.36%) Azure AKS
14 211 (4.36%) Entra ID
15 200 (4.13%) OpenShift
16 184 (3.80%) Azure Monitor
17 175 (3.61%) Dynamics 365
18 161 (3.32%) Amazon ECS
19 158 (3.26%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 208 (4.29%) Firewall
2 113 (2.33%) DNS
3 94 (1.94%) Network Security
4 86 (1.78%) VPN
5 44 (0.91%) TCP/IP
6 27 (0.56%) HTTP
6 27 (0.56%) WAN
7 25 (0.52%) SD-WAN
8 22 (0.45%) SSL
9 20 (0.41%) DHCP
10 19 (0.39%) SAN
11 16 (0.33%) BGP
12 15 (0.31%) MPLS
13 14 (0.29%) HTTPS
13 14 (0.29%) IPsec
14 13 (0.27%) Internet
14 13 (0.27%) Reverse Proxy
15 11 (0.23%) LAN
16 10 (0.21%) Kerberos
16 10 (0.21%) OpenVPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 281 (5.80%) PostgreSQL
2 255 (5.27%) Power BI
3 217 (4.48%) SQL Server
4 192 (3.96%) NoSQL
5 169 (3.49%) Data Lake
6 141 (2.91%) Relational Database
7 127 (2.62%) Data Warehouse
8 123 (2.54%) Amazon RDS
9 117 (2.42%) Azure SQL Database
10 116 (2.40%) MongoDB
11 85 (1.76%) DynamoDB
12 78 (1.61%) Delta Lake
13 74 (1.53%) Oracle Database
14 70 (1.45%) Elasticsearch
15 69 (1.42%) Metadata
16 64 (1.32%) Big Data
17 63 (1.30%) MySQL
18 57 (1.18%) Redis
19 56 (1.16%) Tableau
20 55 (1.14%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 791 (16.33%) Jenkins
2 638 (13.17%) Git
3 636 (13.13%) JIRA
4 557 (11.50%) GitLab
5 138 (2.85%) Selenium
6 106 (2.19%) JUnit
7 96 (1.98%) Postman
8 82 (1.69%) Bitbucket
9 67 (1.38%) Cucumber
10 63 (1.30%) SonarQube
11 57 (1.18%) JMeter
12 55 (1.14%) Cypress.io
13 51 (1.05%) REST Assured
14 49 (1.01%) Artifactory
15 48 (0.99%) Sonatype Nexus
16 47 (0.97%) Maven
17 39 (0.81%) Visual Studio
18 35 (0.72%) Mockito
18 35 (0.72%) Oracle APEX
19 33 (0.68%) Liquibase
General
1 1,353 (27.94%) Social Skills
2 898 (18.54%) Finance
3 647 (13.36%) Public Sector
4 407 (8.40%) Analytical Skills
5 354 (7.31%) Banking
6 164 (3.39%) Documentation Skills
7 74 (1.53%) Influencing Skills
8 64 (1.32%) Financial Institution
9 61 (1.26%) Retail
10 58 (1.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 54 (1.12%) Marketing
12 51 (1.05%) Front Office
13 47 (0.97%) Presentation Skills
14 46 (0.95%) Organisational Skills
15 45 (0.93%) Investment Banking
16 43 (0.89%) Legal
17 38 (0.78%) Telecoms
18 32 (0.66%) Military
19 29 (0.60%) Pharmaceutical
20 25 (0.52%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 875 (18.07%) DevOps Engineer
2 796 (16.44%) Developer
3 664 (13.71%) Senior
4 524 (10.82%) Architect
5 417 (8.61%) Lead
6 301 (6.22%) Azure Engineer
7 285 (5.88%) Data Engineer
8 266 (5.49%) Analyst
9 247 (5.10%) AWS Engineer
10 195 (4.03%) AWS DevOps
11 184 (3.80%) Cloud Engineer
12 169 (3.49%) AWS DevOps Engineer
13 168 (3.47%) Platform Engineer
14 155 (3.20%) Software Engineer
15 145 (2.99%) Senior Developer
16 144 (2.97%) Solutions Architect
17 135 (2.79%) Azure DevOps Engineer
18 133 (2.75%) Senior DevOps
19 132 (2.73%) Business Analyst
20 123 (2.54%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 526 (10.86%) REST
2 428 (8.84%) .NET
3 319 (6.59%) React
4 314 (6.48%) Node.js
5 273 (5.64%) Kafka
6 266 (5.49%) Spring
7 263 (5.43%) RESTful
8 242 (5.00%) Spring Boot
9 192 (3.96%) AngularJS
10 160 (3.30%) JSON
11 150 (3.10%) OAuth
12 142 (2.93%) PySpark
13 138 (2.85%) HTML
13 138 (2.85%) YAML
14 135 (2.79%) Playwright
15 125 (2.58%) SOAP
16 124 (2.56%) Elastic Stack
17 116 (2.40%) CSS
18 108 (2.23%) XML
19 106 (2.19%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 713 (14.72%) Cloud Native
2 283 (5.84%) Product Ownership
3 178 (3.68%) Distributed Systems
4 128 (2.64%) Public Cloud
5 120 (2.48%) Onboarding
6 112 (2.31%) Legacy Systems
7 103 (2.13%) Hybrid Cloud
8 81 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
9 67 (1.38%) Data Protection Act
10 56 (1.16%) Management Information System
10 56 (1.16%) Virtual Team
11 53 (1.09%) Data Centre
12 45 (0.93%) NHS
12 45 (0.93%) Private Cloud
12 45 (0.93%) Security Posture
13 44 (0.91%) Self-Motivation
14 43 (0.89%) Data Structures
15 42 (0.87%) AI Agents
16 39 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
17 38 (0.78%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 475 (9.81%) Linux
2 252 (5.20%) Windows
3 90 (1.86%) Unix
4 67 (1.38%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 48 (0.99%) Windows Server
6 44 (0.91%) VMS
7 23 (0.47%) Ubuntu
8 15 (0.31%) CentOS
9 11 (0.23%) Windows 10
10 10 (0.21%) Android
11 7 (0.14%) Apple iOS
11 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
11 7 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.12%) Solaris
13 5 (0.10%) Windows Server 2012
14 4 (0.083%) Mac OS
15 3 (0.062%) Rocky
15 3 (0.062%) zOS
16 2 (0.041%) Debian
16 2 (0.041%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,761 (57.01%) CI/CD
2 1,861 (38.43%) Agile
3 1,229 (25.38%) Infrastructure as Code
4 886 (18.29%) Problem-Solving
5 875 (18.07%) Containerisation
6 733 (15.14%) Microservices
7 730 (15.07%) Test Automation
8 627 (12.95%) Continuous Improvement
9 613 (12.66%) Analytics
10 580 (11.98%) Migration
11 543 (11.21%) Scrum
12 530 (10.94%) Observability
13 513 (10.59%) AI
14 510 (10.53%) Stakeholder Management
15 436 (9.00%) Data Modelling
16 427 (8.82%) Software Engineering
17 389 (8.03%) Mentoring
18 359 (7.41%) Data Pipeline
19 344 (7.10%) Platform Engineering
20 335 (6.92%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,482 (30.60%) Python
2 1,016 (20.98%) SQL
3 637 (13.15%) Java
4 503 (10.39%) C#
5 449 (9.27%) JavaScript
6 382 (7.89%) PowerShell
7 352 (7.27%) Bash
8 308 (6.36%) TypeScript
9 157 (3.24%) Bicep
10 133 (2.75%) Go
11 80 (1.65%) PL/SQL
12 65 (1.34%) Scala
13 56 (1.16%) Shell Script
14 50 (1.03%) C++
15 49 (1.01%) Ruby
15 49 (1.01%) T-SQL
16 37 (0.76%) Groovy
17 31 (0.64%) Perl
18 30 (0.62%) Rust
19 27 (0.56%) Kusto Query Language
Qualifications
1 1,511 (31.20%) Security Cleared
2 1,235 (25.50%) SC Cleared
3 376 (7.76%) Degree
4 205 (4.23%) Azure Certification
5 184 (3.80%) Computer Science Degree
6 150 (3.10%) AWS Certification
7 146 (3.01%) DV Cleared
8 133 (2.75%) BPSS Clearance
9 83 (1.71%) CISSP
10 76 (1.57%) Master's Degree
11 63 (1.30%) CISM
12 62 (1.28%) ISTQB
13 57 (1.18%) Microsoft Certification
14 56 (1.16%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 48 (0.99%) PMI Certification
16 39 (0.81%) PMP
17 36 (0.74%) Cisco Certification
18 33 (0.68%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
19 28 (0.58%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
20 23 (0.47%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 431 (8.90%) QA
2 210 (4.34%) Data Quality
3 187 (3.86%) GDPR
4 158 (3.26%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 126 (2.60%) Accessibility
5 126 (2.60%) NIST
6 71 (1.47%) NCSC
7 41 (0.85%) PCI DSS
8 38 (0.78%) WCAG
9 34 (0.70%) PMO
10 28 (0.58%) SLA
11 26 (0.54%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 24 (0.50%) HIPAA
13 16 (0.33%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 16 (0.33%) SOC 2
14 14 (0.29%) ISO 20022
15 12 (0.25%) GRC
15 12 (0.25%) NIST 800
15 12 (0.25%) PSD2
16 11 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
System Software
1 1,085 (22.40%) Docker
2 175 (3.61%) Active Directory
3 78 (1.61%) Virtual Machines
4 75 (1.55%) VMware Infrastructure
5 45 (0.93%) vSphere
6 32 (0.66%) VMware NSX
7 15 (0.31%) Virtual Desktop
8 13 (0.27%) Hyper-V
8 13 (0.27%) Slurm Workload Manager
9 11 (0.23%) Lustre
10 9 (0.19%) GPFS
10 9 (0.19%) Squid
11 8 (0.17%) Firmware
11 8 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
12 7 (0.14%) Postfix
13 6 (0.12%) HDFS
14 5 (0.10%) KVM
14 5 (0.10%) Oracle RAC
14 5 (0.10%) RACF
14 5 (0.10%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1,428 (29.49%) Terraform
2 1,328 (27.42%) Kubernetes
3 501 (10.34%) Ansible
4 342 (7.06%) Grafana
5 278 (5.74%) Prometheus
6 104 (2.15%) Argo
7 67 (1.38%) Puppet
8 61 (1.26%) Single Sign-On
9 59 (1.22%) Istio
10 31 (0.64%) Packer
11 28 (0.58%) vCenter Server
12 27 (0.56%) Progress Chef
13 25 (0.52%) Kibana
14 20 (0.41%) HP ALM
14 20 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
15 19 (0.39%) Podman
15 19 (0.39%) Rancher
16 18 (0.37%) Active Directory Federation Services
17 17 (0.35%) Consul
18 16 (0.33%) FortiGate
Vendors
1 833 (17.20%) Microsoft
2 314 (6.48%) Oracle
3 289 (5.97%) Databricks
4 265 (5.47%) Google
5 200 (4.13%) Splunk
6 157 (3.24%) ServiceNow
7 148 (3.06%) Red Hat
8 126 (2.60%) VMware
9 118 (2.44%) Salesforce
10 107 (2.21%) SAP
11 84 (1.73%) OpenAI
12 71 (1.47%) Dynatrace
13 68 (1.40%) Atlassian
14 59 (1.22%) CyberArk
15 44 (0.91%) IBM
16 39 (0.81%) Cisco
17 38 (0.78%) Talend
18 36 (0.74%) Foundry
19 34 (0.70%) Denodo
20 29 (0.60%) Pure Storage