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 9 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 14 14 14
Rank change year-on-year 0 0 -1
Contract jobs citing DevOps 5,672 3,625 3,819
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 10.41% 11.07% 10.02%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.30% 12.24% 11.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,943 2,543 2,581
10th Percentile £381 £362 £381
25th Percentile £438 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £518 £550
Median % change year-on-year +1.45% -5.91% -4.35%
75th Percentile £615 £619 £650
90th Percentile £700 £700 £734
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £550
% change year-on-year - -9.09% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 125 27 71
10th Percentile £37.24 £39.50 £56.00
25th Percentile £55.50 £52.75 £65.00
Median hourly rate £67.50 £67.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year +0.75% -4.29% +7.69%
75th Percentile £77.50 £87.50 £74.22
90th Percentile £94.13 £95.00 £85.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.11 £67.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year +1.65% -4.29% +7.69%

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 46,106 29,609 32,588
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.64% 90.43% 85.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 28,135 18,363 20,196
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £403 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,994 1,772 1,501
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.23 £14.70
25th Percentile £17.60 £17.30 £20.12
Median hourly rate £40.03 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.17% -41.51% +1.96%
75th Percentile £67.84 £45.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.86 £22.60 £43.00
% change year-on-year +85.18% -47.44% +7.50%

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 9 September 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 9 September 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 9 September 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 4,832 £525 - 3,417
London 0 2,550 £550 - 1,959
UK excluding London -4 2,436 £500 - 1,827
Work from Home 0 1,624 £525 +1.94% 1,638
North of England -2 803 £500 +5.26% 517
South East -10 457 £525 +5.00% 430
Midlands -3 446 £488 -2.50% 211
Yorkshire -3 394 £500 +3.63% 148
West Midlands -5 350 £492 -5.81% 137
South West +9 320 £550 +5.77% 262
North West -2 315 £519 +15.37% 286
Scotland -2 217 £483 +1.68% 165
East of England +11 150 £505 -3.81% 156
North East +16 109 £425 -18.27% 87
East Midlands +3 92 £463 +2.78% 74
Wales -4 49 £500 +33.33% 40
Northern Ireland +20 23 £450 +2.27% 64
Channel Islands - 5 £450 -

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
1 340 (5.99%) Confluence
2 149 (2.63%) SharePoint
3 131 (2.31%) Apache Spark
4 130 (2.29%) Apache Airflow
5 114 (2.01%) Apache
6 60 (1.06%) SAS
7 44 (0.78%) CMS
8 39 (0.69%) Jupyter
9 33 (0.58%) IIS
10 26 (0.46%) nginx
11 18 (0.32%) Microsoft Exchange
12 16 (0.28%) Camunda
13 13 (0.23%) OpenStack
14 12 (0.21%) Anypoint
14 12 (0.21%) WebLogic
14 12 (0.21%) WebSphere
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 11 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
16 10 (0.18%) Palantir Foundry
17 9 (0.16%) Appian
Applications
1 65 (1.15%) Microsoft Excel
2 62 (1.09%) Microsoft Project
3 45 (0.79%) MS Visio
4 37 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
5 33 (0.58%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 9 (0.16%) Chatbot
6 9 (0.16%) CPLEX
6 9 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
7 7 (0.12%) Trello
8 5 (0.088%) Notion
8 5 (0.088%) Windchill
9 2 (0.035%) Adobe XD
10 1 (0.018%) EngageOne
10 1 (0.018%) Gliffy
10 1 (0.018%) Mingle
10 1 (0.018%) Mozilla Thunderbird
10 1 (0.018%) Sketch
10 1 (0.018%) Weka
Business Applications
1 76 (1.34%) Dynamics CRM
2 36 (0.63%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
4 13 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.18%) Magento
6 8 (0.14%) SAP MDG
6 8 (0.14%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
7 6 (0.11%) Dynamics AX
7 6 (0.11%) Oracle EBS R12
7 6 (0.11%) Remedy ITSM
8 5 (0.088%) Aladdin
8 5 (0.088%) OpenText MBPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle BPM
8 5 (0.088%) Oracle ERP
9 4 (0.071%) Endur
10 3 (0.053%) Findur
10 3 (0.053%) Maximo
10 3 (0.053%) Oracle Receivables
10 3 (0.053%) Shopify
10 3 (0.053%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 3,107 (54.78%) Azure
2 2,029 (35.77%) AWS
3 1,786 (31.49%) Azure DevOps
4 996 (17.56%) GitHub
5 728 (12.83%) GCP
6 622 (10.97%) GitHub Actions
7 492 (8.67%) Power Platform
8 469 (8.27%) Serverless
9 312 (5.50%) Amazon S3
10 292 (5.15%) AWS Lambda
11 258 (4.55%) Entra ID
12 245 (4.32%) Amazon EKS
13 238 (4.20%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 238 (4.20%) AWS CloudFormation
14 216 (3.81%) Azure AKS
15 213 (3.76%) Azure Monitor
16 206 (3.63%) Azure Data Factory
17 195 (3.44%) Amazon EC2
18 178 (3.14%) Dynamics 365
19 158 (2.79%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 253 (4.46%) Firewall
2 177 (3.12%) DNS
3 122 (2.15%) VPN
4 115 (2.03%) Network Security
5 67 (1.18%) TCP/IP
6 53 (0.93%) SSL
7 49 (0.86%) WAN
8 47 (0.83%) DHCP
9 36 (0.63%) HTTP
10 34 (0.60%) SD-WAN
11 31 (0.55%) BGP
12 30 (0.53%) Internet
13 28 (0.49%) SSH
13 28 (0.49%) Wi-Fi
14 22 (0.39%) OSPF
15 20 (0.35%) SAN
16 19 (0.33%) VLAN
17 17 (0.30%) BIG-IP
17 17 (0.30%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
17 17 (0.30%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 329 (5.80%) Power BI
2 302 (5.32%) PostgreSQL
3 300 (5.29%) SQL Server
4 213 (3.76%) Data Warehouse
5 189 (3.33%) NoSQL
6 184 (3.24%) MongoDB
7 180 (3.17%) Relational Database
8 177 (3.12%) Data Lake
9 146 (2.57%) Amazon RDS
10 128 (2.26%) Metadata
11 111 (1.96%) Azure SQL Database
12 95 (1.67%) DynamoDB
13 94 (1.66%) Delta Lake
14 89 (1.57%) Oracle Database
15 83 (1.46%) MySQL
16 80 (1.41%) Redis
17 69 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
18 65 (1.15%) Big Data
19 61 (1.08%) SQL Server Integration Services
20 54 (0.95%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 809 (14.26%) Git
2 799 (14.09%) Jenkins
3 683 (12.04%) JIRA
4 629 (11.09%) GitLab
5 141 (2.49%) Selenium
6 100 (1.76%) Postman
6 100 (1.76%) SonarQube
7 98 (1.73%) JUnit
8 95 (1.67%) Maven
9 79 (1.39%) Bitbucket
10 74 (1.30%) JMeter
10 74 (1.30%) REST Assured
11 71 (1.25%) Cypress.io
12 66 (1.16%) Gradle
13 60 (1.06%) Cucumber
14 50 (0.88%) Claude Code
15 49 (0.86%) Gatling
16 47 (0.83%) Mockito
17 44 (0.78%) Sonatype Nexus
18 42 (0.74%) LoadRunner
General
1 1,467 (25.86%) Social Skills
2 1,001 (17.65%) Finance
3 817 (14.40%) Public Sector
4 521 (9.19%) Analytical Skills
5 376 (6.63%) Banking
6 165 (2.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 109 (1.92%) Retail
8 91 (1.60%) Documentation Skills
9 77 (1.36%) Influencing Skills
10 65 (1.15%) Legal
10 65 (1.15%) Organisational Skills
11 56 (0.99%) Marketing
12 54 (0.95%) Military
13 51 (0.90%) Aerospace
14 50 (0.88%) Investment Banking
14 50 (0.88%) Telecoms
15 46 (0.81%) Law
16 45 (0.79%) Front Office
17 40 (0.71%) Manufacturing
18 39 (0.69%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 1,132 (19.96%) DevOps Engineer
2 916 (16.15%) Developer
3 864 (15.23%) Senior
4 638 (11.25%) Architect
5 544 (9.59%) Lead
6 359 (6.33%) Azure Engineer
7 322 (5.68%) Data Engineer
8 278 (4.90%) Analyst
9 266 (4.69%) AWS Engineer
10 234 (4.13%) Platform Engineer
11 210 (3.70%) Cloud Engineer
12 208 (3.67%) Azure DevOps Engineer
13 199 (3.51%) Senior DevOps
14 195 (3.44%) Java Developer
15 185 (3.26%) Senior DevOps Engineer
16 181 (3.19%) AWS DevOps
17 180 (3.17%) Solutions Architect
18 170 (3.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
19 160 (2.82%) Senior Developer
20 145 (2.56%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1,681 (29.64%) Terraform
2 607 (10.70%) REST
3 477 (8.41%) .NET
4 383 (6.75%) Kafka
5 355 (6.26%) RESTful
6 312 (5.50%) Spring
7 300 (5.29%) Spring Boot
8 293 (5.17%) React
9 200 (3.53%) Node.js
10 185 (3.26%) JSON
11 169 (2.98%) OAuth
12 166 (2.93%) Playwright
13 165 (2.91%) PySpark
14 141 (2.49%) HTML
15 130 (2.29%) CSS
16 128 (2.26%) .NET Framework
17 126 (2.22%) AngularJS
18 125 (2.20%) SOAP
19 120 (2.12%) OAuth2
20 114 (2.01%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 1,044 (18.41%) Cloud Native
2 434 (7.65%) Product Ownership
3 266 (4.69%) Distributed Systems
4 197 (3.47%) Enterprise Software
5 184 (3.24%) Onboarding
6 152 (2.68%) Hybrid Cloud
6 152 (2.68%) Legacy Systems
7 96 (1.69%) AI Agents
8 87 (1.53%) Data Protection Act
9 86 (1.52%) Management Information System
10 82 (1.45%) Self-Motivation
11 78 (1.38%) Public Cloud
12 76 (1.34%) Replication
13 74 (1.30%) Data Structures
14 69 (1.22%) Security Posture
15 67 (1.18%) Data Centre
16 59 (1.04%) Virtual Team
17 56 (0.99%) Enterprise Cloud
18 52 (0.92%) Mobile App
18 52 (0.92%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 539 (9.50%) Linux
2 307 (5.41%) Windows
3 114 (2.01%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 111 (1.96%) Unix
5 96 (1.69%) Windows Server
6 38 (0.67%) VMS
7 32 (0.56%) Ubuntu
8 31 (0.55%) Apple iOS
9 21 (0.37%) Android
10 10 (0.18%) Amazon Linux
10 10 (0.18%) zOS
11 9 (0.16%) CentOS
11 9 (0.16%) Solaris
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2016
12 8 (0.14%) Windows Server 2019
13 7 (0.12%) AIX
14 6 (0.11%) Mac OS
15 5 (0.088%) Windows Server 2008
16 4 (0.071%) Alpine Linux
16 4 (0.071%) Data ONTAP
Processes & Methodologies
1 3,412 (60.16%) CI/CD
2 2,309 (40.71%) Agile
3 1,640 (28.91%) Infrastructure as Code
4 949 (16.73%) Continuous Improvement
5 943 (16.63%) Containerisation
6 897 (15.81%) Stakeholder Management
7 893 (15.74%) Test Automation
8 887 (15.64%) Problem-Solving
9 836 (14.74%) AI
9 836 (14.74%) Microservices
10 753 (13.28%) Observability
11 747 (13.17%) Platform Engineering
12 726 (12.80%) Software Engineering
13 696 (12.27%) Scrum
14 686 (12.09%) Migration
15 594 (10.47%) Technical Leadership
16 590 (10.40%) Analytics
17 531 (9.36%) Stakeholder Engagement
18 497 (8.76%) Data Modelling
19 486 (8.57%) Roadmaps
Programming Languages
1 1,631 (28.76%) Python
2 1,036 (18.27%) SQL
3 823 (14.51%) Java
4 490 (8.64%) C#
5 488 (8.60%) PowerShell
6 487 (8.59%) Bash
7 462 (8.15%) JavaScript
8 310 (5.47%) TypeScript
9 255 (4.50%) Bicep
10 106 (1.87%) Go
11 81 (1.43%) Shell Script
12 69 (1.22%) Apex Code
12 69 (1.22%) T-SQL
13 67 (1.18%) Scala
14 63 (1.11%) Groovy
15 61 (1.08%) PL/SQL
16 39 (0.69%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 35 (0.62%) Perl
18 30 (0.53%) C++
19 24 (0.42%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 1,815 (32.00%) Security Cleared
2 1,524 (26.87%) SC Cleared
3 349 (6.15%) Degree
4 243 (4.28%) Azure Certification
5 235 (4.14%) BPSS Clearance
6 215 (3.79%) DV Cleared
7 188 (3.31%) AWS Certification
8 138 (2.43%) Computer Science Degree
9 107 (1.89%) Microsoft Certification
10 75 (1.32%) CISSP
11 63 (1.11%) ISTQB
12 54 (0.95%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 49 (0.86%) Cisco Certification
14 44 (0.78%) PMP
15 41 (0.72%) PMI Certification
16 37 (0.65%) Master's Degree
17 30 (0.53%) CISM
18 24 (0.42%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 24 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
19 23 (0.41%) (ISC)2 CCSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 549 (9.68%) QA
2 297 (5.24%) Data Quality
3 205 (3.61%) Accessibility
4 133 (2.34%) GDPR
5 101 (1.78%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 83 (1.46%) WCAG
7 80 (1.41%) NIST
8 52 (0.92%) NCSC
8 52 (0.92%) PMO
9 40 (0.71%) SLA
10 31 (0.55%) PCI DSS
11 29 (0.51%) GRC
12 25 (0.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 18 (0.32%) ISO 20022
14 13 (0.23%) Disclosure Scotland
15 12 (0.21%) Cyber Essentials
16 11 (0.19%) HIPAA
17 10 (0.18%) Actionable Recommendations
17 10 (0.18%) HL7
17 10 (0.18%) SEPA
System Software
1 1,160 (20.45%) Docker
2 173 (3.05%) Active Directory
3 89 (1.57%) VMware Infrastructure
4 81 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
5 27 (0.48%) Hyper-V
5 27 (0.48%) vSphere
6 22 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
7 20 (0.35%) VMware NSX
8 17 (0.30%) Virtual Desktop
9 14 (0.25%) Squid
10 11 (0.19%) IAG
10 11 (0.19%) Oracle RAC
11 9 (0.16%) Postfix
12 7 (0.12%) KVM
12 7 (0.12%) zsh
13 6 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
13 6 (0.11%) Corosync
13 6 (0.11%) Microsoft App-V
13 6 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
14 5 (0.088%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 1,533 (27.03%) Kubernetes
2 536 (9.45%) Ansible
3 370 (6.52%) Grafana
4 312 (5.50%) Prometheus
5 84 (1.48%) Argo
6 58 (1.02%) Puppet
7 53 (0.93%) Single Sign-On
8 48 (0.85%) Progress Chef
9 43 (0.76%) Microsoft Intune
10 34 (0.60%) Packer
11 33 (0.58%) Istio
12 26 (0.46%) Kibana
13 21 (0.37%) Kustomize
14 20 (0.35%) vCenter Server
15 19 (0.33%) Oracle RMAN
15 19 (0.33%) SCCM
16 18 (0.32%) Kubeflow
17 15 (0.26%) HP ALM
18 13 (0.23%) SCOM
18 13 (0.23%) systemd
Vendors
1 1,109 (19.55%) Microsoft
2 316 (5.57%) Oracle
3 310 (5.47%) Databricks
4 278 (4.90%) Google
5 205 (3.61%) ServiceNow
6 186 (3.28%) Salesforce
7 185 (3.26%) Splunk
8 144 (2.54%) Dynatrace
9 130 (2.29%) VMware
10 113 (1.99%) SAP
11 109 (1.92%) Red Hat
12 66 (1.16%) IBM
13 65 (1.15%) OpenAI
14 62 (1.09%) Informatica
14 62 (1.09%) MuleSoft
15 51 (0.90%) Foundry
16 46 (0.81%) AppDynamics
17 45 (0.79%) Cisco
18 43 (0.76%) Atlassian
19 35 (0.62%) CyberArk